Chapter 82

CONCLUSION.

The same day the great news of Myrtle Hazard's accession to fortune came out, the secret was told that she had promised herself in marriage to Mr. Clement Lindsay. But her friends hardly knew how to congratulate her on this last event. Her lover was gone, to risk his life, not improbably to lose it, or to come home a wreck, crippled by wounds, or worn out with disease.

Some of them wondered to see her so cheerful in such a moment of trial. They could not know how the manly strength of Clement's determination had nerved her for womanly endurance. They had not learned that a great cause makes great souls, or reveals them to themselves,--a lesson taught by so many noble examples in the times that followed. Myrtle's only desire seemed to be to labor in some way to help the soldiers and their families. She appeared to have forgotten everything for this duty; she had no time for regrets, if she were disposed to indulge them, and she hardly asked a question as to the extent of the fortune which had fallen to her.

The next number of the "Banner and Oracle" contained two announcements which she read with some interest when her attention was called to them. They were as follows:

"A fair and accomplished daughter of this village comes, by the late decision of the Supreme Court, into possession of a property estimated at a million of dollars or more. It consists of a large tract of land purchased many years ago by the late Malachi Withers, now become of immense value by the growth of a city in its neighborhood, the opening of mines, etc., etc. It is rumored that the lovely and highly educated heiress has formed a connection looking towards matrimony with a certain distinguished artist."

"Our distinguished young townsman, William Murray Bradshaw, Esq., has been among the first to respond to the call of the country for champions to defend her from traitors. We understand that he has obtained a captaincy in the __th regiment, about to march to the threatened seat of war. May victory perch on his banners!"

The two lovers, parted by their own self-sacrificing choice in the very hour that promised to bring them so much happiness, labored for the common cause during all the terrible years of warfare, one in the camp and the field, the other in the not less needful work which the good women carried on at home, or wherever their services were needed. Clement--now Captain Lindsay--returned at the end of his first campaign charged with a special office. Some months later, after one of the great battles, he was sent home wounded. He wore the leaf on his shoulder which entitled him to be called Major Lindsay. He recovered from his wound only too rapidly, for Myrtle had visited him daily in the military hospital where he had resided for treatment; and it was bitter parting. The telegraph wires were thrilling almost hourly with messages of death, and the long pine boxes came by almost every train,--no need of asking what they held.

Once more he came, detailed on special duty, and this time with the eagle on his shoulder,--he was Colonel Lindsay. The lovers could not part again of their own free will. Some adventurous women had followed their husbands to the camp, and Myrtle looked as if she could play the part of the Maid of Saragossa on occasion. So Clement asked her if she would return with him as his wife; and Myrtle answered, with as much willingness to submit as a maiden might fairly show under such circumstances, that she would do his bidding. Thereupon, with the shortest possible legal notice, Father Pemberton was sent for, and the ceremony was performed in the presence of a few witnesses in the large parlor at The Poplars, which was adorned with flowers, and hung round with all the portraits of the dead members of the family, summoned as witnesses to the celebration. One witness looked on with unmoved features, yet Myrtle thought there was a more heavenly smile on her faded lips than she had ever seen before beaming from the canvas,--it was Ann Holyoake, the martyr to her faith, the guardian spirit of Myrtle's visions, who seemed to breathe a holier benediction than any words--even those of the good old Father Pemberton himself--could convey.

They went back together to the camp. From that period until the end of the war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and that of the hospital. In the offices of mercy which she performed for the sick and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature seemed to be burned away. The conflict of mingled lives in her blood had ceased. No lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene resolve which had grown strong by every exercise of its high prerogative. If she had been called now to die for any worthy cause, her race would have been ennobled by a second martyr, true to the blood of her who died under the cruel Queen.

Many sad sights she saw in the great hospital where she passed some months at intervals,--one never to be forgotten. An officer was brought into the ward where she was in attendance. "Shot through the lungs,--pretty nearly gone."

She went softly to his bedside. He was breathing with great difficulty; his face was almost convulsed with the effort, but she recognized him in a moment; it was Murray Bradshaw,--Captain Bradshaw, as she knew by the bars on his coat flung upon the bed where he had just been laid.

She addressed him by name, tenderly as if he had been a dear brother; she saw on his face that hers were to be the last kind words he would ever hear.

He turned his glazing eyes upon her. "Who are you?" he said in a feeble voice.

"An old friend," she answered; "you knew me as Myrtle Hazard."

He started. "You by my bedside! You caring for me!--for me, that burned the title to your fortune to ashes before your eyes! You can't forgive that,--I won't believe it! Don't you hate me, dying as I am?"

Myrtle was used to maintaining a perfect calmness of voice and countenance, and she held her feelings firmly down. "I have nothing to forgive you, Mr. Bradshaw. You may have meant to do me wrong, but Providence raised up a protector for me. The paper you burned was not the original,--it was a copy substituted for it--"

"And did the old man outwit me after all?" he cried out, rising suddenly in bed, and clasping his hands behind his head to give him a few more gasps of breath. "I knew he was cunning, but I thought I was his match. It must have been Byles Gridley,--nobody else. And so the old man beat me after all, and saved you from ruin! Thank God that it came out so! Thank God! I can die now. Give me your hand, Myrtle."

She took his hand, and held it until it gently loosed its hold, and he ceased to breathe. Myrtle's creed was a simple one, with more of trust and love in it than of systematized articles of belief. She cherished the fond hope that these last words of one who had erred so miserably were a token of some blessed change which the influences of the better world might carry onward until he should have outgrown the sins and the weaknesses of his earthly career.

Soon after this she rejoined her husband in the camp. From time to time they received stray copies of the "Banner and Oracle," which, to Myrtle especially, were full of interest, even to the last advertisement. A few paragraphs may be reproduced here which relate to persons who have figured in this narrative.

"TEMPLE OF HYMEN.

"Married, on the 6th instant, Fordyce Hurlbut, M. D., to Olive, only daughter of the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth. The editor of this paper returns his acknowledgments for a bountiful slice of the wedding-cake. May their shadows never be less!"

Not many weeks after this appeared the following:

"Died in this place, on the 28th instant, the venerable Lemuel Hurlbut, M. D., at the great age of XCVI years.

"'With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'"

Myrtle recalled his kind care of her in her illness, and paid the tribute of a sigh to his memory,--there was nothing in a death like his to call for any aching regret.

The usual routine of small occurrences was duly recorded in the village paper for some weeks longer, when she was startled and shocked by receiving a number containing the following paragraph:

CALAMITOUS ACCIDENT

"It is known to our readers that the steeple of the old meeting-house was struck by lightning about a month ago. The frame of the building was a good deal jarred by the shock, but no danger was apprehended from the injury it had received. On Sunday last the congregation came together as usual. The Rev. Mr. Stoker was alone m the pulpit, the Rev. Doctor Pemberton having been detained by slight indisposition. The sermon was from the text, "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid." (Isaiah xi. 6.) The pastor described the millennium as--the reign of love and peace, in eloquent and impressive language. He was in the midst of the prayer which follows the sermon, and had jest put up a petition that the spirit of affection and faith and trust might grow up and prevail among the flock of which he was the shepherd, more especially those dear lambs whom he gathered with his arm, and carried in his bosom, when the old sounding-board, which had hung safely for nearly a century,--loosened, no doubt by the bolt which had fallen on the church,--broke from its fastenings, and fell with a loud crash upon the pulpit, crushing the Rev. Mr. Stoker under its ruins. The scene that followed beggars description. Cries and shrieks resounded through the horse. Two or three young women fainted entirely away. Mr. Penhallow, Deacon Rumrill, Gifted Hopkins, Esq., and others, came forward immediately, and after much effort succeeded in removing the wreck of the sounding-board, and extricating their unfortunate pastor. He was not fatally injured, it is hoped; but, sad to relate, he received such a violent blow upon the spine of the back, that palsy of the lower extremities is like to ensue. He is at present lying entirely helpless. Every attention is paid to him by his affectionately devoted family."

Myrtle had hardly got over the pain which the reading of this unfortunate occurrence gave her, when her eyes were gladdened by the following pleasing piece of intelligence, contained in a subsequent number of the village paper:

IMPOSING CEREMONY.

"The Reverend Doctor Pemberton performed the impressive rite of baptism upon the first-born child of our distinguished townsman, Gifted Hopkins, Esq., the Bard of Oxbow Village, and Mrs. Susan P. Hopkins, his amiable and respected lady. The babe conducted himself with singular propriety on this occasion. He received the Christian name of Byron Tennyson Browning. May be prove worthy of his name and his parentage!"

The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its unharmed survivors. He returned with Myrtle to her native village, and they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence Withers, in the old family mansion. Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle made a generous allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles distant, where she had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at The Poplars. This was a convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe was invited to stay with them for a month or two; and one nurse and two single women under the same roof keep each other in a stew all the time, as the old dame somewhat sharply remarked.

Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle's legal protector, and, with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property she inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that, when Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt that at least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give himself to sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing by him to pinch the features of all his ideals, and give them something of her own likeness.

Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her responsibility. She embellished her spare person a little more than in former years. These young people looked so happy! Love was not so unendurable, perhaps, after all. No woman need despair,--especially if she has a house over her, and a snug little property. A worthy man, a former missionary, of the best principles, but of a slightly jocose and good-humored habit, thought that he could piece his widowed years with the not insignificant, fraction of life left to Miss Silence, to their mutual advantage. He came to the village, therefore, where Father Pemberton was very glad to have him supply the pulpit in the place of his unfortunate disabled colleague. The courtship soon began, and was brisk enough; for the good man knew there was no time to lose at his period of life,--or hers either, for that matter. It was a rather odd specimen of love-making; for he was constantly trying to subdue his features to a gravity which they were not used to, and she was as constantly endeavoring to be as lively as possible, with the innocent desire of pleasing her light-hearted suitor.

"Vieille fille fait jeune mariee." Silence was ten years younger as a bride than she had seemed as a lone woman. One would have said she had got out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some half a dozen behind it,--where there is often good and reasonably cheerful conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the probable amount of his property, or the little slips he may have committed, and where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense sets the four waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-hour ago in the house of mourning. But Miss Silence, that was, thought that two families, with all the possible complications which time might bring, would be better in separate establishments. She therefore proposed selling The Poplars to Myrtle and her husband, and removing to a house in the village, which would be large enough for them, at least for the present. So the young folks bought the old house, and paid a mighty good price for it; and enlarged it, and beautified and glorified it, and one fine morning went together down to the Widow Hopkins's, whose residence seemed in danger of being a little crowded,--for Gifted lived there with his Susan,--and what had happened might happen again,--and gave Master Byles Gridley a formal and most persuasively worded invitation to come up and make his home with them at The Poplars.

Now Master Gridley has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are looking upon him almost for the last time before they part from him, and see his face no more. Let us not inquire too curiously, then, how he received this kind proposition. It is enough, that, when he found that a new study had been built on purpose for him, and a sleeping-room attached to it so that he could live there without disturbing anybody if he chose, he consented to remove there for a while, and that he was there established amidst great rejoicing.

Cynthia Badlam had fallen of late into poor health. She found at last that she was going; and as she had a little property of her own,--as almost all poor relations have, only there is not enough of it,--she was much exercised in her mind as to the final arrangements to be made respecting its disposition. The Rev. Dr. Pemberton was one day surprised by a message, that she wished to have an interview with him. He rode over to the town in which she was residing, and there had a long conversation with her upon this matter. When this was settled, her mind seemed too be more at ease. She died with a comfortable assurance that she was going to a better world, and with a bitter conviction that it would be hard to find one that would offer her a worse lot than being a poor relation in this.

Her little property was left to Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton and Jacob Penhallow, Esq., to be by them employed for such charitable purposes as they should elect, educational or other. Father Pemberton preached an admirable funeral sermon, in which he praised her virtues, known to this people among whom she had long lived, and especially that crowning act by which she devoted all she had to purposes of charity-and benevolence.

The old clergyman seemed to have renewed his youth since the misfortune of his colleague had incapacitated him from labor. He generally preached in the forenoon now, and to the great acceptance of the people,--for the truth was that the honest minister who had married Miss Silence was not young enough or good-looking enough to be an object of personal attentions like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, and the old minister appeared to great advantage contrasted with him in the pulpit. Poor Mr. Stoker was now helpless, faithfully and tenderly waited upon by his own wife, who had regained her health and strength,--in no small measure, perhaps, from the great need of sympathy and active aid which her unfortunate husband now experienced. It was an astonishment to herself when she found that she who had so long been served was able to serve another. Some who knew his errors thought his accident was a judgment; but others believed that it was only a mercy in disguise,--it snatched him roughly from his sin, but it opened his heart to gratitude towards her whom his neglect could not alienate, and through gratitude to repentance and better thoughts. Bathsheba had long ago promised herself to Cyprian Eveleth; and, as he was about to become the rector of a parish in the next town, the marriage was soon to take place.

How beautifully serene Master Byles Gridley's face was growing! Clement loved to study its grand lines, which had so much strength and fine humanity blended in them. He was so fascinated by their noble expression that he sometimes seemed to forget himself, and looked at him more like an artist taking his portrait than like an admiring friend. He maintained that Master Gridley had a bigger bump of benevolence and as large a one of cautiousness as the two people most famous for the size of these organs on the phrenological chart he showed him, and proved it, or nearly proved it, by careful measurements of his head. Master Gridley laughed, and read him a passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.

The disposal of Miss Cynthia's bequest was much discussed in the village. Some wished the trustees would use it to lay the foundations of a public library. Others thought it should be applied for the relief of the families of soldiers who had fallen in the war. Still another set would take it to build a monument to the memory of those heroes. The trustees listened with the greatest candor to all these gratuitous hints. It was, however, suggested, in a well-written anonymous article which appeared in the village paper, that it was desirable to follow the general lead of the testator's apparent preference. The trustees were at liberty to do as they saw fit; but, other things being equal, same educational object should be selected.

If there were any orphan children in the place, it would seem to be very proper to devote the moderate sum bequeathed to educating them. The trustees recognized the justice of this suggestion. Why not apply it to the instruction and maintenance of those two pretty and promising children, virtually orphans, whom the charitable Mrs. Hopkins had cared for so long without any recompense, and at a cost which would soon become beyond her means? The good people of the neighborhood accepted this as the best solution of the difficulty. It was agreed upon at length by the trustees, that the Cynthia Badlam Fund for Educational Purposes should be applied for the benefit of the two foundlings, known as Isosceles and Helminthia Hopkins.

Master Bytes Gridley was greatly exercised about the two "preposterous names," as he called them, which in a moment of eccentric impulse he had given to these children of nature. He ventured to hint as much to Mrs. Hopkins. The good dame was vastly surprised. She thought they was about as pooty names as anybody had had given 'em in the village. And they was so handy, spoke short, Sossy and Minthy,--she never should know how to call 'em anything else.

"But my dear Mrs. Hopkins," Master Gridley urged, "if you knew the meaning they have to the ears of scholars, you would see that I did very wrong to apply such absurd names to my little fellow-creatures, and that I am bound to rectify my error. More than that, my dear madam, I mean to consult you as to the new names; and if we can fix upon proper and pleasing ones, it is my intention to leave a pretty legacy in my will to these interesting children."

"Mr. Gridley," said Mrs. Hopkins, "you're the best man I ever see, or ever shall see, . . . except my poor dear Ammi . . . . I 'll do jest as you say about that, or about anything else in all this livin' world."

"Well, then, Mrs. Hopkins, what shall be the boy's name?"

"Byles Gridley Hopkins!" she answered instantly.

"Good Lord!" said Mr. Gridley, "think a minute, my dear madam. I will not say one word,--only think a minute, and mention some name that will not suggest quite so many winks and whispers."

She did think something less than a minute, and then said aloud, "Abraham Lincoln Hopkins."

"Fifteen thousand children have been so christened during the past year, on a moderate computation."

"Do think of some name yourself, Mr. Gridley; I shall like anything that you like. To think of those dear babes having a fund--if that's the right name--on purpose for 'em, and a promise of a legacy, I hope they won't get that till they're a hundred year old!"

"What if we change Isosceles to Theodore, Mrs. Hopkins? That means the gift of God, and the child has been a gift from Heaven, rather than a burden."

Mrs. Hopkins seized her apron, and held it to her eyes. She was weeping. "Theodore!" she said, "Theodore! My little brother's name, that I buried when I was only eleven year old. Drownded. The dearest little child that ever you see. I have got his little mug with Theodore on it now. Kep' o' purpose. Our little Sossy shall have it. Theodore P. Hopkins,--sha'n't it be, Mr. Gridley?"

"Well, if you say so; but why that P., Mrs. Hopkins? Theodore Parker, is it?"

"Doesn't P. stand for Pemberton, and isn't Father Pemberton the best man in the world--next to you, Mr. Gridley?"

"Well, well, Mrs. Hopkins, let it be so, if you are suited, I am. Now about Helminthia; there can't be any doubt about what we ought to call her,--surely the friend of orphans should be remembered in naming one of the objects of her charity."

"Cynthia Badlam Fund Hopkins," said the good woman triumphantly,--"is that what you mean?"

"Suppose we leave out one of the names,--four are too many. I think the general opinion will be that Hehninthia should unite the names of her two benefactresses,--Cynthia Badlam Hopkins."

"Why, law! Mr. Gridley, is n't that nice?--Minthy and Cynthy,--there ain't but one letter of difference! Poor Cynthy would be pleased if she could know that one of our babes was to be called after her. She was dreadful fond of children."

On one of the sweetest Sundays that ever made Oxbow Village lovely, the Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Pembertan was summoned to officiate at three most interesting ceremonies,--a wedding and two christenings, one of the latter a double one.

The first was celebrated at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, between the Rev. Cyprian Eveleth and Bathsheba, daughter of the first-named clergyman. He could not be present on account of his great infirmity, but the door of his chamber was left open that he might hear the marriage service performed. The old, white-haired minister, assisted, as the papers said, by the bridegroom's father, conducted the ceremony according to the Episcopal form. When he came to those solemn words in which the husband promises fidelity to the wife so long as they both shall live, the nurse, who was watching, near the poor father, saw him bury his face in his pillow, and heard him murmur the words, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"

The christenings were both to take place at the same service, in the old meeting-house. Colonel Clement Lindsay and Myrtle his wife came in, and stout Nurse Byloe bore their sturdy infant in her arms. A slip of paper was handed to the Reverend Doctor on which these words were written:--"The name is Charles Hazard."

The solemn and touching rite was then performed; and Nurse Byloe disappeared with the child, its forehead glistening with the dew of its consecration.

Then, hand in hand, like the babes in the wood, marched up the broad aisle--marshalled by Mrs. Hopkins in front, and Mrs. Gifted Hopkins bringing up the rear--the two children hitherto known as Isosceles and Helminthia. They had been well schooled, and, as the mysterious and to them incomprehensible ceremony was enacted, maintained the most stoical aspect of tranquillity. In Mrs. Hopkins's words, "They looked like picters, and behaved like angels."

That evening, Sunday evening as it was, there was a quiet meeting of some few friends at The Poplars. It was such a great occasion that the Sabbatical rules, never strict about Sunday evening,--which was, strictly speaking, secular time,--were relaxed. Father Pemberton was there, and Master Byles Gridley, of course, and the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, with his son and his daughter-in-law, Bathsheba, and her mother, now in comfortable health, aunt Silence and her husband, Doctor Hurlbut and his wife (Olive Eveleth that was), Jacob Penhallow, Esq., Mrs. Hopkins, her son and his wife (Susan Posey that was), the senior deacon of the old church (the admirer of the great Scott), the Editor-in-chief of the "Banner and Oracle," and in the background Nurse Byloe and the privileged servant, Mistress Kitty Fagan, with a few others whose names we need not mention.

The evening was made pleasant with sacred music, and the fatigues of two long services repaired by such simple refections as would not turn the holy day into a day of labor. A large paper copy of the new edition of Byles Gridley's remarkable work was lying on the table. He never looked so happy,--could anything fill his cup fuller? In the course of the evening Clement spoke of the many trials through which they had passed in common with vast numbers of their countrymen, and some of those peculiar dangers which Myrtle had had to encounter in the course of a life more eventful, and attended with more risks, perhaps, than most of them imagined. But Myrtle, he said, had always been specially cared for. He wished them to look upon the semblance of that protecting spirit who had been faithful to her in her gravest hours of trial and danger. If they would follow him into one of the lesser apartments up stairs they would have an opportunity to do so.

Myrtle wondered a little, but followed with the rest. They all ascended to the little projecting chamber, through the window of which her scarlet jacket caught the eyes of the boys paddling about on the river in those early days when Cyprian Eveleth gave it the name of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.

The light fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from which looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose continued presence with her descendants was the old family legend. But underneath it Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some closely covered object upon it. It was a mysterious arrangement, made without any knowledge on her part.

"Now, then, Kitty!" Mr. Lindsay said.

Kitty Fagan, who had evidently been taught her part, stepped forward, and removed the cloth which concealed the unknown object. It was a lifelike marble bust of Master Byles Gridley.

"And this is what you have been working at so long,--is it, Clement?" Myrtle said.

"Which is the image of your protector, Myrtle?", he answered, smiling.

Myrtle Hazard Lindsay walked up to the bust and kissed its marble forehead, saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel." forehead, saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel."

A MORTAL ANTIPATHY

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

PREFACE.

"A MORTAL ANTIPATHY" was a truly hazardous experiment. A very wise and very distinguished physician who is as much at home in literature as he is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in referring to this story: "I should have been afraid of my subject." He did not explain himself, but I can easily understand that he felt the improbability of the, physiological or pathological occurrence on which the story is founded to be so great that the narrative could hardly be rendered plausible. I felt the difficulty for myself as well as for my readers, and it was only by recalling for our consideration a series of extraordinary but well-authenticated facts of somewhat similar character that I could hope to gain any serious attention to so strange a narrative.

I need not recur to these wonderful stories. There is, however, one, not to be found on record elsewhere, to which I would especially call the reader's attention. It is that of the middle-aged man, who assured me that he could never pass a tall hall clock without an indefinable terror. While an infant in arms the heavy weight of one of these tall clocks had fallen with aloud crash and produced an impression on his nervous system which he had never got over.

The lasting effect of a shock received by the sense of sight or that of hearing is conceivable enough.

But there is another sense, the nerves of which are in close relation with the higher organs of consciousness. The strength of the associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves, the olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience and as related by others. Now we know that every human being, as well as every other living organism, carries its own distinguishing atmosphere. If a man's friend does not know it, his dog does, and can track him anywhere by it. This personal peculiarity varies with the age and conditions of the individual. It may be agreeable or otherwise, a source of attraction or repulsion, but its influence is not less real, though far less obvious and less dominant, than in the lower animals. It was an atmospheric impression of this nature which associated itself with a terrible shock experienced by the infant which became the subject of this story. The impression could not be outgrown, but it might possibly be broken up by some sudden change in the nervous system effected by a cause as potent as the one which had produced the disordered condition.

This is the best key that I can furnish to a story which must have puzzled some, repelled others, and failed to interest many who did not suspect the true cause of the mysterious antipathy.

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August, 1891. O. W. H.

A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.

FIRST OPENING OF THE NEW PORTFOLIO.

INTRODUCTION.

"And why the New Portfolio, I would ask?"

Pray, do you remember, when there was an accession to the nursery in which you have a special interest, whether the new-comer was commonly spoken of as a baby? Was it not, on the contrary, invariably, under all conditions, in all companies, by the whole household, spoken of as the baby? And was the small receptacle provided for it commonly spoken of as a cradle; or was it not always called the cradle, as if there were no other in existence?

Now this New Portfolio is the cradle in which I am to rock my new-born thoughts, and from which I am to lift them carefully and show them to callers, namely, to the whole family of readers belonging to my list of intimates, and such other friends as may drop in by accident. And so it shall have the definite article, and not be lost in the mob of its fellows as a portfolio.

There are a few personal and incidental matters of which I wish to say something before reaching the contents of the Portfolio, whatever these may be. I have had other portfolios before this,--two, more especially, and the first thing I beg leave to introduce relates to these.

Do not throw this volume down, or turn to another page, when I tell you that the earliest of them, that of which I now am about to speak, was opened more than fifty years ago. This is a very dangerous confession, for fifty years make everything hopelessly old-fashioned, without giving it the charm of real antiquity. If I could say a hundred years, now, my readers would accept all I had to tell them with a curious interest; but fifty years ago,--there are too many talkative old people who know all about that time, and at best half a century is a half-baked bit of ware. A coin-fancier would say that your fifty-year-old facts have just enough of antiquity to spot them with rust, and not enough to give them--the delicate and durable patina which is time's exquisite enamel.

When the first Portfolio was opened the coin of the realm bore for its legend,--or might have borne if the more devout hero-worshippers could have had their way,--Andreas Jackson, Populi Gratia, Imp. Caesar. Aug. Div., Max., etc., etc. I never happened to see any gold or silver with that legend, but the truth is I was not very familiarly acquainted with the precious metals at that period of my career, and, there might have been a good deal of such coin in circulation without my handling it, or knowing much about it.

Permit me to indulge in a few reminiscences of that far-off time.

In those days the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the comparatively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in that agreeable resort of amateurs and artists.

How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in the mind's gallery! Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in it for one of our sunset after-glows; and Neagle's full-length portrait of the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves; and Copley's long-waistcoated gentlemen and satin-clad ladies,--they looked like gentlemen and ladies, too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-waisted matrons; and Allston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, unimpassioned women, not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable rocking-horse,--you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in those days; and the Murillo,--not from Marshal Soup's collection; and the portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athenaeum a hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical pictures, and his immense and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph's coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing; and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more generously, than in those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned fish-horns?

If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary butterflies. The father was editor of the "Boston Recorder," a very respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day of the week as "the Sahbuth." The son was the editor of several different periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious, and of many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society, which he studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and color, and with a certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but real, though somewhat frothed over by his worldly experiences.

Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first Portfolio. He had made himself known by his religious poetry, published in his father's paper, I think, and signed "Roy." He had started the "American Magazine," afterwards merged in the "New York Mirror." He had then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to lighter forms of verse. He had just written

"I'm twenty-two, I'm twenty-two, They idly give me joy, As if I should be glad to know That I was less a boy."

He was young, therefore, and already famous. He came very near being very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in luxuriant abundance; his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to show behind the footlights; he dressed with artistic elegance. He was something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde. There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phxdra, in which the beautiful young man, who had kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-mother, always reminded me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of the living face as compared with the ideal. The painted youth is still blooming on the canvas, but the fresh-cheecked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has long faded out of human sight. I took the leaves which lie before me at this moment, as I write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul's Church, on a sad, overclouded winter's day, in the year 1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had all done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was a school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories, which have done honor to our literature, had appeared. Our school-books depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts from the orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant's Thanatopsis, his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the Flowers, Halleck's Marco Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake's American Flag, and Percival's Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius Waking,--and not getting very wide awake, either. These could be depended upon. A few other copies of verses might be found, but Dwight's "Columbia, Columbia," and Pierpont's Airs of Palestine, were already effaced, as many of the favorites of our own day and generation must soon be, by the great wave which the near future will pour over the sands in which they still are legible.

About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled "Truth, a Gift for Scribblers," which made some talk for a while, and is now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones. The "London Athenaeum" spoke of it as having been described as a "tomahawk sort of satire." As the author had been a trapper in Missouri, he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners. Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated at West Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He wrote an article on Bryant's Poems for the "North American Review," and another on the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk. In this last-mentioned article he tells this story as the great warrior told it himself. It was an incident of a fight with the Osages.

"Standing by my father's side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the scalp from his head. Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my lance through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to my father. He said nothing, but looked pleased."

This little red story describes very well Spelling's style of literary warfare. His handling of his most conspicuous victim, Willis, was very much like Black Hawk's way of dealing with the Osage. He tomahawked him in heroics, ran him through in prose, and scalped him in barbarous epigrams. Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised; hardly any one else escaped.

If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find in the pages of "Truth" a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of. I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned in the little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have not read the obituaries of all the others, some of them may be still flourishing in spite of Mr. Spelling's exterminating onslaught. Time dealt as hardly with poor Spelling, who was not without talent and instruction, as he had dealt with our authors. I think he found shelter at last under a roof which held numerous inmates, some of whom had seen better and many of whom had known worse days than those which they were passing within its friendly and not exclusive precincts. Such, at least, was the story I heard after he disappeared from general observation.

That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and all that class of showy annuals. Short stories, slender poems, steel engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,--to manifestations of this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years. The "Scarlet Letter" was an unhinted possibility. The "Voices of the Night" had not stirred the brooding silence; the Concord seer was still in the lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes, which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.

What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations, floating in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring each other in reciprocal reflections! Violent, abusive as he was, unjust to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of the small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use. His attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came with it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble writer Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental pique, or equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three survivors before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest son of the Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment. Bailey, an American writer, "who made long since a happy snatch at fame," which must have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot identify him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last Request, not wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright and agreeable writer of light verse,--all these are commended to the keeping of that venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and hour-glass such a load that he generally drops the burdens committed to his charge, after making a show of paying every possible attention to them so long as he is kept in sight.

It was a good time to open a portfolio. But my old one had boyhood written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old warship I had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen literature, and in the "Naval Monument," was threatened with demolition; a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville in his cocked hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of that first Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere with the duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and thought which would have been otherwise expended in filling it.

During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for the greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up and opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a member.

In the year 1857, towards its close, the "Atlantic Monthly," which I had the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips & Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He thought that I might bring something out of my old Portfolio which would be not unacceptable in the new magazine. I looked at the poor old receptacle, which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had lost its freshness, and seemed hardly presentable to the new company expected to welcome the new-comer in the literary world of Boston, the least provincial of American centres of learning and letters. The gilded covering where the emblems of hope and aspiration had looked so bright had faded; not wholly, perhaps, but how was the gold become dim!---how was the most fine gold changed! Long devotion to other pursuits had left little time for literature, and the waifs and strays gathered from the old Portfolio had done little more than keep alive the memory that such a source of supply was still in existence. I looked at the old Portfolio, and said to myself, "Too late! too late. This tarnished gold will never brighten, these battered covers will stand no more wear and tear; close them, and leave them to the spider and the book-worm."

In the mean time the nebula of the first quarter of the century had condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period. When, a little while after the establishment of the new magazine, the "Saturday Club" gathered about the long table at "Parker's," such a representation of all that was best in American literature had never been collected within so small a compass. Most of the Americans whom educated foreigners cared to see-leaving out of consideration official dignitaries, whose temporary importance makes them objects of curiosity--were seated at that board. But the club did not yet exist, and the "Atlantic Monthly" was an experiment. There had already been several monthly periodicals, more or less successful and permanent, among which "Putnam's Magazine" was conspicuous, owing its success largely to the contributions of that very accomplished and delightful writer, Mr. George William Curtis. That magazine, after a somewhat prolonged and very honorable existence, had gone where all periodicals go when they die, into the archives of the deaf, dumb, and blind recording angel whose name is Oblivion. It had so well deserved to live that its death was a surprise and a source of regret. Could another monthly take its place and keep it when that, with all its attractions and excellences, had died out, and left a blank in our periodical literature which it would be very hard to fill as well as that had filled it?

This was the experiment which the enterprising publishers ventured upon, and I, who felt myself outside of the charmed circle drawn around the scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given myself to other studies and duties, wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my becoming a contributor. And so, yielding to a pressure which I could not understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised to take a part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the columns of the new magazine.

That was the way in which the second Portfolio found its way to my table, and was there opened in the autumn of the year 1857. I was already at least

'Nel mezzo del cammin di mia, vita,'

when I risked myself, with many misgivings, in little-tried paths of what looked at first like a wilderness, a selva oscura, where, if I did not meet the lion or the wolf, I should be sure to find the critic, the most dangerous of the carnivores, waiting to welcome me after his own fashion.

The second Portfolio is closed and laid away. Perhaps it was hardly worth while to provide and open a new one; but here it lies before me, and I hope I may find something between its covers which will justify me in coming once more before my old friends. But before I open it I want to claim a little further indulgence.

There is a subject of profound interest to almost every writer, I might say to almost every human being. No matter what his culture or ignorance, no matter what his pursuit, no matter what his character, the subject I refer to is one of which he rarely ceases to think, and, if opportunity is offered, to talk. On this he is eloquent, if on nothing else. The slow of speech becomes fluent; the torpid listener becomes electric with vivacity, and alive all over with interest.

The sagacious reader knows well what is coming after this prelude. He is accustomed to the phrases with which the plausible visitor, who has a subscription book in his pocket, prepares his victim for the depressing disclosure of his real errand. He is not unacquainted with the conversational amenities of the cordial and interesting stranger, who, having had the misfortune of leaving his carpet-bag in the cars, or of having his pocket picked at the station, finds himself without the means of reaching that distant home where affluence waits for him with its luxurious welcome, but to whom for the moment the loan of some five and twenty dollars would be a convenience and a favor for which his heart would ache with gratitude during the brief interval between the loan and its repayment.

I wish to say a few words in my own person relating to some passages in my own history, and more especially to some of the recent experiences through which I have been passing.

What can justify one in addressing himself to the general public as if it were his private correspondent? There are at least three sufficient reasons: first, if he has a story to tell that everybody wants to hear,--if he has been shipwrecked, or has been in a battle, or has witnessed any interesting event, and can tell anything new about it; secondly, if he can put in fitting words any common experiences not already well told, so that readers will say, "Why, yes! I have had that sensation, thought, emotion, a hundred times, but I never heard it spoken of before, and I never saw any mention of it in print;" and thirdly, anything one likes, provided he can so tell it as to make it interesting.

I have no story to tell in this Introduction which can of itself claim any general attention. My first pages relate the effect of a certain literary experience upon myself,--a series of partial metempsychoses of which I have been the subject. Next follows a brief tribute to the memory of a very dear and renowned friend from whom I have recently been parted. The rest of the Introduction will be consecrated to the memory of my birthplace.

I have just finished a Memoir, which will appear soon after this page is written, and will have been the subject of criticism long before it is in the reader's hands. The experience of thinking another man's thoughts continuously for a long time; of living one's self into another man's life for a month, or a year, or more, is a very curious one. No matter how much superior to the biographer his subject may be, the man who writes the life feels himself, in a certain sense, on the level of the person whose life he is writing. One cannot fight over the battles of Marengo or Austerlitz with Napoleon without feeling as if he himself had a fractional claim to the victory, so real seems the transfer of his personality into that of the conqueror while he reads. Still more must this identification of "subject" and "object" take place when one is writing of a person whose studies or occupations are not unlike his own.

Here are some of my metempsychoses: Ten years ago I wrote what I called A Memorial Outline of a remarkable student of nature. He was a born observer, and such are far from common. He was also a man of great enthusiasm and unwearying industry. His quick eye detected what others passed by without notice: the Indian relic, where another would see only pebbles and fragments; the rare mollusk, or reptile, which his companion would poke with his cane, never suspecting that there was a prize at the end of it. Getting his single facts together with marvellous sagacity and long-breathed patience, he arranged them, classified them, described them, studied them in their relations, and before those around him were aware of it the collector was an accomplished naturalist. When--he died his collections remained, and they still remain, as his record in the hieratic language of science. In writing this memoir the spirit of his quiet pursuits, the even temper they bred in him, gained possession of my own mind, so that I seemed to look at nature through his gold-bowed spectacles, and to move about his beautifully ordered museum as if I had myself prepared and arranged its specimens. I felt wise with his wisdom, fair-minded with his calm impartiality; it seemed as if for the time his placid, observant, inquiring, keen-sighted nature "slid into my soul," and if I had looked at myself in the glass I should almost have expected to see the image of the Hersey professor whose life and character I was sketching.

A few years hater I lived over the life of another friend in writing a Memoir of which he was the subject. I saw him, the beautiful, bright-eyed boy, with dark, waving hair; the youthful scholar, first at Harvard, then at Gottingen and Berlin, the friend and companion of Bismarck; the young author, making a dash for renown as a novelist, and showing the elements which made his failures the promise of success in a larger field of literary labor; the delving historian, burying his fresh young manhood in the dusty alcoves of silent libraries, to come forth in the face of Europe and America as one of the leading historians of the time; the diplomatist, accomplished, of captivating presence and manners, an ardent American, and in the time of trial an impassioned and eloquent advocate of the cause of freedom; reaching at last the summit of his ambition as minister at the Court of Saint James. All this I seemed to share with him as I tracked his career from his birthplace in Dorchester, and the house in Walnut Street where he passed his boyhood, to the palaces of Vienna and London. And then the cruel blow which struck him from the place he adorned; the great sorrow that darkened his later years; the invasion of illness, a threat that warned of danger, and after a period of invalidism, during a part of which I shared his most intimate daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons. Did not my own consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer itself into this brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing record? I, too, seemed to feel the delight of carrying with me, as if they were my own, the charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere. I shared his heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social triumphs, I was honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about him, I was wronged by the indignity from which he suffered, mourned with him in his sorrow, and thus, after I had been living for months with his memory, I felt as if I should carry a part of his being with me so long as my self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.

The years passed away, and the influences derived from the companionships I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own current of being. Then there came to me a new experience in my relations with an eminent member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually for a long period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a prelude to a work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances. He was the subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost necessarily fatal disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon itself if it were not supplied with food from without, he determined to write a treatise on a subject which had greatly interested him, and which would oblige him to bestow much of his time and thought upon it, if indeed he could hold out to finish the work. During the period while he was engaged in writing it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect health, died suddenly of pneumonia. Physical suffering, mental distress, the prospect of death at a near, if uncertain, time always before him, it was hard to conceive a more terrible strain than that which he had to endure. When, in the hour of his greatest need, his faithful companion, the wife of many years of happy union, whose hand had smoothed his pillow, whose voice had consoled and cheered him, was torn from him after a few days of illness, I felt that my, friend's trial was such that the cry of the man of many afflictions and temptations might well have escaped from his lips: "I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder; he hath also taken me by my neck and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground."

I had dreaded meeting him for the first time after this crushing blow. What a lesson he gave me of patience under sufferings which the fearful description of the Eastern poet does not picture too vividly! We have been taught to admire the calm philosophy of Haller, watching his faltering pulse as he lay dying; we have heard the words of pious resignation said to have been uttered with his last breath by Addison: but here was a trial, not of hours, or days, or weeks, but of months, even years, of cruel pain, and in the midst of its thick darkness the light of love, which had burned steadily at his bedside, was suddenly extinguished.

There were times in which the thought would force itself upon my consciousness, How long is the universe to look upon this dreadful experiment of a malarious planet, with its unmeasurable freight of suffering, its poisonous atmosphere, so sweet to breathe, so sure to kill in a few scores of years at farthest, and its heart-breaking woes which make even that brief space of time an eternity? There can be but one answer that will meet this terrible question, which must arise in every thinking nature that would fain "justify the ways of God to men." So must it be until that

"one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves"

has become a reality, and the anthem in which there is no discordant note shall be joined by a voice from every life made "perfect through sufferings."

Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years of companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend, in retracing which I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.

And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of intimacy with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than while he was here in living form and feature. I did not know how difficult a task I had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man whom all, or almost all, agree upon as one of the great lights of the New World, and whom very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah. Never before was I so forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of the work of a newspaper editor,--that threshing of straw already thrice beaten by the flails of other laborers in the same field. What could be said that had not been said of "transcendentalism" and of him who was regarded as its prophet; of the poet whom some admired without understanding, a few understood, or thought they did, without admiring, and many both understood and admired,--among these there being not a small number who went far beyond admiration, and lost themselves in devout worship? While one exalted him as "the greatest man that ever lived," another, a friend, famous in the world of letters, wrote expressly to caution me against the danger of overrating a writer whom he is content to recognize as an American Montaigne, and nothing more.

After finishing this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism and the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the sparkle of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union of prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest audacity of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and was not ashamed, the feeling that I was in the company of a sibylline intelligence which was discounting the promises of the remote future long before they were due,--all this made the task a grave one. But when I found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill; the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical, estimate of hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they whirled, each around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very difficult to keep the faculties clear and the judgment unbiassed.

It is a great privilege to have lived so long in the society of such a man. "He nothing common" said, "or mean." He was always the same pure and high-souled companion. After being with him virtue seemed as natural to man as its opposite did according to the old theologies. But how to let one's self down from the high level of such a character to one's own poor standard? I trust that the influence of this long intellectual and spiritual companionship never absolutely leaves one who has lived in it. It may come to him in the form of self-reproach that he falls so far short of the superior being who has been so long the object of his contemplation. But it also carries him at times into the other's personality, so that he finds himself thinking thoughts that are not his own, using phrases which he has unconsciously borrowed, writing, it may be, as nearly like his long-studied original as Julio Romano's painting was like Raphael's; and all this with the unquestioning conviction that he is talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way. So far as tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy of the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a misfortune for the borrower. But to share the inmost consciousness of a noble thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure and radiant soul,--this is indeed the highest form of teaching and discipline.

I have written these few memoirs, and I am grateful for all that they have taught me. But let me write no more. There are but two biographers who can tell the story of a man's or a woman's life. One is the person himself or herself; the other is the Recording Angel. The autobiographer cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, though he may tell nothing but the truth, and the Recording Angel never lets his book go out of his own hands. As for myself, I would say to my friends, in the Oriental phrase, "Live forever!" Yes, live forever, and I, at least, shall not have to wrong your memories by my imperfect record and unsatisfying commentary.

In connection with these biographies, or memoirs, more properly, in which I have written of my departed friends, I hope my readers will indulge me in another personal reminiscence. I have just lost my dear and honored contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when those four letters, "son b." were written under the date of my birth, August 29th. Autumn had just begun when my great pre-contemporary entered this un-Christian universe and was made a member of the Christian church on the same day, for he was born and baptized on the 18th of September.

Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the great English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in the last century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking and doing; what were his feelings about life; what changes the years had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his reputation. It was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both playing that old familiar air, "Life,"--one a bassoon, if you will, and the other an oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still keeping pace with each other until the players both grew old and gray. At last the thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep accompaniment rolls out its thunder no more.

I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years has left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with many of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know him. I can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted him,--he hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample coat, too, I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs, and beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat, arching in front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence, involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons, and the strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns of support to the massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over it. I can hear him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened to make room for his portly figure. "A fine day," says Sir Joshua. "Sir," he answers, "it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and the skies are nebulous," at which the great painter smiles, shifts his trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.

Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club, between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what I shall find when it is opened.

Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,--I seem to find myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.

Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old dwelling-house, precious for its intimate association with the earliest stages of the war of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace and the home of my boyhood.

The "Old Gambrel-roofed House" exists no longer. I remember saying something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever, as the soul dies out of the body. We may die out of many houses, but the house itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to one who has dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which held him in dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate youth,--so real, I say, is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it must outlast its perishing frame.

The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to admit, a case of justifiable domicide. Not the less was it to be deplored by all who love the memories of the past. With its destruction are obliterated some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took the first steps in the long and bloody march which led us through the wilderness to the promised land of independent nationality. Personally, I have a right to mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me. My private grief for its loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion, were it not that the experience through which I have just passed is one so familiar to my fellow-countrymen that, in telling my own reflections and feelings, I am repeating those of great numbers of men and women who have had the misfortune to outlive their birthplace.

It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon. The Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural objects encircling it. Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and some unpretending two-story houses which had been its neighbors for a century and more. To the south of it the square brick dormitories and the bellfried hall of the university helped to shut out the distant view. But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common, beyond which the historical "Washington elm" and two companions in line with it, spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter. And far away rose the hills that bounded the view, with the glimmer here and there of the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered, half-hidden villa. Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier remembrance, widely open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails gliding along as if through the level fields, for no water was visible. So there were broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination to wander over.

I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us all our days. Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built their fairy palaces, and even now, as I look at them from my library window, across the estuary of the Charles, I find myself in the familiar home of my early visions. The "clouds of glory" which we trail with us in after life need not be traced to a pre-natal state. There is enough to account for them in that unconsciously remembered period of existence before we have learned the hard limitations of real life. Those earliest months in which we lived in sensations without words, and ideas not fettered in sentences, have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving "before the letter." I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and unsympathetic pavement.

Our university town was very much like the real country, in those days of which I am thinking. There were plenty of huckleberries and blueberries within half a mile of the house. Blackberries ripened in the fields, acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees, squirrels ran among the branches, and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen circling over the barnyard. Still another rural element was not wanting, in the form of that far-diffused, infragrant effluvium, which, diluted by a good half mile of pure atmosphere, is no longer odious, nay is positively agreeable, to many who have long known it, though its source and centre has an unenviable reputation. I need not name the animal whose Parthian warfare terrifies and puts to flight the mightiest hunter that ever roused the tiger from his jungle or faced the lion of the desert. Strange as it may seem, an aerial hint of his personality in the far distance always awakens in my mind pleasant remembrances and tender reflections. A whole neighborhood rises up before me: the barn, with its haymow, where the hens laid their eggs to hatch, and we boys hid our apples to ripen, both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis; the shed, where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism that made Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old outhouse, with the "corn-chamber" which the mice knew so well; the paved yard, with its open gutter,--these and how much else come up at the hint of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy. Nothing is more familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories. There was that quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh sawdust. It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the tumble of the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put asunder; the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,--the straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it that mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it listen to reason,--there are just such straight-grained and just such knotty men and women. All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming "egh!*******!"

How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking! From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where the head of the family preached and the limbs of the family listened, was not much more than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue. But of a hot summer's afternoon, after having already heard one sermon, which could not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of presentation to the members of the home circle, and the theology of which was not too clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more or less lugubrious, rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many preliminary snuffles and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by the snort of a huge bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus, with other exercises of the customary character,--after all this in the forenoon, the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the hot sun counted for as much, in my childish dead-reckoning, as from old Israel Porter's in Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston did in after years. It takes a good while to measure the radius of the circle that is about us, for the moon seems at first as near as the watchface. Who knows but that, after a certain number of ages, the planet we live on may seem to us no bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed before the sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her between our thumb and finger, like a bullet or a marble? And time, too; how long was it from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-down" of an old-fashioned, puritanical, judaical first day of the week, which a pious fraud christened "the Sabbath"? Was it a fortnight, as we now reckon duration, or only a week? Curious entities, or non-entities, space and tithe? When you see a metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get rid of these accidents, so as to lay his dry, clean palm on the absolute, does it not remind you of the hopeless task of changing the color of the blackamoor by a similar proceeding? For space is the fluid in which he is washing, and time is the soap which he is using up in the process, and he cannot get free from them until he can wash himself in a mental vacuum.

In my reference to the old house in a former paper, published years ago, I said,

"By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself on this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung so tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with those who cherished them."

What strides the great University has taken since those words were written! During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once, like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my school-boy days, groans under the weight of the massive edifices which have sprung up all around them, crowned by the tower of that noble structure which stands in full view before me as I lift my eyes from the portfolio on the back of which I am now writing.

For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it. I have told you that I have just finished a long memoir, and that it has cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,--if I have overcome them, which others must decide. And I feel exactly as honest Dobbin feels when his harness is slipped off after a long journey with a good deal of up-hill work. He wants to rest a little, then to feed a little; then, if you will turn him loose in the pasture, he wants to roll. I have left my starry and ethereal companionship,--not for a long time, I hope, for it has lifted me above my common self, but for a while. And now I want, so to speak, to roll in the grass and among the dandelions with the other pachyderms. So I have kept to the outside of the portfolio as yet, and am disporting myself in reminiscences, and fancies, and vagaries, and parentheses.

How well I understand the feeling which led the Pisans to load their vessels with earth from the Holy Land, and fill the area of the Campo Santo with that sacred soil! The old house stood upon about as perverse a little patch of the planet as ever harbored a half-starved earth-worm. It was as sandy as Sahara and as thirsty as Tantalus. The rustic aid-de-camps of the household used to aver that all fertilizing matters "leached" through it. I tried to disprove their assertion by gorging it with the best of terrestrial nourishment, until I became convinced that I was feeding the tea-plants of China, and then I gave over the attempt. And yet I did love, and do love, that arid patch of ground. I wonder if a single flower could not be made to grow in a pot of earth from that Campo Santo of my childhood! One noble product of nature did not refuse to flourish there,--the tall, stately, beautiful, soft-haired, many-jointed, generous maize or Indian corn, which thrives on sand and defies the blaze of our shrivelling summer. What child but loves to wander in its forest-like depths, amidst the rustling leaves and with the lofty tassels tossing their heads high above him! There are two aspects of the cornfield which always impress my imagination: the first when it has reached its full growth, and its ordered ranks look like an army on the march with its plumed and bannered battalions; the second when, after the battle of the harvest, the girdled stacks stand on the field of slaughter like so many ragged Niobes,--say rather like the crazy widows and daughters of the dead soldiery.

Once more let us come back to the old house. It was far along in its second century when the edict went forth that it must stand no longer.

The natural death of a house is very much like that of one of its human tenants. The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs of age. Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off, and leave bald the boards that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and soon the garret or the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by the beams sag, the floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels away, the ceilings scale off and fall, the windows are crusted with clinging dust, the doors drop from their rusted hinges, the winds come in without knocking and howl their cruel death-songs through the empty rooms and passages, and at last there comes a crash, a great cloud of dust rises, and the home that had been the shelter of generation after generation finds its grave in its own cellar. Only the chimney remains as its monument. Slowly, little by little, the patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their chemistry pick out the mortar from between the bricks; at last a mighty wind roars around it and rushes against it, and the monumental relic crashes down among the wrecks it has long survived. So dies a human habitation left to natural decay, all that was seen above the surface of the soil sinking gradually below it,

Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell Save home's last wrecks, the cellar and the well.

But if this sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling fall by the hand of violence! The ripping off of the shelter that has kept out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork, the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,--what a brutal act of destruction it seems!

Why should I go over the old house again, having already described it more than ten years ago? Alas! how many remember anything they read but once, and so long ago as that? How many would find it out if one should say over in the same words that which he said in the last decade? But there is really no need of telling the story a second time, for it can be found by those who are curious enough to look it up in a volume of which it occupies the opening chapter.

In order, however, to save any inquisitive reader that trouble, let me remind him that the old house was General Ward's headquarters at the breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying Bunker's Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower room, the floor of which was covered with dents, made, it was alleged, by the butts of the soldiers' muskets. In that house, too, General Warren probably passed the night before the Bunker Hill battle, and over its threshold must the stately figure of Washington have often cast its shadow.

But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one day came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a little universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent identity, with the terrible responsibility of a separate, independent, inalienable existence,--that house does not ask for any historical associations to make it the centre of the earth for him.

If there is any person in the world to be envied, it is the one who is born to an ancient estate, with a long line of family traditions and the means in his hands of shaping his mansion and his domain to his own taste, without losing sight of all the characteristic features which surrounded his earliest years. The American is, for the most part, a nomad, who pulls down his house as the Tartar pulls up his tent-poles. If I had an ideal life to plan for him it would be something like this:

His grandfather should be a wise, scholarly, large-brained, large-hearted country minister, from whom he should inherit the temperament that predisposes to cheerfulness and enjoyment, with the finer instincts which direct life to noble aims and make it rich with the gratification of pure and elevated tastes and the carrying out of plans for the good of his neighbors and his fellow-creatures. He should, if possible, have been born, at any rate have passed some of his early years, or a large part of them, under the roof of the good old minister. His father should be, we will say, a business man in one of our great cities,--a generous manipulator of millions, some of which have adhered to his private fortunes, in spite of his liberal use of his means. His heir, our ideally placed American, shall take possession of the old house, the home of his earliest memories, and preserve it sacredly, not exactly like the Santa Casa, but, as nearly as may be, just as he remembers it. He can add as many acres as he will to the narrow house-lot. He can build a grand mansion for himself, if he chooses, in the not distant neighborhood. But the old house, and all immediately round it, shall be as he recollects it when he had to stretch his little arm up to reach the door-handles. Then, having well provided for his own household, himself included, let him become the providence of the village or the town where he finds himself during at least a portion of every year. Its schools, its library, its poor,--and perhaps the new clergyman who has succeeded his grandfather's successor may be one of them,--all its interests, he shall make his own. And from this centre his beneficence shall radiate so far that all who hear of his wealth shall also hear of him as a friend to his race.

Is not this a pleasing programme? Wealth is a steep hill, which the father climbs slowly and the son often tumbles down precipitately; but there is a table-land on a level with it, which may be found by those who do not lose their head in looking down from its sharply cloven summit.---Our dangerously rich men can make themselves hated, held as enemies of the race, or beloved and recognized as its benefactors. The clouds of discontent are threatening, but if the gold-pointed lightning-rods are rightly distributed the destructive element may be drawn off silently and harmlessly. For it cannot be repeated too often that the safety of great wealth with us lies in obedience to the new version of the Old World axiom, RICHESS oblige.

THE NEW PORTFOLIO: FIRST OPENING.

A MORTAL ANTIPATHY. I GETTING READY.

It is impossible to begin a story which must of necessity tax the powers of belief of readers unacquainted with the class of facts to which its central point of interest belongs without some words in the nature of preparation. Readers of Charles Lamb remember that Sarah Battle insisted on a clean-swept hearth before sitting down to her favorite game of whist.

The narrator wishes to sweep the hearth, as it were, in these opening pages, before sitting down to tell his story. He does not intend to frighten the reader away by prolix explanation, but he does mean to warn him against hasty judgments when facts are related which are not within the range of every-day experience. Did he ever see the Siamese twins, or any pair like them? Probably not, yet he feels sure that Chang and Eng really existed; and if he has taken the trouble to inquire, he has satisfied himself that similar cases have been recorded by credible witnesses, though at long intervals and in countries far apart from each other.

This is the first sweep of the brush, to clear the hearth of the skepticism and incredulity which must be got out of the way before we can begin to tell and to listen in peace with ourselves and each other.

One more stroke of the brush is needed before the stage will be ready for the chief characters and the leading circumstances to which the reader's attention is invited. If the principal personages made their entrance at once, the reader would have to create for himself the whole scenery of their surrounding conditions. In point of fact, no matter how a story is begun, many of its readers have already shaped its chief actors out of any hint the author may have dropped, and provided from their own resources a locality and a set of outward conditions to environ these imagined personalities. These are all to be brushed away, and the actual surroundings of the subject of the narrative represented as they were, at the risk of detaining the reader a little while from the events most likely to interest him. The choicest egg that ever was laid was not so big as the nest that held it. If a story were so interesting that a maiden would rather hear it than listen to the praise of her own beauty, or a poet would rather read it than recite his own verses, still it would have to be wrapped in some tissue of circumstance, or it would lose half its effectiveness.

It may not be easy to find the exact locality referred to in this narrative by looking into the first gazetteer that is at hand. Recent experiences have shown that it is unsafe to be too exact in designating places and the people who live in them. There are, it may be added, so many advertisements disguised under the form of stories and other literary productions that one naturally desires to avoid the suspicion of being employed by the enterprising proprietors of this or that celebrated resort to use his gifts for their especial benefit. There are no doubt many persons who remember the old sign and the old tavern and its four chief personages presently to be mentioned. It is to be hoped that they will not furnish the public with a key to this narrative, and perhaps bring trouble to the writer of it, as has happened to other authors. If the real names are a little altered, it need not interfere with the important facts relating to those who bear them. It might not be safe to tell a damaging story about John or James Smythe; but if the slight change is made of spelling the name Smith, the Smythes would never think of bringing an action, as if the allusion related to any of them. The same gulf of family distinction separates the Thompsons with a p from the Thomsons without that letter.

There are few pleasanter places in the Northern States for a summer residence than that known from the first period of its settlement by the name of Arrowhead Village. The Indians had found it out, as the relics they left behind them abundantly testified. The commonest of these were those chipped stones which are the medals of barbarism, and from Which the place took its name,--the heads of arrows, of various sizes, material, and patterns: some small enough for killing fish and little birds, some large enough for such game as the moose and the bear, to say nothing of the hostile Indian and the white settler; some of flint, now and then one of white quartz, and others of variously colored jasper. The Indians must have lived here for many generations, and it must have been a kind of factory village of the stone age,--which lasted up to near the present time, if we may judge from the fact that many of these relics are met with close to the surface of the ground.

No wonder they found this a pleasant residence, for it is to-day one of the most attractive of all summer resorts; so inviting, indeed, that those who know it do not like to say too much about it, lest the swarms of tourists should make it unendurable to those who love it for itself, and not as a centre of fashionable display and extramural cockneyism.

There is the lake, in the first place,--Cedar Lake,--about five miles long, and from half a mile to a mile and a half wide, stretching from north to south. Near the northern extremity are the buildings of Stoughton University, a flourishing young college with an ambitious name, but well equipped and promising, the grounds of which reach the water. At the southern end of the lake are the edifices of the Corinna Institute, a favorite school for young ladies, where large numbers of the daughters of America are fitted, so far as education can do it, for all stations in life, from camping out with a husband at the mines in Nevada to acting the part of chief lady of the land in the White House at Washington.

Midway between the two extremities, on the eastern shore of the lake, is a valley between two hills, which come down to the very edge of the lake, leaving only room enough for a road between their base and the water. This valley, half a mile in width, has been long settled, and here for a century or more has stood the old Anchor Tavern. A famous place it was so long as its sign swung at the side of the road: famous for its landlord, portly, paternal, whose welcome to a guest that looked worthy of the attention was like that of a parent to a returning prodigal, and whose parting words were almost as good as a marriage benediction; famous for its landlady, ample in person, motherly, seeing to the whole household with her own eyes, mistress of all culinary secrets that Northern kitchens are most proud of; famous also for its ancient servant, as city people would call her,--help, as she was called in the tavern and would have called herself,--the unchanging, seemingly immortal Miranda, who cared for the guests as if she were their nursing mother, and pressed the specially favorite delicacies on their attention as a connoisseur calls the wandering eyes of an amateur to the beauties of a picture. Who that has ever been at the old Anchor Tavern forgets Miranda's

"A little of this fricassee?-it is ver-y nice;"

or

"Some of these cakes? You will find them ver-y good."

Nor would it be just to memory to forget that other notable and noted member of the household,--the unsleeping, unresting, omnipresent Pushee, ready for everybody and everything, everywhere within the limits of the establishment at all hours of the day and night. He fed, nobody could say accurately when or where. There were rumors of a "bunk," in which he lay down with his clothes on, but he seemed to be always wide awake, and at the service of as many guest, at once as if there had been half a dozen of him.

So much for old reminiscences.

The landlord of the Anchor Tavern had taken down his sign. He had had the house thoroughly renovated and furnished it anew, and kept it open in summer for a few boarders. It happened more than once that the summer boarders were so much pleased with the place that they stayed on through the autumn, and some of them through the winter. The attractions of the village were really remarkable. Boating in summer, and skating in winter; ice-boats, too, which the wild ducks could hardly keep up with; fishing, for which the lake was renowned; varied and beautiful walks through the valley and up the hillsides; houses sheltered from the north and northeasterly winds, and refreshed in the hot summer days by the breeze which came over the water,--all this made the frame for a pleasing picture of rest and happiness. But there was a great deal more than this. There was a fine library in the little village, presented and richly endowed by a wealthy native of the place. There was a small permanent population of a superior character to that of an everyday country town; there was a pretty little Episcopal church, with a good-hearted rector, broad enough for the Bishop of the diocese to be a little afraid of, and hospitable to all outsiders, of whom, in the summer season, there were always some who wanted a place of worship to keep their religion from dying out during the heathen months, while the shepherds of the flocks to which they belonged were away from their empty folds.

What most helped to keep the place alive all through the year was the frequent coming together of the members of a certain literary association. Some time before the tavern took down its sign the landlord had built a hall, where many a ball had been held, to which the young folks of all the country round had resorted. It was still sometimes used for similar occasions, but it was especially notable as being the place of meeting of the famous PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

This association, the name of which might be invidiously interpreted as signifying that its members knew everything, had no such pretensions, but, as its Constitution said very plainly and modestly, held itself open to accept knowledge on any and all subjects from such as had knowledge to impart. Its President was the rector of the little chapel, a man who, in spite of the Thirty-Nine Articles, could stand fire from the widest-mouthed heretical blunderbuss without flinching or losing his temper. The hall of the old Anchor Tavern was a convenient place of meeting for the students and instructors of the University and the Institute. Sometimes in boat-loads, sometimes in carriage-loads, sometimes in processions of skaters, they came to the meetings in Pansophian Hall, as it was now commonly called.

These meetings had grown to be occasions of great interest. It was customary to have papers written by members of the Society, for the most part, but now and then by friends of the members, sometimes by the students of the College or the Institute, and in rarer instances by anonymous personages, whose papers, having been looked over and discussed by the Committee appointed for that purpose, were thought worth listening to. The variety of topics considered was very great. The young ladies of the village and the Institute had their favorite subjects, the young gentlemen a different set of topics, and the occasional outside contributors their own; so that one who happened to be admitted to a meeting never knew whether he was going to hear an account of recent arctic discoveries, or an essay on the freedom of the will, or a psychological experience, or a story, or even a poem.

Of late there had been a tendency to discuss the questions relating to the true status and the legitimate social functions of woman. The most conflicting views were held on the subject. Many of the young ladies and some of the University students were strong in defence of all the "woman's rights" doctrines. Some of these young people were extreme in their views. They had read about Semiramis and Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth, until they were ready, if they could get the chance, to vote for a woman as President of the United States or as General of the United States Army. They were even disposed to assert the physical equality of woman to man, on the strength of the rather questionable history of the Amazons, and especially of the story, believed to be authentic, of the female body-guard of the King of Dahomey,--females frightful enough to need no other weapon than their looks to scare off an army of Cossacks.

Miss Lurida Vincent, gold medallist of her year at the Corinna Institute, was the leader of these advocates of virile womanhood. It was rather singular that she should have elected to be the apostle of this extreme doctrine, for she was herself far better equipped with brain than muscles. In fact, she was a large-headed, large-eyed, long-eyelashed, slender-necked, slightly developed young woman; looking almost like a child at an age when many of the girls had reached their full stature and proportions. In her studies she was so far in advance of her different classes that there was always a wide gap between her and the second scholar. So fatal to all rivalry had she proved herself that she passed under the school name of The Terror. She learned so easily that she undervalued her own extraordinary gifts, and felt the deepest admiration for those of her friends endowed with faculties of an entirely different and almost opposite nature. After sitting at her desk until her head was hot and her feet were like ice, she would go and look at the blooming young girls exercising in the gymnasium of the school, and feel as if she would give all her knowledge, all her mathematics and strange tongues and history, all those accomplishments that made her the encyclopaedia of every class she belonged to, if she could go through the series of difficult and graceful exercises in which she saw her schoolmates delighting.

One among them, especially, was the object of her admiration, as she was of all who knew her exceptional powers in the line for which nature had specially organized her. All the physical perfections which Miss Lurida had missed had been united in Miss Euthymia Tower, whose school name was The Wonder. Though of full womanly stature, there were several taller girls of her age. While all her contours and all her movements betrayed a fine muscular development, there was no lack of proportion, and her finely shaped hands and feet showed that her organization was one of those carefully finished masterpieces of nature which sculptors are always in search of, and find it hard to detect among the imperfect products of the living laboratory.

This girl of eighteen was more famous than she cared to be for her performances in the gymnasium. She commonly contented herself with the same exercises that her companions were accustomed to. Only her dumb-bells, with which she exercised easily and gracefully, were too heavy for most of the girls to do more with than lift them from the floor. She was fond of daring feats on the trapeze, and had to be checked in her indulgence in them. The Professor of gymnastics at the University came over to the Institute now and then, and it was a source of great excitement to watch some of the athletic exercises in which the young lady showed her remarkable muscular strength and skill in managing herself in the accomplishment of feats which looked impossible at first sight. How often The Terror had thought to herself that she would gladly give up all her knowledge of Greek and the differential and integral calculus if she could only perform the least of those feats which were mere play to The Wonder! Miss Euthymia was not behind the rest in her attainments in classical or mathematical knowledge, and she was one of the very best students in the out-door branches,--botany, mineralogy, sketching from nature,--to be found among the scholars of the Institute.

There was an eight-oared boat rowed by a crew of the young ladies, of which Miss Euthymia was the captain and pulled the bow oar. Poor little Lurida could not pull an oar, but on great occasions, when there were many boats out, she was wanted as coxswain, being a mere feather-weight, and quick-witted enough to serve well in the important office where brains are more needed than muscle.

There was also an eight-oared boat belonging to the University, and rowed by a picked crew of stalwart young fellows. The bow oar and captain of the University crew was a powerful young man, who, like the captain of the girls' boat, was a noted gymnast. He had had one or two quiet trials with Miss Euthymia, in which, according to the ultras of the woman's rights party, he had not vindicated the superiority of his sex in the way which might have been expected. Indeed, it was claimed that he let a cannon-ball drop when he ought to have caught it, and it was not disputed that he had been ingloriously knocked over by a sand-bag projected by the strong arms of the young maiden. This was of course a story that was widely told and laughingly listened to, and the captain of the University crew had become a little sensitive on the subject. When there was a talk, therefore, about a race between the champion boats of the two institutions there was immense excitement in both of them, as well as among the members of the Pansophian Society and all the good people of the village.

There were many objections to be overcome. Some thought it unladylike for the young maidens to take part in a competition which must attract many lookers-on, and which it seemed to them very hoidenish to venture upon. Some said it was a shame to let a crew of girls try their strength against an equal number of powerful young men. These objections were offset by the advocates of the race by the following arguments. They maintained that it was no more hoidenish to row a boat than it was to take a part in the calisthenic exercises, and that the girls had nothing to do with the young men's boat, except to keep as much ahead of it as possible. As to strength, the woman's righters believed that, weight for weight, their crew was as strong as the other, and of course due allowance would be made for the difference of weight and all other accidental hindrances. It was time to test the boasted superiority of masculine muscle. Here was a chance. If the girls beat, the whole country would know it, and after that female suffrage would be only a question of time. Such was the conclusion, from rather insufficient premises, it must be confessed; but if nature does nothing per saltum,--by jumps,--as the old adage has it, youth is very apt to take long leaps from a fact to a possible sequel or consequence. So it had come about that a contest between the two boat-crews was looked forward to with an interest almost equal to that with which the combat between the Horatii and Curiatii was regarded.

The terms had been at last arranged between the two crews, after cautious protocols and many diplomatic discussions. It was so novel in its character that it naturally took a good deal of time to adjust it in such a way as to be fair to both parties. The course must not be too long for the lighter and weaker crew, for the staying power of the young persons who made it up could not be safely reckoned upon. A certain advantage must be allowed them at the start, and this was a delicate matter to settle. The weather was another important consideration. June would be early enough, in all probability, and if the lake should be tolerably smooth the grand affair might come off some time in that month. Any roughness of the water would be unfavorable to the weaker crew. The rowing-course was on the eastern side of the lake, the starting-point being opposite the Anchor Tavern; from that three quarters of a mile to the south, where the turning-stake was fixed, so that the whole course of one mile and a half would bring the boats back to their starting-point.

The race was to be between the Algonquin, eight-oared boat with outriggers, rowed by young men, students of Stoughton University, and the Atalanta, also eight-oared and outrigger boat, by young ladies from the Corinna Institute. Their boat was three inches wider than the other, for various sufficient reasons, one of which was to make it a little less likely to go over and throw its crew into the water, which was a sound precaution, though all the girls could swim, and one at least, the bow oar, was a famous swimmer, who had pulled a drowning man out of the water after a hard struggle to keep him from carrying her down with him.

Though the coming trial had not been advertised in the papers, so as to draw together a rabble of betting men and ill-conditioned lookers-on, there was a considerable gathering, made up chiefly of the villagers and the students of the two institutions. Among them were a few who were disposed to add to their interest in the trial by small wagers. The bets were rather in favor of the "Quins," as the University boat was commonly called, except where the natural sympathy of the young ladies or the gallantry of some of the young men led them to risk their gloves or cigars, or whatever it might be, on the Atalantas. The elements of judgment were these: average weight of the Algonquins one hundred and sixty-five pounds; average weight of the Atalantas, one hundred and forty-eight pounds; skill in practice about equal; advantage of the narrow boat equal to three lengths; whole distance allowed the Atalantas eight lengths,--a long stretch to be made up in a mile and a half.

And so both crews began practising for the grand trial.

II

THE BOAT-RACE.

The 10th of June was a delicious summer day, rather warm, but still and bright. The water was smooth, and the crews were in the best possible condition. All was expectation, and for some time nothing but expectation. No boat-race or regatta ever began at the time appointed for the start. Somebody breaks an oar, or somebody fails to appear in season, or something is the matter with a seat or an outrigger; or if there is no such excuse, the crew of one or both or all the boats to take part in the race must paddle about to get themselves ready for work, to the infinite weariness of all the spectators, who naturally ask why all this getting ready is not attended to beforehand. The Algonquins wore plain gray flannel suits and white caps. The young ladies were all in dark blue dresses, touched up with a red ribbon here and there, and wore light straw hats. The little coxswain of the Atalanta was the last to step on board. As she took her place she carefully deposited at her feet a white handkerchief wrapped about something or other, perhaps a sponge, in case the boat should take in water.

At last the Algonquin shot out from the little nook where she lay, --long, narrow, shining, swift as a pickerel when he darts from the reedy shore. It was a beautiful sight to see the eight young fellows in their close-fitting suits, their brown muscular arms bare, bending their backs for the stroke and recovering, as if they were parts of a single machine.

"The gals can't stan' it agin them fellers," said the old blacksmith from the village.

"You wait till the gals get a-goin'," said the carpenter, who had often worked in the gymnasium of the Corinna Institute, and knew something of their muscular accomplishments. "Y' ought to see 'em climb ropes, and swing dumb-bells, and pull in them rowin'-machines. Ask Jake there whether they can't row a mild in double-quick time,--he knows all abaout it."

Jake was by profession a fisherman, and a freshwater fisherman in a country village is inspector-general of all that goes on out-of-doors, being a lazy, wandering sort of fellow, whose study of the habits and habitats of fishes gives him a kind of shrewdness of observation, just as dealing in horses is an education of certain faculties, and breeds a race of men peculiarly cunning, suspicious, wary, and wide awake, with a rhetoric of appreciation and depreciation all its own.

Jake made his usual preliminary signal, and delivered himself to the following effect:

"Wahl, I don' know jest what to say. I've seed 'em both often enough when they was practisin', an' I tell ye the' wa'n't no slouch abaout neither on 'em. But them bats is all-fired long, 'n' eight on 'em stretched in a straight line eendways makes a consid'able piece aout 'f a mile 'n' a haaf. I'd bate on them gals if it wa'n't that them fellers is naterally longer winded, as the gals 'll find aout by the time they git raound the stake 'n' over agin the big ellum. I'll go ye a quarter on the pahnts agin the petticoats."

The fresh-water fisherman had expressed the prevailing belief that the young ladies were overmatched. Still there were not wanting those who thought the advantage allowed the "Lantas," as they called the Corinna boatcrew, was too great, and that it would be impossible for the "Quins" to make it up and go by them.

The Algonquins rowed up and down a few times before the spectators. They appeared in perfect training, neither too fat nor too fine, mettlesome as colts, steady as draught-horses, deep-breathed as oxen, disciplined to work together as symmetrically as a single sculler pulls his pair of oars. The fisherman offered to make his quarter fifty cents. No takers.

Five minutes passed, and all eyes were strained to the south, looking for the Atalanta. A clump of trees hid the edge of the lake along which the Corinna's boat was stealing towards the starting-point. Presently the long shell swept into view, with its blooming rowers, who, with their ample dresses, seemed to fill it almost as full as Raphael fills his skiff on the edge of the Lake of Galilee. But how steadily the Atalanta came on!---no rocking, no splashing, no apparent strain; the bow oar turning to look ahead every now and then, and watching her course, which seemed to be straight as an arrow, the beat of the strokes as true and regular as the pulse of the healthiest rower among them all. And if the sight of the other boat and its crew was beautiful, how lovely was the look of this! Eight young girls,--young ladies, for those who prefer that more dignified and less attractive expression,--all in the flush of youth, all in vigorous health; every muscle taught its duty; each rower alert, not to be a tenth of a second out of time, or let her oar dally with the water so as to lose an ounce of its propelling virtue; every eye kindling with the hope of victory. Each of the boats was cheered as it came in sight, but the cheers for the Atalanta were naturally the loudest, as the gallantry of one sex and the clear, high voices of the other gave it life and vigor.

"Take your places!" shouted the umpire, five minutes before the half hour. The two boats felt their way slowly and cautiously to their positions, which had been determined by careful measurement. After a little backing and filling they got into line, at the proper distance from each other, and sat motionless, their bodies bent forward, their arms outstretched, their oars in the water, waiting for the word.

"Go!" shouted the umpire.

Away sprang the Atalanta, and far behind her leaped the Algonquin, her oars bending like so many long Indian bows as their blades flashed through the water.

"A stern chase is a long chase," especially when one craft is a great distance behind the other. It looked as if it would be impossible for the rear boat to overcome the odds against it. Of course the Algonquin kept gaining, but could it possibly gain enough? That was the question. As the boats got farther and farther away, it became more and more difficult to determine what change there was in the interval between them. But when they came to rounding the stake it was easier to guess at the amount of space which had been gained. It was clear that something like half the distance, four lengths, as nearly as could be estimated, had been made up in rowing the first three quarters of a mile. Could the Algonquins do a little better than this in the second half of the race-course, they would be sure of winning.

The boats had turned the stake, and were coming in rapidly. Every minute the University boat was getting nearer the other.

"Go it, Quins!" shouted the students.

"Pull away, Lantas!" screamed the girls, who were crowding down to the edge of the water.

Nearer,--nearer,--the rear boat is pressing the other more and more closely,--a few more strokes, and they will be even, for there is but one length between them, and thirty rods will carry them to the line. It looks desperate for the Atalantas. The bow oar of the Algonquin turns his head. He sees the little coxswain leaning forward at every stroke, as if her trivial weight were of such mighty consequence,--but a few ounces might turn the scale of victory. As he turned he got a glimpse of the stroke oar of the Atalanta. What a flash of loveliness it was! Her face was like the reddest of June roses, with the heat and the strain and the passion of expected triumph. The upper button of her close-fitting flannel suit had strangled her as her bosom heaved with exertion, and it had given way before the fierce clutch she made at it. The bow oar was a staunch and steady rower, but he was human. The blade of his oar lingered in the water; a little more and he would have caught a crab, and perhaps lost the race by his momentary bewilderment.

The boat, which seemed as if it had all the life and nervousness of a Derby three-year-old, felt the slight check, and all her men bent more vigorously to their oars. The Atalantas saw the movement, and made a spurt to keep their lead and gain upon it if they could. It was of no use. The strong arms of the young men were too much for the young maidens; only a few lengths remained to be rowed, and they would certainly pass the Atalanta before she could reach the line.

The little coxswain saw that it was all up with the girls' crew if she could not save them by some strategic device.

"Dolus an virtus quis in hoste requirat?"

she whispered to herself,--for The Terror remembered her Virgil as she did everything else she ever studied. As she stooped, she lifted the handkerchief at her feet, and took from it a flaming bouquet. "Look!" she cried, and flung it just forward of the track of the Algonquin. The captain of the University boat turned his head, and there was the lovely vision which had a moment before bewitched him. The owner of all that loveliness must, he thought, have flung the bouquet. It was a challenge: how could he be such a coward as to decline accepting it.

He was sure he could win the race now, and he would sweep past the line in triumph with the great bunch of flowers at the stem of his boat, proud as Van Tromp in the British channel with the broom at his mast-head.

He turned the boat's head a little by backing water. He came up with the floating flowers, and near enough to reach them. He stooped and snatched them up, with the loss perhaps of a second in all,--no more. He felt sure of his victory.

How can one tell the story of the finish in cold-blooded preterites? Are we not there ourselves? Are not our muscles straining with those of these sixteen young creatures, full of hot, fresh blood, their nerves all tingling like so many tight-strained harp-strings, all their life concentrating itself in this passionate moment of supreme effort? No! We are seeing, not telling about what somebody else once saw!

--The bow of the Algonquin passes the stern of the Atalanta!

--The bow of the Algonquin is on a level with the middle of the Atalanta!

--Three more lengths' rowing and the college crew will pass the girls!

--"Hurrah for the Quins!" The Algonquin ranges up alongside of the Atalanta!

"Through with her!" shouts the captain of the Algonquin.

"Now, girls!" shrieks the captain of the Atalanta.

They near the line, every rower straining desperately, almost madly.

--Crack goes the oar of the Atalanta's captain, and up flash its splintered fragments, as the stem of her boat springs past the line, eighteen inches at least ahead of the Algonquin.

Hooraw for the Lantas! Hooraw for the Girls! Hooraw for the Institoot! shout a hundred voices.

"Hurrah for woman's rights and female suffrage!" pipes the small voice of The Terror, and there is loud laughing and cheering all round.

She had not studied her classical dictionary and her mythology for nothing. "I have paid off one old score," she said. "Set down my damask roses against the golden apples of Hippomenes!"

It was that one second lost in snatching up the bouquet which gave the race to the Atalantas.

III

THE WHITE CANOE.

While the two boats were racing, other boats with lookers-on in them were rowing or sailing in the neighborhood of the race-course. The scene on the water was a gay one, for the young people in the boats were, many of them, acquainted with each other. There was a good deal of lively talk until the race became too exciting. Then many fell silent, until, as the boats neared the line, and still more as they crossed it, the shouts burst forth which showed how a cramp of attention finds its natural relief in a fit of convulsive exclamation.

But far away, on the other side of the lake, a birchbark canoe was to be seen, in which sat a young man, who paddled it skillfully and swiftly. It was evident enough that he was watching the race intently, but the spectators could see little more than that. One of them, however, who sat upon the stand, had a powerful spy-glass, and could distinguish his motions very minutely and exactly. It was seen by this curious observer that the young man had an opera-glass with him, which he used a good deal at intervals. The spectator thought he kept it directed to the girls' boat, chiefly, if not exclusively. He thought also that the opera-glass was more particularly pointed towards the bow of the boat, and came to the natural conclusion that the bow oar, Miss Euthymia Tower, captain of the Atalantas, "The Wonder" of the Corinna Institute, was the attraction which determined the direction of the instrument.

"Who is that in the canoe over there?" asked the owner of the spy-glass.

"That's just what we should like to know," answered the old landlord's wife. "He and his man boarded with us when they first came, but we could never find out anything about him only just his name and his ways of living. His name is Kirkwood, Maurice Kirkwood, Esq., it used to come on his letters. As for his ways of living, he was the solitariest human being that I ever came across. His man carried his meals up to him. He used to stay in his room pretty much all day, but at night he would be off, walking, or riding on horseback, or paddling about in the lake, sometimes till nigh morning. There's something very strange about that Mr. Kirkwood. But there don't seem to be any harm in him. Only nobody can guess what his business is. They got up a story about him at one time. What do you think? They said he was a counterfeiter! And so they went one night to his room, when he was out, and that man of his was away too, and they carried keys, and opened pretty much everything; and they found--well, they found just nothing at all except writings and letters,--letters from places in America and in England, and some with Italian postmarks: that was all. Since that time the sheriff and his folks have let him alone and minded their own business. He was a gentleman,--anybody ought to have known that; and anybody that knew about his nice ways of living and behaving, and knew the kind of wear he had for his underclothing, might have known it. I could have told those officers that they had better not bother him. I know the ways of real gentlemen and real ladies, and I know those fellows in store clothes that look a little too fine,--outside. Wait till washing-day comes!"

The good lady had her own standards for testing humanity, and they were not wholly unworthy of consideration; they were quite as much to be relied on as the judgments of the travelling phrenologist, who sent his accomplice on before him to study out the principal personages in the village, and in the light of these revelations interpreted the bumps, with very little regard to Gall and Spurzheim, or any other authorities.

Even with the small amount of information obtained by the search among his papers and effects, the gossips of the village had constructed several distinct histories for the mysterious stranger. He was an agent of a great publishing house; a leading contributor to several important periodicals; the author of that anonymously published novel which had made so much talk; the poet of a large clothing establishment; a spy of the Italian, some said the Russian, some said the British, Government; a proscribed refugee from some country where he had been plotting; a school-master without a school, a minister without a pulpit, an actor without an engagement; in short, there was no end to the perfectly senseless stories that were told about him, from that which made him out an escaped convict to the whispered suggestion that he was the eccentric heir to a great English title and estate.

The one unquestionable fact was that of his extraordinary seclusion. Nobody in the village, no student in the University, knew his history. No young lady in the Corinna Institute had ever had a word from him. Sometimes, as the boats of the University or the Institute were returning at dusk, their rowers would see the canoe stealing into the shadows as they drew near it. Sometimes on a moonlight night, when a party of the young ladies were out upon the lake, they would see the white canoe gliding ghost-like in the distance. And it had happened more than once that when a boat's crew had been out with singers among them, while they were in the midst of a song, the white canoe would suddenly appear and rest upon the water,--not very near them, but within hearing distance,--and so remain until the singing was over, when it would steal away and be lost sight of in some inlet or behind some jutting rock.

Naturally enough, there was intense curiosity about this young man. The landlady had told her story, which explained nothing. There was nobody to be questioned about him except his servant, an Italian, whose name was Paolo, but who to the village was known as Mr. Paul.

Mr. Paul would have seemed the easiest person in the world to worm a secret out of. He was good-natured, child-like as a Heathen Chinee, talked freely with everybody in such English as he had at command, knew all the little people of the village, and was followed round by them partly from his personal attraction for them, and partly because he was apt to have a stick of candy or a handful of peanuts or other desirable luxury in his pocket for any of his little friends he met with. He had that wholesome, happy look, so uncommon in our arid countrymen,--a look hardly to be found except where figs and oranges ripen in the open air. A kindly climate to grow up in, a religion which takes your money and gives you a stamped ticket good at Saint Peter's box office, a roomy chest and a good pair of lungs in it, an honest digestive apparatus, a lively temperament, a cheerful acceptance of the place in life assigned to one by nature and circumstance,--these are conditions under which life may be quite comfortable to endure, and certainly is very pleasant to contemplate. All these conditions were united in Paolo. He was the easiest; pleasantest creature to talk with that one could ask for a companion. His southern vivacity, his amusing English, his simplicity and openness, made him friends everywhere.

It seemed as if it would be a very simple matter to get the history of his master out of this guileless and unsophisticated being. He had been tried by all the village experts. The rector had put a number of well-studied careless questions, which failed of their purpose. The old librarian of the town library had taken note of all the books he carried to his master, and asked about his studies and pursuits. Paolo found it hard to understand his English, apparently, and answered in the most irrelevant way. The leading gossip of the village tried her skill in pumping him for information. It was all in vain.

His master's way of life was peculiar,--in fact, eccentric. He had hired rooms in an old-fashioned three-story house. He had two rooms in the second and third stories of this old wooden building: his study in the second, his sleeping-room in the one above it. Paolo lived in the basement, where he had all the conveniences for cooking, and played the part of chef for his master and himself. This was only a part of his duty, for he was a man-of-all-work, purveyor, steward, chambermaid,--as universal in his services for one man as Pushee at the Anchor Tavern used to be for everybody.

It so happened that Paolo took a severe cold one winter's day, and had such threatening symptoms that he asked the baker, when he called, to send the village physician to see him. In the course of his visit the doctor naturally inquired about the health of Paolo's master.

"Signor Kirkwood well,--molto bene," said Paolo. "Why does he keep out of sight as he does?" asked the doctor.

"He always so," replied Paolo. "Una antipatia."

Whether Paolo was off his guard with the doctor, whether he revealed it to him as to a father confessor, or whether he thought it time that the reason of his master's seclusion should be known, the doctor did not feel sure. At any rate, Paolo was not disposed to make any further revelations. Una antipatia,--an antipathy,--that was all the doctor learned. He thought the matter over, and the more he reflected the more he was puzzled. What could an antipathy be that made a young man a recluse! Was it a dread of blue sky and open air, of the smell of flowers, or some electrical impression to which he was unnaturally sensitive?

Dr. Butts carried these questions home with him. His wife was a sensible, discreet woman, whom he could trust with many professional secrets. He told her of Paolo's revelation, and talked it over with her in the light of his experience and her own; for she had known some curious cases of constitutional likes and aversions.

Mrs. Butts buried the information in the grave of her memory, where it lay for nearly a week. At the end of that time it emerged in a confidential whisper to her favorite sister-in-law, a perfectly safe person. Twenty-four hours later the story was all over the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the subject of a strange, mysterious, unheard-of antipathy to something, nobody knew what; and the whole neighborhood naturally resolved itself into an unorganized committee of investigation.

IV

What is a country village without its mysterious personage? Few are now living who can remember the advent of the handsome young man who was the mystery of our great university town "sixty years since,"--long enough ago for a romance to grow out of a narrative, as Waverley may remind us. The writer of this narrative remembers him well, and is not sure that he has not told the strange story in some form or other to the last generation, or to the one before the last. No matter: if he has told it they have forgotten it,--that is, if they have ever read it; and whether they have or have not, the story is singular enough to justify running the risk of repetition.

This young man, with a curious name of Scandinavian origin, appeared unheralded in the town, as it was then, of Cantabridge. He wanted employment, and soon found it in the shape of manual labor, which he undertook and performed cheerfully. But his whole appearance showed plainly enough that he was bred to occupations of a very different nature, if, in deed, he had been accustomed to any kind of toil for his living. His aspect was that of one of gentle birth. His hands were not those of a laborer, and his features were delicate and refined, as well as of remarkable beauty. Who he was, where he came from, why he had come to Cantabridge, was never clearly explained. He was alone, without friends, except among the acquaintances he had made in his new residence. If he had any correspondents, they were not known to the neighborhood where he was living. But if he had neither friends nor correspondents, there was some reason for believing that he had enemies. Strange circumstances occurred which connected themselves with him in an ominous and unaccountable way. A threatening letter was slipped under the door of a house where he was visiting. He had a sudden attack of illness, which was thought to look very much like the effect of poison. At one time he disappeared, and was found wandering, bewildered, in a town many miles from that where he was residing. When questioned how he came there; he told a coherent story that he had been got, under some pretext, or in some not incredible way, into a boat, from which, at a certain landing-place, he had escaped and fled for his life, which he believed was in danger from his kidnappers.

Whoever his enemies may have been,--if they really existed,--he did not fall a victim to their plots, so far as known to or remembered by this witness.

Various interpretations were put upon his story. Conjectures were as abundant as they were in the case of Kaspar Hauser. That he was of good family seemed probable; that he was of distinguished birth, not impossible; that he was the dangerous rival of a candidate for a greatly coveted position in one of the northern states of Europe was a favorite speculation of some of the more romantic young persons. There was no dramatic ending to this story,--at least none is remembered by the present writer.

"He left a name," like the royal Swede, of whose lineage he may have been for aught that the village people knew, but not a name at which anybody "grew pale;" for he had swindled no one, and broken no woman's heart with false vows. Possibly some withered cheeks may flush faintly as they recall the handsome young man who came before the Cantabridge maidens fully equipped for a hero of romance when the century was in its first quarter.

The writer has been reminded of the handsome Swede by the incidents attending the advent of the unknown and interesting stranger who had made his appearance at Arrowhead Village.

It was a very insufficient and unsatisfactory reason to assign for the young man's solitary habits that he was the subject of an antipathy. For what do we understand by that word? When a young lady screams at the sight of a spider, we accept her explanation that she has a natural antipathy to the creature. When a person expresses a repugnance to some wholesome article of food, agreeable to most people, we are satisfied if he gives the same reason. And so of various odors, which are pleasing to some persons and repulsive to others. We do not pretend to go behind the fact. It is an individual, and it may be a family, peculiarity. Even between different personalities there is an instinctive elective dislike as well as an elective affinity. We are not bound to give a reason why Dr. Fell is odious to us any more than the prisoner who peremptorily challenges a juryman is bound to say why he does it; it is enough that he "does not like his looks."

There was nothing strange, then, that Maurice Kirkwood should have his special antipathy; a great many other people have odd likes and dislikes. But it was a very curious thing that this antipathy should be alleged as the reason for his singular mode of life. All sorts of explanations were suggested, not one of them in the least satisfactory, but serving to keep the curiosity of inquirers active until they were superseded by a new theory. One story was that Maurice had a great fear of dogs. It grew at last to a connected narrative, in which a fright in childhood from a rabid mongrel was said to have given him such a sensitiveness to the near presence of dogs that he was liable to convulsions if one came close to him.

This hypothesis had some plausibility. No other creature would be so likely to trouble a person who had an antipathy to it. Dogs are very apt to make the acquaintance of strangers, in a free and easy way. They are met with everywhere,--in one's daily walk, at the thresholds of the doors one enters, in the gentleman's library, on the rug of my lady's sitting-room and on the cushion of her carriage. It is true that there are few persons who have an instinctive repugnance to this "friend of man." But what if this so-called antipathy were only a fear, a terror, which borrowed the less unmanly name? It was a fair question, if, indeed, the curiosity of the public had a right to ask any questions at all about a harmless individual who gave no offence, and seemed entitled to the right of choosing his way of living to suit himself, without being submitted to espionage.

There was no positive evidence bearing on the point as yet. But one of the village people had a large Newfoundland dog, of a very sociable disposition, with which he determined to test the question. He watched for the time when Maurice should leave his house for the woods or the lake, and started with his dog to meet him. The animal walked up to the stranger in a very sociable fashion, and began making his acquaintance, after the usual manner of well-bred dogs; that is, with the courtesies and blandishments by which the canine Chesterfield is distinguished from the ill-conditioned cur. Maurice patted him in a friendly way, and spoke to him as one who was used to the fellowship of such companions. That idle question and foolish story were disposed of, therefore, and some other solution must be found, if possible.

A much more common antipathy is that which is entertained with regard to cats. This has never been explained. It is not mere aversion to the look of the creature, or to any sensible quality known to the common observer. The cat is pleasing in aspect, graceful in movement, nice in personal habits, and of amiable disposition. No cause of offence is obvious, and yet there are many persons who cannot abide the presence of the most innocent little kitten. They can tell, in some mysterious way, that there is a cat in the room when they can neither see nor hear the creature. Whether it is an electrical or quasi-magnetic phenomenon, or whatever it may be, of the fact of this strange influence there are too many well-authenticated instances to allow its being questioned. But suppose Maurice Kirkwood to be the subject of this antipathy in its extremest degree, it would in no manner account for the isolation to which he had condemned himself. He might shun the firesides of the old women whose tabbies were purring by their footstools, but these worthy dames do not make up the whole population.

These two antipathies having been disposed of, a new suggestion was started, and was talked over with a curious sort of half belief, very much as ghost stories are told in a circle of moderately instructed and inquiring persons. This was that Maurice was endowed with the unenviable gift of the evil eye. He was in frequent communication with Italy, as his letters showed, and had recently been residing in that country, as was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's "Roba di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign effect may follow a look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may assume that a monk is such as a matter of course. Certainly we have a right to take it for granted that the late Pope, Pius Ninth, was an eminently holy man, and yet he had the name of dispensing the mystic and dreaded jettatura as well as his blessing. If Maurice Kirkwood carried that destructive influence, so that his clear blue eyes were more to be feared than the fascinations of the deadliest serpent, it could easily be understood why he kept his look away from all around him whom he feared he might harm.

No sensible person in Arrowhead Village really believed in the evil eye, but it served the purpose of a temporary hypothesis, as do many suppositions which we take as a nucleus for our observations without putting any real confidence in them. It was just suited to the romantic notions of the more flighty persons in the village, who had meddled more or less with Spiritualism, and were ready for any new fancy, if it were only wild enough.

The riddle of the young stranger's peculiarity did not seem likely to find any very speedy solution. Every new suggestion furnished talk for the gossips of the village and the babble of the many tongues in the two educational institutions. Naturally, the discussion was liveliest among the young ladies. Here is an extract from a letter of one of these young ladies, who, having received at her birth the ever-pleasing name of Mary, saw fit to have herself called Mollie in the catalogue and in her letters. The old postmaster of the town to which her letter was directed took it up to stamp, and read on the envelope the direction to "Miss Lulu Pinrow." He brought the stamp down with a vicious emphasis, coming very near blotting out the nursery name, instead of cancelling the postage-stamp. "Lulu!" he exclaimed. "I should like to know if that great strapping girl isn't out of her cradle yet! I suppose Miss Louisa will think that belongs to her, but I saw her christened and I heard the name the minister gave her, and it was n't 'Lulu,' or any such baby nonsense." And so saying, he gave it a fling to the box marked P, as if it burned his fingers. Why a grown-up young woman allowed herself to be cheapened in the way so many of them do by the use of names which become them as well as the frock of a ten-year-old schoolgirl would become a graduate of the Corinna Institute, the old postmaster could not guess. He was a queer old man.

The letter thus scornfully treated runs over with a young girl's written loquacity:

"Oh, Lulu, there is such a sensation as you never saw or heard of 'in all your born days,' as mamma used to say. He has been at the village for some time, but lately we have had--oh, the weirdest stories about him! 'The Mysterious Stranger is the name some give him, but we girls call him the Sachem, because he paddles about in an Indian canoe. If I should tell you all the things that are said about him I should use up all my paper ten times over. He has never made a visit to the Institute, and none of the girls have ever spoken to him, but the people at the village say he is very, very handsome. We are dying to get a look at him, of course--though there is a horrid story about him--that he has the evil eye did you ever hear about the evil eye? If a person who is born with it looks at you, you die, or something happens--awful--is n't it?

"The rector says he never goes to church, but then you know a good many of the people that pass the summer at the village never do--they think their religion must have vacations--that's what I've heard they say--vacations, just like other hard work--it ought not to be hard work, I'm sure, but I suppose they feel so about it. Should you feel afraid to have him look at you? Some of the girls say they would n't have him for the whole world, but I shouldn't mind it--especially if I had on my eyeglasses. Do you suppose if there is anything in the evil eye it would go through glass? I don't believe it. Do you think blue eye-glasses would be better than common ones? Don't laugh at me--they tell such weird stories! The Terror--Lurida Vincent, you know-makes fun of all they say about it, but then she 'knows everything and doesn't believe anything,' the girls say--Well, I should be awfully scared, I know, if anybody that had the evil eye should look at me--but--oh, I don't know--but if it was a young man--and if he was very--very good-looking--I think--perhaps I would run the risk--but don't tell anybody I said any such horrid thing--and burn this letter right up--there 's a dear good girl."

It is to be hoped that no reader will doubt the genuineness of this letter. There are not quite so many "awfuls" and "awfullys" as one expects to find in young ladies' letters, but there are two "weirds," which may be considered a fair allowance. How it happened that "jolly" did not show itself can hardly be accounted for; no doubt it turns up two or three times at least in the postscript.

Here is an extract from another letter. This was from one of the students of Stoughton University to a friend whose name as it was written on the envelope was Mr. Frank Mayfield. The old postmaster who found fault with Miss "Lulu's" designation would probably have quarrelled with this address, if it had come under his eye. "Frank" is a very pretty, pleasant-sounding name, and it is not strange that many persons use it in common conversation all their days when speaking of a friend. Were they really christened by that name, any of these numerous Franks? Perhaps they were, and if so there is nothing to be said. But if not, was the baptismal name Francis or Franklin? The mind is apt to fasten in a very perverse and unpleasant way upon this question, which too often there is no possible way of settling. One might hope, if he outlived the bearer of the appellation, to get at the fact; but since even gravestones have learned to use the names belonging to childhood and infancy in their solemn record, the generation which docks its Christian names in such an un-Christian way will bequeath whole churchyards full of riddles to posterity. How it will puzzle and distress the historians and antiquarians of a coming generation to settle what was the real name of Dan and Bert and Billy, which last is legible on a white marble slab, raised in memory of a grown person, in a certain burial-ground in a town in Essex County, Massachusetts!

But in the mean time we are forgetting the letter directed to Mr. Frank Mayfield.

"DEAR FRANK,--Hooray! Hurrah! Rah!

"I have made the acquaintance of 'The Mysterious Stranger'! It happened by a queer sort of accident, which came pretty near relieving you of the duty of replying to this letter. I was out in my little boat, which carries a sail too big for her, as I know and ought to have remembered. One of those fitful flaws of wind to which the lake is so liable struck the sail suddenly, and over went my boat. My feet got tangled in the sheet somehow, and I could not get free. I had hard work to keep my head above water, and I struggled desperately to escape from my toils; for if the boat were to go down I should be dragged down with her. I thought of a good many things in the course of some four or five minutes, I can tell you, and I got a lesson about time better than anything Kant and all the rest of them have to say of it. After I had been there about an ordinary lifetime, I saw a white canoe making toward me, and I knew that our shy young gentleman was coming to help me, and that we should become acquainted without an introduction. So it was, sure enough. He saw what the trouble was, managed to disentangle my feet without drowning me in the process or upsetting his little flimsy craft, and, as I was somewhat tired with my struggle, took me in tow and carried me to the landing where he kept his canoe. I can't say that there is anything odd about his manners or his way of talk. I judge him to be a native of one of our Northern States,--perhaps a New Englander. He has lived abroad during some parts of his life. He is not an artist, as it was at one time thought he might be. He is a good-looking fellow, well developed, manly in appearance, with nothing to excite special remark unless it be a certain look of anxiety or apprehension which comes over him from time to time. You remember our old friend Squire B., whose companion was killed by lightning when he was standing close to him. You know the look he had whenever anything like a thundercloud came up in the sky. Well, I should say there was a look like that came over this Maurice Kirkwood's face every now and then. I noticed that he looked round once or twice as if to see whether some object or other was in sight. There was a little rustling in the grass as if of footsteps, and this look came over his features. A rabbit ran by us, and I watched to see if he showed any sign of that antipathy we have heard so much of, but he seemed to be pleased watching the creature.

"If you ask me what my opinion is about this Maurice Kirkwood, I think he is eccentric in his habit of life, but not what they call a 'crank' exactly. He talked well enough about such matters as we spoke of,--the lake, the scenery in general, the climate. I asked him to come over and take a look at the college. He did n't promise, but I should not be surprised if I should get him over there some day. I asked him why he did n't go to the Pansophian meetings. He did n't give any reason, but he shook his head in a very peculiar way, as much as to say that it was impossible.

"On the whole, I think it is nothing more than the same feeling of dread of human society, or dislike for it, which under the name of religion used to drive men into caves and deserts. What a pity that Protestantism does not make special provision for all the freaks of individual character! If we had a little more faith and a few more caverns, or convenient places for making them, we should have hermits in these holes as thick as woodchucks or prairie dogs. I should like to know if you never had the feeling,

"'Oh, that the desert were my dwelling-place!'

"I know what your answer will be, of course. You will say, 'Certainly,

"'With one fair spirit for my minister;'"

"but I mean alone,--all alone. Don't you ever feel as if you should like to have been a pillar-saint in the days when faith was as strong as lye (spelt with a y), instead of being as weak as dish-water? (Jerry is looking over my shoulder, and says this pun is too bad to send, and a disgrace to the University--but never mind.) I often feel as if I should like to roost on a pillar a hundred feet high,--yes, and have it soaped from top to bottom. Wouldn't it be fun to look down at the bores and the duns? Let us get up a pillar-roosters' association. (Jerry--still looking over says there is an absurd contradiction in the idea.)

"What a matter-of-fact idiot Jerry is!

"How do you like looking over, Mr. Inspector general?"

The reader will not get much information out of this lively young fellow's letter, but he may get a little. It is something to know that the mysterious resident of Arrowhead Village did not look nor talk like a crazy person; that he was of agreeable aspect and address, helpful when occasion offered, and had nothing about him, so far as yet appeared, to prevent his being an acceptable member of society.

Of course the people in the village could never be contented without learning everything there was to be learned about their visitor. All the city papers were examined for advertisements. If a cashier had absconded, if a broker had disappeared, if a railroad president was missing, some of the old stories would wake up and get a fresh currency, until some new circumstance gave rise to a new hypothesis. Unconscious of all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood lived on in his inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed likely to remain an unsolved enigma. The "Sachem" of the boating girls became the "Sphinx" of the village ramblers, and it was agreed on all hands that Egypt did not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make out than the meaning of this young man's odd way of living.

V

THE ENIGMA STUDIED.

It was a curious, if it was not a suspicious, circumstance that a young man, seemingly in good health, of comely aspect, looking as if made for companionship, should keep himself apart from all the world around him in a place where there was a general feeling of good neighborhood and a pleasant social atmosphere. The Public Library was a central point which brought people together. The Pansophian Society did a great deal to make them acquainted with each other for many of the meetings were open to outside visitors, and the subjects discussed in the meetings furnished the material for conversation in their intervals. A card of invitation had been sent by the Secretary to Maurice, in answer to which Paolo carried back a polite note of regret. The paper had a narrow rim of black, implying apparently some loss of relative or friend, but not any very recent and crushing bereavement. This refusal to come to the meetings of the society was only what was expected. It was proper to ask him, but his declining the invitation showed that he did not wish for attentions or courtesies. There was nothing further to be done to bring him out of his shell, and seemingly nothing more to be learned about him at present.

In this state of things it was natural that all which had been previously gathered by the few who had seen or known anything of him should be worked over again. When there is no new ore to be dug, the old refuse heaps are looked over for what may still be found in them. The landlord of the Anchor Tavern, now the head of the boarding-house, talked about Maurice, as everybody in the village did at one time or another. He had not much to say, but he added a fact or two.

The young gentleman was good pay,--so they all said. Sometimes he paid in gold; sometimes in fresh bills, just out of the bank. He trusted his man, Mr. Paul, with the money to pay his bills. He knew something about horses; he showed that by the way he handled that colt,--the one that threw the hostler and broke his collar-bone. "Mr. Paul come down to the stable. 'Let me see that cult you all 'fraid of,' says he. 'My master, he ride any hoss,' says Paul. 'You saddle him,' says be; and so they did, and Paul, he led that colt--the kickinest and ugliest young beast you ever see in your life--up to the place where his master, as he calls him, and he lives. What does that Kirkwood do but clap on a couple of long spurs and jump on to that colt's back, and off the beast goes, tail up, heels flying, standing up on end, trying all sorts of capers, and at last going it full run for a couple of miles, till he'd got about enough of it. That colt went off as ferce as a wild-cat, and come back as quiet as a cosset lamb. A man that pays his bills reg'lar, in good money, and knows how to handle a hoss is three quarters of a gentleman, if he is n't a whole one,--and most likely he is a whole one."

So spake the patriarch of the Anchor Tavern. His wife had already given her favorable opinion of her former guest. She now added something to her description as a sequel to her husband's remarks.

"I call him," she said, "about as likely a young gentleman as ever I clapped my eyes on. He is rather slighter than I like to see a young man of his age; if he was my sun, I should like to see him a little more fleshy. I don't believe he weighs more than a hundred and thirty or forty pounds. Did y' ever look at those eyes of his, M'randy? Just as blue as succory flowers. I do like those light-complected young fellows, with their fresh cheeks and their curly hair; somehow, curly hair doos set off anybody's face. He is n't any foreigner, for all that he talks Italian with that Mr. Paul that's his help. He looks just like our kind of folks, the college kind, that's brought up among books, and is handling 'em, and reading of 'em, and making of 'em, as like as not, all their lives. All that you say about his riding the mad colt is just what I should think he was up to, for he's as spry as a squirrel; you ought to see him go over that fence, as I did once. I don't believe there's any harm in that young gentleman,--I don't care what people say. I suppose he likes this place just as other people like it, and cares more for walking in the woods and paddling about in the water than he doos for company; and if he doos, whose business is it, I should like to know?"

The third of the speakers was Miranda, who had her own way of judging people.

"I never see him but two or three times," Miranda said. "I should like to have waited on him, and got a chance to look stiddy at him when he was eatin' his vittles. That 's the time to watch folks, when their jaws get a-goin' and their eyes are on what's afore 'em. Do you remember that chap the sheriff come and took away when we kep' tahvern? Eleven year ago it was, come nex' Thanksgivin' time. A mighty grand gentleman from the City he set up for. I watched him, and I watched him. Says I, I don't believe you're no gentleman, says I. He eat with his knife, and that ain't the way city folks eats. Every time I handed him anything I looked closeter and closeter. Them whiskers never grooved on them cheeks, says I to myself. Them 's paper collars, says I. That dimun in your shirt-front hain't got no life to it, says I. I don't believe it's nothiri' more 'n a bit o' winderglass. So says I to Pushee, 'You jes' step out and get the sheriff to come in and take a look at that chap.' I knowed he was after a fellah. He come right in, an' he goes up to the chap. 'Why, Bill,' says he, 'I'm mighty glad to see yer. We've had the hole in the wall you got out of mended, and I want your company to come and look at the old place,' says he, and he pulls out a couple of handcuffs and has 'em on his wrists in less than no time, an' off they goes together! I know one thing about that young gentleman, anyhow,--there ain't no better judge of what's good eatin' than he is. I cooked him some maccaroni myself one day, and he sends word to me by that Mr. Paul, 'Tell Miss Miranda,' says he, I that the Pope o' Rome don't have no better cooked maccaroni than what she sent up to me yesterday,' says he. I don' know much about the Pope o' Rome except that he's a Roman Catholic, and I don' know who cooks for him, whether it's a man or a woman; but when it comes to a dish o' maccaroni, I ain't afeard of their shefs, as they call 'em,--them he-cooks that can't serve up a cold potater without callin' it by some name nobody can say after 'em. But this gentleman knows good cookin', and that's as good a sign of a gentleman as I want to tell 'em by."

VI

STILL AT FAULT.

The house in which Maurice Kirkwood had taken up his abode was not a very inviting one. It was old, and had been left in a somewhat dilapidated and disorderly condition by the tenants who had lived in the part which Maurice now occupied. They had piled their packing-boxes in the cellar, with broken chairs, broken china, and other household wrecks. A cracked mirror lay on an old straw mattress, the contents of which were airing themselves through wide rips and rents. A lame clothes-horse was saddled with an old rug fringed with a ragged border, out of which all the colors had been completely trodden. No woman would have gone into a house in such a condition. But the young man did not trouble himself much about such matters, and was satisfied when the rooms which were to be occupied by himself and his servant were made decent and tolerably comfortable. During the fine season all this was not of much consequence, and if Maurice made up his mind to stay through the winter he would have his choice among many more eligible places.

The summer vacation of the Corinna Institute had now arrived, and the young ladies had scattered to their homes. Among the graduates of the year were Miss Euthymia Tower and Miss Lurida Vincent, who had now returned to their homes in Arrowhead Village. They were both glad to rest after the long final examinations and the exercises of the closing day, in which each of them had borne a conspicuous part. It was a pleasant life they led in the village, which was lively enough at this season. Walking, riding, driving, boating, visits to the Library, meetings of the Pansophian Society, hops, and picnics made the time pass very cheerfully, and soon showed their restoring influences. The Terror's large eyes did not wear the dull, glazed look by which they had too often betrayed the after effects of over-excitement of the strong and active brain behind them. The Wonder gained a fresher bloom, and looked full enough of life to radiate vitality into a statue of ice. They had a boat of their own, in which they passed many delightful hours on the lake, rowing, drifting, reading, telling of what had been, dreaming of what might be.

The Library was one of the chief centres of the fixed population, and visited often by strangers. The old Librarian was a peculiar character, as these officials are apt to be. They have a curious kind of knowledge, sometimes immense in its way. They know the backs of books, their title-pages, their popularity or want of it, the class of readers who call for particular works, the value of different editions, and a good deal besides. Their minds catch up hints from all manner of works on all kinds of subjects. They will give a visitor a fact and a reference which they are surprised to find they remember and which the visitor might have hunted for a year. Every good librarian, every private book-owner, who has grown into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book. These nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do not like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like to have their naked eyes handled. They come to feel at last that the books of a great collection are a part, not merely of their own property, though they are only the agents for their distribution, but that they are, as it were, outlying portions of their own organization. The old Librarian was getting a miserly feeling about his books, as he called them. Fortunately, he had a young lady for his assistant, who was never so happy as when she could find the work any visitor wanted and put it in his hands,--or her hands, for there were more readers among the wives and--daughters, and especially among the aunts, than there were among their male relatives. The old Librarian knew the books, but the books seemed to know the young assistant; so it looked, at least, to the impatient young people who wanted their services.

Maurice had a good many volumes of his own,--a great many, according to Paolo's account; but Paolo's ideas were limited, and a few well-filled shelves seemed a very large collection to him. His master frequently sent him to the Public Library for books, which somewhat enlarged his notions; still, the Signor was a very learned man, he was certain, and some of his white books (bound in vellum and richly gilt) were more splendid, according to Paolo, than anything in the Library.

There was no little curiosity to know what were the books that Maurice was in the habit of taking out, and the Librarian's record was carefully searched by some of the more inquisitive investigators. The list proved to be a long and varied one. It would imply a considerable knowledge of modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and modern works relating to Spiritualism. With these were the titles of novels and now and then of books of poems; but it may be taken for granted that his own shelves held the works he was most frequently in the habit of reading or consulting. Not much was to be made out of this beyond the fact of wide scholarship,--more or less deep it might be, but at any rate implying no small mental activity; for he appeared to read very rapidly, at any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new ones very frequently. To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters. But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary purpose in all probability. Why should not he be writing a novel? Not a novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to report the talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with. Novelists and lawyers understand the art of "cramming" better than any other persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working up the picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for some story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and hints borrowed from science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and miscellaneous selection of books furnished him? That might be, or possibly he was only reading for amusement. Who could say?

The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the managers to purchase many books out of the common range of reading. The two learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor. These two worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions, which grows out of the fact that one studies nature from below upwards, and the other from above downwards. The rector maintained that physicians contracted a squint which turns their eyes inwardly, while the muscles which roll their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor retorted that theological students developed a third eyelid,--the nictitating membrane, which is so well known in birds, and which serves to shut out, not all light, but all the light they do not want. Their little skirmishes did not prevent their being very good friends, who had a common interest in many things and many persons. Both were on the committee which had the care of the Library and attended to the purchase of books. Each was scholar enough to know the wants of scholars, and disposed to trust the judgment of the other as to what books should be purchased. Consequently, the clergyman secured the addition to the Library of a good many old theological works which the physician would have called brimstone divinity, and held to be just the thing to kindle fires with,--good books still for those who know how to use them, oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of disorganization the whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous belief has strangled the natural human instincts. The physician, in the mean time, acquired for the collection some of those medical works where one may find recorded various rare and almost incredible cases, which may not have their like for a whole century, and then repeat themselves, so as to give a new lease of credibility to stories which had come to be looked upon as fables.

Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in the young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the present, perhaps for a long period. The rector would have been glad to see him at church. He would have liked more especially to have had him hear his sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society. The doctor, meanwhile, was meditating on the duties of society to young men, and wishing that he could gain the young man's confidence, so as to help him out of any false habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject, if he had the power of being useful to him.

Dr. Butts was the leading medical practitioner, not only of Arrowhead Village, but of all the surrounding region. He was an excellent specimen of the country doctor, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, working a great deal harder for his living than most of those who call themselves the laboring classes,--as if none but those whose hands were hardened by the use of farming or mechanical implements had any work to do. He had that sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance, and he had also a fair share of that learning without which sagacity is like a traveller with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the guideboards. He was not a man to be taken in by names. He well knew that oftentimes very innocent-sounding words mean very grave disorders; that all, degrees of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term; that "run down" may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a week or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked patient, or an advanced stage of a mortal illness; that "seedy" may signify the morning's state of feeling, after an evening's over-indulgence, which calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of coffee, or a dangerous malady which will pack off the subject of it, at the shortest notice, to the south of France. He knew too well that what is spoken lightly of as a "nervous disturbance" may imply that the whole machinery of life is in a deranged condition, and that every individual organ would groan aloud if it had any other language than the terrible inarticulate one of pain by which to communicate with the consciousness.

When, therefore, Dr. Butts heard the word antipatia he did not smile, and say to himself that this was an idle whim, a foolish fancy, which the young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to set down everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that supposition might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional, perhaps anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what class of objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as vital to the subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece of electrical machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the history of antipathies as recorded in all the books and journals on which he could lay his hands.

------------------------------

The holder of the Portfolio asks leave to close it for a brief interval. He wishes to say a few words to his readers, before offering them some verses which have no connection with the narrative now in progress.

If one could have before him a set of photographs taken annually, representing the same person as he or she appeared for thirty or forty or fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still, as sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth looking at as it passed through the curve of life,--the vital parabola, which betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An inscription is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or granite, or marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by the aid of a continuous series of photographs would not only be curious; it would teach us much more about the laws of physiognomy than we could get from casual and unconnected observations.

The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be found in them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning in middle life and continued to what many of my correspondents are pleased to remind me--as if I required to have the fact brought to my knowledge--is no longer youth. Here is the latest of a series of annual poems read during the last thirty-four years. There seems to have been one interruption, but there may have been other poems not recorded or remembered. This, the latest poem of the series, was listened to by the scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant circle of classmates and friends when the first of the long series was read before them, then in the flush of ardent manhood:--

THE OLD SONG.

The minstrel of the classic lay Of love and wine who sings Still found the fingers run astray That touched the rebel strings.

Of Cadmus he would fair have sung, Of Atreus and his line; But all the jocund echoes rung With songs of love and wine.

Ah, brothers! I would fair have caught Some fresher fancy's gleam; My truant accents find, unsought, The old familiar theme.

Love, Love! but not the sportive child With shaft and twanging bow, Whose random arrows drove us wild Some threescore years ago;

Not Eros, with his joyous laugh, The urchin blind and bare, But Love, with spectacles and staff, And scanty, silvered hair.

Our heads with frosted locks are white, Our roofs are thatched with snow, But red, in chilling winter's spite, Our hearts and hearthstones glow.

Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in, And while the running sands Their golden thread unheeded spin, He warms his frozen hands.

Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet, And waft this message o'er To all we miss, from all we meet On life's fast-crumbling shore:

Say that to old affection true We hug the narrowing chain That binds our hearts,--alas, how few The links that yet remain!

The fatal touch awaits them all That turns the rocks to dust; From year to year they break and fall, They break, but never rust.

Say if one note of happier strain This worn-out harp afford, --One throb that trembles, not in vain, Their memory lent its chord.

Say that when Fancy closed her wings And Passion quenched his fire, Love, Love, still echoed from the strings As from Anacreon's lyre!

January 8, 1885.

VII

A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES

In thinking the whole matter over, Dr. Butts felt convinced that, with care and patience and watching his opportunity, he should get at the secret, which so far bad yielded nothing but a single word. It might be asked why he was so anxious to learn what, from all appearances, the young stranger was unwilling to explain. He may have been to some extent infected by the general curiosity of the persons around him, in which good Mrs. Butts shared, and which she had helped to intensify by revealing the word dropped by Paolo. But this was not really his chief motive. He could not look upon this young man, living a life of unwholesome solitude, without a natural desire to do all that his science and his knowledge of human nature could help him to do towards bringing him into healthy relations with the world about him. Still, he would not intrude upon him in any way. He would only make certain general investigations, which might prove serviceable in case circumstances should give him the right to counsel the young man as to his course of life. The first thing to be done was to study systematically the whole subject of antipathies. Then, if any further occasion offered itself, he would be ready to take advantage of it. The resources of the Public Library of the place and his own private collection were put in requisition to furnish him the singular and widely scattered facts of which he was in search.

It is not every reader who will care to follow Dr. Butts in his study of the natural history of antipathies. The stories told about them are, however, very curious; and if some of them may be questioned, there is no doubt that many of the strangest are true, and consequently take away from the improbability of others which we are disposed to doubt.

But in the first place, what do we mean by an antipathy? It is an aversion to some object, which may vary in degree from mere dislike to mortal horror. What the cause of this aversion is we cannot say. It acts sometimes through the senses, sometimes through the imagination, sometimes through an unknown channel. The relations which exist between the human being and all that surrounds him vary in consequence of some adjustment peculiar to each individual. The brute fact is expressed in the phrase "One man's meat is another man's poison."

In studying the history of antipathies the doctor began with those referable to the sense of taste, which are among the most common. In any collection of a hundred persons there will be found those who cannot make use of certain articles of food generally acceptable. This may be from the disgust they occasion or the effects they have been found to produce. Every one knows individuals who cannot venture on honey, or cheese, or veal, with impunity. Carlyle, for example, complains of having veal set before him,--a meat he could not endure. There is a whole family connection in New England, and that a very famous one, to many of whose members, in different generations, all the products of the dairy are the subjects of a congenital antipathy. Montaigne says there are persons who dread the smell of apples more than they would dread being exposed to a fire of musketry. The readers of the charming story "A Week in a French Country-House" will remember poor Monsieur Jacque's piteous cry in the night: "Ursula, art thou asleep? Oh, Ursula, thou sleepest, but I cannot close my eyes. Dearest Ursula, there is such a dreadful smell! Oh, Ursula, it is such a smell! I do so wish thou couldst smell it! Good-night, my angel!----Dearest! I have found them! They are apples!" The smell of roses, of peonies, of lilies, has been known to cause faintness. The sight of various objects has had singular effects on some persons. A boar's head was a favorite dish at the table of great people in Marshal d'Albret's time; yet he used to faint at the sight of one. It is not uncommon to meet with persons who faint at the sight of blood. One of the most inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts's college-mates confessed that he had this infirmity. Stranger and far more awkward than this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection, where the subject of the antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of a red color. There are sounds, also, which have strange effects on some individuals. Among the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk stuffs, the sound of sweeping, the croaking of frogs. The effects in different cases have been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse sweating,--all showing a profound disturbance of the nervous system.

All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense, seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres. But there is another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part in the phenomena. Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two very distinguished personages.

Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter. As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall over.

What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one, that it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she entered the holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the sacred symbols, "cried with a loud voice, and came out of" her. A very singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and which the reader may accept as authentic, is the following: At the head of the doctor's front stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of early date and stately presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it as he entered the front door, remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that clock. He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo. This very singular idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms of his nurse.

She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered. Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock may be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of "The Ancient Mariner:"

"I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked And fell down in a fit; The holy hermit raised his eyes And prayed where he did sit. I took the oars; the pilot's boy, Who now doth crazy go, Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro."

This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.

More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person, a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to death, literally. Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like these, such an impression might of course be followed by consequences less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature. If here and there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden startling sight or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,--a shock which falls short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a lasting effect upon the subject of it.

This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that, as a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause may not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some spring in this young man's nature, or so changed its mode of action as to account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life. But how could any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him? He did not hate the human race; that was clear enough. He treated Paolo with great kindness, and the Italian was evidently much attached to him. He had talked naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his dangerous situation when his boat was upset. Dr. Butts heard that he had once made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the University. It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary. What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case? Nothing that the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of which acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who could not look at anything red without fainting. Suppose this were a case of the same antipathy. How very careful it would make the subject of it as to where he went and with whom he consorted! Time and patience would be pretty sure to bring out new developments, and physicians, of all men in the world, know how to wait as well as how to labor.

Such were some of the crude facts as Dr. Butts found them in books or gathered them from his own experience. He soon discovered that the story had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim of an "antipathy," whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of the people of the place. If he suspected the channel through which it had reached the little community, and, spreading from that centre, the country round, he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a domestic casus belli. Paolo might have mentioned it to others as well as to himself. Maurice might have told some friend, who had divulged it. But to accuse Mrs. Butts, good Mrs. Butts, of petit treason in telling one of her husband's professional secrets was too serious a matter to be thought of. He would be a little more careful, he promised himself, the next time, at any rate; for he had to concede, in spite of every wish to be charitable in his judgment, that it was among the possibilities that the worthy lady had forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put their tongues out, and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.

VIII

THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

The Secretary of this association was getting somewhat tired of the office, and the office was getting somewhat tired of him. It occurred to the members of the Society that a little fresh blood infused into it might stir up the general vitality of the organization. The woman suffragists saw no reason why the place of Secretary need as a matter of course be filled by a person of the male sex. They agitated, they made domiciliary visits, they wrote notes to influential citizens, and finally announced as their candidate the young lady who had won and worn the school name of "The Terror," who was elected. She was just the person for the place: wide awake, with all her wits about her, full of every kind of knowledge, and, above all, strong on points of order and details of management, so that she could prompt the presiding officer, to do which is often the most essential duty of a Secretary. The President, the worthy rector, was good at plain sailing in the track of the common moralities and proprieties, but was liable to get muddled if anything came up requiring swift decision and off-hand speech. The Terror had schooled herself in the debating societies of the Institute, and would set up the President, when he was floored by an awkward question, as easily as if he were a ninepin which had been bowled over.

It has been already mentioned that the Pansophian Society received communications from time to time from writers outside of its own organization. Of late these had been becoming more frequent. Many of them were sent in anonymously, and as there were numerous visitors to the village, and two institutions not far removed from it, both full of ambitious and intelligent young persons, it was often impossible to trace the papers to their authors. The new Secretary was alive with curiosity, and as sagacious a little body as one might find if in want of a detective. She could make a pretty shrewd guess whether a paper was written by a young or old person, by one of her own sex or the other, by an experienced hand or a novice.

Among the anonymous papers she received was one which exercised her curiosity to an extraordinary degree. She felt a strong suspicion that "the Sachem," as the boat-crews used to call him, "the Recluse," "the Night-Hawk," "the Sphinx," as others named him, must be the author of it. It appeared to her the production of a young person of a reflective, poetical turn of mind. It was not a woman's way of writing; at least, so thought the Secretary. The writer had travelled much; had resided in Italy, among other places. But so had many of the summer visitors and residents of Arrowhead Village. The handwriting was not decisive; it had some points of resemblance with the pencilled orders for books which Maurice sent to the Library, but there were certain differences, intentional or accidental, which weakened this evidence. There was an undertone in the essay which was in keeping with the mode of life of the solitary stranger. It might be disappointment, melancholy, or only the dreamy sadness of a young person who sees the future he is to climb, not as a smooth ascent, but as overhanging him like a cliff, ready to crush him, with all his hopes and prospects. This interpretation may have been too imaginative, but here is the paper, and the reader can form his own opinion:

MY THREE COMPANIONS.

"I have been from my youth upwards a wanderer. I do not mean constantly flitting from one place to another, for my residence has often been fixed for considerable periods. From time to time I have put down in a notebook the impressions made upon me by the scenes through which I have passed. I have long hesitated whether to let any of my notes appear before the public. My fear has been that they were too subjective, to use the metaphysician's term,--that I have seen myself reflected in Nature, and not the true aspects of Nature as she was meant to be understood. One who should visit the Harz Mountains would see--might see, rather his own colossal image shape itself on the morning mist. But if in every mist that rises from the meadows, in every cloud that hangs upon the mountain, he always finds his own reflection, we cannot accept him as an interpreter of the landscape.

"There must be many persons present at the meetings of the Society to which this paper is offered who have had experiences like that of its author. They have visited the same localities, they have had many of the same thoughts and feelings. Many, I have no doubt. Not all,--no, not all. Others have sought the companionship of Nature; I have been driven to it. Much of my life has been passed in that communion. These pages record some of the intimacies I have formed with her under some of her various manifestations.

"I have lived on the shore of the great ocean, where its waves broke wildest and its voice rose loudest.

"I have passed whole seasons on the banks of mighty and famous rivers.

"I have dwelt on the margin of a tranquil lake, and floated through many a long, long summer day on its clear waters.

"I have learned the 'various language' of Nature, of which poetry has spoken,--at least, I have learned some words and phrases of it. I will translate some of these as I best may into common speech.

"The OCEAN says to the dweller on its shores:--

"You are neither welcome nor unwelcome. I do not trouble myself with the living tribes that come down to my waters. I have my own people, of an older race than yours, that grow to mightier dimensions than your mastodons and elephants; more numerous than all the swarms that fill the air or move over the thin crust of the earth. Who are you that build your palaces on my margin? I see your white faces as I saw the dark faces of the tribes that came before you, as I shall look upon the unknown family of mankind that will come after you. And what is your whole human family but a parenthesis in a single page of my history? The raindrops stereotyped themselves on my beaches before a living creature left his footprints there. This horseshoe-crab I fling at your feet is of older lineage than your Adam,--perhaps, indeed, you count your Adam as one of his descendants. What feeling have I for you? Not scorn, not hatred,--not love,--not loathing. No!---indifference,--blank indifference to you and your affairs that is my feeling, say rather absence of feeling, as regards you.---Oh yes, I will lap your feet, I will cool you in the hot summer days, I will bear you up in my strong arms, I will rock you on my rolling undulations, like a babe in his cradle. Am I not gentle? Am I not kind? Am I not harmless? But hark! The wind is rising, and the wind and I are rough playmates! What do you say to my voice now? Do you see my foaming lips? Do you feel the rocks tremble as my huge billows crash against them? Is not my anger terrible as I dash your argosy, your thunder-bearing frigate, into fragments, as you would crack an eggshell?--No, not anger; deaf, blind, unheeding indifference,--that is all. Out of me all things arose; sooner or later, into me all things subside. All changes around me; I change not. I look not at you, vain man, and your frail transitory concerns, save in momentary glimpses: I look on the white face of my dead mistress, whom I follow as the bridegroom follows the bier of her who has changed her nuptial raiment for the shroud.

"Ye whose thoughts are of eternity, come dwell at my side. Continents and islands grow old, and waste and disappear. The hardest rock crumbles; vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being, wax great, decline, and perish, to give way to others, even as human dynasties and nations and races come and go. Look on me! "Time writes no wrinkle" on my forehead. Listen to me! All tongues are spoken on my shores, but I have only one language: the winds taught me their vowels the crags and the sands schooled me in my rough or smooth consonants. Few words are mine but I have whispered them and sung them and shouted them to men of all tribes from the time when the first wild wanderer strayed into my awful presence. Have you a grief that gnaws at your heart-strings? Come with it to my shore, as of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried his rage and anguish to the margin of the loud-roaring sea. There, if anywhere you will forget your private and short-lived woe, for my voice speaks to the infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.

"To him who loves the pages of human history, who listens to the voices of the world about him, who frequents the market and the thoroughfare, who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather than in the deeper emotions, in abstract speculation and spiritual contemplation, the RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.

"Come live with me. I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get a fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical. I am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of the compass. If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave fertility behind me when I withdraw to my natural channel. Walk by my side toward the place of my destination. I will keep pace with you, and you shall feel my presence with you as that of a self-conscious being like yourself. You will find it hard to be miserable in my company; I drain you of ill-conditioned thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your dwelling and its grounds."

But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen indifference, and the river disturbs with its never-pausing and never-ending story, the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of rest for his soul.

"'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited faculties,' it says; 'yield not yourself to the babble of the running stream. Leave the ocean, which cares nothing for you or any living thing that walks the solid earth; leave the river, too busy with its own errand, too talkative about its own affairs, and find peace with me, whose smile will cheer you, whose whisper will soothe you. Come to me when the morning sun blazes across my bosom like a golden baldric; come to me in the still midnight, when I hold the inverted firmament like a cup brimming with jewels, nor spill one star of all the constellations that float in my ebon goblet. Do you know the charm of melancholy? Where will you find a sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness? Does the ocean share your grief? Does the river listen to your sighs? The salt wave, that called to you from under last month's full moon, to-day is dashing on the rocks of Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and sparkling, has swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is creeping to its grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of liquid crystal. It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed from one season to another; but are your features the same, absolutely the same, from year to year? We both change, but we know each other through all changes. Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours? And does not Nature plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is dressed in the glories of leaf and flower, and draw the icy lid over my shining surface when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of winter?'

"I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could not match in incident. Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous urgency to try a change of existence, if such change is a part of human destiny,--to seek rest, if that is what we gain by laying down the burden of life. I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should appeal for the last service I should have need of. Ocean was there, all ready, asking no questions, answering none. What strange voyages, downward through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and frothing surface, wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach, one perhaps built into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor of the vast laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers! Unwieldy sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity,--what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No! No! Ocean claims great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who would fain be rid of himself.

"Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I have ever found when drifting idly over its surface? No, again. I do not want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature, when life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me. That must not be. The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know me as an unwelcome object.

"If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and lead me out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not unfriendly, pleasantly companionable river.

"But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods of human life which they who are choosing their places of abode should consider. Let the child play upon the seashore. The wide horizon gives his imagination room to grow in, untrammelled. That background of mystery, without which life is a poor mechanical arrangement, is shaped and colored, so far as it can have outline, or any hue but shadow, on a vast canvas, the contemplation of which enlarges and enriches the sphere of consciousness. The mighty ocean is not too huge to symbolize the aspirations and ambitions of the yet untried soul of the adolescent.

"The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a solid limit, which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he would have thought could content him in the years of undefined possibilities. Then he will find the river a more natural intimate than the ocean. It is individual, which the ocean, with all its gulfs and inlets and multitudinous shores, hardly seems to be. It does not love you very dearly, and will not miss you much when you disappear from its margin; but it means well to you, bids you good-morning with its coming waves, and good-evening with those which are leaving. It will lead your thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its source, downwards to the stream to which it is tributary, or the wide waters in which it is to lose itself. A river, by choice, to live by in middle age.

"In hours of melancholy reflection, in those last years of life which have little left but tender memories, the still companionship of the lake, embosomed in woods, sheltered, fed by sweet mountain brooks and hidden springs, commends itself to the wearied and saddened spirit. I am not thinking of those great inland seas, which have many of the features and much of the danger that belong to the ocean, but of those 'ponds,' as our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by summer visitors; beautiful sheets of water from a hundred to a few thousand acres in extent, scattered like raindrops over the map of our Northern sovereignties. The loneliness of contemplative old age finds its natural home in the near neighborhood of one of these tranquil basins."

Nature does not always plant her poets where they belong, but if we look carefully their affinities betray themselves. The youth will carry his Byron to the rock which overlooks the ocean the poet loved so well. The man of maturer years will remember that the sonorous couplets of Pope which ring in his ears were written on the banks of the Thames. The old man, as he nods over the solemn verse of Wordsworth, will recognize the affinity between the singer and the calm sheet that lay before him as he wrote,--the stainless and sleepy Windermere.

"The dwellers by Cedar Lake may find it an amusement to compare their own feelings with those of one who has lived by the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, by the Nile and the Tiber, by Lake Leman and by one of the fairest sheets of water that our own North America embosoms in its forests."

Miss Lurida Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, read this paper, and pondered long upon it. She was thinking very seriously of studying medicine, and had been for some time in frequent communication with Dr. Butts, under whose direction she had begun reading certain treatises, which added to such knowledge of the laws of life in health and in disease as she had brought with her from the Corinna Institute. Naturally enough, she carried the anonymous paper to the doctor, to get his opinion about it, and compare it with her own. They both agreed that it was probably, they would not say certainly, the work of the solitary visitor. There was room for doubt, for there were visitors who might well have travelled to all the places mentioned, and resided long enough on the shores of the waters the writer spoke of to have had all the experiences mentioned in the paper. The Terror remembered a young lady, a former schoolmate, who belonged to one of those nomadic families common in this generation, the heads of which, especially the female heads, can never be easy where they are, but keep going between America and Europe, like so many pith-balls in the electrical experiment, alternately attracted and repelled, never in contented equilibrium. Every few years they pull their families up by the roots, and by the time they have begun to take hold a little with their radicles in the spots to which they have been successively transplanted up they come again, so that they never get a tap-root anywhere. The Terror suspected the daughter of one of these families of sending certain anonymous articles of not dissimilar character to the one she had just received. But she knew the style of composition common among the young girls, and she could hardly believe that it was one of them who had sent this paper. Could a brother of this young lady have written it? Possibly; she knew nothing more than that the young lady had a brother, then a student at the University. All the chances were that Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was the author. So thought Lurida, and so thought Dr. Butts.

Whatever faults there were in this essay, it interested them both. There was nothing which gave the least reason to suspect insanity on the part of the writer, whoever he or she might be. There were references to suicide, it is true, but they were of a purely speculative nature, and did not look to any practical purpose in that direction. Besides, if the stranger were the author of the paper, he certainly would not choose a sheet of water like Cedar Lake to perform the last offices for him, in case he seriously meditated taking unceremonious leave of life and its accidents. He could find a river easily enough, to say nothing of other methods of effecting his purpose; but he had committed himself as to the impropriety of selecting a lake, so they need not be anxious about the white canoe and its occupant, as they watched it skimming the surface of the deep waters.

The holder of the Portfolio would never have ventured to come before the public if he had not counted among his resources certain papers belonging to the records of the Pansophian Society, which he can make free use of, either for the illustration of the narrative, or for a diversion during those intervals in which the flow of events is languid, or even ceases for the time to manifest any progress. The reader can hardly have failed to notice that the old Anchor Tavern had become the focal point where a good deal of mental activity converged. There were the village people, including a number of cultivated families; there were the visitors, among them many accomplished and widely travelled persons; there was the University, with its learned teachers and aspiring young men; there was the Corinna Institute, with its eager, ambitious, hungry-souled young women, crowding on, class after class coming forward on the broad stream of liberal culture, and rounding the point which, once passed, the boundless possibilities of womanhood opened before them. All this furnished material enough and to spare for the records and the archives of the society.

The new Secretary infused fresh life into the meetings. It may be remembered that the girls had said of her, when she was The Terror, that "she knew everything and didn't believe anything." That was just the kind of person for a secretary of such an association. Properly interpreted, the saying meant that she knew a great deal, and wanted to know a great deal more, and was consequently always on the lookout for information; that she believed nothing without sufficient proof that it was true, and therefore was perpetually asking for evidence where, others took assertions on trust.

It was astonishing to see what one little creature like The Terror could accomplish in the course of a single season. She found out what each member could do and wanted to do. She wrote to the outside visitors whom she suspected of capacity, and urged them to speak at the meetings, or send written papers to be read. As an official, with the printed title at the head of her notes, PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY, she was a privileged personage. She begged the young persons who had travelled to tell something of their experiences. She had contemplated getting up a discussion on the woman's rights question, but being a wary little body, and knowing that the debate would become a dispute and divide the members into two hostile camps, she deferred this project indefinitely. It would be time enough after she had her team well in hand, she said to herself,--had felt their mouths and tried their paces. This expression, as she used it in her thoughts, seems rather foreign to her habits, but there was room in her large brain for a wide range of illustrations and an ample vocabulary. She could not do much with her own muscles, but she had known the passionate delight of being whirled furiously over the road behind four scampering horses, in a rocking stage-coach, and thought of herself in the Secretary's chair as not unlike the driver on his box. A few weeks of rest had allowed her nervous energy to store itself up, and the same powers which had distanced competition in the classes of her school had of necessity to expend themselves in vigorous action in her new office.

Her appeals had their effect. A number of papers were very soon sent in; some with names, some anonymously. She looked these papers over, and marked those which she thought would be worth reading and listening to at the meetings. One of them has just been presented to the reader. As to the authorship of the following one there were many conjectures. A well-known writer, who had spent some weeks at Arrowhead Village, was generally suspected of being its author. Some, however, questioned whether it was not the work of a new hand, who wrote, not from experience, but from his or her ideas of the condition to which a story-teller, a novelist, must in all probability be sooner or later reduced. The reader must judge for himself whether this first paper is the work of an old hand or a novice.

SOME EXPERIENCES OF A NOVELIST.

"I have written a frightful number of stories, forty or more, I think. Let me see. For twelve years two novels a year regularly: that makes twenty-four. In three different years I have written three stories annually: that makes thirty-three. In five years one a year,--thirty-eight. That is all, is n't it? Yes. Thirty-eight, not forty. I wish I could make them all into one composite story, as Mr. Galton does his faces.

"Hero--heroine--mamma--papa--uncle--sister, and so on. Love --obstacles--misery--tears--despair--glimmer of hope--unexpected solution of difficulties--happy finale.

"Landscape for background according to season. Plants of each month got up from botanical calendars.

"I should like much to see the composite novel. Why not apply Mr. Galton's process, and get thirty-eight stories all in one? All the Yankees would resolve into one Yankee, all the P----West Britons into one Patrick, etc., what a saving of time it would be!

"I got along pretty well with my first few stories. I had some characters around me which, a little disguised, answered well enough. There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old schoolmaster either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and old uncles. All I had to do was to shift some of their leading peculiarities, keeping the rest. The old minister wore knee-breeches. I clapped them on to the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster carried a tall gold-headed cane. I put this in the minister's hands. So with other things,--I shifted them round, and got a set of characters who, taken together, reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived, but did not copy any individual exactly. Thus it went on for a while; but by and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known, in spite of their change of costume, and at last some altogether too sagacious person published what he called a 'key' to several of my earlier stories, in which I found the names of a number of neighbors attached to aliases of my own invention. All the 'types,' as he called them, represented by these personages of my story had come to be recognized, each as standing for one and the same individual of my acquaintance. It had been of no use to change the costume. Even changing the sex did no good. I had a famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a much-babbling Widow Sertingly. 'Sho!' they all said, that 's old Deacon Spinner, the same he told about in that other story of his,--only the deacon's got on a petticoat and a mob-cap,--but it's the same old sixpence.' So I said to myself, I must have some new characters. I had no trouble with young characters; they are all pretty much alike,--dark-haired or light-haired, with the outfits belonging to their complexion, respectively. I had an old great-aunt, who was a tip-top eccentric. I had never seen anything just like her in books. So I said, I will have you, old lady, in one of my stories; and, sure enough, I fitted her out with a first-rate odd-sounding name, which I got from the directory, and sent her forth to the world, disguised, as I supposed, beyond the possibility of recognition. The book sold well, and the eccentric personage was voted a novelty. A few weeks after it was published a lawyer called upon me, as the agent of the person in the directory, whose family name I had used, as he maintained, to his and all his relatives' great damage, wrong, loss, grief, shame, and irreparable injury, for which the sum of blank thousand dollars would be a modest compensation. The story made the book sell, but not enough to pay blank thousand dollars. In the mean time a cousin of mine had sniffed out the resemblance between the character in my book and our great-aunt. We were rivals in her good graces. 'Cousin Pansie' spoke to her of my book and the trouble it was bringing on me,--she was so sorry about it! She liked my story,--only those personalities, you know. 'What personalities?' says old granny-aunt. 'Why, auntie, dear, they do say that he has brought in everybody we know,--did n't anybody tell you about--well,--I suppose you ought to know it,--did n't anybody tell you you were made fun of in that novel?' Somebody--no matter who--happened to hear all this, and told me. She said granny-aunt's withered old face had two red spots come to it, as if she had been painting her cheeks from a pink saucer. No, she said, not a pink saucer, but as if they were two coals of fire. She sent out and got the book, and made her (the somebody that I was speaking of) read it to her. When she had heard as much as she could stand,--for 'Cousin Pansie' explained passages to her,--explained, you know,--she sent for her lawyer, and that same somebody had to be a witness to a new will she had drawn up. It was not to my advantage. 'Cousin Pansie' got the corner lot where the grocery is, and pretty much everything else. The old woman left me a legacy. What do you think it was? An old set of my own books, that looked as if it had been bought out of a bankrupt circulating library.

"After that I grew more careful. I studied my disguises much more diligently. But after all, what could I do? Here I was, writing stories for my living and my reputation. I made a pretty sum enough, and worked hard enough to earn it. No tale, no money. Then every story that went from my workshop had to come up to the standard of my reputation, and there was a set of critics,--there is a set of critics now and everywhere,--that watch as narrowly for the decline of a man's reputation as ever a village half drowned out by an inundation watched for the falling of the waters. The fame I had won, such as it was, seemed to attend me,--not going before me in the shape of a woman with a trumpet, but rather following me like one of Actaeon's hounds, his throat open, ready to pull me down and tear me. What a fierce enemy is that which bays behind us in the voice of our proudest bygone achievement!

"But, as I said above, what could I do? I must write novels, and I must have characters. 'Then why not invent them?' asks some novice. Oh, yes! Invent them! You can invent a human being that in certain aspects of humanity will answer every purpose for which your invention was intended. A basket of straw, an old coat and pair of breeches, a hat which has been soaked, sat upon, stuffed a broken window, and had a brood of chickens raised in it,--these elements, duly adjusted to each other, will represent humanity so truthfully that the crows will avoid the cornfield when your scarecrow displays his personality. Do you think you can make your heroes and heroines,--nay, even your scrappy supernumeraries,--out of refuse material, as you made your scarecrow? You can't do it. You must study living people and reproduce them. And whom do you know so well as your friends? You will show up your friends, then, one after another. When your friends give out, who is left for you? Why, nobody but your own family, of course. When you have used up your family, there is nothing left for you but to write your autobiography.

"After my experience with my grand-aunt, I be came more cautious, very naturally. I kept traits of character, but I mixed ages as well as sexes. In this way I continued to use up a large amount of material, which looked as if it were as dangerous as dynamite to meddle with. Who would have expected to meet my maternal uncle in the guise of a schoolboy? Yet I managed to decant his characteristics as nicely as the old gentleman would have decanted a bottle of Juno Madeira through that long siphon which he always used when the most sacred vintages were summoned from their crypts to render an account of themselves on his hospitable board. It was a nice business, I confess, but I did it, and I drink cheerfully to that good uncle's memory in a glass of wine from his own cellar, which, with many other more important tokens of his good will, I call my own since his lamented demise.

"I succeeded so well with my uncle that I thought I would try a course of cousins. I had enough of them to furnish out a whole gallery of portraits. There was cousin 'Creeshy,' as we called her; Lucretia, more correctly. She was a cripple. Her left lower limb had had something happen to it, and she walked with a crutch. Her patience under her trial was very pathetic and picturesque, so to speak,--I mean adapted to the tender parts of a story; nothing could work up better in a melting paragraph. But I could not, of course, describe her particular infirmity; that would point her out at once. I thought of shifting the lameness to the right lower limb, but even that would be seen through. So I gave the young woman that stood for her in my story a lame elbow, and put her arm in a sling, and made her such a model of uncomplaining endurance that my grandmother cried over her as if her poor old heart would break. She cried very easily, my grandmother; in fact, she had such a gift for tears that I availed myself of it, and if you remember old Judy, in my novel "Honi Soit" (Honey Sweet, the booksellers called it),--old Judy, the black-nurse,--that was my grandmother. She had various other peculiarities, which I brought out one by one, and saddled on to different characters. You see she was a perfect mine of singularities and idiosyncrasies. After I had used her up pretty well, I came dawn upon my poor relations. They were perfectly fair game; what better use could I put them to? I studied them up very carefully, and as there were a good many of them I helped myself freely. They lasted me, with occasional intermissions, I should say, three or four years. I had to be very careful with my poor relations,--they were as touchy as they could be; and as I felt bound to send a copy of my novel, whatever it might be, to each one of them,--there were as many as a dozen,--I took care to mix their characteristic features, so that, though each might suspect I meant the other, no one should think I meant him or her. I got through all my relations at last except my father and mother. I had treated my brothers and sisters pretty fairly, all except Elisha and Joanna. The truth is they both had lots of odd ways,--family traits, I suppose, but were just different enough from each other to figure separately in two different stories. These two novels made me some little trouble; for Elisha said he felt sure that I meant Joanna in one of them, and quarrelled with me about it; and Joanna vowed and declared that Elnathan, in the other, stood for brother 'Lisha, and that it was a real mean thing to make fun of folks' own flesh and blood, and treated me to one of her cries. She was n't handsome when she cried, poor, dear Joanna; in fact, that was one of the personal traits I had made use of in the story that Elisha found fault with.

"So as there was nobody left but my father and mother, you see for yourself I had no choice. There was one great advantage in dealing with them,--I knew them so thoroughly. One naturally feels a certain delicacy it handling from a purely artistic point of view persons who have been so near to him. One's mother, for instance: suppose some of her little ways were so peculiar that the accurate delineation of them would furnish amusement to great numbers of readers; it would not be without hesitation that a writer of delicate sensibility would draw her portrait, with all its whimsicalities, so plainly that it should be generally recognized. One's father is commonly of tougher fibre than one's mother, and one would not feel the same scruples, perhaps, in using him professionally as material in a novel; still, while you are employing him as bait,--you see I am honest and plain-spoken, for your characters are baits to catch readers with,--I would follow kind Izaak Walton's humane counsel about the frog you are fastening to your fish-hook: fix him artistically, as he directs, but in so doing I use him as though you loved him.'

"I have at length shown up, in one form and another, all my townsmen who have anything effective in their bodily or mental make-up, all my friends, all my relatives; that is, all my blood relatives. It has occurred to me that I might open a new field in the family connection of my father-in-law and mother-in-law. We have been thinking of paying them a visit, and I shall have an admirable opportunity of studying them and their relatives and visitors. I have long wanted a good chance for getting acquainted with the social sphere several grades below that to which I am accustomed, and I have no doubt that I shall find matter for half a dozen new stories among those connections of mine. Besides, they live in a Western city, and one doesn't mind much how he cuts up the people of places he does n't himself live in. I suppose there is not really so much difference in people's feelings, whether they live in Bangor or Omaha, but one's nerves can't be expected to stretch across the continent. It is all a matter of greater or less distance. I read this morning that a Chinese fleet was sunk, but I did n't think half so much about it as I did about losing my sleeve button, confound it! People have accused me of want of feeling; they misunderstand the artist-nature, --that is all. I obey that implicitly; I am sorry if people don't like my descriptions, but I have done my best. I have pulled to pieces all the persons I am acquainted with, and put them together again in my characters. The quills I write with come from live geese, I would have you know. I expect to get some first-rate pluckings from those people I was speaking of, and I mean to begin my thirty-ninth novel as soon as I have got through my visit."

IX

THE SOCIETY AND ITS NEW SECRETARY.

There is no use in trying to hurry the natural course of events, in a narrative like this. June passed away, and July, and August had come, and as yet the enigma which had completely puzzled Arrowhead Village and its visitors remained unsolved. The white canoe still wandered over the lake, alone, ghostly, always avoiding the near approach of the boats which seemed to be coming in its direction. Now and then a circumstance would happen which helped to keep inquiry alive. Good horsemanship was not so common among the young men of the place and its neighborhood that Maurice's accomplishment in that way could be overlooked. If there was a wicked horse or a wild colt whose owner was afraid of him, he would be commended to Maurice's attention. Paolo would lead him to his master with all due precaution,--for he had no idea of risking his neck on the back of any ill-conditioned beast,--and Maurice would fasten on his long spurs, spring into the saddle, and very speedily teach the creature good behavior. There soon got about a story that he was what the fresh-water fisherman called "one o' them whisperers." It is a common legend enough, coming from the Old World, but known in American horse-talking circles, that some persons will whisper certain words in a horse's ear which will tame him if he is as wild and furious as ever Cruiser was. All this added to the mystery which surrounded the young man. A single improbable or absurd story amounts to very little, but when half a dozen such stories are told about the same individual or the same event, they begin to produce the effect of credible evidence. If the year had been 1692 and the place had been Salem Village, Maurice Kirkwood would have run the risk of being treated like the Reverend George Burroughs.

Miss Lurida Vincent's curiosity had been intensely excited with reference to the young man of whom so many stories were told. She had pretty nearly convinced herself that he was the author of the paper on Ocean, Lake, and River, which had been read at one of the meetings of the Pansophian Society. She was very desirous of meeting him, if it were possible. It seemed as if she might, as Secretary of the Society, request the cooperation of any of the visitors, without impropriety. So, after much deliberation, she wrote a careful note, of which the following is an exact copy. Her hand was bold, almost masculine, a curious contrast to that of Euthymia, which was delicately feminine. PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 3, 18-. MAURICE KIRKWOOD, ESQ.

DEAR SIR,--You have received, I trust, a card of invitation to the meetings of our Society, but I think we have not yet had the pleasure of seeing you at any of them. We have supposed that we might be indebted to you for a paper read at the last meeting, and listened to with much interest. As it was anonymous, we do not wish to be inquisitive respecting its authorship; but we desire to say that any papers kindly sent us by the temporary residents of our village will be welcome, and if adapted to the wants of our Association will be read at one of its meetings or printed in its records, or perhaps both read and printed. May we not hope for your presence at the meeting, which is to take place next Wednesday evening? Respectfully yours,

LURIDA VINCENT, Secretary of the Pansophian Society.

To this note the Secretary received the following reply: MISS LURIDA VINCENT,

ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 4, 18-.

Secretary of the Pansophian Society:

DEAR MISS VINCENT,--I have received the ticket you refer to, and desire to express my acknowledgments for the polite attention. I regret that I have not been and I fear shall not be able to attend the meetings of the Society; but if any subject occurs to me on which I feel an inclination to write, it will give me pleasure to send a paper, to be disposed of as the Society may see fit.

Very respectfully yours, MAURICE KIRKWOOD.

"He says nothing about the authorship of the paper that was read the other evening," the Secretary said to herself. "No matter,--he wrote it,--there is no mistaking his handwriting. We know something about him, now, at any rate. But why doesn't he come to our meetings? What has his antipathy to do with his staying away? I must find out what his secret is, and I will. I don't believe it's harder than it was to solve that prize problem which puzzled so many teachers, or than beating Crakowitz, the great chess-player."

To this enigma, then, The Terror determined to bend all the faculties which had excited the admiration and sometimes the amazement of those who knew her in her school-days. It was a very delicate piece of business; for though Lurida was an intrepid woman's rights advocate, and believed she was entitled to do almost everything that men dared to, she knew very well there were certain limits which a young woman like herself must not pass.

In the mean time Maurice had received a visit from the young student at the University,--the same whom he had rescued from his dangerous predicament in the lake. With him had called one of the teachers,--an instructor in modern languages, a native of Italy. Maurice and the instructor exchanged a few words in Italian. The young man spoke it with the ease which implied long familiarity with its use.

After they left, the instructor asked many curious questions about him,--who he was, how long he had been in the village, whether anything was known of his history,--all these inquiries with an eagerness which implied some special and peculiar reason for the interest they evinced.

"I feel satisfied," the instructor said, "that I have met that young man in my own country. It was a number of years ago, and of course he has altered in appearance a good deal; but there is a look about him of--what shall I call it?---apprehension,--as if he were fearing the approach of something or somebody. I think it is the way a man would look that was haunted; you know what I mean,--followed by a spirit or ghost. He does not suggest the idea of a murderer,--very far from it; but if he did, I should think he was every minute in fear of seeing the murdered man's spirit."

The student was curious, in his turn, to know all the instructor could recall. He had seen him in Rome, he thought, at the Fountain of Trevi, where so many strangers go before leaving the city. The youth was in the company of a man who looked like a priest. He could not mistake the peculiar expression of his countenance, but that was all he now remembered about his appearance. His attention had been called to this young man by seeing that some of the bystanders were pointing at him, and noticing that they were whispering with each other as if with reference to him. He should say that the youth was at that time fifteen or sixteen years old, and the time was about ten years ago.

After all, this evidence was of little or no value. Suppose the youth were Maurice; what then? We know that he had been in Italy, and had been there a good while,--or at least we infer so much from his familiarity with the language, and are confirmed in the belief by his having an Italian servant, whom he probably brought from Italy when he returned. If he wrote the paper which was read the other evening, that settles it, for the writer says he had lived by the Tiber. We must put this scrap of evidence furnished by the Professor with the other scraps; it may turn out of some consequence, sooner or later. It is like a piece of a dissected map; it means almost nothing by itself, but when we find the pieces it joins with we may discover a very important meaning in it.

In a small, concentrated community like that which centred in and immediately around Arrowhead Village, every day must have its local gossip as well as its general news. The newspaper tells the small community what is going on in the great world, and the busy tongues of male and female, especially the latter, fill in with the occurrences and comments of the ever-stirring microcosm. The fact that the Italian teacher had, or thought he had, seen Maurice ten years before was circulated and made the most of,--turned over and over like a cake, until it was thoroughly done on both sides and all through. It was a very small cake, but better than nothing. Miss Vincent heard this story, as others did, and talked about it with her friend, Miss Tower. Here was one more fact to help along.

The two young ladies who had recently graduated at the Corinna Institute remained, as they had always been, intimate friends. They were the natural complements of each other. Euthymia represented a complete, symmetrical womanhood. Her outward presence was only an index of a large, wholesome, affluent life. She could not help being courageous, with such a firm organization. She could not help being generous, cheerful, active. She had been told often enough that she was fair to look upon. She knew that she was called The Wonder by the schoolmates who were dazzled by her singular accomplishments, but she did not overvalue them. She rather tended to depreciate her own gifts, in comparison with those of her friend, Miss Lurida Vincent. The two agreed all the better for differing as they did. The octave makes a perfect chord, when shorter intervals jar more or less on the ear. Each admired the other with a heartiness which if they had been less unlike, would have been impossible.

It was a pleasant thing to observe their dependence on each other. The Terror of the schoolroom was the oracle in her relations with her friend. All the freedom of movement which The Wonder showed in her bodily exercises The Terror manifested in the world of thought. She would fling open a book, and decide in a swift glance whether it had any message for her. Her teachers had compared her way of reading to the taking of an instantaneous photograph. When she took up the first book on Physiology which Dr. Butts handed her, it seemed to him that if she only opened at any place, and gave one look, her mind drank its meaning up, as a moist sponge absorbs water. "What can I do with such a creature as this?" he said to himself. "There is only one way to deal with her, treat her as one treats a silkworm: give it its mulberry leaf, and it will spin its own cocoon. Give her the books, and she will spin her own web of knowledge."

"Do you really think of studying medicine?" said Dr. Butts to her.

"I have n't made up my mind about that," she answered, "but I want to know a little more about this terrible machinery of life and death we are all tangled in. I know something about it, but not enough. I find some very strange beliefs among the women I meet with, and I want to be able to silence them when they attempt to proselyte me to their whims and fancies. Besides, I want to know everything."

"They tell me you do, already," said Dr. Butts.

"I am the most ignorant little wretch that draws the breath of life!" exclaimed The Terror.

The doctor smiled. He knew what it meant. She had reached that stage of education in which the vast domain of the unknown opens its illimitable expanse before the eyes of the student. We never know the extent of darkness until it is partially illuminated.

"You did not leave the Institute with the reputation of being the most ignorant young lady that ever graduated there," said the doctor. "They tell me you got the highest marks of any pupil on their record since the school was founded."

"What a grand thing it was to be the biggest fish in our small aquarium, to be sure!" answered The Terror. "He was six inches long, the monster,--a little too big for bait to catch a pickerel with! What did you hand me that schoolbook for? Did you think I did n't know anything about the human body?"

"You said you were such an ignorant creature I thought I would try you with an easy book, by way of introduction."

The Terror was not confused by her apparent self-contradiction.

"I meant what I said, and I mean what I say. When I talk about my ignorance, I don't measure myself with schoolgirls, doctor. I don't measure myself with my teachers, either. You must talk to me as if I were a man, a grown man, if you mean to teach me anything. Where is your hat, doctor? Let me try it on."

The doctor handed her his wide-awake. The Terror's hair was not naturally abundant, like Euthymia's, and she kept it cut rather short. Her head used to get very hot when she studied hard. She tried to put the hat on.

"Do you see that?" she said. "I could n't wear it--it would squeeze my eyes out of my head. The books told me that women's brains were smaller than men's: perhaps they are,--most of them,--I never measured a great many. But when they try to settle what women are good for, by phrenology, I like to have them put their tape round my head. I don't believe in their nonsense, for all that. You might as well tell me that if one horse weighs more than another horse he is worth more,--a cart-horse that weighs twelve or fourteen hundred pounds better than Eclipse, that may have weighed a thousand. Give me a list of the best books you can think of, and turn me loose in your library. I can find what I want, if you have it; and what I don't find there I will get at the Public Library. I shall want to ask you a question now and then."

The doctor looked at her with a kind of admiration, but thoughtfully, as if he feared she was thinking of a task too formidable for her slight constitutional resource.

She returned, instinctively, to the apparent contradiction in her statements about herself.

"I am not a fool, if I am ignorant. Yes, doctor, I sail on a wide sea of ignorance, but I have taken soundings of some of its shallows and some of its depths. Your profession deals with the facts of life that interest me most just now, and I want to know something of it. Perhaps I may find it a calling such as would suit me."

"Do you seriously think of becoming a practitioner of medicine?" said the doctor.

"Certainly, I seriously think of it as a possibility, but I want to know something more about it first. Perhaps I sha'n't believe in medicine enough to practise it. Perhaps I sha'n't like it well enough. No matter about that. I wish to study some of your best books on some of the subjects that most interest me. I know about bones and muscles and all that, and about digestion and respiration and such things. I want to study up the nervous system, and learn all about it. I am of the nervous temperament myself, and perhaps that is the reason. I want to read about insanity and all that relates to it."

A curious expression flitted across the doctor's features as The Terror said this.

"Nervous system. Insanity. She has headaches, I know,--all those large-headed, hard-thinking girls do, as a matter of course; but what has set her off about insanity and the nervous system? I wonder if any of her more remote relatives are subject to mental disorder. Bright people very often have crazy relations. Perhaps some of her friends are in that way. I wonder whether"--the doctor did not speak any of these thoughts, and in fact hardly shaped his "whether," for The Terror interrupted his train of reflection, or rather struck into it in a way which startled him.

"Where is the first volume of this Medical Cyclopaedia?" she asked, looking at its empty place on the shelf.

"On my table," the doctor answered. "I have been consulting it."

Lurida flung it open, in her eager way, and turned the pages rapidly until she came to the one she wanted. The doctor cast his eye on the beading of the page, and saw the large letters A N T.

"I thought so," he said to himself. "We shall know everything there is in the books about antipathies now, if we never did before. She has a special object in studying the nervous system, just as I suspected. I think she does not care to mention it at this time; but if she finds out anything of interest she will tell me, if she does anybody. Perhaps she does not mean to tell anybody. It is a rather delicate business,--a young girl studying the natural history of a young man. Not quite so safe as botany or palaeontology!"

Lurida, lately The Terror, now Miss Vincent, had her own plans, and chose to keep them to herself, for the present, at least. Her hands were full enough, it might seem, without undertaking the solution of the great Arrowhead Village enigma. But she was in the most perfect training, so far as her intelligence was concerned; and the summer rest had restored her bodily vigor, so that her brain was like an overcharged battery which will find conductors somewhere to carry off its crowded energy.

At this time Arrowhead Village was enjoying the most successful season it had ever known. The Pansophian Society flourished to an extraordinary degree under the fostering care of the new Secretary. The rector was a good figure-head as President, but the Secretary was the life of the Society. Communications came in abundantly: some from the village and its neighborhood, some from the University and the Institute, some from distant and unknown sources. The new Secretary was very busy with the work of examining these papers. After a forenoon so employed, the carpet of her room looked like a barn floor after a husking-match. A glance at the manuscripts strewed about, or lying in heaps, would have frightened any young writer away from the thought of authorship as a business. If the candidate for that fearful calling had seen the process of selection and elimination, he would have felt still more desperately. A paper of twenty pages would come in, with an underscored request to please read through, carefully. That request alone is commonly sufficient to condemn any paper, and prevent its having any chance of a hearing; but the Secretary was not hardened enough yet for that kind of martial law in dealing with manuscripts. The looker-on might have seen her take up the paper, cast one flashing glance at its title, read the first sentence and the last, dip at a venture into two or three pages, and decide as swiftly as the lightning calculator would add up a column of figures what was to be its destination. If rejected, it went into the heap on the left; if approved, it was laid apart, to be submitted to the Committee for their judgment. The foolish writers who insist on one's reading through their manuscript poems and stories ought to know how fatal the request is to their prospects. It provokes the reader, to begin with. The reading of manuscript is frightful work, at the best; the reading of worthless manuscript--and most of that which one is requested to read through is worthless--would add to the terrors of Tartarus, if any infernal deity were ingenious enough to suggest it as a punishment.

If a paper was rejected by the Secretary, it did not come before the Committee, but was returned to the author, if he sent for it, which he commonly did. Its natural course was to try for admission into some one of the popular magazines: into "The Sifter," the most fastidious of them all; if that declined it, into "The Second Best;" and if that returned it, into "The Omnivorous." If it was refused admittance at the doors of all the magazines, it might at length find shelter in the corner of a newspaper, where a good deal of very readable verse is to be met with nowadays, some of which has been, no doubt, presented to the Pansophian Society, but was not considered up to its standard.

X

A NEW ARRIVAL.

There was a recent accession to the transient population of the village which gave rise to some speculation. The new-comer was a young fellow, rather careless in his exterior, but apparently as much at home as if he owned Arrowhead Village and everything in it. He commonly had a cigar in his mouth, carried a pocket pistol, of the non-explosive sort, and a stick with a bulldog's bead for its knob; wore a soft bat, a coarse check suit, a little baggy, and gaiterboots which had been half-soled,--a Bohemian-looking personage, altogether.

This individual began making explorations in every direction. He was very curious about the place and all the people in it. He was especially interested in the Pansophian Society, concerning which he made all sorts of inquiries. This led him to form a summer acquaintance with the Secretary, who was pleased to give him whatever information he asked for; being proud of the Society, as she had a right to be, and knowing more about it than anybody else.

The visitor could not have been long in the village without hearing something of Maurice Kirkwood, and the stories, true and false, connected with his name. He questioned everybody who could tell him anything about Maurice, and set down the answers in a little note-book he always had with him.

All this naturally excited the curiosity of the village about this new visitor. Among the rest, Miss Vincent, not wanting in an attribute thought to belong more especially to her sex, became somewhat interested to know more exactly who this inquiring, note-taking personage, who seemed to be everywhere and to know everybody, might himself be. Meeting him at the Public Library at a fortunate moment, when there was nobody but the old Librarian, who was hard of hearing, to interfere with their conversation, the little Secretary had a chance to try to find out something about him.

"This is a very remarkable library for a small village to possess," he remarked to Miss Lurida.

"It is, indeed," she said. "Have you found it well furnished with the books you most want?"

"Oh, yes,--books enough. I don't care so much for the books as I do for the Newspapers. I like a Review well enough,--it tells you all there is in a book; but a good abstract of the Review in a Newspaper saves a fellow the trouble of reading it."

"You find the papers you want, here, I hope," said the young lady.

"Oh, I get along pretty well. It's my off-time, and I don't do much reading or writing. Who is the city correspondent of this place?"

"I don't think we have any one who writes regularly. Now and then, there is a letter, with the gossip of the place in it, or an account of some of the doings at our Society. The city papers are always glad to get the reports of our meetings, and to know what is going on in the village."

"I suppose you write about the Society to the papers, as you are the Secretary."

This was a point-blank shot. She meant to question the young man about his business, and here she was on the witness-stand. She ducked her head, and let the question go over her.

"Oh, there are plenty of members who are willing enough to write, --especially to give an account of their own papers. I think they like to have me put in the applause, when they get any. I do that sometimes." (How much more, she did not say.)

"I have seen some very well written articles, which, from what they tell me of the Secretary, I should have thought she might have written herself."

He looked her straight in the eyes.

"I have transmitted some good papers," she said, without winking, or swallowing, or changing color, precious little color she had to change; her brain wanted all the blood it could borrow or steal, and more too. "You spoke of Newspapers," she said, without any change of tone or manner: "do you not frequently write for them yourself?"

"I should think I did," answered the young man. "I am a regular correspondent of 'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"

"The regular correspondent from where?"

"Where! Oh, anywhere,--the place does not make much difference. I have been writing chiefly from Naples and St. Petersburg, and now and then from Constantinople."

"How long since your return to this country, may I ask?"

"My return? I have never been out of this country. I travel with a gazetteer and some guide-books. It is the cheapest way, and you can get the facts much better from them than by trusting your own observation. I have made the tour of Europe by the help of them and the newspapers. But of late I have taken to interviewing. I find that a very pleasant specialty. It is about as good sport as trout-tickling, and much the same kind of business. I should like to send the Society an account of one of my interviews. Don't you think they would like to hear it?"

"I have no doubt they would. Send it to me, and I will look it over; and if the Committee approve it, we will have it at the next meeting. You know everything has to be examined and voted on by the Committee," said the cautious Secretary.

"Very well,--I will risk it. After it is read, if it is read, please send it back to me, as I want to sell it to 'The Sifter,' or 'The Second Best,' or some of the paying magazines."

This is the paper, which was read at the next meeting of the Pansophian Society.

"I was ordered by the editor of the newspaper to which I am attached, 'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor,' to make a visit to a certain well-known writer, and obtain all the particulars I could concerning him and all that related to him. I have interviewed a good many politicians, who I thought rather liked the process; but I had never tried any of these literary people, and I was not quite sure how this one would feel about it. I said as much to the chief, but he pooh-poohed my scruples. 'It is n't our business whether they like it or not,' said he; 'the public wants it, and what the public wants it's bound to have, and we are bound to furnish it. Don't be afraid of your man; he 's used to it,--he's been pumped often enough to take it easy, and what you've got to do is to pump him dry. You need n't be modest,--ask him what you like; he is n't bound to answer, you know.'

"As he lived in a rather nice quarter of the town, I smarted myself up a little, put on a fresh collar and cuffs, and got a five-cent shine on my best high-lows. I said to myself, as I was walking towards the house where he lived, that I would keep very shady for a while and pass for a visitor from a distance; one of those 'admiring strangers' who call in to pay their respects, to get an autograph, and go home and say that they have met the distinguished So and So, which gives them a certain distinction in the village circle to which they belong.

"My man, the celebrated writer, received me in what was evidently his reception-room. I observed that he managed to get the light full on my face, while his own was in the shade. I had meant to have his face in the light, but he knew the localities, and had arranged things so as to give him that advantage. It was like two frigates manoeuvring,--each trying to get to windward of the other. I never take out my note-book until I and my man have got engaged in artless and earnest conversation,--always about himself and his works, of course, if he is an author.

"I began by saying that he must receive a good many callers. Those who had read his books were naturally curious to see the writer of them.

"He assented, emphatically, to this statement. He had, he said, a great many callers.

"I remarked that there was a quality in his books which made his readers feel as if they knew him personally, and caused them to cherish a certain attachment to him.

"He smiled, as if pleased. He was himself disposed to think so, he said. In fact, a great many persons, strangers writing to him, had told him so.

"My dear sir, I said, there is nothing wonderful in the fact you mention. You reach a responsive chord in many human breasts.

'One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.'

"Everybody feels as if he, and especially she (his eyes sparkled), were your blood relation. Do they not name their children after you very frequently?

"He blushed perceptibly. 'Sometimes,' he answered. 'I hope they will all turn out well.'

"I am afraid I am taking up too much of your time, I said.

"No, not at all,' he replied. 'Come up into my library; it is warmer and pleasanter there.'

"I felt confident that I had him by the right handle then; for an author's library, which is commonly his working-room, is, like a lady's boudoir, a sacred apartment.

"So we went upstairs, and again he got me with the daylight on my face, when I wanted it on has.

"You have a fine library, I remarked. There were books all round the room, and one of those whirligig square book-cases. I saw in front a Bible and a Concordance, Shakespeare and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's book, and other classical works and books of grave aspect. I contrived to give it a turn, and on the side next the wall I got a glimpse of Barnum's Rhyming Dictionary, and several Dictionaries of Quotations and cheap compends of knowledge. Always twirl one of those revolving book-cases when you visit a scholar's library. That is the way to find out what books he does n't want you to see, which of course are the ones you particularly wish to see.

"Some may call all this impertinent and inquisitive. What do you suppose is an interviewer's business? Did you ever see an oyster opened? Yes? Well, an interviewer's business is the same thing. His man is his oyster, which he, not with sword, but with pencil and note-book, must open. Mark how the oysterman's thin blade insinuates itself,--how gently at first, how strenuously when once fairly between the shells!

"And here, I said, you write your books,--those books which have carried your name to all parts of the world, and will convey it down to posterity! Is this the desk at which you write? And is this the pen you write with?

"'It is the desk and the very pen,' he replied.

"He was pleased with my questions and my way of putting them. I took up the pen as reverentially as if it had been made of the feather which the angel I used to read about in Young's "Night Thoughts" ought to have dropped, and did n't.

"Would you kindly write your autograph in my note-book, with that pen? I asked him. Yes, he would, with great pleasure.

"So I got out my note-book.

"It was a spick and span new one, bought on purpose for this interview. I admire your bookcases, said I. Can you tell me just how high they are?

"'They are about eight feet, with the cornice.'

"I should like to have some like those, if I ever get rich enough, said I. Eight feet,--eight feet, with the cornice. I must put that down.

"So I got out my pencil.

"I sat there with my pencil and note-book in my hand, all ready, but not using them as yet.

"I have heard it said, I observed, that you began writing poems at a very early age. Is it taking too great a liberty to ask how early you began to write in verse?

"He was getting interested, as people are apt to be when they are themselves the subjects of conversation.

"'Very early,--I hardly know how early. I can say truly, as Louise Colet said,

"'Je fis mes premiers vers sans savoir les ecrire.'"

"I am not a very good French scholar, said I; perhaps you will be kind enough to translate that line for me.

"'Certainly. With pleasure. I made my first verses without knowing how to write them.'

"How interesting! But I never heard of Louise Colet. Who was she?

"My man was pleased to gi-ve me a piece of literary information.

"'Louise the lioness! Never heard of her? You have heard of Alphonse Karr?'

"Why,--yes,--more or less. To tell the truth, I am not very well up in French literature. What had he to do with your lioness?

"'A good deal. He satirized her, and she waited at his door with a case-knife in her hand, intending to stick him with it. By and by he came down, smoking a cigarette, and was met by this woman flourishing her case-knife. He took it from her, after getting a cut in his dressing-gown, put it in his pocket, and went on with his cigarette. He keeps it with an inscription:

"Donne a Alphonse Karr Par Madame Louise Colet.... Dans le dos.

"Lively little female!'

"I could n't help thinking that I should n't have cared to interview the lively little female. He was evidently tickled with the interest I appeared to take in the story he told me. That made him feel amiably disposed toward me.

"I began with very general questions, but by degrees I got at everything about his family history and the small events of his boyhood. Some of the points touched upon were delicate, but I put a good bold face on my most audacious questions, and so I wormed out a great deal that was new concerning my subject. He had been written about considerably, and the public wouldn't have been satisfied without some new facts; and these I meant to have, and I got. No matter about many of them now, but here are some questions and answers that may be thought worth reading or listening to:

"How do you enjoy being what they call 'a celebrity,' or a celebrated man?

"'So far as one's vanity is concerned it is well enough. But self-love is a cup without any bottom, and you might pour the Great Lakes all through it, and never fill it up. It breeds an appetite for more of the same kind. It tends to make the celebrity a mere lump of egotism. It generates a craving for high-seasoned personalities which is in danger of becoming slavery, like that following the abuse of alcohol, or opium, or tobacco. Think of a man's having every day, by every post, letters that tell him he is this and that and the other, with epithets and endearments, one tenth part of which would have made him blush red hot before he began to be what you call a celebrity!'

"Are there not some special inconveniences connected with what is called celebrity?

"'I should think so! Suppose you were obliged every day of your life to stand and shake hands, as the President of the United States has to after his inauguration: how do you think your hand would feel after a few months' practice of that exercise? Suppose you had given you thirty-five millions of money a year, in hundred-dollar coupons, on condition that you cut them all off yourself in the usual manner: how do you think you should like the look of a pair of scissors at the end of a year, in which you had worked ten hours a day every day but Sunday, cutting off a hundred coupons an hour, and found you had not finished your task, after all? You have addressed me as what you are pleased to call "a literary celebrity." I won't dispute with you as to whether or not I deserve that title. I will take it for granted I am what you call me, and give you some few hints on my experience.

"'You know there was formed a while ago an Association of Authors for Self-Protection. It meant well, and it was hoped that something would come of it in the way of relieving that oppressed class, but I am sorry to say that it has not effected its purpose.'

"I suspected he had a hand in drawing up the Constitution and Laws of that Association. Yes, I said, an admirable Association it was, and as much needed as the one for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I am sorry to hear that it has not proved effectual in putting a stop to the abuse of a deserving class of men. It ought to have done it; it was well conceived, and its public manifesto was a masterpiece. (I saw by his expression that he was its author.)

"'I see I can trust you,' he said. 'I will unbosom myself freely of some of the grievances attaching to the position of the individual to whom you have applied the term "Literary Celebrity."

"'He is supposed to be a millionaire, in virtue of the immense sales of his books, all the money from which, it is taken for granted, goes into his pocket. Consequently, all subscription papers are handed to him for his signature, and every needy stranger who has heard his name comes to him for assistance.

"'He is expected to subscribe for all periodicals, and is goaded by receiving blank formulae, which, with their promises to pay, he is expected to fill up.

"'He receives two or three books daily, with requests to read and give his opinion about each of them, which opinion, if it has a word which can be used as an advertisement, he will find quoted in all the newspapers.

"'He receives thick masses of manuscript, prose and verse, which he is called upon to examine and pronounce on their merits; these manuscripts having almost invariably been rejected by the editors to whom they have been sent, and having as a rule no literary value whatever.

"'He is expected to sign petitions, to contribute to journals, to write for fairs, to attend celebrations, to make after-dinner speeches, to send money for objects he does not believe in to places he never heard of.

"'He is called on to keep up correspondences with unknown admirers, who begin by saying they have no claim upon his time, and then appropriate it by writing page after page, if of the male sex; and sheet after sheet, if of the other.

"'If a poet, it is taken for granted that he can sit down at any moment and spin off any number of verses on any subject which may be suggested to him; such as congratulations to the writer's great-grandmother on her reaching her hundredth year, an elegy on an infant aged six weeks, an ode for the Fourth of July in a Western township not to be found in Lippincott's last edition, perhaps a valentine for some bucolic lover who believes that wooing in rhyme is the way to win the object of his affections.'

"Is n't it so? I asked the Celebrity.

"'I would bet on the prose lover. She will show the verses to him, and they will both have a good laugh over them.'

"I have only reported a small part of the conversation I had with the Literary Celebrity. He was so much taken up with his pleasing self-contemplation, while I made him air his opinions and feelings and spread his characteristics as his laundress spreads and airs his linen on the clothes-line, that I don't believe it ever occurred to him that he had been in the hands of an interviewer until he found himself exposed to the wind and sunshine in full dimensions in the columns of The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'"

After the reading of this paper, much curiosity was shown as to who the person spoken of as the "Literary Celebrity" might be. Among the various suppositions the startling idea was suggested that he was neither more nor less than the unexplained personage known in the village as Maurice Kirkwood. Why should that be his real name? Why should not he be the Celebrity, who had taken this name and fled to this retreat to escape from the persecutions of kind friends, who were pricking him and stabbing him nigh to death with their daggers of sugar candy?

The Secretary of the Pansophian Society determined to question the Interviewer the next time she met him at the Library, which happened soon after the meeting when his paper was read.

"I do not know," she said, in the course of a conversation in which she had spoken warmly of his contribution to the literary entertainment of the Society, "that you mentioned the name of the Literary Celebrity whom you interviewed so successfully."

"I did not mention him, Miss Vincent," he answered, "nor do I think it worth while to name him. He might not care to have the whole story told of how he was handled so as to make him communicative. Besides, if I did, it would bring him a new batch of sympathetic letters, regretting that he was bothered by those horrid correspondents, full of indignation at the bores who presumed to intrude upon him with their pages of trash, all the writers of which would expect answers to their letters of condolence."

The Secretary asked the Interviewer if he knew the young gentleman who called himself Maurice Kirkwood.

"What," he answered, "the man that paddles a birch canoe, and rides all the wild horses of the neighborhood? No, I don't know him, but I have met him once or twice, out walking. A mighty shy fellow, they tell me. Do you know anything particular about him?"

"Not much. None of us do, but we should like to. The story is that he has a queer antipathy to something or to somebody, nobody knows what or whom."

"To newspaper correspondents, perhaps," said the interviewer. "What made you ask me about him? You did n't think he was my 'Literary Celebrity,' did you?"

"I did not know. I thought he might be. Why don't you interview this mysterious personage? He would make a good sensation for your paper, I should think."

"Why, what is there to be interviewed in him? Is there any story of crime, or anything else to spice a column or so, or even a few paragraphs, with? If there is, I am willing to handle him professionally."

"I told you he has what they call an antipathy. I don't know how much wiser you are for that piece of information."

"An antipathy! Why, so have I an antipathy. I hate a spider, and as for a naked caterpillar,--I believe I should go into a fit if I had to touch one. I know I turn pale at the sight of some of those great green caterpillars that come down from the elm-trees in August and early autumn."

"Afraid of them?" asked the young lady.

"Afraid? What should I be afraid of? They can't bite or sting. I can't give any reason. All I know is that when I come across one of these creatures in my path I jump to one side, and cry out,--sometimes using very improper words. The fact is, they make me crazy for the moment."

"I understand what you mean," said Miss Vincent. "I used to have the same feeling about spiders, but I was ashamed of it, and kept a little menagerie of spiders until I had got over the feeling; that is, pretty much got over it, for I don't love the creatures very dearly, though I don't scream when I see one."

"What did you tell me, Miss Vincent, was this fellow's particular antipathy?"

That is just the question. I told you that we don't know and we can't guess what it is. The people here are tired out with trying to discover some good reason for the young man's keeping out of the way of everybody, as he does. They say he is odd or crazy, and they don't seem to be able to tell which. It would make the old ladies of the village sleep a great deal sounder,--yes, and some of the young ladies, too,--if they could find out what this Mr. Kirkwood has got into his head, that he never comes near any of the people here."

"I think I can find out," said the Interviewer, whose professional ambition was beginning to be excited. "I never came across anybody yet that I could n't get something out of. I am going to stay here a week or two, and before I go I will find out the secret, if there is any, of this Mr. Maurice Kirkwood."

We must leave the Interviewer to his contrivances until they present us with some kind of result, either in the shape of success or failure.

XI

THE INTERVIEWER ATTACKS THE SPHINX.

When Miss Euthymia Tower sent her oar off in flashing splinters, as she pulled her last stroke in the boat-race, she did not know what a strain she was putting upon it. She did know that she was doing her best, but how great the force of her best was she was not aware until she saw its effects. Unconsciousness belonged to her robust nature, in all its manifestations. She did not pride herself on her knowledge, nor reproach herself for her ignorance. In every way she formed a striking contrast to her friend, Miss Vincent. Every word they spoke betrayed the difference between them: the sharp tones of Lurida's head-voice, penetrative, aggressive, sometimes irritating, revealed the corresponding traits of mental and moral character; the quiet, conversational contralto of Euthymia was the index of a nature restful and sympathetic.

The friendships of young girls prefigure the closer relations which will one day come in and dissolve their earlier intimacies. The dependence of two young friends may be mutual, but one will always lean more heavily than the other; the masculine and feminine elements will be as sure to assert themselves as if the friends were of different sexes.

On all common occasions Euthymia looked up to her friend as her superior. She fully appreciated all her varied gifts and knowledge, and deferred to her opinion in every-day matters, not exactly as an oracle, but as wiser than herself or any of her other companions. It was a different thing, however, when the graver questions of life came up. Lurida was full of suggestions, plans, projects, which were too liable to run into whims before she knew where they were tending. She would lay out her ideas before Euthymia so fluently and eloquently that she could not help believing them herself, and feeling as if her friend must accept them with an enthusiasm like her own. Then Euthymia would take them up with her sweet, deliberate accents, and bring her calmer judgment to bear on them.

Lurida was in an excited condition, in the midst of all her new interests and occupations. She was constantly on the lookout for papers to be read at the meetings of her Society,--for she made it her own in great measure, by her zeal and enthusiasm,--and in the mean time she was reading in various books which Dr. Butts selected for her, all bearing on the profession to which, at least as a possibility, she was looking forward. Privately and in a very still way, she was occupying herself with the problem of the young stranger, the subject of some delusion, or disease, or obliquity of unknown nature, to which the vague name of antipathy had been attached. Euthymia kept an eye upon her, partly in the fear that over-excitement would produce some mental injury, and partly from anxiety lest she should compromise her womanly dignity in her desire to get at the truth of a very puzzling question.

"How do you like the books I see you reading?" said Euthymia to Lurida, one day, as they met at the Library.

"Better than all the novels I ever read," she answered. "I have been reading about the nervous system, and it seems to me I have come nearer the springs of life than ever before in all my studies. I feel just as if I were a telegraph operator. I was sure that I had a battery in my head, for I know my brain works like one; but I did not know how many centres of energy there are, and how they are played upon by all sorts of influences, external and internal. Do you know, I believe I could solve the riddle of the 'Arrowhead Village Sphinx,' as the paper called him, if he would only stay here long enough?"

"What paper has had anything about it, Lurida? I have not seen or heard of its being mentioned in any of the papers."

"You know that rather queer-looking young man who has been about here for some time,--the same one who gave the account of his interview with a celebrated author? Well, he has handed me a copy of a paper in which he writes, 'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.' He talks about this village in a very free and easy way. He says there is a Sphinx here, who has mystified us all."

"And you have been chatting with that fellow! Don't you know that he'll have you and all of us in his paper? Don't you know that nothing is safe where one of those fellows gets in with his note-book and pencil? Oh, Lurida, Lurida, do be careful!" What with this mysterious young man and this very questionable newspaper-paragraph writer, you will be talked about, if you don't mind, before you know it. You had better let the riddle of the Sphinx alone. If you must deal with such dangerous people, the safest way is to set one of them to find out the other.--I wonder if we can't get this new man to interview the visitor you have so much curiosity about. That might be managed easily enough without your having anything to do with it. Let me alone, and I will arrange it. But mind, now, you must not meddle; if you do, you will spoil everything, and get your name in the 'Household Inquisitor' in a way you won't like."

"Don't be frightened about me, Euthymia. I don't mean to give him a chance to work me into his paper, if I can help it. But if you can get him to try his skill upon this interesting personage and his antipathy, so much the better. I am very curious about it, and therefore about him. I want to know what has produced this strange state of feeling in a young man who ought to have all the common instincts of a social being. I believe there are unexplained facts in the region of sympathies and antipathies which will repay study with a deeper insight into the mysteries of life than we have dreamed of hitherto. I often wonder whether there are not heart-waves and soul-waves as well as 'brain-waves,' which some have already recognized."

Euthymia wondered, as well she might, to hear this young woman talking the language of science like an adept. The truth is, Lurida was one of those persons who never are young, and who, by way of compensation, will never be old. They are found in both sexes. Two well-known graduates of one of our great universities are living examples of this precocious but enduring intellectual development. If the readers of this narrative cannot pick them out, they need not expect the writer of it to help them. If they guess rightly who they are, they will recognize the fact that just such exceptional individuals as the young woman we are dealing with are met with from time to time in families where intelligence has been cumulative for two or three generations.

Euthymia was very willing that the questioning and questionable visitor should learn all that was known in the village about the nebulous individual whose misty environment all the eyes in the village were trying to penetrate, but that he should learn it from some other informant than Lurida.

The next morning, as the Interviewer took his seat on a bench outside his door, to smoke his after-breakfast cigar, a bright-looking and handsome youth, whose features recalled those of Euthymia so strikingly that one might feel pretty sure he was her brother, took a seat by his side. Presently the two were engaged in conversation. The Interviewer asked all sorts of questions about everybody in the village. When he came to inquire about Maurice, the youth showed a remarkable interest regarding him. The greatest curiosity, he said, existed with reference to this personage. Everybody was trying to find out what his story was,--for a story, and a strange one, he must surely have,--and nobody had succeeded.

The Interviewer began to be unusually attentive. The young man told him the various antipathy stories, about the evil-eye hypothesis, about his horse-taming exploits, his rescuing the student whose boat was overturned, and every occurrence he could recall which would help out the effect of his narrative.

The Interviewer was becoming excited. "Can't find out anything about him, you said, did n-'t you? How do you know there's anything to find? Do you want to know what I think he is? I'll tell you. I think he is an actor,--a fellow from one of the city theatres. Those fellows go off in their summer vacation, and like to puzzle the country folks. They are the very same chaps, like as not, the visitors have seen in plays at the city theatres; but of course they don't know 'em in plain clothes. Kings and Emperors look pretty shabby off the stage sometimes, I can tell you."

The young man followed the Interviewer's lead. "I shouldn't wonder if you were right," he said. "I remember seeing a young fellow in Romeo that looked a good deal like this one. But I never met the Sphinx, as they call him, face to face. He is as shy as a woodchuck. I believe there are people here that would give a hundred dollars to find out who he is, and where he came from, and what he is here for, and why he does n't act like other folks. I wonder why some of those newspaper men don't come up here and get hold of this story. It would be just the thing for a sensational writer."

To all this the Interviewer listened with true professional interest. Always on the lookout for something to make up a paragraph or a column about; driven oftentimes to the stalest of repetitions,--to the biggest pumpkin story, the tall cornstalk, the fat ox, the live frog from the human stomach story, the third set of teeth and reading without spectacles at ninety story, and the rest of the marvellous commonplaces which are kept in type with e o y or e 6 m (every other year or every six months) at the foot; always in want of a fresh incident, a new story, an undescribed character, an unexplained mystery, it is no wonder that the Interviewer fastened eagerly upon this most tempting subject for an inventive and emotional correspondent.

He had seen Paolo several times, and knew that he was Maurice's confidential servant, but had never spoken to him. So he said to himself that he must make Paolo's acquaintance, to begin with. In the summer season many kinds of small traffic were always carried on in Arrowhead Village. Among the rest, the sellers of fruits--oranges, bananas, and others, according to the seasons--did an active business. The Interviewer watched one of these fruit-sellers, and saw that his hand-cart stopped opposite the house where, as he knew, Maurice Kirkwood was living. Presently Paolo came out of the door, and began examining the contents of the hand-cart. The Interviewer saw his opportunity. Here was an introduction to the man, and the man must introduce him to the master.

He knew very well how to ingratiate himself with the man,--there was no difficulty about that. He had learned his name, and that he was an Italian whom Maurice had brought to this country with him.

"Good morning, Mr. Paul," he said. "How do you like the look of these oranges?"

"They pretty fair," said Paolo: "no so good as them las' week; no sweet as them was."

"Why, how do you know without tasting them?" said the Interviewer.

"I know by his look,--I know by his smell,--he no good yaller,--he no smell ripe,--I know orange ever since my head no bigger than he is," and Paolo laughed at his own comparison.

The Interviewer laughed louder than Paolo.

"Good!" said he,--"first-rate! Of course you know all about 'em. Why can't you pick me out a couple of what you think are the best of 'em? I shall be greatly obliged to you. I have a sick friend, and I want to get two nice sweet ones for him."

Paolo was pleased. His skill and judgment were recognized. He felt grateful to the stranger, who had given him, an opportunity of conferring a favor. He selected two, after careful examination and grave deliberation. The Interviewer had sense and tact enough not to offer him an orange, and so shift the balance of obligation.

"How is Mr. Kirkwood, to-day?" he asked.

"Signor? He very well. He always well. Why you ask? Anybody tell you he sick?"

"No, nobody said he was sick. I have n't seen him going about for a day or two, and I thought he might have something the matter with him. Is he in the house now?"

"No: he off riding. He take long, long rides, sometime gone all day. Sometime he go on lake, paddle, paddle in the morning, very, very early,--in night when the moon shine; sometime stay in house, and read, and study, and write,--he great scholar, Misser Kirkwood."

"A good many books, has n't he?"

"He got whole shelfs full of books. Great books, little books, old books, new books, all sorts of books. He great scholar, I tell you."

"Has n't he some curiosities,--old figures, old jewelry, old coins, or things of that sort?"

Paolo looked at the young man cautiously, almost suspiciously. "He don't keep no jewels nor no money in his chamber. He got some old things,--old jugs, old brass figgers, old money, such as they used to have in old times: she don't pass now." Paolo's genders were apt to be somewhat indiscriminately distributed.

A lucky thought struck the Interviewer. "I wonder if he would examine some old coins of mine?" said he, in a modestly tentative manner.

"I think he like to see anything curious. When he come home I ask him. Who will I tell him wants to ask him about old coin?"

"Tell him a gentleman visiting Arrowhead Village would like to call and show him some old pieces of money, said to be Roman ones."

The Interviewer had just remembered that he had two or three old battered bits of copper which he had picked up at a tollman's, where they had been passed off for cents. He had bought them as curiosities. One had the name of Gallienus upon it, tolerably distinct,--a common little Roman penny; but it would serve his purpose of asking a question, as would two or three others with less legible legends. Paolo told him that if he came the next morning he would stand a fair chance of seeing Mr. Kirkwood. At any rate, he would speak to his master.

The Interviewer presented himself the next morning, after finishing his breakfast and his cigar, feeling reasonably sure of finding Mr. Kirkwood at home, as he proved to be. He had told Paolo to show the stranger up to his library,--or study, as he modestly called it.

It was a pleasant room enough, with a lookout on the lake in one direction, and the wooded hill in another. The tenant had fitted it up in scholarly fashion. The books Paolo spoke of were conspicuous, many of them, by their white vellum binding and tasteful gilding, showing that probably they had been bound in Rome, or some other Italian city. With these were older volumes in their dark original leather, and recent ones in cloth or paper. As the Interviewer ran his eye over them, he found that he could make very little out of what their backs taught him. Some of the paper-covered books, some of the cloth-covered ones, had names which he knew; but those on the backs of many of the others were strange to his eyes. The classics of Greek and Latin and Italian literature were there; and he saw enough to feel convinced that he had better not attempt to display his erudition in the company of this young scholar.

The first thing the Interviewer had to do was to account for his visiting a person who had not asked to make his acquaintance, and who was living as a recluse. He took out his battered coppers, and showed them to Maurice.

"I understood that you were very skilful in antiquities, and had a good many yourself. So I took the liberty of calling upon you, hoping that you could tell me something about some ancient coins I have had for a good while." So saying, he pointed to the copper with the name of Gallienus.

"Is this very rare and valuable? I have heard that great prices have been paid for some of these ancient coins,--ever so many guineas, sometimes. I suppose this is as much as a thousand years old."

"More than a thousand years old," said Maurice.

"And worth a great deal of money?" asked the Interviewer.

"No, not a great deal of money," answered Maurice.

"How much, should you say?" said the Interviewer.

Maurice smiled. "A little more than the value of its weight in copper,--I am afraid not much more. There are a good many of these coins of Gallienus knocking about. The peddlers and the shopkeepers take such pieces occasionally, and sell them, sometimes for five or ten cents, to young collectors. No, it is not very precious in money value, but as a relic any piece of money that was passed from hand to hand a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago is interesting. The value of such relics is a good deal a matter of imagination."

"And what do you say to these others?" asked the Interviewer. Poor old worn-out things they were, with a letter or two only, and some faint trace of a figure on one or two of them.

"Very interesting, always, if they carry your imagination back to the times when you may suppose they were current. Perhaps Horace tossed one of them to a beggar. Perhaps one of these was the coin that was brought when One said to those about Him, 'Bring me a penny, that I may see it.' But the market price is a different matter. That depends on the beauty and preservation, and above all the rarity, of the specimen. Here is a coin, now,"--he opened a small cabinet, and took one from it. "Here is a Syracusan decadrachm with the head of Persephone, which is at once rare, well preserved, and beautiful. I am afraid to tell what I paid for it."

The Interviewer was not an expert in numismatics. He cared very little more for an old coin than he did for an old button, but he had thought his purchase at the tollman's might prove a good speculation. No matter about the battered old pieces: he had found out, at any rate, that Maurice must have money and could be extravagant, or what he himself considered so; also that he was familiar with ancient coins. That would do for a beginning.

"May I ask where you picked up the coin you are showing me?" he said

"That is a question which provokes a negative answer. One does not 'pick up' first-class coins or paintings, very often, in these times. I bought this of a great dealer in Rome."

"Lived in Rome once?" said the Interviewer.

"For some years. Perhaps you have been there yourself?"

The Interviewer said he had never been there yet, but he hoped he should go there, one of these years, "suppose you studied art and antiquities while you were there?" he continued.

"Everybody who goes to Rome must learn something of art and antiquities. Before you go there I advise you to review Roman history and the classic authors. You had better make a study of ancient and modern art, and not have everything to learn while you are going about among ruins, and churches, and galleries. You know your Horace and Virgil well, I take it for granted?"

The Interviewer hesitated. The names sounded as if he had heard them. "Not so well as I mean to before going to Rome," he answered. "May I ask how long you lived in Rome?"

"Long enough to know something of what is to be seen in it. No one should go there without careful preparation beforehand. You are familiar with Vasari, of course?"

The Interviewer felt a slight moisture on his forehead. He took out his handkerchief. "It is a warm day," he said. "I have not had time to read all--the works I mean to. I have had too much writing to do, myself, to find all the time for reading and study I could have wished."

"In what literary occupation have you been engaged, if you will pardon my inquiry? said Maurice.

"I am connected with the press. I understood that you were a man of letters, and I hoped I might have the privilege of hearing from your own lips some account of your literary experiences."

"Perhaps that might be interesting, but I think I shall reserve it for my autobiography. You said you were connected with the press. Do I understand that you are an author?"

By this time the Interviewer had come to the conclusion that it was a very warm day. He did not seem to be getting hold of his pitcher by the right handle, somehow. But he could not help answering Maurice's very simple question.

"If writing for a newspaper gives one a right to be called an author, I may call myself one. I write for the "People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor."

"Are you the literary critic of that well-known journal, or do you manage the political column?"

"I am a correspondent from different places and on various matters of interest."

"Places you have been to, and people you have known?"

"Well, yes,-generally, that is. Sometimes I have to compile my articles."

"Did you write the letter from Rome, published a few weeks ago?"

The Interviewer was in what he would call a tight place. However, he had found that his man was too much for him, and saw that the best thing he could do was to submit to be interviewed himself. He thought that he should be able to pick up something or other which he could work into his report of his visit.

"Well, I--prepared that article for our columns. You know one does not have to see everything he describes. You found it accurate, I hope, in its descriptions?"

"Yes, Murray is generally accurate. Sometimes he makes mistakes, but I can't say how far you have copied them. You got the Ponte Molle--the old Milvian bridge--a good deal too far down the stream, if I remember. I happened to notice that, but I did not read the article carefully. May I ask whether you propose to do me the honor of reporting this visit and the conversation we have had, for the columns of the newspaper with which you are connected?"

The Interviewer thought he saw an opening. "If you have no objections," he said, "I should like very much to ask a few questions." He was recovering his professional audacity.

"You can ask as many questions as you consider proper and discreet, --after you have answered one or two of mine: Who commissioned you to submit me to examination?"

"The curiosity of the public wishes to be gratified, and I am the humble agent of its investigations."

"What has the public to do with my private affairs?"

"I suppose it is a question of majority and minority. That settles everything in this country. You are a minority of one opposed to a large number of curious people that form a majority against you. That is the way I've heard the chief put it."

Maurice could not help smiling at the quiet assumption of the American citizen. The Interviewer smiled, too, and thought he had his man, sure, at last. Maurice calmly answered, "There is nothing left for minorities, then, but the right of rebellion. I don't care about being made the subject of an article for your paper. I am here for my pleasure, minding my own business, and content with that occupation. I rebel against your system of forced publicity. Whenever I am ready I shall tell the public all it has any right to know about me. In the mean time I shall request to be spared reading my biography while I am living. I wish you a good-morning."

The Interviewer had not taken out his note-book and pencil. In his next communication from Arrowhead Village he contented himself with a brief mention of the distinguished and accomplished gentleman now visiting the place, whose library and cabinet of coins he had had the privilege of examining, and whose courtesy was equalled only by the modesty that shunned the public notoriety which the organs of popular intelligence would otherwise confer upon him.

The Interviewer had attempted the riddle of the Sphinx, and had failed to get the first hint of its solution.

The many tongues of the village and its visitors could not remain idle. The whole subject of antipathies had been talked over, and the various cases recorded had become more or less familiar to the conversational circles which met every evening in the different centres of social life. The prevalent hypothesis for the moment was that Maurice had a congenital aversion to some color, the effects of which upon him were so painful or disagreeable that he habitually avoided exposure to it. It was known, and it has already been mentioned, that such cases were on record. There had been a great deal of discussion, of late, with reference to a fact long known to a few individuals, but only recently made a matter of careful scientific observation and brought to the notice of the public. This was the now well-known phenomenon of color-blindness. It did not seem very strange that if one person in every score or two could not tell red from green there might be other curious individual peculiarities relating to color. A case has already been referred to where the subject of observation fainted at the sight of any red object. What if this were the trouble with Maurice Kirkwood? It will be seen at once how such a congenital antipathy would tend to isolate the person who was its unfortunate victim. It was an hypothesis not difficult to test, but it was a rather delicate business to be experimenting on an inoffensive stranger. Miss Vincent was thinking it over, but said nothing, even to Euthymia, of any projects she might entertain.

XII

MISS VINCENT AS A MEDICAL STUDENT.

The young lady whom we have known as The Terror, as Lurida, as Miss Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, had been reading various works selected for her by Dr. Butts,--works chiefly relating to the nervous system and its different affections. She thought it was about time to talk over the general subject of the medical profession with her new teacher,--if such a self-directing person as Lurida could be said to recognize anybody as teacher.

She began at the beginning. "What is the first book you would put in a student's hands, doctor?" she said to him one day. They were in his study, and Lurida had just brought back a thick volume on Insanity, one of Bucknill and Puke's, which she had devoured as if it had been a pamphlet.

"Not that book, certainly," he said. "I am afraid it will put all sorts of notions into your head. Who or what set you to reading that, I should like to know?"

"I found it on one of your shelves, and as I thought I might perhaps be crazy some time or other, I felt as if I should like to know what kind of a condition insanity is. I don't believe they were ever very bright, those insane people, most of them. I hope I am not stupid enough ever to lose my wits."

"There is no telling, my dear, what may happen if you overwork that busy brain of yours. But did n't it make you nervous, reading about so many people possessed with such strange notions?"

"Nervous? Not a bit. I could n't help thinking, though, how many people I had known that had a little touch of craziness about them. Take that poor woman that says she is Her Majesty's Person,--not Her Majesty, but Her Majesty's Person,--a very important distinction, according to her: how she does remind me of more than one girl I have known! She would let her skirts down so as to make a kind of train, and pile things on her head like a sort of crown, fold her arms and throw her head back, and feel as grand as a queen. I have seen more than one girl act very much in that way. Are not most of us a little crazy, doctor,--just a little? I think so. It seems to me I never saw but one girl who was free from every hint of craziness."

"And who was that, pray?"

"Why, Euthymia,--nobody else, of course. She never loses her head,--I don't believe she would in an earthquake. Whenever we were at work with our microscopes at the Institute I always told her that her mind was the only achromatic one I ever looked into,--I did n't say looked through.---But I did n't come to talk about that. I read in one of your books that when Sydenham was asked by a student what books he should read, the great physician said, 'Read "Don Quixote."' I want you to explain that to me; and then I want you to tell me what is the first book, according to your idea, that a student ought to read."

"What do you say to my taking your question as the subject of a paper to be read before the Society? I think there may be other young ladies at the meeting, besides yourself, who are thinking of pursuing the study of medicine. At any rate, there are a good many who are interested in the subject; in fact, most people listen readily to anything doctors tell them about their calling."

"I wish you would, doctor. I want Euthymia to hear it, and I don't doubt there will be others who will be glad to hear everything you have to say about it. But oh, doctor, if you could only persuade Eutbymia to become a physician! What a doctor she would make! So strong, so calm, so full of wisdom! I believe she could take the wheel of a steamboat in a storm, or the hose of a fire-engine in a conflagration, and handle it as well as the captain of the boat or of the fire-company."

"Have you ever talked with her about studying medicine?"

"Indeed I have. Oh, if she would only begin with me! What good times we would have studying together!"

"I don't doubt it. Medicine is a very pleasant study. But how do you think practice would be? How would you like being called up to ride ten miles in a midnight snow-storm, just when one of your raging headaches was racking you?"

"Oh, but we could go into partnership, and Euthymia is n't afraid of storms or anything else. If she would only study medicine with me!"

"Well, what does she say to it?"

"She does n't like the thought of it. She does n't believe in women doctors. She thinks that now and then a woman may be fitted for it by nature, but she does n't think there are many who are. She gives me a good many reasons against their practising medicine, you know what most of them are, doctor,--and ends by saying that the same woman who would be a poor sort of doctor would make a first-rate nurse; and that, she thinks, is a woman's business, if her instinct carries her to the hospital or sick-chamber. I can't argue her ideas out of her."

"Neither can I argue you out of your feeling about the matter; but I am disposed to agree with your friend, that you will often spoil a good nurse to make a poor doctor. Doctors and side-saddles don't seem to me to go together. Riding habits would be awkward things for practitioners. But come, we won't have a controversy just now. I am for giving women every chance for a good education, and if they think medicine is one of their proper callings let them try it. I think they will find that they had better at least limit themselves to certain specialties, and always have an expert of the other sex to fall back upon. The trouble is that they are so impressible and imaginative that they are at the mercy of all sorts of fancy systems. You have only to see what kinds of instruction they very commonly flock to in order to guess whether they would be likely to prove sensible practitioners. Charlatanism always hobbles on two crutches, the tattle of women, and the certificates of clergymen, and I am afraid that half the women doctors will be too much under both those influences."

Lurida believed in Dr. Butts, who, to use the common language of the village, had "carried her through" a fever, brought on by over-excitement and exhausting study. She took no offence at his reference to nursery gossip, which she had learned to hold cheap. Nobody so despises the weaknesses of women as the champion of woman's rights. She accepted the doctor's concession of a fair field and open trial of the fitness of her sex for medical practice, and did not trouble herself about his suggested limitations. As to the imaginative tendencies of women, she knew too well the truth of the doctor's remark relating to them to wish to contradict it.

"Be sure you let me have your paper in season for the next meeting, doctor," she said; and in due season it came, and was of course approved for reading.

XIII

DR. BUTTS READS A PAPER.

"Next to the interest we take in all that relates to our immortal souls is that which we feel for our mortal bodies. I am afraid my very first statement may be open to criticism. The care of the body is the first thought with a great many,--in fact, with the larger part of the world. They send for the physician first, and not until he gives them up do they commonly call in the clergyman. Even the minister himself is not so very different from other people. We must not blame him if he is not always impatient to exchange a world of multiplied interests and ever-changing sources of excitement for that which tradition has delivered to us as one eminently deficient in the stimulus of variety. Besides, these bodily frames, even when worn and disfigured by long years of service, hang about our consciousness like old garments. They are used to us, and we are used to them. And all the accidents of our lives,--the house we dwell in, the living people round us, the landscape we look over, all, up to the sky that covers us like a bell glass,--all these are but looser outside garments which we have worn until they seem a part of us, and we do not like the thought of changing them for a new suit which we have never yet tried on. How well I remember that dear ancient lady, who lived well into the last decade of her century, as she repeated the verse which, if I had but one to choose, I would select from that string of pearls, Gray's 'Elegy'!

"'For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?'

"Plotinus was ashamed of his body, we are told. Better so, it may be, than to live solely for it, as so many do. But it may be well doubted if there is any disciple of Plotinus in this Society. On the contrary, there are many who think a great deal of their bodies, many who have come here to regain the health they have lost in the wear and tear of city life, and very few who have not at some time or other of their lives had occasion to call in the services of a physician.

"There is, therefore, no impropriety in my offering to the members some remarks upon the peculiar difficulties which beset the medical practitioner in the discharge of his laborious and important duties.

"A young friend of mine, who has taken an interest in medical studies, happened to meet with a very familiar story about one of the greatest and most celebrated of all English physicians, Thomas Sydenham. The story is that, when a student asked him what books he should read, the great doctor told him to read 'Don Quixote.'

"This piece of advice has been used to throw contempt upon the study of books, and furnishes a convenient shield for ignorant pretenders. But Sydenham left many writings in which he has recorded his medical experience, and he surely would not have published them if he had not thought they would be better reading for the medical student than the story of Cervantes. His own works are esteemed to this day, and he certainly could not have supposed that they contained all the wisdom of all the past. No remedy is good, it was said of old, unless applied at the right time in the right way. So we may say of all anecdotes, like this which I have told you about Sydenham and the young man. It is very likely that he carried him to the bedside of some patients, and talked to him about the cases he showed him, instead of putting a Latin volume in his hand. I would as soon begin in that way as any other, with a student who had already mastered the preliminary branches,--who knew enough about the structure and functions of the body in health.

"But if you ask me what reading I would commend to the medical student of a philosophical habit of mind, you may be surprised to hear me say it would be certain passages in 'Rasselas.' They are the ones where the astronomer gives an account to Imlac of his management of the elements, the control of which, as he had persuaded himself, had been committed to him. Let me read you a few sentences from this story, which is commonly bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like a woollen lining to a silken mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before their tramping platoons.

"The astronomer has taken Imlac into his confidence, and reveals to him the secret of his wonderful powers:--

"'Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit. I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto eluded my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial tempests, which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain.'

"The reader naturally wishes to know how the astronomer, a sincere, devoted, and most benevolent man, for forty years a student of the heavens, came to the strange belief that he possessed these miraculous powers. This is his account:

"'One day, as I was looking on the fields withering with heat, I felt in my mind a sudden wish that I could send rain on the southern mountains, and raise the Nile to an inundation. In the hurry of my imagination I commanded rain to fall, and by comparing the time of my command with that of the inundation I found that the clouds had listened to my lips.'

"'Might not some other cause,' said I, 'produce this concurrence? The Nile does not always rise on the same day.'

"'Do not believe,' said he, with impatience, I that such objections could escape me: I reasoned long against my own conviction, and labored against truth with the utmost obstinacy. I sometimes suspected myself of madness, and should not have dared to impart this secret but to a man like you, capable of distinguishing the wonderful from the impossible and the incredible from the false.'

"The good old astronomer gives his parting directions to Imlac, whom he has adopted as his successor in the government of the elements and the seasons, in these impressive words:

"Do not, in the administration of the year, indulge thy pride by innovation; do not please thyself with thinking that thou canst make thyself renowned to all future ages by disordering the seasons. The memory of mischief is no desirable fame. Much less will it become thee to let kindness or interest prevail. Never rob other countries of rain to pour it on thine own. For us the Nile is sufficient.'

"Do you wonder, my friends, why I have chosen these passages, in which the delusions of an insane astronomer are related with all the pomp of the Johnsonian vocabulary, as the first lesson for the young person about to enter on the study of the science and art of healing? Listen to me while I show you the parallel of the story of the astronomer in the history of medicine.

"This history is luminous with intelligence, radiant with benevolence, but all its wisdom and all its virtue have had to struggle with the ever-rising mists of delusion. The agencies which waste and destroy the race of mankind are vast and resistless as the elemental forces of nature; nay, they are themselves elemental forces. They may be to some extent avoided, to some extent diverted from their aim, to some extent resisted. So may the changes of the seasons, from cold that freezes to heats that strike with sudden death, be guarded against. So may the tides be in some small measure restrained in their inroads. So may the storms be breasted by walls they cannot shake from their foundations. But the seasons and the tides and the tempests work their will on the great scale upon whatever stands in their way; they feed or starve the tillers of the soil; they spare or drown the dwellers by the shore; they waft the seaman to his harbor or bury him in the angry billows.

"The art of the physician can do much to remove its subjects from deadly and dangerous influences, and something to control or arrest the effects of these influences. But look at the records of the life-insurance offices, and see how uniform is the action of nature's destroying agencies. Look at the annual reports of the deaths in any of our great cities, and see how their regularity approaches the uniformity of the tides, and their variations keep pace with those of the seasons. The inundations of the Nile are not more certainly to be predicted than the vast wave of infantile disease which flows in upon all our great cities with the growing heats of July,--than the fevers and dysenteries which visit our rural districts in the months of the falling leaf.

"The physician watches these changes as the astronomer watched the rise of the great river. He longs to rescue individuals, to protect communities from the inroads of these destroying agencies. He uses all the means which experience has approved, tries every rational method which ingenuity can suggest. Some fortunate recovery leads him to believe he has hit upon a preventive or a cure for a malady which had resisted all known remedies. His rescued patient sounds his praises, and a wide circle of his patient's friends joins in a chorus of eulogies. Self-love applauds him for his sagacity. Self-interest congratulates him on his having found the road to fortune; the sense of having proved a benefactor of his race smooths the pillow on which he lays his head to dream of the brilliant future opening before him. If a single coincidence may lead a person of sanguine disposition to believe that he has mastered a disease which had baffled all who were before his time, and on which his contemporaries looked in hopeless impotence, what must be the effect of a series of such coincidences even on a mind of calmer temper! Such series of coincidences will happen, and they may well deceive the very elect. Think of Dr. Rush,--you know what a famous man he was, the very head and front of American medical science in his day, --and remember how he spoke about yellow fever, which he thought he had mastered!

"Thus the physician is entangled in the meshes of a wide conspiracy, in which he and his patient and their friends, and-Nature herself, are involved. What wonder that the history of Medicine should be to so great an extent a record of self-delusion!

"If this seems a dangerous concession to the enemies of the true science and art of healing, I will remind you that it is all implied in the first aphorism of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine. Do not draw a wrong inference from the frank statement of the difficulties which beset the medical practitioner. Think rather, if truth is so hard of attainment, how precious are the results which the consent of the wisest and most experienced among the healers of men agrees in accepting. Think what folly it is to cast them aside in favor of palpable impositions stolen from the records of forgotten charlatanism, or of fantastic speculations spun from the squinting brains of theorists as wild as the Egyptian astronomer.

"Begin your medical studies, then, by reading the fortieth and the following four chapters of 'Rasselas.' Your first lesson will teach you modesty and caution in the pursuit of the most deceptive of all practical branches of knowledge. Faith will come later, when you learn how much medical science and art have actually achieved for the relief of mankind, and how great are the promises it holds out of still larger triumphs over the enemies of human health and happiness."

After the reading of this paper there was a lively discussion, which we have no room to report here, and the Society adjourned.

XIV

MISS VINCENT'S STARTLING DISCOVERY.

The sober-minded, sensible, well-instructed Dr. Butts was not a little exercised in mind by the demands made upon his knowledge by his young friend, and for the time being his pupil, Miss Lurida Vincent.

"I don't wonder they called her The Terror," he said to himself. "She is enough to frighten anybody. She has taken down old books from my shelves that I had almost forgotten the backs of, and as to the medical journals, I believe the girl could index them from memory. She is in pursuit of some special point of knowledge, I feel sure, and I cannot doubt what direction she is working in, but her wonderful way of dealing with books amazes me."

What marvels those "first scholars" in the classes of our great universities and colleges are, to be sure! They are not, as a rule, the most distinguished of their class in the long struggle of life. The chances are that "the field" will beat "the favorite" over the long race-course. Others will develop a longer stride and more staying power. But what fine gifts those "first scholars" have received from nature! How dull we writers, famous or obscure, are in the acquisition of knowledge as compared with them! To lead their classmates they must have quick apprehension, fine memories, thorough control of their mental faculties, strong will, power of concentration, facility of expression,--a wonderful equipment of mental faculties. I always want to take my hat off to the first scholar of his year.

Dr. Butts felt somewhat in the same way as he contemplated The Terror. She surprised him so often with her knowledge that he was ready to receive her without astonishment when she burst in upon him one allay with a cry of triumph, "Eureka! Eureka!"

"And what have you found, my dear?" said the doctor.

Lurida was flushed and panting with the excitement of her new discovery.

"I do believe that I have found the secret of our strange visitor's dread of all human intercourse!"

The seasoned practitioner was not easily thrown off his balance.

"Wait a minute and get your breath," said the doctor. "Are you not a little overstating his peculiarity? It is not quite so bad as that. He keeps a man to serve him, he was civil with the people at the Old Tavern, he was affable enough, I understand, with the young fellow he pulled out of the water, or rescued somehow,--I don't believe be avoids the whole human race. He does not look as if he hated them, so far as I have remarked his expression. I passed a few words with him when his man was ailing, and found him polite enough. No, I don't believe it is much more than an extreme case of shyness, connected, perhaps, with some congenital or other personal repugnance to which has been given the name of an antipathy."

Lurida could hardly keep still while the doctor was speaking. When he finished, she began the account of her discovery:

"I do certainly believe I have found an account of his case in an Italian medical journal of about fourteen years ago. I met with a reference which led me to look over a file of the Giornale degli Ospitali lying among the old pamphlets in the medical section of the Library. I have made a translation of it, which you must read and then tell me if you do not agree with me in my conclusion."

"Tell me what your conclusion is, and I will read your paper and see for myself whether I think the evidence justifies the conviction you seem to have reached."

Lurida's large eyes showed their whole rounds like the two halves of a map of the world, as she said,

"I believe that Maurice Kirkwood is suffering from the effects of the bite of a TARANTULA!"

The doctor drew a long breath. He remembered in a vague sort of way the stories which used to be told of the terrible Apulian spider, but he had consigned them to the limbo of medical fable where so many fictions have clothed themselves with a local habitation and a name. He looked into the round eyes and wide pupils a little anxiously, as if he feared that she was in a state of undue excitement, but, true to his professional training, he waited for another symptom, if indeed her mind was in any measure off its balance.

"I know what you are thinking," Lurida said, "but it is not so. 'I am not mad, most noble Festus.' You shall see the evidence and judge for yourself. Read the whole case,--you can read my hand almost as if it were print, and tell me if you do not agree with me that this young man is in all probability the same person as the boy described in the Italian journal,

"One thing you might say is against the supposition. The young patient is spoken of as Signorino M . . . Ch. . . . But you must remember that ch is pronounced hard in Italian, like k, which letter is wanting in the Italian alphabet; and it is natural enough that the initial of the second name should have got changed in the record to its Italian equivalent."

Before inviting the reader to follow the details of this extraordinary case as found in a medical journal, the narrator wishes to be indulged in a few words of explanation, in order that he may not have to apologize for allowing the introduction of a subject which may be thought to belong to the professional student rather than to the readers of this record. There is a great deal in medical books which it is very unbecoming to bring before the general public,--a great deal to repel, to disgust, to alarm, to excite unwholesome curiosity. It is not the men whose duties have made them familiar with this class of subjects who are most likely to offend by scenes and descriptions which belong to the physician's private library, and not to the shelves devoted to polite literature. Goldsmith and even Smollett, both having studied and practised medicine, could not by any possibility have outraged all the natural feelings of delicacy and decency as Swift and Zola have outraged them. But without handling doubtful subjects, there are many curious medical experiences which have interest for every one as extreme illustrations of ordinary conditions with which all are acquainted. No one can study the now familiar history of clairvoyance profitably who has not learned something of the vagaries of hysteria. No one can read understandingly the life of Cowper and that of Carlyle without having some idea of the influence of hypochondriasis and of dyspepsia upon the disposition and intellect of the subjects of these maladies. I need not apologize, therefore, for giving publicity to that part of this narrative which deals with one of the most singular maladies to be found in the records of bodily and mental infirmities.

The following is the account of the case as translated by Miss Vincent. For obvious reasons the whole name was not given in the original paper, and for similar reasons the date of the event and the birthplace of the patient are not precisely indicated here.

[Giornale degli Ospitali, Luglio 21, 18-.] REMARKABLE CASE OF TARANTISM.

"The great interest attaching to the very singular and exceptional instance of this rare affection induces us to give a full account of the extraordinary example of its occurrence in a patient who was the subject of a recent medical consultation in this city.

"Signorino M . . . Ch . . . is the only son of a gentleman travelling in Italy at this time. He is eleven years of age, of sanguine-nervous temperament, light hair, blue eyes, intelligent countenance, well grown, but rather slight in form, to all appearance in good health, but subject to certain peculiar and anomalous nervous symptoms, of which his father gives this history.

"Nine years ago, the father informs us, he was travelling in Italy with his wife, this child, and a nurse. They were passing a few days in a country village near the city of Bari, capital of the province of the same name in the division (compartamento) of Apulia. The child was in perfect health and had never been affected by any serious illness. On the 10th of July he was playing out in the field near the house where the family was staying when he was heard to scream suddenly and violently. The nurse rushing to him found him in great pain, saying that something had bitten him in one of his feet. A laborer, one Tommaso, ran up at the moment and perceived in the grass, near where the boy was standing, an enormous spider, which he at once recognized as a tarantula. He managed to catch the creature in a large leaf, from which he was afterwards transferred to a wide-mouthed bottle, where he lived without any food for a month or more. The creature was covered with short hairs, and had a pair of nipper-like jaws, with which he could inflict an ugly wound. His body measured about an inch in length, and from the extremity of one of the longest limbs to the other was between two and three inches. Such was the account given by the physician to whom the peasant carried the great spider.

"The boy who had been bitten continued screaming violently while his stocking was being removed and the foot examined. The place of the bite was easily found and the two marks of the claw-like jaws already showed the effects of the poison, a small livid circle extending around them, with some puffy swelling. The distinguished Dr. Amadei was immediately sent for, and applied cups over the wounds in the hope of drawing forth the poison. In vain all his skill and efforts! Soon, ataxic (irregular) nervous symptoms declared themselves, and it became plain that the system had been infected by the poison.

"The symptoms were very much like those of malignant fever, such as distress about the region of the heart, difficulty of breathing, collapse of all the vital powers, threatening immediate death. From these first symptoms the child rallied, but his entire organism had been profoundly affected by the venom circulating through it. His constitution has never thrown off the malady resulting from this toxic (poisonous) agent. The phenomena which have been observed in this young patient correspond so nearly with those enumerated in the elaborate essay of the celebrated Baglivi that one might think they had been transcribed from his pages.

"He is very fond of solitude,--of wandering about in churchyards and other lonely places. He was once found hiding in an empty tomb, which had been left open. His aversion to certain colors is remarkable. Generally speaking, he prefers bright tints to darker ones, but his likes and dislikes are capricious, and with regard to some colors his antipathy amounts to positive horror. Some shades have such an effect upon him that he cannot remain in the room with them, and if he meets any one whose dress has any of that particular color he will turn away or retreat so as to avoid passing that person. Among these, purple and dark green are the least endurable. He cannot explain the sensations which these obnoxious colors produce except by saying that it is like the deadly feeling from a blow on the epigastrium (pit of the stomach).

"About the same season of the year at which the tarantular poisoning took place he is liable to certain nervous seizures, not exactly like fainting or epilepsy, but reminding the physician of those affections. All the other symptoms are aggravated at this time.

"In other respects than those mentioned the boy is in good health. He is fond of riding, and has a pony on which he takes a great deal of exercise, which seems to do him more good than any other remedy.

"The influence of music, to which so much has been attributed by popular belief and even by the distinguished Professor to whom we shall again refer, has not as yet furnished any satisfactory results. If the graver symptoms recur while the patient is under our observation, we propose to make use of an agency discredited by modern skepticism, but deserving of a fair trial as an exceptional remedy for an exceptional disease.

"The following extracts from the work of the celebrated Italian physician of the last century are given by the writer of the paper in the Giornale in the original Latin, with a translation into Italian, subjoined. Here are the extracts, or rather here is a selection from them, with a translation of them into English.

"After mentioning the singular aversion to certain colors shown by the subject of Tarantism, Baglivi writes as follows: "'Et si astantes incedant vestibus eo colore difusis, qui Tarantatis ingrates est, necesse est ut ab illorum aspectu recedant; nam ad intuitum molesti coloris angore cordis, et symptomatum recrudescantia stating corripiuntur.' (G. Baglivi, Op. Omnia, page 614. Lugduni, 1745.)

"That is, 'if the persons about the patient wear dresses of the color which is offensive to him, he must get away from the sight of them, for on seeing the obnoxious color he is at once seized with distress in the region of the heart, and a renewal of his symptoms.'

"As to the recurrence of the malady, Baglivi says: "'Dam calor solis ardentius exurere incip at, quod contingit circa initia Julii et Augusti, Tarantati lente venientem recrudescentiam veneni percipiunt.' (Ibid., page 619.)

"Which I render, 'When the heat of the sun begins to burn more fiercely, which happens about the beginning of July and August, the subjects of Tarantism perceive the gradually approaching recrudescence (returning symptoms) of the poisoning. Among the remedies most valued by this illustrious physician is that mentioned in the following sentence:

"'Laudo magnopere equitationes in aere rusticano factas singulis diebus, hord potissimum matutina, quibus equitationibus morbos chronicos pene incurabiles protanus eliminavi.'

"Or in translation, 'I commend especially riding on horseback in country air, every day, by preference in the morning hours, by the aid of which horseback riding I have driven off chronic diseases which were almost incurable.'"

Miss Vincent read this paper aloud to Dr. Butts, and handed it to him to examine and consider. He listened with a grave countenance and devout attention.

As she finished reading her account, she exclaimed in the passionate tones of the deepest conviction,

"There, doctor! Have n't I found the true story of this strange visitor? Have n't I solved the riddle of the Sphinx? Who can this man be but the boy of that story? Look at the date of the journal when he was eleven years old, it would make him twenty-five now, and that is just about the age the people here think he must be of. What could account so entirely for his ways and actions as that strange poisoning which produces the state they call Tarantism? I am just as sure it must be that as I am that I am alive. Oh, doctor, doctor, I must be right,--this Signprino M . . . Ch . . . was the boy Maurice Kirkwood, and the story accounts for everything,--his solitary habits, his dread of people,--it must be because they wear the colors he can't bear. His morning rides on horseback, his coming here just as the season was approaching which would aggravate all his symptoms, does n't all this prove that I must be right in my conjecture,--no, my conviction?"

The doctor knew too much to interrupt the young enthusiast, and so he let her run on until she ran down. He was more used to the rules of evidence than she was, and could not accept her positive conclusion so readily as she would have liked to have him. He knew that beginners are very apt to make what they think are discoveries. But he had been an angler and knew the meaning of a yielding rod and an easy-running reel. He said quietly,

"You are a most sagacious young lady, and a very pretty prima facie case it is that you make out. I can see no proof that Mr. Kirkwood is not the same person as the M . . . Ch . . . of the medical journal,--that is, if I accept your explanation of the difference in the initials of these two names. Even if there were a difference, that would not disprove their identity, for the initials of patients whose cases are reported by their physicians are often altered for the purpose of concealment. I do not know, however, that Mr. Kirkwood has shown any special aversion to any particular color. It might be interesting to inquire whether it is so, but it is a delicate matter. I don't exactly see whose business it is to investigate Mr. Maurice Kirkwood's idiosyncrasies and constitutional history. If he should have occasion to send for me at any time, he might tell me all about himself, in confidence, you know. These old accounts from Baglivi are curious and interesting, but I am cautious about receiving any stories a hundred years old, if they involve an improbability, as his stories about the cure of the tarantula bite by music certainly do. I am disposed to wait for future developments, bearing in mind, of course, the very singular case you have unearthed. It wouldn't be very strange if our young gentleman had to send for me before the season is over. He is out a good deal before the dew is off the grass, which is rather risky in this neighborhood as autumn comes on. I am somewhat curious, I confess, about the young man, but I do not meddle where I am not asked for or wanted, and I have found that eggs hatch just as well if you let them alone in the nest as if you take them out and shake them every day. This is a wonderfully interesting supposition of yours, and may prove to be strictly in accordance with the facts. But I do not think we have all the facts in this young man's case. If it were proved that he had an aversion to any color, it would greatly strengthen your case. His 'antipatia,' as his man called it, must be one which covers a wide ground, to account for his self-isolation,--and the color hypothesis seems as plausible as any. But, my dear Miss Vincent, I think you had better leave your singular and striking hypothesis in my keeping for a while, rather than let it get abroad in a community like this, where so many tongues are in active exercise. I will carefully study this paper, if you will leave it with me, and we will talk the whole matter over. It is a fair subject for speculation, only we must keep quiet about it."

This long speech gave Lurida's perfervid brain time to cool off a little. She left the paper with the doctor, telling him she would come for it the next day, and went off to tell the result of this visit to her bosom friend, Miss Euthymia Tower.

XV

DR. BUTTS CALLS ON EUTHYMIA.

The doctor was troubled in thinking over his interview with the young lady. She was fully possessed with the idea that she had discovered the secret which had defied the most sagacious heads of the village. It was of no use to oppose her while her mind was in an excited state. But he felt it his duty to guard her against any possible results of indiscretion into which her eagerness and her theory of the equality, almost the identity, of the sexes might betray her. Too much of the woman in a daughter of our race leads her to forget danger. Too little of the woman prompts her to defy it. Fortunately for this last class of women, they are not quite so likely to be perilously seductive as their more emphatically feminine sisters.

Dr. Butts had known Lurida and her friend from the days of their infancy. He had watched the development of Lurida's intelligence from its precocious nursery-life to the full vigor of its trained faculties. He had looked with admiration on the childish beauty of Euthymia, and had seen her grow up to womanhood, every year making her more attractive. He knew that if anything was to be done with his self-willed young scholar and friend, it would be more easily effected through the medium of Euthymia than by direct advice to the young lady herself. So the thoughtful doctor made up his mind to have a good talk with Euthymia, and put her on her guard, if Lurida showed any tendency to forget the conventionalities in her eager pursuit of knowledge.

For the doctor's horse and chaise to stop at the door of Miss Euthymia Tower's parental home was an event strange enough to set all the tongues in the village going. This was one of those families where illness was hardly looked for among the possibilities of life. There were other families where a call from the doctor was hardly more thought of than a call from the baker. But here he was a stranger, at least on his professional rounds, and when he asked for Miss Euthymia the servant, who knew his face well, stared as if he had held in his hand a warrant for her apprehension.

Euthymia did not keep the doctor waiting very long while she made ready to meet him. One look at her glass to make sure that a lock had not run astray, or a ribbon got out of place, and her toilet for a morning call was finished. Perhaps if Mr. Maurice Kirkwood had been announced, she might have taken a second look, but with the good middle-aged, married doctor one was enough for a young lady who had the gift of making all the dresses she wore look well, and had no occasion to treat her chamber like the laboratory where an actress compounds herself.

Euthymia welcomed the doctor very heartily. She could not help suspecting his errand, and she was very glad to have a chance to talk over her friend's schemes and fancies with him.

The doctor began without any roundabout prelude.

"I want to confer with you about our friend Lurida. Does she tell you all her plans and projects?"

"Why, as to that, doctor, I can hardly say, positively, but I do not believe she keeps back anything of importance from me. I know what she has been busy with lately, and the queer idea she has got into her head. What do you think of the Tarantula business? She has shown you the paper, she has written, I suppose."

"Indeed she has. It is a very curious case she has got hold of, and I do not wonder at all that she should have felt convinced that she had come at the true solution of the village riddle. It may be that this young man is the same person as the boy mentioned in the Italian medical journal. But it is very far from clear that he is so. You know all her reasons, of course, as you have read the story. The times seem to agree well enough. It is easy to conceive that Ch might be substituted for K in the report. The singular solitary habits of this young man entirely coincide with the story. If we could only find out whether he has any of those feelings with reference to certain colors, we might guess with more chance of guessing right than we have at present. But I don't see exactly how we are going to submit him to examination on this point. If he were only a chemical compound, we could analyze him. If he were only a bird or a quadruped, we could find out his likes and dislikes. But being, as he is, a young man, with ways of his own, and a will of his own, which he may not choose to have interfered with, the problem becomes more complicated. I hear that a newspaper correspondent has visited him so as to make a report to his paper,--do you know what he found out?"

"Certainly I do, very well. My brother has heard his own story, which was this: He found out he had got hold of the wrong person to interview. The young gentleman, he says, interviewed him, so that he did not learn much about the Sphinx. But the newspaper man told Willy about the Sphinx's library and a cabinet of coins he had; and said he should make an article out of him, anyhow. I wish the man would take himself off. I am afraid Lurida's love of knowledge will get her into trouble!"

"Which of the men do you wish would take himself off?"

"I was thinking of the newspaper man."

She blushed a little as she said, "I can't help feeling a strange sort of interest about the other, Mr. Kirkwood. Do you know that I met him this morning, and had a good look at him, full in the face?"

"Well, to be sure! That was an interesting experience. And how did you like his looks?"

"I thought his face a very remarkable one. But he looked very pale as he passed me, and I noticed that he put his hand to his left side as if he had a twinge of pain, or something of that sort,--spasm or neuralgia,--I don't know what. I wondered whether he had what you call angina pectoris. It was the same kind of look and movement, I remember, as you trust, too, in my uncle who died with that complaint."

The doctor was silent for a moment. Then he asked, "Were you dressed as you are now?"

"Yes, I was, except that I had a thin mantle over my shoulders. I was out early, and I have always remembered your caution."

"What color was your mantle?"

"It was black. I have been over all this with Lucinda. A black mantle on a white dress. A straw hat with an old faded ribbon. There can't be much in those colors to trouble him, I should think, for his man wears a black coat and white linen,--more or less white, as you must have noticed, and he must have seen ribbons of all colors often enough. But Lurida believes it was the ribbon, or something in the combination of colors. Her head is full of Tarantulas and Tarantism. I fear that she will never be easy until the question is settled by actual trial. And will you believe it? the girl is determined in some way to test her supposition!"

"Believe it, Euthymia? I can believe almost anything of Lurida. She is the most irrepressible creature I ever knew. You know as well as I do what a complete possession any ruling idea takes of her whole nature. I have had some fears lest her zeal might run away with her discretion. It is a great deal easier to get into a false position than to get out of it."

"I know it well enough. I want you to tell me what you think about the whole business. I don't like the look of it at all, and yet I can do nothing with the girl except let her follow her fancy, until I can show her plainly that she will get herself into trouble in some way or other. But she is ingenious,--full of all sorts of devices, innocent enough in themselves, but liable to be misconstrued. You remember how she won us the boat-race?"

"To be sure I do. It was rather sharp practice, but she felt she was paying off an old score. The classical story of Atalanta, told, like that of Eve, as illustrating the weakness of woman, provoked her to make trial of the powers of resistance in the other sex. But it was audacious. I hope her audacity will not go too far. You must watch her. Keep an eye on her correspondence."

The doctor had great confidence in the good sense of Lurida's friend. He felt sure that she would not let Lurida commit herself by writing foolish letters to the subject of her speculations, or similar indiscreet performances. The boldness of young girls, who think no evil, in opening correspondence with idealized personages is something quite astonishing to those who have had an opportunity of knowing the facts. Lurida had passed the most dangerous age, but her theory of the equality of the sexes made her indifferent to the by-laws of social usage. She required watching, and her two guardians were ready to check her, in case of need.

XVI

MISS VINCENT WRITES A LETTER.

Euthymia noticed that her friend had been very much preoccupied for two or three days. She found her more than once busy at her desk, with a manuscript before her, which she turned over and placed inside the desk, as Euthymia entered.

This desire of concealment was not what either of the friends expected to see in the other. It showed that some project was under way, which, at least in its present stage, the Machiavellian young lady did not wish to disclose. It had cost her a good deal of thought and care, apparently, for her waste-basket was full of scraps of paper, which looked as if they were the remains of a manuscript like that at which she was at work. "Copying and recopying, probably," thought Euthymia, but she was willing to wait to learn what Lurida was busy about, though she had a suspicion that it was something in which she might feel called upon to interest herself.

"Do you know what I think?" said Euthymia to the doctor, meeting him as he left his door. "I believe Lurida is writing to this man, and I don't like the thought of her doing such a thing. Of course she is not like other girls in many respects, but other people will judge her by the common rules of life."

"I am glad that you spoke of it," answered the doctor; "she would write to him just as quickly as to any woman of his age. Besides, under the cover of her office, she has got into the way of writing to anybody. I think she has already written to Mr. Kirkwood, asking him to contribute a paper for the Society. She can find a pretext easily enough if she has made up her mind to write. In fact, I doubt if she would trouble herself for any pretext at all if she decided to write. Watch her well. Don't let any letter go without seeing it, if you can help it."

Young women are much given to writing letters to persons whom they only know indirectly, for the most part through their books, and especially to romancers and poets. Nothing can be more innocent and simple-hearted than most of these letters. They are the spontaneous outflow of young hearts easily excited to gratitude for the pleasure which some story or poem has given them, and recognizing their own thoughts, their own feelings, in those expressed by the author, as if on purpose for them to read. Undoubtedly they give great relief to solitary young persons, who must have some ideal reflection of themselves, and know not where to look since Protestantism has taken away the crucifix and the Madonna. The recipient of these letters sometimes wonders, after reading through one of them, how it is that his young correspondent has managed to fill so much space with her simple message of admiration or of sympathy.

Lurida did not belong to this particular class of correspondents, but she could not resist the law of her sex, whose thoughts naturally surround themselves with superabundant drapery of language, as their persons float in a wide superfluity of woven tissues. Was she indeed writing to this unknown gentleman? Euthymia questioned her point-blank.

"Are you going to open a correspondence with Mr. Maurice Kirkwood, Lurida? You seem to be so busy writing, I can think of nothing else. Or are you going to write a novel, or a paper for the Society,--do tell me what you are so much taken up with."

"I will tell you, Euthymia, if you will promise not to find fault with me for carrying out my plan as I have made up my mind to do. You may read this letter before I seal it, and if you find anything in it you don't like you can suggest any change that you think will improve it. I hope you will see that it explains itself. I don't believe that you will find anything to frighten you in it."

This is the letter, as submitted to Miss Tower by her friend. The bold handwriting made it look like a man's letter, and gave it consequently a less dangerous expression than that which belongs to the tinted and often fragrant sheet with its delicate thready characters, which slant across the page like an April shower with a south wind chasing it.

ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August--, 18--.

MY DEAR SIR,--You will doubtless be surprised at the sight of a letter like this from one whom you only know as the Secretary of the Pansophian Society. There is a very common feeling that it is unbecoming in one of my sex to address one of your own with whom she is unacquainted, unless she has some special claim upon his attention. I am by no means disposed to concede to the vulgar prejudice on this point. If one human being has anything to communicate to another,--anything which deserves being communicated,--I see no occasion for bringing in the question of sex. I do not think the homo sum of Terence can be claimed for the male sex as its private property on general any more than on grammatical grounds,

I have sometimes thought of devoting myself to the noble art of healing. If I did so, it would be with the fixed purpose of giving my whole powers to the service of humanity. And if I should carry out that idea, should I refuse my care and skill to a suffering fellow-mortal because that mortal happened to be a brother, and not a sister? My whole nature protests against such one-sided humanity! No! I am blind to all distinctions when my eyes are opened to any form of suffering, to any spectacle of want.

You may ask me why I address you, whom I know little or nothing of, and to whom such an advance may seem presumptuous and intrusive. It is because I was deeply impressed by the paper which I attributed to you,--that on Ocean, River, and Lake, which was read at one of our meetings. I say that I was deeply impressed, but I do not mean this as a compliment to that paper. I am not bandying compliments now, but thinking of better things than praises or phrases. I was interested in the paper, partly because I recognized some of the feelings expressed in it as my own,--partly because there was an undertone of sadness in all the voices of nature as you echoed them which made me sad to hear, and which I could not help longing to cheer and enliven. I said to myself, I should like to hold communion with the writer of that paper. I have had my lonely hours and days, as he has had. I have had some of his experiences in my intercourse with nature. And oh! if I could draw him into those better human relations which await us all, if we come with the right dispositions, I should blush if I stopped to inquire whether I violated any conventional rule or not.

You will understand me, I feel sure. You believe, do you not? in the insignificance of the barrier which divides the sisterhood from the brotherhood of mankind. You believe, do you not? that they should be educated side by side, that they should share the same pursuits, due regard being had to the fitness of the particular individual for hard or light work, as it must always be, whether we are dealing with the "stronger" or the "weaker" sex. I mark these words because, notwithstanding their common use, they involve so much that is not true. Stronger! Yes, to lift a barrel of flour, or a barrel of cider,--though there have been women who could do that, and though when John Wesley was mobbed in Staffordshire a woman knocked down three or four men, one after another, until she was at last overpowered and nearly murdered. Talk about the weaker sex! Go and see Miss Euthymia Tower at the gymnasium! But no matter about which sex has the strongest muscles. Which has most to suffer, and which has most endurance and vitality? We go through many ordeals which you are spared, but we outlast you in mind and body. I have been led away into one of my accustomed trains of thought, but not so far away from it as you might at first suppose.

My brother! Are you not ready to recognize in me a friend, an equal, a sister, who can speak to you as if she had been reared under the same roof? And is not the sky that covers us one roof, which makes us all one family? You are lonely, you must be longing for some human fellowship. Take me into your confidence. What is there that you can tell me to which I cannot respond with sympathy? What saddest note in your spiritual dirges which will not find its chord in mine?

I long to know what influence has cast its shadow over your existence. I myself have known what it is to carry a brain that never rests in a body that is always tired. I have defied its infirmities, and forced it to do my bidding. You have no such hindrance, if we may judge by your aspect and habits. You deal with horses like a Homeric hero. No wild Indian could handle his bark canoe more dexterously or more vigorously than we have seen you handling yours. There must be some reason for your seclusion which curiosity has not reached, and into which it is not the province of curiosity to inquire. But in the irresistible desire which I have to bring you into kindly relations with those around you, I must run the risk of giving offence that I may know in what direction to look for those restorative influences which the sympathy of a friend and sister can offer to a brother in need of some kindly impulse to change the course of a life which is not, which cannot be, in accordance with his true nature.

I have thought that there may be something in the conditions with which you are here surrounded which is repugnant to your feelings,--something which can be avoided only by keeping yourself apart from the people whose acquaintance you would naturally have formed. There can hardly be anything in the place itself, or you would not have voluntarily sought it as a residence, even for a single season there might be individuals here whom you would not care to meet, there must be such, but you cannot have a personal aversion to everybody. I have heard of cases in which certain sights and sounds, which have no particular significance for most persons, produced feelings of distress or aversion that made, them unbearable to the subjects of the constitutional dislike. It has occurred to me that possibly you might have some such natural aversion to the sounds of the street, or such as are heard in most houses, especially where a piano is kept, as it is in fact in almost all of those in the village. Or it might be, I imagined, that some color in the dresses of women or the furniture of our rooms affected you unpleasantly. I know that instances of such antipathy have been recorded, and they would account for the seclusion of those who are subject to it.

If there is any removable condition which interferes with your free entrance into and enjoyment of the social life around you, tell me, I beg of you, tell me what it is, and it shall be eliminated. Think it not strange, O my brother, that I thus venture to introduce myself into the hidden chambers of your life. I will never suffer myself to be frightened from the carrying out of any thought which promises to be of use to a fellow-mortal by a fear lest it should be considered "unfeminine." I can bear to be considered unfeminine, but I cannot endure to think of myself as inhuman. Can I help you, my brother'?

Believe me your most sincere well-wisher, LURIDA VINCENT.

Euthymia had carried off this letter and read it by herself. As she finished it, her feelings found expression in an old phrase of her grandmother's, which came up of itself, as such survivals of early days are apt to do, on great occasions.

"Well, I never!"

Then she loosened some button or string that was too tight, and went to the window for a breath of outdoor air. Then she began at the beginning and read the whole letter all over again.

What should she do about it? She could not let this young girl send a letter like that to a stranger of whose character little was known except by inference,--to a young man, who would consider it a most extraordinary advance on the part of the sender. She would have liked to tear it into a thousand pieces, but she had no right to treat it in that way. Lurida meant to send it the next morning, and in the mean time Euthymia had the night to think over what she should do about it.

There is nothing like the pillow for an oracle. There is no voice like that which breaks the silence--of the stagnant hours of the night with its sudden suggestions and luminous counsels. When Euthymia awoke in the morning, her course of action was as clear before her as if it bad been dictated by her guardian angel. She went straight over to the home of Lurida, who was just dressed for breakfast.

She was naturally a little surprised at this early visit. She was struck with the excited look of Euthymia, being herself quite calm, and contemplating her project with entire complacency.

Euthymia began, in tones that expressed deep anxiety.

"I have read your letter, my dear, and admired its spirit and force. It is a fine letter, and does you great credit as an expression of the truest human feeling. But it must not be sent to Mr. Kirkwood. If you were sixty years old, perhaps if you were fifty, it might be admissible to send it. But if you were forty, I should question its propriety; if you were thirty, I should veto it, and you are but a little more than twenty. How do you know that this stranger will not show your letter to anybody or everybody? How do you know that he will not send it to one of the gossiping journals like the 'Household Inquisitor'? But supposing he keeps it to himself, which is more than you have a right to expect, what opinion is he likely to form of a young lady who invades his privacy with such freedom? Ten to one he will think curiosity is at the bottom of it,--and,--come, don't be angry at me for suggesting it,--may there not be a little of that same motive mingled with the others? No, don't interrupt me quite yet; you do want to know whether your hypothesis is correct. You are full of the best and kindest feelings in the world, but your desire for knowledge is the ferment under them just now, perhaps more than you know."

Lurida's pale cheeks flushed and whitened more than once while her friend was speaking. She loved her too sincerely and respected her intelligence too much to take offence at her advice, but she could not give up her humane and sisterly intentions merely from the fear of some awkward consequences to herself. She had persuaded herself that she was playing the part of a Protestant sister of charity, and that the fact of her not wearing the costume of these ministering angels made no difference in her relations to those who needed her aid.

"I cannot see your objections in the light in which they appear to you," she said gravely. "It seems to me that I give up everything when I hesitate to help a fellow-creature because I am a woman. I am not afraid to send this letter and take all the consequences."

"Will you go with me to the doctor's, and let him read it in our presence? And will you agree to abide by his opinion, if it coincides with mine?"

Lurida winced a little at this proposal. "I don't quite like," she said, "showing this letter to--to" she hesitated, but it had to come out--"to a man, that is, to another man than the one for whom it was intended."

The neuter gender business had got a pretty damaging side-hit.

"Well, never mind about letting him read the letter. Will you go over to his house with me at noon, when he comes back after his morning visits, and have a talk over the whole matter with him? You know I have sometimes had to say must to you, Lurida, and now I say you must go to the doctor's with me and carry that letter."

There was no resisting the potent monosyllable as the sweet but firm voice delivered it. At noon the two maidens rang at the doctor's door. The servant said he had been at the house after his morning visits, but found a hasty summons to Mr. Kirkwood, who had been taken suddenly ill and wished to see him at once. Was the illness dangerous? The servant-maid did n't know, but thought it was pretty bad, for Mr. Paul came in as white as a sheet, and talked all sorts of languages which she couldn't understand, and took on as if he thought Mr. Kirkwood was going to die right off.

And so the hazardous question about sending the letter was disposed of, at least for the present.

XVII

Dr. BUTTS'S PATIENT.

The physician found Maurice just regaining his heat after a chill of a somewhat severe character. He knew too well what this meant, and the probable series of symptoms of which it was the prelude. His patient was not the only one in the neighborhood who was attacked in this way. The autumnal fevers to which our country towns are subject, in the place of those "agues," or intermittents, so largely prevalent in the South and West, were already beginning, and Maurice, who had exposed himself in the early and late hours of the dangerous season, must be expected to go through the regular stages of this always serious and not rarely fatal disease.

Paolo, his faithful servant, would fain have taken the sole charge of his master during his illness. But the doctor insisted that he must have a nurse to help him in his task, which was likely to be long and exhausting.

At the mention of the word "nurse" Paolo turned white, and exclaimed in an agitated and thoroughly frightened way,

"No! no nuss! no woman! She kill him! I stay by him day and night, but don' let no woman come near him,--if you do, he die!"

The doctor explained that he intended to send a man who was used to taking care of sick people, and with no little effort at last succeeded in convincing Paolo that, as he could not be awake day and night for a fortnight or three weeks, it was absolutely necessary to call in some assistance from without. And so Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was to play the leading part in that drama of nature's composing called a typhoid fever, with its regular bedchamber scenery, its properties of phials and pill-boxes, its little company of stock actors, its gradual evolution of a very simple plot, its familiar incidents, its emotional alternations, and its denouement, sometimes tragic, oftener happy.

It is needless to say that the sympathies of all the good people of the village, residents and strangers, were actively awakened for the young man about whom they knew so little and conjectured so much. Tokens of their kindness came to him daily: flowers from the woods and from the gardens; choice fruit grown in the open air or under glass, for there were some fine houses surrounded by well-kept grounds, and greenhouses and graperies were not unknown in the small but favored settlement.

On all these luxuries Maurice looked with dull and languid eyes. A faint smile of gratitude sometimes struggled through the stillness of his features, or a murmured word of thanks found its way through his parched lips, and he would relapse into the partial stupor or the fitful sleep in which, with intervals of slight wandering, the slow hours dragged along the sluggish days one after another. With no violent symptoms, but with steady persistency, the disease moved on in its accustomed course. It was at no time immediately threatening, but the experienced physician knew its uncertainties only too well. He had known fever patients suddenly seized with violent internal inflammation, and carried off with frightful rapidity. He remembered the case of a convalescent, a young woman who had been attacked while in apparently vigorous general health, who, on being lifted too suddenly to a sitting position, while still confined to her bed, fainted, and in a few moments ceased to breathe. It may well be supposed that he took every possible precaution to avert the accidents which tend to throw from its track a disease the regular course of which is arranged by nature as carefully as the route of a railroad from one city to another. The most natural interpretation which the common observer would put upon the manifestations of one of these autumnal maladies would be that some noxious combustible element had found its way into the system which must be burned to ashes before the heat which pervades the whole body can subside. Sometimes the fire may smoulder and seem as if it were going out, or were quite extinguished, and again it will find some new material to seize upon, and flame up as fiercely as ever. Its coming on most frequently at the season when the brush fires which are consuming the dead branches, and withered leaves, and all the refuse of vegetation are sending up their smoke is suggestive. Sometimes it seems as if the body, relieved of its effete materials, renewed its youth after one of these quiet, expurgating, internal fractional cremations. Lean, pallid students have found themselves plump and blooming, and it has happened that one whose hair was straight as gnat of an Indian has been startled to behold himself in his mirror with a fringe of hyacinthine curls about his rejuvenated countenance.

There was nothing of what medical men call malignity in the case of Maurice Kirkwood. The most alarming symptom was a profound prostration, which at last reached such a point that he lay utterly helpless, as unable to move without aid as the feeblest of paralytics. In this state he lay for many days, not suffering pain, but with the sense of great weariness, and the feeling that he should never rise from his bed again. For the most part his intellect was unclouded when his attention was aroused. He spoke only in whispers, a few words at a time. The doctor felt sure, by the expression which passed over his features from time to time, that something was worrying and oppressing him; something which he wished to communicate, and had not the force, or the tenacity of purpose, to make perfectly clear. His eyes often wandered to a certain desk, and once he had found strength to lift his emaciated arm and point to it. The doctor went towards it as if to fetch it to him, but he slowly shook his head. He had not the power to say at that time what he wished. The next day he felt a little less prostrated; and succeeded in explaining to the doctor what he wanted. His words, so far as the physician could make them out, were these which follow. Dr. Butts looked upon them as possibly expressing wishes which would be his last, and noted them down carefully immediately after leaving his chamber.

"I commit the secret of my life to your charge. My whole story is told in a paper locked in that desk. The key is--put your hand under my pillow. If I die, let the story be known. It will show that I was--human--and save my memory from reproach."

He was silent for a little time. A single tear stole down his hollow cheek. The doctor turned his head away, for his own eyes were full. But he said to himself, "It is a good sign; I begin to feel strong hopes that he will recover."

Maurice spoke once more. "Doctor, I put full trust in you. You are wise and kind. Do what you will with this paper, but open it at once and read. I want you to know the story of my life before it is finished--if the end is at hand. Take it with you and read it before you sleep." He was exhausted and presently his eyes closed, but the doctor saw a tranquil look on his features which added encouragement to his hopes.

XVIII

MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE.

I am an American by birth, but a large part of my life has been passed in foreign lands. My father was a man of education, possessed of an ample fortune; my mother was considered, a very accomplished and amiable woman. I was their first and only child. She died while I was yet an infant. If I remember her at all it is as a vision, more like a glimpse of a pre-natal existence than as a part of my earthly life. At the death of my mother I was left in the charge of the old nurse who had enjoyed her perfect confidence. She was devoted to me, and I became absolutely dependent on her, who had for me all the love and all the care of a mother. I was naturally the object of the attentions and caresses of the family relatives. I have been told that I was a pleasant, smiling infant, with nothing to indicate any peculiar nervous susceptibility; not afraid of strangers, but on the contrary ready to make their acquaintance. My father was devoted to me and did all in his power to promote my health and comfort.

I was still a babe, often carried in arms, when the event happened which changed my whole future and destined me to a strange and lonely existence. I cannot relate it even now without a sense of terror. I must force myself to recall the circumstances as told me and vaguely remembered, for I am not willing that my doomed and wholly exceptional life should pass away unrecorded, unexplained, unvindicated. My nature is, I feel sure, a kind and social one, but I have lived apart, as if my heart were filled with hatred of my fellow-creatures. If there are any readers who look without pity, without sympathy, upon those who shun the fellowship of their fellow men and women, who show by their downcast or averted eyes that they dread companionship and long for solitude, I pray them, if this paper ever reaches them, to stop at this point. Follow me no further, for you will not believe my story, nor enter into the feelings which I am about to reveal. But if there are any to whom all that is human is of interest, who have felt in their own consciousness some stirrings of invincible attraction to one individual and equally invincible repugnance to another, who know by their own experience that elective affinities have as their necessary counterpart, and, as it were, their polar opposites, currents not less strong of elective repulsions, let them read with unquestioning faith the story of a blighted life I am about to relate, much of it, of course, received from the lips of others.

My cousin Laura, a girl of seventeen, lately returned from Europe, was considered eminently beautiful. It was in my second summer that she visited my father's house, where he was living with his servants and my old nurse, my mother having but recently left him a widower. Laura was full of vivacity, impulsive, quick in her movements, thoughtless occasionally, as it is not strange that a young girl of her age should be. It was a beautiful summer day when she saw me for the first time. My nurse had me in her arms, walking back and forward on a balcony with a low railing, upon which opened the windows of the second story of my father's house. While the nurse was thus carrying me, Laura came suddenly upon the balcony. She no sooner saw me than with all the delighted eagerness of her youthful nature she rushed toward me, and, catching me from the nurse's arms, began tossing me after the fashion of young girls who have been so lately playing with dolls that they feel as if babies were very much of the same nature. The abrupt seizure frightened me; I sprang from her arms in my terror, and fell over the railing of the balcony. I should probably enough have been killed on the spot but for the fact that a low thorn-bush grew just beneath the balcony, into which I fell and thus had the violence of the shock broken. But the thorns tore my tender flesh, and I bear to this day marks of the deep wounds they inflicted.

That dreadful experience is burned deep into my memory. The sudden apparition of the girl; the sense of being torn away from the protecting arms around me; the frantic effort to escape; the shriek that accompanied my fall through what must have seemed unmeasurable space; the cruel lacerations of the piercing and rending thorns,--all these fearful impressions blended in one paralyzing terror.

When I was taken up I was thought to be dead. I was perfectly white, and the physician who first saw me said that no pulse was perceptible. But after a time consciousness returned; the wounds, though painful, were none of them dangerous, and the most alarming effects of the accident passed away. My old nurse cared for me tenderly day and night, and my father, who had been almost distracted in the first hours which followed the injury, hoped and believed that no permanent evil results would be found to result from it. My cousin Laura was of course deeply distressed to feel that her thoughtlessness had been the cause of so grave an accident. As soon as I had somewhat recovered she came to see me, very penitent, very anxious to make me forget the alarm she had caused me, with all its consequences. I was in the nursery sitting up in my bed, bandaged, but not in any pain, as it seemed, for I was quiet and to all appearance in a perfectly natural state of feeling. As Laura came near me I shrieked and instantly changed color. I put my hand upon my heart as if I had been stabbed, and fell over, unconscious. It was very much the same state as that in which I was found immediately after my fall.

The cause of this violent and appalling seizure was but too obvious. The approach of the young girl and the dread that she was about to lay her hand upon me had called up the same train of effects which the moment of terror and pain had already occasioned. The old nurse saw this in a moment. "Go! go!" she cried to Laura, "go, or the child will die!" Her command did not have to be repeated. After Laura had gone I lay senseless, white and cold as marble, for some time. The doctor soon came, and by the use of smart rubbing and stimulants the color came back slowly to my cheeks and the arrested circulation was again set in motion.

It was hard to believe that this was anything more than a temporary effect of the accident. There could be little doubt, it was thought by the doctor and by my father, that after a few days I should recover from this morbid sensibility and receive my cousin as other infants receive pleasant-looking young persons. The old nurse shook her head. "The girl will be the death of the child," she said, "if she touches him or comes near him. His heart stopped beating just as when the girl snatched him out of my arms, and he fell over the balcony railing." Once more the experiment was tried, cautiously, almost insidiously. The same alarming consequences followed. It was too evident that a chain of nervous disturbances had been set up in my system which repeated itself whenever the original impression gave the first impulse. I never saw my cousin Laura after this last trial. Its result had so distressed her that she never ventured again to show herself to me.

If the effect of the nervous shock had stopped there, it would have been a misfortune for my cousin and myself, but hardly a calamity. The world is wide, and a cousin or two more or less can hardly be considered an essential of existence. I often heard Laura's name mentioned, but never by any one who was acquainted with all the circumstances, for it was noticed that I changed color and caught at my breast as if I wanted to grasp my heart in my hand whenever that fatal name was mentioned.

Alas! this was not all. While I was suffering from the effects of my fall among the thorns I was attended by my old nurse, assisted by another old woman, by a physician, and my father, who would take his share in caring for me. It was thought best to keep--me perfectly quiet, and strangers and friends were alike excluded from my nursery, with one exception, that my old grandmother came in now and then. With her it seems that I was somewhat timid and shy, following her with rather anxious eyes, as if not quite certain whether or not she was dangerous. But one day, when I was far advanced towards recovery, my father brought in a young lady, a relative of his, who had expressed a great desire to see me. She was, as I have been told, a very handsome girl, of about the same age as my cousin Laura, but bearing no personal resemblance to her in form, features, or complexion. She had no sooner entered the room than the same sudden changes which had followed my cousin's visit began to show themselves, and before she had reached my bedside I was in a state of deadly collapse, as on the occasions already mentioned.

Some time passed before any recurrence of these terrifying seizures. A little girl of five or six years old was allowed to come into the nursery one day and bring me some flowers. I took them from her hand, but turned away and shut my eyes. There was no seizure, but there was a certain dread and aversion, nothing more than a feeling which it might be hoped that time would overcome. Those around me were gradually finding out the circumstances which brought on the deadly attack to which I was subject.

The daughter of one of our near neighbors was considered the prettiest girl of the village where we were passing the summer. She was very anxious to see me, and as I was now nearly well it was determined that she should be permitted to pay me a short visit. I had always delighted in seeing her and being caressed by her. I was sleeping when she entered the nursery and came and took a seat at my side in perfect silence. Presently I became restless, and a moment later I opened my eyes and saw her stooping over me. My hand went to my left breast,--the color faded from my cheeks,--I was again the cold marble image so like death that it had well-nigh been mistaken for it.

Could it be possible that the fright which had chilled my blood had left me with an unconquerable fear of woman at the period when she is most attractive not only to adolescents, but to children of tender age, who feel the fascination of her flowing locks, her bright eyes, her blooming cheeks, and that mysterious magnetism of sex which draws all life into its warm and potently vitalized atmosphere? So it did indeed seem. The dangerous experiment could not be repeated indefinitely. It was not intentionally tried again, but accident brought about more than one renewal of it during the following years, until it became fully recognized that I was the unhappy subject of a mortal dread of woman,--not absolutely of the human female, for I had no fear of my old nurse or of my grandmother, or of any old wrinkled face, and I had become accustomed to the occasional meeting of a little girl or two, whom I nevertheless regarded with a certain ill-defined feeling that there was danger in their presence. I was sent to a boys' school very early, and during the first ten or twelve years of my life I had rarely any occasion to be reminded of my strange idiosyncrasy.

As I grew out of boyhood into youth, a change came over the feelings which had so long held complete possession of me. This was what my father and his advisers had always anticipated, and was the ground of their confident hope in my return to natural conditions before I should have grown to mature manhood.

How shall I describe the conflicts of those dreamy, bewildering, dreadful years? Visions of loveliness haunted me sleeping and waking. Sometimes a graceful girlish figure would so draw my eyes towards it that I lost sight of all else, and was ready to forget all my fears and find myself at her side, like other youths by the side of young maidens,--happy in their cheerful companionship, while I,--I, under the curse of one blighting moment, looked on, hopeless. Sometimes the glimpse of a fair face or the tone of a sweet voice stirred within me all the instincts that make the morning of life beautiful to adolescence. I reasoned with myself:

Why should I not have outgrown that idle apprehension which had been the nightmare of my earlier years? Why should not the rising tide of life have drowned out the feeble growths that infested the shallows of childhood? How many children there are who tremble at being left alone in the dark, but who, a few years later, will smile at their foolish terrors and brave all the ghosts of a haunted chamber! Why should I any longer be the slave of a foolish fancy that has grown into a half insane habit of mind? I was familiarly acquainted with all the stories of the strange antipathies and invincible repugnances to which others, some of them famous men, had been subject. I said to myself, Why should not I overcome this dread of woman as Peter the Great fought down his dread of wheels rolling over a bridge? Was I, alone of all mankind, to be doomed to perpetual exclusion from the society which, as it seemed to me, was all that rendered existence worth the trouble and fatigue of slavery to the vulgar need of supplying the waste of the system and working at the task of respiration like the daughters of Danaus,--toiling day and night as the worn-out sailor labors at the pump of his sinking vessel?

Why did I not brave the risk of meeting squarely, and without regard to any possible danger, some one of those fair maidens whose far-off smile, whose graceful movements, at once attracted and agitated me? I can only answer this question to the satisfaction of any really inquiring reader by giving him the true interpretation of the singular phenomenon of which I was the subject. For this I shall have to refer to a paper of which I have made a copy, and which will be found included with this manuscript. It is enough to say here, without entering into the explanation of the fact, which will be found simple enough as seen by the light of modern physiological science, that the "nervous disturbance" which the presence of a woman in the flower of her age produced in my system was a sense of impending death, sudden, overwhelming, unconquerable, appalling. It was a reversed action of the nervous centres,--the opposite of that which flushes the young lover's cheek and hurries his bounding pulses as he comes into the presence of the object of his passion. No one who has ever felt the sensation can have failed to recognize it as an imperative summons, which commands instant and terrified submission.

It was at this period of my life that my father determined to try the effect of travel and residence in different localities upon my bodily and mental condition. I say bodily as well as mental, for I was too slender for my height and subject to some nervous symptoms which were a cause of anxiety. That the mind was largely concerned in these there was no doubt, but the mutual interactions of mind and body are often too complex to admit of satisfactory analysis. Each is in part cause and each also in part effect.

We passed some years in Italy, chiefly in Rome, where I was placed in a school conducted by priests, and where of course I met only those of my own sex. There I had the opportunity of seeing the influences under which certain young Catholics, destined for the priesthood, are led to separate themselves from all communion with the sex associated in their minds with the most subtle dangers to which the human soul can be exposed. I became in some degree reconciled to the thought of exclusion from the society of women by seeing around me so many who were self-devoted to celibacy. The thought sometimes occurred to me whether I should not find the best and the only natural solution of the problem of existence, as submitted to myself, in taking upon me the vows which settle the whole question and raise an impassable barrier between the devotee and the object of his dangerous attraction.

How often I talked this whole matter over with the young priest who was at once my special instructor and my favorite companion! But accustomed as I had become to the forms of the Roman Church, and impressed as I was with the purity and excellence of many of its young members with whom I was acquainted, my early training rendered it impossible for me to accept the credentials which it offered me as authoritative. My friend and instructor had to set me down as a case of "invincible ignorance." This was the loop-hole through which he crept out of the prison-house of his creed, and was enabled to look upon me without the feeling of absolute despair with which his sterner brethren would, I fear, have regarded me.

I have said that accident exposed me at times to the influence which I had such reasons for dreading. Here is one example of such an occurrence, which I relate as simply as possible, vividly as it is impressed upon my memory. A young friend whose acquaintance I had made in Rome asked me one day to come to his rooms and look at a cabinet of gems and medals which he had collected. I had been but a short time in his library when a vague sense of uneasiness came over me. My heart became restless,--I could feel it stirring irregularly, as if it were some frightened creature caged in my breast. There was nothing that I could see to account for it. A door was partly open, but not so that I could see into the next room. The feeling grew upon me of some influence which was paralyzing my circulation. I begged my friend to open a window. As he did so, the door swung in the draught, and I saw a blooming young woman,--it was my friend's sister, who had been sitting with a book in her hand, and who rose at the opening of the door. Something had warned me of the presence of a woman, that occult and potent aura of individuality, call it personal magnetism, spiritual effluence, or reduce it to a simpler expression if you will; whatever it was, it had warned me of the nearness of the dread attraction which allured at a distance and revealed itself with all the terrors of the Lorelei if approached too recklessly. A sign from her brother caused her to withdraw at once, but not before I had felt the impression which betrayed itself in my change of color, anxiety about the region of the heart, and sudden failure as if about to fall in a deadly fainting-fit.

Does all this seem strange and incredible to the reader of my manuscript? Nothing in the history of life is so strange or exceptional as it seems to those who have not made a long study of its mysteries. I have never known just such a case as my own, and yet there must have been such, and if the whole history of mankind were unfolded I cannot doubt that there have been many like it. Let my reader suspend his judgment until he has read the paper I have referred to, which was drawn up by a Committee of the Royal Academy of the Biological Sciences. In this paper the mechanism of the series of nervous derangements to which I have been subject since the fatal shock experienced in my infancy is explained in language not hard to understand. It will be seen that such a change of polarity in the nervous centres is only a permanent form and an extreme degree of an emotional disturbance, which as a temporary and comparatively unimportant personal accident is far from being uncommon,--is so frequent, in fact, that every one must have known instances of it, and not a few must have had more or less serious experiences of it in their own private history.

It must not be supposed that my imagination dealt with me as I am now dealing with the reader. I was full of strange fancies and wild superstitions. One of my Catholic friends gave me a silver medal which had been blessed by the Pope, and which I was to wear next my body. I was told that this would turn black after a time, in virtue of a power which it possessed of drawing out original sin, or certain portions of it, together with the evil and morbid tendencies which had been engrafted on the corrupt nature. I wore the medal faithfully, as directed, and watched it carefully. It became tarnished and after a time darkened, but it wrought no change in my unnatural condition.

There was an old gypsy who had the reputation of knowing more of futurity than she had any right to know. The story was that she had foretold the assassination of Count Rossi and the death of Cavour.

However that may have been, I was persuaded to let her try her black art upon my future. I shall never forget the strange, wild look of the wrinkled hag as she took my hand and studied its lines and fixed her wicked old eyes on my young countenance. After this examination she shook her head and muttered some words, which as nearly as I could get them would be in English like these:

Fair lady cast a spell on thee, Fair lady's hand shall set thee free.

Strange as it may seem, these words of a withered old creature, whose palm had to be crossed with silver to bring forth her oracular response, have always clung to my memory as if they were destined to fulfilment. The extraordinary nature of the affliction to which I was subject disposed me to believe the incredible with reference to all that relates to it. I have never ceased to have the feeling that, sooner or later, I should find myself freed from the blight laid upon me in my infancy. It seems as if it would naturally come through the influence of some young and fair woman, to whom that merciful errand should be assigned by the Providence that governs our destiny. With strange hopes, with trembling fears, with mingled belief and doubt, wherever I have found myself I have sought with longing yet half-averted eyes for the "elect lady," as I have learned to call her, who was to lift the curse from my ruined life.

Three times I have been led to the hope, if not the belief, that I had found the object of my superstitious belief.--Singularly enough it was always on the water that the phantom of my hope appeared before my bewildered vision. Once it was an English girl who was a fellow passenger with me in one of my ocean voyages. I need not say that she was beautiful, for she was my dream realized. I heard her singing, I saw her walking the deck on some of the fair days when sea-sickness was forgotten. The passengers were a social company enough, but I had kept myself apart, as was my wont. At last the attraction became too strong to resist any longer. "I will venture into the charmed circle if it kills me," I said to my father. I did venture, and it did not kill me, or I should not be telling this story. But there was a repetition of the old experiences. I need not relate the series of alarming consequences of my venture. The English girl was very lovely, and I have no doubt has made some one supremely happy before this, but she was not the "elect lady" of the prophecy and of my dreams.

A second time I thought myself for a moment in the presence of the destined deliverer who was to restore me to my natural place among my fellow men and women. It was on the Tiber that I met the young maiden who drew me once more into that inner circle which surrounded young womanhood with deadly peril for me, if I dared to pass its limits. I was floating with the stream in the little boat in which I passed many long hours of reverie when I saw another small boat with a boy and a young girl in it. The boy had been rowing, and one of his oars had slipped from his grasp. He did not know how to paddle with a single oar, and was hopelessly rowing round and round, his oar all the time floating farther away from him. I could not refuse my assistance. I picked up the oar and brought my skiff alongside of the boat. When I handed the oar to the boy the young girl lifted her veil and thanked me in the exquisite music of the language which

'Sounds as if it should be writ on satin.'

She was a type of Italian beauty,--a nocturne in flesh and blood, if I may borrow a term certain artists are fond of; but it was her voice which captivated me and for a moment made me believe that I was no longer shut off from all relations with the social life of my race. An hour later I was found lying insensible on the floor of my boat, white, cold, almost pulseless. It cost much patient labor to bring me back to consciousness. Had not such extreme efforts been made, it seems probable that I should never have waked from a slumber which was hardly distinguishable from that of death.

Why should I provoke a catastrophe which appears inevitable if I invite it by exposing myself to its too well ascertained cause? The habit of these deadly seizures has become a second nature. The strongest and the ablest men have found it impossible to resist the impression produced by the most insignificant object, by the most harmless sight or sound to which they had a congenital or acquired antipathy. What prospect have I of ever being rid of this long and deep-seated infirmity? I may well ask myself these questions, but my answer is that I will never give up the hope that time will yet bring its remedy. It may be that the wild prediction which so haunts me shall find itself fulfilled. I have had of late strange premonitions, to which if I were superstitious I could not help giving heed. But I have seen too much of the faith that deals in miracles to accept the supernatural in any shape,--assuredly when it comes from an old witch-like creature who takes pay for her revelations of the future. Be it so: though I am not superstitious, I have a right to be imaginative, and my imagination will hold to those words of the old zingara with an irresistible feeling that, sooner or later, they will prove true.

Can it be possible that her prediction is not far from its realization? I have had both waking and sleeping visions within these last months and weeks which have taken possession of me and filled my life with new thoughts, new hopes, new resolves.

Sometimes on the bosom of the lake by which I am dreaming away this season of bloom and fragrance, sometimes in the fields or woods in a distant glimpse, once in a nearer glance, which left me pale and tremulous, yet was followed by a swift reaction, so that my cheeks flushed and my pulse bounded, I have seen her who--how do I dare to tell it so that my own eyes can read it?---I cannot help believing is to be my deliverer, my saviour.

I have been warned in the most solemn and impressive language by the experts most deeply read in the laws of life and the history of its disturbing and destroying influences, that it would be at the imminent risk of my existence if I should expose myself to the repetition of my former experiences. I was reminded that unexplained sudden deaths were of constant, of daily occurrence; that any emotion is liable to arrest the movements of life: terror, joy, good news or bad news,--anything that reaches the deeper nervous centres. I had already died once, as Sir Charles Napier said of himself; yes, more than once, died and been resuscitated. The next time, I might very probably fail to get my return ticket after my visit to Hades. It was a rather grim stroke of humor, but I understood its meaning full well, and felt the force of its menace.

After all, what had I to live for if the great primal instinct which strives to make whole the half life of lonely manhood is defeated, suppressed, crushed out of existence? Why not as well die in the attempt to break up a wretched servitude to a perverted nervous movement as in any other way? I am alone in the world,--alone save for my faithful servant, through whom I seem to hold to the human race as it were by a single filament. My father, who was my instructor, my companion, my dearest and best friend through all my later youth and my earlier manhood, died three years ago and left me my own master, with the means of living as might best please my fancy. This season shall decide my fate. One more experiment, and I shall find myself restored to my place among my fellow-beings, or, as I devoutly hope, in a sphere where all our mortal infirmities are past and forgotten.

I have told the story of a blighted life without reserve, so that there shall not remain any mystery or any dark suspicion connected with my memory if I should be taken away unexpectedly. It has cost me an effort to do it, but now that my life is on record I feel more reconciled to my lot, with all its possibilities, and among these possibilities is a gleam of a better future. I have been told by my advisers, some of them wise, deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny should be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others, and especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when they are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of the closely connected nervous centres.

For myself I can truly say that I have very little morbid sensibility left with reference to the destiny which has been allotted to me. I have passed through different stages of feeling with reference to it, as I have developed from infancy to manhood. At first it was mere blind instinct about which I had no thought, living like other infants the life of impressions without language to connect them in series. In my boyhood I began to be deeply conscious of the infirmity which separated me from those around me. In youth began that conflict of emotions and impulses with the antagonistic influence of which I have already spoken, a conflict which has never ceased, but to which I have necessarily become to a certain degree accustomed; and against the dangers of which I have learned to guard myself habitually. That is the meaning of my isolation. You, young man,--if at any time your eyes shall look upon my melancholy record,--you at least will understand me. Does not your heart throb, in the presence of budding or blooming womanhood, sometimes as if it "were ready to crack" with its own excess of strain? What if instead of throbbing it should falter, flutter, and stop as if never to beat again? You, young woman, who with ready belief and tender sympathy will look upon these pages, if they are ever spread before you, know what it is when your breast heaves with uncontrollable emotion and the grip of the bodice seems unendurable as the embrace of the iron virgin of the Inquisition. Think what it would be if the grasp were tightened so that no breath of air could enter your panting chest!

Does your heart beat in the same way, young man, when your honored friend, a venerable matron of seventy years, greets you with her kindly smile as it does in the presence of youthful loveliness? When a pretty child brings you her doll and looks into your eyes with artless grace and trustful simplicity, does your pulse quicken, do you tremble, does life palpitate through your whole being, as when the maiden of seventeen meets your enamored sight in the glow of her rosebud beauty? Wonder not, then, if the period of mystic attraction for you should be that of agitation, terror, danger, to one in whom the natural current of the instincts has had its course changed as that of a stream is changed by a convulsion of nature, so that the impression which is new life to you is death to him.

I am now twenty-five years old. I have reached the time of life which I have dreamed, nay even ventured to hope, might be the limit of the sentence which was pronounced upon me in my infancy. I can assign no good reason for this anticipation. But in writing this paper I feel as if I were preparing to begin a renewed existence. There is nothing for me to be ashamed of in the story I have told. There is no man living who would not have yielded to the sense of instantly impending death which seized upon me under the conditions I have mentioned. Martyrs have gone singing to their flaming shrouds, but never a man could hold his breath long enough to kill himself; he must have rope or water, or some mechanical help, or nature will make him draw in a breath of air, and would make him do so though he knew the salvation of the human race would be forfeited by that one gasp.

This paper may never reach the eye of any one afflicted in the same way that I have been. It probably never will; but for all that, there are many shy natures which will recognize tendencies in themselves in the direction of my unhappy susceptibility. Others, to whom such weakness seems inconceivable, will find their scepticism shaken, if not removed, by the calm, judicial statement of the Report drawn up for the Royal Academy. It will make little difference to me whether my story is accepted unhesitatingly or looked upon as largely a product of the imagination. I am but a bird of passage that lights on the boughs of different nationalities. I belong to no flock; my home may be among the palms of Syria, the olives of Italy, the oaks of England, the elms that shadow the Hudson or the Connecticut; I build no nest; to-day I am here, to-morrow on the wing.

If I quit my native land before the trees have dropped their leaves I shall place this manuscript in the safe hands of one whom I feel sure that I can trust; to do with it as he shall see fit. If it is only curious and has no bearing on human welfare, he may think it well to let it remain unread until I shall have passed away. If in his judgment it throws any light on one of the deeper mysteries of our nature,--the repulsions which play such a formidable part in social life, and which must be recognized as the correlatives of the affinities that distribute the individuals governed by them in the face of impediments which seem to be impossibilities,--then it may be freely given to the world.

But if I am here when the leaves are all fallen, the programme of my life will have changed, and this story of the dead past will be illuminated by the light of a living present which will irradiate all its saddening features. Who would not pray that my last gleam of light and hope may be that of dawn and not of departing day?

The reader who finds it hard to accept the reality of a story so far from the common range of experience is once more requested to suspend his judgment until he has read the paper which will next be offered for his consideration.

XIX.

THE REPORT OF THE BIOLOGICAL COMMITTEE.

Perhaps it is too much to expect a reader who wishes to be entertained, excited, amused, and does not want to work his passage through pages which he cannot understand without some effort of his own, to read the paper which follows and Dr. Butts's reflections upon it. If he has no curiosity in the direction of these chapters, he can afford to leave them to such as relish a slight flavor of science. But if he does so leave them he will very probably remain sceptical as to the truth of the story to which they are meant to furnish him with a key.

Of course the case of Maurice Kirkwood is a remarkable and exceptional one, and it is hardly probable that any reader's experience will furnish him with its parallel. But let him look back over all his acquaintances, if he has reached middle life, and see if he cannot recall more than one who, for some reason or other, shunned the society of young women, as if they had a deadly fear of their company. If he remembers any such, he can understand the simple statements and natural reflections which are laid before him.

One of the most singular facts connected with the history of Maurice Kirkwood was the philosophical equanimity with which he submitted to the fate which had fallen upon him. He did not choose to be pumped by the Interviewer, who would show him up in the sensational columns of his prying newspaper. He lived chiefly by himself, as the easiest mode of avoiding those meetings to which he would be exposed in almost every society into which he might venture. But he had learned to look upon himself very much as he would upon an intimate not himself,--upon a different personality. A young man will naturally enough be ashamed of his shyness. It is something which others believe, and perhaps he himself thinks, he might overcome. But in the case of Maurice Kirkwood there was no room for doubt as to the reality and gravity of the long enduring effects of his first convulsive terror. He had accepted the fact as he would have accepted the calamity of losing his sight or his hearing. When he was questioned by the experts to whom his case was submitted, he told them all that he knew about it almost without a sign of emotion. Nature was so peremptory with him,--saying in language that had no double meaning: "If you violate the condition on which you hold my gift of existence I slay you on the spot,"--that he became as decisive in his obedience as she was in her command, and accepted his fate without repining.

Yet it must not be thought for a moment,--it cannot be supposed,--that he was insensible because he looked upon himself with the coolness of an enforced philosophy. He bore his burden manfully, hard as it was to live under it, for he lived, as we have seen, in hope. The thought of throwing it off with his life, as too grievous to be borne, was familiar to his lonely hours, but he rejected it as unworthy of his manhood. How he had speculated and dreamed about it is plain enough from the paper the reader may remember on Ocean, River, and Lake.

With these preliminary hints the paper promised is submitted to such as may find any interest in them.

ACCOUNT OF A CASE OF GYNOPHOBIA.

WITH REMARKS.

Being the Substance of a Report to the Royal Academy of the Biological Sciences by a Committee of that Institution.

"The singular nature of the case we are about to narrate and comment upon will, we feel confident, arrest the attention of those who have learned the great fact that Nature often throws the strongest light upon her laws by the apparent exceptions and anomalies which from time to time are observed. We have done with the lusus naturae of earlier generations. We pay little attention to the stories of 'miracles,' except so far as we receive them ready-made at the hands of the churches which still hold to them. Not the less do we meet with strange and surprising facts, which a century or two ago would have been handled by the clergy and the courts, but today are calmly recorded and judged by the best light our knowledge of the laws of life can throw upon them. It must be owned that there are stories which we can hardly dispute, so clear and full is the evidence in their support, which do, notwithstanding, tax our faith and sometimes leave us sceptical in spite of all the testimony which supports them.

"In this category many will be disposed to place the case we commend to the candid attention of the Academy. If one were told that a young man, a gentleman by birth and training, well formed, in apparently perfect health, of agreeable physiognomy and manners, could not endure the presence of the most attractive young woman, but was seized with deadly terror and sudden collapse of all the powers of life, if he came into her immediate presence; if it were added that this same young man did not shrink from the presence of an old withered crone; that he had a certain timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at the absurdity of the fable. Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some playwright. It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out. A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and making love to her grandmother! This would, of course, be overstating the truth of the story, but to such a misinterpretation the plain facts lend themselves too easily. We will relate the leading circumstances of the case, as they were told us with perfect simplicity and frankness by the subject of an affection which, if classified, would come under the general head of Antipathy, but to which, if we give it a name, we shall have to apply the term Gynophobia, or Fear of Woman."

Here follows the account furnished to the writer of the paper, which is in all essentials identical with that already laid before the reader.

"Such is the case offered to our consideration. Assuming its truthfulness in all its particulars, it remains to see in the first place whether or not it is as entirely exceptional and anomalous as it seems at first sight, or whether it is only the last term of a series of cases which in their less formidable aspect are well known to us in literature, in the records of science, and even in our common experience.

"To most of those among us the explanations we are now about to give are entirely superfluous. But there are some whose chief studies have been in different directions, and who will not complain if certain facts are mentioned which to the expert will seem rudimentary, and which hardly require recapitulation to those who are familiarly acquainted with the common text-books.

"The heart is the centre of every living movement in the higher animals, and in man, furnishing in varying amount, or withholding to a greater or less extent, the needful supplies to all parts of the system. If its action is diminished to a certain degree, faintness is the immediate consequence; if it is arrested, loss of consciousness; if its action is not soon restored, death, of which fainting plants the white flag, remains in possession of the system.

"How closely the heart is under the influence of the emotions we need not go to science to learn, for all human experience and all literature are overflowing with evidence that shows the extent of this relation. Scripture is full of it; the heart in Hebrew poetry represents the entire life, we might almost say. Not less forcible is the language of Shakespeare, as for instance, in 'Measure for Measure:'

"'Why does my blood thus muster to my heart, Making it both unable for itself And dispossessing all my other parts Of necessary fitness?'

"More especially is the heart associated in every literature with the passion of love. A famous old story is that of Galen, who was called to the case of a young lady long ailing, and wasting away from some cause the physicians who had already seen her were unable to make out. The shrewd old practitioner suspected that love was at the bottom of the young lady's malady. Many relatives and friends of both sexes, all of them ready with their sympathy, came to see her. The physician sat by her bedside during one of these visits, and in an easy, natural way took her hand and placed a finger on her pulse. It beat quietly enough until a certain comely young gentleman entered the apartment, when it suddenly rose infrequency, and at the same moment her hurried breathing, her changing color, pale and flushed by turns, betrayed the profound agitation his presence excited. This was enough for the sagacious Greek; love was the disease, the cure of which by its like may be claimed as an anticipation of homoeopathy. In the frontispiece to the fine old 'Junta' edition of the works of Galen, you may find among the wood-cuts a representation of the interesting scene, with the title Amantas Dignotio,--the diagnosis, or recognition, of the lover.

"Love has many languages, but the heart talks through all of them. The pallid or burning cheek tells of the failing or leaping fountain which gives it color. The lovers at the 'Brookside' could hear each other's hearts beating. When Genevieve, in Coleridge's poem, forgot herself, and was beforehand with her suitor in her sudden embrace,

"'T was partly love and partly fear, And partly 't was a bashful art, That I might rather feel than see The swelling of her heart'

"Always the heart, whether its hurried action is seen, or heard, or felt. But it is not always in this way that the 'deceitful' organ treats the lover.

"'Faint heart never won fair lady.'

"This saying was not meant, perhaps, to be taken literally, but it has its literal truth. Many a lover has found his heart sink within him,--lose all its force, and leave him weak as a child in his emotion at the sight of the object of his affections. When Porphyro looked upon Madeline at her prayers in the chapel, it was too much for him:

"'She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint, She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from earthly taint.'

"And in Balzac's novel, 'Cesar Birotteau,' the hero of the story 'fainted away for-joy at the moment when, under a linden-tree, at Sceaux, Constance-Barbe-Josephine accepted him as her future husband.'

"One who faints is dead if he does not I come to,' and nothing is more likely than that too susceptible lovers have actually gone off in this way. Everything depends on how the heart behaves itself in these and similar trying moments. The mechanism of its actions becomes an interesting subject, therefore, to lovers of both sexes, and to all who are capable of intense emotions.

"The heart is a great reservoir, which distributes food, drink, air, and heat to every part of the system, in exchange for its waste material. It knocks at the gate of every organ seventy or eighty times in a minute, calling upon it to receive its supplies and unload its refuse. Between it and the brain there is the closest relation. The emotions, which act upon it as we have seen, govern it by a mechanism only of late years thoroughly understood. This mechanism can be made plain enough to the reader who is not afraid to believe that he can understand it.

"The brain, as all know, is the seat of ideas, emotions, volition. It is the great central telegraphic station with which many lesser centres are in close relation, from which they receive, and to which they transmit, their messages. The heart has its own little brains, so to speak,--small collections of nervous substance which govern its rhythmical motions under ordinary conditions. But these lesser nervous centres are to a large extent dominated by influences transmitted from certain groups of nerve-cells in the brain and its immediate dependencies.

"There are two among the special groups of nerve-cells which produce directly opposite effects. One of these has the power of accelerating the action of the heart, while the other has the power of retarding or arresting this action. One acts as the spur, the other as the bridle. According as one or the other predominates, the action of the heart will be stimulated or restrained. Among the great modern discoveries in physiology is that of the existence of a distinct centre of inhibition, as the restraining influence over the heart is called.

"The centre of inhibition plays a terrible part in the history of cowardice and of unsuccessful love. No man can be brave without blood to sustain his courage, any more than he can think, as the German materialist says, not absurdly, without phosphorus. The fainting lover must recover his circulation, or his lady will lend him her smelling-salts and take a gallant with blood in his cheeks. Porphyro got over his faintness before he ran away with Madeline, and Cesar Birotteau was an accepted lover when he swooned with happiness: but many an officer has been cashiered, and many a suitor has been rejected, because the centre of inhibition has got the upper hand of the centre of stimulation.

"In the well-known cases of deadly antipathy which have been recorded, the most frequent cause has been the disturbed and depressing influence of the centre of inhibition. Fainting at the sight of blood is one of the commonest examples of this influence. A single impression, in a very early period of atmospheric existence,--perhaps, indirectly, before that period, as was said to have happened in the case of James the First of England,--may establish a communication between this centre and the heart which will remain open ever afterwards. How does a footpath across a field establish itself? Its curves are arbitrary, and what we call accidental, but one after another follows it as if he were guided by a chart on which it was laid down. So it is with this dangerous transit between the centre of inhibition and the great organ of life. If once the path is opened by the track of some profound impression, that same impression, if repeated, or a similar one, is likely to find the old footmarks and follow them. Habit only makes the path easier to traverse, and thus the unreasoning terror of a child, of an infant, may perpetuate itself in a timidity which shames the manhood of its subject.

"The case before us is an exceptional and most remarkable example of the effect of inhibition on the heart.

"We will not say that we believe it to be unique in the history of the human race; on the contrary, we do not doubt that there have been similar cases, and that in some rare instances sudden death has been the consequence of seizures like that of the subject of this Report. The case most like it is that of Colone Townsend, which is too well known to require any lengthened description in this paper. It is enough to recall the main facts. He could by a voluntary effort suspend the action of his heart for a considerable period, during which he lay like one dead, pulseless, and without motion. After a time the circulation returned, and he does not seem to have been the worse for his dangerous, or seemingly dangerous, experiment. But in his case it was by an act of the will that the heart's action was suspended. In the case before us it is an involuntary impulse transmitted from the brain to the inhibiting centre, which arrests the cardiac movements.

"What is like to be the further history of the case?

"The subject of this anomalous affliction is now more than twenty years old. The chain of nervous actions has become firmly established. It might have been hoped that the changes of adolescence would have effected a transformation of the perverted instinct. On the contrary, the whole force of this instinct throws itself on the centre of inhibition, instead of quickening the heart-beats, and sending the rush of youthful blood with fresh life through the entire system to the throbbing finger-tips.

"Is it probable that time and circumstances will alter a habit of nervous interactions so long established? We are disposed to think that there is a chance of its being broken up. And we are not afraid to say that we suspect the old gypsy woman, whose prophecy took such hold of the patient's imagination, has hit upon the way in which the 'spell,' as she called it, is to be dissolved. She must, in all probability, have had a hint of the 'antipatia' to which the youth before her was a victim, and its cause, and if so, her guess as to the probable mode in which the young man would obtain relief from his unfortunate condition was the one which would naturally suggest itself.

"If once the nervous impression which falls on the centre of inhibition can be made to change its course, so as to follow its natural channel, it will probably keep to that channel ever afterwards. And this will, it is most likely, be effected by some sudden, unexpected impression. If he were drowning, and a young woman should rescue him, it is by no means impossible that the change in the nervous current we have referred to might be brought about as rapidly, as easily, as the reversal of the poles in a magnet, which is effected in an instant. But he cannot be expected to throw himself into the water just at the right moment when the 'fair lady' of the gitana's prophecy is passing on the shore. Accident may effect the cure which art seems incompetent to perform. It would not be strange if in some future seizure he should never come back to consciousness. But it is quite conceivable, on the other hand, that a happier event may occur, that in a single moment the nervous polarity may be reversed, the whole course of his life changed, and his past terrible experiences be to him like a scarce-remembered dream.

"This is one, of those cases in which it is very hard to determine the wisest course to be pursued. The question is not unlike that which arises in certain cases of dislocation of the bones of the neck. Shall the unfortunate sufferer go all his days with his face turned far round to the right or the left, or shall an attempt be made to replace the dislocated bones? an attempt which may succeed, or may cause instant death. The patient must be consulted as to whether he will take the chance. The practitioner may be unwilling to risk it, if the patient consents. Each case must be judged on its own special grounds. We cannot think that this young man is doomed to perpetual separation from the society of womanhood during the period of its bloom and attraction. But to provoke another seizure after his past experiences would be too much like committing suicide. We fear that we must trust to the chapter of accidents. The strange malady--for such it is--has become a second nature, and may require as energetic a shock to displace it as it did to bring it into existence. Time alone can solve this question, on which depends the well-being and, it may be, the existence of a young man every way fitted to be happy, and to give happiness, if restored to his true nature."

XX.

DR. BUTTS REFLECTS.

Dr. Butts sat up late at night reading these papers and reflecting upon them. He was profoundly impressed and tenderly affected by the entire frankness, the absence of all attempt at concealment, which Maurice showed in placing these papers at his disposal. He believed that his patient would recover from this illness for which he had been taking care of him. He thought deeply and earnestly of what he could do for him after he should have regained his health and strength.

There were references, in Maurice's own account of himself, which the doctor called to mind with great interest after reading his brief autobiography. Some one person--some young woman, it must be--had produced a singular impression upon him since those earlier perilous experiences through which he had passed. The doctor could not help thinking of that meeting with Euthymia of which she had spoken to him. Maurice, as she said, turned pale,--he clapped his hand to his breast. He might have done so if he had met her chambermaid, or any straggling damsel of the village. But Euthymia was not a young woman to be looked upon with indifference. She held herself like a queen, and walked like one, not a stage queen, but one born and bred to self-reliance, and command of herself as well as others. One could not pass her without being struck with her noble bearing and spirited features. If she had known how Maurice trembled as he looked upon her, in that conflict of attraction and uncontrollable dread,--if she had known it! But what, even then, could she have done? Nothing but get away from him as fast as she could. As it was, it was a long time before his agitation subsided, and his heart beat with its common force and frequency.

Dr. Butts was not a male gossip nor a matchmaking go-between. But he could not help thinking what a pity it was that these two young persons could not come together as other young people do in the pairing season, and find out whether they cared for and were fitted for each other. He did not pretend to settle this question in his own mind, but the thought was a natural one. And here was a gulf between them as deep and wide as that between Lazarus and Dives. Would it ever be bridged over? This thought took possession of the doctor's mind, and he imagined all sorts of ways of effecting some experimental approximation between Maurice and Euthymia. From this delicate subject he glanced off to certain general considerations suggested by the extraordinary history he had been reading. He began by speculating as to the possibility of the personal presence of an individual making itself perceived by some channel other than any of the five senses. The study of the natural sciences teaches those who are devoted to them that the most insignificant facts may lead the way to the discovery of the most important, all-pervading laws of the universe. From the kick of a frog's hind leg to the amazing triumphs which began with that seemingly trivial incident is a long, a very long stride if Madam Galvani had not been in delicate health, which was the occasion of her having some frog-broth prepared for her, the world of to-day might not be in possession of the electric telegraph and the light which blazes like the sun at high noon. A common-looking occurrence, one seemingly unimportant, which had hitherto passed unnoticed with the ordinary course of things, was the means of introducing us to a new and vast realm of closely related phenomena. It was like a key that we might have picked up, looking so simple that it could hardly fit any lock but one of like simplicity, but which should all at once throw back the bolts of the one lock which had defied the most ingenious of our complex implements and open our way into a hitherto unexplored territory.

It certainly was not through the eye alone that Maurice felt the paralyzing influence. He could contemplate Euthymia from a distance, as he did on the day of the boat-race, without any nervous disturbance. A certain proximity was necessary for the influence to be felt, as in the case of magnetism and electricity. An atmosphere of danger surrounded every woman he approached during the period when her sex exercises its most powerful attractions. How far did that atmosphere extend, and through what channel did it act?

The key to the phenomena of this case, he believed, was to be found in a fact as humble as that which gave birth to the science of galvanism and its practical applications. The circumstances connected with the very common antipathy to cats were as remarkable in many points of view as the similar circumstances in the case of Maurice Kirkwood. The subjects of that antipathy could not tell what it was which disturbed their nervous system. All they knew was that a sense of uneasiness, restlessness, oppression, came over them in the presence of one of these animals. He remembered the fact already mentioned, that persons sensitive to this impression can tell by their feelings if a cat is concealed in the apartment in which they may happen to be. It may be through some emanation. It may be through the medium of some electrical disturbance. What if the nerve-thrills passing through the whole system of the animal propagate themselves to a certain distance without any more regard to intervening solids than is shown by magnetism? A sieve lets sand pass through it; a filter arrests sand, but lets fluids pass, glass holds fluids, but lets light through; wood shuts out light, but magnetic attraction goes through it as sand went through the sieve. No good reasons can be given why the presence of a cat should not betray itself to certain organizations, at a distance, through the walls of a box in which the animal is shut up. We need not disbelieve the stories which allege such an occurrence as a fact and a not very infrequent one.

If the presence of a cat can produce its effects under these circumstances, why should not that of a human being under similar conditions, acting on certain constitutions, exercise its specific influence? The doctor recalled a story told him by one of his friends, a story which the friend himself heard from the lips of the distinguished actor, the late Mr. Fechter. The actor maintained that Rachel had no genius as an actress. It was all Samson's training and study, according to him, which explained the secret of her wonderful effectiveness on the stage. But magnetism, he said,--magnetism, she was full of. He declared that he was made aware of her presence on the stage, when he could not see her or know of her presence otherwise, by this magnetic emanation. The doctor took the story for what it was worth. There might very probably be exaggeration, perhaps high imaginative coloring about it, but it was not a whit more unlikely than the cat-stories, accepted as authentic. He continued this train of thought into further developments. Into this series of reflections we will try to follow him.

What is the meaning of the halo with which artists have surrounded the heads of their pictured saints, of the aureoles which wraps them like a luminous cloud? Is it not a recognition of the fact that these holy personages diffuse their personality in the form of a visible emanation, which reminds us of Milton's definition of light:

"Bright effluence of bright essence increate"?

The common use of the term influence would seem to imply the existence of its correlative, effluence. There is no good reason that I can see, the doctor said to himself, why among the forces which work upon the nervous centres there should not be one which acts at various distances from its source. It may not be visible like the "glory" of the painters, it may not be appreciable by any one of the five senses, and yet it may be felt by the person reached by it as much as if it were a palpable presence,--more powerfully, perhaps, from the mystery which belongs to its mode of action.

Why should not Maurice have been rendered restless and anxious by the unseen nearness of a young woman who was in the next room to him, just as the persons who have the dread of cats are made conscious of their presence through some unknown channel? Is it anything strange that the larger and more powerful organism should diffuse a consciousness of its presence to some distance as well as the slighter and feebler one? Is it strange that this mysterious influence or effluence should belong especially or exclusively to the period of complete womanhood in distinction from that of immaturity or decadence? On the contrary, it seems to be in accordance with all the analogies of nature,--analogies too often cruel in the sentence they pass upon the human female.

Among the many curious thoughts which came up in the doctor's mind was this, which made him smile as if it were a jest, but which he felt very strongly had its serious side, and was involved with the happiness or suffering of multitudes of youthful persons who die without telling their secret:

How many young men have a mortal fear of woman, as woman, which they never overcome, and in consequence of which the attraction which draws man towards her, as strong in them as in others,--oftentimes, in virtue of their peculiarly sensitive organizations, more potent in them than in others of like age and conditions,--in consequence of which fear, this attraction is completely neutralized, and all the possibilities of doubled and indefinitely extended life depending upon it are left unrealized! Think what numbers of young men in Catholic countries devote themselves to lives of celibacy. Think how many young men lose all their confidence in the presence of the young woman to whom they are most attracted, and at last steal away from a companionship which it is rapture to dream of and torture to endure, so does the presence of the beloved object paralyze all the powers of expression. Sorcerers have in all time and countries played on the hopes and terrors of lovers. Once let loose a strong impulse on the centre of inhibition, and the warrior who had faced bayonets and batteries becomes a coward whom the well-dressed hero of the ball-room and leader of the German will put to ignominious flight in five minutes of easy, audacious familiarity with his lady-love.

Yes, the doctor went on with his reflections, I do not know that I have seen the term Gynophobia before I opened this manuscript, but I have seen the malady many times. Only one word has stood between many a pair of young people and their lifelong happiness, and that word has got as far as the lips, but the lips trembled and would not, could not, shape that little word. All young women are not like Coleridge's Genevieve, who knew how to help her lover out of his difficulty, and said yes before he had asked for an answer. So the wave which was to have wafted them on to the shore of Elysium has just failed of landing them, and back they have been drawn into the desolate ocean to meet no more on earth.

Love is the master-key, he went on thinking, love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!--not only the historic wonder of beauty, that "burnt the topless towers of Ilium" for the smile of Helen, and fired the palaces of Babylon by the hand of Thais, but the beauty which springs up in all times and places, and carries a torch and wears a serpent for a wreath as truly as any of the Eumenides. Paint Beauty with her foot upon a skull and a dragon coiled around her.

The doctor smiled at his own imposing classical allusions and pictorial imagery. Drifting along from thought to thought, he reflected on the probable consequences of the general knowledge of Maurice Kirkwood's story, if it came before the public.

What a piece of work it would make among the lively youths of the village, to be sure! What scoffing, what ridicule, what embellishments, what fables, would follow in the trail of the story! If the Interviewer got hold of it, how "The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor" would blaze with capitals in its next issue! The young fellows' of the place would be disposed to make fun of the whole matter. The young girls-the doctor hardly dared to think what would happen when the story got about among them. "The Sachem" of the solitary canoe, the bold horseman, the handsome hermit,--handsome so far as the glimpses they had got of him went,--must needs be an object of tender interest among them, now that he was ailing, suffering, in danger of his life, away from friends,--poor fellow! Little tokens of their regard had reached his sick-chamber; bunches of flowers with dainty little notes, some of them pinkish, some three-cornered, some of them with brief messages, others "criss-crossed," were growing more frequent as it was understood that the patient was likely to be convalescent before many days had passed. If it should come to be understood that there was a deadly obstacle to their coming into any personal relations with him, the doctor had his doubts whether there were not those who would subject him to the risk; for there were coquettes in the village,--strangers, visitors, let us hope,--who would sacrifice anything or anybody to their vanity and love of conquest.

XXI

AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION.

The illness from which Maurice had suffered left him in a state of profound prostration. The doctor, who remembered the extreme danger of any overexertion in such cases, hardly allowed him to lift his head from the pillow. But his mind was gradually recovering its balance, and he was able to hold some conversation with those about him. His faithful Paolo had grown so thin in waiting upon him and watching with him that the village children had to take a second look at his face when they passed him to make sure that it was indeed their old friend and no other. But as his master advanced towards convalescence and the doctor assured him that he was going in all probability to get well, Paolo's face began to recover something of its old look and expression, and once more his pockets filled themselves with comfits for his little circle of worshipping three and four year old followers.

"How is Mr. Kirkwood?" was the question with which he was always greeted. In the worst periods of the fever be rarely left his master. When he did, and the question was put to him, he would shake his head sadly, sometimes without a word, sometimes with tears and sobs and faltering words,--more like a brokenhearted child than a stalwart man as he was, such a man as soldiers are made of in the great Continental armies.

"He very bad,--he no eat nothing,--he--no say nothing,--he never be no better," and all his Southern nature betrayed itself in a passionate burst of lamentation. But now that he began to feel easy about his master, his ready optimism declared itself no less transparently.

"He better every day now. He get well in few weeks, sure. You see him on hoss in little while." The kind-hearted creature's life was bound up in that of his "master," as he loved to call him, in sovereign disregard of the comments of the natives, who held themselves too high for any such recognition of another as their better. They could not understand how he, so much their superior in bodily presence, in air and manner, could speak of the man who employed him in any other way than as "Kirkwood," without even demeaning himself so far as to prefix a "Mr." to it. But "my master" Maurice remained for Paolo in spite of the fact that all men are born free and equal. And never was a servant more devoted to a master than was Paolo to Maurice during the days of doubt and danger. Since his improvement Maurice insisted upon his leaving his chamber and getting out of the house, so as to breathe the fresh air of which he was in so much need. It worried him to see his servant returning after too short an absence. The attendant who had helped him in the care of the patient was within call, and Paolo was almost driven out of the house by the urgency of his master's command that he should take plenty of exercise in the open air.

Notwithstanding the fact of Maurice's improved condition, although the force of the disease had spent itself, the state of weakness to which he had been reduced was a cause of some anxiety, and required great precautions to be taken. He lay in bed, wasted, enfeebled to such a degree that he had to be cared for very much as a child is tended. Gradually his voice was coming back to him, so that he could hold some conversation, as was before mentioned, with those about him. The doctor waited for the right moment to make mention of the manuscript which Maurice had submitted to him. Up to this time, although it had been alluded to and the doctor had told him of the intense interest with which he had read it, he had never ventured to make it the subject of any long talk, such as would be liable to fatigue his patient. But now he thought the time had come.

"I have been thinking," the doctor said, "of the singular seizures to which you are liable, and as it is my business not merely to think about such cases, but to do what I can to help any who may be capable of receiving aid from my art, I wish to have some additional facts about your history. And in the first place, will you allow me to ask what led you to this particular place? It is so much less known to the public at large than many other resorts that we naturally ask, What brings this or that new visitor among us? We have no ill-tasting, natural spring of bad water to be analyzed by the state chemist and proclaimed as a specific. We have no great gambling-houses, no racecourse (except that fox boats on the lake); we have no coaching-club, no great balls, few lions of any kind, so we ask, What brings this or that stranger here? And I think I may venture to ask you whether any, special motive brought you among us, or whether it was accident that determined your coming to this place."

"Certainly, doctor," Maurice answered, "I will tell you with great pleasure. Last year I passed on the border of a great river. The year before I lived in a lonely cottage at the side of the ocean. I wanted this year to be by a lake. You heard the paper read at the meeting of your society, or at least you heard of it,--for such matters are always talked over in a village like this. You can judge by that paper, or could, if it were before you, of the frame of mind in which I came here. I was tired of the sullen indifference of the ocean and the babbling egotism of the river, always hurrying along on its own private business. I wanted the dreamy stillness of a large, tranquil sheet of water that had nothing in particular to do, and would leave me to myself and my thoughts. I had read somewhere about the place, and the old Anchor Tavern, with its paternal landlord and motherly landlady and old-fashioned household, and that, though it was no longer open as a tavern, I could find a resting-place there early in the season, at least for a few days, while I looked about me for a quiet place in which I might pass my summer. I have found this a pleasant residence. By being up early and out late I have kept myself mainly in the solitude which has become my enforced habit of life. The season has gone by too swiftly for me since my dream has become a vision."

The doctor was sitting with his hand round Maurice's wrist, three fingers on his pulse. As he spoke these last words he noticed that the pulse fluttered a little,--beat irregularly a few times; intermitted; became feeble and thready; while his cheek grew whiter than the pallid bloodlessness of his long illness had left it.

"No more talk, now," he said. "You are too tired to be using your voice. I will hear all the rest another time."

The doctor had interrupted Maurice at an interesting point. What did he mean by saying that his dream had become a vision? This is what the doctor was naturally curious, and professionally anxious, to know. But his hand was still on his patient's pulse, which told him unmistakably that the heart had taken the alarm and was losing its energy under the depressing nervous influence. Presently, however, it recovered its natural force and rhythm, and a faint flush came back to the pale cheek. The doctor remembered the story of Galen, and the young maiden whose complaint had puzzled the physicians.

The next day his patient was well enough to enter once more into conversation.

"You said something about a dream of yours which had become a vision," said the doctor, with his fingers on his patient's wrist, as before. He felt the artery leap, under his pressure, falter a little, stop, then begin again, growing fuller in its beat. The heart had felt the pull of the bridle, but the spur had roused it to swift reaction.

"You know the story of my past life, doctor," Maurice answered; "and, I will tell you what is the vision which has taken the place of my dreams. You remember the boat-race? I watched it from a distance, but I held a powerful opera-glass in my hand, which brought the whole crew of the young ladies' boat so close to me that I could see the features, the figures, the movements, of every one of the rowers. I saw the little coxswain fling her bouquet in the track of the other boat,--you remember how the race was lost and won,--but I saw one face among those young girls which drew me away from all the rest. It was that of the young lady who pulled the bow oar, the captain of the boat's crew. I have since learned her name, you know it well,--I need not name her. Since that day I have had many distant glimpses of her; and once I met her so squarely that the deadly sensation came over me, and I felt that in another moment I should fall senseless at her feet. But she passed on her way and I on mine, and the spasm which had clutched my heart gradually left it, and I was as well as before. You know that young lady, doctor?"

"I do; and she is a very noble creature. You are not the first young man who has been fascinated, almost at a glance, by Miss Euthymia Tower. And she is well worth knowing more intimately."

The doctor gave him a full account of the young lady, of her early days, her character, her accomplishments. To all this he listened devoutly, and when the doctor left him he said to himself, "I will see her and speak with her, if it costs me my life."

XXII

EUTHYMIA.

"The Wonder" of the Corinna Institute had never willingly made a show of her gymnastic accomplishments. Her feats, which were so much admired, were only her natural exercise. Gradually the dumb-bells others used became too light for her, the ropes she climbed too short, the clubs she exercised with seemed as if they were made of cork instead of being heavy wood, and all the tests and meters of strength and agility had been strained beyond the standards which the records of the school had marked as their historic maxima. It was not her fault that she broke a dynamometer one day; she apologized for it, but the teacher said he wished he could have a dozen broken every year in the same way. The consciousness of her bodily strength had made her very careful in her movements. The pressure of her hand was never too hard for the tenderest little maiden whose palm was against her own. So far from priding herself on her special gifts, she was disposed to be ashamed of them. There were times and places in which she could give full play to her muscles without fear or reproach. She had her special costume for the boat and for the woods. She would climb the rugged old hemlocks now and then for the sake of a wide outlook, or to peep into the large nest where a hawk, or it may be an eagle, was raising her little brood of air-pirates.

There were those who spoke of her wanderings in lonely places as an unsafe exposure. One sometimes met doubtful characters about the neighborhood, and stories were--told of occurrences which might well frighten a young girl, and make her cautious of trusting herself alone in the wild solitudes which surrounded the little village.. Those who knew Euthymia thought her quite equal to taking care of herself. Her very look was enough to ensure the respect of any vagabond who might cross her path, and if matters came to the worst she would prove as dangerous as a panther.

But it was a pity to associate this class of thoughts with a noble specimen of true womanhood. Health, beauty, strength, were fine qualities, and in all these she was rich. She enjoyed all her natural gifts, and thought little about them. Unwillingly, but over-persuaded by some of her friends, she had allowed her arm and hand to be modelled. The artists who saw the cast wondered if it would be possible to get the bust of the maiden from whom it was taken. Nobody would have dared to suggest such an idea to her except Lurida. For Lurida sex was a trifling accident, to be disregarded not only in the interests of humanity, but for the sake of art.

"It is a shame," she said to Euthymia, "that you will not let your exquisitely moulded form be perpetuated in marble. You have no right to withhold such a model from the contemplation of your fellow-creatures. Think how rare it is to see a woman who truly represents the divine idea! You belong to your race, and not to yourself,--at least, your beauty is a gift not to be considered as a piece of private property. Look at the so-called Venus of Milo. Do you suppose the noble woman who was the original of that divinely chaste statue felt any scruple about allowing the sculptor to reproduce her pure, unblemished perfections?"

Euthymia was always patient with her imaginative friend. She listened to her eloquent discourse, but she could not help blushing, used as she was to Lurida's audacities. "The Terror's" brain had run away with a large share of the blood which ought to have gone to the nourishment of her general system. She could not help admiring, almost worshipping, a companion whose being was rich in the womanly developments with which nature had so economically endowed herself. An impoverished organization carries with it certain neutral qualities which make its subject appear, in the presence of complete manhood and womanhood, like a deaf-mute among speaking persons. The deep blush which crimsoned Euthymia's cheek at Lurida's suggestion was in a strange contrast to her own undisturbed expression. There was a range of sensibilities of which Lurida knew far less than she did of those many and difficult studies which had absorbed her vital forces. She was startled to see what an effect her proposal had produced, for Euthymia was not only blushing, but there was a flame in her eyes which she had hardly ever seen before.

"Is this only your own suggestion?" Euthymia said, "or has some one been putting the idea into your head?" The truth was that she had happened to meet the Interviewer at the Library, one day, and she was offended by the long, searching stare with which that individual had honored her. It occurred to her that he, or some such visitor to the place, might have spoken of her to Lurida, or to some other person who had repeated what was said to Lurida, as a good subject for the art of the sculptor, and she felt all her maiden sensibilities offended by the proposition. Lurida could not understand her excitement, but she was startled by it. Natures which are complementary of each other are liable to these accidental collisions of feeling. They get along very well together, none the worse for their differences, until all at once the tender spot of one or the other is carelessly handled in utter unconsciousness on the part of the aggressor, and the exclamation, the outcry, or the explosion explains the situation altogether too emphatically. Such scenes did not frequently occur between the two friends, and this little flurry was soon over; but it served to warn Lurida that Miss Euthymia Tower was not of that class of self-conscious beauties who would be ready to dispute the empire of the Venus of Milo on her own ground, in defences as scanty and insufficient as those of the marble divinity.

Euthymia had had admirers enough, at a distance, while at school, and in the long vacations, near enough to find out that she was anything but easy to make love to. She fairly frightened more than one rash youth who was disposed to be too sentimental in her company. They overdid flattery, which she was used to and tolerated, but which cheapened the admirer in her estimation, and now and then betrayed her into an expression which made him aware of the fact, and was a discouragement to aggressive amiability. The real difficulty was that not one of her adorers had ever greatly interested her. It could not be that nature had made her insensible. It must have been because the man who was made for her had never yet shown himself. She was not easy to please, that was certain; and she was one of those young women who will not accept as a lover one who but half pleases them. She could not pick up the first stick that fell in her way and take it to shape her ideal out of. Many of the good people of the village doubted whether Euthymia would ever be married.

"There 's nothing good enough for her in this village," said the old landlord of what had been the Anchor Tavern.

"She must wait till a prince comes along," the old landlady said in reply. "She'd make as pretty a queen as any of them that's born to it. Wouldn't she be splendid with a gold crown on her head, and di'monds a glitterin' all over her! D' you remember how handsome she looked in the tableau, when the fair was held for the Dorcas Society? She had on an old dress of her grandma's,--they don't make anything half so handsome nowadays,--and she was just as pretty as a pictur'. But what's the use of good looks if they scare away folks? The young fellows think that such a handsome girl as that would cost ten times as much to keep as a plain one. She must be dressed up like an empress,--so they seem to think. It ain't so with Euthymy: she'd look like a great lady dressed anyhow, and she has n't got any more notions than the homeliest girl that ever stood before a glass to look at herself."

In the humbler walks of Arrowhead Village society, similar opinions were entertained of Miss Euthymia. The fresh-water fisherman represented pretty well the average estimate of the class to which he belonged. "I tell ye," said he to another gentleman of leisure, whose chief occupation was to watch the coming and going of the visitors to Arrowhead Village,--"I tell ye that girl ain't a gon to put up with any o' them slab-sided fellahs that you see hangin' raound to look at her every Sunday when she comes aout o' meetin'. It's one o' them big gents from Boston or New York that'll step up an' kerry her off."

In the mean time nothing could be further from the thoughts of Euthymia than the prospect of an ambitious worldly alliance. The ideals of young women cost them many and great disappointments, but they save them very often from those lifelong companionships which accident is constantly trying to force upon them, in spite of their obvious unfitness. The higher the ideal, the less likely is the commonplace neighbor who has the great advantage of easy access, or the boarding-house acquaintance who can profit by those vacant hours when the least interesting of visitors is better than absolute loneliness,--the less likely are these undesirable personages to be endured, pitied, and, if not embraced, accepted, for want of something better. Euthymia found so much pleasure in the intellectual companionship of Lurida, and felt her own prudence and reserve so necessary to that independent young lady, that she had been contented, so far, with friendship, and thought of love only in an abstract sort of way. Beneath her abstractions there was a capacity of loving which might have been inferred from the expression of her features, the light that shone in her eyes, the tones of her voice, all of which were full of the language which belongs to susceptible natures. How many women never say to themselves that they were born to love, until all at once the discovery opens upon them, as the sense that he was born a painter is said to have dawned suddenly upon Correggio!

Like all the rest of the village and its visitors, she could not help thinking a good deal about the young man lying ill amongst strangers. She was not one of those who had sent him the three-cornered notes or even a bunch of flowers. She knew that he was receiving abounding tokens of kindness and sympathy from different quarters, and a certain inward feeling restrained her from joining in these demonstrations. If he had been suffering from some deadly and contagious malady she would have risked her life to help him, without a thought that there was any wonderful heroism in such self-devotion. Her friend Lurida might have been capable of the same sacrifice, but it would be after reasoning with herself as to the obligations which her sense of human rights and duties laid upon her, and fortifying her courage with the memory of noble deeds recorded of women in ancient and modern history. With Euthymia the primary human instincts took precedence of all reasoning or reflection about them. All her sympathies were excited by the thought of this forlorn stranger in his solitude, but she felt the impossibility of giving any complete expression to them. She thought of Mungo Park in the African desert, and she envied the poor negress who not only pitied him, but had the blessed opportunity of helping and consoling him. How near were these two human creatures, each needing the other! How near in bodily presence, how far apart in their lives, with a barrier seemingly impassable between them!

XXIII

THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.

These autumnal fevers, which carry off a large number of our young people every year, are treacherous and deceptive diseases. Not only are they liable, as has been mentioned, to various accidental complications which may prove suddenly fatal, but too often, after convalescence seems to be established, relapses occur which are more serious than the disease had appeared to be in its previous course. One morning Dr. Butts found Maurice worse instead of better, as he had hoped and expected to find him. Weak as he was, there was every reason to fear the issue of this return of his threatening symptoms. There was not much to do besides keeping up the little strength which still remained. It was all needed.

Does the reader of these pages ever think of the work a sick man as much as a well one has to perform while he is lying on his back and taking what we call his "rest"? More than a thousand times an hour, between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand times a week, he has to lift the bars of the cage in which his breathing organs are confined, to save himself from asphyxia. Rest! There is no rest until the last long sigh tells those who look upon the dying that the ceaseless daily task, to rest from which is death, is at last finished. We are all galley-slaves, pulling at the levers of respiration,--which, rising and falling like so many oars, drive us across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore to another. No! Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these four and twenty oars, at which we must tug day and night all our life long.

The doctor could not find any accidental cause to account for this relapse. It presently occurred to him that there might be some local source of infection which had brought on the complaint, and was still keeping up the symptoms which were the ground of alarm. He determined to remove Maurice to his own house, where he could be sure of pure air, and where he himself could give more constant attention to his patient during this critical period of his disease. It was a risk to take, but he could be carried on a litter by careful men, and remain wholly passive during the removal. Maurice signified his assent, as he could hardly help doing,--for the doctor's suggestion took pretty nearly the form of a command. He thought it a matter of life and death, and was gently urgent for his patient's immediate change of residence. The doctor insisted on having Maurice's books and other movable articles carried to his own house, so that he should be surrounded by familiar sights, and not worry himself about what might happen to objects which he valued, if they were left behind him.

All these dispositions were quickly and quietly made, and everything was ready for the transfer of the patient to the house of the hospitable physician. Paolo was at the doctor's, superintending the arrangement of Maurice's effects and making all ready for his master. The nurse in attendance, a trustworthy man enough in the main, finding his patient in a tranquil sleep, left his bedside for a little fresh air. While he was at the door he heard a shouting which excited his curiosity, and he followed the sound until he found himself at the border of the lake. It was nothing very wonderful which had caused the shouting. A Newfoundland dog had been showing off his accomplishments, and some of the idlers were betting as to the time it would take him to bring back to his master the various floating objects which had been thrown as far from the shore as possible. He watched the dog a few minutes, when his attention was drawn to a light wherry, pulled by one young lady and steered by another. It was making for the shore, which it would soon reach. The attendant remembered all at once, that he had left his charge, and just before the boat came to land he turned and hurried back to the patient. Exactly how long he had been absent he could not have said,--perhaps a quarter of an hour, perhaps longer; the time appeared short to him, wearied with long sitting and watching.

It had seemed, when he stole away from Maurice's bedside, that he was not in the least needed. The patient was lying perfectly quiet, and to all appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone. It was such a comfort to look at something besides the worn features of a sick man, to hear something besides his labored breathing and faint, half-whispered words, that the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few minutes had proved irresistible.

Unfortunately, Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the absence of the nurse. He very soon fell into a dream, which began quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing, terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him, fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage through which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin the air seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of Mont Blanc, it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No, it was not Mont Blanc,--it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla that he was climbing.

The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, and awoke.

The room was full of smoke. He was gasping for breath, strangling in the smothering oven which his chamber had become.

The house was on fire!

He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in a whisper. He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in the bed for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back upon his pillow, helpless. He felt that his hour had come, for he could not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone. He could hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to another. It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,--the fate that many a martyr had had to face,--to be first strangled and then burned. Death had not the terror for him that it has for most young persons. He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes wistfully, even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction had come upon him as a temptation. But here was death in an unexpected and appalling shape. He did not know before how much he cared to live. All his old recollections came before him as it were in one long, vivid flash. The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line, and past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision. The dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror. He felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,--the rush of air,--the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if simultaneous. The vision of the "inward eye" was so intensified in this moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence. Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description means. The development of a photograph may not explain it, but it illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections of the drowning man's experience. The sensitive plate has taken one look at a scene, and remembers it all,

Every little circumstance is there,--the hoof in air, the wing in flight, the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks. All there, but invisible; potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if not existing at all. A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene comes out in all its perfection of detail. In those supreme moments when death stares a man suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods the undeveloped pictures of vanished years, stored away in the memory, the vast panorama of a lifetime, and in one swift instant the past comes out as vividly as if it were again the present. So it was at this moment with the sick man, as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die. For he saw no hope of relief: the smoke was drifting in clouds into the room; the flames were very near; if he was not reached and rescued immediately it was all over with him.

His past life had flashed before him. Then all at once rose the thought of his future,--of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes which he had cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him. There was something, then, to be lived for, something! There was a new life, it might be, in store for him, and such a new life! He thought of all he was losing. Oh, could he but have lived to know the meaning of love! And the passionate desire of life came over him,--not the dread of death, but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness for him.

All this took place in the course of a very few moments. Dreams and visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air he was breathing.

What had happened? In the confusion of moving books and other articles to the doctor's house, doors and windows had been forgotten. Among the rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old furniture had been left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed. One of the lazy natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar, had thrown the burning stump in at this open window. He had no particular intention of doing mischief, but he had that indifference to consequences which is the next step above the inclination to crime. The burning stump happened to fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open. The smoker went his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced that no other person passed the house for some time. Presently the straw was in a blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along the entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was lying.

The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a mass of combustibles,--loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture, and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the newspaper reports, "a perfect tinder-box," and would probably be a heap of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected assistance should come to his rescue.

As the attendant drew near the house where Maurice was lying, he was horror-struck to see dense volumes of smoke pouring out of the lower windows. It was beginning to make its way through the upper windows, also, and presently a tongue of fire shot out and streamed upward along the side of the house. The man shrieked Fire! Fire! with all his might, and rushed to the door of the building to make his way to Maurice's room and save him. He penetrated but a short distance when, blinded and choking with the smoke, he rushed headlong down the stairs with a cry of despair that roused every man, woman, and child within reach of a human voice. Out they came from their houses in every quarter of the village. The shout of Fire! Fire! was the chief aid lent by many of the young and old. Some caught up pails and buckets: the more thoughtful ones filling them; the hastier snatching them up empty, trusting to find water nearer the burning building.

Is the sick man moved?

This was the awful question first asked,--for in the little village all knew that Maurice was about being transferred to the doctor's house. The attendant, white as death, pointed to the chamber where he had left him, and gasped out,

"He is there!"

A ladder! A ladder! was the general cry, and men and boys rushed off in search of one. But a single minute was an age now, and there was no ladder to be had without a delay of many minutes. The sick man was going to be swallowed up in the flames before it could possibly arrive. Some were going for a blanket or a coverlet, in the hope that the young man might have strength enough to leap from the window and be safely caught in it. The attendant shook his head, and said faintly,

"He cannot move from his bed."

One of the visitors at the village,--a millionaire, it was said,--a kind-hearted man, spoke in hoarse, broken tones:

"A thousand dollars to the man that will bring him from his chamber!"

The fresh-water fisherman muttered, "I should like to save the man and to see the money, but it ain't a thaousan' dollars, nor ten thaousan' dollars, that'll pay a fellah for burnin' to death,--or even chokin' to death, anyhaow."

The carpenter, who knew the framework of every house in the village, recent or old, shook his head.

"The stairs have been shored up," he said, "and when the fists that holds 'em up goes, down they'll come. It ain't safe for no man to go over them stairs. Hurry along your ladder,--that's your only chance."

All was wild confusion around the burning house. The ladder they had gone for was missing from its case,--a neighbor had carried it off for the workmen who were shingling his roof. It would never get there in time. There was a fire-engine, but it was nearly half a mile from the lakeside settlement. Some were throwing on water in an aimless, useless way; one was sending a thin stream through a garden syringe: it seemed like doing something, at least. But all hope of saving Maurice was fast giving way, so rapid was the progress of the flames, so thick the cloud of smoke that filled the house and poured from the windows. Nothing was heard but confused cries, shrieks of women, all sorts of orders to do this and that, no one knowing what was to be done. The ladder! The ladder! Five minutes more and it will be too late!

In the mean time the alarm of fire had reached Paolo, and he had stopped his work of arranging Maurice's books in the same way as that in which they had stood in his apartment, and followed in the direction of the sound, little thinking that his master was lying helpless in the burning house. "Some chimney afire," he said to himself; but he would go and take a look, at any rate.

Before Paolo had reached the scene of destruction and impending death, two young women, in boating dresses of decidedly Bloomerish aspect, had suddenly joined the throng. "The Wonder" and "The Terror" of their school-days--Miss Euthymia rower and Miss Lurida Vincent had just come from the shore, where they had left their wherry. A few hurried words told them the fearful story. Maurice Kirkwood was lying in the chamber to which every eye was turned, unable to move, doomed to a dreadful death. All that could be hoped was that he would perish by suffocation rather than by the flames, which would soon be upon him. The man who had attended him had just tried to reach his chamber, but had reeled back out of the door, almost strangled by the smoke. A thousand dollars had been offered to any one who would rescue the sick man, but no one had dared to make the attempt; for the stairs might fall at any moment, if the smoke did not blind and smother the man who passed them before they fell.

The two young women looked each other in the face for one swift moment.

"How can he be reached?" asked Lurida. "Is there nobody that will venture his life to save a brother like that?"

"I will venture mine," said Euthymia.

"No! no!" shrieked Lurida,--"not you! not you! It is a man's work, not yours! You shall not go!" Poor Lurida had forgotten all her theories in this supreme moment. But Euthymia was not to be held back. Taking a handkerchief from her neck, she dipped it in a pail of water and bound it about her head. Then she took several deep breaths of air, and filled her lungs as full as they would hold. She knew she must not take a single breath in the choking atmosphere if she could possibly help it, and Euthymia was noted for her power of staying under water so long that more than once those who saw her dive thought she would never come up again. So rapid were her movements that they paralyzed the bystanders, who would forcibly have prevented her from carrying out her purpose. Her imperious determination was not to be resisted. And so Euthymia, a willing martyr, if martyr she was to be, and not saviour, passed within the veil that hid the sufferer.

Lurida turned deadly pale, and sank fainting to the ground. She was the first, but not the only one, of her sex that fainted as Euthymia disappeared in the smoke of the burning building. Even the rector grew very white in the face,--so white that one of his vestry-men begged him to sit down at once, and sprinkled a few drops of water on his forehead, to his great disgust and manifest advantage. The old landlady was crying and moaning, and her husband was wiping his eyes and shaking his head sadly.

"She will nevar come out alive," he said solemnly.

"Nor dead, neither," added the carpenter. "Ther' won't be nothing left of neither of 'em but ashes." And the carpenter hid his face in his hands.

The fresh-water fisherman had pulled out a rag which he called a "hangkercher,"--it had served to carry bait that morning,--and was making use of its best corner to dry the tears which were running down his cheeks. The whole village was proud of Euthymia, and with these more quiet signs of grief were mingled loud lamentations, coming alike from old and young.

All this was not so much like a succession of events as it was like a tableau. The lookers-on were stunned with its suddenness, and before they had time to recover their bewildered senses all was lost, or seemed lost. They felt that they should never look again on either of those young faces.

The rector, not unfeeling by nature, but inveterately professional by habit, had already recovered enough to be thinking of a text for the funeral sermon. The first that occurred to him was this,--vaguely, of course, in the background of consciousness:

"Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego came forth of the midst of the fire."

The village undertaker was of naturally sober aspect and reflective disposition. He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a funeral pile blazing before his eyes. He, too, had his human sympathies, but in the distance his imagination pictured the final ceremony, and how he himself should figure in a spectacle where the usual centre piece of attraction would be wanting,--perhaps his own services uncalled for.

Blame him not, you whose garden-patch is not watered with the tears of mourners. The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to the wail of the De Profundis. Not always,--not always; let us not be cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say, is subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and soul-subduing influences.

It seems as if we were doing great wrong to the scene we are contemplating in delaying it by the description of little circumstances and individual thoughts and feelings. But linger as we may, we cannot compress into a chapter--we could not crowd into a volume--all that passed through the minds and stirred the emotions of the awe-struck company which was gathered about the scene of danger and of terror. We are dealing with an impossibility: consciousness is a surface; narrative is a line.

Maurice had given himself up for lost. His breathing was becoming every moment more difficult, and he felt that his strength could hold out but a few minutes longer.

"Robert!" he called in faint accents. But the attendant was not there to answer.

"Paolo! Paolo!" But the faithful servant, who would have given his life for his master, had not yet reached the place where the crowd was gathered.

"Oh, for a breath of air! Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed! Too late! Too late!" he gasped, with what might have seemed his dying expiration.

"Not too late!" The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as if it had come down to him from heaven.

In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the arms of--a woman!

Out of the stifling chamber,--over the burning stairs,--close by the tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could reach,--out into the open air, he was borne swiftly and safely,--carried as easily as if he had been a babe, in the strong arms of "The Wonder" of the gymnasium, the captain of the Atalanta, who had little dreamed of the use she was to make of her natural gifts and her school-girl accomplishments.

Such a cry as arose from the crowd of on-lookers! It was a sound that none of them had ever heard before or could expect ever to hear again, unless he should be one of the last boat-load rescued from a sinking vessel. Then, those who had resisted the overflow of their emotion, who had stood in white despair as they thought of these two young lives soon to be wrapped in their burning shroud,--those stern men--the old sea-captain, the hard-faced, moneymaking, cast-iron tradesmen of the city counting-room--sobbed like hysteric women; it was like a convulsion that overcame natures unused to those deeper emotions which many who are capable of experiencing die without ever knowing.

This was the scene upon which the doctor and Paolo suddenly appeared at the same moment.

As the fresh breeze passed over the face of the rescued patient, his eyes opened wide, and his consciousness returned in almost supernatural lucidity. Euthymia had sat down upon a bank, and was still supporting him. His head was resting on her bosom. Through his awakening senses stole the murmurs of the living cradle which rocked him with the wavelike movements of respiration, the soft susurrus of the air that entered with every breath, the double beat of the heart which throbbed close to his ear. And every sense, and every instinct, and every reviving pulse told him in language like a revelation from another world that a woman's arms were around him, and that it was life, and not death, which her embrace had brought him.

She would have disengaged him from her protecting hold, but the doctor made her a peremptory sign, which he followed by a sharp command:--

"Do not move him a hair's breadth," he said. "Wait until the litter comes. Any sudden movement might be dangerous. Has anybody a brandy flask about him?"

One or two members of the local temperance society looked rather awkward, but did not come forward.

The fresh-water fisherman was the first who spoke.

"I han't got no brandy," he said, "but there's a drop or two of old Medford rum in this here that you're welcome to, if it'll be of any help. I alliz kerry a little on 't in case o' gettin' wet 'n' chilled."

So saying he held forth a flat bottle with the word Sarsaparilla stamped on the green glass, but which contained half a pint or more of the specific on which he relied in those very frequent exposures which happen to persons of his calling.

The doctor motioned back Paolo, who would have rushed at once to the aid of Maurice, and who was not wanted at that moment. So poor Paolo, in an agony of fear for his master, was kept as quiet as possible, and had to content himself with asking all sorts of questions and repeating all the prayers he could think of to Our Lady and to his holy namesake the Apostle.

The doctor wiped the mouth of the fisherman's bottle very carefully. "Take a few drops of this cordial," he said, as he held it to his patient's lips. "Hold him just so, Euthymia, without stirring. I will watch him, and say when he is ready to be moved. The litter is near by, waiting." Dr. Butts watched Maurice's pulse and color. The "Old Medford" knew its business. It had knocked over its tens of thousands; it had its redeeming virtue, and helped to set up a poor fellow now and then. It did this for Maurice very effectively. When he seemed somewhat restored, the doctor had the litter brought to his side, and Euthymia softly resigned her helpless burden, which Paolo and the attendant Robert lifted with the aid of the doctor, who walked by the patient as he was borne to the home where Mrs. Butts had made all ready for his reception.

As for poor Lurida, who had thought herself equal to the sanguinary duties of the surgeon, she was left lying on the grass with an old woman over her, working hard with fan and smelling-salts to bring her back from her long fainting fit.

XXIV

THE INEVITABLE.

Why should not human nature be the same in Arrowhead Village as elsewhere? It could not seem strange to the good people of that place and their visitors that these two young persons, brought together under circumstances that stirred up the deepest emotions of which the human soul is capable, should become attached to each other. But the bond between them was stronger than any knew, except the good doctor, who had learned the great secret of Maurice's life. For the first time since his infancy he had fully felt the charm which the immediate presence of youthful womanhood carries with it. He could hardly believe the fact when he found himself no longer the subject of the terrifying seizures of which he had had many and threatening experiences.

It was the doctor's business to save his patient's life, if he could possibly do it. Maurice had been reduced to the most perilous state of debility by the relapse which had interrupted his convalescence. Only by what seemed almost a miracle had he survived the exposure to suffocation and the mental anguish through which he had passed. It was perfectly clear to Dr. Butts that if Maurice could see the young woman to whom he owed his life, and, as the doctor felt assured, the revolution in his nervous system which would be the beginning of a new existence, it would be of far more value as a restorative agency than any or all of the drugs in the pharmacopoeia. He told this to Euthymia, and explained the matter to her parents and friends. She must go with him on some of his visits. Her mother should go with her, or her sister; but this was a case of life and death, and no maidenly scruples must keep her from doing her duty.

The first of her visits to the sick, perhaps dying, man presented a scene not unlike the picture before spoken of on the title-page of the old edition of Galen. The doctor was perhaps the most agitated of the little group. He went before the others, took his seat by the bedside, and held the patient's wrist with his finger on the pulse. As Euthymia entered it gave a single bound, fluttered for an instant as if with a faint memory of its old habit, then throbbed full and strong, comparatively, as if under the spur of some powerful stimulus. Euthymia's task was a delicate one, but she knew how to disguise its difficulty.

"Here is a flower I have brought you, Mr. Kirkwood," she said, and handed him a white chrysanthemum. He took it from her hand, and before she knew it he took her hand into his own, and held it with a gentle constraint. What could she do? Here was the young man whose life she had saved, at least for the moment, and who was yet in danger from the disease which had almost worn out his powers of resistance.

"Sit down by Mr. Kirkwood's side," said the doctor. "He wants to thank you, if he has strength to do it, for saving him from the death which seemed inevitable."

Not many words could Maurice command. He was weak enough for womanly tears, but their fountains no longer flowed; it was with him as with the dying, whose eyes may light up, but rarely shed a tear.

The river which has found a new channel widens and deepens--it; it lets the old water-course fill up, and never returns to its forsaken bed. The tyrannous habit was broken. The prophecy of the gitana had verified itself, and the ill a fair woman had wrought a fairer woman bad conquered and abolished.

The history of Maurice Kirkwood loses its exceptional character from the time of his restoration to his natural conditions. His convalescence was very slow and gradual, but no further accident interrupted its even progress. The season was over, the summer visitors had left Arrowhead Village; the chrysanthemums were going out of flower, the frosts had come, and Maurice was still beneath the roof of the kind physician. The relation between him and his preserver was so entirely apart from all common acquaintances and friendships that no ordinary rules could apply to it. Euthymia visited him often during the period of his extreme prostration.

"You must come every day," the doctor said. "He gains with every visit you make him; he pines if you miss him for a single day." So she came and sat by him, the doctor or good Mrs. Butts keeping her company in his presence. He grew stronger,--began to sit up in bed; and at last Euthymia found him dressed as in health, and beginning to walk about the room. She was startled. She had thought of herself as a kind of nurse, but the young gentleman could hardly be said to need a nurse any longer. She had scruples about making any further visits. She asked Lurida what she thought about it.

"Think about it?" said Lurida. "Why should n't you go to see a brother as well as a sister, I should like to know? If you are afraid to go to see Maurice Kirkwood, I am not afraid, at any rate. If you would rather have me go than go yourself, I will do it, and let people talk just as much as they want to. Shall I go instead of you?"

Euthymia was not quite sure that this would be the best thing for the patient. The doctor had told her he thought there were special reasons for her own course in coming daily to see him. "I am afraid," she said, "you are too bright to be safe for him in his weak state. Your mind is such a stimulating one, you know. A dull sort of person like myself is better for him just now. I will continue visiting him as long as the doctor says it is important that I should; but you must defend me, Lurida,--I know you can explain it all so that people will not blame me."

Euthymia knew full well what the effect of Lurida's penetrating head-voice would be in a convalescent's chamber. She knew how that active mind of hers would set the young man's thoughts at work, when what he wanted was rest of every faculty. Were not these good and sufficient reasons for her decision? What others could there be?

So Euthymia kept on with her visits, until she blushed to see that she was continuing her charitable office for one who was beginning to look too well to be called an invalid. It was a dangerous condition of affairs, and the busy tongues of the village gossips were free in their comments. Free, but kindly, for the story of the rescue had melted every heart; and what could be more natural than that these two young people whom God had brought together in the dread moment of peril should find it hard to tear themselves asunder after the hour of danger was past? When gratitude is a bankrupt, love only can pay his debts; and if Maurice gave his heart to Euthymia, would not she receive it as payment in full?

The change which had taken place in the vital currents of Maurice Kirkwood's system was as simple and solid a fact as the change in a magnetic needle when the boreal becomes the austral pole, and the austral the boreal. It was well, perhaps, that this change took place while he was enfeebled by the wasting effects of long illness. For all the long-defeated, disturbed, perverted instincts had found their natural channel from the centre of consciousness to the organ which throbs in response to every profound emotion. As his health gradually returned, Euthymia could not help perceiving a flush in his cheek, a glitter in his eyes, a something in the tone of his voice, which altogether were a warning to the young maiden that the highway of friendly intercourse was fast narrowing to a lane, at the head of which her woman's eye could read plainly enough, "Dangerous passing."

"You look so much better to-day, Mr. Kirkwood," she said, "that I think I had better not play Sister of Charity any longer. The next time we meet I hope you will be strong enough to call on me."

She was frightened to see how pale he turned,--he was weaker than she thought. There was a silence so profound and so long that Mrs. Butts looked up from the stocking she was knitting. They had forgotten the good woman's presence.

Presently Maurice spoke,--very faintly, but Mrs. Butts dropped a stitch at the first word, and her knitting fell into her lap as she listened to what followed.

"No! you must not leave me. You must never leave me. You saved my life. But you have done more than that,--more than you know or can ever know. To you I owe it that I am living; with you I live henceforth, if I am to live at all. All I am, all I hope,--will you take this poor offering from one who owes you everything, whose lips never touched those of woman or breathed a word of love before you?"

What could Euthymia reply to this question, uttered with all the depth of a passion which had never before found expression.

Not one syllable of answer did listening Mrs. Butts overhear. But she told her husband afterwards that there was nothing in the tableaux they had had in September to compare with what she then saw. It was indeed a pleasing picture which those two young heads presented as Euthymia gave her inarticulate but infinitely expressive answer to the question of Maurice Kirkwood. The good-hearted woman thought it time to leave the young people. Down went the stocking with the needles in it; out of her lap tumbled the ball of worsted, rolling along the floor with its yarn trailing after it, like some village matron who goes about circulating from hearth to hearth, leaving all along her track the story of the new engagement or of the arrival of the last "little stranger."

Not many suns had set before it was told all through Arrowhead Village that Maurice Kirkwood was the accepted lover of Euthymia Tower.

POSTSCRIPT: AFTER-GLIMPSES.

MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD. ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, May 18.

MY DEAREST EUTHYMIA,--Who would have thought, when you broke your oar as the Atalanta flashed by the Algonquin, last June, that before the roses came again you would find yourself the wife of a fine scholar and grand gentleman, and the head of a household such as that of which you are the mistress? You must not forget your old Arrowhead Village friends. What am I saying?---you forget them! No, dearest, I know your heart too well for that! You are not one of those who lay aside their old friendships as they do last years bonnet when they get a new one. You have told me all about yourself and your happiness, and now you want me to tell you about myself and what is going on in our little place.

And first about myself. I have given up the idea of becoming a doctor. I have studied mathematics so much that I have grown fond of certainties, of demonstrations, and medicine deals chiefly in probabilities. The practice of the art is so mixed up with the deepest human interests that it is hard to pursue it with that even poise of the intellect which is demanded by science. I want knowledge pure and simple,--I do not fancy having it mixed. Neither do I like the thought of passing my life in going from one scene of suffering to another; I am not saintly enough for such a daily martyrdom, nor callous enough to make it an easy occupation. I fainted at the first operation I saw, and I have never wanted to see another. I don't say that I wouldn't marry a physician, if the right one asked me, but the young doctor is not forthcoming at present. Yes, I think I might make a pretty good doctor's wife. I could teach him a good deal about headaches and backaches and all sorts of nervous revolutions, as the doctor says the French women call their tantrums. I don't know but I should be willing to let him try his new medicines on me. If he were a homeopath, I know I should; for if a billionth of a grain of sugar won't begin to sweeten my tea or coffee, I don't feel afraid that a billionth of a grain of anything would poison me,--no, not if it were snake-venom; and if it were not disgusting, I would swallow a handful of his lachesis globules, to please my husband. But if I ever become a doctor's wife, my husband will not be one of that kind of practitioners, you may be sure of that, nor an "eclectic," nor a "faith-cure man." On the whole, I don't think I want to be married at all. I don't like the male animal very well (except such noble specimens as your husband). They are all tyrants,--almost all,--so far as our sex is concerned, and I often think we could get on better without them.

However, the creatures are useful in the Society. They send us papers, some of them well worth reading. You have told me so often that you would like to know how the Society is getting on, and to read some of the papers sent to it if they happened to be interesting, that I have laid aside one or two manuscripts expressly for your perusal. You will get them by and by.

I am delighted to know that you keep Paolo with you. Arrowhead Village misses him dreadfully, I can tell you. That is the reason people become so attached to these servants with Southern sunlight in their natures? I suppose life is not long enough to cool their blood down to our Northern standard. Then they are so child-like, whereas the native of these latitudes is never young after he is ten or twelve years old. Mother says,--you know mother's old-fashioned notions, and how shrewd and sensible she is in spite of them,--mother says that when she was a girl families used to import young men and young women from the country towns, who called themselves "helps," not servants,--no, that was Scriptural; "but they did n't know everything down in Judee," and it is not good American language. She says that these people would live in the same household until they were married, and the women often remain in the same service until they died or were old and worn out, and then, what with the money they had saved and the care and assistance they got from their former employers, would pass a decent and comfortable old age, and be buried in the family lot. Mother has made up her mind to the change, but grandmother is bitter about it. She says there never was a country yet where the population was made up of "ladies" and "gentlemen," and she does n't believe there can be; nor that putting a spread eagle on a copper makes a gold dollar of it. She is a pessimist after her own fashion. She thinks all sentiment is dying out of our people. No loyalty for the sovereign, the king-post of the political edifice, she says; no deep attachment between employer and employed; no reverence of the humbler members of a household for its heads; and to make sure of continued corruption and misery, what she calls "universal suffrage" emptying all the sewers into the great aqueduct we all must drink from. "Universal suffrage!" I suppose we women don't belong to the universe! Wait until we get a chance at the ballot-box, I tell grandma, and see if we don't wash out the sewers before they reach the aqueduct! But my pen has run away with men I was thinking of Paolo, and what a pleasant thing it is to have one of those child-like, warm-hearted, attachable, cheerful, contented, humble, faithful, companionable, but never presuming grownup children of the South waiting on one, as if everything he could do for one was a pleasure, and carrying a look of content in his face which makes every one who meets him happier for a glimpse of his features.

It does seem a shame that the charming relation of master and servant, intelligent authority and cheerful obedience, mutual interest in each other's welfare, thankful recognition of all the advantages which belong to domestic service in the better class of families, should be almost wholly confined to aliens and their immediate descendants. Why should Hannah think herself so much better than Bridget? When they meet at the polls together, as they will before long, they will begin to feel more of an equality than is recognized at present. The native female turns her nose up at the idea of "living out;" does she think herself so much superior to the women of other nationalities? Our women will have to come to it,--so grandmother says,--in another generation or two, and in a hundred years, according to her prophecy, there will be a new set of old "Miss Pollys" and "Miss Betseys" who have lived half a century in the same families, respectful and respected, cherished, cared for in time of need (citizens as well as servants, holding a ballot as well as a broom, I tell her), and bringing back to us the lowly, underfoot virtues of contentment and humility, which we do so need to carpet the barren and hungry thoroughfare of our unstratified existence.

There, I have got a-going, and am forgetting all the news I have to tell you. There is an engagement you will want to know all about. It came to pass through our famous boat-race, which you and I remember, and shall never forget as long as we live. It seems that the young fellow who pulled the bow oar of that men's college boat which we had the pleasure of beating got some glimpses of Georgina, our handsome stroke oar. I believe he took it into his head that it was she who threw the bouquet that won the race for us. He was, as you know, greatly mistaken, and ought to have made love to me, only he did n't. Well, it seems he came posting down to the Institute just before the vacation was over, and there got a sight of Georgina. I wonder whether she told him she didn't fling the bouquet! Anyhow, the acquaintance began in that way, and now it seems that this young fellow, good-looking and a bright scholar, but with a good many months more to pass in college, is her captive. It was too bad. Just think of my bouquet's going to another girl's credit! No matter, the old Atalanta story was paid off, at any rate.

You want to know all about dear Dr. Butts. They say he has just been offered a Professorship in one of the great medical colleges. I asked him about it, and he did not say that he had or had not. "But," said be, "suppose that I had been offered such a place; do you think I ought to accept it and leave Arrowhead Village? Let us talk it over," said he, "just as if I had had such an offer." I told him he ought to stay. There are plenty of men that can get into a Professor's chair, I said, and talk like Solomons to a class of wondering pupils: but once get a really good doctor in a place, a man who knows all about everybody, whether they have this or that tendency, whether when they are sick they have a way of dying or a way of getting well, what medicines agree with them and what drugs they cannot take, whether they are of the sort that think nothing is the matter with them until they are dead as smoked herring, or of the sort that send for the minister if they get a stomach-ache from eating too many cucumbers,--who knows all about all the people within half a dozen miles (all the sensible ones, that is, who employ a regular practitioner),--such a man as that, I say, is not to be replaced like a missing piece out of a Springfield musket or a Waltham watch. Don't go! said I. Stay here and save our precious lives, if you can, or at least put us through in the proper way, so that we needn't be ashamed of ourselves for dying, if we must die. Well, Dr. Butts is not going to leave us. I hope you will have no unwelcome occasion for his services,--you are never ill, you know,--but, anyhow, he is going to be here, and no matter what happens he will be on hand.

The village news is not of a very exciting character. Item 1. A new house is put up over the ashes of the one in which your husband lived while he was here. It was planned by one of the autochthonous inhabitants with the most ingenious combination of inconveniences that the natural man could educe from his original perversity of intellect. To get at any one room you must pass through every other. It is blind, or nearly so, on the only side which has a good prospect, and commands a fine view of the barn and pigsty through numerous windows. Item 2. We have a small fire-engine near the new house which can be worked by a man or two, and would be equal to the emergency of putting out a bunch of fire-crackers. Item 3. We have a new ladder, in a bog, close to the new fire-engine, so if the new house catches fire, like its predecessor, and there should happen to, be a sick man on an upper floor, he can be got out without running the risk of going up and down a burning staircase. What a blessed thing it was that there was no fire-engine near by and no ladder at hand on the day of the great rescue! If there had been, what a change in your programme of life! You remember that "cup of tea spilt on Mrs. Masham's apron," which we used to read of in one of Everett's Orations, and all its wide-reaching consequences in the affairs of Europe. I hunted up that cup of tea as diligently as ever a Boston matron sought for the last leaves in her old caddy after the tea-chests had been flung overboard at Griffin's wharf,--but no matter about that, now. That is the way things come about in this world. I must write a lecture on lucky mishaps, or, more elegantly, fortunate calamities. It will be just the converse of that odd essay of Swift's we read together, the awkward and stupid things done with the best intentions. Perhaps I shall deliver the lecture in your city: you will come and hear it, and bring him, won't you, dearest? Always, your loving

LURIDA.

MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.

It seems forever since you left us, dearest Euthymia! And are you, and is your husband, and Paolo,--good Paolo,--are you all as well and happy as you have been and as you ought to be? I suppose our small village seems a very quiet sort of place to pass the winter in, now that you have become accustomed to the noise and gayety of a great city. For all that, it is a pretty busy place this winter, I can tell you. We have sleighing parties,--I never go to them, myself, because I can't keep warm, and my mind freezes up when my blood cools down below 95 or 96 deg. Fahrenheit. I had a great deal rather sit by a good fire and read about Arctic discoveries. But I like very well to hear the bells' jingling and to see the young people trying to have a good time as hard as they do at a picnic. It may be that they do, but to me a picnic is purgatory and a sleigh-ride that other place, where, as my favorite Milton says, "frost performs the effect of fire." I believe I have quoted him correctly; I ought to, for I could repeat half his poems from memory once, if I cannot now.

You must have plenty of excitement in your city life. I suppose you recognized yourself in one of the society columns of the "Household Inquisitor:" "Mrs. E. K., very beautiful, in an elegant," etc., etc, "with pearls," etc., etc.,--as if you were not the ornament of all that you wear, no matter what it is!

I am so glad that you have married a scholar! Why should not Maurice--you both tell me to call him so--take the diplomatic office which has been offered him? It seems to me that he would find himself in exactly the right place. He can talk in two or three languages, has good manners, and a wife who--well, what shall I say of Mrs. Kirkwood but that "she would be good company for a queen," as our old friend the quondam landlady of the Anchor Tavern used to say? I should so like to see you presented at Court! It seems to me that I should be willing to hold your train for the sake of seeing you in your court feathers and things.

As for myself, I have been thinking of late that I would become either a professional lecturer or head mistress of a great school or college for girls. I have tried the first business a little. Last month I delivered a lecture on Quaternions. I got three for my audience; two came over from the Institute, and one from that men's college which they try to make out to be a university, and where no female is admitted unless she belongs among the quadrupeds. I enjoyed lecturing, but the subject is a difficult one, and I don't think any one of them had any very clear notion of what I was talking about, except Rhodora,--and I know she did n't. To tell the truth, I was lecturing to instruct myself. I mean to try something easier next time. I have thought of the Basque language and literature. What do you say to that?

The Society goes on famously. We have had a paper presented and read lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor "poets," as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have taken to sending him their rhymed productions to be criticised,--expecting to be praised, no doubt, every one of them. I must give you one of the sauciest extracts from his paper in his own words:

"It takes half my time to read the 'poems' sent me by young people of both sexes. They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness, and the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence of ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority. Of course there are exceptions to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the presumption is always against the rhymester as compared with the less pretentious persons about him or her, busy with some useful calling,--too busy to be tagging rhymed commonplaces together. Just now there seems to be an epidemic of rhyming as bad as the dancing mania, or the sweating sickness. After reading a certain amount of manuscript verse one is disposed to anathematize the inventor of homophonous syllabification. [This phrase made a great laugh when it was read.] This, that is rhyming, must have been found out very early,

"'Where are you, Adam?'

"'Here am I, Madam;'

"but it can never have been habitually practised until after the Fall. The intrusion of tintinnabulating terminations into the conversational intercourse of men and angels would have spoiled Paradise itself. Milton would not have them even in Paradise Lost, you remember. For my own part, I wish certain rhymes could be declared contraband of written or printed language. Nothing should be allowed to be hurled at the world or whirled with it, or furled upon it or curled over it; all eyes should be kept away from the skies, in spite of os homini sublime dedit; youth should be coupled with all the virtues except truth; earth should never be reminded of her birth; death should never be allowed to stop a mortal's breath, nor the bell to sound his knell, nor flowers from blossoming bowers to wave over his grave or show their bloom upon his tomb. We have rhyming dictionaries,--let us have one from which all rhymes are rigorously excluded. The sight of a poor creature grubbing for rhymes to fill up his sonnet, or to cram one of those voracious, rhyme-swallowing rigmaroles which some of our drudging poetical operatives have been exhausting themselves of late to satiate with jingles, makes my head ache and my stomach rebel. Work, work of some kind, is the business of men and women, not the making of jingles! No,--no,--no! I want to see the young people in our schools and academies and colleges, and the graduates of these institutions, lifted up out of the little Dismal Swamp of self-contemplating and self-indulging and self-commiserating emotionalism which is surfeiting the land with those literary sandwiches,--thin slices of tinkling sentimentality between two covers looking like hard-baked gilt gingerbread. But what faces these young folks make up at my good advice! They get tipsy on their rhymes. Nothing intoxicates one like his--or her--own verses, and they hold on to their metre-ballad-mongering as the fellows that inhale nitrous oxide hold on to the gas-bag."

We laughed over this essay of the old Professor; though it hit us pretty hard. The best part of the joke is that the old man himself published a thin volume of poems when he was young, which there is good reason to think he is not very proud of, as they say he buys up all the copies he can find in the shops. No matter what they say, I can't help agreeing with him about this great flood of "poetry," as it calls itself, and looking at the rhyming mania much as he does.

How I do love real poetry! That is the reason hate rhymes which have not a particle of it in them. The foolish scribblers that deal in them are like bad workmen in a carpenter's shop. They not only turn out bad jobs of work, but they spoil the tools for better workmen. There is hardly a pair of rhymes in the English language that is not so dulled and hacked and gapped by these 'prentice hands that a master of the craft hates to touch them, and yet he cannot very well do without them. I have not been besieged as the old Professor has been with such multitudes of would-be-poetical aspirants that he could not even read their manuscripts, but I have had a good many letters containing verses, and I have warned the writers of the delusion under which they were laboring.

You may like to know that I have just been translating some extracts from the Greek Anthology. I send you a few specimens of my work, with a Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I hope you will find something of the Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught a spark of inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian. I have found great delight in this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as when I read from my manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into which I have transferred the thought of the men and women of two thousand years ago, or given rhythmical expression to my own rapturous feelings with regard to them. I must read you my Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I cannot help thinking that you will like it better than either of my last two, The Song of the Roses, or The Wail of the Weeds.

How I do miss you, dearest! I want you: I want you to listen to what I have written; I want you to hear all about my plans for the future; I want to look at you, and think how grand it must be to feel one's self to be such a noble and beautiful-creature; I want to wander in the woods with you, to float on the lake, to share your life and talk over every day's doings with you. Alas! I feel that we have parted as two friends part at a port of embarkation: they embrace, they kiss each other's cheeks, they cover their faces and weep, they try to speak good-by to each other, they watch from the pier and from the deck; the two forms grow less and less, fainter and fainter in the distance, two white handkerchiefs flutter once and again, and yet once more, and the last visible link of the chain which binds them has parted. Dear, dear, dearest Euthymia, my eyes are running over with tears when I think that we may never, never meet again.

Don't you want some more items of village news? We are threatened with an influx of stylish people: "Buttons" to answer the door-bell, in place of the chamber-maid; "butler," in place of the "hired man;" footman in top-boots and breeches, cockade on hat, arms folded a la Napoleon; tandems, "drags," dogcarts, and go-carts of all sorts. It is rather amusing to look at their ambitious displays, but it takes away the good old country flavor of the place.

I don't believe you mean to try to astonish us when you come back to spend your summers here. I suppose you must have a large house, and I am sure you will have a beautiful one. I suppose you will have some fine horses, and who would n't be glad to? But I do not believe you will try to make your old Arrowhead Village friends stare their eyes out of their heads with a display meant to outshine everybody else that comes here. You can have a yacht on the lake, if you like, but I hope you will pull a pair of oars in our old boat once in a while, with me to steer you. I know you will be just the same dear-Euthymia you always were and always must be. How happy you must make such a man as Maurice Kirkwood! And how happy you ought to be with him!--a man who knows what is in books, and who has seen for himself, what is in men. If he has not seen so much of women, where could he study all that is best in womanhood as he can in his own wife? Only one thing that dear Euthymia lacks. She is not quite pronounced enough in her views as to the rights and the wrongs of the sex. When I visit you, as you say I shall, I mean to indoctrinate Maurice with sound views on that subject. I have written an essay for the Society, which I hope will go a good way towards answering all the objections to female suffrage. I mean to read it to your husband, if you will let me, as I know you will, and perhaps you would like to hear it,--only you know my thoughts on the subject pretty well already.

With all sorts of kind messages to your dear husband, and love to your precious self, I am ever your LURIDA.

DR. BUTTS TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.

MY DEAR EUTHYMIA,--My pen refuses to call you by any other name. Sweet-souled you are, and your Latinized Greek name is--the one which truly designates you. I cannot tell you how we have followed you, with what interest and delight through your travels, as you have told their story in your letters to your mother. She has let us have the privilege of reading them, and we have been with you in steamer, yacht, felucca, gondola, Nile-boat; in all sorts of places, from crowded capitals to "deserts where no men abide,"--everywhere keeping company with you in your natural and pleasant descriptions of your experiences. And now that you have returned to your home in the great city I must write you a few lines of welcome, if nothing more.

You will find Arrowhead Village a good deal changed since you left it. We are discovered by some of those over-rich people who make the little place upon which they swarm a kind of rural city. When this happens the consequences are striking,--some of them desirable and some far otherwise. The effect of well-built, well-furnished, well-kept houses and of handsome grounds always maintained in good order about them shows itself in a large circuit around the fashionable centre. Houses get on a new coat of paint, fences are kept in better order, little plots of flowers show themselves where only ragged weeds had rioted, the inhabitants present themselves in more comely attire and drive in handsomer vehicles with more carefully groomed horses. On the other hand, there is a natural jealousy on the part of the natives of the region suddenly become fashionable. They have seen the land they sold at farm prices by the acre coming to be valued by the foot, like the corner lots in a city. Their simple and humble modes of life look almost poverty-stricken in the glare of wealth and luxury which so outshines their plain way of living. It is true that many of them have found them selves richer than in former days, when the neighborhood lived on its own resources. They know how to avail themselves of their altered position, and soon learn to charge city prices for country products; but nothing can make people feel rich who see themselves surrounded by men whose yearly income is many times their own whole capital. I think it would be better if our rich men scattered themselves more than they do,--buying large country estates, building houses and stables which will make it easy to entertain their friends, and depending for society on chosen guests rather than on the mob of millionaires who come together for social rivalry. But I do not fret myself about it. Society will stratify itself according to the laws of social gravitation. It will take a generation or two more, perhaps, to arrange the strata by precipitation and settlement, but we can always depend on one principle to govern the arrangement of the layers. People interested in the same things will naturally come together. The youthful heirs of fortunes who keep splendid yachts have little to talk about with the oarsman who pulls about on the lake or the river. What does young Dives, who drives his four-in-hand and keeps a stable full of horses, care about Lazarus, who feels rich in the possession of a horse-railroad ticket? You know how we live at our house, plainly, but with a certain degree of cultivated propriety. We make no pretensions to what is called "style." We are still in that social stratum where the article called "a napkin-ring" is recognized as admissible at the dinner-table. That fact sufficiently defines our modest pretensions. The napkin-ring is the boundary mark between certain classes. But one evening Mrs. Butts and I went out to a party given by the lady of a worthy family, where the napkin itself was a newly introduced luxury. The conversation of the hostess and her guests turned upon details of the kitchen and the laundry; upon the best mode of raising bread, whether with "emptins" (emptyings, yeast) or baking powder; about "bluing" and starching and crimping, and similar matters. Poor Mrs. Butts! She knew nothing more about such things than her hostess did about Shakespeare and the musical glasses. What was the use of trying to enforce social intercourse under such conditions? Incompatibility of temper has been considered ground for a divorce; incompatibility of interests is a sufficient warrant for social separation. The multimillionaires have so much that is common among themselves, and so little that they share with us of moderate means, that they will naturally form a specialized class, and in virtue of their palaces, their picture-galleries, their equipages, their yachts, their large hospitality, constitute a kind of exclusive aristocracy. Religion, which ought to be the great leveller, cannot reduce these elements to the same grade. You may read in the parable, "Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?" The modern version would be, "How came you at Mrs. Billion's ball not having a dress on your back which came from Paris?"

The little church has got a new stained window, a saint who reminds me of Hamlet's uncle,--a thing "of shreds and patches," but rather pretty to look at, with an inscription under it which is supposed to be the name of the person in whose honor the window was placed in the church. Smith was a worthy man and a faithful churchwarden, and I hope posterity will be able to spell out his name on his monumental window; but that old English lettering would puzzle Mephistopheles himself, if he found himself before this memorial tribute, on the inside,--you know he goes to church sometimes, if you remember your Faust.

The rector has come out, in a quiet way, as an evolutionist. He has always been rather "broad" in his views, but cautious in their expression. You can tell the three branches of the mother-island church by the way they carry their heads. The low-church clergy look down, as if they felt themselves to be worms of the dust; the high-church priest drops his head on one side, after the pattern of the mediaeval saints; the broad-church preacher looks forward and round about him, as if he felt himself the heir of creation. Our rector carries his head in the broad-church aspect, which I suppose is the least open to the charge of affectation,--in fact, is the natural and manly way of carrying it.

The Society has justified its name of Pansophian of late as never before. Lurida has stirred up our little community and its neighbors, so that we get essays on all sorts of subjects, poems and stories in large numbers. I know all about it, for she often consults me as to the merits of a particular contribution.

What is to be the fate of Lurida? I often think, with no little interest and some degree of anxiety, about her future. Her body is so frail and her mind so excessively and constantly active that I am afraid one or the other will give way. I do not suppose she thinks seriously of ever being married. She grows more and more zealous in behalf of her own sex, and sterner in her judgment of the other. She declares that she never would marry any man who was not an advocate of female suffrage, and as these gentlemen are not very common hereabouts the chance is against her capturing any one of the hostile sex.

What do you think? I happened, just as I was writing the last sentence, to look out of my window, and whom should I see but Lurida, with a young man in tow, listening very eagerly to her conversation, according to all appearance! I think he must be a friend of the rector, as I have seen a young man like this one in his company. Who knows?

Affectionately yours, etc.

DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS.

MY BELOVED WIFE,--This letter will tell you more news than you would have thought could have been got together in this little village during the short time you have been staying away from it.

Lurida Vincent is engaged! He is a clergyman with a mathematical turn. The story is that he put a difficult problem into one of the mathematical journals, and that Lurida presented such a neat solution that the young man fell in love with her on the strength of it. I don't think the story is literally true, nor do I believe that other report that he offered himself to her in the form of an equation chalked on the blackboard; but that it was an intellectual rather than a sentimental courtship I do not doubt. Lurida has given up the idea of becoming a professional lecturer,--so she tells me,--thinking that her future husband's parish will find her work enough to do. A certain amount of daily domestic drudgery and unexciting intercourse with simple-minded people will be the best thing in the world for that brain of hers, always simmering with some new project in its least fervid condition.

All our summer visitors have arrived. Euthymia Mrs. Maurice Kirkwood and her husband and little Maurice are here in their beautiful house looking out on the lake. They gave a grand party the other evening. You ought to have been there, but I suppose you could not very well have left your sister in the middle of your visit: All the grand folks were there, of course. Lurida and her young man--Gabriel is what she calls him--were naturally the objects of special attention. Paolo acted as major-domo, and looked as if he ought to be a major-general. Nothing could be pleasanter than the way in which Mr. and Mrs. Kirkwood received their plain country neighbors; that is, just as they did the others of more pretensions, as if they were really glad to see them, as I am sure they were. The old landlord and his wife had two arm-chairs to themselves, and I saw Miranda with the servants of the household looking in at the dancers and out at the little groups in the garden, and evidently enjoying it as much as her old employers. It was a most charming and successful party. We had two sensations in the course of the evening. One was pleasant and somewhat exciting, the other was thrilling and of strange and startling interest.

You remember how emaciated poor Maurice Kirkwood was left after his fever, in that first season when he was among us. He was out in a boat one day, when a ring slipped off his thin finger and sunk in a place where the water was rather shallow. "Jake"--you know Jake,--everybody knows Jake--was rowing him. He promised to come to the spot and fish up the ring if he could possibly find it. He was seen poking about with fish-hooks at the end of a pole, but nothing was ever heard from him about the ring. It was an antique intaglio stone in an Etruscan setting,--a wild goose flying over the Campagna. Mr. Kirkwood valued it highly, and regretted its loss very much.

While we were in the garden, who should appear at the gate but Jake, with a great basket, inquiring for Mr. Kirkwood. "Come," said Maurice to me, "let us see what our old friend the fisherman has brought us. What have you got there, Jake?"

"What I 've got? Wall, I 'll tell y' what I've got: I 've got the biggest pickerel that's been ketched in this pond for these ten year. An' I 've got somethin' else besides the pickerel. When I come to cut him open, what do you think I faound in his insides but this here ring o' yourn,"--and he showed the one Maurice had lost so long before. There it was, as good as new, after having tried Jonah's style of housekeeping for all that time. There are those who discredit Jake's story about finding the ring in the fish; anyhow, there was the ring and there was the pickerel. I need not say that Jake went off well paid for his pickerel and the precious contents of its stomach. Now comes the chief event of the evening. I went early by special invitation. Maurice took me into his library, and we sat down together.

"I have something of great importance," he said, "to say to you. I learned within a few days that my cousin Laura is staying with a friend in the next town to this. You know, doctor, that we have never met since the last, almost fatal, experience of my early years. I have determined to defy the strength of that deadly chain of associations connected with her presence, and I have begged her to come this evening with the friends with whom she is staying. Several letters passed between us, for it was hard to persuade her that there was no longer any risk in my meeting her. Her imagination was almost as deeply impressed as mine had been at those alarming interviews, and I had to explain to her fully that I had become quite indifferent to the disturbing impressions of former years. So, as the result of our correspondence, Laura is coming this evening, and I wish you to be present at our meeting. There is another reason why I wish you to be here. My little boy is not far from the--age at which I received my terrifying, almost disorganizing shock. I mean to have little Maurice brought into the presence of Laura, who is said to be still a very handsome woman, and see if he betrays any hint of that peculiar sensitiveness which showed itself in my threatening seizure. It seemed to me not impossible that he might inherit some tendency of that nature, and I wanted you to be at hand if any sign of danger should declare itself. For myself I have no fear. Some radical change has taken place in my nervous system. I have been born again, as it were, in my susceptibilities, and am in certain respects a new man. But I must know how it is with my little Maurice."

Imagine with what interest I looked forward to this experiment; for experiment it was, and not without its sources of anxiety, as it seemed to me. The evening wore along; friends and neighbors came in, but no Laura as yet. At last I heard the sound of wheels, and a carriage stopped at the door. Two ladies and a gentleman got out, and soon entered the drawing room.

"My cousin Laura!" whispered Maurice to me, and went forward to meet her. A very handsome woman, who might well have been in the thirties,--one of those women so thoroughly constituted that they cannot help being handsome at every period of life. I watched them both as they approached each other. Both looked pale at first, but Maurice soon recovered his usual color, and Laura's natural, rich bloom came back by degrees. Their emotion at meeting was not to be wondered at, but there was no trace in it of the paralyzing influence on the great centres of life which had once acted upon its fated victim like the fabled head which turned the looker-on into a stone.

"Is the boy still awake?" said Maurice to Paolo, who, as they used to say of Pushee at the old Anchor Tavern, was everywhere at once on that gay and busy evening.

"What! Mahser Maurice asleep an' all this racket going on? I hear him crowing like young cockerel when he fus' smell daylight."

"Tell the nurse to bring him down quietly to the little room that leads out of the library."

The child was brought down in his night-clothes, wide awake, wondering apparently at the noise he heard, which he seemed to think was for his special amusement.

"See if he will go to that lady," said his father. Both of us held our breath as Laura stretched her arms towards little Maurice.

The child looked for an instant searchingly, but fearlessly, at her glowing cheeks, her bright eyes, her welcoming smile, and met her embrace as she clasped him to her bosom as if he had known her all his days.

The mortal antipathy had died out of the soul and the blood of Maurice Kirkwood at that supreme moment when he found himself snatched from the grasp of death and cradled in the arms of Euthymia.

--------------------------

In closing the New Portfolio I remember that it began with a prefix which the reader may by this time have forgotten, namely, the First Opening. It was perhaps presumptuous to thus imply the probability of a second opening.

I am reminded from time to time by the correspondents who ask a certain small favor of me that, as I can only expect to be with my surviving contemporaries a very little while longer, they would be much obliged if I would hurry up my answer before it is too late. They are right, these delicious unknown friends of mine, in reminding me of a fact which I cannot gainsay and might suffer to pass from my recollection. I thank them for recalling my attention to a truth which I shall be wiser, if not more hilarious, for remembering.

No, I had no right to say the First Opening. How do I know that I shall have a chance to open it again? How do I know that anybody will want it to be opened a second time? How do I know that I shall feel like opening it? It is safest neither to promise to open the New Portfolio once more, nor yet to pledge myself to keep it closed hereafter. There are many papers potentially existent in it, some of which might interest a reader here and there. The Records of the Pansophian Society contain a considerable number of essays, poems, stories, and hints capable of being expanded into presentable dimensions. In the mean time I will say with Prospero, addressing my old readers, and my new ones, if such I have,

"If you be pleased, retire into my cell And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk, To still my beating mind."

When it has got quiet I may take up the New Portfolio again, and consider whether it is worth while to open it consider whether it is worth while to open it.

PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

CONTENTS: BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN" THE INEVITABLE TRIAL CINDERS FROM ASHES THE PULPIT AND THE PEW

BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.

(September, 1861.)

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace. It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs. They must have something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have something to eat, and the papers to read.

Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to Europe sine die. If we live in a small way, there are at least new dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with. If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform, its respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a caraway-umbel late in the season. He will cheerfully calm the perturbed nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying a new one, if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only bread and the newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely repulsive.

All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many among us. We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency with which diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the terrible emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. Laennec tells the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director, where all the nuns were subjected to the severest penances and schooled in the most painful doctrines. They all became consumptive soon after their entrance, so that, in the course of his ten years' attendance, all the inmates died out two or three times, and were replaced by new ones. He does not hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suffered to those depressing moral influences to which they were subjected.

So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants. Take the first trifling example which comes to our recollection. A sad disaster to the Federal army was told the other day in the presence of two gentlemen and a lady. Both the gentlemen complained of a sudden feeling at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit of the stomach, changed color, and confessed to a slight tremor about the knees. The lady had a "grande revolution," as French patients say,--went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile at the mention of such trivial indispositions, but in more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from no more serious cause. An old, gentleman fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba. One of our early friends, who recently died of the same complaint, was thought to have had his attack mainly in consequence of the excitements of the time.

We all know what the war fever is in our young men,--what a devouring passion it becomes in those whom it assails. Patriotism is the fire of it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which we often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the most ardent of our soldiers. But something of the same fever in a different form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or their families. Some of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They stroll up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light of the terrible present. Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time that we had closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth century any more than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over? Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the noon extra,--he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin-board, and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years. This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we cannot at first think what,--and then groping our way about through the twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is, after all, only a dream,--if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed grief is unreal. This attempt to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in the dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for their especial use.

Watch one of them. He does not feel quite well,--at least, he suspects himself of indisposition. Nothing serious,--let us just rub our fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us rubs his hands, and all will be right. He rubs them with that peculiar twisting movement of his, and pauses for the effect. No! all is not quite right yet. Ah! it is our head that is not set on just as it ought to be. Let us settle that where it should be, and then we shall certainly be in good trim again. So he pulls his head about as an old lady adjusts her cap, and passes his fore-paw over it like a kitten washing herself. Poor fellow! It is not a fancy, but a fact, that he has to deal with. If he could read the letters at the head of the sheet, he would see they were Fly-Paper.--So with us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we dream! Perhaps very young persons may not understand this; as we grow older, our waking and dreaming life run more and more into each other.

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of old habits. The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us in company, it will not stand on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of Americans. Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers the Revolution well. How should she forget it? Did she not lose her doll, which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston, about that time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls dropping in from the neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of which see the tower of Brattle Street Church at this very day? War in her memory means '76. As for the brush of 1812, "we did not think much about that"; and everybody knows that the Mexican business did not concern us much, except in its political relations. No! war is a new thing to all of us who are not in the last quarter of their century. We are learning many strange matters from our fresh experience. And besides, there are new conditions of existence which make war as it is with us very different from war as it has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body. The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another. What was the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th of April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of instantaneous action, keeps us always alive with excitement. It is not a breathless courier who comes back with the report from an army we have lost sight of for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells us all we are to know for a week of some great engagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden with truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us restless always for the last fact or rumor they are telling. And so of the movements of our armies. To-night the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under their own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours they are among the tobacco-fields and the slave-pens of Virginia. The war passion burned like scattered coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times; now it rushes all through the land like a flame over the prairie. And this instant diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another singular effect in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We may not be able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a week afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would have been in a whole season before our national nervous system was organized.

"As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea, Thou only teachest all that man can be!"

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that Society.

Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind, we have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,--especially when one of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to build and keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop would give us a new professor. Now we begin to think that there was some meaning in our poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing else could, what we can be and are. It has exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and driven us all back upon our substantial human qualities, for a long time more or less kept out of sight by the spirit of commerce, the love of art, science, or literature, or other qualities not belonging to all of us as men and women.

It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than the preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do. We are finding out that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism is gentility. All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery. The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crecy and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.

Even our poor "Brahmins,"--whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the, "bloated aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an aptitude for learning,--even these poor New England Brahmins of ours, subvirates of an organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if their courage is big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely about their slender figures.

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under our windows. A few days afterwards a field piece was dragged to the water's edge, and fired many times over the river. We asked a bystander, who looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to "break the gall," he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface. A strange physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is not our present point. A good many extraordinary objects do really come to the surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as when they roared over Charleston harbor.

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary times had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern people as the English in the last centuries used to talk about the French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be remembered, called one Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English, again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,--forgetting that Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold, and Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of forging iron. These persons have learned better now. The bravery of our free working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not drowned. The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had only to change their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as ready to conquer the masses of living force opposed to them as they had been to build towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer brute matter into every shape civilization can ask for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in new shapes,--that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our bones and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Brave Winthrop, marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a little startled to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of the Eighth Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-ninth, to show us that continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief. When the masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in his heart that God takes better care of him than of his "Congregationalist" Colonel? Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, and the Homoousians translated from the battle-field to the abodes of everlasting woe? War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not be. He must not be a bigot and a fool in the presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls to battle, and where a man should have but two thoughts: to do his duty, and trust his Maker. Let our brave dead come back from the fields where they have fallen for law and liberty, and if you will follow them to their graves, you will find out what the Broad Church means; the narrow church is sparing of its exclusive formulae over the coffins wrapped in the flag which the fallen heroes had defended! Very little comparatively do we hear at such times of the dogmas on which men differ; very much of the faith and trust in which all sincere Christians can agree. It is a noble lesson, and nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach it so that it shall be heard over all the angry cries of theological disputants.

Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity of our friends, and to get at their principles of judgment. Perhaps most, of us, will agree that our faith in domestic prophets has been diminished by the experience of the last six months. We had the notable predictions attributed to the Secretary of State, which so unpleasantly refused to fulfil themselves. We were infested at one time with a set of ominous-looking seers, who shook their heads and muttered obscurely about some mighty preparations that were making to substitute the rule of the minority for that of the majority. Organizations were darkly hinted at; some thought our armories would be seized; and there are not wanting ancient women in the neighboring University town who consider that the country was saved by the intrepid band of students who stood guard, night after night, over the G. R. cannon and the pile of balls in the Cambridge Arsenal.

As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best prophecies are those which the sages remember after the event prophesied of has come to pass, and remind us that they have made long ago. Those who, are rash enough to predict publicly beforehand commonly give us what they hope, or what they fear, or some conclusion from an abstraction of their own, or some guess founded on private information not half so good as what everybody gets who reads the papers,--never by any possibility a word that we can depend on, simply because there are cobwebs of contingency between every to-day and to-morrow that no field-glass can penetrate when fifty of them lie woven one over another. Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge. Say that you think the rebels are weaker than is commonly supposed, but, on the other hand, that they may prove to be even stronger than is anticipated. Say what you like,--only don't be too peremptory and dogmatic; we know that wiser men than you have been notoriously deceived in their predictions in this very matter.

Ibis et redibis nunquam in bello peribis.

Let that be your model; and remember, on peril of your reputation as a prophet, not to put a stop before or after the nunquam.

There are two or three facts connected with time, besides that already referred to, which strike us very forcibly in their relation to the great events passing around us. We spoke of the long period seeming to have elapsed since this war began. The buds were then swelling which held the leaves that are still green. It seems as old as Time himself. We cannot fail to observe how the mind brings together the scenes of to-day and those of the old Revolution. We shut up eighty years into each other like the joints of a pocket-telescope. When the young men from Middlesex dropped in Baltimore the other day, it seemed to bring Lexington and the other Nineteenth of April close to us. War has always been the mint in which the world's history has been coined, and now every day or week or month has a new medal for us. It was Warren that the first impression bore in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face hardly seems fresher than the old. All battle-fields are alike in their main features. The young fellows who fell in our earlier struggle seemed like old men to us until within these few months; now we remember they were like these fiery youth we are cheering as they go to the fight; it seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside was crimsoned but yesterday, and the cannon-ball imbedded in the church-tower would feel warm, if we laid our hand upon it.

Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled, are but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon the field of conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is always a right against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour may go, a movement onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to serve its mighty ends. The very implements of our warfare change less than we think. Our bullets and cannonballs have lengthened into bolts like those which whistled out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with weapons, such as are pictured on the walls of Theban tombs, wearing a newly invented head-gear as old as the days of the Pyramids.

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our narrowness, our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame. Better, because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by the time, and our people are rising to the standard the time calls for. For this is the question the hour is putting to each of us: Are you ready, if need be, to sacrifice all that you have and hope for in this world, that the generations to follow you may inherit a whole country whose natural condition shall be peace, and not a broken province which must live under the perpetual threat, if not in the constant presence, of war and all that war brings with it? If we are all ready for this sacrifice, battles may be lost, but the campaign and its grand object must be won.

Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals. We are not abruptly asked to give up all that we most care for, in view of the momentous issues before us. Perhaps we shall never be asked to give up all, but we have already been called upon to part with much that is dear to us, and should be ready to yield the rest as it is called for. The time may come when even the cheap public print shall be a burden our means cannot support, and we can only listen in the square that was once the marketplace to the voices of those who proclaim defeat or victory. Then there will be only our daily food left. When we have nothing to read and nothing to eat, it will be a favorable moment to offer a compromise. At present we have all that nature absolutely demands,--we can live on bread and the newspaper.

MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN."

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam, my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud summons of a telegraphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day with rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might bring.

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted. I took the envelope from his hand, opened it, and read:

HAGERSTOWN 17th

To__________ H ______

Capt H______ wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at Keedysville WILLIAM G. LEDUC

Through the neck,--no bullet left in wound. Windpipe, food-pipe, carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable vessels, a great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord,--ought to kill at once, if at all. Thought not mortal, or not thought mortal,--which was it? The first; that is better than the second would be.--"Keedysville, a post-office, Washington Co., Maryland." Leduc? Leduc? Don't remember that name. The boy is waiting for his money. A dollar and thirteen cents. Has nobody got thirteen cents? Don't keep that boy waiting,--how do we know what messages he has got to carry?

The boy had another message to carry. It was to the father of Lieutenant-Colonel Wilder Dwight, informing him that his son was grievously wounded in the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough, a town a few miles this side of Keedysville. This I learned the next morning from the civil and attentive officials at the Central Telegraph Office.

Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant to leave in the quarter past two o'clock train, taking with him Dr. George H. Gay, an accomplished and energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question or pressing emergency. I agreed to accompany them, and we met in the cars. I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in having companions whose society would be a pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my own, and whose assistance I might, in case of need, be glad to claim.

It is of the journey which we began together, and which I finished apart, that I mean to give my "Atlantic" readers an account. They must let me tell my story in my own way, speaking of many little matters that interested or amused me, and which a certain leisurely class of elderly persons, who sit at their firesides and never travel, will, I hope, follow with a kind of interest. For, besides the main object of my excursion, I could not help being excited by the incidental sights and occurrences of a trip which to a commercial traveller or a newspaper-reporter would seem quite commonplace and undeserving of record. There are periods in which all places and people seem to be in a conspiracy to impress us with their individuality, in which every ordinary locality seems to assume a special significance and to claim a particular notice, in which every person we meet is either an old acquaintance or a character; days in which the strangest coincidences are continually happening, so that they get to be the rule, and not the exception. Some might naturally think that anxiety and the weariness of a prolonged search after a near relative would have prevented my taking any interest in or paying any regard to the little matters around me. Perhaps it had just the contrary effect, and acted like a diffused stimulus upon the attention. When all the faculties are wide-awake in pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing emotion, they are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous story where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.

Be that as it may,--though I set out with a full and heavy heart, though many times my blood chilled with what were perhaps needless and unwise fears, though I broke through all my habits without thinking about them, which is almost as hard in certain circumstances as for one of our young fellows to leave his sweetheart and go into a Peninsular campaign, though I did not always know when I was hungry nor discover that I was thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth that I did look out of the car-windows with an eye for all that passed, that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that I did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time even laugh very much as others do who are attacked with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars. A communicative friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a railroad journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in itself agreeable. "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto. Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous experiment,--fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,--all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,--many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of fresh juices. My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety in what we know as sea-sickness. Where the horizon opened widely, it pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones. Looking from a right-hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not only do not appear to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at hand as if they were moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole landscape becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied them. We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated. The traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience of Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found "his warmest welcome at an inn," has something to learn at the offices of the great city hotels. The unheralded guest who is honored by mere indifference may think himself blessed with singular good-fortune. If the despot of the Patent-Annunciator is only mildly contemptuous in his manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal favor. The coldest welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the door of a bishop's palace, the most icy reception that a country cousin ever received at the city mansion of a mushroom millionaire, is agreeably tepid, compared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the more or less elevated circle of his inverted Inferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your name on his dog's-eared register. I have less hesitation in unburdening myself of this uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met with more than one exception to the rule. Officials become brutalized, I suppose, as a matter of course. One cannot expect an office clerk to embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message he receives for transmission. Still, humanity is not always totally extinguished in these persons. I discovered a youth in a telegraph office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will not made.

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars with sliding panels and fixed windows, so that in summer the whole side of the car maybe made transparent. New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a State. Its dull red dust looks like the dried and powdered mud of a battle-field. Peach-trees are common, and champagne-orchards. Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by, feeling their way along like blind men led by dogs. I had a mighty passion come over me to be the captain of one,--to glide back and forward upon a sea never roughened by storms,--to float where I could not sink,--to navigate where there is no shipwreck,--to lie languidly on the deck and govern the huge craft by a word or the movement of a finger: there was something of railroad intoxication in the fancy: but who has not often envied a cobbler in his stall?

The boys cry the "N'-York Heddle," instead of "Herald"; I remember that years ago in Philadelphia; we must be getting near the farther end of the dumb-bell suburb. A bridge has been swept away by a rise of the waters, so we must approach Philadelphia by the river. Her physiognomy is not distinguished; nez camus, as a Frenchman would say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like the walls of a hock-glass.

I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would be heard of, if anywhere in this region. His lieutenant-colonel was there, gravely wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a son of the house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier, brother of the last, was there, prostrate with fever. A fourth bed was waiting ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of him, though inquiries had been made in the towns from and through which the father had brought his two sons and the lieutenant-colonel. And so my search is, like a "Ledger" story, to be continued.

I rejoined my companions in time to take the noon-train for Baltimore. Our company was gaining in number as it moved onwards. We had found upon the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the wife of one of our most spirited Massachusetts officers, the brave Colonel of the __th Regiment, going to seek her wounded husband at Middletown, a place lying directly in our track. She was the light of our party while we were together on our pilgrimage, a fair, gracious woman, gentle, but courageous,

---"ful plesant and amiable of port, ---estatelich of manere, And to ben holden digne of reverence."

On the road from Philadelphia, I found in the same car with our party Dr. William Hunt of Philadelphia, who had most kindly and faithfully attended the Captain, then the Lieutenant, after a wound received at Ball's Bluff, which came very near being mortal. He was going upon an errand of mercy to the wounded, and found he had in his memorandum-book the name of our lady's husband, the Colonel, who had been commended to his particular attention.

Not long after leaving Philadelphia, we passed a solitary sentry keeping guard over a short railroad bridge. It was the first evidence that we were approaching the perilous borders, the marches where the North and the South mingle their angry hosts, where the extremes of our so-called civilization meet in conflict, and the fierce slave-driver of the Lower Mississippi stares into the stern eyes of the forest-feller from the banks of the Aroostook. All the way along, the bridges were guarded more or less strongly. In a vast country like ours, communications play a far more complex part than in Europe, where the whole territory available for strategic purposes is so comparatively limited. Belgium, for instance, has long been the bowling-alley where kings roll cannon-balls at each other's armies; but here we are playing the game of live ninepins without any alley.

We were obliged to stay in Baltimore over night, as we were too late for the train to Frederick. At the Eutaw House, where we found both comfort and courtesy, we met a number of friends, who beguiled the evening hours for us in the most agreeable manner. We devoted some time to procuring surgical and other articles, such as might be useful to our friends, or to others, if our friends should not need them. In the morning, I found myself seated at the breakfast-table next to General Wool. It did not surprise me to find the General very far from expansive. With Fort McHenry on his shoulders and Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and the weight of a military department loading down his social safety-valves, I thought it a great deal for an officer in his trying position to select so very obliging and affable an aid as the gentleman who relieved him of the burden of attending to strangers.

We left the Eutaw House, to take the cars for Frederick. As we stood waiting on the platform, a telegraphic message was handed in silence to my companion. Sad news: the lifeless body of the son he was hastening to see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore. It was no time for empty words of consolation: I knew what he had lost, and that now was not the time to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear it, felt as women feel it.

Colonel Wilder Dwight was first made known to me as the friend of a beloved relative of my own, who was with him during a severe illness in Switzerland; and for whom while living, and for whose memory when dead, he retained the warmest affection. Since that the story of his noble deeds of daring, of his capture and escape, and a brief visit home before he was able to rejoin his regiment, had made his name familiar to many among us, myself among the number. His memory has been honored by those who had the largest opportunity of knowing his rare promise, as a man of talents and energy of nature. His abounding vitality must have produced its impression on all who met him; there was a still fire about him which any one could see would blaze up to melt all difficulties and recast obstacles into implements in the mould of an heroic will. These elements of his character many had the chance of knowing; but I shall always associate him with the memory of that pure and noble friendship which made me feel that I knew him before I looked upon his face, and added a personal tenderness to the sense of loss which I share with the whole community.

Here, then, I parted, sorrowfully, from the companions with whom I set out on my journey.

In one of the cars, at the same station, we met General Shriver of Frederick, a most loyal Unionist, whose name is synonymous with a hearty welcome to all whom he can aid by his counsel and his hospitality. He took great pains to give us all the information we needed, and expressed the hope, which was afterwards fulfilled, to the great gratification of some of us, that we should meet again when he should return to his home.

There was nothing worthy of special note in the trip to Frederick, except our passing a squad of Rebel prisoners, whom I missed seeing, as they flashed by, but who were said to be a most forlorn-looking crowd of scarecrows. Arrived at the Monocacy River, about three miles this side of Frederick, we came to a halt, for the railroad bridge had been blown up by the Rebels, and its iron pillars and arches were lying in the bed of the river. The unfortunate wretch who fired the train was killed by the explosion, and lay buried hard by, his hands sticking out of the shallow grave into which he had been huddled. This was the story they told us, but whether true or not I must leave to the correspondents of "Notes and Queries" to settle.

There was a great confusion of carriages and wagons at the stopping-place of the train, so that it was a long time before I could get anything that would carry us. At last I was lucky enough to light on a sturdy wagon, drawn by a pair of serviceable bays, and driven by James Grayden, with whom I was destined to have a somewhat continued acquaintance. We took up a little girl who had been in Baltimore during the late Rebel inroad. It made me think of the time when my own mother, at that time six years old, was hurried off from Boston, then occupied by the British soldiers, to Newburyport, and heard the people saying that "the redcoats were coming, killing and murdering everybody as they went along." Frederick looked cheerful for a place that had so recently been in an enemy's hands. Here and there a house or shop was shut up, but the national colors were waving in all directions, and the general aspect was peaceful and contented. I saw no bullet-marks or other sign of the fighting which had gone on in the streets. The Colonel's lady was taken in charge by a daughter of that hospitable family to which we had been commended by its head, and I proceeded to inquire for wounded officers at the various temporary hospitals.

At the United States Hotel, where many were lying, I heard mention of an officer in an upper chamber, and, going there, found Lieutenant Abbott, of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteers, lying ill with what looked like typhoid fever. While there, who should come in but the almost ubiquitous Lieutenant Wilkins, of the same Twentieth, whom I had met repeatedly before on errands of kindness or duty, and who was just from the battle-ground. He was going to Boston in charge of the body of the lamented Dr. Revere, the Assistant Surgeon of the regiment, killed on the field. From his lips I learned something of the mishaps of the regiment. My Captain's wound he spoke of as less grave than at first thought; but he mentioned incidentally having heard a story recently that he was killed,--a fiction, doubtless,--a mistake,--a palpable absurdity,--not to be remembered or made any account of. Oh no! but what dull ache is this in that obscurely sensitive region, somewhere below the heart, where the nervous centre called the semilunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself until a great grief or a mastering anxiety reaches it through all the non-conductors which isolate it from ordinary impressions? I talked awhile with Lieutenant Abbott, who lay prostrate, feeble, but soldier-like and uncomplaining, carefully waited upon by a most excellent lady, a captain's wife, New England born, loyal as the Liberty on a golden ten-dollar piece, and of lofty bearing enough to have sat for that goddess's portrait. She had stayed in Frederick through the Rebel inroad, and kept the star-spangled banner where it would be safe, to unroll it as the last Rebel hoofs clattered off from the pavement of the town.

Near by Lieutenant Abbott was an unhappy gentleman, occupying a small chamber, and filling it with his troubles. When he gets well and plump, I know he will forgive me if I confess that I could not help smiling in the midst of my sympathy for him. He had been a well-favored man, he said, sweeping his hand in a semicircle, which implied that his acute-angled countenance had once filled the goodly curve he described. He was now a perfect Don Quixote to look upon. Weakness had made him querulous, as it does all of us, and he piped his grievances to me in a thin voice, with that finish of detail which chronic invalidism alone can command. He was starving,--he could not get what he wanted to eat. He was in need of stimulants, and he held up a pitiful two-ounce phial containing three thimblefuls--of brandy,--his whole stock of that encouraging article. Him I consoled to the best of my ability, and afterwards, in some slight measure, supplied his wants. Feed this poor gentleman up, as these good people soon will, and I should not know him, nor he himself. We are all egotists in sickness and debility. An animal has been defined as "a stomach ministered to by organs;" and the greatest man comes very near this simple formula after a month or two of fever and starvation.

James Grayden and his team pleased me well enough, and so I made a bargain with him to take us, the lady and myself, on our further journey as far as Middletown. As we were about starting from the front of the United States Hotel, two gentlemen presented themselves and expressed a wish to be allowed to share our conveyance. I looked at them and convinced myself that they were neither Rebels in disguise, nor deserters, nor camp-followers, nor miscreants, but plain, honest men on a proper errand. The first of them I will pass over briefly. He was a young man of mild and modest demeanor, chaplain to a Pennsylvania regiment, which he was going to rejoin. He belonged to the Moravian Church, of which I had the misfortune to know little more than what I had learned from Southey's "Life of Wesley." and from the exquisite hymns we have borrowed from its rhapsodists. The other stranger was a New Englander of respectable appearance, with a grave, hard, honest, hay-bearded face, who had come to serve the sick and wounded on the battle-field and in its immediate neighborhood. There is no reason why I should not mention his name, but I shall content myself with calling him the Philanthropist.

So we set forth, the sturdy wagon, the serviceable bays, with James Grayden their driver, the gentle lady, whose serene patience bore up through all delays and discomforts, the Chaplain, the Philanthropist, and myself, the teller of this story.

And now, as we emerged from Frederick, we struck at once upon the trail from the great battle-field. The road was filled with straggling and wounded soldiers. All who could travel on foot,--multitudes with slight wounds of the upper limbs, the head, or face,--were told to take up their beds,--alight burden or none at all,--and walk. Just as the battle-field sucks everything into its red vortex for the conflict, so does it drive everything off in long, diverging rays after the fierce centripetal forces have met and neutralized each other. For more than a week there had been sharp fighting all along this road. Through the streets of Frederick, through Crampton's Gap, over South Mountain, sweeping at last the hills and the woods that skirt the windings of the Antietam, the long battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes which tear their path through our fields and villages. The slain of higher condition, "embalmed" and iron-cased, were sliding off on the railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were cared for hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to the neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as I have said, at every step in the road. It was a pitiable sight, truly pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that many single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings more than the sight of this great caravan of maimed pilgrims. The companionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock of their suffering; it was next to impossible to individualize it, and so bring it home, as one can do with a single broken limb or aching wound. Then they were all of the male sex, and in the freshness or the prime of their strength. Though they tramped so wearily along, yet there was rest and kind nursing in store for them. These wounds they bore would be the medals they would show their children and grandchildren by and by. Who would not rather wear his decorations beneath his uniform than on it?

Yet among them were figures which arrested our attention and sympathy. Delicate boys, with more spirit than strength, flushed with fever or pale with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged their weary limbs along as if each step would exhaust their slender store of strength. At the roadside sat or lay others, quite spent with their journey. Here and there was a house at which the wayfarers would stop, in the hope, I fear often vain, of getting refreshment; and in one place was a clear, cool spring, where the little bands of the long procession halted for a few moments, as the trains that traverse the desert rest by its fountains. My companions had brought a few peaches along with them, which the Philanthropist bestowed upon the tired and thirsty soldiers with a satisfaction which we all shared. I had with me a small flask of strong waters, to be used as a medicine in case of inward grief. From this, also, he dispensed relief, without hesitation, to a poor fellow who looked as if he needed it. I rather admired the simplicity with which he applied my limited means of solace to the first-comer who wanted it more than I; a genuine benevolent impulse does not stand on ceremony, and had I perished of colic for want of a stimulus that night, I should not have reproached my friend the Philanthropist, any more than I grudged my other ardent friend the two dollars and more which it cost me to send the charitable message he left in my hands.

It was a lovely country through which we were riding. The hillsides rolled away into the distance, slanting up fair and broad to the sun, as one sees them in the open parts of the Berkshire Valley, at Lanesborough, for instance, or in the many-hued mountain chalice at the bottom of which the Shaker houses of Lebanon have shaped themselves like a sediment of cubical crystals. The wheat was all garnered, and the land ploughed for a new crop. There was Indian corn standing, but I saw no pumpkins warming their yellow carapaces in the sunshine like so many turtles; only in a single instance did I notice some wretched little miniature specimens in form and hue not unlike those colossal oranges of our cornfields. The rail fences were somewhat disturbed, and the cinders of extinguished fires showed the use to which they had been applied. The houses along the road were not for the most part neatly kept; the garden fences were poorly built of laths or long slats, and very rarely of trim aspect. The men of this region seemed to ride in the saddle very generally, rather than drive. They looked sober and stern, less curious and lively than Yankees, and I fancied that a type of features familiar to us in the countenance of the late John Tyler, our accidental President, was frequently met with. The women were still more distinguishable from our New England pattern. Soft, sallow, succulent, delicately finished about the mouth and firmly shaped about the chin, dark-eyed, full-throated, they looked as if they had been grown in a land of olives. There was a little toss in their movement, full of muliebrity. I fancied there was something more of the duck and less of the chicken about them, as compared with the daughters of our leaner soil; but these are mere impressions caught from stray glances, and if there is any offence in them, my fair readers may consider them all retracted.

At intervals, a dead horse lay by the roadside, or in the fields, unburied, not grateful to gods or men. I saw no bird of prey, no ill-omened fowl, on my way to the carnival of death, or at the place where it had been held. The vulture of story, the crow of Talavera, the "twa corbies" of the ghastly ballad, are all from Nature, doubtless; but no black wing was spread over these animal ruins, and no call to the banquet pierced through the heavy-laden and sickening air.

Full in the middle of the road, caring little for whom or what they met, came long strings of army wagons, returning empty from the front after supplies. James Grayden stated it as his conviction that they had a little rather run into a fellow than not. I liked the looks of these equipages and their drivers; they meant business. Drawn by mules mostly, six, I think, to a wagon, powdered well with dust, wagon, beast, and driver, they came jogging along the road, turning neither to right nor left,--some driven by bearded, solemn white men, some by careless, saucy-looking negroes, of a blackness like that of anthracite or obsidian. There seemed to be nothing about them, dead or alive, that was not serviceable. Sometimes a mule would give out on the road; then he was left where he lay, until by and by he would think better of it, and get up, when the first public wagon that came along would hitch him on, and restore him to the sphere of duty.

It was evening when we got to Middletown. The gentle lady who had graced our homely conveyance with her company here left us. She found her husband, the gallant Colonel, in very comfortable quarters, well cared for, very weak from the effects of the fearful operation he had been compelled to undergo, but showing calm courage to endure as he had shown manly energy to act. It was a meeting full of heroism and tenderness, of which I heard more than there is need to tell. Health to the brave soldier, and peace to the household over which so fair a spirit presides!

Dr. Thompson, the very active and intelligent surgical director of the hospitals of the place, took me in charge. He carried me to the house of a worthy and benevolent clergyman of the German Reformed Church, where I was to take tea and pass the night. What became of the Moravian chaplain I did not know; but my friend the Philanthropist had evidently made up his mind to adhere to my fortunes. He followed me, therefore, to the house of the "Dominie." as a newspaper correspondent calls my kind host, and partook of the fare there furnished me. He withdrew with me to the apartment assigned for my slumbers, and slept sweetly on the same pillow where I waked and tossed. Nay, I do affirm that he did, unconsciously, I believe, encroach on that moiety of the couch which I had flattered myself was to be my own through the watches of the night, and that I was in serious doubt at one time whether I should not be gradually, but irresistibly, expelled from the bed which I had supposed destined for my sole possession. As Ruth clave unto Naomi, so my friend the Philanthropist clave unto me. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge." A really kind, good man, full of zeal, determined to help somebody, and absorbed in his one thought, he doubted nobody's willingness to serve him, going, as he was, on a purely benevolent errand. When he reads this, as I hope he will, let him be assured of my esteem and respect; and if he gained any accommodation from being in my company, let me tell him that I learned a lesson from his active benevolence. I could, however, have wished to hear him laugh once before we parted, perhaps forever. He did not, to the best of my recollection, even smile during the whole period that we were in company. I am afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor are not so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in people of sentiment, who are always ready with their tears and abounding in passionate expressions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a practical specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with its peculiar sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies, an organizing and art ranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold, of hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists are commonly grave, occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose. Their expansive social force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through its legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the boiler, the less it whistles and sings at its work. When Dr. Waterhouse, in 1780, travelled with Howard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and hospitals, he found his temper and manners very different from what would have been expected.

My benevolent companion having already made a preliminary exploration of the hospitals of the place, before sharing my bed with him, as above mentioned, I joined him in a second tour through them. The authorities of Middletown are evidently leagued with the surgeons of that place, for such a break-neck succession of pitfalls and chasms I have never seen in the streets of a civilized town. It was getting late in the evening when we began our rounds. The principal collections of the wounded were in the churches. Boards were laid over the tops of the pews, on these some straw was spread, and on this the wounded lay, with little or no covering other than such scanty clothes as they had on. There were wounds of all degrees of severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs. Most of the sufferers were hurt in the limbs, some had undergone amputation, and all had, I presume, received such attention as was required. Still, it was but a rough and dreary kind of comfort that the extemporized hospitals suggested. I could not help thinking the patients must be cold; but they were used to camp life, and did not complain. The men who watched were not of the soft-handed variety of the race. One of them was smoking his pipe as he went from bed to bed. I saw one poor fellow who had been shot through the breast; his breathing was labored, and he was tossing, anxious and restless. The men were debating about the opiate he was to take, and I was thankful that I happened there at the right moment to see that he was well narcotized for the night. Was it possible that my Captain could be lying on the straw in one of these places? Certainly possible, but not probable; but as the lantern was held over each bed, it was with a kind of thrill that I looked upon the features it illuminated. Many times as I went from hospital to hospital in my wanderings, I started as some faint resemblance,-the shade of a young man's hair, the outline of his half-turned face,--recalled the presence I was in search of. The face would turn towards me, and the momentary illusion would pass away, but still the fancy clung to me. There was no figure huddled up on its rude couch, none stretched at the roadside, none toiling languidly along the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambulance, that I did not scrutinize, as if it might be that for which I was making my pilgrimage to the battlefield.

"There are two wounded Secesh," said my companion. I walked to the bedside of the first, who was an officer, a lieutenant, if I remember right, from North Carolina. He was of good family, son of a judge in one of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, gentle, intelligent. One moment's intercourse with such an enemy, lying helpless and wounded among strangers, takes away all personal bitterness towards those with whom we or our children have been but a few hours before in deadly strife. The basest lie which the murderous contrivers of this Rebellion have told is that which tries to make out a difference of race in the men of the North and South. It would be worth a year of battles to abolish this delusion, though the great sponge of war that wiped it out were moistened with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of slight, scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among the parts of speech. It made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in the humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his forefathers and the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict against others of like training with his own,--a man who, but for the curse which our generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in the beneficent task of shaping the intelligence and lifting the moral standard of a peaceful and united people.

On Sunday morning, the twenty-first, having engaged James Grayden and his team, I set out with the Chaplain and the Philanthropist for Keedysville. Our track lay through the South Mountain Gap, and led us first to the town of Boonsborough, where, it will be remembered, Colonel Dwight had been brought after the battle. We saw the positions occupied in the battle of South Mountain, and many traces of the conflict. In one situation a group of young trees was marked with shot, hardly one having escaped. As we walked by the side of the wagon, the Philanthropist left us for a while and climbed a hill, where, along the line of a fence, he found traces of the most desperate fighting. A ride of some three hours brought us to Boonsborough, where I roused the unfortunate army surgeon who had charge of the hospitals, and who was trying to get a little sleep after his fatigues and watchings. He bore this cross very creditably, and helped me to explore all places where my soldier might be lying among the crowds of wounded. After the useless search, I resumed my journey, fortified with a note of introduction to Dr. Letterman; also with a bale of oakum which I was to carry to that gentleman, this substance being employed as a substitute for lint. We were obliged also to procure a pass to Keedysville from the Provost Marshal of Boonsborough. As we came near the place, we learned that General McClellan's head quarters had been removed from this village some miles farther to the front.

On entering the small settlement of Keedysville, a familiar face and figure blocked the way, like one of Bunyan's giants. The tall form and benevolent countenance, set off by long, flowing hair, belonged to the excellent Mayor Frank B. Fay of Chelsea, who, like my Philanthropist, only still more promptly, had come to succor the wounded of the great battle. It was wonderful to see how his single personality pervaded this torpid little village; he seemed to be the centre of all its activities. All my questions he answered clearly and decisively, as one who knew everything that was going on in the place. But the one question I had come five hundred miles to ask,--Where is Captain H.?--he could not answer. There were some thousands of wounded in the place, he told me, scattered about everywhere. It would be a long job to hunt up my Captain; the only way would be to go to every house and ask for him. Just then a medical officer came up.

"Do you know anything of Captain H. of the Massachusetts Twentieth?"

"Oh yes; he is staying in that house. I saw him there, doing very well."

A chorus of hallelujahs arose in my soul, but I kept them to myself. Now, then, for our twice-wounded volunteer, our young centurion whose double-barred shoulder-straps we have never yet looked upon. Let us observe the proprieties, however; no swelling upward of the mother,--no hysterica passio, we do not like scenes. A calm salutation,--then swallow and hold hard. That is about the programme.

A cottage of squared logs, filled in with plaster, and whitewashed. A little yard before it, with a gate swinging. The door of the cottage ajar,--no one visible as yet. I push open the door and enter. An old woman, Margaret Kitzmuller her name proves to be, is the first person I see.

"Captain H. here?"

"Oh no, sir,--left yesterday morning for Hagerstown,--in a milk-cart."

The Kitzmuller is a beady-eyed, cheery-looking ancient woman, answers questions with a rising inflection, and gives a good account of the Captain, who got into the vehicle without assistance, and was in excellent spirits. Of course he had struck for Hagerstown as the terminus of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, and was on his way to Philadelphia, via Chambersburg and Harrisburg, if he were not already in the hospitable home of Walnut Street, where his friends were expecting him.

I might follow on his track or return upon my own; the distance was the same to Philadelphia through Harrisburg as through Baltimore. But it was very difficult, Mr. Fay told me, to procure any kind of conveyance to Hagerstown; and, on the other hand, I had James Grayden and his wagon to carry me back to Frederick. It was not likely that I should overtake the object of my pursuit with nearly thirty-six hours start, even if I could procure a conveyance that day. In the mean time James was getting impatient to be on his return, according to the direction of his employers. So I decided to go back with him.

But there was the great battle-field only about three miles from Keedysville, and it was impossible to go without seeing that. James Grayden's directions were peremptory, but it was a case for the higher law. I must make a good offer for an extra couple of hours, such as would satisfy the owners of the wagon, and enforce it by a personal motive. I did this handsomely, and succeeded without difficulty. To add brilliancy to my enterprise, I invited the Chaplain and the Philanthropist to take a free passage with me.

We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off to the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise directions, over the hills. Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide creek in which soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which we did not then know, but which must have been the Antietam. At one point we met a party, women among them, bringing off various trophies they had picked up on the battlefield. Still wandering along, we were at last pointed to a hill in the distance, a part of the summit of which was covered with Indian corn. There, we were told, some of the fiercest fighting of the day had been done. The fences were taken down so as to make a passage across the fields, and the tracks worn within the last few days looked like old roads. We passed a fresh grave under a tree near the road. A board was nailed to the tree, bearing the name, as well as I could make it out, of Gardiner, of a New Hampshire regiment.

On coming near the brow of the hill, we met a party carrying picks and spades. "How many?" "Only one." The dead were nearly all buried, then, in this region of the field of strife. We stopped the wagon, and, getting out, began to look around us. Hard by was a large pile of muskets, scores, if not hundreds, which had been picked up, and were guarded for the Government. A long ridge of fresh gravel rose before us. A board stuck up in front of it bore this inscription, the first part of which was, I believe, not correct: "The Rebel General Anderson and 80 Rebels are buried in this hole." Other smaller ridges were marked with the number of dead lying under them. The whole ground was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat. I saw two soldiers' caps that looked as though their owners had been shot through the head. In several places I noticed dark red patches where a pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life out on the sod. I then wandered about in the cornfield. It surprised me to notice, that, though there was every mark of hard fighting having taken place here, the Indian corn was not generally trodden down. One of our cornfields is a kind of forest, and even when fighting, men avoid the tall stalks as if they were trees. At the edge of this cornfield lay a gray horse, said to have belonged to a Rebel colonel, who was killed near the same place. Not far off were two dead artillery horses in their harness. Another had been attended to by a burying-party, who had thrown some earth over him but his last bed-clothes were too short, and his legs stuck out stark and stiff from beneath the gravel coverlet. It was a great pity that we had no intelligent guide to explain to us the position of that portion of the two armies which fought over this ground. There was a shallow trench before we came to the cornfield, too narrow for a road, as I should think, too elevated for a water-course, and which seemed to have been used as a rifle-pit. At any rate, there had been hard fighting in and about it. This and the cornfield may serve to identify the part of the ground we visited, if any who fought there should ever look over this paper. The opposing tides of battle must have blended their waves at this point, for portions of gray uniform were mingled with the "garments rolled in blood" torn from our own dead and wounded soldiers. I picked up a Rebel canteen, and one of our own,--but there was something repulsive about the trodden and stained relics of the stale battle-field. It was like the table of some hideous orgy left uncleared, and one turned away disgusted from its broken fragments and muddy heeltaps. A bullet or two, a button, a brass plate from a soldier's belt, served well enough for mementos of my visit, with a letter which I picked up, directed to Richmond, Virginia, its seal unbroken. "N. C. Cleveland County. E. Wright to J. Wright." On the other side, "A few lines from W. L. Vaughn." who has just been writing for the wife to her husband, and continues on his own account. The postscript, "tell John that nancy's folks are all well and has a verry good Little Crop of corn a growing." I wonder, if, by one of those strange chances of which I have seen so many, this number or leaf of the "Atlantic" will not sooner or later find its way to Cleveland County, North Carolina, and E. Wright, widow of James Wright, and Nancy's folks, get from these sentences the last glimpse of husband and friend as he threw up his arms and fell in the bloody cornfield of Antietam? I will keep this stained letter for them until peace comes back, if it comes in my time, and my pleasant North Carolina Rebel of the Middletown Hospital will, perhaps look these poor people up, and tell them where to send for it.

On the battle-field I parted with my two companions, the Chaplain and the Philanthropist. They were going to the front, the one to find his regiment, the other to look for those who needed his assistance. We exchanged cards and farewells, I mounted the wagon, the horses' heads were turned homewards, my two companions went their way, and I saw them no more. On my way back, I fell into talk with James Grayden. Born in England, Lancashire; in this country since he was four years old. Had nothing to care for but an old mother; didn't know what he should do if he lost her. Though so long in this country, he had all the simplicity and childlike lightheartedness which belong to the Old World's people. He laughed at the smallest pleasantry, and showed his great white English teeth; he took a joke without retorting by an impertinence; he had a very limited curiosity about all that was going on; he had small store of information; he lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me. His quiet animal nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits of anxiety, and I liked his frequent "'Deed I don't know, sir." better than I have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and other very wise men.

I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the second time. Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded Colonel and his lady. She gave me a most touching account of all the suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he succeeded in finding a shelter; showing the terrible want of proper means of transportation of the wounded after the battle. It occurred to me, while at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for the first time in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family with whom the Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.

After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a Highlander by birth, educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating talk. He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold in the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional pinch from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of those frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch Dumollard, who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light of day. He had a good deal to say, too, about the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations, mercurial and the rest, which I remember well having seen there,--the "sudabit multum." and others,--also of our New York Professor Carnochan's handiwork, a specimen of which I once admired at the New York College. But the doctor was not in a happy frame of mind, and seemed willing to forget the present in the past: things went wrong, somehow, and the time was out of joint with him.

Dr. Thompson, kind, cheerful, companionable, offered me half his own wide bed, in the house of Dr. Baer, for my second night in Middletown. Here I lay awake again another night. Close to the house stood an ambulance in which was a wounded Rebel officer, attended by one of their own surgeons. He was calling out in a loud voice, all night long, as it seemed to me, "Doctor! Doctor! Driver! Water!" in loud, complaining tones, I have no doubt of real suffering, but in strange contrast with the silent patience which was the almost universal rule.

The courteous Dr. Thompson will let me tell here an odd coincidence, trivial, but having its interest as one of a series. The Doctor and myself lay in the bed, and a lieutenant, a friend of his, slept on the sofa, At night, I placed my match-box, a Scotch one, of the Macpherson-plaid pattern, which I bought years ago, on the bureau, just where I could put my hand upon it. I was the last of the three to rise in the morning, and on looking for my pretty match-box, I found it was gone. This was rather awkward,--not on account of the loss, but of the unavoidable fact that one of my fellow-lodgers must have taken it. I must try to find out what it meant.

"By the way, Doctor, have you seen anything of a little plaid-pattern match-box?"

The Doctor put his hand to his pocket, and, to his own huge surprise and my great gratification, pulled out two match-boxes exactly alike, both printed with the Macpherson plaid. One was his, the other mine, which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own, thrusting it into his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from the same workshop. In memory of which event, we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric heroes.

This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some supposed cases of plagiarism of which I will mention one where my name figured. When a little poem called "The Two Streams" was first printed, a writer in the New York "Evening Post" virtually accused the author of it of borrowing the thought from a baccalaureate sermon of President Hopkins of Williamstown, and printed a quotation from that discourse, which, as I thought, a thief or catch-poll might well consider as establishing a fair presumption that it was so borrowed. I was at the same time wholly unconscious of ever having met with the discourse or the sentence which the verses were most like, nor do I believe I ever had seen or heard either. Some time after this, happening to meet my eloquent cousin, Wendell Phillips, I mentioned the fact to him, and he told me that he had once used the special image said to be borrowed, in a discourse delivered at Williamstown. On relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he informed me that he too, had used the image,--perhaps referring to his poem called "The Twins." He thought Tennyson had used it also. The parting of the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the "Boston Evening Transcript" for October 23, 1859. Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks of the showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the Atlantic, one to the Pacific. I found the image running loose in my mind, without a halter. It suggested itself as an illustration of the will, and I worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School Atlas.--The spores of a great many ideas are floating about in the atmosphere. We no more know where all the growths of our mind came from, than where the lichens which eat the names off from the gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them birth. The two match-boxes were just alike, but neither was a plagiarism.

In the morning I took to the same wagon once more, but, instead of James Grayden, I was to have for my driver a young man who spelt his name "Phillip Ottenheimer" and whose features at once showed him to be an Israelite. I found him agreeable enough, and disposed to talk. So I asked him many questions about his religion, and got some answers that sound strangely in Christian ears. He was from Wittenberg, and had been educated in strict Jewish fashion. From his childhood he had read Hebrew, but was not much of a scholar otherwise. A young person of his race lost caste utterly by marrying a Christian. The Founder of our religion was considered by the Israelites to have been "a right smart man and a great doctor." But the horror with which the reading of the New Testament by any young person of their faith would be regarded was as great, I judged by his language, as that of one of our straitest sectaries would be, if he found his son or daughter perusing the "Age of Reason."

In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of its clustered spires struck me very much, so that I was not surprised to find "Fair-View" laid down about this point on a railroad map. I wish some wandering photographer would take a picture of the place, a stereoscopic one, if possible, to show how gracefully, how charmingly, its group of steeples nestles among the Maryland hills. The town had a poetical look from a distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there. The first sign I read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be considered as confirming my remote impression. It bore these words: "Miss Ogle, Past, Present, and Future." On arriving, I visited Lieutenant Abbott, and the attenuated unhappy gentleman, his neighbor, sharing between them as my parting gift what I had left of the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as Spiritus Vini Gallici. I took advantage of General Shriver's always open door to write a letter home, but had not time to partake of his offered hospitality. The railroad bridge over the Monocacy had been rebuilt since I passed through Frederick, and we trundled along over the track toward Baltimore.

It was a disappointment, on reaching the Eutaw House, where I had ordered all communications to be addressed, to find no telegraphic message from Philadelphia or Boston, stating that Captain H. had arrived at the former place, "wound doing well in good spirits expects to leave soon for Boston." After all, it was no great matter; the Captain was, no doubt, snugly lodged before this in the house called Beautiful, at * * * * Walnut Street, where that "grave and beautiful damsel named Discretion" had already welcomed him, smiling, though "the water stood in her eyes," and had "called out Prudence, Piety, and Charity, who, after a little more discourse with him, had him into the family."

The friends I had met at the Eutaw House had all gone but one, the lady of an officer from Boston, who was most amiable and agreeable, and whose benevolence, as I afterwards learned, soon reached the invalids I had left suffering at Frederick. General Wool still walked the corridors, inexpansive, with Fort McHenry on his shoulders, and Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and his courteous aid again pressed upon me his kind offices. About the doors of the hotel the news-boys cried the papers in plaintive, wailing tones, as different from the sharp accents of their Boston counterparts as a sigh from the southwest is from a northeastern breeze. To understand what they said was, of course, impossible to any but an educated ear, and if I made out "Starr" and "Clipp'rr," it was because I knew beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising coranach.

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twenty-third, there beyond question to meet my Captain, once more united to his brave wounded companions under that roof which covers a household of as noble hearts as ever throbbed with human sympathies. Back River, Bush River, Gunpowder Creek,--lives there the man with soul so dead that his memory has cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the same envelopes with their meaningless localities? But the Susquehanna,--the broad, the beautiful, the historical, the poetical Susquehanna,--the river of Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the shores where

"Aye those sunny mountains half-way down Would echo flageolet from some romantic town,"--

did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who has made it lovely to the imagination as well as to the eye, and so identified his fame with the noble stream that it "rolls mingling with his fame forever?" The prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the fact that a great sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes him, sitting in the car, on its back, and swims across with him like Arion's dolphin,--also that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs in the season, and ducks of lower degree at other periods.

At Philadelphia again at last! Drive fast, O colored man and brother, to the house called Beautiful, where my Captain lies sore wounded, waiting for the sound of the chariot wheels which bring to his bedside the face and the voice nearer than any save one to his heart in this his hour of pain and weakness! Up a long street with white shutters and white steps to all the houses. Off at right angles into another long street with white shutters and white steps to all the houses. Off again at another right angle into still another long street with white shutters and white steps to all the houses. The natives of this city pretend to know one street from another by some individual differences of aspect; but the best way for a stranger to distinguish the streets he has been in from others is to make a cross or other mark on the white shutters.

This corner-house is the one. Ring softly,--for the Lieutenant-Colonel lies there with a dreadfully wounded arm, and two sons of the family, one wounded like the Colonel, one fighting with death in the fog of a typhoid fever, will start with fresh pangs at the least sound you can make. I entered the house, but no cheerful smile met me. The sufferers were each of them thought to be in a critical condition. The fourth bed, waiting its tenant day after day, was still empty. Not a word from my Captain.

Then, foolish, fond body that I was, my heart sank within me. Had he been taken ill on the road, perhaps been attacked with those formidable symptoms which sometimes come on suddenly after wounds that seemed to be doing well enough, and was his life ebbing away in some lonely cottage, nay, in some cold barn or shed, or at the wayside, unknown, uncared for? Somewhere between Philadelphia and Hagerstown, if not at the latter town, he must be, at any rate. I must sweep the hundred and eighty miles between these places as one would sweep a chamber where a precious pearl had been dropped. I must have a companion in my search, partly to help me look about, and partly because I was getting nervous and felt lonely. Charley said he would go with me,--Charley, my Captain's beloved friend, gentle, but full of spirit and liveliness, cultivated, social, affectionate, a good talker, a most agreeable letter-writer, observing, with large relish of life, and keen sense of humor. He was not well enough to go, some of the timid ones said; but he answered by packing his carpet-bag, and in an hour or two we were on the Pennsylvania Central Railroad in full blast for Harrisburg.

I should have been a forlorn creature but for the presence of my companion. In his delightful company I half forgot my anxieties, which, exaggerated as they may seem now, were not unnatural after what I had seen of the confusion and distress that had followed the great battle, nay, which seem almost justified by the recent statement that "high officers" were buried after that battle whose names were never ascertained. I noticed little matters, as usual. The road was filled in between the rails with cracked stones, such as are used for macadamizing streets. They keep the dust down, I suppose, for I could not think of any other use for them. By and by the glorious valley which stretches along through Chester and Lancaster Counties opened upon us. Much as I had heard of the fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the uniform luxuriance of this region astonished me. The grazing pastures were so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample, the fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that this region was called the England of Pennsylvania. The people whom we saw were, like the cattle, well nourished; the young women looked round and wholesome.

"Grass makes girls." I said to my companion, and left him to work out my Orphic saying, thinking to myself, that as guano makes grass, it was a legitimate conclusion that Ichaboe must be a nursery of female loveliness.

As the train stopped at the different stations, I inquired at each if they had any wounded officers. None as yet; the red rays of the battle-field had not streamed off so far as this. Evening found us in the cars; they lighted candles in spring-candle-sticks; odd enough I thought it in the land of oil-wells and unmeasured floods of kerosene. Some fellows turned up the back of a seat so as to make it horizontal, and began gambling, or pretending to gamble; it looked as if they were trying to pluck a young countryman; but appearances are deceptive, and no deeper stake than "drinks for the crowd" seemed at last to be involved. But remembering that murder has tried of late years to establish itself as an institution in the cars, I was less tolerant of the doings of these "sportsmen" who tried to turn our public conveyance into a travelling Frascati. They acted as if they were used to it, and nobody seemed to pay much attention to their manoeuvres.

We arrived at Harrisburg in the course of the evening, and attempted to find our way to the Jones House, to which we had been commended. By some mistake, intentional on the part of somebody, as it may have been, or purely accidental, we went to the Herr House instead. I entered my name in the book, with that of my companion. A plain, middle-aged man stepped up, read it to himself in low tones, and coupled to it a literary title by which I have been sometimes known. He proved to be a graduate of Brown University, and had heard a certain Phi Beta Kappa poem delivered there a good many years ago. I remembered it, too; Professor Goddard, whose sudden and singular death left such lasting regret, was the Orator. I recollect that while I was speaking a drum went by the church, and how I was disgusted to see all the heads near the windows thrust out of them, as if the building were on fire. Cedat armis toga. The clerk in the office, a mild, pensive, unassuming young man, was very polite in his manners, and did all he could to make us comfortable. He was of a literary turn, and knew one of his guests in his character of author. At tea, a mild old gentleman, with white hair and beard, sat next us. He, too, had come hunting after his son, a lieutenant in a Pennsylvania regiment. Of these, father and son, more presently.

After tea we went to look up Dr. Wilson, chief medical officer of the hospitals in the place, who was staying at the Brady House. A magnificent old toddy-mixer, Bardolphian in hue, and stern of aspect, as all grog-dispensers must be, accustomed as they are to dive through the features of men to the bottom of their souls and pockets to see whether they are solvent to the amount of sixpence, answered my question by a wave of one hand, the other being engaged in carrying a dram to his lips. His superb indifference gratified my artistic feeling more than it wounded my personal sensibilities. Anything really superior in its line claims my homage, and this man was the ideal bartender, above all vulgar passions, untouched by commonplace sympathies, himself a lover of the liquid happiness he dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all those lesser felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any of the roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the cheap, all-powerful substitute.

Dr. Wilson was in bed, though it was early in the evening, not having slept for I don't know how many nights.

"Take my card up to him, if you please." "This way, sir."

A man who has not slept for a fortnight or so is not expected to be as affable, when attacked in his bed, as a French Princess of old time at her morning receptions. Dr. Wilson turned toward me, as I entered, without effusion, but without rudeness. His thick, dark moustache was chopped off square at the lower edge of the upper lip, which implied a decisive, if not a peremptory, style of character.

I am Dr. So-and-So of Hubtown, looking after my wounded son. (I gave my name and said Boston, of course, in reality.)

Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in my face, his features growing cordial. Then he put out his hand, and good-humoredly excused his reception of me. The day before, as he told me, he had dismissed from the service a medical man hailing from ******, Pennsylvania, bearing my last name, preceded by the same two initials; and he supposed, when my card came up, it was this individual who was disturbing his slumbers. The coincidence was so unlikely a priori, unless some forlorn parent without antecedents had named, a child after me, that I could not help cross-questioning the Doctor, who assured me deliberately that the fact was just as he had said, even to the somewhat unusual initials. Dr. Wilson very kindly furnished me all the information in his power, gave me directions for telegraphing to Chambersburg, and showed every disposition to serve me.

On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, white-haired old gentleman in a very happy state. He had just discovered his son, in a comfortable condition, at the United States Hotel. He thought that he could probably give us some information which would prove interesting. To the United States Hotel we repaired, then, in company with our kind-hearted old friend, who evidently wanted to see me as happy as himself. He went up-stairs to his son's chamber, and presently came down to conduct us there.

Lieutenant P________, of the Pennsylvania __th, was a very fresh, bright-looking young man, lying in bed from the effects of a recent injury received in action. A grape-shot, after passing through a post and a board, had struck him in the hip, bruising, but not penetrating or breaking. He had good news for me.

That very afternoon, a party of wounded officers had passed through Harrisburg, going East. He had conversed in the bar-room of this hotel with one of them, who was wounded about the shoulder (it might be the lower part of the neck), and had his arm in a sling. He belonged to the Twentieth Massachusetts; the Lieutenant saw that he was a Captain, by the two bars on his shoulder-strap. His name was my family-name; he was tall and youthful, like my Captain. At four o'clock he left in the train for Philadelphia. Closely questioned, the Lieutenant's evidence was as round, complete, and lucid as a Japanese sphere of rock-crystal.

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS! The Lord's name be praised! The dead pain in the semilunar ganglion (which I must remind my reader is a kind of stupid, unreasoning brain, beneath the pit of the stomach, common to man and beast, which aches in the supreme moments of life, as when the dam loses her young ones, or the wild horse is lassoed) stopped short. There was a feeling as if I had slipped off a tight boot, or cut a strangling garter,--only it was all over my system. What more could I ask to assure me of the Captain's safety? As soon as the telegraph office opens tomorrow morning we will send a message to our friends in Philadelphia, and get a reply, doubtless, which will settle the whole matter.

The hopeful morrow dawned at last, and the message was sent accordingly. In due time, the following reply was received: "Phil Sept 24 I think the report you have heard that W [the Captain] has gone East must be an error we have not seen or heard of him here M L H"

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI! He could not have passed through Philadelphia without visiting the house called Beautiful, where he had been so tenderly cared for after his wound at Ball's Bluff, and where those whom he loved were lying in grave peril of life or limb. Yet he did pass through Harrisburg, going East, going to Philadelphia, on his way home. Ah, this is it! He must have taken the late night-train from Philadelphia for New York, in his impatience to reach home. There is such a train, not down in the guide-book, but we were assured of the fact at the Harrisburg depot. By and by came the reply from Dr. Wilson's telegraphic message: nothing had been heard of the Captain at Chambersburg. Still later, another message came from our Philadelphia friend, saying that he was seen on Friday last at the house of Mrs. K________, a well-known Union lady in Hagerstown. Now this could not be true, for he did not leave Keedysville until Saturday; but the name of the lady furnished a clew by which we could probably track him. A telegram was at once sent to Mrs. K_______, asking information. It was transmitted immediately, but when the answer would be received was uncertain, as the Government almost monopolized the line. I was, on the whole, so well satisfied that the Captain had gone East, that, unless something were heard to the contrary, I proposed following him in the late train leaving a little after midnight for Philadelphia.

This same morning we visited several of the temporary hospitals, churches and school-houses, where the wounded were lying. In one of these, after looking round as usual, I asked aloud, "Any Massachusetts men here?" Two bright faces lifted themselves from their pillows and welcomed me by name. The one nearest me was private John B. Noyes of Company B, Massachusetts Thirteenth, son of my old college class-tutor, now the reverend and learned Professor of Hebrew, etc., in Harvard University. His neighbor was Corporal Armstrong of the same Company. Both were slightly wounded, doing well. I learned then and since from Mr. Noyes that they and their comrades were completely overwhelmed by the attentions of the good people of Harrisburg,--that the ladies brought them fruits and flowers, and smiles, better than either,--and that the little boys of the place were almost fighting for the privilege of doing their errands. I am afraid there will be a good many hearts pierced in this war that will have no bulletmark to show.

There were some heavy hours to get rid of, and we thought a visit to Camp Curtin might lighten some of them. A rickety wagon carried us to the camp, in company with a young woman from Troy, who had a basket of good things with her for a sick brother. "Poor boy! he will be sure to die," she said. The rustic sentries uncrossed their muskets and let us in. The camp was on a fair plain, girdled with hills, spacious, well kept apparently, but did not present any peculiar attraction for us. The visit would have been a dull one, had we not happened to get sight of a singular-looking set of human beings in the distance. They were clad in stuff of different hues, gray and brown being the leading shades, but both subdued by a neutral tint, such as is wont to harmonize the variegated apparel of travel-stained vagabonds. They looked slouchy, listless, torpid,--an ill-conditioned crew, at first sight, made up of such fellows as an old woman would drive away from her hen-roost with a broomstick. Yet these were estrays from the fiery army which has given our generals so much trouble,--"Secesh prisoners," as a bystander told us. A talk with them might be profitable and entertaining. But they were tabooed to the common visitor, and it was necessary to get inside of the line which separated us from them.

A solid, square captain was standing near by, to whom we were referred. Look a man calmly through the very centre of his pupils and ask him for anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it, and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit hari-kari. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch type, like the Amsterdam galiots, broad in the beam, capacious in the hold, and calculated to carry a heavy cargo rather than to make fast time. He must have been in politics at some time or other, for he made orations to all the "Secesh," in which he explained to them that the United States considered and treated them like children, and enforced upon them the ridiculous impossibility of the Rebels attempting to do anything against such a power as that of the National Government.

Much as his discourse edified them and enlightened me, it interfered somewhat with my little plans of entering into frank and friendly talk with some of these poor fellows, for whom I could not help feeling a kind of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of the Rebellion as one is like to find under the stars and stripes. It is fair to take a man prisoner. It is fair to make speeches to a man. But to take a man prisoner and then make speeches to him while in durance is not fair.

I began a few pleasant conversations, which would have come to something but for the reason assigned.

One old fellow had a long beard, a drooping eyelid, and a black clay pipe in his mouth. He was a Scotchman from Ayr, dour enough, and little disposed to be communicative, though I tried him with the "Twa Briggs," and, like all Scotchmen, he was a reader of "Burrns." He professed to feel no interest in the cause for which he was fighting, and was in the army, I judged, only from compulsion. There was a wild-haired, unsoaped boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who looked as if he might be about seventeen, as he said he was. I give my questions and his answers literally.

"What State do you come from?"

"Georgy."

"What part of Georgia?"

"Midway."

--[How odd that is! My father was settled for seven years as pastor over the church at Midway, Georgia, and this youth is very probably a grandson or great grandson of one of his parishioners.]

"Where did you go to church when you were at home?"

"Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m' life."

"What did you do before you became a soldier?"

"Nothin'."

"What do you mean to do when you get back?"

"Nothin'."

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed, this dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence but one degree above that of the idiot?

With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in his gray coat,--one button gone, perhaps to make a breastpin for some fair traitorous bosom. A short, stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the "subject race" by any obvious meanderings of the sangre azul on his exposed surfaces. He did not say much, possibly because he was convinced by the statements and arguments of the Dutch captain. He had on strong, iron-heeled shoes, of English make, which he said cost him seventeen dollars in Richmond.

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the prisoners, what they were fighting for. One answered, "For our homes." Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested great indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their number, a sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly derogatory to those who would not stand up for the cause they had been fighting for. A feeble; attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel uniform, if such it could be called, stood by without showing any sign of intelligence. It was cutting very close to the bone to carve such a shred of humanity from the body politic to make a soldier of.

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the party. "That is the true Southern type," I said to my companion. A young fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a perfectly smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and a fine, almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and as we turned towards him fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at the loose canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to talk. He was from Mississippi, he said, had been at Georgetown College, and was so far imbued with letters that even the name of the literary humility before him was not new to his ears. Of course I found it easy to come into magnetic relation with him, and to ask him without incivility what he was fighting for. "Because I like the excitement of it," he answered. I know those fighters with women's mouths and boys' cheeks. One such from the circle of my own friends, sixteen years old, slipped away from his nursery, and dashed in under, an assumed name among the red-legged Zouaves, in whose company he got an ornamental bullet-mark in one of the earliest conflicts of the war.

"Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?" said my Philadelphia friend to the young Mississippian.

"I have shot at a good many of them," he replied, modestly, his woman's mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying furs of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so much for the weight of a foot. It deranged the balance of our intercourse; there was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone had just splashed into the water, and I nodded a good-by to the boy-fighter, thinking how much pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain to address him with unanswerable arguments and crushing statements in his own tent than it would be to meet him upon some remote picket station and offer his fair proportions to the quick eye of a youngster who would draw a bead on him before he had time to say dunder and blixum.

We drove back to the town. No message. After dinner still no message. Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say. Let us hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House. A gentleman of large proportions, but of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but ripened in Georgia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on one side,--a sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and dignified person like him, business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted while occupied with another, but giving himself up heartily to the claimant who held him for the time. He was so genial, so cordial, so encouraging, that it seemed as if the clouds, which had been thick all the morning, broke away as we came into his presence, and the sunshine of his large nature filled the air all around us. He took the matter in hand at once, as if it were his own private affair. In ten minutes he had a second telegraphic message on its way to Mrs. K at Hagerstown, sent through the Government channel from the State Capitol,--one so direct and urgent that I should be sure of an answer to it, whatever became of the one I had sent in the morning.

While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by an odd young native, neither boy nor man, "as a codling when 't is almost an apple," who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who smiled faintly at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of suspicion, and a gleam of the shrewdness that all men get who live in the atmosphere of horses. He drove us round by the Capitol grounds, white with tents, which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly scrawls in huge letters, thus: THE SEVEN BLOOMSBURY BROTHERS, DEVIL'S HOLE, and similar inscriptions. Then to the Beacon Street of Harrisburg, which looks upon the Susquehanna instead of the Common, and shows a long front of handsome houses with fair gardens. The river is pretty nearly a mile across here, but very shallow now. The codling told us that a Rebel spy had been caught trying its fords a little while ago, and was now at Camp Curtin with a heavy ball chained to his leg,--a popular story, but a lie, Dr. Wilson said. A little farther along we came to the barkless stump of the tree to which Mr. Harris, the Cecrops of the city named after him, was tied by the Indians for some unpleasant operation of scalping or roasting, when he was rescued by friendly savages, who paddled across the stream to save him. Our youngling pointed out a very respectable-looking stone house as having been "built by the Indians" about those times. Guides have queer notions occasionally.

I was at Niagara just when Dr. Rae arrived there with his companions and dogs and things from his Arctic search after the lost navigator.

"Who are those?" I said to my conductor.

"Them?" he answered. "Them's the men that's been out West, out to Michig'n, aft' Sir Ben Franklin."

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or whatever it is called, seems most worth notice. Its facade is imposing, with a row of stately columns, high above which a broad sign impends, like a crag over the brow of a lofty precipice. The lower floor only appeared to be open to the public. Its tessellated pavement and ample courts suggested the idea of a temple where great multitudes might kneel uncrowded at their devotions; but from appearances about the place where the altar should be, I judged, that, if one asked the officiating priest for the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, his prayer would not be unanswered. The edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon I had once looked upon,--the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua. It was the same thing in Italy and America: a rich man builds himself a mausoleum, and calls it a place of entertainment. The fragrance of innumerable libations and the smoke of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall ascend day and night through the arches of his funereal monument. What are the poor dips which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that stand at the corners of St. Genevieve's filigree-cased sarcophagus to this perpetual offering of sacrifice?

Ten o'clock in the evening was approaching. The telegraph office would presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from Hagerstown. Let us step over and see for ourselves. A message! A message!

"Captain H. still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna Is doing well Mrs HK--."

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the hotel.

We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall. For now the over-tense nerves are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that which comes over one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us. He presently confided to me, with infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer that he in his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so far as I could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, such as all writers are supposed to possess in abounding measure. While I fell short of his ideal in this respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no means the remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I had nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest consciousness of most abundantly deserving.

Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thursday. The train from Hagerstown was due at 11.15 A. M: We took another ride behind the codling, who showed us the sights of yesterday over again. Being in a gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the varying aspects of the town-pumps and other striking objects which we had once inspected, as seen by the different lights of evening and morning. After this, we visited the school-house hospital. A fine young fellow, whose arm had been shattered, was just falling into the spasms of lock-jaw. The beads of sweat stood large and round on his flushed and contracted features. He was under the effect of opiates,--why not (if his case was desperate, as it seemed to be considered) stop his sufferings with chloroform? It was suggested that it might shorten life. "What then?" I said. "Are a dozen additional spasms worth living for?"

The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we went to the station. I was struck, while waiting there, with what seemed to me a great want of care for the safety of the people standing round. Just after my companion and myself had stepped off the track, I noticed a car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may say, without engine, without visible conductor, without any person heralding its approach, so silently, so insidiously, that I could not help thinking how very near it came to flattening out me and my match-box worse than the Ravel pantomimist and his snuff-box were flattened out in the play. The train was late,--fifteen minutes, half an hour late, and I began to get nervous, lest something had happened. While I was looking for it, out started a freight-train, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was expecting, for a grand smash-up. I shivered at the thought, and asked an employee of the road, with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few minutes old, why there should not be a collision of the expected train with this which was just going out. He smiled an official smile, and answered that they arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision did occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least eleven persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse. The expected train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see it on the track. Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain; there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many cities.

"How are you, Boy?"

"How are you, Dad?"

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay, which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture.

These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or griefs. I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice addressed me by name. I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time. I should have yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this meeting might well call forth.

"You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you once in Boston?"

"I do remember him well."

"He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown. I am carrying his body back with me on this train. He was my only child. If you could come to my house,--I can hardly call it my home now,--it would be a pleasure to me."

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a "New System of Latin Paradigms," a work showing extraordinary scholarship and capacity. It was this book which first made me acquainted with him, and I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth. Some time afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be introduced to President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid him in a course of independent study he was proposing to himself. I was most happy to smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see me and express his satisfaction in the opportunities for study he enjoyed at Cambridge. He was a dark, still, slender person, always with a trance-like remoteness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his mind reacted slowly on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer would often be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few words spoken under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's chambers. For such a young man, seemingly destined for the inner life of contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural. Yet he spoke to me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood must now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make her soil sacred forever. Had he lived, I doubt not that he would have redeemed the rare promise of his earlier years. He has done better, for he has died that unborn generations may attain the hopes held out to our nation and to mankind.

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come once more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the same region I had left! No mysterious attraction warned me that the heart warm with the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own. I thought of that lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides unconsciously by Evangeline upon the great river. Ah, me! if that railroad crash had been a few hours earlier, we two should never have met again, after coming so close to each other!

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough. The Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once for Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did, and as I took it for granted he certainly would. But as he walked languidly along, some ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved with pity, and pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to accept their invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable roof. The mansion was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should be; the ladies were some of them young, and all were full of kindness; there were gentle cares, and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, and music-sprinklings from the piano, with a sweet voice to keep them company,--and all this after the swamps of the Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the dragging marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk--cart! Thanks, uncounted thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions detained him from Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite bewilderment! As for his wound, how could it do otherwise than well under such hands? The bullet had gone smoothly through, dodging everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right in time and leave him as well as ever.

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house of the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind companion. The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to these benignant Philadelphia households. Many things reminded me that I was no longer in the land of the Pilgrims. On the table were Kool Slaa and Schmeer Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet, simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant of Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed in that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features. He also approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom we passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach. But he was so good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our economic civilization. It provides for the comforts and conveniences, and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. Many of its characteristics are accounted for to some extent by its geographical position. It is the great neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of the South and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer limits, and result in a compound which neither turns litmus red nor turmeric brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving out Franklin and Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered its famous water-works. In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was with a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that perennial fountain. Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole and diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own heart, I looked upon their giant mechanism. But in the place of "Pratt's Garden" was an open park, and the old house where Robert Morris held his court in a former generation was changing to a public restaurant. A suspension bridge cobwebbed itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the river at a single bound,--an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell us, than was ever before constructed. The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes. It had an air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming the dead level of respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of the rectangular city. Philadelphia will never be herself again until another Robert Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new palladium. She must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly shake their heads, like the Jews at the sight of the second temple, remembering the glories of that which it replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not charm, a weary soul, and such a vacant hour there was on this same Friday evening. The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably ventilated. As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window a bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces. I called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was irresistibly droll, and Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed uncared-for down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York. Mr. Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious look on his face which implied that he knew how to do me a service and meant to do it. Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found a couch spread for the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York with no visits, but those of civility, from the conductor. The best thing I saw on the route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure of the kind I have ever seen,--each length being of a special pattern, ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown. I trust some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to go with the view of the spires of Frederick, already referred to, as mementos of my journey.

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed people whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at some time or other. Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, forming a group by themselves. Presently one addressed me by name, and, on inquiry, I found him to be the gentleman who was with me in the pulpit as Orator on the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem, one delivered at New Haven. The party were very courteous and friendly, and contributed in various ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand people in the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes and then before them, like the "army" in a beggarly stage-show. Suppose that I should really wish; some time or other, to get away from this everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries, where should I buy a ticket the like of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat to which some one of them was not a neighbor.

A little less than a year before, after the Ball's Bluff accident, the Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night on our homeward journey at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged on the ground-floor, and fared sumptuously. We were not so peculiarly fortunate this time, the house being really very full. Farther from the flowers and nearer to the stars,--to reach the neighborhood of which last the per ardua of three or four flights of stairs was formidable for any mortal, wounded or well.

The "vertical railway" settled that for us, however. It is a giant corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork, which, by some divine judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Igion, and the other Sisyphus.

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it feels that it is his property,--at least, as much as it is anybody's. My Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my Boulevards. I went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day that we rested at our grand hotel, to visit some new pleasure-grounds the citizens had been arranging for us, and which I had not yet seen. The Central Park is an expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as to form ridges which will give views and hollows that will hold water. The hips and elbows and other bones of Nature stick out here and there in the shape of rocks which give character to the scenery, and an unchangeable, unpurchasable look to a landscape that without them would have been in danger of being fattened by art and money out of all its native features. The roads were fine, the sheets of water beautiful, the bridges handsome, the swans elegant in their deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast horse's winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so by clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my new property,--but it cost me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules of the fashionable quarter. What it will be by and by depends on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as Brookline is central to Boston.

The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably arranged, but remote pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but between his Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its artificial reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica Pond. I say this not invidiously, but in justice to the beauties which surround our own metropolis. To compare the situations of any dwellings in either of the great cities with those which look upon the Common, the Public Garden, the waters of the Back Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage of Fifth Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's daughter dresses in plainer clothes than her more stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her right hand and a diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be ashamed of.

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars for home. Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens; straggling houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then Stamford: then NORWALK. Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed close on the heels of the great disaster. But that my lids were heavy on that morning, my readers would probably have had no further trouble with me. Two of my friends saw the car in which they rode break in the middle and leave them hanging over the abyss. From Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey of two hundred miles was a long funeral procession.

Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its ashes with all its phoenix-egg domes,--bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for balls,--romantic with West Rock and its legends,--cursed with a detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be the frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,--with its neat carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-dormitories, its vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows; Hartford, substantial, well-bridged, many--steepled city,--every conical spire an extinguisher of some nineteenth-century heresy; so onward, by and across the broad, shallow Connecticut,--dull red road and dark river woven in like warp and woof by the shuttle of the darting engine; then Springfield, the wide-meadowed, well-feeding, horse-loving, hot-summered, giant-treed town,--city among villages, village among cities; Worcester, with its Daedalian labyrinth of crossing railroad-bars, where the snorting Minotaurs, breathing fire and smoke and hot vapors, are stabled in their dens; Framingham, fair cup-bearer, leaf-cinctured Hebe of the deep-bosomed Queen sitting by the seaside on the throne of the Six Nations. And now I begin to know the road, not by towns, but by single dwellings; not by miles, but by rods. The poles of the great magnet that draws in all the iron tracks through the grooves of all the mountains must be near at hand, for here are crossings, and sudden stops, and screams of alarmed engines heard all around. The tall granite obelisk comes into view far away on the left, its bevelled cap-stone sharp against the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East Cambridge flaunt their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now one fair bosom of the three-pilled city, with its dome-crowned summit, reveals itself, as when many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with half-open chlamys before her worshippers.

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the waters and towards the western sun! Let the joyous light shine in upon the pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set with the names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in whose pages our boys learn that life is noble only when it is held cheap by the side of honor and of duty. Lay him in his own bed, and let him sleep off his aches and weariness. So comes down another night over this household, unbroken by any messenger of evil tidings,--a night of peaceful rest and grateful thoughts; for this our son and brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.

THE INEVITABLE TRIAL

[An Oration delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, on the 4th of July, 1863.]

It is our first impulse, upon this returning day of our nation's birth, to recall whatever is happiest and noblest in our past history, and to join our voices in celebrating the statesmen and the heroes, the men of thought and the men of action, to whom that history owes its existence. In other years this pleasing office may have been all that was required of the holiday speaker. But to-day, when the very life of the nation is threatened, when clouds are thick about us, and men's hearts are throbbing with passion, or failing with fear, it is the living question of the hour, and not the dead story of the past, which forces itself into all minds, and will find unrebuked debate in all assemblies.

In periods of disturbance like the present, many persons who sincerely love their country and mean to do their duty to her disappoint the hopes and expectations of those who are actively working in her cause. They seem to have lost whatever moral force they may have once possessed, and to go drifting about from one profitless discontent to another, at a time when every citizen is called upon for cheerful, ready service. It is because their minds are bewildered, and they are no longer truly themselves. Show them the path of duty, inspire them with hope for the future, lead them upwards from the turbid stream of events to the bright, translucent springs of eternal principles, strengthen their trust in humanity and their faith in God, and you may yet restore them to their manhood and their country.

At all times, and especially on this anniversary of glorious recollections and kindly enthusiasms, we should try to judge the weak and wavering souls of our brothers fairly and generously. The conditions in which our vast community of peace-loving citizens find themselves are new and unprovided for. Our quiet burghers and farmers are in the position of river-boats blown from their moorings out upon a vast ocean, where such a typhoon is raging as no mariner who sails its waters ever before looked upon. If their beliefs change with the veering of the blast, if their trust in their fellow-men, and in the course of Divine Providence, seems well-nigh shipwrecked, we must remember that they were taken unawares, and without the preparation which could fit them to struggle with these tempestuous elements. In times like these the faith is the man; and they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special duty to those who for want of it are faint at heart, uncertain in speech, feeble in effort, and purposeless in aim.

Assuming without argument a few simple propositions,--that self-government is the natural condition of an adult society, as distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary arrangements of monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences; that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, the one of the two claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves and divided between them, is the true mother of this blessed Union; that the contest in which we are engaged is one of principles overlaid by circumstances; that the longer we fight, and the more we study the movements of events and ideas, the more clearly we find the moral nature of the cause at issue emerging in the field and in the study; that all honest persons with average natural sensibility, with respectable understanding, educated in the school of northern teaching, will have eventually to range themselves in the armed or unarmed host which fights or pleads for freedom, as against every form of tyranny; if not in the front rank now, then in the rear rank by and by;--assuming these propositions, as many, perhaps most of us, are ready to do, and believing that the more they are debated before the public the more they will gain converts, we owe it to the timid and the doubting to keep the great questions of the time in unceasing and untiring agitation. They must be discussed, in all ways consistent with the public welfare, by different classes of thinkers; by priests and laymen; by statesmen and simple voters; by moralists and lawyers; by men of science and uneducated hand-laborers; by men of facts and figures, and by men of theories and aspirations; in the abstract and in the concrete; discussed and rediscussed every month, every week, every day, and almost every hour, as the telegraph tells us of some new upheaval or subsidence of the rocky base of our political order.

Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen the convictions of the great body of loyal citizens. They may do nothing toward changing the views of those, if such there be, as some profess to believe, who follow politics as a trade. They may have no hold upon that class of persons who are defective in moral sensibility, just as other persons are wanting in an ear for music. But for the honest, vacillating minds, the tender consciences supported by the tremulous knees of an infirm intelligence, the timid compromisers who are always trying to curve the straight lines and round the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual debate of these living questions is the one offered means of grace and hope of earthly redemption. And thus a true, unhesitating patriot may be willing to listen with patience to arguments which he does not need, to appeals which have no special significance for him, in the hope that some less clear in mind or less courageous in temper may profit by them.

As we look at the condition in which we find ourselves on this fourth day of July, 1863, at the beginning of the Eighty-eighth Year of American Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have to indulge in public rejoicings. If the war in which we are engaged is an accidental one, which might have been avoided but for our fault; if it is for any ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless, and we are madly persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power to make a safe and honorable peace, and we refuse to do it; if our free institutions are in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place to an irresponsible tyranny; if we are moving in the narrow circles which are to ingulf us in national ruin,--then we had better sing a dirge, and leave this idle assemblage, and hush the noisy cannon which are reverberating through the air, and tear down the scaffolds which are soon to blaze with fiery symbols; for it is mourning and not joy that should cover the land; there should be silence, and not the echo of noisy gladness, in our streets; and the emblems with which we tell our nation's story and prefigure its future should be traced, not in fire, but in ashes.

If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable result of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that swept away the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no mean, unworthy end, but for national life, for liberty everywhere, for humanity, for the kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless, but only growing to such dimensions that the world shall remember the final triumph of right throughout all time; if there is no safe and honorable peace for us but a peace proclaimed from the capital of every revolted province in the name of the sacred, inviolable Union; if the fear of tyranny is a phantasm, conjured up by the imagination of the weak, acted on by the craft of the cunning; if so far from circling inward to the gulf of our perdition, the movement of past years is reversed, and every revolution carries us farther and farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by God's blessing, we shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost coil of the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul, in an hour's discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's exultant festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of our harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who are to inherit the fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about unblamed, making day and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism.

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have come a little sooner, or a little later, but it must have come. The disease of the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough chirurgery of war was its only remedy.

In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived, or if this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have gone on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the glories of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his heresies; if Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr. Phillips, the Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium, had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr. Clay had still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth the billows of contention; if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from the dust to fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of rebellion,--we might have been spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is but simple Martha's faith, without the reason she could have given: "If Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died."

They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling, who believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride their waves. It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent to continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its own bubbles. If this is true of all the narrower manifestations of human progress, how much more must it be true of those broad movements in the intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind? But in the more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more familiar than that there is a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual minds at once, so that genius comes in clusters, and shines rarely as a single star. You may trace a common motive and force in the pyramid-builders of the earliest recorded antiquity, in the evolution of Greek architecture, and in the sudden springing up of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth and following centuries, growing out of the soil with stem and bud and blossom, like flowers of stone whose seeds might well have been the flaming aerolites cast over the battlements of heaven. You may see the same law showing itself in the brief periods of glory which make the names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in the painters, the sculptors, the scholars of "Leo's golden days"; in the authors of the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this century following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of Cowper and the song of Hayley. You may accept the fact as natural, that Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the same reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt their hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of the dim, unseen Planet; that Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce, were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end. You see why Patrick Henry, in Richmond, and Samuel Adams, in Boston, were startling the crown officials with the same accents of liberty, and why the Mecklenburg Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the Province of Massachusetts. This law of simultaneous intellectual movement, recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay and by Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is eminently applicable to that change of thought and feeling which necessarily led to the present conflict.

The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of this or that enthusiast or fanatic. It was the consequence of a movement in mass of two different forms of civilization in different directions, and the men to whom it was attributed were only those who represented it most completely, or who talked longest and loudest about it. Long before the accents of those famous statesmen referred to ever resounded in the halls of the Capitol, long before the "Liberator" opened its batteries, the controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional divisions, well knowing the line of cleavage that ran through the seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the Union was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests, but through the change of character it was bringing about in the people of the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself in the sight of his descendants, that "by an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities." The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.

The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture. The descendants of the men "daily exercised in tyranny," the "petty tyrants" as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness.

At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a sudden harvest of crime. Violence stalked into the senate-chamber, theft and perjury wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally, openly organized conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious entrance into a chief stronghold of the Union. That the principle which underlay these acts of fraud and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every needed sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler of the false government to be its Messiah to the listening world. As with Pharaoh, the Lord hardened his heart, while he opened his mouth, as of old he opened that of the unwise animal ridden by cursing Balaam. Then spake Mr. "Vice-President" Stephens those memorable words which fixed forever the theory of the new social order. He first lifted a degraded barbarism to the dignity of a philosophic system. He first proclaimed the gospel of eternal tyranny as the new revelation which Providence had reserved for the western Palestine. Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth! The corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the recognized inequality of races; not that the strong may protect the weak, as men protect women and children, but that the strong may claim the authority of Nature and of God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt, to cheat out of the reward of his labor, to keep in perpetual ignorance, to blast with hereditary curses throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New World, upon whose darkness has dawned the star of the occidental Bethlehem!

After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave States, we read in the "Richmond Examiner": "The establishment of the Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole course of the mistaken civilization of the age. For 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,' we have deliberately substituted Slavery, Subordination, and Government."

A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to look for any other cause than slavery as having any material agency in dividing the country. Match the two broken pieces of the Union, and you will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself half across the continent like an isothermal line, shooting its splintery projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely according to the limitations of particular States, but as a county or other limited section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery. Add to this the official statement made in 1862, that "there is not one regiment or battalion, or even company of men, which was organized in or derived from the Free States or Territories, anywhere, against the Union"; throw in gratuitously Mr. Stephens's explicit declaration in the speech referred to, and we will consider the evidence closed for the present on this count of the indictment.

In the face of these predictions, these declarations, this line of fracture, this precise statement, testimony from so many sources, extending through several generations, as to the necessary effect of slavery, a priori, and its actual influence as shown by the facts, few will suppose that anything we could have done would have stayed its course or prevented it from working out its legitimate effects on the white subjects of its corrupting dominion. Northern acquiescence or even sympathy may have sometimes helped to make it sit more easily on the consciences of its supporters. Many profess to think that Northern fanaticism, as they call it, acted like a mordant in fixing the black dye of slavery in regions which would but for that have washed themselves free of its stain in tears of penitence. It is a delusion and a snare to trust in any such false and flimsy reasons where there is enough and more than enough in the institution itself to account for its growth. Slavery gratifies at once the love of power, the love of money, and the love of ease; it finds a victim for anger who cannot smite back his oppressor; and it offers to all, without measure, the seductive privileges which the Mormon gospel reserves for the true believers on earth, and the Bible of Mahomet only dares promise to the saints in heaven.

Still it is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that the same gallows-tree ought to bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and the leading champion of aggressive liberty. The mob of Jerusalem was not satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a cross also for the reforming Galilean, who interfered so rudely with its conservative traditions! It is asserted that the fault was quite as much on our side as on the other; that our agitators and abolishers kindled the flame for which the combustibles were all ready on the other side of the border. If these men could have been silenced, our brothers had not died.

Who are the persons that use this argument? They are the very ones who are at the present moment most zealous in maintaining the right of free discussion. At a time when every power the nation can summon is needed to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and turn their force upon its foes,--when a false traitor at home may lose us a battle by a word, and a lying newspaper may demoralize an army by its daily or weekly stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim upon the liberty of speech and of the press; liberty, nay license, to deal with government, with leaders, with every measure, however urgent, in any terms they choose, to traduce the officer before his own soldiers, and assail the only men who have any claim at all to rule over the country, as the very ones who are least worthy to be obeyed. If these opposition members of society are to have their way now, they cannot find fault with those persons who spoke their minds freely in the past on that great question which, as we have agreed, underlies all our present dissensions.

It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards reformers. They are never general favorites. They are apt to interfere with vested rights and time-hallowed interests. They often wear an unlovely, forbidding aspect. Their office corresponds to that of Nature's sanitary commission for the removal of material nuisances. It is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she employs for this duty. It is not the bird of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of dark plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is entrusted the sacred duty of eliminating the substances that infect the air. And the force of obvious analogy teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please the general taste in those whose instincts lead them to attack the moral nuisances which poison the atmosphere of society. But whether they please us in all their aspects or not, is not the question. Like them or not, they must and will perform their office, and we cannot stop them. They may be unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but they are alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses as soon as they are dead, and often to help them to die. To quarrel with them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June just passed, the Governor of Missouri, chairman of the Committee on Emancipation, introduced to the Convention an Ordinance for the final extinction of Slavery! They hunted another through the streets of a great Northern city in 1835; and within a few weeks a regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing the marks of the slave-driver's whip on their backs, marched out before a vast multitude tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the streets of the same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and Liberty!

The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action. It is charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with them, as certain so-called "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed characters set before them. In all questions involving duty, we act from sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family order rests upon them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any two of its members implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment. It is true that men often forget them or act against their bidding in the keen competition of business and politics. But God has not left the hard intellect of man to work out its devices without the constant presence of beings with gentler and purer instincts. The breast of woman is the ever-rocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or later steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion; which will by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and at last thunder forth in the edicts of its law-givers and masters. Woman herself borrows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that shudders at the picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration "from God, who is our home." To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinctively attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the natural sensibilities.

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in the other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics. For what is meant by self-government is, that a man shall make his convictions of what is right and expedient regulate the community so far as his fractional share of the government extends. If one has come to the conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular institution or statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it is to be expected that he will choose to be represented by those who share his belief, and who will in their wider sphere do all they legitimately can to get rid of the wrong in which they find themselves and their constituents involved. To prevent opinion from organizing itself under political forms may be very desirable, but it is not according to the theory or practice of self-government. And if at last organized opinions become arrayed in hostile shape against each other, we shall find that a just war is only the last inevitable link in a chain of closely connected impulses of which the original source is in Him who gave to tender and humble and uncorrupted souls the sense of right and wrong, which, after passing through various forms, has found its final expression in the use of material force. Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,--who looks upon the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies."

The simplest course for the malcontent is to find fault with the order of Nature and the Being who established it. Unless the law of moral progress were changed, or the Governor of the Universe were dethroned, it would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the human conscience against a system, the legislation relating to which, in the words of so calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our laws, presents "such unparalleled atrocities as to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted." Until the infinite selfishness of the powers that hate and fear the principles of free government swallowed up their convenient virtues, that system was hissed at by all the old-world civilization. While in one section of our land the attempt has been going on to lift it out of the category of tolerated wrongs into the sphere of the world's beneficent agencies, it was to be expected that the protest of Northern manhood and womanhood would grow louder and stronger until the conflict of principles led to the conflict of forces. The moral uprising of the North came with the logical precision of destiny; the rage of the "petty tyrants" was inevitable; the plot to erect a slave empire followed with fated certainty; and the only question left for us of the North was, whether we should suffer the cause of the Nation to go by default, or maintain its existence by the argument of cannon and musket, of bayonet and sabre.

The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly ambitious or unworthy purpose. It was primarily, and is to this moment, for the preservation of our national existence. The first direct movement towards it was a civil request on the part of certain Southern persons, that the Nation would commit suicide, without making any unnecessary trouble about it. It was answered, with sentiments of the highest consideration, that there were constitutional and other objections to the Nation's laying violent hands upon itself. It was then requested, in a somewhat peremptory tone, that the Nation would be so obliging as to abstain from food until the natural consequences of that proceeding should manifest themselves. All this was done as between a single State and an isolated fortress; but it was not South Carolina and Fort Sumter that were talking; it was a vast conspiracy uttering its menace to a mighty nation; the whole menagerie of treason was pacing its cages, ready to spring as soon as the doors were opened; and all that the tigers of rebellion wanted to kindle their wild natures to frenzy, was the sight of flowing blood.

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was literally to launch the first missile, figuratively, to "fire the southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was given into the trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incendiary whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus. The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote every loyal American full in the face. As when the foul witch used to torture her miniature image, the person it represented suffered all that she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his mother's Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and most hope for in the future,--the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course of events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war"; if under any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the violence of South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal combat, in which we must either die or give the last and finishing stroke.

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have anchored under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of the rebellion flying at their peaks. "Old Ironsides" herself would have perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater of secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the red-handed conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the ships and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border States have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now triumphant faction? Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by fire,--have been in the day of trial? Into whose hands would the Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the nation as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in spite of the volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered the roar of the first gun at Sumter? Worse than all, are we permitted to doubt that in the very bosom of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but not sleeping, which only listened for the first word that made it safe to strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend its golden scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the cotton-fields. Who would not wish that he were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can forget the mysterious warnings that the allies of the rebels were to be found far north of the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own streets, against their own brothers, that the champions of liberty were to defend her sacred heritage?

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere, and to humanity. You have only to see who are our friends and who are our enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are combating. We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with us. We know what the West End of London wishes may be result of this controversy. The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the shears, threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or later cut into shreds the old charters of tyranny. How they would exult if they could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one resistless weapon! The man who of all living Americans had the best opportunity of knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in March, 1862: "That Great Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master it, and then become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect way possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably be the verdict made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the evidence."

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occupied the same position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn Republic.

"It cannot be denied,"--says another observer, placed on one of our national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--"it cannot be denied that the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places, is more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people," he adds, "everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against an oligarchy." These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,--John Lothrop Motley.

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially of British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such terms of the manner in which our struggle has been regarded. We had, no doubt, very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at least, in a strife which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its cause, arrayed upon one side the supporters of an institution she was supposed to hate in earnest, and on the other its assailants. We had forgotten what her own poet, one of the truest and purest of her children, had said of his countrymen, in words which might well have been spoken by the British Premier to the American Ambassador asking for some evidence of kind feeling on the part of his government:

"Alas I expect it not. We found no bait To tempt us in thy country. Doing good, Disinterested good, is not our trade."

We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest lines. We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why they are our enemies. Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat, which, in spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and consecrated wrongs so long associated with its history, is still venerated as the throne. One of these supports is the pensioned church; the second is the purchased army; the third is the long-suffering people. Whenever the third caryatid comes to life and walks from beneath its burden, the capitals of Europe will be filled with the broken furniture of palaces. No wonder that our ministers find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic split into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of liberty!

We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights. We know our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political and social progress. The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright have both been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man of the people has been true to the cause of the people. That deep and generous thinker, who, more than any of her philosophical writers, represents the higher thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has spoken for us in tones to which none but her sordid hucksters and her selfish land-graspers can refuse to listen. Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from liberal France; France, the country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations embodied themselves for us in the person of the youthful Lafayette. Italy,--would you know on which side the rights of the people and the hopes of the future are to be found in this momentous conflict, what surer test, what ampler demonstration can you ask--than the eager sympathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling many, and the dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the heroic Garibaldi?

But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the nation, and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of mankind, for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as against oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither the unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned. Is it too much to say that whether the war is hopeless or not for the North depends chiefly on the answer to the question, whether the North has virtue and manhood enough to persevere in the contest so long as its resources hold out? But how much virtue and manhood it has can never be told until they are tried, and those who are first to doubt the prevailing existence of these qualities are not commonly themselves patterns of either. We have a right to trust that this people is virtuous and brave enough not to give up a just and necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown to be unattainable for want of material agencies. What was the end to be attained by accepting the gage of battle? It was to get the better of our assailants, and, having done so, to take exactly those steps which we should then consider necessary to our present and future safety. The more obstinate the resistance, the more completely must it be subdued. It may not even have been desirable, as Mr. Mill suggested long since, that the victory over the rebellion should have been easily and speedily won, and so have failed to develop the true meaning of the conflict, to bring out the full strength of the revolted section, and to exhaust the means which would have served it for a still more desperate future effort. We cannot complain that our task has proved too easy. We give our Southern army,--for we must remember that it is our army, after all, only in a state of mutiny,--we give our Southern army credit for excellent spirit and perseverance in the face of many disadvantages. But we have a few plain facts which show the probable course of events; the gradual but sure operation of the blockade; the steady pushing back of the boundary of rebellion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even of such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are now meeting with their long lines of bayonets,--may God grant them victory!--the progress of our arms down the Mississippi; the relative value of gold and currency at Richmond and Washington. If the index-hands of force and credit continue to move in the ratio of the past two years, where will the Confederacy be in twice or thrice that time?

Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth of the two sections of the country signify nothing, or the resources of our opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than our own. The running sand of the hour-glass gives no warning, but runs as freely as ever when its last grains are about to fall. The merchant wears as bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a bankrupt, as he wore at the height of his fortunes. If Colonel Grierson found the Confederacy "a mere shell," so far as his equestrian excursion carried him, how can we say how soon the shell will collapse? It seems impossible that our own dissensions can produce anything more than local disturbances, like the Morristown revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his faithful Massachusetts soldiers. But in a rebellious state dissension is ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure on every inch of the containing surface. Now we know the tremendous force which has compelled the "unanimity" of the Southern people. There are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence which reaches us, who have been recruited with packs of blood-hounds, and drilled, as it were, with halters around their necks. We know what is the bitterness of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the remorseless conspirators; and from that we can judge of the elements of destruction incorporated with many of the seemingly solid portions of the fabric of the rebellion. The facts are necessarily few, but we can reason from the laws of human nature as to what must be the feelings of the people of the South to their Northern neighbors. It is impossible that the love of the life which they have had in common, their glorious recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans, their mingled blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and protected by it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the same outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred and eternal alienation. Men do not change in this way, and we may be quite sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or other prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which the plotters have managed with such consummate skill. It is hardly to be doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of deliverance, and for whom the coming of "our good friends, the enemies," as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels to the prison-cells of Paul and Silas. But there is no need of depending on the aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or be they few; there is material power enough in the North, if there be the will to use it, to overrun and by degrees to recolonize the South, and it is far from impossible that some such process may be a part of the mechanism of its new birth, spreading from various centres of organization, on the plan which Nature follows when she would fill a half-finished tissue with blood-vessels or change a temporary cartilage into bone.

Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say absolutely hopeless,--because that is the unfounded hypothesis of those whose wish is father to their thought,--but full of discouragement. Can we make a safe and honorable peace as the quarrel now stands? As honor comes before safety, let us look at that first. We have undertaken to resent a supreme insult, and have had to bear new insults and aggressions, even to the direct menace of our national capital. The blood which our best and bravest have shed will never sink into the ground until our wrongs are righted, or the power to right them is shown to be insufficient. If we stop now, all the loss of life has been butchery; if we carry out the intention with which we first resented the outrage, the earth drinks up the blood of our martyrs, and the rose of honor blooms forever where it was shed. To accept less than indemnity for the past, so far as the wretched kingdom of the conspirators can afford it, and security for the future, would discredit us in our own eyes and in the eyes of those who hate and long to be able to despise us. But to reward the insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the surrender of our fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on the banks of the national river,--and this and much more would surely be demanded of us,--would place the United Fraction of America on a level with the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open to be plundered by all comers!

If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that would be safe and lasting? We could have an armistice, no doubt, long enough for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken bones to knit together. But could we expect a solid, substantial, enduring peace, in which the grass would have time to grow in the war-paths, and the bruised arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon rusted in our State arsenal, sleeping with their tompions in their mouths, like so many sucking lambs? It is not the question whether the same set of soldiers would be again summoned to the field. Let us take it for granted that we have seen enough of the miseries of warfare to last us for a while, and keep us contented with militia musters and sham-fights. The question is whether we could leave our children and our children's children with any secure trust that they would not have to go through the very trials we are enduring, probably on a more extended scale and in a more aggravated form.

It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is established on the basis of Southern independence, the only peace possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions who already call the Southern whites their masters. We know what the prevailing--we do not mean universal--spirit and temper of those people have been for generations, and what they are like to be after a long and bitter warfare. We know what their tone is to the people of the North; if we do not, De Bow and Governor Hammond are schoolmasters who will teach us to our heart's content. We see how easily their social organization adapts itself to a state of warfare. They breed a superior order of men for leaders, an ignorant commonalty ready to follow them as the vassals of feudal times followed their lords; and a race of bondsmen, who, unless this war changes them from chattels to human beings, will continue to add vastly to their military strength in raising their food, in building their fortifications, in all the mechanical work of war, in fact, except, it may be, the handling of weapons. The institution proclaimed as the corner-stone of their government does violence not merely to the precepts of religion, but to many of the best human instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as sincere as any tribe of the desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of Allah. They call themselves by the same name as the Christians of the North, yet there is as much difference between their Christianity and that of Wesley or of Channing, as between creeds that in past times have vowed mutual extermination. Still we must not call them barbarians because they cherish an institution hostile to civilization. Their highest culture stands out all the more brilliantly from the dark background of ignorance against which it is seen; but it would be injustice to deny that they have always shone in political science, or that their military capacity makes them most formidable antagonists, and that, however inferior they may be to their Northern fellow-countrymen in most branches of literature and science, the social elegances and personal graces lend their outward show to the best circles among their dominant class.

Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of separation,--our neighbors along a splintered line of fracture extending for thousands of miles,--but the Saracens of the Nineteenth Century; a fierce, intolerant, fanatical people, the males of which will be a perpetual standing army; hating us worse than the Southern Hamilcar taught his swarthy boy to hate the Romans; a people whose existence as a hostile nation on our frontier is incompatible with our peaceful development? Their wealth, the proceeds of enforced labor, multiplied by the breaking up of new cottonfields, and in due time by the reopening of the slave-trade, will go to purchase arms, to construct fortresses, to fit out navies. The old Saracens, fanatics for a religion which professed to grow by conquest, were a nation of predatory and migrating warriors. The Southern people, fanatics for a system essentially aggressive, conquering, wasting, which cannot remain stationary, but must grow by alternate appropriations of labor and of land, will come to resemble their earlier prototypes. Already, even, the insolence of their language to the people of the North is a close imitation of the style which those proud and arrogant Asiatics affected toward all the nations of Europe. What the "Christian dogs" were to the followers of Mahomet, the "accursed Yankees," the "Northern mud-sills" are to the followers of the Southern Moloch. The accomplishments which we find in their choicer circles were prefigured in the court of the chivalric Saladin, and the long train of Painim knights who rode forth to conquest under the Crescent. In all branches of culture, their heathen predecessors went far beyond them. The schools of mediaeval learning were filled with Arabian teachers. The heavens declare the glory of the Oriental astronomers, as Algorab and Aldebaran repeat their Arabic names to the students of the starry firmament. The sumptuous edifice erected by the Art of the nineteenth century, to hold the treasures of its Industry, could show nothing fairer than the court which copies the Moorish palace that crowns the summit of Granada. Yet this was the power which Charles the Hammer, striking for Christianity and civilization, had to break like a potter's vessel; these were the people whom Spain had to utterly extirpate from the land where they had ruled for centuries.

Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds this dangerous Afrit of Southern nationality, for a power on your borders that will be to you what the Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin shattered their armies, and flung the shards and shivers of their broken strength upon the refuse heap of extinguished barbarisms. Prepare for the possible fate of Christian Spain; for a slave-market in Philadelphia; for the Alhambra of a Southern caliph on the grounds consecrated by the domestic virtues of a long line of Presidents and their exemplary families. Remember the ages of border warfare between England and Scotland, closed at last by the union of the two kingdoms. Recollect the hunting of the deer on the Cheviot hills, and all that it led to; then think of the game which the dogs will follow open-mouthed across our Southern border, and all that is like to follow which the child may rue that is unborn; think of these possibilities, or probabilities, if you will, and say whether you are ready to make a peace which will give you such a neighbor; which may betray your civilization as that of half the Peninsula was given up to the Moors; which may leave your fair border provinces to be crushed under the heel of a tyrant, as Holland was left to be trodden down by the Duke of Alva!

No! no! fellow-citizens! We must fight in this quarrel until one side or the other is exhausted. Rather than suffer all that we have poured out of our blood, all that we have lavished of our substance, to have been expended in vain, and to bequeath an unsettled question, an unfinished conflict, an unavenged insult, an unrighted wrong, a stained escutcheon, a tarnished shield, a dishonored flag, an unheroic memory to the descendants of those who have always claimed that their fathers were heroes; rather than do all this, it were hardly an American exaggeration to say, better that the last man and the last dollar should be followed by the last woman and the last dime, the last child and the last copper!

There are those who profess to fear that our government is becoming a mere irresponsible tyranny. If there are any who really believe that our present Chief Magistrate means to found a dynasty for himself and family, that a coup d'etat is in preparation by which he is to become ABRAHAM, DEI GRATIA REX,--they cannot have duly pondered his letter of June 12th, in which he unbosoms himself with the simplicity of a rustic lover called upon by an anxious parent to explain his intentions. The force of his argument is not at all injured by the homeliness of his illustrations. The American people are not much afraid that their liberties will be usurped. An army of legislators is not very likely to throw away its political privileges, and the idea of a despotism resting on an open ballot-box, is like that of Bunker Hill Monument built on the waves of Boston Harbor. We know pretty well how much of sincerity there is in the fears so clamorously expressed, and how far they are found in company with uncompromising hostility to the armed enemies of the nation. We have learned to put a true value on the services of the watch-dog who bays the moon, but does not bite the thief!

The men who are so busy holy-stoning the quarterdeck, while all hands are wanted to keep the ship afloat, can no doubt show spots upon it that would be very unsightly in fair weather. No thoroughly loyal man, however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise of power, such as emergencies always give rise to. If any half-loyal man forgets his code of half-decencies and half-duties so far as to become obnoxious to the peremptory justice which takes the place of slower forms in all centres of conflagration, there is no sympathy for him among the soldiers who are risking their lives for us; perhaps there is even more satisfaction than when an avowed traitor is caught and punished. For of all men who are loathed by generous natures, such as fill the ranks of the armies of the Union, none are so thoroughly loathed as the men who contrive to keep just within the limits of the law, while their whole conduct provokes others to break it; whose patriotism consists in stopping an inch short of treason, and whose political morality has for its safeguard a just respect for the jailer and the hangman! The simple preventive against all possible injustice a citizen is like to suffer at the hands of a government which in its need and haste must of course commit many errors, is to take care to do nothing that will directly or indirectly help the enemy, or hinder the government in carrying on the war. When the clamor against usurpation and tyranny comes from citizens who can claim this negative merit, it may be listened to. When it comes from those who have done what they could to serve their country, it will receive the attention it deserves. Doubtless there may prove to be wrongs which demand righting, but the pretence of any plan for changing the essential principle of our self-governing system is a figment which its contrivers laugh over among themselves. Do the citizens of Harrisburg or of Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the strict legality of an executive act meant in good faith for their protection against the invader? We are all citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour of their peril, and with the enemy at work in our own harbors, we begin to understand the difference between a good and bad citizen; the man that helps and the man that hinders; the man who, while the pirate is in sight, complains that our anchor is dragging in his mud, and the man who violates the proprieties, like our brave Portland brothers, when they jumped on board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable, and bore down on the corsair, with a habeas corpus act that lodged twenty buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in the whirlpool of national destruction. If our borders are invaded, it is only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to rouse his slumbering mettle. If our property is taxed, it is only to teach us that liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for. We are pouring out the most generous blood of our youth and manhood; alas! this is always the price that must be paid for the redemption of a people. What have we to complain of, whose granaries are choking with plenty, whose streets are gay with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose industry is abundant enough to reap all its overflowing harvest, yet sure of employment and of its just reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is an inexhaustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores of heat and power, imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all the inhabitants and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered ages, whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over beds of golden sand,--what have we to complain of?

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do and bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne over and over again for their form of government? Could England, in her wars with Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must we faint under the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.? Was she content to negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and that paid in depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin with our national stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par, and the "five-twenty" war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount of nearly two hundred millions, without any check to the flow of the current pressing inwards against the doors of the Treasury? Except in those portions of the country which are the immediate seat of war, or liable to be made so, and which, having the greatest interest not to become the border states of hostile nations, can best afford to suffer now, the state of prosperity and comfort is such as to astonish those who visit us from other countries. What are war taxes to a nation which, as we are assured on good authority, has more men worth a million now than it had worth ten thousand dollars at the close of the Revolution,--whose whole property is a hundred times, and whose commerce, inland and foreign, is five hundred times, what it was then? But we need not study Mr. Still's pamphlet and "Thompson's Bank-Note Reporter" to show us what we know well enough, that, so far from having occasion to tremble in fear of our impending ruin, we must rather blush for our material prosperity. For the multitudes who are unfortunate enough to be taxed for a million or more, of course we must feel deeply, at the same time suggesting that the more largely they report their incomes to the tax-gatherer, the more consolation they will find in the feeling that they have served their country. But,--let us say it plainly,--it will not hurt our people to be taught that there are other things to be cared for besides money-making and money-spending; that the time has come when manhood must assert itself by brave deeds and noble thoughts; when womanhood must assume its most sacred office, "to warn, to comfort," and, if need be, "to command," those whose services their country calls for. This Northern section of the land has become a great variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities are the long-extended counter. We have grown rich for what? To put gilt bands on coachmen's hats? To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest silks which the toiling artisans of France can send us? To look through plate-glass windows, and pity the brown soldiers,--or sneer at the black ones? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two below its old minimum? to color meerschaums? to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in diamonds? to dredge our maidens' hair with gold-dust? to float through life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues to the beaches, and back again from the beaches to the avenues? Was it for this that the broad domain of the Western hemisphere was kept so long unvisited by civilization?--for this, that Time, the father of empires, unbound the virgin zone of this youngest of his daughters, and gave her, beautiful in the long veil of her forests, to the rude embrace of the adventurous Colonist? All this is what we see around us, now, now while we are actually fighting this great battle, and supporting this great load of indebtedness. Wait till the diamonds go back to the Jews of Amsterdam; till the plate-glass window bears the fatal announcement, For Sale or to Let; till the voice of our Miriam is obeyed, as she sings,

"Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms!"

till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to buy bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the platform of the horse-cars; till the music-grinders cease because none will pay them; till there are no peaches in the windows at twenty-four dollars a dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples selling at the street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;--but till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is carrying us farther and farther, every hour, out of the influence of the great failing which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin which was our fatal inheritance!

Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field of discussion we are just leaving.

On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one, at half-past four of the clock in the morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of South Carolina at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United States. Its ball carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty years, shaped and cooled in the mould of malignant deliberation. Its wad was the charter of our national existence. Its muzzle was pointed at the stone which bore the symbol of our national sovereignty. As the echoes of its thunder died away, the telegraph clicked one word through every office of the land. That word was WAR!

War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is claimed by its true parents. This war has eaten its way backward through all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of ordinances and statutes; through all the casuistries of divines, experts in the differential calculus of conscience and duty; until it stands revealed to all men as the natural and inevitable conflict of two incompatible forms of civilization, one or the other of which must dominate the central zone of the continent, and eventually claim the hemisphere for its development.

We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms which the wise Romans, the world's lawgivers, always recognized as above all special enactments. We have come to that solid substratum acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise: "Necessity itself which reduces things to the mere right of Nature." The old rules which were enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless "as moonlight on the dial of the day." We have followed precedents as long as they could guide us; now we must make precedents for the ages which are to succeed us.

If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent, the current prices of United States stocks show that we value our nationality at only a small fraction of our wealth. If we feel that we are paying too dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us recall those grand words of Samuel Adams:

"I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it were revealed from heaven that nine hundred and ninety-nine were to perish, and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his liberty!"

What we want now is a strong purpose; the purpose of Luther, when he said, in repeating his Pater Noster, fiat voluntas MEA,--let my will be done; though he considerately added, quia Tua,--because my will is Thine. We want the virile energy of determination which made the oath of Andrew Jackson sound so like the devotion of an ardent saint that the recording angel might have entered it unquestioned among the prayers of the faithful.

War is a grim business. Two years ago our women's fingers were busy making "Havelocks." It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made half the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of inexperience and illusion. We know now what War means, and we cannot look its dull, dead ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there is some great and noble principle behind it. It makes little difference what we thought we were fighting for at first; we know what we are fighting for now, and what we are fighting against.

We are fighting for our existence. We say to those who would take back their several contributions to that undivided unity which we call the Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal; you cannot reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible! There are rights, possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties, acquired, retained, called into existence in virtue of the principle of absolute solidarity,--belonging to the United States as an organic whole, which cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties can claim as its own, which perish out of its living frame when the wild forces of rebellion tear it limb from limb, and which it must defend, or confess self-government itself a failure.

We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national existence reposes, now subjected by those who fired the scroll on which it was written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those chances which the necessities of war entail upon every human arrangement, but still the venerable charter of our wide Republic.

We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother cause of all the progeny of lesser antagonisms. Whether we know it or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the system that has proved the source of all those miseries which the author of the Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate. And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough to die, wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! He rose from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred years ago. He is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he lies buried wherever man, made in his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Master gave him! This is our Holy War, and we must fight it against that great General who will bring to it all the powers with which he fought against the Almighty before he was cast down from heaven. He has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him; he has bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher to be his chaplain; he has engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the profligate by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler natures by motives which we can all understand; whose delusion we pity as we ought always to pity the error of those who know not what they do. Against him or for him we are all called upon to declare ourselves. There is no neutrality for any single true-born American. If any seek such a position, the stony finger of Dante's awful muse points them to their place in the antechamber of the Halls of Despair,--

"--With that ill band Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved, Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves Were only."

"--Fame of them the world hath none Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both. Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by."

We must use all the means which God has put into our hands to serve him against the enemies of civilization. We must make and keep the great river free, whatever it costs us; it is strapping up the forefoot of the wild, untamable rebellion. We must not be too nice in the choice of our agents. Non eget Mauri jaculis,--no African bayonets wanted,--was well enough while we did not yet know the might of that desperate giant we had to deal with; but Tros, Tyriusve,--white or black,--is the safer motto now; for a good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad color. The iron-skins, as well as the iron-clads, have already done us noble service, and many a mother will clasp the returning boy, many a wife will welcome back the war-worn husband, whose smile would never again have gladdened his home, but that, cold in the shallow trench of the battle-field, lies the half-buried form of the unchained bondsman whose dusky bosom sheathes the bullet which would else have claimed that darling as his country's sacrifice.

We shall have success if we truly will success, not otherwise. It may be long in coming,--Heaven only knows through what trials and humblings we may have to pass before the full strength of the nation is duly arrayed and led to victory. We must be patient, as our fathers were patient; even in our worst calamities, we must remember that defeat itself may be a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it costs ourselves. But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who vindicated the insulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her assailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood for your temporal salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies are starred with bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the soil which they defended. In every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as children amidst the clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them. By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the sake of men everywhere and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to stand by her through good report and through evil report, in triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization, Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's emancipated peoples; until the flag that fell from the wall of Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme, over all her ancient inheritance, every fortress, every capital, every ship, and this warring land is once more a, United Nation!

CINDERS FROM THE ASHES.

The personal revelations contained in my report of certain breakfast-table conversations were so charitably listened to and so good-naturedly interpreted, that I may be in danger of becoming over-communicative. Still, I should never have ventured to tell the trivial experiences here thrown together, were it not that my brief story is illuminated here and there by a glimpse of some shining figure that trod the same path with me for a time, or crossed it, leaving a momentary or lasting brightness in its track. I remember that, in furnishing a chamber some years ago, I was struck with its dull aspect as I looked round on the black-walnut chairs and bedstead and bureau. "Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to the key of that dark chest of drawers," I said to the furnisher. It was done, and that one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment as the evening star glorifies the dusky firmament. So, my loving reader,--and to none other can such table-talk as this be addressed, --I hope there will be lustre enough in one or other of the names with which I shall gild my page to redeem the dulness of all that is merely personal in my recollections.

After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by infantine loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by the great forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and deodauds, and by the long willow stick by the aid of which the good old body, now stricken in years and unwieldy in person could stimulate the sluggish faculties or check the mischievous sallies of the child most distant from his ample chair,--a school where I think my most noted schoolmate was the present Bishop of Delaware, became the pupil of Master William Biglow. This generation is not familiar with his title to renown, although he fills three columns and a half in Mr. Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia of American Literature." He was a humorist hardly robust enough for more than a brief local immortality. I am afraid we were an undistinguished set, for I do not remember anybody near a bishop in dignity graduating from our benches.

At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the "Port School," because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the College. This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being much of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as compared with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the many beautiful mansions that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, and Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except the "Dana House" and the "Opposition House" and the "Clark House," these roads were almost all the way bordered by pastures until we reached the "stores" of Main Street, or were abreast of that forlorn "First Row" of Harvard Street. We called the boys of that locality "Port-chucks." They called us "Cambridge-chucks," but we got along very well together in the main.

Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular loveliness. I once before referred to her as "the golden blonde," but did not trust myself to describe her charms. The day of her appearance in the school was almost as much a revelation to us boys as the appearance of Miranda was to Caliban. Her abounding natural curls were so full of sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her smile and her voice were so all-subduing, that half our heads were turned. Her fascinations were everywhere confessed a few years afterwards; and when I last met her, though she said she was a grandmother, I questioned her statement, for her winning looks and ways would still have made her admired in any company.

Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, one of them very small, perhaps the youngest boy in school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet, reserved, sticking loyally by each other, the oldest, however, beginning to enter into social relations with us of somewhat maturer years. One of these two boys was destined to be widely known, first in literature, as author of one of the most popular books of its time and which is freighted for a long voyage; then as an eminent lawyer; a man who, if his countrymen are wise, will yet be prominent in the national councils. Richard Henry Dana, Junior, is the name he bore and bears; he found it famous, and will bequeath it a fresh renown.

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age. She came with the reputation of being "smart," as we should have called it, clever as we say nowadays. This was Margaret Fuller, the only one among us who, like "Jean Paul," like "The Duke," like "Bettina," has slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to which she was anchored, and floats on the waves of speech as "Margaret." Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them. She was a great student and a great reader of what she used to call "naw-vels." I remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-treatment of a relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the viraginian aspect.

Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a celebrity as Margaret. I remember being greatly awed once, in our school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions. Some themes were brought home from the school for examination by my father, among them one of hers. I took it up with a certain emulous interest (for I fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one, at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read the first words.

"It is a trite remark," she began.

I stopped. Alas! I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority? I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for cinders with her,--she in a snowy cap, and I in a decent peruke!

After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I was to enter college. It seemed advisable to give me a year of higher training, and for that end some public school was thought to offer advantages. Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us. We had been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries. Some Boston boys of well-known and distinguished parentage had been scholars there very lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd Walley, Master Nathaniel Parker Willis,--all promising youth, who fulfilled their promise.

I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of quiet by my temporary absence, but I have wondered that there was not. Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it is true; but I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of the exceptional kind. I had tendencies in the direction of flageolets and octave flutes. I had a pistol and a gun, and popped at everything that stirred, pretty nearly, except the house-cat. Worse than this, I would buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments, putting it meantime in the barrel of my pistol, by a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall; for no maternal or other female eyes would explore the cavity of that dread implement in search of contraband commodities.

It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and preparations were made that I might join the school at the beginning of the autumn.

In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little modernized from the pattern of my Lady Bountiful's, and we jogged soberly along,--kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,--towards the seat of learning, some twenty miles away. Up the old West Cambridge road, now North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree and swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a colossal conical ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest of the ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great square boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous murder done by its lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had it, and the rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so at last into the hallowed borders of the academic town.

It was a shallow, two-story white house before which we stopped, just at the entrance of the central village, the residence of a very worthy professor in the theological seminary,--learned, amiable, exemplary, but thought by certain experts to be a little questionable in the matter of homoousianism, or some such doctrine. There was a great rock that showed its round back in the narrow front yard. It looked cold and hard; but it hinted firmness and indifference to the sentiments fast struggling to get uppermost in my youthful bosom; for I was not too old for home-sickness,--who is: The carriage and my fond companions had to leave me at last. I saw it go down the declivity that sloped southward, then climb the next ascent, then sink gradually until the window in the back of it disappeared like an eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to some widowed heart.

Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy but time. Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy. There was an ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf, rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other murmurous fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy gentlewoman of the poor-relation variety. She comforted me, I well remember, but not with apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons. She went in her benevolence, and, taking a blue and white soda-powder, mingled the same in water, and encouraged me to drink the result. It might be a specific for seasickness, but it was not for home-sickness. The fiz was a mockery, and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my despondent heart. I did not disgrace myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on the water often cures seasickness.

There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who began to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the conditions surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met in my life. My room-mate came later. He was the son of a clergyman in a neighboring town,--in fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergymen's sons at Andover. He and I went in harness together as well as most boys do, I suspect; and I have no grudge against him, except that once, when I was slightly indisposed, he administered to me,--with the best intentions, no doubt,--a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of time, as Mr. Morrissey would say,--not quite into eternity, but so near it that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a word of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which so brings realities home to the imagination, that "I never should look any whiter when I was laid out as a corpse." After my room-mate and I had been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen and acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close literary neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article, signed by him, in the last number of the "Galaxy." Does it not sometimes seem as if we were all marching round and round in a circle, like the supernumeraries who constitute the "army" of a theatre, and that each of us meets and is met by the same and only the same people, or their doubles, twice, thrice, or a little oftener, before the curtain drops and the "army" puts off its borrowed clothes?

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare and uninteresting as our own "University Building" at Cambridge, since the piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance the ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added to "Harvard Hall." Two masters sat at the end of the great room,--the principal and his assistant. Two others presided in separate rooms, one of them the late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent and lovable man, who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard, a clergyman's son, too, which privilege I did not always find the warrant of signal virtues; but no matter about that here, and I have promised myself to be amiable.

On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these words:

YOUTH IS THE SEED-TIME OF LIFE.

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me with its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension.

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth, with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a singularly malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime. Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very distinguished divine. He was bright enough, and more select in his choice of recreations, at least during school hours, than my late homicidal neighbor. But the principal called me up presently, and cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion. Could it be so? If the son of that boy's father could not be trusted, what boy in Christendom could? It seemed like the story of the youth doomed to be slain by a lion before reaching a certain age, and whose fate found him out in the heart of the tower where his father had shut him up for safety. Here was I, in the very dove's nest of Puritan faith, and out of one of its eggs a serpent had been hatched and was trying to nestle in my bosom! I parted from him, however, none the worse for his companionship so far as I can remember.

Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired great distinction among the scholars of the land. One day I observed a new boy in a seat not very far from my own. He was a little fellow, as I recollect him, with black hair and very bright black eyes, when at length I got a chance to look at them. Of all the new-comers during my whole year he was the only one whom the first glance fixed in my memory, but there he is now, at this moment, just as he caught my eye on the morning of his entrance. His head was between his hands (I wonder if he does not sometimes study in that same posture nowadays!) and his eyes were fastened to his book as if he had been reading a will that made him heir to a million. I feel sure that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not find fault with me for writing his name under this inoffensive portrait. Thousands of faces and forms that I have known more or less familiarly have faded from my remembrance, but this presentment of the youthful student, sitting there entranced over the page of his text-book,--the child-father of the distinguished scholar that was to be,--is not a picture framed and hung up in my mind's gallery, but a fresco on its walls, there to remain so long as they hold together.

My especial intimate was a fine, rosy-faced boy, not quite so free of speech as myself, perhaps, but with qualities that promised a noble manhood, and ripened into it in due season. His name was Phinehas Barnes, and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the State of Maine, something will be heard to his advantage from any honest and intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the question. This was one of two or three friendships that lasted. There were other friends and classmates, one of them a natural humorist of the liveliest sort, who would have been quarantined in any Puritan port, his laugh was so potently contagious.

Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I remember best was Professor Moses Stuart. His house was nearly opposite the one in which I resided and I often met him and listened to him in the chapel of the Seminary. I have seen few more striking figures in my life than his, as I remember it. Tall, lean, with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, great solemnity and impressiveness of voice and manner, he was my early model of a classic orator. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare like Cicero's, and his toga,--that is his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm, whatever might have been the weather, with such a statue-like rigid grace that he might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked noble by the side of the antiques of the Vatican.

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his throat, and his face "festooned"--as I heard Hillard say once, speaking of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles. Ill health gives a certain common character to all faces, as Nature has a fixed course which she follows in dismantling a human countenance: the noblest and the fairest is but a death's-head decently covered over for the transient ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls half off before the procession has passed.

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the Professors. He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-heterodoxy, as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,--just as old doctors grow to be sparing of the more exasperating drugs in their later days. He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so long and so exhaustively, that he would have seemed more at home among the mediaeval schoolmen than amidst the working clergy of our own time.

All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the world is waiting in dumb expectancy. In due time the world seizes upon these wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves of an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for the most part heard of no more. We had two great men, grown up both of them. Which was the more awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, we debated. Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by taking one away early, and padding the other with prosperity so that his course was comparatively noiseless and ineffective. We had our societies, too; one in particular, "The Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am under a lifelong obligation never to reveal. The fate of William Morgan, which the community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the danger of the ground upon which I am treading.

There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study a season of relief. One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of asking students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with and for them. Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded by spiritual exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the heroic sport of football were followed with some spirit.

A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in very shallow and simple sources. Yet a kind of romance gilds for me the sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in contact with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with facilis descensus on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating sed revocare gradum. I wandered' in the autumnal woods that crown the "Indian Ridge," much wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers believed with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies. The little Shawshine was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimack, the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning stroll. At home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his enormities, for he spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest little living protest against the prevailing solemnities of the locality. It did not take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing that this is apt to be so with young people. What else could have made us think it great sport to leave our warm beds in the middle of winter and "camp out,"--on the floor of our room,--with blankets disposed tent-wise, except the fact that to a boy a new discomfort in place of an old comfort is often a luxury.

More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the preceptors to see if he would not drop dead while he was praying. He had a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a warning, and told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come and visit him in turn, as one whom they were soon to lose. More than one boy kept his eye on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the man had who followed Van Amburgh about with the expectation, let us not say the hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later.

Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to Haverhill with my room-mate, and how he led me to the mighty bridge over the Merrimack which defied the ice-rafts of the river; and to the old meetinghouse, where, in its porch, I saw the door of the ancient parsonage, with the bullet-hole in it through which Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, was shot by the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great city!--for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural effect I hate to inquire too nicely.

My literary performances at Andover, if any reader who may have survived so far cares to know, included a translation from Virgil, out of which I remember this couplet, which had the inevitable cockney rhyme of beginners:

"Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm The boiling ocean trembled into calm."

Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, which he treated argumentatively and I rhetorically and sentimentally. My sentences were praised and his conclusions adopted. Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held in the large hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly enough from the roof, suspended by iron rods. Subject, Fancy. Treatment, brief but comprehensive, illustrating the magic power of that brilliant faculty in charming life into forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is heir to,--the gift of Heaven to every condition and every clime, from the captive in his dungeon to the monarch on his throne; from the burning sands of the desert to the frozen icebergs of the poles, from--but I forget myself.

This was the last of my coruscations at Andover. I went from the Academy to Harvard College, and did not visit the sacred hill again for a long time.

On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover, for many years, I took the cars at noon, and in an hour or a little more found myself at the station,--just at the foot of the hill. My first pilgrimage was to the old elm, which I remembered so well as standing by the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it held, buried in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time to keep the Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks. I then began the once familiar toil of ascending the long declivity. Academic villages seem to change very slowly. Once in a hundred years the library burns down with all its books. A new edifice or two may be put up, and a new library begun in the course of the same century; but these places are poor, for the most part, and cannot afford to pull down their old barracks.

These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone. The story of them must be told succinctly. It is like the opium-smoker's showing you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, empty of the precious extract which has given him his dream.

I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for the new library building on my left. But for these it was surprising to see how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed. The Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-coach landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old. The pale brick seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if "Hollis" and "Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge,--carried there in the night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa. Away to my left again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building; and in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where I lived a year in the days of James Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.

The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered among the places he knew so well. I went to the front of the house. There was the great rock showing its broad back in the front yard. I used to crack nuts on that, whispered the small ghost. I looked in at the upper window in the farther part of the house. I looked out of that on four long changing seasons, said the ghost. I should have liked to explore farther, but, while I was looking, one came into the small garden, or what used to be the garden, in front of the house, and I desisted from my investigation and went on my way. The apparition that put me and my little ghost to flight had a dressing-gown on its person and a gun in its hand. I think it was the dressing-gown, and not the gun, which drove me off.

And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be Shipman's, after passing what I think used to be Jonathan Leavitt's bookbindery, and here is the back road that will lead me round by the old Academy building.

Could I believe my senses when I found that it was turned into a gymnasium, and heard the low thunder of ninepin balls, and the crash of tumbling pins from those precincts? The little ghost said, Never! It cannot be. But it was. "Have they a billiard-room in the upper story?" I asked myself. "Do the theological professors take a hand at all-fours or poker on weekdays, now and then, and read the secular columns of the 'Boston Recorder' on Sundays?" I was demoralized for the moment, it is plain; but now that I have recovered from the shock, I must say that the fact mentioned seems to show a great advance in common sense from the notions prevailing in my time.

I sauntered,--we, rather, my ghost and I,--until we came to a broken field where there was quarrying and digging going on,--our old base-ball ground, hard by the burial-place. There I paused; and if any thoughtful boy who loves to tread in the footsteps that another has sown with memories of the time when he was young shall follow my footsteps, I need not ask him to rest here awhile, for he will be enchained by the noble view before him. Far to the north and west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their summits in along encircling ridge of pale blue waves. The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline with perfect definition against the sky. This was a sight which had more virtue and refreshment in it than any aspect of nature that I had looked upon, I am afraid I must say for years. I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to what the winds have to say and getting angry with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to those who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name recalls!--and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her bravest and hardiest children,--I can never look at them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. It is more than a year since I have looked on those blue mountains, and they "are to me as a feeling" now, and have been ever since.

I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burial-ground. It was thinly tenanted as I remember it, but now populous with the silent immigrants of more than a whole generation. There lay the dead I had left, the two or three students of the Seminary; the son of the worthy pair in whose house I lived, for whom in those days hearts were still aching, and by whose memory the house still seemed haunted. A few upright stones were all that I recollect. But now, around them were the monuments of many of the dead whom I remembered as living. I doubt if there has been a more faithful reader of these graven stones than myself for many a long day. I listened to more than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had often heard as they thundered their doctrines down upon me from the throne-like desk. Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a narrower pulpit, from an older text than any they ever found in Cruden's Concordance, but there was an eloquence in their voices the listening chapel had never known. There were stately monuments and studied inscriptions, but none so beautiful, none so touching, as that which hallows the resting-place of one of the children of the very learned Professor Robinson: "Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well."

While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer to the gravedigger and his companion. They christened a mountain or two for me, "Kearnsarge" among the rest, and revived some old recollections, of which the most curious was "Basil's Cave." The story was recent, when I was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or Buzzell, or whatever his name might have been, a member of the Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally extravagant, and of more or less lawless habits. He had commanded a cave to be secretly dug, and furnished it sumptuously, and there with his companions indulged in revelries such as the daylight of that consecrated locality had never looked upon. How much truth there was in it all I will not pretend to say, but I seem to remember stamping over every rock that sounded hollow, to question if it were not the roof of what was once Basil's Cave.

The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I sought a shelter under which to partake of the hermit fare I had brought with me. Following the slope of the hill northward behind the cemetery, I found a pleasant clump of trees grouped about some rocks, disposed so as to give a seat, a table, and a shade. I left my benediction on this pretty little natural caravansera, and a brief record on one of its white birches, hoping to visit it again on some sweet summer or autumn day.

Two scenes remained to look upon,--the Shawshine River and the Indian Ridge. The streamlet proved to have about the width with which it flowed through my memory. The young men and the boys were bathing in its shallow current, or dressing and undressing upon its banks as in the days of old; the same river, only the water changed; "The same boys, only the names and the accidents of local memory different," I whispered to my little ghost.

The Indian Ridge more than equalled what I expected of it. It is well worth a long ride to visit. The lofty wooded bank is a mile and a half in extent, with other ridges in its neighborhood, in general running nearly parallel with it, one of them still longer. These singular formations are supposed to have been built up by the eddies of conflicting currents scattering sand and gravel and stones as they swept over the continent. But I think they pleased me better when I was taught that the Indians built them; and while I thank Professor Hitchcock, I sometimes feel as if I should like to found a chair to teach the ignorance of what people do not want to know.

"Two tickets to Boston." I said to the man at the station.

But the little ghost whispered, "When you leave this place you leave me behind you."

"One ticket to Boston, if you please. Good by, little ghost."

I believe the boy-shadow still lingers around the well-remembered scenes I traversed on that day, and that, whenever I revisit them, I shall find him again as my companion.

THE PULPIT AND THE PEW.

The priest is dead for the Protestant world. Luther's inkstand did not kill the devil, but it killed the priest, at least for us: He is a loss in many respects to be regretted. He kept alive the spirit of reverence. He was looked up to as possessing qualities superhuman in their nature, and so was competent to be the stay of the weak and their defence against the strong. If one end of religion is to make men happier in this world as well as in the next, mankind lost a great source of happiness when the priest was reduced to the common level of humanity, and became only a minister. Priest, which was presbyter, corresponded to senator, and was a title to respect and honor. Minister is but the diminutive of magister, and implies an obligation to render service.

It was promised to the first preachers that in proof of their divine mission they should have the power of casting out devils and talking in strange tongues; that they should handle serpents and drink poisons with impunity; that they should lay hands on the sick and they should recover. The Roman Church claims some of these powers for its clergy and its sacred objects to this day. Miracles, it is professed, are wrought by them, or through them, as in the days of the apostles. Protestantism proclaims that the age of such occurrences as the apostles witnessed is past. What does it know about miracles? It knows a great many records of miracles, but this is a different kind of knowledge.

The minister may be revered for his character, followed for his eloquence, admired for his learning, loved for his amiable qualities, but he can never be what the priest was in past ages, and is still, in the Roman Church. Dr. Arnold's definition may be found fault with, but it has a very real meaning. "The essential point in the notion of a priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us morally,--an unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity." He did not mean, of course, that the priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a special power, quite independent of his personal character, which could act, as it were, mechanically; that out of him went a virtue, as from the hem of his Master's raiment, to those with whom his sacred office brought him in contact.

It was a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a tangible personality of like nature with themselves as a mediator between them and the heavenly powers. Sympathy can do much for the sorrowing, the suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking directly through human lips, to feel the touch of a hand which is the channel of communication with the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is the privilege of those who looked and those who still look up to a priesthood. It has been said, and many who have walked the hospitals or served in the dispensaries can bear witness to the truth of the assertion, that the Roman Catholics know how to die. The same thing is less confidently to be said of Protestants. How frequently is the story told of the most exemplary Protestant Christians, nay, how common is it to read in the lives of the most exemplary Protestant ministers, that they were beset with doubts and terrors in their last days! The blessing of the viaticum is unknown to them. Man is essentially an idolater,--that is, in bondage to his imagination,--for there is no more harm in the Greek word eidolon than in the Latin word imago. He wants a visible image to fix his thought, a scarabee or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are to our own time what these were to the ancient Egyptians. He wants a vicegerent of the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him godspeed on his last journey. Who but such an immediate representative of the Divinity would have dared to say to the monarch just laying his head on the block, "Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel"?

It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly republicanize the American Protestant descendant of the ancient priesthood. The history of the Congregationalists in New England would show us how this change has gone on, until we have seen the church become a hall open to all sorts of purposes, the pulpit come down to the level of the rostrum, and the clergyman take on the character of a popular lecturer who deals with every kind of subject, including religion.

Whatever fault we may find with many of their beliefs, we have a right to be proud of our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers among the clergy. They were ready to do and to suffer anything for their faith, and a faith which breeds heroes is better than an unbelief which leaves nothing worth being a hero for. Only let us be fair, and not defend the creed of Mohammed because it nurtured brave men and enlightened scholars, or refrain from condemning polygamy in our admiration of the indomitable spirit and perseverance of the Pilgrim Fathers of Mormonism, or justify an inhuman belief, or a cruel or foolish superstition, because it was once held or acquiesced in by men whose nobility of character we heartily recognize. The New England clergy can look back to a noble record, but the pulpit has sometimes required a homily from the pew, and may sometimes find it worth its while to listen to one even in our own days.

From the settlement of the country to the present time, the ministers have furnished the highest type of character to the people among whom they have lived. They have lost to a considerable extent the position of leaders, but if they are in our times rather to be looked upon as representatives of their congregations, they represent what is best among those of whom they are the speaking organs. We have a right to expect them to be models as well as teachers of all that makes the best citizens for this world and the next, and they have not been, and are not in these later days unworthy of their high calling. They have worked hard for small earthly compensation. They have been the most learned men the country had to show, when learning was a scarce commodity. Called by their consciences to self-denying labors, living simply, often half-supported by the toil of their own hands, they have let the light, such light as shone for them, into the minds of our communities as the settler's axe let the sunshine into their log-huts and farm-houses.

Their work has not been confined to their professional duties, as a few instances will illustrate. Often, as was just said, they toiled like day-laborers, teasing lean harvests out of their small inclosures of land, for the New England soil is not one that "laughs when tickled with a hoe," but rather one that sulks when appealed to with that persuasive implement. The father of the eminent Boston physician whose recent loss is so deeply regretted, the Reverend Pitt Clarke, forty-two years pastor of the small fold in the town of Norton, Massachusetts, was a typical example of this union of the two callings, and it would be hard to find a story of a more wholesome and useful life, within a limited and isolated circle, than that which the pious care of one of his children commemorated. Sometimes the New England minister, like worthy Mr. Ward of Stratford-on-Avon, in old England, joined the practice of medicine to the offices of his holy profession. Michael Wigglesworth, the poet of "The Day of Doom," and Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard College, were instances of this twofold service. In politics their influence has always been felt, and in many cases their drums ecclesiastic have beaten the reveille as vigorously, and to as good purpose, as it ever sounded in the slumbering camp. Samuel Cooper sat in council with the leaders of the Revolution in Boston. The three Northampton-born brothers Allen, Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted their voices, and, when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of liberty. In later days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood carried politics into their pulpits as boldly as their antislavery successors have done in times still more recent.

The learning, the personal character, the sacredness of their office, tended, to give the New England clergy of past generations a kind of aristocratic dignity, a personal grandeur, much more felt in the days when class distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than at present. Their costume added to the effect of their bodily presence, as the old portraits illustrate for us, as those of us who remember the last of the "fair, white, curly" wigs, as it graced the imposing figure of the Reverend Dr. Marsh of Wethersfield, Connecticut, can testify. They were not only learned in the history of the past, but they were the interpreters of the prophecy, and announced coming events with a confidence equal to that with which the weather-bureau warns us of a coming storm. The numbers of the book of Daniel and the visions of the Revelation were not too hard for them. In the commonplace book of the Reverend Joel Benedict is to be found the following record, made, as it appears, about the year 1773: "Conversing with Dr. Bellamy upon the downfall of Antichrist, after many things had been said upon the subject, the Doctor began to warm, and uttered himself after this manner: 'Tell your children to tell their children that in the year 1866 something notable will happen in the church; tell them the old man says so.'"

The "old man" came pretty near hitting the mark, as we shall see if we consider what took place in the decade from 1860 to 1870. In 1864 the Pope issued the "Syllabus of Errors," which "must be considered by Romanists--as an infallible official document, and which arrays the papacy in open war against modern civilization and civil and religious freedom." The Vatican Council in 1870 declared the Pope to be the bishop of bishops, and immediately after this began the decisive movement of the party known as the "Old Catholics." In the exact year looked forward to by the New England prophet, 1866, the evacuation of Rome by the French and the publication of "Ecce Homo" appear to be the most remarkable events having Special relation to the religious world. Perhaps the National Council of the Congregationalists, held at Boston in 1865, may be reckoned as one of the occurrences which the oracle just missed.

The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted down to a later period. "In half a century," said the venerable Dr. Porter of Conway, New Hampshire, in 1822, "there will be no Pagans, Jews, Mohammedans, Unitarians, or Methodists." The half-century has more than elapsed, and the prediction seems to stand in need of an extension, like many other prophetic utterances.

The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggy-browed old minister of Medford, that he had expressed his belief that not more than one soul in two thousand would be saved. Seeing a knot of his parishioners in debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and was told that they were questioning which of the Medford people was the elected one, the population being just two thousand, and that opinion was divided whether it would be the minister or one of his deacons. The story may or may not be literally true, but it illustrates the popular belief of those days, that the clergyman saw a good deal farther into the councils of the Almighty than his successors could claim the power of doing.

The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind the varied accomplishments of some of the New England clergy. The face of the Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years' experience of eternity. The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription: "Ezroe Stiles, 1766. Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth." Both were noted scholars and philosophers. The hand-lens before me was imported, with other philosophical instruments, by the Reverend John Prince of Salem, an earlier student of science in the town since distinguished by the labors of the Essex Institute. Jeremy Belknap holds an honored place in that unpretending row of local historians. And in the pages of his "History of New Hampshire" may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable man, in many respects, among all the older clergymen preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in state and national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a Territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to him. This manifold individual was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts,--the Reverend Manasseh Cutler. These reminiscences from surrounding objects came up unexpectedly, of themselves: and have a right here, as showing how wide is the range of intelligence in the clerical body thus accidentally represented in a single library making no special pretensions.

It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added that they were often the wits and humorists of their localities. Mather Byles's facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences. But these were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles. True humor is an outgrowth of character. It is never found in greater perfection than in old clergymen and old college professors. Dr. Sprague's "Annals of the American Pulpit" tells many stories of our old ministers as good as Dean Ramsay's "Scottish Reminiscences." He has not recorded the following, which is to be found in Miss Larned's excellent and most interesting History of Windham County, Connecticut. The Reverend Josiah Dwight was the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700. He was not old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers. The "sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the drollery of its expressions. A specimen or two may dispose the reader to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of mind. "If unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak." Some of his ministerial associates took offence at his eccentricities, and called on a visit of admonition to the offending clergyman. "Mr. Dwight received their reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his faults, and promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks for the brotherly visit and admonition, 'hoped that they might so hitch their horses on earth that they should never kick in the stables of everlasting salvation.'"

It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old ministers in one's veins. An English bishop proclaimed the fact before an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not ashamed to say that he had a son who was a doctor. Very kind that was in the bishop, and very proud his medical audience must have felt. Perhaps he was not ashamed of the Gospel of Luke, "the beloved physician," or even of the teachings which came from the lips of one who was a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter. So a New-Englander, even if he were a bishop, need not be ashamed to say that he consented to have an ancestor who was a minister. On the contrary, he has a right to be grateful for a probable inheritance of good instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a library where he bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father's or grandfather's folios. What are the names of ministers' sons which most readily occur to our memory as illustrating these advantages? Edward Everett, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth, James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton, were all ministers' boys. John Lothrop Motley was the grandson of the clergyman after whom he was named. George Ticknor was next door to such a descent, for his father was a deacon. This is a group which it did not take a long or a wide search to bring together.

Men such as the ministers who have been described could not fail to exercise a good deal of authority in the communities to which they belonged. The effect of the Revolution must have been to create a tendency to rebel against spiritual dictation. Republicanism levels in religion as in everything. It might have been expected, therefore, that soon after civil liberty had been established there would be conflicts between the traditional, authority of the minister and the claims of the now free and independent congregation. So it was, in fact, as for instance in the case which follows, for which the reader is indebted to Miss Lamed's book, before cited.

The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Platform gave rise, in the year 1792, to a fierce conflict in the town of Pomfret, Connecticut. Zephaniah Swift, a lawyer of Windham, came out in the Windham "Herald," in all the vehemence of partisan phraseology, with all the emphasis of italics and small capitals. Was it not time, he said, for people to look about them and see whether "such despotism was founded in Scripture, in reason, in policy, or on the rights of man! A minister, by his vote, by his single voice, may negative the unanimous vote of the church! Are ministers composed of finer clay than the rest of mankind, that entitles them to this preeminence? Does a license to preach transform a man into a higher order of beings and endow him with a natural quality to govern? Are the laity an inferior order of beings, fit only to be slaves and to be governed? Is it good policy for mankind to subject themselves to such degrading vassalage and abject submission? Reason, common sense, and the Bible, with united voice, proclaim to all mankind that they are all born free and equal; that every member of a church or Christian congregation must be on the same footing in respect of church government, and that the CONSTITUTION, which delegates to one the power to negative the vote of all the rest, is SUBVERSIVE OF THE NATURAL RIGHT OF MANKIND AND REPUGNANT TO THE WORD OF GOD."

The Reverend Mr. Welch replied to the lawyer's attack, pronouncing him to be "destitute of delicacy, decency, good manners, sound judgment, honesty, manhood, and humanity; a poltroon, a cat's-paw, the infamous tool of a party, a partisan, a political weathercock, and a ragamuffin."

No Fourth-of-July orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and no clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses Welch. The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that last two or three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels by assertion of their special dignities or privileges. The public is better bred than to carry on an ecclesiastical controversy in terms which political brawlers would hardly think admissible. The minister of religion is generally treated with something more than respect; he is allowed to say undisputed what would be sharply controverted in anybody else. Bishop Gilbert Haven, of happy memory, had been discussing a religious subject with a friend who was not convinced by his arguments. "Wait till you hear me from the pulpit," he said; "there you cannot answer me." The preacher--if I may use an image which would hardly have suggested itself to him--has his hearer's head in chancery, and can administer punishment ad libitum. False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar, stale images, borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to without a word of comment or a look of disapprobation.

One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen has lately ventured to question whether all his professional brethren invariably give utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been sharply criticised for so doing. The layman, who sits silent in his pew, has his rights when out of it, and among them is the right of questioning that which has been addressed to him from the privileged eminence of the pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious teacher. It is nearly two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote these words: "I am not ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient, and the inbred fire (I do not call it pride) of many of our modern divines, have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth as well as falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as has given advantage to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have profest to be nothing but a mere trick."

So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the college yard. But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of those judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so largely attributable to the clergy.

Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the doctors. The old reproach against physicians, that where there were three of them together there were two atheists, had a real significance, but not that which was intended by the sharp-tongued ecclesiastic who first uttered it. Undoubtedly there is a strong tendency in the pursuits of the medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition and diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is impossible, or at least very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads oftenest--to heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the given conditions,--it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity.

On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,--led upward by what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his own eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that psalm of praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if this "heathen" could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not be surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the crowd of medical "atheists."

No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial relations as those to which belong the healers of the body and the headers of the mind. There can be no more fatal mistake than that which brings them into hostile attitudes with reference to each other, both having in view the welfare of their fellow-creatures. But there is a territory always liable to be differed about between them. There are patients who never tell their physician the grief which lies at the bottom of their ailments. He goes through his accustomed routine with them, and thinks he has all the elements needed for his diagnosis. But he has seen no deeper into the breast than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than the wrist. A wise and experienced clergyman, coming to the patient's bedside,--not with the professional look on his face which suggests the undertaker and the sexton, but with a serene countenance and a sympathetic voice, with tact, with patience, waiting for the right moment,--will surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt, the sorrow, the shame, the remorse, the terror which underlies all the bodily symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying soul is a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the world. And, on the other hand, there are many nervous and over-sensitive natures which have been wrought up by self-torturing spiritual exercises until their best confessor would be a sagacious and wholesome-minded physician.

Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants that he is subject to what are known to the records of insanity as hallucinations: that he hears voices whispering blasphemy in his ears, and sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to be torn in pieces, or trodden into the mire. Suppose that his mental conflicts, after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last reduce him to a state of despair, so that he now contemplates taking his own life, and debates with himself whether it shall be by knife, halter, or poison, and after much questioning is apparently making up his mind to commit suicide. Is not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known as melancholia? Would not any prudent physician keep such a person under the eye of constant watchers, as in a dangerous state of, at least, partial mental alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental condition of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress," and its counterpart has been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of self-destruction, which came so near taking place in the hero of the allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this example is taken is, next to the Bible and the Treatise of "De Imitatione Christi," the best-known religious work of Christendom. If Bunyan and his contemporary, Sydenham, had met in consultation over the case of Christian at the time when he was meditating self-murder, it is very possible that there might have been a difference of judgment. The physician would have one advantage in such a consultation. He would pretty certainly have received a Christian education, while the clergyman would probably know next to nothing of the laws or manifestations of mental or bodily disease. It does not seem as if any theological student was really prepared for his practical duties until he had learned something of the effects of bodily derangements, and, above all, had become familiar with the gamut of mental discord in the wards of an insane asylum.

It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physician stands to the divine in the same light as the divine stands to the physician, so far as each may attempt to handle subjects belonging especially to the other's profession. Many physicians know a great deal more about religious matters than they do about medicine. They have read the Bible ten times as much as they ever read any medical author. They have heard scores of sermons for one medical lecture to which they have listened. They often hear much better preaching than the average minister, for he hears himself chiefly, and they hear abler men and a variety of them. They have now and then been distinguished in theology as well as in their own profession. The name of Servetus might call up unpleasant recollections, but that of another medical practitioner may be safely mentioned. "It was not till the middle of the last century that the question as to the authorship of the Pentateuch was handled with anything like a discerning criticism. The first attempt was made by a layman, whose studies we might have supposed would scarcely have led him to such an investigation." This layman was "Astruc, doctor and professor of medicine in the Royal College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV." The quotation is from the article "Pentateuch" in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," which, of course, lies on the table of the least instructed clergyman. The sacred profession has, it is true, returned the favor by giving the practitioner of medicine Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on Tar-water," and the invaluable prescription of that "aged clergyman whose sands of life"----but let us be fair, if not generous, and remember that Cotton Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston the credit of introducing the practice of inoculation into America. The professions should be cordial allies, but the church-going, Bible-reading physician ought to know a great deal more of the subjects included under the general name of theology than the clergyman can be expected to know of medicine. To say, as has been said not long since, that a young divinity student is as competent to deal with the latter as an old physician is to meddle with the former, suggests the idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in the family of the one who says it. What a set of idiots our clerical teachers must have been and be, if, after a quarter or half a century of their instruction, a person of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any opinion about the subjects which they have been teaching, or trying to teach him, so long!

A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do not believe, or only half believe, what he preaches. But pews without heads in them are a still more depressing spectacle. He may convince the doubter and reform the profligate. But he cannot produce any change on pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the more wood he sees as he looks along his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being useful. It is natural that in times like the present changes of faith and of place of worship should be far from infrequent. It is not less natural that there should be regrets on one side and gratification on the other, when such changes occur. It even happens occasionally that the regrets become aggravated into reproaches, rarely from the side which receives the new accessions, less rarely from the one which is left. It is quite conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great offence. It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within the Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would seem that it is not a deadly defection to pass from one to another.

So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to happen a great deal oftener than they do. All the larger bodies of Christians should be constantly exchanging members. All men are born with conservative or aggressive tendencies: they belong naturally with the idol-worshippers or the idol-breakers. Some wear their fathers' old clothes, and some will have a new suit. One class of men must have their faith hammered in like a nail, by authority; another class must have it worked in like a screw, by argument. Members of one of these classes often find themselves fixed by circumstances in the other. The late Orestes A. Brownson used to preach at one time to a little handful of persons, in a small upper room, where some of them got from him their first lesson about the substitution of reverence for idolatry, in dealing with the books they hold sacred. But after a time Mr. Brownson found he had mistaken his church, and went over to the Roman Catholic establishment, of which he became and remained to his dying day one of the most stalwart champions. Nature is prolific and ambidextrous. While this strong convert was trying to carry us back to the ancient faith, another of her sturdy children, Theodore Parker, was trying just as hard to provide a new church for the future. One was driving the sheep into the ancient fold, while the other was taking down the bars that kept them out of the new pasture. Neither of these powerful men could do the other's work, and each had to find the task for which he was destined.

The "old gospel ship," as the Methodist song calls it, carries many who would steer by the wake of their vessel. But there are many others who do not trouble themselves to look over the stern, having their eyes fixed on the light-house in the distance before them. In less figurative language, there are multitudes of persons who are perfectly contented with the old formulae of the church with which they and their fathers before them have been and are connected, for the simple reason that they fit, like old shoes, because they have been worn so long, and mingled with these, in the most conservative religious body, are here and there those who are restless in the fetters of a confession of faith to which they have pledged themselves without believing in it. This has been true of the Athanasian creed, in the Anglican Church, for two centuries more or less, unless the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tillotson, stood alone in wishing the church were well rid of it. In fact, it has happened to the present writer to hear the Thirty-nine Articles summarily disposed of by one of the most zealous members of the American branch of that communion, in a verb of one syllable, more familiar to the ears of the forecastle than to those of the vestry.

But on the other hand, it is far from uncommon to meet with persons among the so-called "liberal" denominations who are uneasy for want of a more definite ritual and a more formal organization than they find in their own body. Now, the rector or the minister must be well aware that there are such cases, and each of them must be aware that there are individuals under his guidance whom he cannot satisfy by argument, and who really belong by all their instincts to another communion. It seems as if a thoroughly honest, straight-collared clergyman would say frankly to his restless parishioner: "You do not believe the central doctrines of the church which you are in the habit of attending. You belong properly to Brother A.'s or Brother B.'s fold, and it will be more manly and probably more profitable for you to go there than to stay with us." And, again, the rolling-collared clergyman might be expected to say to this or that uneasy listener: "You are longing for a church which will settle your beliefs for you, and relieve you to a great extent from the task, to which you seem to be unequal, of working out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Go over the way to Brother C.'s or Brother D.'s; your spine is weak, and they will furnish you a back-board which will keep you straight and make you comfortable." Patients are not the property of their physicians, nor parishioners of their ministers.

As for the children of clergymen, the presumption is that they will adhere to the general belief professed by their fathers. But they do not lose their birthright or their individuality, and have the world all before them to choose their creed from, like other persons. They are sometimes called to account for attacking the dogmas they are supposed to have heard preached from their childhood. They cannot defend themselves, for various good reasons. If they did, one would have to say he got more preaching than was good for him, and came at last to feel about sermons and their doctrines as confectioners' children do about candy. Another would have to own that he got his religious belief, not from his father, but from his mother. That would account for a great deal, for the milk in a woman's veins sweetens, or at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the motherly cow softens the virulence of small-pox, so that its mark survives only as the seal of immunity. Another would plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts from his great-grandfather, as some do their complexion or their temper. Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that which they naturally inherited. No man can be expected to go thus into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an ill-bred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face, as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in the light of a new generation. Common delicacy would prevent him from saying that he did not get his faith from his father, but from somebody else, perhaps from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, like the young man whom the Apostle cautioned against total abstinence.

It is always the right, and may sometimes be the duty, of the layman to call the attention of the clergy to the short-comings and errors, not only of their own time, but also of the preceding generations, of which they are the intellectual and moral product. This is especially true when the authority of great names is fallen back upon as a defence of opinions not in themselves deserving to be upheld. It may be very important to show that the champions of this or that set of dogmas, some of which are extinct or obsolete as beliefs, while others retain their vitality, held certain general notions which vitiated their conclusions. And in proportion to the eminence of such champions, and the frequency with which their names are appealed to as a bulwark of any particular creed or set of doctrines, is it urgent to show into what obliquities or extravagances or contradictions of thought they have been betrayed.

In summing up the religious history of New England, it would be just and proper to show the agency of the Mathers, father and son, in the witchcraft delusion. It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf the common beliefs of their time. It would be an extenuation of their acts that, not many years before, the great and good magistrate, Sir Matthew Hale, had sanctioned the conviction of prisoners accused of witchcraft. To fall back on the errors of the time is very proper when we are trying our predecessors in foro conscientace: The houses they dwelt in may have had some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their shelter, at any rate. It is quite another matter when those rotten timbers are used in holding up the roofs over our own heads. Still more, if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation, the best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave it if we can. And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a warning and not as a guide.

Such was the reason of the present writer's taking up the writings of Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay. The "Edwardsian" theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomination to which he belonged. One or more churches bear his name, and it is thrown into the scale of theological belief as if it added great strength to the party which claims him. That he was a man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so remarkable a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. When he presents us a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions, "are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers;" when he gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for "the bulk of mankind;" when he cruelly pictures a future in which parents are to sing hallelujahs of praise as they see their children driven into the furnace, where they are to lie "roasting" forever,--we have a right to say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian pessimism.

If these and similar doctrines are so generally discredited as some appear to think, we might expect to see the change showing itself in catechisms and confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of relief from its horrors in all our churches, and no longer to read in the newspapers of ministers rejected or put on trial for heresy because they could not accept the most dreadful of these doctrines. Whether this be so or not, it must be owned that the name of Jonathan Edwards does at this day carry a certain authority with it for many persons, so that anything he believed gains for them some degree of probability from that circumstance. It would, therefore, be of much interest to know whether he was trustworthy in his theological speculations, and whether he ever changed his belief with reference to any of the great questions above alluded to.

Some of our readers may remember a story which got abroad many years ago that a certain M. Babinet, a scientific Frenchman of note, had predicted a serious accident soon to occur to the planet on which we live by the collision with it of a great comet then approaching us, or some such occurrence. There is no doubt that this prediction produced anxiety and alarm in many timid persons. It became a very interesting question with them who this M. Babinet might be. Was he a sound observer, who had made other observations and predictions which had proved accurate? Or was he one of those men who are always making blunders for other people to correct? Is he known to have changed his opinion as to the approaching disastrous event?

So long as there were any persons made anxious by this prediction, so long as there was even one who believed that he, and his family, and his nation, and his race, and the home of mankind, with all its monuments, were very soon to be smitten in mid-heaven and instantly shivered into fragments, it was very desirable to find any evidence that this prophet of evil was a man who held many extravagant and even monstrous opinions. Still more satisfactory would it be if it could be shown that he had reconsidered his predictions, and declared that he could not abide by his former alarming conclusions. And we should think very ill of any astronomer who would not rejoice for the sake of his fellow-creatures, if not for his own, to find the threatening presage invalidated in either or both of the ways just mentioned, even though he had committed himself to M. Babinet's dire belief.

But what is the trivial, temporal accident of the wiping out of a planet and its inhabitants to the infinite catastrophe which shall establish a mighty world of eternal despair? And which is it most desirable for mankind to have disproved or weakened, the grounds of the threat of M. Babinet, or those of the other infinitely more terrible comminations, so far as they rest on the authority of Jonathan Edwards?

The writer of this paper had been long engaged in the study of the writings of Edwards, with reference to the essay he had in contemplation, when, on speaking of the subject to a very distinguished orthodox divine, this gentleman mentioned the existence of a manuscript of Edwards which had been held back from the public on account of some opinions or tendencies it contained, or was suspected of containing "High Arianism" was the exact expression he used with reference to it. On relating this fact to an illustrious man of science, whose name is best known to botanists, but is justly held in great honor by the orthodox body to which he belongs, it appeared that he, too, had heard of such a manuscript, and the questionable doctrine associated with it in his memory was Sabellianism. It was of course proper in the writer of an essay on Jonathan Edwards to mention the alleged existence of such a manuscript, with reference to which the same caution seemed to have been exercised as that which led, the editor of his collected works to suppress the language Edwards had used about children.

This mention led to a friendly correspondence between the writer and one of the professors in the theological school at Andover, and finally to the publication of a brief essay, which, for some reason, had been withheld from publication for more than a century. Its title is "Observations concerning the Scripture OEconomy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemption. By Jonathan Edwards." It contains thirty-six pages and a half, each small page having about two hundred words. The pages before the reader will be found to average about three hundred and twenty-five words. An introduction and an appendix by the editor, Professor Egbert C. Smyth, swell the contents to nearly a hundred pages, but these additions, and the circumstance that it is bound in boards, must not lead us to overlook the fact that the little volume is nothing more than a pamphlet in book's clothing.

A most extraordinary performance it certainly is, dealing with the arrangements entered into by the three persons of the Trinity, in as bald and matter-of-fact language and as commercial a spirit as if the author had been handling the adjustment of a limited partnership between three retail tradesmen. But, lest a layman's judgment might be considered insufficient, the treatise was submitted by the writer to one of the most learned of our theological experts,--the same who once informed a church dignitary, who had been attempting to define his theological position, that he was a Eutychian,--a fact which he seems to have been no more aware of than M. Jourdain was conscious that he had been speaking prose all his life. The treatise appeared to this professor anti-trinitarian, not in the direction of Unitarianism, however, but of Tritheism. Its anthropomorphism affected him like blasphemy, and the paper produced in him the sense of "great disgust," which its whole character might well excite in the unlearned reader.

All this is, however, of little importance, for this is not the work of Edwards referred to by the present writer in his previous essay. The tract recently printed as a volume may be the one referred to by Dr. Bushnell, in 1851, but of this reference by him the writer never heard until after his own essay was already printed. The manuscript of the "Observations" was received by Professor Smyth, as he tells us in his introduction, about fifteen years ago, from the late Reverend William T. Dwight, D. D., to whom it was bequeathed by his brother, the Reverend Dr. Sereno E. Dwight.

But the reference of the present writer was to another production of the great logician, thus spoken of in a quotation from "the accomplished editor of the Hartford 'Courant,'" to be found in Professor Smyth's introduction:

"It has long been a matter of private information that Professor Edwards A. Park, of Andover, had in his possession an published manuscript of Edwards of considerable extent, perhaps two thirds as long as his treatise on the will. As few have ever seen the manuscript, its contents are only known by vague reports.... It is said that it contains a departure from his published views on the Trinity and a modification of the view of original sin. One account of it says that the manuscript leans toward Sabellianism, and that it even approaches Pelagianism."

It was to this "suppressed" manuscript the present writer referred, and not to the slender brochure recently given to the public. He is bound, therefore, to say plainly that to satisfy inquirers who may be still in doubt with reference to Edwards's theological views, it would be necessary to submit this manuscript, and all manuscripts of his which have been kept private, to their inspection, in print, if possible, so that all could form their own opinion about it or them.

The whole matter may be briefly stated thus: Edwards believed in an eternity of unimaginable horrors for "the bulk of mankind." His authority counts with many in favor of that belief, which affects great numbers as the idea of ghosts affected Madame de Stall: "Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains." This belief is one which it is infinitely desirable to the human race should be shown to be possibly, probably, or certainly erroneous. It is, therefore, desirable in the interest of humanity that any force the argument in its favor may derive from Edwards's authority should be weakened by showing that he was capable of writing most unwisely, and if it should be proved that he changed his opinions, or ran into any "heretical" vagaries, by using these facts against the validity of his judgment. That he was capable of writing most unwisely has been sufficiently shown by the recent publication of his "Observations." Whether he, anywhere contradicted what were generally accepted as his theological opinions, or how far he may have lapsed into heresies, the public will never rest satisfied until it sees and interprets for itself everything that is open to question which may be contained in his yet unpublished manuscripts. All this is not in the least a personal affair with the writer, who, in the course of his studies of Edwards's works, accidentally heard, from the unimpeachable sources sufficiently indicated, the reports, which it seems must have been familiar to many, that there was unpublished matter bearing on the opinions of the author through whose voluminous works he had been toiling. And if he rejoiced even to hope that so wise a man as Edwards has been considered, so good a man as he is recognized to have been, had, possibly in his changes of opinion, ceased to think of children as vipers, and of parents as shouting hallelujahs while their lost darlings were being driven into the flames, where is the theologian who would not rejoice to hope so with him or who would be willing to tell his wife or his daughter that he did not?

The real, vital division of the religious part of our Protestant communities is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists. The Christian optimist in his fullest development is characterized by a cheerful countenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised enjoyment of earthly comforts, and a short confession of faith. His theory of the universe is progress; his idea of God is that he is a Father with all the true paternal attributes, of man that he is destined to come into harmony with the key-note of divine order, of this earth that it is a training school for a better sphere of existence. The Christian pessimist in his most typical manifestation is apt to wear a solemn aspect, to speak, especially from the pulpit, in the minor key, to undervalue the lesser enjoyments of life, to insist on a more extended list of articles of belief. His theory of the universe recognizes this corner of it as a moral ruin; his idea of the Creator is that of a ruler whose pardoning power is subject to the veto of what is called "justice;" his notion of man is that he is born a natural hater of God and goodness, and that his natural destiny is eternal misery. The line dividing these two great classes zigzags its way through the religious community, sometimes following denominational layers and cleavages, sometimes going, like a geological fracture, through many different strata. The natural antagonists of the religious pessimists are the men of science, especially the evolutionists, and the poets. It was but a conditioned prophecy, yet we cannot doubt what was in Milton's mind when he sang, in one of the divinest of his strains, that

"Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day."

And Nature, always fair if we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,--painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors of all time,--kind Nature, after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the inspired ploughman, whose songs have done more to humanize the hard theology of Scotland than all the rationalistic sermons that were ever preached. Our own Whittier has done and is doing the same thing, in a far holier spirit than Burns, for the inherited beliefs of New England and the country to which New England belongs. Let me sweeten these closing paragraphs of an essay not meaning to hold a word of bitterness with a passage or two from the lay-preacher who is listened to by a larger congregation than any man who speaks from the pulpit. Who will not hear his words with comfort and rejoicing when he speaks of "that larger hope which, secretly cherished from the times of Origen and Duns Scotus to those of Foster and Maurice, has found its fitting utterance in the noblest poem of the age?"

It is Tennyson's "In Memoriam" to which he refers, and from which he quotes four verses, of which this is the last:

"Behold! we know not anything I can but trust that good shall fall At last,--far off,--at last, to all, And every winter change to spring."

If some are disposed to think that the progress of civilization and the rapidly growing change of opinion renders unnecessary any further effort to humanize "the Gospel of dread tidings;" if any believe the doctrines of the Longer and Shorter Catechism of the Westminster divines are so far obsolete as to require no further handling; if there are any who thank these subjects have lost their interest for living souls ever since they themselves have learned to stay at home on Sundays, with their cakes and ale instead of going to meeting,--not such is Mr. Whittier's opinion, as we may infer from his recent beautiful poem, "The Minister's Daughter." It is not science alone that the old Christian pessimism has got to struggle with, but the instincts of childhood, the affections of maternity, the intuitions of poets, the contagious humanity of the philanthropist,--in short, human nature and the advance of civilization. The pulpit has long helped the world, and is still one of the chief defences against the dangers that threaten society, and it is worthy now, as it always has been in its best representation, of all love and honor. But many of its professed creeds imperatively demand revision, and the pews which call for it must be listened to, or the preacher will by and by find himself speaking to a congregation of bodiless echoes by and by find himself speaking to a congregation of bodiless echoes.

MEDICAL ESSAYS

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

1842-1882

CONTENTS:

I. HOMEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS

II. THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER

III. CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS IN MEDICAL SCIENCE

IV. BORDER LINES OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOME PROVINCES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE

V. SCHOLASTIC AND BEDSIDE TEACHING

VI. THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IN MASSACHUSETTS

VII. THE YOUNG PRACTITIONER

VIII. MEDICAL LIBRARIES

IX. SOME OF MY EARLY TEACHERS

PREFACE.

The character of the opposition which some of these papers have met with suggests the inference that they contain really important, but unwelcome truths. Negatives multiplied into each other change their sign and become positives. Hostile criticisms meeting together are often equivalent to praise, and the square of fault-finding turns out to be the same thing as eulogy.

But a writer has rarely so many enemies as it pleases him to believe. Self-love leads us to overrate the numbers of our negative constituency. The larger portion of my limited circle of readers must be quite indifferent to, if not ignorant of, the adverse opinions which have been expressed or recorded concerning any of these Addresses or Essays now submitted to their own judgment. It is proper, however, to inform them, that some of the positions maintained in these pages have been unsparingly attacked, with various degrees of ability, scholarship, and good-breeding. The tone of criticism naturally changes with local conditions in different parts of a country extended like our own, so that it is one of the most convenient gauges of the partial movements in the direction of civilization. It is satisfactory to add, that the views assailed have also been unflinchingly defended by unsought champions, among the ablest of whom it is pleasant to mention, at this moment of political alienation, the Editor of the Charleston Medical Journal.

"Currents and Counter-Currents" was written and delivered as an Oration, a florid rhetorical composition, expressly intended to secure the attention of an audience not easy to hold as listeners. It succeeded in doing this, and also in being as curiously misunderstood and misrepresented as if it had been a political harangue. This gave it more local notoriety than it might otherwise have attained, so that, as I learn, one ingenious person made use of its title as an advertisement to a production of his own.

The commonest mode of misrepresentation was this: qualified propositions, the whole meaning of which depended on the qualifications, were stripped of these and taken as absolute. Thus, the attempt to establish a presumption against giving poisons to sick persons was considered as equivalent to condemning the use of these substances. The only important inference the writer has been able to draw from the greater number of the refutations of his opinions which have been kindly sent him, is that the preliminary education of the Medical Profession is not always what it ought to be.

One concession he is willing to make, whatever sacrifice of pride it may involve. The story of Massasoit, which has furnished a coral, as it were, for some teething critics, when subjected to a powerful logical analysis, though correct in its essentials, proves to have been told with exceptionable breadth of statement, and therefore (to resume the metaphor) has been slightly rounded off at its edges, so as to be smoother for any who may wish to bite upon it hereafter. In other respects the Discourse has hardly been touched. It is only an individual's expression, in his own way, of opinions entertained by hundreds of the Medical Profession in every civilized country, and has nothing in it which on revision the writer sees cause to retract or modify. The superstitions it attacks lie at the very foundation of Homoeopathy, and of almost every form of medical charlatanism. Still the mere routinists and unthinking artisans in most callings dislike whatever shakes the dust out of their traditions, and it may be unreasonable to expect that Medicine will always prove an exception to the rule. One half the opposition which the numerical system of Louis has met with, as applied to the results of treatment, has been owing to the fact that it showed the movements of disease to be far more independent of the kind of practice pursued than was agreeable to the pride of those whose self-confidence it abated.

The statement, that medicines are more sparingly used in physicians' families than in most others, admits of a very natural explanation, without putting a harsh construction upon it, which it was not intended to admit. Outside pressure is less felt in the physician's own household; that is all. If this does not sometimes influence him to give medicine, or what seems to be medicine, when among those who have more confidence in drugging than his own family commonly has, the learned Professor Dunglison is hereby requested to apologize for his definition of the word Placebo, or to expunge it from his Medical Dictionary.

One thing is certain. A loud outcry on a slight touch reveals the weak spot in a profession, as well as in a patient. It is a doubtful policy to oppose the freest speech in those of our own number who are trying to show us where they honestly believe our weakness lies. Vast as are the advances of our Science and Art, may it not possibly prove on examination that we retain other old barbarisms beside the use of the astrological sign of Jupiter, with which we endeavor to insure good luck to our prescriptions? Is it the act of a friend or a foe to try to point them out to our brethren when asked to address them, and is the speaker to subdue the constitutional habit of his style to a given standard, under penalty of giving offence to a grave assembly?

"Homoeopathy and its Kindred Delusions" was published nearly twenty years ago, and has been long out of print, so that the author tried in vain to procure a copy until the kindness of a friend supplied him with the only one he has had for years. A foolish story reached his ears that he was attempting to buy up stray copies for the sake of suppressing it. This edition was in the press at that very time.

Many of the arguments contained in the Lectures have lost whatever novelty they may have possessed. All its predictions have been submitted to the formidable test of time. They appear to have stood it, so far, about as well as most uninspired prophecies; indeed, some of them require much less accommodation than certain grave commentators employ in their readings of the ancient Prophets.

If some statistics recently published are correct, Homoeopathy has made very slow progress in Europe.

In all England, as it appears, there are hardly a fifth more Homoeopathic practitioners than there are students attending Lectures at the Massachusetts Medical College at the present time. In America it has undoubtedly proved more popular and lucrative, yet how loose a hold it has on the public confidence is shown by the fact that, when a specially valued life, which has been played with by one of its agents, is seriously threatened, the first thing we expect to hear is that a regular practitioner is by the patient's bed, and the Homoeopathic counsellor overruled or discarded. Again, how many of the ardent and capricious persons who embraced Homoeopathy have run the whole round of pretentious novelties;--have been boarded at water-cure establishments, closeted with uterine and other specialists, and finally wandered over seas to put themselves in charge of foreign celebrities, who dosed them as lustily as they were ever dosed before they took to globules! It will surprise many to learn to what a shadow of a shade Homoeopathy has dwindled in the hands of many of its noted practitioners. The itch-doctrine is treated with contempt. Infinitesimal doses are replaced by full ones whenever the fancy-practitioner chooses. Good Homoeopathic reasons can be found for employing anything that anybody wants to employ. Homoeopathy is now merely a name, an unproved theory, and a box of pellets pretending to be specifics, which, as all of us know, fail ignominiously in those cases where we would thankfully sacrifice all our prejudices and give the world to have them true to their promises.

Homoeopathy has not died out so rapidly as Tractoration. Perhaps it was well that it should not, for it has taught us a lesson of the healing faculty of Nature which was needed, and for which many of us have made proper acknowledgments. But it probably does more harm than good to medical science at the present time, by keeping up the delusion of treating everything by specifics,--the old barbarous notion that sick people should feed on poisons [Lachesis, arrow-poison, obtained from a serpent (Pulte). Crotalus horridus, rattlesnake's venom (Neidhard). The less dangerous Pediculus capitis is the favorite remedy of Dr. Mure, the English "Apostle of Homoeopathy." These are examples of the retrograde current setting towards barbarism] against which a part of the Discourse at the beginning of this volume is directed.

The infinitesimal globules have not become a curiosity as yet, like Perkins's Tractors. But time is a very elastic element in Geology and Prophecy. If Daniel's seventy weeks mean four hundred and ninety years, as the learned Prideaux and others have settled it that they do, the "not many years" of my prediction may be stretched out a generation or two beyond our time, if necessary, when the prophecy will no doubt prove true.

It might be fitting to add a few words with regard to the Essay on the Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. But the whole question I consider to be now transferred from the domain of medical inquiry to the consideration of Life Insurance agencies and Grand Juries. For the justification of this somewhat sharply accented language I must refer the reader to the paper itself for details which I regret to have been forced to place on permanent record.

BOSTON, January, 1861.

A SECOND PREFACE.

These Lectures and Essays are arranged in the order corresponding to the date of their delivery or publication. They must, of course, be read with a constant reference to these dates, by such as care to read them. I have not attempted to modernize their aspect or character in presenting them, in this somewhat altered connection, to the public. Several of them were contained in a former volume which received its name from the Address called "Currents and Counter-Currents." Some of those contained in the former volume have been replaced by others. The Essay called "Mechanism of Vital Actions" has been transferred to a distinct collection of Miscellaneous essays, forming a separate volume.

I had some intention of including with these papers an Essay on Intermittent Fever in New England, which received one of the Boylston prizes in 1837, and was published in the following year. But as this was upon a subject of local interest, chiefly, and would have taken up a good deal of room, I thought it best to leave it out, trusting that the stray copies to be met with in musty book-shops would sufficiently supply the not very extensive or urgent demand for a paper almost half a century old.

Some of these papers created a little stir when they first fell from the press into the pool of public consciousness. They will slide in very quietly now in this new edition, and find out for themselves whether the waters are those of Lethe, or whether they are to live for a time as not wholly unvalued reminiscences.

March 21, 1883.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

These Essays are old enough now to go alone without staff or crutch in the shape of Prefaces. A very few words may be a convenience to the reader who takes up the book and wishes to know what he is likely to find in it.

HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS.

Homoeopathy has proved lucrative, and so long as it continues to be so will surely exist,--as surely as astrology, palmistry, and other methods of getting a living out of the weakness and credulity of mankind and womankind. Though it has no pretensions to be considered as belonging among the sciences, it may be looked upon by a scientific man as a curious object of study among the vagaries of the human mind. Its influence for good or the contrary may be made a matter of calm investigation. I have studied it in the Essay before the reader, under the aspect of an extravagant and purely imaginative creation of its founder. Since that first essay was written, nearly half a century ago, we have all had a chance to witness its practical working. Two opposite inferences may be drawn from its doctrines and practice. The first is that which is accepted by its disciples. This is that all diseases are "cured" by drugs. The opposite conclusion is drawn by a much larger number of persons. As they see that patients are very commonly getting well under treatment by infinitesimal drugging, which they consider equivalent to no medication at all, they come to disbelieve in every form of drugging and put their whole trust in "nature." Thus experience,

"From seeming evil still educing good,"

has shown that the dealers in this preposterous system of pseudo-therapeutics have cooperated with the wiser class of practitioners in breaking up the system of over-dosing and over-drugging which has been one of the standing reproaches of medical practice. While. keeping up the miserable delusion that diseases were all to be "cured" by drugging, Homoeopathy has been unintentionally showing that they would very generally get well without any drugging at all. In the mean time the newer doctrines of the "mind cure," the "faith cure," and the rest are encroaching on the territory so long monopolized by that most ingenious of the pseudo-sciences. It would not be surprising if its whole ground should be taken possession of by these new claimants with their flattering appeals to the imaginative class of persons open to such attacks. Similia similabus may prove fatally true for once, if Homoeopathy is killed out by its new-born rivals.

It takes a very moderate amount of erudition to unearth a charlatan like the supposed father of the infinitesimal dosing system. The real inventor of that specious trickery was an Irishman by the name of Butler. The whole story is to be found in the "Ortus Medicinm" of Van Helmont. I have given some account of his chapter "Butler" in different articles, but I would refer the students of our Homoeopathic educational institutions to the original, which they will find very interesting and curious.

CURRENTS AND COUNTER-CURRENTS

My attack on over-drugging brought out some hostile comments and treatment. Thirty years ago I expressed myself with more vivacity than I should show if I were writing on the same subjects today. Some of my more lively remarks called out very sharp animadversion. Thus my illustration of prevention as often better than treatment in the mother's words to her child which had got a poisonous berry in its mouth,--"Spit it out!" gave mortal offence to a well-known New York practitioner and writer, who advised the Massachusetts Medical Society to spit out the offending speaker. Worse than this was my statement of my belief that if a ship-load of miscellaneous drugs, with certain very important exceptions,--drugs, many of which were then often given needlessly and in excess, as then used "could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." This was too bad. The sentence was misquoted, quoted without its qualifying conditions, and frightened some of my worthy professional brethren as much as if I had told them to throw all physic to the dogs. But for the epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have been unnoticed as a harmless overstatement at the very worst.

Since this lecture was delivered a great and, as I think, beneficial change has taken place in the practice of medicine. The habit of the English "general practitioner" of making his profit out of the pills and potions he administered was ruinous to professional advancement and the dignity of the physician. When a half-starving medical man felt that he must give his patient draught and boluses for which he could charge him, he was in a pitiable position and too likely to persuade himself that his drugs were useful to his patient because they were profitable to him. This practice has prevailed a good deal in America, and was doubtless the source in some measure of the errors I combated.

THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER.

This Essay was read before a small Association called "The Society for Medical Improvement," and published in a Medical Journal which lasted but a single year. It naturally attracted less attention than it would have done if published in such a periodical as the "American Journal of Medical Sciences." Still it had its effect, as I have every reason to believe. I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives of many young mothers by calling attention to the existence and propagation of "Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence," and laying down rules for taking the necessary precautions against it. The case has long been decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when I wrote two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their experience and position.

This paper was written in a great heat and with passionate indignation. If I touched it at all I might trim its rhetorical exuberance, but I prefer to leave it all its original strength of expression. I could not, if I had tried, have disguised the feelings with which I regarded the attempt to put out of sight the frightful facts which I brought forward and the necessary conclusions to which they led. Of course the whole matter has been looked at in a new point of view since the microbe as a vehicle of contagion has been brought into light, and explained the mechanism of that which was plain enough as a fact to all who were not blind or who did not shut their eyes.

O. W. H.

BEVERLY Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891

HOMOEOPATHY AND ITS KINDRED DELUSIONS

[Two lectures delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. 1842.]

[When a physician attempts to convince a person, who has fallen into the Homoeopathic delusion, of the emptiness of its pretensions, he is often answered by a statement of cases in which its practitioners are thought to have effected wonderful cures. The main object of the first of these Lectures is to show, by abundant facts, that such statements, made by persons unacquainted with the fluctuations of disease and the fallacies of observation, are to be considered in general as of little or no value in establishing the truth of a medical doctrine or the utility of a method of practice.

Those kind friends who suggest to a person suffering from a tedious complaint, that he "Had better try Homoeopathy," are apt to enforce their suggestion by adding, that "at any rate it can do no harm." This may or may not be true as regards the individual. But it always does very great harm to the community to encourage ignorance, error, or deception in a profession which deals with the life and health of our fellow-creatures. Whether or not those who countenance Homoeopathy are guilty of this injustice towards others, the second of these Lectures may afford them some means of determining.

To deny that good effects may happen from the observance of diet and regimen when prescribed by Homoeopathists as well as by others, would be very unfair to them. But to suppose that men with minds so constituted as to accept such statements and embrace such doctrines as make up the so-called science of Homoeopathy are more competent than others to regulate the circumstances which influence the human body in health and disease, would be judging very harshly the average capacity of ordinary practitioners.

To deny that some patients may have been actually benefited through the influence exerted upon their imaginations, would be to refuse to Homoeopathy what all are willing to concede to every one of those numerous modes of practice known to all intelligent persons by an opprobrious title.

So long as the body is affected through the mind, no audacious device, even of the most manifestly dishonest character, can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield it an implicit or even a partial faith. The argument founded on this occasional good would be as applicable in justifying the counterfeiter and giving circulation to his base coin, on the ground that a spurious dollar had often relieved a poor man's necessities.

Homoeopathy has come before our public at a period when the growing spirit of eclecticism has prepared many ingenious and honest minds to listen to all new doctrines with a candor liable to degenerate into weakness. It is not impossible that the pretended evolution of great and mysterious virtues from infinitely attenuated atoms may have enticed a few over-refining philosophers, who have slid into a vague belief that matter subdivided grows less material, and approaches nearer to a spiritual nature as it requires a more powerful microscope for its detection.

However this may be, some persons seem disposed to take the ground of Menzel that the Laity must pass formal judgment between the Physician and the Homoeopathist, as it once did between Luther and the Romanists. The practitioner and the scholar must not, therefore, smile at the amount of time and labor expended in these Lectures upon this shadowy system; which, in the calm and serious judgment of many of the wisest members of the medical profession, is not entitled by anything it has ever said or done to the notoriety of a public rebuke, still less to the honors of critical martyrdom.]

I

I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of which I shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They are

1. The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula.

2. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder.

3. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley.

4. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism.

The first two illustrate the ease with which numerous facts are accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless extravagances.

The third exhibits the entire insufficiency of exalted wisdom, immaculate honesty, and vast general acquirements to make a good physician of a great bishop.

The fourth shows us the intimate machinery of an extinct delusion, which flourished only forty years ago; drawn in all its details, as being a rich and comparatively recent illustration of the pretensions, the arguments, the patronage, by means of which windy errors have long been, and will long continue to be, swollen into transient consequence. All display in superfluous abundance the boundless credulity and excitability of mankind upon subjects connected with medicine.

"From the time of Edward the Confessor to Queen Anne, the monarchs of England were in the habit of touching those who were brought to them suffering with the scrofula, for the cure of that distemper. William the Third had good sense enough to discontinue the practice, but Anne resumed it, and, among her other patients, performed the royal operation upon a child, who, in spite of his, disease, grew up at last into Samuel Johnson. After laying his hand upon the sufferers, it was customary for the monarch to hang a gold piece around the neck of each patient. Very strict precautions were adopted to prevent those who thought more of the golden angel hung round the neck by a white ribbon, than of relief of their bodily infirmities, from making too many calls, as they sometimes attempted to do. According to the statement of the advocates and contemporaries of this remedy, none ever failed of receiving benefit unless their little faith and credulity starved their merits. Some are said to have been cured immediately on the very touch, others did not so easily get rid of their swellings, until they were touched a second time. Several cases are related, of persons who had been blind for several weeks, and months, and obliged even to be led to Whitehall, yet recovered their sight immediately upon being touched, so as to walk away without any guide." So widely, at one period, was the belief diffused, that, in the course of twelve years, nearly a hundred thousand persons were touched by Charles the Second. Catholic divines; in disputes upon the orthodoxy of their church, did not deny that the power had descended to protestant princes;--Dr. Harpsfield, in his "Ecclesiastical History of England," admitted it, and in Wiseman's words, "when Bishop Tooker would make use of this Argument to prove the Truth of our Church, Smitheus doth not thereupon go about to deny the Matter of fact; nay, both he and Cope acknowledge it." "I myself," says Wiseman, the best English surgical writer of his day,[Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. iii. p. 103.]--"I my self have been a frequent Eye-witness of many hundred of Cures performed by his Majesties Touch alone, without any assistance of Chirurgery; and those, many of them such as had tired out the endeavours of able Chirurgeons before they came hither. It were endless to recite what I myself have seen, and what I have received acknowledgments of by Letter, not only from the severall parts of this Nation, but also from Ireland, Scotland, Jersey, Garnsey. It is needless also to remember what Miracles of this nature were performed by the very Bloud of his late Majesty of Blessed memory, after whose decollation by the inhuman Barbarity of the Regicides, the reliques of that were gathered on Chips and in Handkerchieffs by the pious Devotes, who could not but think so great a suffering in so honourable and pious a Cause, would be attended by an extraordinary assistance of God, and some more then ordinary a miracle: nor did their Faith deceive them in this there point, being so many hundred that found the benefit of it." [Severall Chirurgicall Treatises. London.1676. p. 246.]

Obstinate and incredulous men, as he tells us, accounted for these cures in three ways: by the journey and change of air the patients obtained in coming to London; by the influence of imagination; and the wearing of gold.

To these objections he answers, 1st. That many of those cured were inhabitants of the city. 2d. That the subjects of treatment were frequently infants. 3d. That sometimes silver was given, and sometimes nothing, yet the patients were cured.

A superstition resembling this probably exists at the present time in some ignorant districts of England and this country. A writer in a Medical Journal in the year 1807, speaks of a farmer in Devonshire, who, being a ninth son of a ninth son, is thought endowed with healing powers like those of ancient royalty, and who is accustomed one day in every week to strike for the evil.

I remember that one of my schoolmates told me, when a boy, of a seventh son of a seventh son, somewhere in Essex County, who touched for the scrofula, and who used to hang a silver fourpence halfpenny about the neck of those who came to him, which fourpence halfpenny it was solemnly affirmed became of a remarkably black color after having been some time worn, and that his own brother had been subjected to this extraordinary treatment; but I must add that my schoolmate drew a bow of remarkable length, strength, and toughness for his tender years.

One of the most curious examples of the fallacy of popular belief and the uncertainty of asserted facts in medical experience is to be found in the history of the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM, or WEAPON OINTMENT.

Fabricius Hildanus, whose name is familiar to every surgical scholar, and Lord Bacon, who frequently dipped a little into medicine, are my principal authorities for the few circumstances I shall mention regarding it. The Weapon Ointment was a preparation used for the healing of wounds, but instead of its being applied to them, the injured part was washed and bandaged, and the weapon with which the wound was inflicted was carefully anointed with the unguent. Empirics, ignorant barbers, and men of that sort, are said to have especially employed it. Still there were not wanting some among the more respectable members of the medical profession who supported its claims. The composition of this ointment was complicated, in the different formulae given by different authorities; but some substances addressed to the imagination, rather than the wound or weapon, entered into all. Such were portions of mummy, of human blood, and of moss from the skull of a thief hung in chains.

Hildanus was a wise and learned man, one of the best surgeons of his time. He was fully aware that a part of the real secret of the Unguentum Armarium consisted in the washing and bandaging the wound and then letting it alone. But he could not resist the solemn assertions respecting its efficacy; he gave way before the outcry of facts, and therefore, instead of denying all their pretensions, he admitted and tried to account for them upon supernatural grounds. As the virtue of those applications, he says, which are made to the weapon cannot reach the wound, and as they can produce no effect without contact, it follows, of necessity, that the Devil must have a hand in the business; and as he is by far the most long headed and experienced of practitioners, he cannot find this a matter of any great difficulty. Hildanus himself reports, in detail, the case of a lady who had received a moderate wound, for which the Unguentum Armarium was employed without the slightest use. Yet instead of receiving this flat case of failure as any evidence against the remedy, he accounts for its not succeeding by the devout character of the lady, and her freedom from that superstitious and over-imaginative tendency which the Devil requires in those who are to be benefited by his devices.

Lord Bacon speaks of the Weapon Ointment, in his Natural History, as having in its favor the testimony of men of credit, though, in his own language, he himself "as yet is not fully inclined to believe it." His remarks upon the asserted facts respecting it show a mixture of wise suspicion and partial belief. He does not like the precise directions given as to the circumstances under which the animals from which some of the materials were obtained were to be killed; for he thought it looked like a provision for an excuse in case of failure, by laying the fault to the omission of some of these circumstances. But he likes well that "they do not observe the confecting of the Ointment under any certain constellation; which is commonly the excuse of magical medicines, when they fail, that they were not made under a fit figure of heaven." [This was a mistake, however, since the two recipes given by Hildanus are both very explicit as to the aspect of the heavens required for different stages of the process.] "It was pretended that if the offending weapon could not be had, it would serve the purpose to anoint a wooden one made like it." "This," says Bacon, "I should doubt to be a device to keep this strange form of cure in request and use; because many times you cannot come by the weapon itself." And in closing his remarks on the statements of the advocates of the ointment, he says, "Lastly, it will cure a beast as well as a man, which I like best of all the rest, because it subjecteth the matter to an easy trial." It is worth remembering, that more than two hundred years ago, when an absurd and fantastic remedy was asserted to possess wonderful power, and when sensible persons ascribed its pretended influence to imagination, it was boldly answered that the cure took place when the wounded party did not know of the application made to the weapon, and even when a brute animal was the subject of the experiment, and that this assertion, as we all know it was, came in such a shape as to shake the incredulity of the keenest thinker of his time. The very same assertion has been since repeated in favor of Perkinism, and, since that, of Homoeopathy.

The same essential idea as that of the Weapon Ointment reproduced itself in the still more famous SYMPATHETIC POWDER. This Powder was said to have the faculty, if applied to the blood-stained garments of a wounded person, to cure his injuries, even though he were at a great distance at the time. A friar, returning from the East, brought the recipe to Europe somewhat before the middle of the seventeenth century. The Grand Duke of Florence, in which city the friar was residing, heard of his cures, and tried, but without success, to obtain his secret. Sir Kenehn Digby, an Englishman well known to fame, was fortunate enough to do him a favor, which wrought upon his feelings and induced him to impart to his benefactor the composition of his extraordinary Powder. This English knight was at different periods of his life an admiral, a theologian, a critic, a metaphysician, a politician, and a disciple of Alchemy. As is not unfrequent with versatile and inflammable people, he caught fire at the first spark of a new medical discovery, and no sooner got home to England than he began to spread the conflagration.

An opportunity soon offered itself to try the powers of the famous powder. Mr. J. Howell, having been wounded in endeavoring to part two of his friends who were fighting a duel, submitted himself to a trial of the Sympathetic Powder. Four days after he received his wounds, Sir Kenehn dipped one of Mr. Howell's gaiters in a solution of the Powder, and immediately, it is said, the wounds, which were very painful, grew easy, although the patient, who was conversing in a corner of the chamber, had not, the least idea of what was doing with his garter. He then returned home, leaving his garter in the hands of Sir Kenelm, who had hung it up to dry, when Mr. Howell sent his servant in a great hurry to tell him that his wounds were paining him horribly; the garter was therefore replaced in the solution of the Powder, "and the patient got well after five or six days of its continued immersion."

King James First, his son Charles the First, the Duke of Buckingham, then prime minister, and all the principal personages of the time, were cognizant of this fact; and James himself, being curious to know the secret of this remedy, asked it of Sir Kenelm, who revealed it to him, and his Majesty had the opportunity of making several trials of its efficacy, "which all succeeded in a surprising manner." [Dict. des Sciences Medieales.]

The king's physician, Dr. Mayerne, was made master of the secret, which he carried to France and communicated to the Duke of Mayenne, who performed many cures by means of it, and taught it to his surgeon, who, after the Duke's death, sold it to many distinguished persons, by whose agency it soon ceased to be a secret. What was this wonderful substance which so astonished kings, princes, dukes, knights, and doctors? Nothing but powdered blue vitriol. But it was made to undergo several processes that conferred on it extraordinary virtues. Twice or thrice it was to be dissolved, filtered, and crystallized. The crystals were to be laid in the sun during the months of June, July, and August, taking care to turn them carefully that all should be exposed. Then they were to be powdered, triturated, and again exposed to the sun, again reduced to a very fine powder, and secured in a vessel, while hot, from the sunshine. If there seem anything remarkable in the fact of such astonishing properties being developed by this process, it must be from our short-sightedness, for common salt and charcoal develop powers quite as marvellous after a certain number of thumps, stirs, and shakes, from the hands of modern workers of miracles. In fact the Unguentum Armarium and Sympathetic Powder resemble some more recent prescriptions; the latter consisting in an infinite dilution of the common dose in which remedies are given, and the two former in an infinite dilution of the common distance at which they are applied.

Whether philosophers, and more especially metaphysicians, have any peculiar tendency to dabble in drugs and dose themselves with physic, is a question which might suggest itself to the reader of their biographies.

When Bishop Berkeley visited the illustrious Malebranche at Paris, he found him in his cell, cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for an inflammation of the lungs, from which he was suffering; and the disease, being unfortunately aggravated by the vehemence of their discussion, or the contents of the pipkin, carried him off in the course of a few days. Berkeley himself afforded a remarkable illustration of a truth which has long been known to the members of one of the learned professions, namely, that no amount of talent, or of acquirements in other departments, can rescue from lamentable folly those who, without something of the requisite preparation, undertake to experiment with nostrums upon themselves and their neighbors. The exalted character of Berkeley is thus drawn by Sir James Mackintosh: Ancient learning, exact science, polished society, modern literature, and the fine arts, contributed to adorn and enrich the mind of this accomplished man. All his contemporaries agreed with the satirist in ascribing

"'To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.'

"Even the discerning, fastidious, and turbulent Atterbury said, after an interview with him, 'So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, till I saw this gentleman.'"

But among the writings of this great and good man is an Essay of the most curious character, illustrating his weakness upon the point in question, and entitled, "Siris, a Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of TAR WATER, and divers other Subjects,"--an essay which begins with a recipe for his favorite fluid, and slides by gentle gradations into an examination of the sublimest doctrines of Plato. To show how far a man of honesty and benevolence, and with a mind of singular acuteness and depth, may be run away with by a favorite notion on a subject which his habits and education do not fit him to investigate, I shall give a short account of this Essay, merely stating that as all the supposed virtues of Tar Water, made public in successive editions of his treatise by so illustrious an author, have not saved it from neglect and disgrace, it may be fairly assumed that they were mainly imaginary.

The bishop, as is usual in such cases, speaks of himself as indispensably obliged, by the duty he owes to mankind, to make his experience public. Now this was by no means evident, nor does it follow in general, that because a man has formed a favorable opinion of a person or a thing he has not the proper means of thoroughly understanding, he shall be bound to print it, and thus give currency to his impressions, which may be erroneous, and therefore injurious. He would have done much better to have laid his impressions before some experienced physicians and surgeons, such as Dr. Mead and Mr. Cheselden, to have asked them to try his experiment over again, and have been guided by their answers. But the good bishop got excited; he pleased himself with the thought that he had discovered a great panacea; and having once tasted the bewitching cup of self-quackery, like many before and since his time, he was so infatuated with the draught that he would insist on pouring it down the throats of his neighbors and all mankind.

The precious fluid was made by stirring a gallon of water with a quart of tar, leaving it forty-eight hours, and pouring off the clear water. Such was the specific which the great metaphysician recommended for averting and curing all manner of diseases. It was, if he might be believed, a preventive of the small-pox, and of great use in the course of the disease. It was a cure for impurities of the blood, coughs, pleurisy, peripneumony, erysipelas, asthma, indigestion, carchexia, hysterics, dropsy, mortification, scurvy, and hypochondria. It was of great use in gout and fevers, and was an excellent preservative of the teeth and gums; answered all the purpose of Elixir Proprietatis, Stoughton's drops, diet drinks, and mineral waters; was particularly to be recommended to sea-faring persons, ladies, and men of studious and sedentary lives; could never be taken too long, but, on the contrary, produced advantages which sometimes did not begin to show themselves for two or three months.

"From my representing Tar Water as good for so many things," says Berkeley, "some perhaps may conclude it is good for nothing. But charity obligeth me to say what I know, and what I think, however it may be taken. Men may censure and object as they please, but I appeal to time and experiment. Effects misimputed, cases wrong told, circumstances overlooked, perhaps, too, prejudices and partialities against truth, may for a time prevail and keep her at the bottom of her well, from whence nevertheless she emergeth sooner or later, and strikes the eyes of all who do not keep them shut." I cannot resist the temptation of illustrating the bishop's belief in the wonderful powers of his remedy, by a few sentences from different parts of his essay. "The hardness of stubbed vulgar constitutions renders them insensible of a thousand things that fret and gall those delicate people, who, as if their skin was peeled off, feel to the quick everything that touches them. The tender nerves and low spirits of such poor creatures would be much relieved by the use of Tar Water, which might prolong and cheer their lives." "It [the Tar Water] may be made stronger for brute beasts, as horses, in whose disorders I have found it very useful." "This same water will also give charitable relief to the ladies, who often want it more than the parish poor; being many of them never able to make a good meal, and sitting pale, puny, and forbidden, like ghosts, at their own table, victims of vapors and indigestion." It does not appear among the virtues of Tar Water that "children cried for it," as for some of our modern remedies, but the bishop says, "I have known children take it for above six months together with great benefit, and without any inconvenience; and after long and repeated experience I do esteem it a most excellent diet drink, fitted to all seasons and ages." After mentioning its usefulness in febrile complaints, he says: "I have had all this confirmed by my own experience in the late sickly season of the year one thousand seven hundred and forty-one, having had twenty-five fevers in my own family cured by this medicinal water, drunk copiously." And to finish these extracts with a most important suggestion for the improvement of the British nation: "It is much to be lamented that our Insulars who act and think so much for themselves, should yet, from grossness of air and diet, grow stupid or doat sooner than other people, who, by virtue of elastic air, water-drinking, and light food, preserve their faculties to extreme old age; an advantage which may perhaps be approached, if not equaled, even in these regions, by Tar Water, temperance, and early hours."

Berkeley died at the age of about seventy; he might have lived longer, but his fatal illness was so sudden that there was not time enough to stir up a quart of the panacea. He was an illustrious man, but he held two very odd opinions; that tar water was everything, and that the whole material universe was nothing.

--------------------------

Most of those present have at some time in their lives heard mention made of the METALLIC TRACTORS, invented by one Dr. Perkins, an American, and formerly enjoying great repute for the cure of various diseases. Many have seen or heard of a satirical poem, written by one of our own countrymen also, about forty years since, and called "Terrible Tractoration." The Metallic Tractors are now so utterly abandoned that I have only by good fortune fallen upon a single one of a pair, to show for the sake of illustration. For more than thirty years this great discovery, which was to banish at least half the evils which afflict humanity, has been sleeping undisturbed in the grave of oblivion. Not a voice has, for this long period, been raised in its favor; its noble and learned patrons, its public institutions, its eloquent advocates, its brilliant promises are all covered with the dust of silent neglect; and of the generation which has sprung up since the period when it flourished, very few know anything of its history, and hardly even the title which in its palmy days it bore of PERKINISM. Taking it as settled, then, as no one appears to answer for it, that Perkinism is entirely dead and gone, that both in public and private, officially and individually, its former adherents even allow it to be absolutely defunct, I select it for anatomical examination. If this pretended discovery was made public; if it was long kept before the public; if it was addressed to the people of different countries; if it was formally investigated by scientific men, and systematically adopted by benevolent persons, who did everything in their power to diffuse the knowledge and practice of it; if various collateral motives, such as interest and vanity, were embarked in its cause; if, notwithstanding all these things, it gradually sickened and died, then the conclusion seems a fair one, that it did not deserve to live. Contrasting its failure with its high pretensions, it is fair to call it an imposition; whether an expressly fraudulent contrivance or not, some might be ready to question. Everything historically shown to have happened concerning the mode of promulgation, the wide diffusion, the apparent success of this delusion, the respectability and enthusiasm of its advocates, is of great interest in showing to what extent and by what means a considerable part of the community may be led into the belief of that which is to be eventually considered' as an idle folly. If there is any existing folly, fraudulent or innocent in its origin, which appeals to certain arguments for its support; provided that the very same arguments can be shown to have been used for Perkinism with as good reason, they will at once fall to the ground. Still more, if it shall appear that the general course of any existing delusion bears a strong resemblance to that of Perkinism, that the former is most frequently advocated by the same class of persons who were conspicuous in behalf of the latter, and treated with contempt or opposed by the same kind of persons who thus treated Perkinism; if the facts in favor of both have a similar aspect; if the motives of their originators and propagators may be presumed to have been similar; then there is every reason to suppose that the existing folly will follow in the footsteps of the past, and after displaying a given amount of cunning and credulity in those deceiving and deceived, will drop from the public view like a fruit which has ripened into spontaneous rottenness, and be succeeded by the fresh bloom of some other delusion required by the same excitable portion of the community.

Dr. Elisha Perkins was born at Norwich, Connecticut, in the year 1740. He had practised his profession with a good local reputation for many years, when he fell upon a course of experiments, as it is related, which led to his great discovery. He conceived the idea that metallic substances might have the effect of removing diseases, if applied in a certain manner; a notion probably suggested by the then recent experiments of Galvani, in which muscular contractions were found to be produced by the contact of two metals with the living fibre. It was in 1796 that his discovery was promulgated in the shape of the Metallic Tractors, two pieces of metal, one apparently iron and the other brass, about three inches long, blunt at one end and pointed at the other. These instruments were applied for the cure of different complaints, such as rheumatism, local pains, inflammations, and even tumors, by drawing them over the affected part very lightly for about twenty minutes. Dr. Perkins took out a patent for his discovery, and travelled about the country to diffuse the new practice. He soon found numerous advocates of his discovery, many of them of high standing and influence. In the year 1798 the tractors had crossed the Atlantic, and were publicly employed in the Royal Hospital at Copenhagen. About the same time the son of the inventor, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, carried them to London, where they soon attracted attention. The Danish physicians published an account of their cases, containing numerous instances of alleged success, in a respectable octavo volume. In the year 1804 an establishment, honored with the name of the Perkinean Institution, was founded in London. The transactions of this institution were published in pamphlets, the Perkinean Society had public dinners at the Crown and Anchor, and a poet celebrated their medical triumph in strains like these:

"See, pointed metals, blest with power t' appease The ruthless rage of merciless disease, O'er the frail part a subtle fluid pour, Drenched with invisible Galvanic shower, Till the arthritic staff and crutch forego, And leap exulting like the bounding roe!"

While all these things were going on, Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins was calmly pocketing money, so that after some half a dozen years he left the country with more than ten thousand pounds, which had been paid him by the believers in Great Britain. But in spite of all this success, and the number of those interested and committed in its behalf, Perkinism soon began to decline, and in 1811 the Tractors are spoken of by an intelligent writer as being almost forgotten. Such was the origin and duration of this doctrine and practice, into the history of which we will now look a little more narrowly.

Let us see, then, by whose agency this delusion was established and kept up; whether it was principally by those who were accustomed to medical pursuits, or those whose habits and modes of reasoning were different; whether it was with the approbation of those learned bodies usually supposed to take an interest in scientific discoveries, or only of individuals whose claims to distinction were founded upon their position in society, or political station, or literary eminence; whether the judicious or excitable classes entered most deeply into it; whether, in short, the scientific men of that time were deceived, or only intruded upon, and shouted down for the moment by persons who had no particular call to invade their precincts.

Not much, perhaps, was to be expected of the Medical Profession in the way of encouragement. One Dr. Fuller, who wrote in England, himself a Perkinist, thus expressed his opinion: "It must be an extraordinary exertion of virtue and humanity for a medical man, whose livelihood depends either on the sale of drugs, or on receiving a guinea for writing a prescription, which must relate to those drugs, to say to his patient, 'You had better purchase a set of Tractors to keep in your family; they will cure you without the expense of my attendance, or the danger of the common medical practice.' For very obvious reasons medical men must never be expected to recommend the use of Perkinism. The Tractors must trust for their patronage to the enlightened and philanthropic out of the profession, or to medical men retired from practice, and who know of no other interest than the luxury of relieving the distressed. And I do not despair of seeing the day when but very few of this description as well as private families will be without them."

Whether the motives assigned by this medical man to his professional brethren existed or not, it is true that Dr. Perkins did not gain a great deal at their hands. The Connecticut Medical Society expelled him in 1797 for violating their law against the use of nostrums, or secret remedies. The leading English physicians appear to have looked on with singular apathy or contempt at the miracles which it was pretended were enacting in the hands of the apostles of the new practice. In looking over the reviews of the time, I have found little beyond brief occasional notices of their pretensions; the columns of these journals being occupied with subjects of more permanent interest. The state of things in London is best learned, however, from the satirical poem to which I have already alluded as having been written at the period referred to. This was entitled, "Terrible Tractoration!! A Poetical Petition against Galvanizing Trumpery and the Perkinistic Institution. Most respectfully addressed to the Royal College of Physicians, by Christopher Caustic, M. D., LL. D., A. S. S., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Aberdeen, and Honorary Member of no less than nineteen very learned Societies." Two editions of this work were published in London in the years 1803 and 1804, and one or two have been published in this country.

"Terrible Tractoration" is supposed, by those who never read it, to be a satire upon the follies of Perkins and his followers. It is, on the contrary, a most zealous defence of Perkinism, and a fierce attack upon its opponents, most especially upon such of the medical profession as treated the subject with neglect or ridicule. The Royal College of Physicians was the more peculiar object of the attack, but with this body, the editors of some of the leading periodicals, and several physicians distinguished at that time, and even now remembered for their services to science and humanity, were involved in unsparing denunciations. The work is by no means of the simply humorous character it might be supposed, but is overloaded with notes of the most seriously polemical nature. Much of the history of the subject, indeed, is to be looked for in this volume.

It appears from this work that the principal members of the medical profession, so far from hailing Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins as another Harvey or Jenner, looked very coldly upon him and his Tractors; and it is now evident that, though they were much abused for so doing, they knew very well what they had to deal with, and were altogether in the right. The delusion at last attracted such an amount of attention as to induce Dr. Haygarth and some others of respectable standing to institute some experiments which I shall mention in their proper place, the result of which might have seemed sufficient to show the emptiness of the whole contrivance.

The Royal Society, that learned body which for ages has constituted the best tribunal to which Britain can appeal in questions of science, accepted Mr. Perkins's Tractors and the book written about them, passed the customary vote of thanks, and never thought of troubling itself further in the investigation of pretensions of such an aspect. It is not to be denied that a considerable number of physicians did avow themselves advocates of the new practice; but out of the whole catalogue of those who were publicly proclaimed as such, no one has ever been known, so far as I am aware, to the scientific world, except in connection with the short-lived notoriety of Perkinism. Who were the people, then, to whose activity, influence, or standing with the community was owing all the temporary excitement produced by the Metallic Tractors?

First, those persons who had been induced to purchase a pair of Tractors. These little bits of brass and iron, the intrinsic value of which might, perhaps, amount to ninepence, were sold at five guineas a pair! A man who has paid twenty-five dollars for his whistle is apt to blow it louder and longer than other people. So it appeared that when the "Perkinean Society" applied to the possessors of Tractors in the metropolis to concur in the establishment of a public institution for the use of these instruments upon the poor, "it was found that only five out of above a hundred objected to subscribe, on account of their want of confidence in the efficacy of the practice; and these," the committee observes, "there is reason to believe, never gave them a fair trial, probably never used them in more than one case, and that perhaps a case in which the Tractors had never been recommended as serviceable." "Purchasers of the Tractors," said one of their ardent advocates, "would be among the last to approve of them if they had reason to suppose themselves defrauded of five guineas." He forgot poor Moses, with his "gross of green spectacles, with silver rims and shagreen cases." "Dear mother," cried the boy, "why won't you listen to reason? I had them a dead bargain, or I should not have bought them. The silver rims alone will sell for double the money."

But it is an undeniable fact, that many persons of considerable standing, and in some instances holding the most elevated positions in society, openly patronized the new practice. In a translation of a work entitled "Experiments with the Metallic Tractors," originally published in Danish, thence rendered successively into German and English, Mr. Benjamin Perkins, who edited the English edition, has given a copious enumeration of the distinguished individuals, both in America and Europe, whose patronage he enjoyed. He goes so far as to signify that ROYALTY itself was to be included among the number. When the Perkinean Institution was founded, no less a person than Lord Rivers was elected President, and eleven other individuals of distinction, among them Governor Franklin, son of Dr. Franklin, figured as Vice-Presidents. Lord Henniker, a member of the Royal Society, who is spoken of as a man of judgment and talents, condescended to patronize the astonishing discovery, and at different times bought three pairs of Tractors. When the Tractors were introduced into Europe, a large number of testimonials accompanied them from various distinguished characters in America, the list of whom is given in the translation of the Danish work referred to as follows:

"Those who have individually stated cases, or who have presented their names to the public as men who approved of this remedy, and acknowledged themselves instrumental in circulating the Tractors, are fifty-six in number; thirty-four of whom are physicians and surgeons, and many of them of the first eminence, thirteen clergymen, most of whom are doctors of divinity, and connected with the literary institutions of America; among the remainder are two members of Congress, one professor of natural philosophy in a college, etc., etc." It seemed to be taken rather hardly by Mr. Perkins that the translators of the work which he edited, in citing the names of the advocates of the Metallic Practice, frequently omitted the honorary titles which should have been annexed. The testimonials were obtained by the Danish writer, from a pamphlet published in America, in which these titles were given in full. Thus one of these testimonials is from "John Tyler, Esq., a magistrate in the county of New London, and late Brigadier-General of the militia in that State." The "omission of the General's title" is the subject of complaint, as if this title were sufficient evidence of the commanding powers of one of the patrons of tractoration. A similar complaint is made when "Calvin Goddard, Esq., of Plainfield, Attorney at Law, and a member of the Legislature of the State of Connecticut," is mentioned without his titular honors, and even on account of the omission of the proper official titles belonging to "Nathan Pierce, Esq., Governor and Manager of the Almshouse of Newburyport." These instances show the great importance to be attached to civil and military dignities, in qualifying their holders to judge of scientific subjects, a truth which has not been overlooked by the legitimate successors of the Perkinists. In Great Britain, the Tractors were not less honored than in America, by the learned and the illustrious. The "Perkinistic Committee" made this statement in their report: "Mr. Perkins has annually laid before the public a large collection of new cases communicated to him for that purpose by disinterested and intelligent characters, from almost every quarter of Great Britain. In regard to the competency of these vouchers, it will be sufficient simply to state that, amongst others whose names have been attached to their communications, are eight professors, in four different universities, twenty-one regular Physicians, nineteen Surgeons, thirty Clergymen, twelve of whom are Doctors of Divinity, and numerous other characters of equal respectability."

It cannot but excite our notice and surprise that the number of clergymen both in America and Great Britain who thrust forward their evidence on this medical topic was singularly large in proportion to that of the members of the medical profession. Whole pages are contributed by such worthies as the Rev. Dr. Trotter of Hans Place, the Rear. Waring Willett, Chaplain to the Earl of Dunmore, the Rev. Dr. Clarke, Chaplain to the Prince of Wales. The style of these theologico-medical communications may be seen in the following from a divine who was also professor in one of the colleges of New England. "I have used the Tractors with success in several other cases in my own family, and although, like Naaman the Syrian, I cannot tell why the waters of Jordan should be better than Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus; yet since experience has proved them so, no reasoning can change the opinion. Indeed, the causes of all common facts are, we think, perfectly well known to us; and it is very probable, fifty or a hundred years hence, we shall as well know why the Metallic Tractors should in a few minutes remove violent pains, as we now know why cantharides and opium will produce opposite effects, namely, we shall know very little about either excepting facts." Fifty or a hundred years hence! if he could have looked forward forty years, he would have seen the descendants of the "Perkinistic" philosophers swallowing infinitesimal globules, and knowing and caring as much about the Tractors as the people at Saratoga Springs do about the waters of Abana and Pharpar.

I trust it will not be thought in any degree disrespectful to a profession which we all honor, that I have mentioned the great zeal of many clergymen in the cause of Perkinism. I hope, too, that I may without offence suggest the causes which have often led them out of their own province into one to which their education has no special reference. The members of that profession ought to be, and commonly are, persons of benevolent character. Their duties carry them into the midst of families, and particularly at times when the members of them are suffering from bodily illness. It is natural enough that a strong desire should be excited to alleviate sufferings which may have defied the efforts of professional skill; as natural that any remedy which recommends itself to the belief or the fancy of the spiritual physician should be applied with the hope of benefit; and perfectly certain that the weakness of human nature, from which no profession is exempt, will lead him to take the most flattering view of its effects upon the patient; his own sagacity and judgment being staked upon the success of the trial. The inventor of the Tractors was aware of these truths. He therefore sent the Tractors gratuitously to many clergymen, accompanied with a formal certificate that the holder had become entitled to their possession by the payment of five guineas. This was practised in our own neighborhood, and I remember finding one of these certificates, so presented, which proved that amongst the risks of infancy I had to encounter Perkins's Tractors. Two clergymen of Boston and the vicinity, both well known to local fame, gave in their testimony to the value of the instruments thus presented to them; an unusually moderate proportion, when it is remembered that to the common motives of which I have spoken was added the seduction of a gift for which the profane public was expected to pay so largely.

It was remarkable, also, that Perkinism, which had so little success with the medical and scientific part of the community, found great favor in the eyes of its more lovely and less obstinate portion. "The lady of Major Oxholin,"--I quote from Mr. Perkins's volume,--"having been lately in America, had seen and heard much of the great effects of Perkinism. Influenced by a most benevolent disposition, she brought these Tractors and the pamphlet with her to Europe, with a laudable desire of extending their utility to her suffering countrymen." Such was the channel by which the Tractors were conveyed to Denmark, where they soon became the ruling passion. The workmen, says a French writer, could not manufacture them fast enough. Women carried them about their persons, and delighted in bringing them into general use. To what extent the Tractors were favored with the patronage of English and American ladies, it is of course not easy to say, except on general principles, as their names were not brought before the public. But one of Dr. Haygarth's stories may lead us to conjecture that there was a class of female practitioners who went about doing good with the Tractors in England as well as in Denmark. A certain lady had the misfortune to have a spot as big as a silver penny at the corner of her eye, caused by a bruise, or some such injury. Another lady, who was a friend of hers, and a strong believer in Perkinism, was very anxious to try the effects of tractoration upon this unfortunate blemish. The patient consented; the lady "produced the instruments, and, after drawing them four or five times over the spot, declared that it changed to a paler color, and on repeating the use of them a few minutes longer, that it had almost vanished, and was scarcely visible, and departed in high triumph at her success." The lady who underwent the operation assured the narrator "that she looked in the glass immediately after, and that not the least visible alteration had taken place."

It would be a very interesting question, what was the intellectual character of those persons most conspicuous in behalf of the Perkinistic delusion? Such an inquiry might bring to light some principles which we could hereafter apply to the study of other popular errors. But the obscurity into which nearly all these enthusiasts have subsided renders the question easier to ask than to answer. I believe it would have been found that most of these persons were of ardent temperament and of considerable imagination, and that their history would show that Perkinism was not the first nor the last hobby-horse they rode furiously. Many of them may very probably have been persons of more than common talent, of active and ingenious minds, of versatile powers and various acquirements. Such, for instance, was the estimable man to whom I have repeatedly referred as a warm defender of tractoration, and a bitter assailant of its enemies. The story tells itself in the biographical preface to his poem. He went to London with the view of introducing a hydraulic machine, which he and his Vermont friends regarded as a very important invention. He found, however, that the machine was already in common use in that metropolis. A brother Yankee, then in London, had started the project of a mill, which was to be carried by the water of the Thames. He was sanguine enough to purchase one fifth of this concern, which also proved a failure. At about the same period he wrote the work which proved the great excitement of his mind upon the subject of the transient folly then before the public. Originally a lawyer, he was in succession a mechanician, a poet, and an editor, meeting with far less success in each of these departments than usually attends men of less varied gifts, but of more tranquil and phlegmatic composition. But who is ignorant that there is a class of minds characterized by qualities like those I have mentioned; minds with many bright and even beautiful traits; but aimless and fickle as the butterfly; that settle upon every gayly-colored illusion as it opens into flower, and flutter away to another when the first has dropped its leaves, and stands naked in the icy air of truth!

Let us now look at the general tenor of the arguments addressed by believers to sceptics and opponents. Foremost of all, emblazoned at the head of every column, loudest shouted by every triumphant disputant, held up as paramount to all other considerations, stretched like an impenetrable shield to protect the weakest advocate of the great cause against the weapons of the adversary, was that omnipotent monosyllable which has been the patrimony of cheats and the currency of dupes from time immemorial,--Facts! Facts! Facts! First came the published cases of the American clergymen, brigadier-generals, almshouse governors, representatives, attorneys, and esquires. Then came the published cases of the surgeons of Copenhagen. Then followed reports of about one hundred and fifty cases published in England, "demonstrating the efficacy of the metallic practice in a variety of complaints both upon the human body and on horses, etc." But the progress of facts in Great Britain did not stop here. Let those who rely upon the numbers of their testimonials, as being alone sufficient to prove the soundness and stability of a medical novelty, digest the following from the report of the Perkinistic Committee. "The cases published [in Great Britain] amounted, in March last, the date of Mr. Perkins's last publication, to about five thousand. Supposing that not more than one cure in three hundred which the Tractors have performed has been published, and the proportion is probably much greater, it will be seen that the number, to March last, will have exceeded one million five hundred thousand!"

Next in order after the appeal to what were called facts, came a series of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered round in the cause of every doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less reputable classes, to the officers of police.

No doubt many of my hearers will recognize, in the following passages, arguments they may have heard brought forward with triumphant confidence in behalf of some doctrine not yet extinct. No doubt some may have honestly thought they proved something; may have used them with the purpose of convincing their friends, or of silencing the opponents of their favorite doctrine, whatever that might be. But any train of arguments which was contrived for Perkinism, which was just as applicable to it as to any other new doctrine in the same branch of science, and which was fully employed against its adversaries forty years since, might, in common charity, be suffered to slumber in the grave of Perkinism. Whether or not the following sentences, taken literally from the work of Mr. Perkins, were the originals of some of the idle propositions we hear bandied about from time to time, let those who listen judge.

The following is the test assumed for the new practice: "If diseases are really removed, as those persons who have practised extensively with the Tractors declare, it should seem there would be but little doubt of their being generally adopted; but if the numerous reports of their efficacy which have been published are forgeries, or are unfounded, the practice ought to be crushed." To this I merely add, it has been crushed.

The following sentence applies to that a priori judging and uncandid class of individuals who buy their dinners without tasting all the food there is in the market. "On all discoveries there are persons who, without descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest errors. These were those who knew that Harvey's report of the circulation of the blood was a preposterous and ridiculous suggestion, and in latter later days there were others who knew that Franklin deserved reproach for declaring that points were preferable to balls for protecting buildings from lightning."

Again: "This unwarrantable mode of offering assertion for proof, so unauthorized and even unprecedented except in the condemnation of a Galileo, the persecution of a Copernicus, and a few other acts of inquisitorial authority, in the times of ignorance and superstition, affords but a lamentable instance of one of his remarks, that this is far from being the Age of Reason."

"The most valuable medicines in the Materia Medica act on principles of which we are totally ignorant. None have ever yet been able to explain how opium produces sleep, or how bark cures intermittent fevers; and yet few, it is hoped, will be so absurd as to desist from the use of these important articles because they know nothing of the principle of their operations." Or if the argument is preferred, in the eloquent language of the Perkinistic poet:

"What though the CAUSES may not be explained, Since these EFFECTS are duly ascertained, Let not self-interest, prejudice, or pride, Induce mankind to set the means aside; Means which, though simple, are by Heaven designed to alleviate the woes of human kind."

This course of argument is so often employed, that it deserves to be expanded a little, so that its length and breadth may be fairly seen. A series of what are called facts is brought forward to prove some very improbable doctrine. It is objected by judicious people, or such as have devoted themselves to analogous subjects, that these assumed facts are in direct opposition to all that is known of the course of nature, that the universal experience of the past affords a powerful presumption against their truth, and that in proportion to the gravity of these objections, should be the number and competence of the witnesses. The answer is a ready one. What do we know of the mysteries of Nature? Do we understand the intricate machinery of the Universe? When to this is added the never-failing quotation,

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,"--

the question is thought to be finally disposed of.

Take the case of astrology as an example. It is in itself strange and incredible that the relations of the heavenly bodies to each other at a given moment of time, perhaps half a century ago, should have anything to do with my success or misfortune in any undertaking of to-day. But what right have I to say it cannot be so? Can I bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? I do not know by what mighty magic the planets roll in their fluid paths, confined to circles as unchanging as if they were rings of steel, nor why the great wave of ocean follows in a sleepless round upon the skirts of moonlight; nor cam I say from any certain knowledge that the phases of the heavenly bodies, or even the falling of the leaves of the forest, or the manner in which the sands lie upon the sea-shore, may not be knit up by invisible threads with the web of human destiny. There is a class of minds much more ready to believe that which is at first sight incredible, and because it is incredible, than what is generally thought reasonable. Credo quia impossibile est,--"I believe, because it is impossible,"--is an old paradoxical expression which might be literally applied to this tribe of persons. And they always succeed in finding something marvellous, to call out the exercise of their robust faith. The old Cabalistic teachers maintained that there was not a verse, line, word, or even letter in the Bible which had not a special efficacy either to defend the person who rightly employed it, or to injure his enemies; always provided the original Hebrew was made use of. In the hands of modern Cabalists every substance, no matter how inert, acquires wonderful medicinal virtues, provided it be used in a proper state of purity and subdivision.

I have already mentioned the motives attributed by the Perkinists to the Medical Profession, as preventing its members from receiving the new but unwelcome truths. This accusation is repeated in different forms and places, as, for instance, in the following passage: "Will the medical man who has spent much money and labor in the pursuit of the arcana of Physic, and on the exercise of which depends his support in life, proclaim the inefficacy of his art, and recommend a remedy to his patient which the most unlettered in society can employ as advantageously as himself? and a remedy, too, which, unlike the drops, the pills, the powders, etc., of the Materia Medica, is inconsumable, and ever in readiness to be employed in successive diseases?"

As usual with these people, much indignation was expressed at any parallel between their particular doctrine and practice and those of their exploded predecessors. "The motives," says the disinterested Mr. Perkins, "which must have impelled to this attempt at classing the METALLIC PRACTICE with the most paltry of empyrical projects, are but too thinly veiled to escape detection."

To all these arguments was added, as a matter of course, an appeal to the feelings of the benevolent in behalf of suffering humanity, in the shape of a notice that the poor would be treated gratis. It is pretty well understood that this gratuitous treatment of the poor does not necessarily imply an excess of benevolence, any more than the gratuitous distribution of a trader's shop-bills is an evidence of remarkable generosity; in short, that it is one of those things which honest men often do from the best motives, but which rogues and impostors never fail to announce as one of their special recommendations. It is astonishing to see how these things brighten up at the touch of Mr. Perkins's poet:

"Ye worthy, honored, philanthropic few, The muse shall weave her brightest wreaths for you, Who in Humanity's bland cause unite, Nor heed the shaft by interest aimed or spite; Like the great Pattern of Benevolence, Hygeia's blessings to the poor dispense; And though opposed by folly's servile brood, ENJOY THE LUXURY OF DOING GOOD."

Having thus sketched the history of Perkinism in its days of prosperity; having seen how it sprung into being, and by what means it maintained its influence, it only remains to tell the brief story of its discomfiture and final downfall. The vast majority of the sensible part of the medical profession were contented, so far as we can judge, to let it die out of itself. It was in vain that the advocates of this invaluable discovery exclaimed over their perverse and interested obstinacy,--in vain that they called up the injured ghosts of Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus to shame that unbelieving generation; the Baillies and the Heberdens,--men whose names have come down to us as synonymous with honor and wisdom,--bore their reproaches in meek silence, and left them unanswered to their fate. There were some others, however, who, believing the public to labor under a delusion, thought it worth while to see whether the charm would be broken by an open trial of its virtue, as compared with that of some less hallowed formula. It must be remembered that a peculiar value was attached to the Metallic Tractors, as made and patented by Mr. Perkins. Dr. Haygarth, of Bath, performed various experiments upon patients afflicted with different complaints,--the patients supposing that the real five-guinea Tractors were employed. Strange to relate, he obtained equally wonderful effects with Tractors of lead and of wood; with nails, pieces of bone, slate pencil, and tobacco-pipe. Dr. Alderson employed sham Tractors made of wood, and produced such effects upon five patients that they returned solemn thanks in church for their cures. A single specimen of these cases may stand for all of them. Ann Hill had suffered for some months from pain in the right arm and shoulder. The Tractors (wooden ones) were applied, and in the space of five minutes she expressed herself relieved in the following apostrophe: "Bless me! why, who could have thought it, that them little things could pull the pain from one. Well, to be sure, the longer one lives, the more one sees; ah, dear!"

These experiments did not result in the immediate extinction of Perkinism. Doubtless they were a great comfort to many obstinate unbelievers, and helped to settle some sceptical minds; but for the real Perkinistic enthusiasts, it may be questioned whether they would at that time have changed their opinion though one had risen from the dead to assure them that it was an error. It perished without violence, by an easy and natural process. Like the famous toy of Mongolfier, it rose by means of heated air,--the fevered breath of enthusiastic ignorance,--and when this grew cool, as it always does in a little while, it collapsed and fell.

And now, on reviewing the whole subject, how shall we account for the extraordinary prevalence of the belief in Perkinism among a portion of what is supposed to be the thinking part of the community?

Could the cures have been real ones, produced by the principle of ANIMAL MAGNETISM? To this it may be answered that the Perkinists ridiculed the idea of approximating Mesmer and the founder of their own doctrine, that nothing like the somnambulic condition seems to have followed the use of the Tractors, and that neither the exertion of the will nor the powers of the individual who operated seem to have been considered of any consequence. Besides, the absolute neglect into which the Tractors soon declined is good evidence that they were incapable of affording any considerable and permanent relief in the complaints for the cure of which they were applied.

Of course a large number of apparent cures were due solely to nature; which is true under every form of treatment, orthodox or empirical. Of course many persons experienced at least temporary relief from the strong impression made upon their minds by this novel and marvellous method of treatment.

Many, again, influenced by the sanguine hopes of those about them, like dying people, who often say sincerely, from day to day, that they are getting better, cheated themselves into a false and short-lived belief that they were cured; and as happens in such cases, the public never knew more than the first half of the story.

When it was said to the Perkinists, that whatever effects they produced were merely through the imagination, they declared (like the advocates of the ROYAL TOUCH and the UNGUENTUM ARMARIUM) that this explanation was sufficiently disproved by the fact of numerous and successful cures which had been witnessed in infants and brute animals. Dr. Haygarth replied to this, that "in these cases it is not the Patient, but the Observer, who is deceived by his own imagination," and that such may be the fact, we have seen in the case of the good lady who thought she had conjured away the spot from her friend's countenance, when it remained just as before.

As to the motives of the inventor and vender of the Tractors, the facts must be allowed to speak for themselves. But when two little bits of brass and iron are patented, as an invention, as the result of numerous experiments, when people are led, or even allowed, to infer that they are a peculiar compound, when they are artfully associated with a new and brilliant discovery (which then happened to be Galvanism), when they are sold at many hundred times their value, and the seller prints his opinion that a Hospital will suffer inconvenience, "unless it possesses many sets of the Tractors, and these placed in the hands of the patients to practise on each other," one cannot but suspect that they were contrived in the neighborhood of a wooden nutmeg factory; that legs of ham in that region are not made of the best mahogany; and that such as buy their cucumber seed in that vicinity have to wait for the fruit as long as the Indians for their crop of gunpowder.

--------------------------

The succeeding lecture will be devoted to an examination of the doctrines of Samuel Hahnemann and his disciples; doctrines which some consider new and others old; the common title of which is variously known as Ho-moeopathy, Homoe-op-athy, Homoeo-paith-y, or Hom'pathy, and the claims of which are considered by some as infinitely important, and by many as immeasurably ridiculous.

I wish to state, for the sake of any who may be interested in the subject, that I shall treat it, not by ridicule, but by argument; perhaps with great freedom, but with good temper and in peaceable language; with very little hope of reclaiming converts, with no desire of making enemies, but with a firm belief that its pretensions and assertions cannot stand before a single hour of calm investigation.

II.

It may be thought that a direct attack upon the pretensions of HOMOEOPATHY is an uncalled-for aggression upon an unoffending doctrine and its peaceful advocates.

But a little inquiry will show that it has long assumed so hostile a position with respect to the Medical Profession, that any trouble I, or any other member of that profession, may choose to bestow upon it may be considered merely as a matter of self-defence. It began with an attempt to show the insignificance of all existing medical knowledge. It not only laid claim to wonderful powers of its own, but it declared the common practice to be attended with the most positively injurious effects, that by it acute diseases are aggravated, and chronic diseases rendered incurable. It has at various times brought forward collections of figures having the air of statistical documents, pretending to show a great proportional mortality among the patients of the Medical Profession, as compared with those treated according to its own rules. Not contented with choosing a name of classical origin for itself, it invented one for the whole community of innocent physicians, assuring them, to their great surprise, that they were all ALLOPATHISTS, whether they knew it or not, and including all the illustrious masters of the past, from Hippocrates down to Hunter, under the same gratuitous title. The line, then, has been drawn by the champions of the new doctrine; they have lifted the lance, they have sounded the charge, and are responsible for any little skirmishing which may happen.

But, independently of any such grounds of active resistance, the subject involves interests so disproportioned to its intrinsic claims, that it is no more than an act of humanity to give it a public examination. If the new doctrine is not truth, it is a dangerous, a deadly error. If it is a mere illusion, and acquires the same degree of influence that we have often seen obtained by other illusions, there is not one of my audience who may not have occasion to deplore the fatal credulity which listened to its promises.

I shall therefore undertake a sober examination of its principles, its facts, and some points of its history. The limited time at my disposal requires me to condense as much as possible what I have to say, but I shall endeavor to be plain and direct in expressing it. Not one statement shall be made which cannot be supported by unimpeachable reference: not one word shall be uttered which I am not as willing to print as to speak. I have no quibbles to utter, and I shall stoop to answer none; but, with full faith in the sufficiency of a plain statement of facts and reasons, I submit the subject to the discernment of my audience.

The question may be asked in the outset,--Have you submitted the doctrines you are professing to examine to the test of long-repeated and careful experiment; have you tried to see whether they were true or not? To this I answer, that it is abundantly evident, from what has often happened, that it would be of no manner of use for me to allege the results of any experiments I might have instituted. Again and again have the most explicit statements been made by the most competent persons of the utter failure of all their trials, and there were the same abundant explanations offered as used to be for the Unguentum Armarium and the Metallic Tractors. I could by no possibility perform any experiments the result of which could not be easily explained away so as to be of no conclusive significance. Besides, as arguments in favor of Homoeopathy are constantly addressed to the public in journals, pamphlets, and even lectures, by inexperienced dilettanti, the same channel must be open to all its opponents.

It is necessary, for the sake of those to whom the whole subject may be new, to give in the smallest possible compass the substance of the Homoeopathic Doctrine. Samuel Hahnemann, its founder, is a German physician, now living in Paris, [Hahnemann died in 1843.] at the age of eighty-seven years. In 1796 he published the first paper containing his peculiar notions; in 1805 his first work on the subject; in 1810 his somewhat famous "Organon of the Healing Art;" the next year what he called the "Pure Materia Medica;" and in 1828 his last work, the "Treatise on Chronic Diseases." He has therefore been writing at intervals on his favorite subject for nearly half a century.

The one great doctrine which constitutes the basis of Homoeopathy as a system is expressed by the Latin aphorism,

"SIMILIA SIBILIBUS CURANTUR,"

or like cures like, that is, diseases are cured by agents capable of producing symptoms resembling those found in the disease under treatment. A disease for Hahnemann consists essentially in a group of symptoms. The proper medicine for any disease is the one which is capable of producing a similar group of symptoms when given to a healthy person.

It is of course necessary to know what are the trains of symptoms excited by different substances, when administered to persons in health, if any such can be shown to exist. Hahnemann and his disciples give catalogues of the symptoms which they affirm were produced upon themselves or others by a large number of drugs which they submitted to experiment.

The second great fact which Hahnemann professes to have established is the efficacy of medicinal substances reduced to a wonderful degree of minuteness or dilution. The following account of his mode of preparing his medicines is from his work on Chronic Diseases, which has not, I believe, yet been translated into English. A grain of the substance, if it is solid, a drop if it is liquid, is to be added to about a third part of one hundred grains of sugar of milk in an unglazed porcelain capsule which has had the polish removed from the lower part of its cavity by rubbing it with wet sand; they are to be mingled for an instant with a bone or horn spatula, and then rubbed together for six minutes; then the mass is to be scraped together from the mortar and pestle, which is to take four minutes; then to be again rubbed for six minutes. Four minutes are then to be devoted to scraping the powder into a heap, and the second third of the hundred grains of sugar of milk to be added. Then they are to be stirred an instant and rubbed six minutes,--again to be scraped together four minutes and forcibly rubbed six; once more scraped together for four minutes, when the last third of the hundred grains of sugar of milk is to be added and mingled by stirring with the spatula; six minutes of forcible rubbing, four of scraping together, and six more (positively the last six) of rubbing, finish this part of the process.

Every grain of this powder contains the hundredth of a grain of the medicinal substance mingled with the sugar of milk. If, therefore, a grain of the powder just prepared is mingled with another hundred grains of sugar of milk, and the process just described repeated, we shall have a powder of which every grain contains the hundredth of the hundredth, or the ten thousandth part of a grain of the medicinal substance. Repeat the same process with the same quantity of fresh sugar of milk, and every grain of your powder will contain the millionth of a grain of the medicinal substance. When the powder is of this strength, it is ready to employ in the further solutions and dilutions to be made use of in practice.

A grain of the powder is to be taken, a hundred drops of alcohol are to be poured on it, the vial is to be slowly turned for a few minutes, until the powder is dissolved, and two shakes are to be given to it. On this point I will quote Hahnemann's own words. "A long experience and multiplied observations upon the sick lead me within the last few years to prefer giving only two shakes to medicinal liquids, whereas I formerly used to give ten." The process of dilution is carried on in the same way as the attenuation of the powder was done; each successive dilution with alcohol reducing the medicine to a hundredth part of the quantity of that which preceded it. In this way the dilution of the original millionth of a grain of medicine contained in the grain of powder operated on is carried successively to the billionth, trillionth, quadrillionth, quintillionth, and very often much higher fractional divisions. A dose of any of these medicines is a minute fraction of a drop, obtained by moistening with them one or more little globules of sugar, of which Hahnemann says it takes about two hundred to weigh a grain.

As an instance of the strength of the medicines prescribed by Hahnemann, I will mention carbonate of lime. He does not employ common chalk, but prefers a little portion of the friable part of an oystershell. Of this substance, carried to the sextillionth degree, so much as one or two globules of the size mentioned can convey is a common dose. But for persons of very delicate nerves it is proper that the dilution should be carried to the decillionth degree. That is, an important medicinal effect is to be expected from the two hundredth or hundredth part of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of the millionth of a grain of oyster-shell. This is only the tenth degree of potency, but some of his disciples profess to have obtained palpable effects from "much higher dilutions."

The third great doctrine of Hahnemann is the following. Seven eighths at least of all chronic diseases are produced by the existence in the system of that infectious disorder known in the language of science by the appellation of PSORA, but to the less refined portion of the community by the name of ITCH. In the words of Hahnemann's "Organon," "This Psora is the sole true and fundamental cause that produces all the other countless forms of disease, which, under the names of nervous debility, hysteria, hypochondriasis, insanity, melancholy, idiocy, madness, epilepsy, and spasms of all kinds, softening of the bones, or rickets, scoliosis and cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungua haematodes, gout,--yellow jaundice and cyanosis, dropsy,--"

["The degrees of DILUTION must not be confounded with those of POTENCY. Their relations may be seen by this table:

lst dilution,--One hundredth of a drop or grain.

2d " One ten thousandth.

3d " One millionth, marked I.

4th " One hundred millionth.

5th " One ten thousand millionth.

6th " One million millionth, or one billionth, marked II.

7th " One hundred billionth.

8th " One ten thousand billionth.

9th " One million billionth, or one trillionth, marked III.

10th " One hundred trillionth.

11th " One ten thousand trillionth.

12th " One million trillionth, or one quadrillionth, marked IV.,--and so on indefinitely.

The large figures denote the degrees of POTENCY.]

"gastralgia, epistaxis, haemoptysis,--asthma and suppuration of the lungs,--megrim, deafness, cataract and amaurosis,--paralysis, loss of sense, pains of every kind, etc., appear in our pathology as so many peculiar, distinct, and independent diseases."

For the last three centuries, if the same authority may be trusted, under the influence of the more refined personal habits which have prevailed, and the application of various external remedies which repel the affection from the skin; Psora has revealed itself in these numerous forms of internal disease, instead of appearing, as in former periods, under the aspect of an external malady.

These are the three cardinal doctrines of Hahnemann, as laid down in those standard works of Homoeopathy, the "Organon" and the "Treatise on Chronic Diseases."

Several other principles may be added, upon all of which he insists with great force, and which are very generally received by his disciples.

1. Very little power is allowed to the curative efforts of nature. Hahnemann goes so far as to say that no one has ever seen the simple efforts of nature effect the durable recovery of a patient from a chronic disease. In general, the Homoeopathist calls every recovery which happens under his treatment a cure.

2. Every medicinal substance must be administered in a state of the most perfect purity, and uncombined with any other. The union of several remedies in a single prescription destroys its utility, and, according to the "Organon," frequently adds a new disease.

3. A large number of substances commonly thought to be inert develop great medicinal powers when prepared in the manner already described; and a great proportion of them are ascertained to have specific antidotes in case their excessive effects require to be neutralized.

4. Diseases should be recognized, as far as possible, not by any of the common names imposed upon them, as fever or epilepsy, but as individual collections of symptoms, each of which differs from every other collection.

5. The symptoms of any complaint must be described with the most minute exactness, and so far as possible in the patient's own words. To illustrate the kind of circumstances the patient is expected to record, I will mention one or two from the 313th page of the "Treatise on Chronic Diseases,"--being the first one at which I opened accidentally.

"After dinner, disposition to sleep; the patient winks."

"After dinner, prostration and feeling of weakness (nine days after taking the remedy)."

This remedy was that same oyster-shell which is to be prescribed "fractions of the sextillionth or decillionth degree." According to Hahnemann, the action of a single dose of the size mentioned does not fully display itself in some cases until twenty-four or even thirty days after it is taken, and in such instances has not exhausted its good effects until towards the fortieth or fiftieth day,--before which time it would be absurd and injurious to administer a new remedy.

So much for the doctrines of Hahnemann, which have been stated without comment, or exaggeration of any of their features, very much as any adherent of his opinions might have stated them, if obliged to compress them into so narrow a space.

Does Hahnemann himself represent Homoeopathy as it now exists? He certainly ought to be its best representative, after having created it, and devoted his life to it for half a century. He is spoken of as the great physician of the time, in most, if not all Homoeopathic works. If he is not authority on the subject of his own doctrines, who is? So far as I am aware, not one tangible discovery in the so-called science has ever been ascribed to any other observer; at least, no general principle or law, of consequence enough to claim any prominence in Homoeopathic works, has ever been pretended to have originated with any of his illustrious disciples. He is one of the only two Homoeopathic writers with whom, as I shall mention, the Paris publisher will have anything to do upon his own account. The other is Jahr, whose Manual is little more than a catalogue of symptoms and remedies. If any persons choose to reject Hahnemann as not in the main representing Homoeopathy, if they strike at his authority, if they wink out of sight his deliberate and formally announced results, it is an act of suicidal rashness; for upon his sagacity and powers of observation, and experience, as embodied in his works, and especially in his Materia Medica, repose the foundations of Homoeopathy as a practical system.

So far as I can learn from the conflicting statements made upon the subject, the following is the present condition of belief.

1. All of any note agree that the law Similia similibus is the only fundamental principle in medicine. Of course if any man does not agree to this the name Homoeopathist can no longer be applied to him with propriety.

2. The belief in and employment of the infinitesimal doses is general, and in some places universal, among the advocates of Homoeopathy; but a distinct movement has been made in Germany to get rid of any restriction to the use of these doses, and to employ medicines with the same license as other practitioners.

3. The doctrine of the origin of most chronic diseases in Psora, notwithstanding Hahnemann says it cost him twelve years of study and research to establish the fact and its practical consequences, has met with great neglect and even opposition from very many of his own disciples.

It is true, notwithstanding, that, throughout most of their writings which I have seen, there runs a prevailing tone of great deference to Hahnemann's opinions, a constant reference to his authority, a general agreement with the minor points of his belief, and a pretence of harmonious union in a common faith. [Those who will take the trouble to look over Hull's Translation of Jahr's Manual may observe how little comparative space is given to remedies resting upon any other authority than that of Hahnemann.]

Many persons, and most physicians and scientific men, would be satisfied with the statement of these doctrines, and examine them no further. They would consider it vastly more probable that any observer in so fallacious and difficult a field of inquiry as medicine had been led into error, or walked into it of his own accord, than that such numerous and extraordinary facts had really just come to light. They would feel a right to exercise the same obduracy towards them as the French Institute is in the habit of displaying when memoirs or models are offered to it relating to the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; which it is the rule to pass over without notice. They would feel as astronomers and natural philosophers must have felt when, some half a dozen years ago, an unknown man came forward, and asked for an opportunity to demonstrate to Arago and his colleagues that the moon and planets were at a distance of a little more than a hundred miles from the earth. And so they would not even look into Homoeopathy, though all its advocates should exclaim in the words of Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins, vender of the Metallic Tractors, that "On all discoveries there are persons who, without descending to any inquiry into the truth, pretend to know, as it were by intuition, that newly asserted facts are founded in the grossest errors." And they would lay their heads upon their pillows with a perfectly clear conscience, although they were assured that they were behaving in the same way that people of old did towards Harvey, Galileo, and Copernicus, the identical great names which were invoked by Mr. Benjamin Douglass Perkins.

But experience has shown that the character of these assertions is not sufficient to deter many, from examining their claims to belief. I therefore lean but very slightly on the extravagance and extreme apparent singularity of their pretensions. I might have omitted them, but on the whole it seemed more just to the claims of my argument to suggest the vast complication of improbabilities involved in the statements enumerated. Every one must of course judge for himself as to the weight of these objections, which are by no means brought forward as a proof of the extravagance of Homoeopathy, but simply as entitled to a brief consideration before the facts of the case are submitted to our scrutiny.

The three great asserted discoveries of Hahnemann are entirely unconnected with and independent of each other. Were there any natural relation between them it would seem probable enough that the discovery of the first would have led to that of the others. But assuming it to be a fact that diseases are cured by remedies capable of producing symptoms like their own, no manifest relation exists between this fact and the next assertion, namely, the power of the infinitesimal doses. And allowing both these to be true, neither has the remotest affinity to the third new doctrine, that which declares seven eighths of all chronic diseases to be owing to Psora.

This want of any obvious relation between Hahnemann's three cardinal doctrines appears to be self-evident upon inspection. But if, as is often true with his disciples, they prefer the authority of one of their own number, I will refer them to Dr. Trinks's paper on the present state of Homoeopathy in Europe, with which, of course, they are familiar, as his name is mentioned as one of the most prominent champions of their faith, in their American official organ. It would be a fact without a parallel in the history, not merely of medicine, but of science, that three such unconnected and astonishing discoveries, each of them a complete revolution of all that ages of the most varied experience had been taught to believe, should spring full formed from the brain of a single individual.

Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms. But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that the Homoeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the sole law of nature in therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty, that it demands a corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast pretensions.

So much ridicule has been thrown upon the pretended powers of the minute doses that I shall only touch upon this point for the purpose of conveying, by illustrations, some shadow of ideas far transcending the powers of the imagination to realize. It must be remembered that these comparisons are not matters susceptible of dispute, being founded on simple arithmetical computations, level to the capacity of any intelligent schoolboy. A person who once wrote a very small pamphlet made some show of objecting to calculations of thus kind, on the ground that the highest dilutions could easily be made with a few ounces of alcohol. But he should have remembered that at every successive dilution he lays aside or throws away ninety-nine hundredths of the fluid on which he is operating, and that, although he begins with a drop, he only prepares a millionth, billionth, trillionth, and similar fractions of it, all of which, added together, would constitute but a vastly minute portion of the drop with which he began. But now let us suppose we take one single drop of the Tincture of Camomile, and that the whole of this were to be carried through the common series of dilutions.

A calculation nearly like the following was made by Dr. Panvini, and may be readily followed in its essential particulars by any one who chooses.

For the first dilution it would take 100 drops of alcohol.

For the second dilution it would take 10;000 drops, or about a pint.

For the third dilution it would take 100 pints.

For the fourth dilution it would take 10,000 pints, or more than 1,000 gallons, and so on to the ninth dilution, which would take ten billion gallons, which he computed would fill the basin of Lake Agnano, a body of water two miles in circumference. The twelfth dilution would of course fill a million such lakes. By the time the seventeenth degree of dilution should be reached, the alcohol required would equal in quantity the waters of ten thousand Adriatic seas. Trifling errors must be expected, but they are as likely to be on one side as the other, and any little matter like Lake Superior or the Caspian would be but a drop in the bucket.

Swallowers of globules, one of your little pellets, moistened in the mingled waves of one million lakes of alcohol, each two miles in circumference, with which had been blended that one drop of Tincture of Camomile, would be of precisely the strength recommended for that medicine in your favorite Jahr's Manual, "against the most sudden, frightful, and fatal diseases!" [In the French edition of 1834, the proper doses of the medicines are mentioned, and Camomile is marked IV. Why are the doses omitted in Hull's Translation, except in three instances out of the whole two hundred remedies, notwithstanding the promise in the preface that "some remarks upon the doses used may be found at the head of each medicine"? Possibly because it makes no difference whether they are employed in one Homoeopathic dose or another; but then it is very singular that such precise directions were formerly given in the same work, and that Hahnemann's "experience" should have led him to draw the nice distinctions we have seen in a former part of this Lecture (p. 44).]

And proceeding on the common data, I have just made a calculation which shows that this single drop of Tincture of Camomile, given in the quantity ordered by Jahr's Manual, would have supplied every individual of the whole human family, past and present, with more than five billion doses each, the action of each dose lasting about four days.

Yet this is given only at the quadrillionth, or fourth degree of potency, and various substances are frequently administered at the decillionth or tenth degree, and occasionally at still higher attenuations with professed medicinal results. Is there not in this as great an exception to all the hitherto received laws of nature as in the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Ask this question of a Homoeopathist, and he will answer by referring to the effects produced by a very minute portion of vaccine matter, or the extraordinary diffusion of odors. But the vaccine matter is one of those substances called morbid poisons, of which it is a peculiar character to multiply themselves, when introduced into the system, as a seed does in the soil. Therefore the hundredth part of a grain of the vaccine matter, if no more than this is employed, soon increases in quantity, until, in the course of about a week, it is a grain or more, and can be removed in considerable drops. And what is a very curious illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not produce its most. characteristic effects until it is already in sufficient quantity not merely to be visible, but to be collected for further use. The thoughtlessness which can allow an inference to be extended from a product of disease possessing this susceptibility of multiplication when conveyed into the living body, to substances of inorganic origin, such as silex or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a pebble may produce a mountain, because an acorn can become a forest.

As to the analogy to be found between the alleged action of the infinitely attenuated doses, and the effects of some odorous substances which possess the extraordinary power of diffusing their imponderable emanations through a very wide space, however it may be abused in argument, and rapidly as it evaporates on examination, it is not like that just mentioned, wholly without meaning. The fact of the vast diffusion of some odors, as that of musk or the rose, for instance, has long been cited as the most remarkable illustration of the divisibility of matter, and the nicety of the senses. And if this were compared with the effects of a very minute dose of morphia on the whole system, or the sudden and fatal impression of a single drop of prussic acid, or, with what comes still nearer, the poisonous influence of an atmosphere impregnated with invisible malaria, we should find in each of these examples an evidence of the degree to which nature, in some few instances, concentrates powerful qualities in minute or subtile forms of matter. But if a man comes to me with a pestle and mortar in his hand, and tells me that he will take a little speck of some substance which nobody ever thought to have any smell at all, as, for instance, a grain of chalk or of charcoal, and that he will, after an hour or two of rubbing and scraping, develop in a portion of it an odor which, if the whole grain were used, would be capable of pervading an apartment, a house, a village, a province, an empire, nay, the entire atmosphere of this broad planet upon which we tread; and that from each of fifty or sixty substances he can in this way develop a distinct and hitherto unknown odor: and if he tries to show that all this is rendered quite reasonable by the analogy of musk and roses, I shall certainly be justified in considering him incapable of reasoning, and beyond the reach of my argument. What if, instead of this, he professes to develop new and wonderful medicinal powers from the same speck of chalk or charcoal, in such proportions as would impregnate every pond, lake, river, sea, and ocean of our globe, and appeals to the same analogy in favor of the probability of his assertion.

All this may be true, notwithstanding these considerations. But so extraordinary would be the fact, that a single atom of substances which a child might swallow without harm by the teaspoonful could, by an easy mechanical process, be made to develop such inconceivable powers, that nothing but the strictest agreement of the most cautious experimenters, secured by every guaranty that they were honest and faithful, appealing to repeated experiments in public, with every precaution to guard against error, and with the most plain and peremptory results, should induce us to lend any credence to such pretensions.

The third doctrine, that Psora, the other name of which you remember, is the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, is a startling one, to say the least. That an affection always recognized as a very unpleasant personal companion, but generally regarded as a mere temporary incommodity, readily yielding to treatment in those unfortunate enough to suffer from it, and hardly known among the better classes of society, should be all at once found out by a German physician to be the great scourge of mankind, the cause of their severest bodily and mental calamities, cancer and consumption, idiocy and madness, must excite our unqualified surprise. And when the originator of this singular truth ascribes, as in the page now open before me, the declining health of a disgraced courtier, the chronic malady of a bereaved mother, even the melancholy of the love-sick and slighted maiden, to nothing more nor less than the insignificant, unseemly, and almost unmentionable ITCH, does it not seem as if the very soil upon which we stand were dissolving into chaos, over the earthquake-heaving of discovery?

And when one man claims to have established these three independent truths, which are about as remote from each other as the discovery of the law of gravitation, the invention of printing, and that of the mariner's compass, unless the facts in their favor are overwhelming and unanimous, the question naturally arises, Is not this man deceiving himself, or trying to deceive others?

I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and his school.

In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured by like), to be the basis of the healing art,--"the sole law of nature in therapeutics,"--it is necessary,

1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be faithfully studied and recorded.

2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those diseases most like their own symptoms.

3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.

1. The effects of drugs upon healthy persons have been studied by Hahnemann and his associates. Their results were made known in his Materia Medica, a work in three large volumes in the French translation, published about eight years ago. The mode of experimentation appears to have been, to take the substance on trial, either in common or minute doses, and then to set down every little sensation, every little movement of mind or body, which occurred within many succeeding hours or days, as being produced solely by the substance employed. When I have enumerated some of the symptoms attributed to the power of the drugs taken, you will be able to judge how much value is to be ascribed to the assertions of such observers.

The following list was taken literally from the Materia Medica of Hahnemann, by my friend M. Vernois, for whose accuracy I am willing to be responsible. He has given seven pages of these symptoms, not selected, but taken at hazard from the French translation of the work. I shall be very brief in my citations.

"After stooping some time, sense of painful weight about the head upon resuming the erect posture."

"An itching, tickling sensation at the outer edge of the palm of the left hand, which obliges the person to scratch." The medicine was acetate of lime, and as the action of the globule taken is said to last twenty-eight days, you may judge how many such symptoms as the last might be supposed to happen.

Among the symptoms attributed to muriatic acid are these: a catarrh, sighing, pimples; "after having written a long time with the back a little bent over, violent pain in the back and shoulder-blades, as if from a strain,"--"dreams which are not remembered,--disposition to mental dejection,--wakefulness before and after midnight."

I might extend this catalogue almost indefinitely. I have not cited these specimens with any view to exciting a sense of the ridiculous, which many others of those mentioned would not fail to do, but to show that the common accidents of sensation, the little bodily inconveniences to which all of us are subject, are seriously and systematically ascribed to whatever medicine may have been exhibited, even in the minute doses I have mentioned, whole days or weeks previously.

To these are added all the symptoms ever said by anybody, whether deserving confidence or not, as I shall hereafter illustrate, to be produced by the substance in question.

The effects of sixty-four medicinal substances, ascertained by one or both of these methods, are enumerated in the Materia Medica of Hahnemann, which may be considered as the basis of practical Homoeopathy. In the Manual of Jahr, which is the common guide, so far as I know, of those who practise Homoeopathy in these regions, two hundred remedies are enumerated, many of which, however, have never been employed in practice. In at least one edition there were no means of distinguishing those which had been tried upon the sick from the others. It is true that marks have been added in the edition employed here, which serve to distinguish them; but what are we to think of a standard practical author on Materia Medica, who at one time omits to designate the proper doses of his remedies, and at another to let us have any means of knowing whether a remedy has ever been tried or not, while he is recommending its employment in the most critical and threatening diseases?

I think that, from what I have shown of the character of Hahnemann's experiments, it would be a satisfaction to any candid inquirer to know whether other persons, to whose assertions he could look with confidence, confirm these pretended facts. Now there are many individuals, long and well known to the scientific world, who have tried these experiments upon healthy subjects, and utterly deny that their effects have at all corresponded to Hahnemann's assertions.

I will take, for instance, the statements of Andral (and I am not referring to his well-known public experiments in his hospital) as to the result of his own trials. This distinguished physician is Professor of Medicine in the School of Paris, and one of the most widely known and valued authors upon practical and theoretical subjects the profession can claim in any country. He is a man of great kindness of character, a most liberal eclectic by nature and habit, of unquestioned integrity, and is called, in the leading article of the first number of the "Homoepathic Examiner," "an eminent and very enlightened allopathist." Assisted by a number of other persons in good health, he experimented on the effects of cinchona, aconite, sulphur, arnica, and the other most highly extolled remedies. His experiments lasted a year, and he stated publicly to the Academy of Medicine that they never produced the slightest appearance of the symptoms attributed to them. The results of a man like this, so extensively known as one of the most philosophical and candid, as well as brilliant of instructors, and whose admirable abilities and signal liberality are generally conceded, ought to be of great weight in deciding the question.

M. Double, a well-known medical writer and a physician of high standing in Paris, had occasion so long ago as 1801, before he had heard of Homoeopathy, to make experiments upon Cinchona, or Peruvian bark. He and several others took the drug in every kind of dose for four months, and the fever it is pretended by Hahnemann to excite never was produced.

M. Bonnet, President of the Royal Society of Medicine of Bordeaux, had occasion to observe many soldiers during the Peninsular War, who made use of Cinchona as a preservative against different diseases, but he never found it to produce the pretended paroxysms.

If any objection were made to evidence of this kind, I would refer to the express experiments on many of the Homoeopathic substances, which were given to healthy persons with every precaution as to diet and regimen, by M. Louis Fleury, without being followed by the slightest of the pretended consequences. And let me mention as a curious fact, that the same quantity of arsenic given to one animal in the common form of the unprepared powder, and to another after having been rubbed up into six hundred globules, offered no particular difference of activity in the two cases.

This is a strange contradiction to the doctrine of the development of what they call dynamic power, by means of friction and subdivision.

In 1835 a public challenge was offered to the best known Homoeopathic physician in Paris to select any ten substances asserted to produce the most striking effects; to prepare them himself; to choose one by lot without knowing which of them he had taken, and try it upon himself or any intelligent and devoted Homoeopathist, and, waiting his own time, to come forward and tell what substance had been employed. The challenge was at first accepted, but the acceptance retracted before the time of trial arrived.

From all this I think it fair to conclude that the catalogues of symptoms attributed in Homoeopathic works to the influence of various drugs upon healthy persons are not entitled to any confidence.

2. It is necessary to show, in the next place, that medicinal substances are always capable of curing diseases most like their own symptoms. For facts relating to this question we must look to two sources; the recorded experience of the medical profession in general, and the results of trials made according to Homoeopathic principles, and capable of testing the truth of the doctrine.

No person, that I am aware of, has ever denied that in some cases there exists a resemblance between the effects of a remedy and the symptoms of diseases in which it is beneficial. This has been recognized, as Hahnemann himself has shown, from the time of Hippocrates. But according to the records of the medical profession, as they have been hitherto interpreted, this is true of only a very small proportion of useful remedies. Nor has it ever been considered as an established truth that the efficacy of even these few remedies was in any definite ratio to their power of producing symptoms more or less like those they cured.

Such was the state of opinion when Hahnemann came forward with the proposition that all the cases of successful treatment found in the works of all preceding medical writers were to be ascribed solely to the operation of the Homoeopathic principle, which had effected the cure, although without the physician's knowledge that this was the real secret. And strange as it may seem, he was enabled to give such a degree of plausibility to this assertion, that any person not acquainted somewhat with medical literature, not quite familiar, I should rather say, with the relative value of medical evidence, according to the sources whence it is derived, would be almost frightened into the belief, at seeing the pages upon pages of Latin names he has summoned as his witnesses.

It has hitherto been customary, when examining the writings of authors of preceding ages, upon subjects as to which they were less enlightened than ourselves, and which they were very liable to misrepresent, to exercise some little discretion; to discriminate, in some measure, between writers deserving confidence and those not entitled to it. But there is not the least appearance of any such delicacy on the part of Hahnemann. A large majority of the names of old authors he cites are wholly unknown to science. With some of them I have been long acquainted, and I know that their accounts of diseases are no more to be trusted than their contemporary Ambroise Pare's stories of mermen, and similar absurdities. But if my judgment is rejected, as being a prejudiced one, I can refer to Cullen, who mentioned three of Hahnemann's authors in one sentence, as being "not necessarily bad authorities; but certainly such when they delivered very improbable events;" and as this was said more than half a century ago, it could not have had any reference to Hahnemann. But although not the slightest sign of discrimination is visible in his quotations,--although for him a handful of chaff from Schenck is all the same thing as a measure of wheat from Morgagni,--there is a formidable display of authorities, and an abundant proof of ingenious researches to be found in each of the great works of Hahnemann with which I am familiar. [Some painful surmises might arise as to the erudition of Hahnemann's English Translator, who makes two individuals of "Zacutus, Lucitanus," as well as respecting that of the conductors of an American Homoeopathic periodical, who suffer the name of the world-renowned Cardanus to be spelt Cardamus in at least three places, were not this gross ignorance of course attributable only to the printer.]

It is stated by Dr. Leo-Wolf, that Professor Joerg, of Leipsic, has proved many of Hahnemann's quotations from old authors to be adulterate and false. What particular instances he has pointed out I have no means of learning. And it is probably wholly impossible on this side of the Atlantic, and even in most of the public libraries of Europe, to find anything more than a small fraction of the innumerable obscure publications which the neglect of grocers and trunkmakers has spared to be ransacked by the all-devouring genius of Homoeopathy. I have endeavored to verify such passages as my own library afforded me the means of doing. For some I have looked in vain, for want, as I am willing to believe, of more exact references. But this I am able to affirm, that, out of the very small number which I have been able, to trace back to their original authors, I have found two to be wrongly quoted, one of them being a gross misrepresentation.

The first is from the ancient Roman author, Caelius Aurelianus; the second from the venerable folio of Forestus. Hahnemann uses the following expressions,--if he is not misrepresented in the English Translation of the 'Organon': "Asclepiades on one occasion cured an inflammation of the brain by administering a small quantity of wine." After correcting the erroneous reference of the Translator, I can find no such case alluded to in the chapter. But Caelius Aurelianus mentions two modes of treatment employed by Asclepiades, into both of which the use of wine entered, as being "in the highest degree irrational and dangerous." [Caelius Aurel. De Morb. Acut. et Chron. lib. I. cap. xv. not xvi. Amsterdam. Wetstein, 1755.]

In speaking of the oil of anise-seed, Hahnemann says that Forestus observed violent colic caused by its administration. But, as the author tells the story, a young man took, by the counsel of a surgeon, an acrid and virulent medicine, the name of which is not given, which brought on a most cruel fit of the gripes and colic. After this another surgeon was called, who gave him oil of anise-seed and wine, "which increased his suffering." [Observ. et Curat. Med. lib. XXI obs. xiii. Frankfort, 1614.] Now if this was the Homoeopathic remedy, as Hahnemann pretends, it might be a fair question why the young man was not cured by it. But it is a much graver question why a man who has shrewdness and learning enough to go so far after his facts, should think it right to treat them with such astonishing negligence or such artful unfairness.

Even if every word he had pretended to take from his old authorities were to be found in them, even if the authority of every one of these authors were beyond question, the looseness with which they are used to prove whatever Hahnemann chooses is beyond the bounds of credibility. Let me give one instance to illustrate the character of this man's mind. Hahnemann asserts, in a note annexed to the 110th paragraph of the "Organon," that the smell of the rose will cause certain persons to faint. And he says in the text that substances which produce peculiar effects of this nature on particular constitutions cure the same symptoms in people in general. Then in another note to the same paragraph he quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians.

"It was by these means (i.e. Homoeopathically) that the Princess Eudosia with rose-water restored a person who had fainted!"

Is it possible that a man who is guilty of such pedantic folly as this,--a man who can see a confirmation of his doctrine in such a recovery as this,--a recovery which is happening every day, from a breath of air, a drop or two of water, untying a bonnet-string, loosening a stay-lace, and which can hardly help happening, whatever is done,--is it possible that a man, of whose pages, not here and there one, but hundreds upon hundreds are loaded with such trivialities, is the Newton, the Columbus, the Harvey of the nineteenth century!

The whole process of demonstration he employs is this. An experiment is instituted with some drug upon one or more healthy persons. Everything that happens for a number of days or weeks is, as we have seen, set down as an effect of the medicine. Old volumes are then ransacked promiscuously, and every morbid sensation or change that anybody ever said was produced by the drug in question is added to the list of symptoms. By one or both of these methods, each of the sixty-four substances enumerated by Hahnemann is shown to produce a very large number of symptoms, the lowest in his scale being ninety-seven, and the highest fourteen hundred and ninety-one. And having made out this list respecting any drug, a catalogue which, as you may observe in any Homoeopathic manual, contains various symptoms belonging to every organ of the body, what can be easier than to find alleged cures in every medical author which can at once be attributed to the Homoeopathic principle; still more if the grave of extinguished credulity is called upon to give up its dead bones as living witnesses; and worst of all, if the monuments of the past are to be mutilated in favor of "the sole law of Nature in therapeutics"?

There are a few familiar facts of which great use has been made as an entering wedge for the Homoeopathic doctrine. They have been suffered to pass current so long that it is time they should be nailed to the counter, a little operation which I undertake, with perfect cheerfulness, to perform for them.

The first is a supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law found in the precept given for the treatment of parts which have been frozen, by friction with snow or similar means. But we deceive ourselves by names, if we suppose the frozen part to be treated by cold, and not by heat. The snow may even be actually warmer than the part to which it is applied. But even if it were at the same temperature when applied, it never did and never could do the least good to a frozen part, except as a mode of regulating the application of what? of heat. But the heat must be applied gradually, just as food must be given a little at a time to those perishing with hunger. If the patient were brought into a warm room, heat would be applied very rapidly, were not something interposed to prevent this, and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is exactly what is wanted; it is not cold to the part; it is very possibly warm, on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and if it does not melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain frozen up until doomsday. Now the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in large or small quantities, is not Homoeopathy.

The next supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire. This is a popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little consequence to require any more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. It produces a most acute pain in the part, which is followed by some loss of sensibility, as happens with the eye after exposure to strong light, and the ear after being subjected to very intense sounds. This is all it is capable of doing, and all further notions of its efficacy must be attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the flatiron that the fire does not literally "draw the fire out," which is her hypothesis.

But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle of Homoeopathy.

For you will remember that this principle is that Like cures Like, and not that Same cures Same; that there is resemblance and not identity between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by the drug which cures it, and none have been readier to insist upon this distinction than the Homoeopathists themselves. For if Same cures Same, then every poison must be its own antidote,--which is neither a part of their theory nor their so-called experience. They have been asked often enough, why it was that arsenic could not cure the mischief which arsenic had caused, and why the infectious cause of small-pox did not remedy the disease it had produced, and then the; were ready enough to see the distinction I have pointed out. O no! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of one very much like him!

A third instance in proof of the Homoeopathic law is sought for in the acknowledged efficacy of vaccination. And how does the law apply to this? It is granted by the advocates of Homoeopathy that there is a resemblance between the effects of the vaccine virus on a person in health and the symptoms of small-pox. Therefore, according to the rule, the vaccine virus will cure the small-pox, which, as everybody knows, is entirely untrue. But it prevents small-pox, say the Homoeopathists. Yes, and so does small-pox prevent itself from ever happening again, and we know just as much of the principle involved in the one case as in the other. For this is only one of a series of facts which we are wholly unable to explain. Small-pox, measles, scarlet-fever, hooping-cough, protect those who have them once from future attacks; but nettle-rash and catarrh and lung fever, each of which is just as Homoeopathic to itself as any one of the others, have no such preservative power. We are obliged to accept the fact, unexplained, and we can do no more for vaccination than for the rest.

I come now to the most directly practical point connected with the subject, namely,--

What is the state of the evidence as to the efficacy of the proper Homoeopathic treatment in the cure of diseases.

As the treatment adopted by the Homoeopathists has been almost universally by means of the infinitesimal doses, the question of their efficacy is thrown open, in common with that of the truth of their fundamental axiom, as both are tested in practice.

We must look for facts as to the actual working of Homoeopathy to three sources.

1. The statements of the unprofessional public.

2. The assertions of Homoeopathic practitioners.

3. The results of trials by competent and honest physicians, not pledged to the system.

I think, after what we have seen of medical facts, as they are represented by incompetent persons, we are disposed to attribute little value to all statements of wonderful cures, coming from those who have never been accustomed to watch the caprices of disease, and have not cooled down their young enthusiasm by the habit of tranquil observation. Those who know nothing of the natural progress of a malady, of its ordinary duration, of its various modes of terminating, of its liability to accidental complications, of the signs which mark its insignificance or severity, of what is to be expected of it when left to itself, of how much or how little is to be anticipated from remedies, those who know nothing or next to nothing of all these things, and who are in a great state of excitement from benevolence, sympathy, or zeal for a new medical discovery, can hardly be expected to be sound judges of facts which have misled so many sagacious men, who have spent their lives in the daily study and observation of them. I believe that, after having drawn the portrait of defunct Perkinism, with its five thousand printed cures, and its million and a half computed ones, its miracles blazoned about through America, Denmark, and England; after relating that forty years ago women carried the Tractors about in their pockets, and workmen could not make them fast enough for the public demand; and then showing you, as a curiosity, a single one of these instruments, an odd one of a pair, which I obtained only by a lucky accident, so utterly lost is the memory of all their wonderful achievements; I believe, after all this, I need not waste time in showing that medical accuracy is not to be looked for in the florid reports of benevolent associations, the assertions of illustrious patrons, the lax effusions of daily journals, or the effervescent gossip of the tea-table.

Dr. Hering, whose name is somewhat familiar to the champions of Homoeopathy, has said that "the new healing art is not to be judged by its success in isolated cases only, but according to its success in general, its innate truth, and the incontrovertible nature of its innate principles."

We have seen something of "the incontrovertible nature of its innate principles," and it seems probable, on the whole, that its success in general must be made up of its success in isolated cases. Some attempts have been made, however, to finish the whole matter by sweeping statistical documents, which are intended to prove its triumphant success over the common practice.

It is well known to those who have had the good fortune to see the "Homoeopathic Examiner," that this journal led off, in its first number, with a grand display of everything the newly imported doctrine had to show for itself. It is well remarked, on the twenty-third page of this article, that "the comparison of bills of mortality among an equal number of sick, treated by divers methods, is a most poor and lame way to get at conclusions touching principles of the healing art." In confirmation of which, the author proceeds upon the twenty-fifth page to prove the superiority of the Homoeopathic treatment of cholera, by precisely these very bills of mortality. Now, every intelligent physician is aware that the poison of cholera differed so much in its activity at different times and, places, that it was next to impossible to form any opinion as to the results of treatment, unless every precaution was taken to secure the most perfectly corresponding conditions in the patients treated, and hardly even then. Of course, then, a Russian Admiral, by the name of Mordvinov, backed by a number of so-called physicians practising in Russian villages, is singularly competent to the task of settling the whole question of the utility of this or that kind of treatment; to prove that, if not more than eight and a half per cent. of those attacked with the disease perished, the rest owed their immunity to Hahnemann. I can remember when more than a hundred patients in a public institution were attacked with what, I doubt not, many Homoeopathic physicians (to say nothing of Homoeopathic admirals) would have called cholera, and not one of them died, though treated in the common way, and it is my firm belief that, if such a result had followed the administration of the omnipotent globules, it would have been in the mouth of every adept in Europe, from Quin of London to Spohr of Gandersheim. No longer ago than yesterday, in one of the most widely circulated papers of this city, there was published an assertion that the mortality in several Homoeopathic Hospitals was not quite five in a hundred, whereas, in what are called by the writer Allopathic Hospitals, it is said to be eleven in a hundred. An honest man should be ashamed of such an argumentum ad ignorantiam. The mortality of a hospital depends not merely on the treatment of the patients, but on the class of diseases it is in the habit of receiving, on the place where it is, on the season, and many other circumstances. For instance, there are many hospitals in the great cities of Europe that receive few diseases of a nature to endanger life, and, on the other hand, there are others where dangerous diseases are accumulated out of the common proportion. Thus, in the wards of Louis, at the Hospital of La Pitie, a vast number of patients in the last stages of consumption were constantly entering, to swell the mortality of that hospital. It was because he was known to pay particular attention to the diseases of the chest that patients laboring under those fatal affections to an incurable extent were so constantly coming in upon him. It is always a miserable appeal to the thoughtlessness of the vulgar, to allege the naked fact of the less comparative mortality in the practice of one hospital or of one physician than another, as an evidence of the superiority of their treatment. Other things being equal, it must always be expected that those institutions and individuals enjoying to the highest degree the confidence of the community will lose the largest proportion of their patients; for the simple reason that they will naturally be looked to by those suffering from the gravest class of diseases; that many, who know that they are affected with mortal disease, will choose to die under their care or shelter, while the subjects of trifling maladies, and merely troublesome symptoms, amuse themselves to any extent among the fancy practitioners. When, therefore, Dr. Mublenbein, as stated in the "Homoeopathic Examiner," and quoted in yesterday's "Daily Advertiser," asserts that the mortality among his patients is only one per cent. since he has practised Homoeopathy, whereas it was six per cent. when he employed the common mode of practice, I am convinced by this, his own statement, that the citizens of Brunswick, whenever they are seriously sick, take good care not to send for Dr. Muhlenbein!

It is evidently impossible that I should attempt, within the compass of a single lecture, any detailed examination of the very numerous cases reported in the Homoeopathic Treatises and Journals. Having been in the habit of receiving the French "Archives of Homoeopathic Medicine" until the premature decease of that Journal, I have had the opportunity of becoming acquainted somewhat with the style of these documents, and experiencing whatever degree of conviction they were calculated to produce. Although of course I do not wish any value to be assumed for my opinion, such as it is, I consider that you are entitled to hear it. So far, then, as I am acquainted with the general character of the cases reported by the Homoeopathic physicians, they would for the most part be considered as wholly undeserving a place in any English, French, or American periodical of high standing, if, instead of favoring the doctrine they were intended to support, they were brought forward to prove the efficacy of any common remedy administered by any common practitioner. There are occasional exceptions to this remark; but the general truth of it is rendered probable by the fact that these cases are always, or almost always, written with the single object of showing the efficacy of the medicine used, or the skill of the practitioner, and it is recognized as a general rule that such cases deserve very little confidence. Yet they may sound well enough, one at a time, to those who are not fully aware of the fallacies of medical evidence. Let me state a case in illustration. Nobody doubts that some patients recover under every form of practice. Probably all are willing to allow that a large majority, for instance, ninety in a hundred, of such cases as a physician is called to in daily practice, would recover, sooner or later, with more or less difficulty, provided nothing were done to interfere seriously with the efforts of nature.

Suppose, then, a physician who has a hundred patients prescribes to each of them pills made of some entirely inert substance, as starch, for instance. Ninety of them get well, or if he chooses to use such language, he cures ninety of them. It is evident, according to the doctrine of chances, that there must be a considerable number of coincidences between the relief of the patient and the administration of the remedy. It is altogether probable that there will happen two or three very striking coincidences out of the whole ninety cases, in which it would seem evident that the medicine produced the relief, though it had, as we assumed, nothing to do with it. Now suppose that the physician publishes these cases, will they not have a plausible appearance of proving that which, as we granted at the outset, was entirely false? Suppose that instead of pills of starch he employs microscopic sugarplums, with the five' million billion trillionth part of a suspicion of aconite or pulsatilla, and then publishes his successful cases, through the leaden lips of the press, or the living ones of his female acquaintances,--does that make the impression a less erroneous one? But so it is that in Homoeopathic works and journals and gossip one can never, or next to never, find anything but successful cases, which might do very well as a proof of superior skill, did it not prove as much for the swindling advertisers whose certificates disgrace so many of our newspapers. How long will it take mankind to learn that while they listen to "the speaking hundreds and units," who make the world ring with the pretended triumphs they have witnessed, the "dumb millions" of deluded and injured victims are paying the daily forfeit of their misplaced confidence!

I am sorry to see, also, that a degree of ignorance as to the natural course of diseases is often shown in these published cases, which, although it may not be detected by the unprofessional reader, conveys an unpleasant impression to those who are acquainted with the subject. Thus a young woman affected with jaundice is mentioned in the German "Annals of Clinical Homoeopathy" as having been cured in twenty-nine days by pulsatilla and nux vomica. Rummel, a well-known writer of the same school, speaks of curing a case of jaundice in thirty-four days by Homoeopathic doses of pulsatilla, aconite, and cinchona. I happened to have a case in my own household, a few weeks since, which lasted about ten days, and this was longer than I have repeatedly seen it in hospital practice, so that it was nothing to boast of.

Dr. Munneche of Lichtenburg in Saxony is called to a patient with sprained ankle who had been a fortnight under the common treatment. The patient gets well by the use of arnica in a little more than a month longer, and this extraordinary fact is published in the French "Archives of Homoeopathic Medicine."

In the same Journal is recorded the case of a patient who with nothing more, so far as any proof goes, than inluenza, gets down to her shop upon the sixth day.

And again, the cool way in which everything favorable in a case is set down by these people entirely to their treatment, may be seen in a case of croup reported in the "Homoeopathic Gazette" of Leipsic, in which leeches, blistering, inhalation of hot vapor, and powerful internal medicine had been employed, and yet the merit was all attributed to one drop of some Homoeopathic fluid.

I need not multiply these quotations, which illustrate the grounds of an opinion which the time does not allow me to justify more at length; other such cases are lying open before me; there is no end to them if more were wanted; for nothing is necessary but to look into any of the numerous broken-down Journals of Homoeopathy, the volumes of which may be found on the shelves of those curious in such matters.

A number of public trials of Homoeopathy have been made in different parts of the world. Six of these are mentioned in the Manifesto of the "Homoeopathic Examiner." Now to suppose that any trial can absolutely silence people, would be to forget the whole experience of the past. Dr. Haygarth and Dr. Alderson could not stop the sale of the five-guinea Tractors, although they proved that they could work the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner" itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish of that Journal. I had not the intention to speak of these public trials at all, having abundant other evidence on the point. But I think it best, on the whole, to mention two of them in a few words,--that instituted at Naples and that of Andral.

There have been few names in the medical profession, for the last half century, so widely known throughout the world of science as that of M. Esquirol, whose life was devoted to the treatment of insanity, and who was without a rival in that department of practical medicine. It is from an analysis communicated by him to the "Gazette Medicale de Paris" that I derive my acquaintance with the account of the trial at Naples by Dr. Panvini, physician to the Hospital della Pace. This account seems to be entirely deserving of credit. Ten patients were set apart, and not allowed to take any medicine at all,--much against the wish of the Homoeopathic physician. All of them got well, and of course all of them would have been claimed as triumphs if they had been submitted to the treatment. Six other slight cases (each of which is specified) got well under the Homoeopathic treatment, none of its asserted specific effects being manifested.

All the rest were cases of grave disease; and so far as the trial, which was interrupted about the fortieth day, extended, the patients grew worse, or received no benefit. A case is reported on the page before me of a soldier affected with acute inflammation in the chest, who took successively aconite, bryonia, nux vomica, and pulsatilla, and after thirty-eight days of treatment remained without any important change in his disease. The Homoeopathic physician who treated these patients was M. de Horatiis, who had the previous year been announcing his wonderful cures. And M. Esquirol asserted to the Academy of Medicine in 1835, that this M. de Horatiis, who is one of the prominent personages in the "Examiner's" Manifesto published in 1840, had subsequently renounced Homoeopathy. I may remark, by the way, that this same periodical, which is so very easy in explaining away the results of these trials, makes a mistake of only six years or a little more as to the time when this at Naples was instituted.

M. Andral, the "eminent and very enlightened allopathist" of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," made the following statement in March, 1835, to the Academy of Medicine: "I have submitted this doctrine to experiment; I can reckon at this time from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty cases, recorded with perfect fairness, in a great hospital, under the eye of numerous witnesses; to avoid every objection--I obtained my remedies of M. Guibourt, who keeps a Homoeopathic pharmacy, and whose strict exactness is well known; the regimen has been scrupulously observed, and I obtained from the sisters attached to the hospital a special regimen, such as Hahnemann orders. I was told, however, some months since, that I had not been faithful to all the rules of the doctrine. I therefore took the trouble to begin again; I have studied the practice of the Parisian Homoeopathists, as I had studied their books, and I became convinced that they treated their patients as I had treated mine, and I affirm that I have been as rigorously exact in the treatment as any other person."

And he expressly asserts the entire nullity of the influence of all the Homoeopathic remedies tried by him in modifying, so far as he could observe, the progress or termination of diseases. It deserves notice that he experimented with the most boasted substances,--cinchona, aconite, mercury, bryonia, belladonna. Aconite, for instance, he says he administered in more than forty cases of that collection of feverish symptoms in which it exerts so much power, according to Hahnemann, and in not one of them did it have the slightest influence, the pulse and heat remaining as before.

These statements look pretty honest, and would seem hard to be explained away, but it is calmly said that he "did not know enough of the method to select the remedies with any tolerable precision." ["Homoeopathic Examiner, vol. i. p. 22.]

"Nothing is left to the caprice of the physician." (In a word, instead of being dependent upon blind chance, that there is an infallible law, guided by which; the physician MUST select the proper remedies.') ['Ibid.,' in a notice of Menzel's paper.] Who are they that practice Homoeopathy, and say this of a man with the Materia Medica of Hahnemann lying before him? Who are they that send these same globules, on which he experimented, accompanied by a little book, into families, whose members are thought competent to employ them, when they deny any such capacity to a man whose life has been passed at the bedside of patients, the most prominent teacher in the first Medical Faculty in the world, the consulting physician of the King of France, and one of the most renowned practical writers, not merely of his nation, but of his age? I leave the quibbles by which such persons would try to creep out from under the crushing weight of these conclusions to the unfortunates who suppose that a reply is equivalent to an answer.

Dr. Baillie, one of the physicians in the great Hotel Dieu of Paris, invited two Homoeopathic practitioners to experiment in his wards. One of these was Curie, now of London, whose works are on the counters of some of our bookstores, and probably in the hands of some of my audience. This gentleman, whom Dr. Baillie declares to be an enlightened man, and perfectly sincere in his convictions, brought his own medicines from the pharmacy which furnished Hahnemann himself, and employed them for four or five months upon patients in his ward, and with results equally unsatisfactory, as appears from Dr. Baillie's statement at a meeting of the Academy of Medicine. And a similar experiment was permitted by the Clinical Professor of the Hotel Dieu of Lyons, with the same complete failure.

But these are old and prejudiced practitioners. Very well, then take the statement of Dr. Fleury, a most intelligent young physician, who treated homoeopathically more than fifty patients, suffering from diseases which it was not dangerous to treat in this way, taking every kind of precaution as to regimen, removal of disturbing influences, and the state of the atmosphere, insisted upon by the most vigorous partisans of the doctrine, and found not the slightest effect produced by the medicines. And more than this, read nine of these cases, which he has published, as I have just done, and observe the absolute nullity of aconite, belladonna, and bryonia, against the symptoms over which they are pretended to exert such palpable, such obvious, such astonishing influences. In the view of these statements, it is impossible not to realize the entire futility of attempting to silence this asserted science by the flattest and most peremptory results of experiment. Were all the hospital physicians of Europe and America to devote themselves, for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, and were their results to be unanimous as to the total worthlessness of the whole system in practice, this slippery delusion would slide through their fingers without the slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had crushed every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.

3. I have said, that to show the truth of the Homoeopathic doctrine, as announced by Hahnemann, it would be necessary to show, in the third place, that remedies never cure diseases when they are not capable of producing similar symptoms! The burden of this somewhat comprehensive demonstration lying entirely upon the advocates of this doctrine, it may be left to their mature reflections.

It entered into my original plan to treat of the doctrine relating to Psora, or itch,--an almost insane conception, which I am glad to get rid of, for this is a subject one does not care to handle without gloves. I am saved this trouble, however, by finding that many of the disciples of Hahnemann, those disciples the very gospel of whose faith stands upon his word, make very light of his authority on this point, although he himself says, "It has cost me twelve years of study and research to trace out the source of this incredible number of chronic affections, to discover this great truth, which remained concealed from all my predecessors and contemporaries, to establish the basis of its demonstration, and find out, at the same time, the curative medicines that were fit to combat this hydra in all its different forms."

But, in the face of all this, the following remarks are made by Wolff, of Dresden, whose essays, according to the editor of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," "represent the opinions of a large majority of Homoeopathists in Europe."

"It cannot be unknown to any one at all familiar with Homoeopathic literature, that Hahnemann's idea of tracing the large majority of chronic diseases to actual itch has met with the greatest opposition from Homoeopathic physicians themselves." And again, "If the Psoric theory has led to no proper schism, the reason is to be found in the fact that it is almost without any influence in practice."

We are told by Jahr, that Dr. Griesselich, "Surgeon to the Grand Duke of Baden," and a "distinguished" Homoeopathist, actually asked Hahnemann for the proof that chronic diseases, such as dropsy, for instance, never arise from any other cause than itch; and that, according to common report, the venerable sage was highly incensed (fort courrouce) with Dr. Hartmann, of Leipsic, another "distinguished" Homoeopathist, for maintaining that they certainly did arise from other causes.

And Dr. Fielitz, in the "Homoeopathic Gazette" of Leipsic, after saying, in a good-natured way, that Psora is the Devil in medicine, and that physicians are divided on this point into diabolists and exorcists, declares that, according to a remark of Hahnemann, the whole civilized world is affected with Psora. I must therefore disappoint any advocate of Hahnemann who may honor me with his presence, by not attacking a doctrine on which some of the disciples of his creed would be very happy to have its adversaries waste their time and strength. I will not meddle with this excrescence, which, though often used in time of peace, would be dropped, like the limb of a shell-fish, the moment it was assailed; time is too precious, and the harvest of living extravagances nods too heavily to my sickle, that I should blunt it upon straw and stubble.

I will close the subject with a brief examination of some of the statements made in Homoeopathic works, and more particularly in the brilliant Manifesto of the "Examiner," before referred to. And first, it is there stated under the head of "Homoeopathic Literature," that "SEVEN HUNDRED volumes have been issued from the press developing the peculiarities of the system, and many of them possessed of a scientific character that savans know well how to respect." If my assertion were proper evidence in the case, I should declare, that, having seen a good many of these publications, from the year 1834, when I bought the work of the Rev. Thomas Everest, [Dr. Curie speaks of this silly pamphlet as having been published in 1835.] to within a few weeks, when I received my last importation of Homaeopathic literature, I have found that all, with a very few exceptions, were stitched pamphlets varying from twenty or thirty pages to somewhat less than a hundred, and generally resembling each other as much as so many spelling-books.

But not being evidence in the case, I will give you the testimony of Dr. Trinks, of Dresden, who flourishes on the fifteenth page of the same Manifesto as one of the most distinguished among the Homoeopathists of Europe. I translate the sentence literally from the "Archives de la Medecine Homoeopathique."

"The literature of Homoeopathy, if that honorable name must be applied to all kinds of book-making, has been degraded to the condition of the humblest servitude. Productions without talent, without spirit, without discrimination, flat and pitiful eulogies, exaggerations surpassing the limits of the most robust faith, invectives against such as dared to doubt the dogmas which had been proclaimed, or catalogues of remedies; of such materials is it composed! From distance to distance only, have appeared some memoirs useful to science or practice, which appear as so many green oases in the midst of this literary desert."

It is a very natural as well as a curious question to ask, What has been the success of Homoeopathy in the different countries of Europe, and what is its present condition?

The greatest reliance of the advocates of Homoeopathy is of course on Germany. We know very little of its medical schools, its medical doctrines, or its medical men, compared with those of England and France. And, therefore, when an intelligent traveller gives a direct account from personal inspection of the miserable condition of the Homoeopathic hospital at Leipsic, the first established in Europe, and the first on the list of the ever-memorable Manifesto, it is easy enough answer or elude the fact by citing various hard names of "distinguished" practitioners, which sound just as well to the uninformed public as if they were Meckel, or Tiedemann, or Langenbeck. Dr. Leo-Wolf, who, to be sure, is opposed to Homoeopathy, but who is a scholar, and ought to know something of his own countrymen, assures us that "Dr. Kopp is the only German Homoeopathist, if we can call him so, who has been distinguished as an author and practitioner before he examined this method." And Dr. Lee, the same gentleman in whose travels the paragraph relating to the Leipsic Hospital is to be found, says the same thing. And I will cheerfully expose myself to any impertinent remark which it might suggest, to assure my audience that I never heard or saw one authentic Homoeopathic name of any country in Europe, which I had ever heard mentioned before as connected with medical science by a single word or deed sufficient to make it in any degree familiar to my ears, unless Arnold of Heidelberg is the anatomist who discovered a little nervous centre, called the otic ganglion. But you need ask no better proof of who and what the German adherents of this doctrine must be, than the testimony of a German Homoeopathist as to the wretched character of the works they manufacture to enforce its claims.

As for the act of this or that government tolerating or encouraging Homoeopathy, every person of common intelligence knows that it is a mere form granted or denied according to the general principles of policy adopted in different states, or the degree of influence which some few persons who have adopted it may happen to have at court. What may be the value of certain pompous titles with which many of the advocates of Homoeopathy are honored, it might be disrespectful to question. But in the mean time the judicious inquirer may ponder over an extract which I translate from a paper relating to a personage well known to the community as Williams the Oculist, with whom I had the honor of crossing the Atlantic some years since, and who himself handed me two copies of the paper in question.

"To say that he was oculist of Louis XVIII. and of Charles X., and that he now enjoys the same title with respect to His Majesty, Louis Philippe, and the King of the Belgians, is unquestionably to say a great deal; and yet it is one of the least of his titles to public confidence. His reputation rests upon a basis more substantial even than the numerous diplomas with which he is provided, than the membership of the different medical societies which have chosen him as their associate," etc., etc.

And as to one more point, it is time that the public should fully understand that the common method of supporting barefaced imposture at the present day, both in Europe and in this country, consists in trumping up "Dispensaries," "Colleges of Health," and other advertising charitable clap-traps, which use the poor as decoy-ducks for the rich, and the proprietors of which have a strong predilection for the title of "Professor." These names, therefore, have come to be of little or no value as evidence of the good character, still less of the high pretensions of those who invoke their authority. Nor does it follow, even when a chair is founded in connection with a well-known institution, that it has either a salary or an occupant; so that it may be, and probably is, a mere harmless piece of toleration on the part of the government if a Professorship of Homoeopathy is really in existence at Jena or Heidelberg. And finally, in order to correct the error of any who might suppose that the whole Medical Profession of Germany has long since fallen into the delusions of Hahnemann, I will quote two lines which a celebrated anatomist and surgeon (whose name will occur again in this lecture in connection with a very pleasing letter) addressed to the French Academy of Medicine in 1835. "I happened to be in Germany some months since, at a meeting of nearly six hundred physicians; one of them wished to bring up the question of Homoeopathy; they would not even listen to him." This may have been very impolite and bigoted, but that is not precisely the point in reference to which I mention the circumstance.

But if we cannot easily get at Germany, we can very easily obtain exact information from France and England. I took the trouble to write some months ago to two friends in Paris, in whom I could place confidence, for information upon the subject. One of them answered briefly to the effect that nothing was said about it. When the late Curator of the Lowell Institute, at his request, asked about the works upon the subject, he was told that they had remained a long time on the shelves quite unsalable, and never spoken of.

The other gentleman, [Dr. Henry T. Bigelow, now Professor of Surgery in Harvard University] whose name is well known to my audience, and who needs no commendation of mine, had the kindness to procure for me many publications upon the subject, and some information which sets the whole matter at rest, so far as Paris is concerned. He went directly to the Baillieres, the principal and almost the only publishers of all the Homoeopathic books and journals in that city. The following facts were taken by him from the account-books of this publishing firm. Four Homoeopathic Journals have been published in Paris; three of them by the Baillieres.

The reception they met with may be judged of by showing the number of subscribers to each on the books of the publishing firm.

A Review published by some other house, which lasted one year, and had about fifty subscribers, appeared in 1834, 1835.

There were only four Journals of Homoeopathy ever published in Paris. The Baillieres informed my correspondent that the sale of Homoeopathic books was much less than formerly, and that consequently they should undertake to publish no new books upon the subject, except those of Jahr or Hahnemann. "This man," says my correspondent,--referring to one of the brothers,--"the publisher and headquarters of Homoeopathy in Paris, informs me that it is going down in England and Germany as well as in Paris." For all the facts he had stated he pledged himself as responsible.

Homoeopathy was in its prime in Paris, he said, in 1836 and 1837, and since then has been going down.

Louis told my correspondent that no person of distinction in Paris had embraced Homoeopathy, and that it was declining. If you ask who Louis is, I refer you to the well-known Homoeopathist, Peschier of Geneva, who says, addressing him, "I respect no one more than yourself; the feeling which guides your researches, your labors, and your pen, is so honorable and rare, that I could not but bow down before it; and I own, if there were any allopathist who inspired me with higher veneration, it would be him and not yourself whom I should address."

Among the names of "Distinguished Homoeopathists," however, displayed in imposing columns, in the index of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," are those of MARJOLIN, AMUSSAT, and BRESCHET, names well known to the world of science, and the last of them identified with some of the most valuable contributions which anatomical knowledge has received since the commencement of the present century. One Dr. Chrysaora, who stands sponsor for many facts in that Journal, makes the following statement among the rest: "Professors, who are esteemed among the most distinguished of the Faculty (Faculty de Medicine), both as to knowledge and reputation, have openly confessed the power of Homoeopathia in forms of disease where the ordinary method of practice proved totally insufficient. It affords me the highest pleasure to select from among these gentlemen, Marjolin, Amussat, and Breschet."

Here is a literal translation of an original letter, now in my possession, from one of these Homoeopathists to my correspondent:--

"DEAR SIR, AND RESPECTED PROFESSIONAL BROTHER:

"You have had the kindness to inform me in your letter that a new American Journal, the 'New World,' has made use of my name in support of the pretended Homoeopathic doctrines, and that I am represented as one of the warmest partisans of Homoeopathy in France.

"I am vastly surprised at the reputation manufactured for me upon the new continent; but I am obliged, in deference to truth, to reject it with my whole energy. I spurn far from me everything which relates to that charlatanism called Homoeopathy, for these pretended doctrines cannot endure the scrutiny of wise and enlightened persons, who are guided by honorable sentiments in the practice of the noblest of arts.

"PARIS, 3d November, 1841

"I am, etc., etc., "G. BRESCHET,

"Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Member of the Institute, Surgeon of Hotel Dieu, and Consulting Surgeon to the King, etc." [I first saw M. Breschet's name mentioned in that Journal]

Concerning Amussat, my correspondent writes, that he was informed by Madame Hahnemann, who converses in French more readily than her husband, and therefore often speaks for him, that "he was not a physician, neither Homoeopathist nor Allopathist, but that he was the surgeon of their own establishment; that is, performed as a surgeon all the operations they had occasion for in their practice."

I regret not having made any inquiries as to Marjolin, who, I doubt not, would strike his ponderous snuff-box until it resounded like the Grecian horse, at hearing such a doctrine associated with his respectable name. I was not aware, when writing to Paris, that this worthy Professor, whose lectures I long attended, was included in these audacious claims; but after the specimens I have given of the accuracy of the foreign correspondence of the "Homoeopathic Examiner," any further information I might obtain would seem so superfluous as hardly to be worth the postage.

Homoeopathy may be said, then, to be in a sufficiently miserable condition in Paris. Yet there lives, and there has lived for years, the illustrious Samuel Hahnemann, who himself assured my correspondent that no place offered the advantages of Paris in its investigation, by reason of the attention there paid to it.

In England, it appears by the statement of Dr. Curie in October, 1839, about eight years after its introduction into the country, that there were eighteen Homoeopathic physicians in the United Kingdom, of whom only three were to be found out of London, and that many of these practised Homoeopathy in secret.

It will be seen, therefore, that, according to the recent statement of one of its leading English advocates, Homoeopathy had obtained not quite half as many practical disciples in England as Perkinism could show for itself in a somewhat less period from the time of its first promulgation in that country.

Dr. Curie's letter, dated London, October 30, 1839, says there is "one in Dublin, Dr. Luther; at Glasgow, Dr. Scott." The "distinguished" Chrysaora writes from Paris, dating October 20, 1839, "On the other hand, Homoeopathy is commencing to make an inroad into England by the way of Ireland. At Dublin, distinguished physicians have already embraced the new system, and a great part of the nobility and gentry of that city have emancipated themselves from the English fashion and professional authority."

But the Marquis of Anglesea and Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer patronize Homoeopathy; the Queen Dowager Adelaide has been treated by a Homoeopathic physician. "Jarley is the delight of the nobility and gentry." "The Royal Family are the patrons of Jarley."

Let me ask if a Marquis and a Knight are better than two Lords, and if the Dowager of Royalty is better than Royalty itself, all of which illustrious dignities were claimed in behalf of Benjamin Douglass Perkins?

But if the balance is thought too evenly suspended in this case, another instance can be given in which the evidence of British noblemen and their ladies is shown to be as valuable in establishing the character of a medical man or doctrine, as would be the testimony of the Marquis of Waterford concerning the present condition and prospects of missionary enterprise. I have before me an octavo volume of more than four hundred pages, in which, among much similar matter, I find highly commendatory letters from the Marchioness of Ormond, Lady Harriet Kavanagh, the Countess of Buckinghamshire, the Right Hon. Viscount Ingestre, M. P., and the Most Noble, the Marquis of Sligo,--all addressed to "John St. John Long, Esq," a wretched charlatan, twice tried for, and once convicted of, manslaughter at the Old Bailey.

This poor creature, too, like all of his tribe, speaks of the medical profession as a great confederation of bigoted monopolists. He, too, says that "If an innovator should appear, holding out hope to those in despair, and curing disorders which the faculty have recorded as irremediable, he is at once, and without inquiry, denounced as an empiric and an impostor." He, too, cites the inevitable names of Galileo and Harvey, and refers to the feelings excited by the great discovery of Jenner. From the treatment of the great astronomer who was visited with the punishment of other heretics by the ecclesiastical authorities of a Catholic country some centuries since, there is no very direct inference to be drawn to the medical profession of the present time. His name should be babbled no longer, after having been placarded for the hundredth time in the pages of St. John Long. But if we are doomed to see constant reference to the names of Harvey and Jenner in every worthless pamphlet containing the prospectus of some new trick upon the public, let us, once for all, stare the facts in the face, and see how the discoveries of these great men were actually received by the medical profession.

In 1628, Harvey published his first work upon the circulation. His doctrines were a complete revolution of the prevailing opinions of all antiquity. They immediately found both champions and opponents; of which last, one only, Riolanus, seemed to Harvey worthy of an answer, on account of his "rank, fame, and learning." Controversy in science, as in religion, was not, in those days, carried on with all the courtesy which our present habits demand, and it is possible that some hard words may have been applied to Harvey, as it is very certain that he used the most contemptuous expressions towards others.

Harvey declares in his second letter to Riolanus, "Since the first discovery of the circulation, hardly a day, or a moment, has passed without my hearing it both well and ill spoken of; some attack it with great hostility, others defend it with high encomiums; one party believe that I have abundantly proved the truth of the doctrine against all the weight of opposing arguments, by experiments, observations, and dissections; others think it not yet sufficiently cleared up, and free from objections." Two really eminent Professors, Plempius of Louvain, and Walaeus of Leyden, were among its early advocates.

The opinions sanctioned by the authority of long ages, and the names of Hippocrates and Galen, dissolved away, gradually, but certainly, before the demonstrations of Harvey. Twenty-four years after the publication of his first work, and six years before his death, his bust in marble was placed in the Hall of the College of Physicians, with a suitable inscription recording his discoveries.

Two years after this he was unanimously invited to accept the Presidency of that body; and he lived to see his doctrine established, and all reputable opposition withdrawn.

There were many circumstances connected with the discovery of Dr. Jenner which were of a nature to excite repugnance and opposition. The practice of inoculation for the small-pox had already disarmed that disease of many of its terrors. The introduction of a contagious disease from a brute creature into the human system naturally struck the public mind with a sensation of disgust and apprehension, and a part of the medical public may have shared these feelings. I find that Jenner's discovery of vaccination was made public in June, 1798. In July of the same year the celebrated surgeon, Mr. Cline, vaccinated a child with virus received from Dr. Jenner, and in communicating the success of this experiment, he mentions that Dr. Lister, formerly of the Small-Pox Hospital, and himself, are convinced of the efficacy of the cow-pox. In November of the same year, Dr. Pearson published his "Inquiry," containing the testimony of numerous practitioners in different parts of the kingdom, to the efficacy of the practice. Dr. HAYGARTH, who was so conspicuous in exposing the follies of Perkinism, was among the very earliest to express his opinion in favor of vaccination. In 1801, Dr. Lettsom mentions the circumstance "as being to the honor of the medical professors, that they have very generally encouraged this salutary practice, although it is certainly calculated to lessen their pecuniary advantages by its tendency to extirpate a fertile source of professional practice."

In the same year the Medical Committee of Paris spoke of vaccination in a public letter, as "the most brilliant and most important discovery of the eighteenth century." The Directors of a Society for the Extermination of the Small-Pox, in a Report dated October 1st, 1807, "congratulate the public on the very favorable opinion which the Royal College of Physicians of London, after a most minute and laborious investigation made by the command of his Majesty, have a second time expressed on the subject of vaccination, in their Report laid before the House of Commons, in the last session of Parliament; in consequence of which the sum of twenty thousand pounds was voted to Dr. Jenner, as a remuneration for his discovery, in addition to ten thousand pounds before granted." (In June, 1802.)

These and similar accusations, so often brought up against the Medical Profession, are only one mode in which is manifested a spirit of opposition not merely to medical science, but to all science, and to all sound knowledge. It is a spirit which neither understands itself nor the object at which it is aiming. It gropes among the loose records of the past, and the floating fables of the moment, to glean a few truths or falsehoods tending to prove, if they prove anything, that the persons who have passed their lives in the study of a branch of knowledge the very essence of which must always consist in long and accurate observation, are less competent to judge of new doctrines in their own department than the rest of the community. It belongs to the clown in society, the destructive in politics, and the rogue in practice.

The name of Harvey, whose great discovery was the legitimate result of his severe training and patient study, should be mentioned only to check the pretensions of presumptuous ignorance. The example of Jenner, who gave his inestimable secret, the result of twenty-two years of experiment and researches, unpurchased, to the public,--when, as was said in Parliament, he might have made a hundred thousand pounds by it as well as any smaller sum,--should be referred to only to rebuke the selfish venders of secret remedies, among whom his early history obliges us reluctantly to record Samuel Hahnemann. Those who speak of the great body of physicians as if they were united in a league to support the superannuated notions of the past against the progress of improvement, have read the history of medicine to little purpose. The prevalent failing of this profession has been, on the contrary, to lend a too credulous ear to ambitious and plausible innovators. If at the present time ten years of public notoriety have passed over any doctrine professing to be of importance in medical science, and if it has not succeeded in raising up a powerful body of able, learned, and ingenious advocates for its claims, the fault must be in the doctrine and not in the medical profession.

Homoeopathy has had a still more extended period of trial than this, and we have seen with what results. It only remains to throw out a few conjectures as to the particular manner in which it is to break up and disappear.

1. The confidence of the few believers in this delusion will never survive the loss of friends who may die of any acute disease, under a treatment such as that prescribed by Homoeopathy. It is doubtful how far cases of this kind will be trusted to its tender mercies, but wherever it acquires any considerable foothold, such cases must come, and with them the ruin of those who practise it, should any highly valued life be thus sacrificed.

2. After its novelty has worn out, the ardent and capricious individuals who constitute the most prominent class of its patrons will return to visible doses, were it only for the sake of a change.

3. The Semi-Homoeopathic practitioner will gradually withdraw from the rotten half of his business and try to make the public forget his connection with it.

4. The ultra Homoeopathist will either recant and try to rejoin the medical profession; or he will embrace some newer and if possible equally extravagant doctrine; or he will stick to his colors and go down with his sinking doctrine. Very few will pursue the course last mentioned.

A single fact may serve to point out in what direction there will probably be a movement of the dissolving atoms of Homoeopathy. On the 13th page of the too frequently cited Manifesto of the "Examiner" I read the following stately paragraph:

"Bigelius, M. D., physician to the Emperor of Russia, whose elevated reputation is well known in Europe, has been an acknowledged advocate of Hahnemann's doctrines for several years. He abandoned Allopathia for Homoeopathia." The date of this statement is January, 1840. I find on looking at the booksellers' catalogues that one Bigel, or Bigelius, to speak more classically, has been at various times publishing Homoeopathic books for some years.

Again, on looking into the "Encyclographie des Sciences Medicales" for April, 1840, I find a work entitled "Manual of HYDROSUDOPATHY, or the Treatment of Diseases by Cold Water, etc., etc., by Dr. Bigel, Physician of the School of Strasburg, Member of the Medico-Chirurgical Institute of Naples, of the Academy of St. Petersburg,--Assessor of the College of the Empire of Russia, Physician of his late Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Constantine, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, etc." Hydrosudopathy or Hydropathy, as it is sometimes called, is a new medical doctrine or practice which has sprung up in Germany since Homoeopathy, which it bids fair to drive out of the market, if, as Dr. Bigel says, fourteen physicians afflicted with diseases which defied themselves and their colleagues came to Graefenberg, in the year 1836 alone, and were cured. Now Dr. Bigel, "whose elevated reputation is well known in Europe," writes as follows: "The reader will not fail to see in this defence of the curative method of Graefenberg a profession of medical faith, and he will be correct in so doing." And his work closes with the following sentence, worthy of so distinguished an individual: "We believe, with religion, that the water of baptism purifies the soul from its original sin; let us believe also, with experience, that it is for our corporeal sins the redeemer of the human body." If Bigel, Physician to the late Grand Duke Constantine, is identical with Bigel whom the "Examiner" calls Physician to the Emperor of Russia, it appears that he is now actively engaged in throwing cold water at once upon his patients and the future prospects of Homoeopathy.

If, as must be admitted, no one of Hahnemann's doctrines is received with tolerable unanimity among his disciples, except the central axiom, Similia similibus curantur; if this axiom itself relies mainly for its support upon the folly and trickery of Hahnemann, what can we think of those who announce themselves ready to relinquish all the accumulated treasures of our art, to trifle with life upon the strength of these fantastic theories? What shall we think of professed practitioners of medicine, if, in the words of Jahr, "from ignorance, for their personal convenience, or through charlatanism, they treat their patients one day Homoeopathically and the next Allopathically;" if they parade their pretended new science before the unguarded portion of the community; if they suffer their names to be coupled with it wherever it may gain a credulous patient; and deny all responsibility for its character, refuse all argument for its doctrines, allege no palliation for the ignorance and deception interwoven with every thread of its flimsy tissue, when they are questioned by those competent to judge and entitled to an answer?

Such is the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition. Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the public, because it has its journals, its patrons, its apostles, some are weak enough to suppose it can escape the inevitable doom of utter disgrace and oblivion. Not many years can pass away before the same curiosity excited by one of Perkins's Tractors will be awakened at the sight of one of the Infinitesimal Globules. If it should claim a longer existence, it can only be by falling into the hands of the sordid wretches who wring their bread from the cold grasp of disease and death in the hovels of ignorant poverty.

As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests of mankind, always assailed and insulted from without by such as are ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in unequal contest with the hundred-armed giant who walks in the noonday, and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not merely for itself and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted my voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble science it is too weak to strike, or to injure.

THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF PUERPERAL FEVER

Printed in 1843; reprinted with additions, 1855.

THE POINT AT ISSUE.

THE AFFIRMATIVE.

"The disease known as Puerperal Fever is so far contagious as to be frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses." O. W. Holmes, 1843.

THE NEGATIVE.

"The result of the whole discussion will, I trust, serve, not only to exalt your views of the value and dignity of our profession, but to divest your minds of the overpowering dread that you can ever become, especially to woman, under the extremely interesting circumstances of gestation and parturition, the minister of evil; that you can ever convey, in any possible manner, a horrible virus, so destructive in its effects, and so mysterious in its operations as that attributed to puerperal fever."--Professor Hodge, 1852.

"I prefer to attribute them to accident, or Providence, of which I can form a conception, rather than to a contagion of which I cannot form any clear idea, at least as to this particular malady."--Professor Meigs, 1852.

" . . . in the propagation of which they have no more to do, than with the propagation of cholera from Jessore to San Francisco, and from Mauritius to St. Petersburg."--Professor Meigs, 1854.

---------------------

"I arrived at that certainty in the matter, that I could venture to foretell what women would be affected with the disease, upon hearing by what midwife they were to be delivered, or by what nurse they were to be attended, during their lying-in; and, almost in every instance, my prediction was verified."--Gordon, 1795.

"A certain number of deaths is caused every year by the contagion of puerperal fever, communicated by the nurses and medical attendants." Farr, in Fifth Annual Report of Registrar-General of England, 1843.

". . . boards of health, if such exist, or, without them, the medical institutions of a country, should have the power of coercing, or of inflicting some kind of punishment on those who recklessly go from cases of puerperal fevers to parturient or puerperal females, without using due precaution; and who, having been shown the risk, criminally encounter it, and convey pestilence and death to the persons they are employed to aid in the most interesting and suffering period of female existence." --Copland's Medical Dictionary, Art. Puerperal States and Diseases, 1852.

"We conceive it unnecessary to go into detail to prove the contagious nature of this disease, as there are few, if any, American practitioners who do not believe in this doctrine."--Dr. Lee, in Additions to Article last cited.

-----------------------

[INTRODUCTORY NOTE.] It happened, some years ago, that a discussion arose in a Medical Society of which I was a member, involving the subject of a certain supposed cause of disease, about which something was known, a good deal suspected, and not a little feared. The discussion was suggested by a case, reported at the preceding meeting, of a physician who made an examination of the body of a patient who had died with puerperal fever, and who himself died in less than a week, apparently in consequence of a wound received at the examination, having attended several women in confinement in the mean time, all of whom, as it was alleged, were attacked with puerperal fever.

Whatever apprehensions and beliefs were entertained, it was plain that a fuller knowledge of the facts relating to the subject would be acceptable to all present. I therefore felt that it would be doing a good service to look into the best records I could find, and inquire of the most trustworthy practitioners I knew, to learn what experience had to teach in the matter, and arrived at the results contained in the following pages.

The Essay was read before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, and, at the request of the Society, printed in the "New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery" for April, 1843. As this Journal never obtained a large circulation, and ceased to be published after a year's existence, and as the few copies I had struck off separately were soon lost sight of among the friends to whom they were sent, the Essay can hardly be said to have been fully brought before the Profession.

The subject of this Paper has the same profound interest for me at the present moment as it had when I was first collecting the terrible evidence out of which, as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of reason could not help shaping the truth it involved. It is not merely on account of the bearing of the question,--if there is a question,--on all that is most sacred in human life and happiness, that the subject cannot lose its interest. It is because it seems evident that a fair statement of the facts must produce its proper influence on a very large proportion of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds. Individuals may, here and there, resist the practical bearing of the evidence on their own feelings or interests; some may fail to see its meaning, as some persons may be found who cannot tell red from green; but I cannot doubt that most readers will be satisfied and convinced, to loathing, long before they have finished the dark obituary calendar laid before them.

I do not know that I shall ever again have so good an opportunity of being useful as was granted me by the raising of the question which produced this Essay. For I have abundant evidence that it has made many practitioners more cautious in their relations with puerperal females, and I have no doubt it will do so still, if it has a chance of being read, though it should call out a hundred counterblasts, proving to the satisfaction of their authors that it proved nothing. And for my part, I had rather rescue one mother from being poisoned by her attendant, than claim to have saved forty out of fifty patients to whom I had carried the disease. Thus, I am willing to avail myself of any hint coming from without to offer this paper once more to the press. The occasion has presented itself, as will be seen, in a convenient if not in a flattering form.

I send this Essay again to the MEDICAL PROFESSION, without the change of a word or syllable. I find, on reviewing it, that it anticipates and eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be entertained for a moment until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled. In its very statement of the doctrine maintained it avoids all discussion of the nature of the disease "known as puerperal fever," and all the somewhat stale philology of the word contagion. It mentions, fairly enough, the names of sceptics, or unbelievers as to the reality of personal transmission; of Dewees, of Tonnelle, of Duges, of Baudelocque, and others; of course, not including those whose works were then unwritten or unpublished; nor enumerating all the Continental writers who, in ignorance of the great mass of evidence accumulated by British practitioners, could hardly be called well informed on this subject. It meets all the array of negative cases,--those in which disease did not follow exposure,--by the striking example of small-pox, which, although one of the most contagious of diseases, is subject to the most remarkable irregularities and seeming caprices in its transmission. It makes full allowance for other causes besides personal transmission, especially for epidemic influences. It allows for the possibility of different modes of conveyance of the destructive principle. It recognizes and supports the belief that a series of cases may originate from a single primitive source which affects each new patient in turn; and especially from cases of Erysipelas. It does not undertake to discuss the theoretical aspect of the subject; that is a secondary matter of consideration. Where facts are numerous, and unquestionable, and unequivocal in their significance, theory must follow them as it best may, keeping time with their step, and not go before them, marching to the sound of its own drum and trumpet. Having thus narrowed its area to a limited practical platform of discussion, a matter of life and death, and not of phrases or theories, it covers every inch of it with a mass of evidence which I conceive a Committee of Husbands, who can count coincidences and draw conclusions as well as a Synod of Accoucheurs, would justly consider as affording ample reasons for an unceremonious dismissal of a practitioner (if it is conceivable that such a step could be waited for), after five or six funerals had marked the path of his daily visits, while other practitioners were not thus escorted. To the Profession, therefore, I submit the paper in its original form, and leave it to take care of itself.

To the MEDICAL STUDENTS, into whose hands this Essay may fall, some words of introduction may be appropriate, and perhaps, to a small number of them, necessary. There are some among them who, from youth, or want of training, are easily bewildered and confused in any conflict of opinions into which their studies lead them. They are liable to lose sight of the main question in collateral issues, and to be run away with by suggestive speculations. They confound belief with evidence, often trusting the first because it is expressed with energy, and slighting the latter because it is calm and unimpassioned. They are not satisfied with proof; they cannot believe a point is settled so long as everybody is not silenced. They have not learned that error is got out of the minds that cherish it, as the taenia is removed from the body, one joint, or a few joints at a time, for the most part, rarely the whole evil at once. They naturally have faith in their instructors, turning to them for truth, and taking what they may choose to give them; babes in knowledge, not yet able to tell the breast from the bottle, pumping away for the milk of truth at all that offers, were it nothing better than a Professor's shrivelled forefinger.

In the earliest and embryonic stage of professional development, any violent impression on the instructor's mind is apt to be followed by some lasting effect on that of the pupil. No mother's mark is more permanent than the mental naevi and moles, and excrescences, and mutilations, that students carry with them out of the lecture-room, if once the teeming intellect which nourishes theirs has been scared from its propriety by any misshapen fantasy. Even an impatient or petulant expression, which to a philosopher would be a mere index of the low state of amiability of the speaker at the moment of its utterance, may pass into the young mind as an element of its future constitution, to injure its temper or corrupt its judgment. It is a duty, therefore, which we owe to this younger class of students, to clear any important truth which may have been rendered questionable in their minds by such language, or any truth-teller against whom they may have been prejudiced by hasty epithets, from the impressions such words have left. Until this is done, they are not ready for the question, where there is a question, for them to decide. Even if we ourselves are the subjects of the prejudice, there seems to be no impropriety in showing that this prejudice is local or personal, and not an acknowledged conviction with the public at large. It may be necessary to break through our usual habits of reserve to do this, but this is the fault of the position in which others have placed us.

Two widely-known and highly-esteemed practitioners, Professors in two of the largest Medical Schools of the Union, teaching the branch of art which includes the Diseases of Women, and therefore speaking with authority; addressing in their lectures and printed publications large numbers of young men, many of them in the tenderest immaturity of knowledge, have recently taken ground in a formal way against the doctrine maintained in this paper:

On the Non-Contagious Character of Puerperal Fever: An Introductory Lecture. By Hugh L. Hodge, M. D., Professor of Obstetrics in the University of Pennsylvania. Delivered Monday, October 11, 1852. Philadelphia, 1852.

On the Nature, Signs, and Treatment of Childbed Fevers: in a Series of Letters addressed to the Students of his Class. By Charles D. Meigs, M. D., Professor of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children in Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, etc., etc. Philadelphia, 1854.