Part 3

"Oh!" said Jimmie, turning to me as he went below. "That gentleman from Cuba says he knows you. He wanted to know all about the _Hecuba_ before he would come on board. You see, the Spanish flag we're flying made him nervous like," and Jimmie and his accomplice in trouble-making disappeared. When Captain Wade presented me to the Cuban--who seemed by his bearing to be a man of consequence--as the agent of the patriots whom I was to meet, I thought that if there was such a thing as luck in the affairs of Henderson, Burt, & Co., it was not all necessarily bad. And I inwardly blessed troublesome boys and distinguished Cuban rebels who would run risk of capture and execution by rescuing a pair of youngsters from drowning in sight of what they supposed was a Spanish revenue-schooner. They told me that what with the presence of the Spanish cruiser and no sign of our schooner, they had thought that further waiting at the rendezvous was both useless and dangerous, and it explains their appearance at such an opportune moment.

When the arms were landed and hidden in a dense jungle, and several bags of gold were snugly lying in the Captain's locker, my views on blockade-running, boys, and things in general underwent a radical change. I even began to have a tender feeling towards sharks, particularly thrasher sharks who lure boys into getting rescued by Cuban officers. And I mentally retracted all the then harsh things I had thought about the folly of holding on to a shark from the bottom of an upturned boat in a heavy sea. I asked the ragged young ship's boy why he held on so long.

"Hold on!" he said. "Why, I couldn't help it. When we upset, Chimmie's foot got tangled in de line, and it tied round his ankle. Hold on? Guess I did. Chimmie'u'd be voyagin' round after dat shark now as dead as a Baxter Street herrin' if we hadn't. Course I held on!"

A LOYAL TRAITOR.

A STORY OF THE WAR OF 1812 BETWEEN AMERICA AND ENGLAND.

BY JAMES BARNES.

CHAPTER II.

A DEFERRED SOLUTION.

It was very early the next morning when we started northward along the turnpike. The doctor and I were driving in a tall chaise that swayed on its hinges like a small-boat in a tide-rip.

Mr. Edgerton followed on horseback. The sun had not risen when I had been awakened, and the morning chill was in the air; a mist hung low over the marshes, and the waters of the bay looked dull and cold. I had begun to shiver, and the kind physician threw a heavy cape around me, and tucked me in carefully beside him.

We had not spoken, except for a morning's greeting, but now he began a fire of questions, and I could not answer even the simplest. I had never heard that my mother was a widow before her marriage to the man whose name I bore; I did not know her maiden name, nor where she came from; and if I was not born at the plantation on the Gunpowder, my birthplace was a mystery to me; for, as I have said, my first recollection was the warm day on the beach.

My mother had told me nothing from which I could formulate a suggestion or give a reply that would throw any light upon my family history. What was to become of me I did not know. Apparently my mother had left no will, and my appearance upon the day of her conversation with Mr. Edgerton had interrupted, probably, any disclosures which she had intended making.

The lawyer had ridden alongside of the chaise as we slowly ascended a slight hill.

"Know you anything, Master Hurdiss, of a large iron-bound chest in a room on the second story of Marshwood House?" (I have forgotten to say that the estate upon which we lived was known in the neighborhood as the "Marshwood plantation," whether from the name of a previous owner or its location, I have never been able to ascertain.)

To the lawyer's question I could only reply that I had often seen the box and had once caught a glimpse of the interior, that it was full of papers, and I had noticed it must have contained some money, for I saw my mother take some gold pieces from a heavy leather bag that she had afterwards replaced.

"Never mind; we will solve it all," continued the man of law, "so soon as we get there. I have the keys. Come, doctor, press ahead!"

The horses lurched forward into a trot--we had now reached the top of the hill--and tired and sleepy, I leaned back on my kind friend's shoulder and fell asleep.

When I awakened the sun was high, but the chill was yet in the air, and a damp breeze had sprung up from the eastward that presaged rain. Aloft against the heavy clouds a V-shaped line of wild-geese were winging their way to the south; their coarse honking fell down to us. The sound caused me to look upward, and I followed the steady flight. I have always been well versed in the signs of nature, and there is nothing so sure to judge by as the flight of wild-fowl.

"We are going to have cold weather," I remarked to the doctor.

"Yes, the old gander is setting a pace for them as if the snow were after him," he replied.

To my surprise, as I gazed about near to hand, I saw that we were almost at the cross-roads, where it was our intention to stop and procure something to eat, as we had had nothing since the gray of morning.

Two or three new houses had been added to the group that lined the road-side, and a new sign-post waved its arms at the corner. A number of negroes hurried out and took the horses.

As we entered the low-ceilinged front room of the tavern I overheard the talk that the doctor and lawyer were having together. "It was certainly most careless to leave such property unguarded," the latter was saying. This made me listen.

"But no one would suspect anything in the way of treasure, and they are honest people hereabouts," returned the doctor reassuringly.

For some reason I could scarcely swallow a mouthful of the meal that was served for us, although it smelt most savory. As a special honor the landlord himself insisted upon waiting upon the table, and I shrewdly suspect, putting things together, that he was of a curious nature, and longed for a chance to listen to the conversation; but if this was his desire, it was not gratified, as the doctor and the lawyer were most reserved in his presence.

At last, however, we were on the move again, a fresh horse having been placed in the shafts of the old rattle-trap (upon the possession of which, by-the-way, I found that the doctor prided himself most mightily). Well, off we went at a tremendous pace, the new horse charging down the road in a clumsy, heedless fashion, and the chaise rocking behind him fit to capsize us.

The doctor at last succeeded in pulling the nag down to a steadier gait, and Mr. Edgerton, coughing and choking, came trotting up beside us through the trailing cloud of dust that, despite the damp, hung in our wake. For two miles we drove on in silence, and then turned from the main road into the lane that led to Marshwood. The old-fields on either hand were grown breast-high with brambles, and the lane wheel-rucks were almost hidden in the tall grass that swished softly and quietly under the box of the chaise.

Marshwood House was built partly of brick and partly of wood. The brick had come from England at the time when the colonies, because of the tax on industries mayhap, brought even their building material from over the water. It had once been very handsome, but during the Revolution the outbuildings had been destroyed, and the right wing of the house had fallen into sad decay. By the expenditure of some not inconsiderable sum, however, the whole estate could have been restored to the beauty it must once have possessed (but alas! that never has or never will happen, I suppose). Now, at the time of which I speak, ruin was writ on everything.

When the horses had been tied to two rusty staples driven into the trunk of an oak-tree that stood before the door, we all stepped up on to the piazza. The boards were sagged so badly that they had fallen away from the body of the house, and even the stone-work had crumbled along the foundations.

It appeared like the old place, and yet it was not; but there was the same hornets' nest that I had watched building up (ages and ages ago, it seemed to me); and there, hanging on a nail, was a fishing-rod with a rusty iron hook dangling from a bit of rotten fish-line. I had stood on tiptoe and put it there; now I could touch it with my elbow.

The lawyer had some difficulty in opening the door. However, at last he succeeded, and gave a sigh of relief as he saw that there were no traces of any one having preceded him.

"Come in, doctor," he said, cheerily, his voice echoing oddly down the empty hallway.

"Come on, John, my son," reiterated the physician to me.

I turned, before I crossed the threshold, and looked out over the sloping meadow and the stretch of yellow marsh to the blue-gray waters of the Chesapeake. The rain that had been threatening all the morning had begun to fall with that depressing, sun-filtered drizzle that promises hours of it.

It was on such a day that I used to lie with my head in my mother's lap while she read to me. I remembered this with a certain calmness, for there had settled upon me a firmly assured belief that I should never be happy again, and I accepted the feeling with a stoicism that now I wonder at. But my pen runs from the main task of putting facts on paper. To return:

I entered the house, and insensibly caught the doctor's great hand in mine.

There was a musty, locked-up odor greeting us that checked full breathing. The big room on the right smelt like a cellar, dank and unhealthy.

The doctor drew aside a chair, and, opening a window and the shutters, admitted some light. Dust was all about, everywhere; the heavy oak centre table was littered with dead, starved flies; the whole place was so chill and unhomelike that I shuddered. The doctor closed the window.

"By Jove, it grows cold!" he said.

The lawyer, who had deposited a pair of large empty saddle-bags on the floor, stamped his feet.

"Heigho!" he cried, "let's cheer things up a bit. Here's a fire all ready for the lighting; that's a godsend."

In the wide fireplace were some good-sized logs and a handful of fat-wood. Drawing a flint and steel, he struck a light, and soon a tiny blaze crept up the old chimney, and broadened with a burst of flame at last into a cheerful, roaring, warming glow. It cleared the room of its unhealthiness, and all three of us spread our hands out to it as if it had been winter.

"I think the look of things has made us exaggerate the weather," said the doctor, with an attempt at a laugh. "Come, let's set to work."

The lawyer drew from his pocket a small bunch of keys. "We will have to try for it--they're not numbered," he replied, thrusting one into the keyhole of the desk in the chimney-corner.

He tried them all before he found one that would fit. Then he turned the bolt with a sharp click, and lowered the lid. I began to feel excited, and I could see that the others were and did not conceal it.

"Ah, no one has been here, that's evident!" exclaimed the doctor.

Plain to view in a neat pile were some French coins, a shining little tower of gold. The lawyer opened one of the drawers on the left. It was empty. Then another, with the same result. In the bottom one, on the right hand, however, was a paper and a miniature on ivory. I remembered the last--the side face of a large, heavy man in a white wig. His nose was very prominent, and despite the massive jowl he had an air that suggested the effect of a noble presence. His costume was magnificent. From beneath a broad sash that crossed his breast peeped a great diamond star, and lace and jewels decked him.

"An excellent likeness, I judge," said the doctor, looking at the portrait with one eye shut.

"I should know it across the room," replied the lawyer.

"Who is it?" I asked, for I had seen it once in my mother's hands.

"It is the French King who lost his head by the guillotine," answered the doctor--"Louis the Sixteenth."

"Did your mother never speak to you about this portrait?" asked the lawyer, who was untying the ribbon with which the paper had been fastened.

"Once I saw her looking at it," I replied, "and I asked her. But I never did so again, because she began to talk so fast and in such strange words that I could not follow. Then she began to weep, and her hair fell down all about her. Aunt Sheba came running in and held her in her arms. It was a long time before she grew calm again. She never told me who it was."

By this the lawyer had spread the document on his knee. He gave a grunt of vexation.

"This is Greek to me," he muttered. "See what you can make out of it."

He handed the paper to the doctor. The latter wrinkled his brows and shrugged his shoulders.

"I give it up," he replied, half smiling.

I peeped beneath his elbow.

"Why, it's French," I said, "and my mother's writing, sir!"

"Can you read it?" asked the doctor, spreading it out on the desk lid.

In reply I began without hesitation:

"'_To Monsieur Henri Amedee Laralle de Brienne._

"'DEAR BROTHER,--Although I have not written you and have received no word from you, I am writing these lines, trusting and intending that they will meet your eye should you survive me. My husband, whose memory I cherish, is dead--lost at sea. Despite the injustice with which you have treated him, and me also since my second marriage, I recommend to you my son, who bears the name of his step-father.'"

I started and read the last words over twice.

"Go on!" interjected the lawyer, rapping the mantelpiece sharply with his knuckles.

I continued, with my face burning and my lips atremble:

"'For the sake of the name _that he might claim_, and all that it may mean, you may receive him. I have told him little of the past. In my judgment it was not needed, nor could it now produce anything to his favor. If circumstances should alter, you may divulge the secret; but I pray you not to do so unless this happens. This I beseech you for the sake of her whom you have loved. My son will bear with him the chest that contains the papers that I brought from the château at A. They will be unopened and addressed to you. There is enough money in the two bags to pay for my Jean's education. I have never been able to bring myself to talk about the dreadful happenings. I cannot even think of them, or I should go mad. Somehow it has appeared that silence has been the better part; but to your discretion I leave this, and to you I intrust my son's future. May God watch over him and direct you! It is evident to me from your letter that you were uncertain which one of your sisters was writing to you. I am _H. de B._, who inscribes here what will be carved upon her tombstone, "_Madam John Hurdiss_, widow of Captain John Hurdiss, merchant and trader, of Cornwall, England."'"

This was all the letter contained. It did not seem to lessen any mystery that existed, and for some minutes neither the doctor nor Mr. Edgerton spoke a word. Suddenly the latter kicked back one of the logs in the fireplace with his foot.

"Confound the fire, it smokes like a smudge!" he grumbled. "So we are not to open the papers, after all! But there may be something lying loose. Let us up."

All at once the doctor raised his hand. "Hark! What noise is that?" he exclaimed.

A roaring crackling sound came from overhead. Something fell heavily on the floor of the hallway outside. The two men sprang to the door and pulled it open. The hall and the other rooms were filled with stifling smoke. The old portrait (the one with the long brown curls) had fallen, and a blazing bit of wainscoting burned through the canvas that had smouldered to the frame.

"The strong-box!" shrieked the lawyer, and he plunged up the stairs.

"It's in the room on the right!" I cried, as the doctor and I followed him, feeling our way with the aid of the banisters.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

TYPICAL ENGLISH SCHOOLS.

BY JOHN CORBIN.

WINCHESTER.

The English public schools are not what we should call public schools at all--that is, they are not kept up at the public expense, and you can't go to them without paying. What we call public schools the English call free schools, and only poor children go to them. The kind of schools I am going to write about are attended by the sons of the richer people and of the nobility. They are not unlike the big American schools which prepare fellows for college--Exeter, Andover, St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, and others--though they are all much older, and have many quaint and interesting customs inherited from the Middle Ages. I shall give an article to each of three of these schools--Winchester, Eton, and Rugby--and then shall add an article on athletics at public schools in general.

The oldest of all the schools is Winchester. Fellows at Andover sometimes tell you that their fathers and grandfathers went there before them. At Winchester this is a common case; and since the quadrangles of the college were built, there has been time not for one grandfather but for fifteen in a line. The prim and charming buildings look every day as old as they are; but if you were to go into the dormitories and see the rows of little iron bedsteads, each with a boy sleeping in it, you would find it hard to realize that grandfathers of these boys have slept at Winchester for five hundred years back, and that all our grandfathers began by being young and small enough to sleep in these cots.

The founder of the school was William of Wykeham, Bishop of the See of Winchester, who was not only a great bishop and a great statesman, but one of the greatest builders of the Middle Ages. His purpose in founding a school was to prepare boys to enter a college he had just founded at Oxford--New College, as it was called, and is still called after more than five hundred years. At both Winchester and New College the scholars are proud to call themselves Wykehamists; and when a fellow has been through both he is apt to tell you that he is a Wykehamist of the Wykehamists--which means more than you can ever understand until you hear and see a man say it. The first result of preparing boys to enter the university was to make them too far advanced for the teaching they found when they got there. To carry on their education Wykeham had to have a special body of tutors at New College. This was the beginning of the English custom of having a complete set of teachers at each of the score of colleges that make up a university. Thus Winchester is not only the father of all preparatory schools, but of the English university system of instruction by colleges.

Wykeham intended that all his scholars should be too poor to pay for their own education, and left funds to support them. Within the last generation, however, the masters have changed this. In order to get the cleverest possible pupils, they examine all boys between twelve and fourteen, and admit the best ones each year. About eight usually fail for one who gets in. The boys who succeed are, of course, those who have had the best training; and thus the fellows who get the benefit of Wykeham's money are usually sons of university graduates, and are often rich. Many people object strongly to this, and with good reason; yet the method has one great virtue. Fellows get almost as much credit in school for being studious and able, as for playing football; so that many of the richest fellows study hardest. In our schools, and even in our universities, there is still a stupid prejudice against being a first-rate scholar.

Within the school also there is keen competition. The five or six best students each year get scholarships at New College, which enable them to go through the university without expense to themselves. This is called "getting New," and is perhaps the greatest achievement of a Wykehamist. That such has been the case for at least two hundred years may be seen in the epitaph of a boy who died in 1676 from being hit by a stone, "In this school he stood first, and we hope he is not the last in heaven, where he went, instead of Oxford." When such is the case, there would seem to be little need of the motto on the wall of the old school, which Wykehamists translate, "Work, walk, or be wopped."

Beside the members of the "college" Wykeham founded, another kind of pupils has grown up, called commoners, who pay for lodging, board, and tuition--about $700 a year. These, at first few and unimportant, have increased so greatly of late that they are usually regarded as the characteristic kind of school-boy. They live in nine communities, or houses, of about thirty-five each, under separate masters. The life of the commoners is almost exactly the same as that of the collegians; but the division into those who are and those who are not supported by the college is worth remembering, for a similar distinction exists not only in all public schools, but in the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. It does not happen everywhere, however, that the best scholars all live together; and many Wykehamists maintain that both scholars and commoners would gain by being mingled. Before many years the old college will doubtless be broken up, and the "scholars" proportioned among the various "houses."

The discipline is not so strict as at many public schools, yet quite strict enough, according to American standards. The boys--or _men_, as they are always called--are not allowed to enter the town, and have to get special "leave out" to go far into the country. The school day begins at seven o'clock, and bed-time comes at nine or ten. Constant attendance at prayers is required, morning and night; and there are four services on Sunday. For breaches of discipline the boys are still flogged. One is tempted to say that such a system is not modern; but as a matter of fact, it did not exist, among the commoners, at least, until the present century; and no true Wykehamist would think of changing it. Even the boys like it sincerely, in spite of some few breaches of discipline. Certainly the strictness has no more faults than the great freedom granted by certain of our large preparatory schools; and though we should hardly want to live just as English boys do, we can learn a great deal from them.

The main idea of the discipline of an English school is that as much of it as possible shall be carried on by the boys themselves. At Winchester it was ordained from the beginning that eighteen of the older boys should, in Wykeham's own words, "oversee their fellows, and from time to time certify the masters of their behavior and progress in study." These eighteen are called Prefects, and are chosen from the men who stand highest in studies. To an American boy, I am afraid, it wouldn't seem much fun to have to take care of his schoolmates' behavior. He would probably look upon himself more or less as a spy. Yet everything I saw at Winchester went to prove that to be a Prefect was almost as great an honor as to be an athlete. Five of the Prefects have special titles, such as Prefect of Chapel, Prefect of Hall, etc. These are generally chosen from the five best scholars. The Prefect of Hall has charge not only of his special duties, but of the other Prefects. If any disturbance takes place, he quells it. If the boys have any favors to ask, he is their spokesman. He is thus the head of the whole school, and a far more important person, I should say, than the Captain of the cricket team.