CHAPTER III.

I have often wondered at the freshness, loquacity and altogether unreal tone of the duellists' rooms pending an encounter; and I can only liken it to the mind of an assiduous chess-player, which still even in dreams is tilting with ivory knights and banning with puppet bishops. Such fancies are accepted among duelling men as the real sentiments that move and govern society. To Lind Mason, who was naturally made of paste-board and stuffed with bran, they were the breath in his nostrils. He vapored of the family as if, instead of plain Brown, it had been born in the purple. Payne on his return had said, "The funk wanted to apologize," and that "Lind had a soft thing of it," chaffing his principal not a little over the prospects of his aunt's generosity.

"Ye-as," said Lind, negligently drawing the long silky moustache and beard through the hollow of his hand and letting the points drop. "Woodlawn. We talked it over. 'Marry, my boy,' said the old girl, 'and settle.' 'All right!' said I, 'aunty: _I'll_ marry, and _you_ settle.' Payne and I made out a liberal schedule of my liabilities for her lawyer last night. My motto is, be off at the tap if you can, or a wink before it, and come down the quarter under the whip. I consider my autograph on Aunt Fanny good for a thousand any day. T'other day I said to Payne I wanted the stick and two hoops ($100), and Aunt Fanny just said, 'Double it, and arrange with your cousin Sue.' Soon as this baggytell is over little Sue Brown jines the Masons.--Here's to her, gentlemen! and no heeltaps. No need to say fellows of this party are welcome to our table;" and he delicately tipped off the wine, saying "he had drunk better."

"Payne says the fellow will apologize," said one. "What will you do?"

"Well," drawled Mason, dipping a cracker in the fragrant sherry and munching, "a fellow that saw it all from Mill Springs to Appomattox doesn't care for these little things. If it was the first time, or even the second or third, I wouldn't stand it. But after that the thing loses its gloss and gets to be a confounded bore. You see it's getting up so early; and there's your man squatting on the grass like a hurt wild-duck, and all the fellows scared and ugly, and poking at you as if it was your fault. And the confounded police, and the bother of keeping out of the way, and maybe lose the spring meeting. It gets to be deuced low, fellows. No: if the little man will own up and quit annoying somebody--" with a lazy wink. "I drink to Sue Mason, _née_ Brown, gentlemen. I don't care: he may get off whole. Of course a written apology."

"Apology," said Major Johnstone, whose impressible nature went with the extremists. "My God, sir! is a venerable lady of wealth and fashion--of the American peerage, by George, sir! American peerage--to be insulted in an assembly of her nearest relatives, and the base scullion to escape with a bare 'Sorry for it'? A pocket full of apologies and a back full of bruises, as Tom Marshall said, by George! Look at Rule 10, Tipperary Code," slapping Barrington's _Sketches_ emphatically. "No, sir! Such an example would corrupt American youth."

"Bosh!" said another, who sat on the side of the bed and rocked his legs alternately as if for a wager. "That rot is past salting down. A lady's name involved! Our chivalrous principal is right. Honorably adjusted, satisfactory, etc., is the end of it."

"But a blow?" said the major, like a weathercock in contradictory flaws, and running over the leaves. "Here is Rule 5--"

"That's Payne," said one, interrupting the major unceremoniously at a step outside.

"Payne never walked that fast in his life," was the reply. "Payne was born tired. There's somebody with him."

The door opened, and Deane Lee in gray tweed, from foot to forage-cap the dashing soldier, saluted. "Honor to report from Captain Nettles," he said, touching his cap. Military titles prevail on such occasions.

"Will you join us?" said Payne, motioning to the refreshments, as Mason read the note.

"Don't care if I do. Plain: no cooked drinks for me," said the envoy briefly.

This struck the major as having a judicial bearing upon the coats of the stomach. He cocked his chin and began unconsciously to imitate the dashing stranger.

"An unfortunate affair," said Payne. He had thought it amusing, absurd, but something in this young fellow impressed him also, and he said it, and meant it.

"D---- unlucky!" said the other, in much the same tone as if he had said "lucky." "But my man is all right. He had to hunt me up, or I'd been in your lines before now." He took the ice from the tumbler, dashed off the moisture, and ate it like a salamander.

The major was possessed. He whispered behind his hand to his neighbors, "Never saw but one like him."

"Who?" asked several, for the easy, cool assurance of Bob Nettles's second affected them all.

The major shook his head and sighed grievously.

"Was he killed?" asked one eagerly.

"Kill him!" said the major in hollow emphasis of scorn: "no, sir."

"Died, then?" suggested another.

"No, sir," said the major: "his worst enemy could not say that of him. No, he didn't die."

"Drowned?" put in a third, venturing at the major's conundrum.

"No, sir," said the major gutturally. "Water couldn't drown him. It is not wet enough. Lost."

"Lost!" marvelled his auditors at this sphinx. "How?"

"Married," said the major in basso-profundo, husky with emotion.

Such an ornament lost to the chivalry of duelling accentuated their admiration of his after-type in Bob's second.

"When I last saw him," continued the major, in the tone of Griffith describing the last hours of Wolsey--

"Well?" ejaculated all in one voice.

"He was buying seed-corn."

Degradation could no lower go, and in the pause they could hear the blue fly buzz in the window-pane.

Mason had beckoned Payne aside. The two found that reply a hard nut to crack. Payne had regarded the duel as a huge hoax, and counted on easily bluffing the burgher's second. But bluffing those steely nerves yonder, that stood at ease with a suggestion of military accoutrements, was not to be thought of. Nor could his principal go out, under the pretext of controlling the associations of Walter Brown's family, without Walter Brown's approval.

"For proper reasons, no doubt," said Payne courteously, "your principal ignores what is, with us, the gravamen of his offence--his behavior in the house of Mr. Mason's relations."

Pretty well covered for Mr. Payne, but it would not do.

"Don't want to ignore anything," said Deane Lee. "Just don't want petticoats mixed up in it. My man does not pledge worth a--pyrotechnic." He had got it in at last, and with a step--a peremptory refusal to submit to dictation of any kind.

Payne felt outmanœuvred and crowded. He saw Bob Nettles was not to be bullied out of little Sue, and they must give up that point. "My principal is disposed to waive that part," said Payne haughtily, "rather than involve others."

"All right!" said Deane carelessly. "It's not in the regulations--but come to taps. We want this thing over before reveille. I've got an infernal mule-team to yank up and down these streets after that."

It was done with the easiest nonchalance, yet Wilde Payne felt he was bitted and spurred, and the butt of this ridiculous duel might prove to be the man who had brought it about.

"I don't know where he picked up Deane Lee," said he after his rival left; "but Deane will fight his man. It isn't going to be such a soft thing, after all."

"He is only a street-car conductor," said a callow Brown, who looked on, and thought all this very heroic and fine.

"I don't care," said the major, rising on his crutch, "but if that man drives a mule, it is a credit, sir--to the mule; and, gentlemen, I wish you well out of it--I do, by George!" and he stumped off and out of the room. The major's departure was as significant as the sinking of the mercury in the sealed tube: it indicated a stormy atmosphere outside, setting in favor of the other side.

But an incident just then, seeming to confirm some of Mason's vaporing, created a profound sensation, and so complicated and embarrassed the duel for that gentleman as to tax all his ingenuity and address to come out of it with anything like credit. It adds a lustre to his boast that he was "betting on a certainty" and "intended to put the saddle on the right horse." A servant presented a card on a tray, with "Lady in ladies' parlor C wishes to see Captain Mason."

Mason took it up, looked flushed, flattered, more pompous than ever. "Here, Payne," said he; and the two whispered.

"You'd better not," said Payne critically: "it will compromise you."

"But she knows I am here--meddlesome servant, etc." In fact, Mason was too flattered by the visit to deny the lady or himself.

"Poor girl!" was whispered about--"desperately attached."--"She needn't be uneasy: it's the other fellow ought to be looked after."

To explain who this mysterious visitor was we must go back a little.

Sudie arose the morning after her garden-party flushed and feverish, with a strange consciousness of being unlike herself. She drifted from room to room; peeped into the parlor, with its fading garlands, in a little superstitious awe of her last night's vision, and then took to standing at the gate or looking from the west windows toward the city, as if she expected some one. But she did not: it was only that all her anxiety lay there. At 10 A.M. she took the pony carriage to town and hurried to Aunt Fanny, only to learn that the etiquette of the code had excluded the dowager's messenger, and that Her Majesty was so incensed thereat as to resolve to let matters take their course. This by no means satisfied Sudie. She thought it horrible, wicked. She would see papa--she had all a child's confidence in papa--and he could stop it. Passing the hotel, an impulse seized her to appeal to her cousin; for he was her cousin, Sudie repeated to herself to justify her resolution; and so, without any formed plan of appeal, she sent up her card. She was enough confused and embarrassed at her cousin's entrance to have deceived a wiser man than Lind Mason; but, luckily, he was better at reading the backs of his cards than a woman's face, and, to his credit, felt supremely silly.

"Cousin Lind," said the little girl, speaking the first thought in her mind, "I was going to see papa, and--" and she broke down.

"Hem! Mr. Brown is in the city, ha? Of course," blundered Mason, shy as an awkward girl to her first lover, and obstinately turning that eye away from her on which Bob Nettles had left his mark.

"And--and--" hesitated Sudie, with a little shuddering, nervous laugh, like a smothered cry, "have you and Mr. Nettles met this morning?"

To do Mason justice, he was too artificial and shallow to retain any resentments. He was only confused at his novel position, and before he could muster a reply Sudie went on: "Because I want you and him to be friends," with that tremulous laugh again; "and I should be so mad if--if he was to--to hurt you."

"By Joe!" thought Lind, "what am I to do if she proposes outright?" He was terribly scared: no one is so timid as one of these fast, horsey men in the presence of an innocent, pure-minded girl. The situation was trying: he thought it was his cue to put his arm about her and say something; but when he saw how she sat back in the chair, and had tested his own nerves, he felt he could not do it. Little Sue, therefore, had it all to herself, recovering courage by her own freedom, without any conception of what was troubling the thoughts of the great, handsome, awkward booby before her. "Aunt Fanny wants you to be friends," she continued, "and so do I."

Mason began to pluck up a little at this. The association of Aunt Fanny's name suggested that she had talked the matter over with her niece, as she had with him, and broken the ice for him. He looked over his shoulder to see if the parlor was clear. She was leaning forward now, holding out two plump little hands, like a child going to beg, and with a sly, roguish look too. He thought he could do it now: he would drop gracefully on one knee and--

And Sudie went on: "Somebody else will be mad too, you don't know." A half whisper from the roguish pucker of those dimpling lips: "Ma'amselle Hortense."

The blood rushed to that ensanguined face till it looked like a great romanete apple: "Hortense?"

"Yes," with a half-dozen mischievous, confidential little nods. "There! Now you go right straight and see Mr. Nettles, and tell him _I_ sent you; and if he doesn't behave himself to you, just let _me_ know." And, nodding intelligence, little Sue rose with a rustle and flutter of puffs and bows, in childish confidence of having done her whole duty and stopped that wicked, wicked business.

That skilful card-player Mason was as completely stumped as if some one had raked down the stakes on a pair of deuces against his exhibit of the four aces. Nothing but the most gracious condescension and chaste humility of salutation had passed between him and his aunt's French maid; yet shrewd little Sudie, with her intuitive woman's instinct, had shot her arrow in the dark and cloven the wand.

She went out in the innocent simplicity of her childlike faith, and it was hours before she came to realize how utterly she had failed in stopping the execution of that deadly purpose.

How often is it the case with her sex that, having no other coin than the affections, so dear to themselves, they over-value them for others, and only know from finding them soiled and trampled in the mud how little they are estimated in the hard and selfish dealings of man with man! But the little girl went off, happy in her delusion. God bless the rest of heart from apprehension that it gave her!

But Mason had to slip aside into the hotel bar and drink a mighty jorum of brandy before he could rejoin his friends. As he thought of all the confounded annoyances and embarrassments growing out of the little girl's discovery, including the loss of her hand and fortune, the terse and pithy brevity of his summing-up of the situation was an epitome of Spartan eloquence. It was, "D---- it!"

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

THE DOINGS AND GOINGS-ON OF HIRED GIRLS.

Leave the town and the highway, journey onward deep among the hills, and in their farthest nooks and crannies you will come to places where the hired girls are living happily. You will come to places where the hired girls do not long to be old nor long to be dead--spots where there are no vulgar, insulting rich, untrained to the management of servants and ignorant of the routine of good housework--neighborhoods where the maxim of the ancient noblesse of France, that only the low-born are hard with their hirelings, still prevails. In Mid New York, for instance, are regions sweet as Thessaly, hilly, shaggy with woods, and peopled by descendants of the Puritans bearing old Shakespearian names--Ford, Page, Peck and Scroop--a yeomanry on whom the rich soil of their present seats has had a powerful effect: they enjoy their hills in health and mellow content, and their servants live at ease with them.

The New York farmer of Puritan descent is a patriot. He can never enough gloat over the number of Britishers his ancestors killed at the battle of Lexington. He loves politics. He is great at voting. He stands up for his candidate almost to the fighting-point. Squires Catesby and Plunket did have a little fight at the Forge Hollow election; not actually coming to blows--that would be too absurd for men of their figure and property--but hunching and shouldering each other around the tavern bar-room until they hunched the stove over and the chairs and tables upside down. A farmer of their type has a mind busied in operating, American fashion, on every conceivable topic--you will see such a one in town, broad-shouldered as an Egyptian statue, matching silk for his wife after selling a herd of cattle--and this kind of man is not the one to be "snooping round the house" worrying his servants. His wife is like himself, a comfortable person to serve. It would be hard to find a more luxurious woman, one fonder of taking naps and of driving about the country paying visits--our opulent New York farmer has not the least suspicion that his wife can walk anywhere--and partly because of a paucity of fashionable calls and milliners' windows, partly because the country doctor is such a good one to make her think she needs medicine, she cultivates a gentle hypochondria, spins talk spider-like from her own frame, thinks she lives in a sort of human oven where she is in constant peril of being overdone, and so is tender of her domestics, lest they be overdone. The rich farmer's wife does not wash trencher nor scrape dish; she boils not, neither does she skin apple or potato; she occupies herself with fancy-work that would make Solomon in all his glory stare. You ought to see her best bedroom: it is a bower of bonbonnerie of her own make. Its treatment, as an architect would say, is in the Decorated pocketed style--pockets on the wall for papers; pockets for rags and scraps; a double pocket for slippers; one for your watch, one for your comb, one for lamplighters, one for burnt matches; ever so many others for what you can't guess; and all beaded, bugled, tasselled and embroidered to form a perfect zodiac of splendors.

Though the country wife is kind to her domestics, she has a knack of getting the best out of them. The girl who scorches things and boils tea as if some incantation of double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and teapot bubble, had got into her head--the girl who stands like a Stoughton bottle and bawls "Ma'am!" whenever she is spoken to--the slow girl who can't tell time, forgets to put on the teakettle, and never gets beyond "one I, one--two I, two," on the kitchen clock--the small servant with the bad cold who _will_ sit by the parlor fire coughing, snuffing and breathing hard--the girl like an overgrown man who slobbers dish-water on the floor and steps in it--the Deutsche girl who spoils the parlor clock turning it upside down to dust it thoroughly,--these and worse become reliable people under the sway of the old-fashioned country housewife. The Deutsche girl becomes a paragon in the farmhouse, quickly falling into Yankee ways and picking up Yankee kitchen phrases, and turning them with a bold originality. "Them clothes is bone dry," says the Deutsche girl. "Oh land! yes: they got a bone drying to-day. I gave them clothes a bone rubbing and a bone boiling, and to-morrow they'll get a bone ironing, you bet," says she. Next to her rank the Dane and the Swede. The Irish girl is never a congenial inmate of the farmhouse. The Irish girl is too noisy and too much given to lying. The last might be endured--the farmer's wife would rather hear an Irish girl tell forty lies than sing one song--but the noise she makes talking to the butcher's boy, the peddler, the essence-man and the ash-gatherer is insufferable; and when the Irish rag-merchant bursts open the kitchen door roaring, "God bless you! you're a real lady; got any rags? don't sell to them theivin' Jews, they're villains; sold your rags to a man that pays more than me? divil a man in the county pays more than me," why, the farmhouse quiet is torn to ribbons. And then the Irish girl is cross to visitors, who form the solace and charm of country life. "I wants no lady-visitors around me; they makes too much bodderin' wid towels and wather; they're always a-washin' of theirselves. They wants a clean towel to every one of their tin fingers: they're afraid us gurrels sha'n't earn our wages. Give me men for my money: they ain't always a-cleanin' of theirselves," growls the Irish girl.

No girl of any species can compare with an oldish American hired girl. Give Sar' Ann her due. She works at a spanking pace; she is "poison clean;" she can do up a shirt fit for a funeral, and she is a dabster at cooking. In butchering or in haying and harvesting she will pitch in and work without a murmur until she is pale and damp with weariness, and at such times will let her hair go until her head looks like Encke's comet, one halo of frowse, with a frowsy knob in its periphery. Still, she will put up with no asperity from her mistress: "the foodle ages" are done with, look you! as to Sar' Ann. Let her mistress once reprimand her, she turns the tables on that lady slap, dab. "It's a poor story," ejaculates Sar' Ann, "for you to talk so, Mis' Fife. I've dug and delved for you six year, and run my daylights out of me, and I won't do it no longer. It's jaw, jaw, jaw with you till I'm worn to a shadder. I've spunked up now, Mis' Fife, and I'll light out. I never crep' nor crawled to nobody, and I won't begin now. I'll throw my dishcloth right smack up the chimbly, and I'll clear." If you have a servant who understands her rights and business better than you do yours, where are you? "Why, there you are," as the man in the play says.

In the farmhouse kitchen you sometimes find a girl rare, now-a-days, outside of old portraits, and one seen only in spots as sequestered as the haunts of the deer and wild-duck. She has hair of a burnished copper color, eyes so fair they reflect crystal sparkles of light from their lashes, a pure skin, round cheeks, a delicate cocked-up nose, a chin all weakness and a look of wistful propitiation. Another girl peculiar to country kitchens, not so rare, but delicious, is a fresh, dark nymph of a temperament both gay and imperturbable. This one has almost perfect beauty--black hair that should be crowned with water-cresses, black eyes with a thrilling glance, and a sudden, frank, enchanting smile. Perhaps you will say her nose and lips are a line too heavy: there is no skimping in her outlines. The country-people never find out that she is handsome. "Adeline would be quite handsome if she was not so dark," say they.

A well-to-do farmhouse, where the work is "done up" early, is a pleasant place to work in. Adeline has an hour of liberty every day in which she may stand in the door "dressed up," looking out over the meadows, or run to The Corners to "borry a teaspoonful of soda," or look over a newspaper. If Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne Cecil, marquis of Salisbury (what a sound that has!), were the farmer's guest, Adeline would condescend to talk to him during this hour when she is waiting for tea-time. "I guess you feel pretty lonesome over here," she would say; and when he replied that he felt "like a crumb of bread at the bottom of a trowsers pocket," as he probably would, she would try to amuse him with innocent rustic familiarity. It never occurs to her that she is not as good as "them kings" or anybody else, she has such an idea of her own smartness and respectability. At five o'clock she sits down to tea with her mistress. The men-folks take supper after milking is done, the farmer supping with his men that he may talk over the harvest. When there is company the hired people have all the good things going--jelly-cake sixteen streaks deep, floating islands, preserves, tarts, pound-sweet apples boiled in sweet cider, boiled tongue, inconceivable pickles, cabbage salad--everything. After a company supper the hired man is just able to crawl out and perch himself on the dooryard fence, where he sits blown up as by hydraulic pressure until bedtime brings him the deep satisfaction of a hired man's sleep.

A circumstance that makes farmhouse servitude agreeable is, that the hired girl's friends are welcome there. Her mother comes often to see her. This interesting old woman has a face dried down as if to last for ages, strong gray hair and a smile that drives back a score of wrinkles in her cheeks, being "tough as a biled owl." She wears a black bombazine dress, and under it a heavy quilted petticoat, in which she invariably sleeps, goodness gracious only knows why. She comes in with the remark, "Sorry to hender;" she calls flowers "blummies," houses, "housen," bouquets, "beaupots;" terminates her assertions with "'sfurzino" ("as far as I know"), and talks with a muffled yang-yang, as if she had an invisible tumor at the end of her nose. Her observations would remind you of something in Browning's _Aristophanes' Apology_--

You too, my Chrusomelolthian-Phaps Girl-goldling-beetle-beauty,

for example. Her conversation has the effect of hasheesh for lengthening the apparent duration of time: the Happy Thought man would call it dry as an extinct volcano; it drives everybody to the wall; is a perfect battering-ram for that--all talk and no wool, you know. She is perpetually finding mares' nests and getting news by the "grapevine telegraph," and she is always looking for signs in the air, in the embers, in candle-snuff, in empty teacups, as if mysterious laws like Kepler's threaded the universe and she knew the clue to them. If the cat turns her tail to the fire, the hired girl's mother thinks something will happen. She has a great deal of trouble. "Trouble sticks to me," says she. She keeps turkeys which are creatures that assert their American origin by running away to the woods and going wild at every opportunity, and a respectable old lady in cap and spectacles cannot chase wild turkeys through the woods; besides, they insist on roosting in her neighbors' cherry trees, a proceeding sure to kill the trees. And she keeps a cow with a genius for opening gates. Her cow has a habit of standing meditatively before a garden gate swinging her tail, but suddenly, after looking cautiously round, she will hook one horn into the gate by a quick twirl of her head, and by giving it a series of searching shakes will unfasten the latch, after which she will shoulder herself into the garden and take off its cream in great content. These facts are calculated to inflict a wound on neighborly peace not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but all the king's horses and all the king's men could not make it whole again. The hired girl's mother keeps hens too, and being a lone woman lets them run round the house for company. In winter you will be surprised to see a hen's face looking from her parlor window with an air of being at home.

The hired girl's sister and sister's husband also come frequently to see her, riding in an old wagon drawn by a large, gray, famished horse that devours the farmer's oats by the bushel. The sister's husband is a carpenter by trade. He usually has a large boil or carbuncle on his arm that gives him leisure, and he sits by the kitchen fire with his chair tilted back, rubbing a grease spot on the wall from his bushy black hair and getting redder and redder in the face, talking about his boil until his head looks like a lampwick that has burned too long and needs snuffing. They stay until the sisters begin to quarrel. "Your coffee is dish-water and your gravy paste," sneers the hired girl's sister before she goes, alluding to the fact that thin coffee and fried pork gravy, in which are lumps that break on the tongue and fill the mouth with dry flour, are the vulnerable points of the farmhouse breakfast.

When there is a young girl in the kitchen, she is on good terms with the jingle-legged boys of the farm. She is interested in their pets, especially in that funny one of the bear tribe that has the head of a fox with shaggy whiskers round his sharp visage, and that sits on his hind legs and holds his food in his hands and looks around him when he eats, and that makes friends so insinuatingly with the puppies, kittens and ducks until he finds a chance to devour them--the raccoon. Of evenings, when the barefoot boys sit on the kitchen lounge tired with their long day's work, yet scuffling and knocking their elbows and knees together, she keeps up an incessant tittering with them. And in the beginning of the season, when they clear out the leavings of last year's pease, beans and seed-corn from the garret, she has a good time with the boys a-dodging the wasps that fly through the garret singing their bass buzz and carrying blobs of mud like boxing-gloves on their feet, and taking such irregular zig-zags their course cannot be foreseen. She wastes her time then watching quivering fights between spiders and unfortunate wasps that have become entangled in cobwebs among the rafters. "She has found a te-he's nest with a lot of ha-ha's eggs in it," says the farmer's wife, listening at the foot of the garret-stairs. "That girl is not worth her keep." The girl has another gala-day with the boys if the bees swarm in May: that brings a mild jollity to the house, because

A swarm of bees in May Is worth a load of hay; In June Is worth a silver spoon; In July It ain't worth a fly.

She thinks it is fun to see the bees make a rush at the hired man blundering about in the way, and when he throws his hat at them, thinking to fool them, and sets to whipping his own ears, and the wise creatures settle in his hair, and the boys madly whisk hay in the air for his salvation, she "laughs like ten christenings."

Much farmhouse work has a trace of pleasure. Such is going a-greening in mornings of the still season before grasshoppers chirp or moths flutter or bats whir or dewdrops patter--mornings when people look up and repeat the distich,

Mackerel sky! mackerel sky! It won't be long wet, and it won't be long dry.

While the girl gathers skokeweed, milkweed, dock and dandelion from the fields, deerweed from the corners of the fence that runs around the woods, cowslip from the fragrant swamp, and adder's tongue and crinkle-root from the black forest earth, to make a dish loved by women and hated by men, she sees the airy attacks of crows upon a hawk, and his escape from them by sailing up, up, in circles delightful to contemplate for their height and immensity to altitudes his enemies cannot attain. At times she is near enough to a hawk to catch one glance from his bright, observant, defiant eye--a different glance from that of the caged bird. At times she finds an owl dreaming on the edge of a wood, and gazes long into its strange, deep, contemplative, satisfying eyes, and recollects the boys say an owl knows whether a hunter's gun is loaded or not. She sees the crows make an attack on the owl too, rushing upon it with a wild "ha! ha!" of multitudinous laughter and clattering of wings that are met with still indifference, for the owl knows that not one dares venture within reach of its iron claw and bending beak. And, ah, too rarely, she beholds an eagle on the dry branch of a tall pine. He, like the owl, encounters with nonchalance the insolent hate of the crows, who caw, flap their wings about his head and perch around him in myriads. When he rises, as he waves his broad and long wings in the leisurely movements that plunge him so swiftly through the blazing sky, the eagle will grasp a crow in his talons and drop it dead on the plain, where the girl picks it up, a mass of crushed feathers.

To go blackberrying is a fête. It falls on a day when the morning meadows, veiled in cobwebs strung with drops of dew, assert that though

The wind may alter twenty ways, A tempest cannot blow. It may blow north, it still is warm; Or south, it still is clear; Or east, it smells like a clover-farm; Or west, no thunder fear.

They go in straw hats and sun-bonnets, with tinkling milkpails and buckets in their wagon, and driving the sleek bay brood mare as carefully as if she were crammed with nitro-glycerine and would blow up at a touch. They travel merrily along a road that is nothing but "the bare possibility of going somewhere;" they pass through a pair of bars; they follow a lonely farm-track; they stop in a stump-lot, where they leave the mare in a doze, and, crossing the light baked earth of the clearing still covered with puff-balls and the dry stalks and kexes of forest plants, they dive into the berry-patch, a steep gulf of briers terraced by former berry-seekers. As they pick their way downward in the hot sunshine, the pealing sound of waters comes up to meet them through dense woods beneath their feet, for a broad, dark, perfumed stream, margined with pebbles and yeasty and barmy with foam, rushes through the bottom of the ravine. Refreshing is its odor when the berry-pickers reach it: they quaff its moist breath as one would drink some melanagogue, some old medicine able to cure sorrow or fear. The sight of its heavy verdure and of its gurges heaped high with froth lifts them like immortal thoughts. Half an hour of skipping stones on the water, a lunch on a rock, a drive homeward with their wagonload of fruit, and the day's work is done.

There is a ball in summer for the hired girl's delectation. You should stand in the village street and look up at the lighted tavern ball-room, and listen to the thundering floor. You would see the heads of the village tailor, harness-maker and photographer bobbing up and down; the hired man's head, with its heavy forelock whipping his forehead; the white brow and swarthy cheeks of the farm-boy leaping above the rest; and the hired girl's rosy face shaken up with scores of other young girls' faces, wagging, whirling, swaying, in delirious arcs and parabolas, and all wearing a perturbed and anxious expression, as if they were hard put to it to keep track of the fiddler's "Swing pardners once and a half; all sashay; allemand left," and so on. The hired girl dances "every heat," and at half-past three rides home through a landscape like a line from Milton, giving a vast idea of night and darkness and the stillness brooding over a woody, pastoral country. As she lifts the kitchen latch she sees a line of citron-green light behind the eastern hills, and

The curled moon Is like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf.

Later comes the hired man on foot, having run the risk of being "chawed up" by farmhouse dogs for a mile and a half. The two seek their beds through Saharas of darkness in woodhouse, kitchen, back entry and back stairs, and at five are both up milking and milk-skimming.

Going to funerals is a heart's delight for the hired girl. She relishes the ride in fine weather, the good funeral sermon, the sight of other people's best clothes and furniture, the touch of tragedy we all like in life, the cheerful reaction after the solemnity, and the staving good supper she cooks when they come home.

"Bill, go up to Ford Hill and find out about that funeral," is her entreaty on the eve of the event.

Bill has been raking with the horse-rake, or, worse, mowing pease all day. Whatever you have to do in this world, if you have ever mowed pease, that you will acknowledge to be the hardest work you have ever done. Bill is tired. There is a hole in the toe of his boot into which a stiff pea-straw has thrust itself once in five minutes all day--a circumstance exhausting to the nervous system of a hired man. And he had the heifer to hunt before milking. The old cows wait at the bars to come up, but the heifer stays a mile away at the top of the pasture. Bill can see her every night lying with her ears pricked up against the sky, and never stirring until she feels a pebble against her forehead. Then she gallops homeward as if remembering that Bill's motto is a kick in time saves nine. However, Bill likes to accommodate. "I'm off like a pot-leg," says he.

"What time is it to be?" asks the hired girl when he returns.

"I forgot to ask," he replies.

"Who's a-going to preach?"

"Nobody said," is the answer.

"Is it at the house or church?"

"I didn't think to find out," returns he.

"Well, you _are_ a nimshi!" declares she.

"Go yourself next time," rejoins he.

"I wish I had your wooden head for a chopping-bowl," says she.

"Gaul darn it! you're never suited," says he.

"Needn't get your Dutch up: we're going together. You may depend on takin' on us to that funeral: him and her is going," says she.

"Walking is too good for you, by thunder!" says he.

"It's a sin to be as mad as hops at nothing," says she.

"I'm as much of a angel as you be: put a pair of wings on you, you'd be a hen turkey," says he.

"I ain't a goose: I've got a head on me, Bill Blowers."

"So has a pin."

"If I'm a pin, you let me be: children and fools shouldn't play with edge tools. I'm a pin that'll go to that funeral, then. It'll be a good funeral--singing and everything right up to the handle."

"Plague take it! I knowed how it would be when I started on the arrant," he grumbles.

"You're blue as a whetstone now, but a couple of fritters big as rhinoceroses on your plate to-morrow night will set you up again, I guess," she says.

The hired man has a monstrous inaptitude for doing an errand. The time he spends going to the Green to get the horses shod is enormous. He can be depended on for nothing but to come home across lots when the dinner-horn blows.

Said the farmer to his hired man, "Go to the Holler and bring the square immediately."--"That saws my legs off," he added soon after, seeing "Square" Catesby pounding along the road toward the farm with a face of great importance and concern, the hired man in full swing behind, evidently bringing him.

Melvine, a fat, lazy farmer--so fat he had lost his voice, probably inside of him somewhere--while dozing away a winter afternoon yawned to such an immoderate degree that he dislocated his jaw. The hired man was despatched to the village for a doctor, and in the course of revolving ages returned, without the doctor. "Where is the doctor?" cried the folks. "He wasn't to hum," replied the hired man.--"Misery to tell! Didn't you bring one? Go back and get one," shouted they. The hired man mogged off, hitched up again, and after an interminable period, during which Melvine cast figurative ashes on his bald head (if they had been actual wood-ashes and "lively" he could not have suffered worse), did bring a doctor. The doctor gave Melvine's jaw a tap: it flew into place. Here pause: trouble no kind heart with the hired man's fate when Melvine regained the use of his jaw.

The hired girl's autumn and winter beam with long evenings of leisure, when neighbors drop in for talk, games and stories go round, and spitzenbergs and gillyflowers, nutcakes, cider, and butternuts that make cider taste wonderfully delicious, are enjoyed. In farm-houses among the hills games are played that were known to the hearths of the Angles. "Saddleback" is one. The farmer takes a brand from the fire, saying,

"Robin's alive--as live as a bee: If he dies in my hand, you may saddleback me;"

and gives it to his next neighbor, who repeats the verse and hands the brand to his neighbor; and thus it goes round the circle. He in whose hand the brand goes out ('tis the hired man, of course, who never can scramble through his verse half fast enough) must be blind-folded and guess what objects are held before him, all he guesses wrong to be placed on his back at the end of his guessing. Then he lies face down on the floor, while kitchen tables and chairs, skillets, pokers, tongs, frying-pans, the bread-board, the rolling-pin, the egg-beater, all are piled on his back; after which he rises slowly and overturns the things with a house-quaking crash which is rather interesting to hear and see. Antique stories that were never written, or, if at all, were written in dead languages that tell no tales at the present time, fill the lapse of the winter evening until it is time honest folks were in bed and thieves a-jogging. Listen to this: it has the flavor of a sip of mulse from a yew-tree keg. It was told among the Druids, maybe, long ago in gray-lit ages a thousand years before the mediæval darkness, when King Cymbeline was building his city of Warwick, and his fair daughter Imogen was having adventures in a cavern. Call it _How Cunning paid better than Industry_.

Richard was a hard-working, saving farmer: his brother Ned was a lazy lout. Ned's cow died, and he hung the cowskin up in the barn to dry, too lazy to carry it to market. After the cowskin was dried up, Ned started for town to sell it. On the way, feeling lazy, he wrapped himself in his cowskin and went to sleep in a barn's hay-mow. Night came, and some robbers with a lantern entered the barn to count their gold. Ned with a groan rolled himself down from the mow, horns, hoofs and tail, and the robbers fled in terror, leaving their money behind. "Where did you get your gold?" asked Richard, seeing his brother's treasure.--"I sold my cowskin for a penny a hair," answered Ned. Then Richard killed his cows, dried their skins and took them to market. Enraged at not selling them, he fell upon his brother, tied him in a bag and took him to the river to drown him. Before throwing him in he thought he would give Ned a good licking; so he went to the woods to get some withes. While he was gone a man with a flock of sheep came by, who, seeing Ned struggling in the bag on the river-bank, asked, "What are you doing in the bag?"--"Going to heaven," replied Ned.--"How is that?" questioned the man.--"You get in here and you will see," said Ned. The man untied the bag, and took Ned's place therein. Ned tied him up, and drove the sheep off to market. When Richard returned from the woods he gave the shepherd in the bag a basting, threw him into the river, and after the last bubble had risen to the surface went home, where he found Ned counting a pile of gold. "Whence that treasure?" asked Richard.--"The bubbles you saw when you drowned me turned into sheep, and I took them to town and sold them," quoth Ned.

As a rule, the hired girl and the hired man are not good friends: he derides her, and she scorns him. "I do expise that Bill Blowers: he don't know beans when the bag's untied. He's as bashful as nothing," says she. She likes the farm-hand by the day: she often visits his cotland on the edge of a woods. He really is a man to respect, knows a reason for the crooks in the mully scythe and in the light cradle's snath, and can tell the time of day by holding his hoe-handle straight in the sunshine and looking at its shadow on the ground. The hired girl particularly hates the Scotch hired man, a fellow with a face like a wig-block, white hair and eyebrows, and a working-suit made apparently of old snuff-rags and flatiron-holders. He keeps his eye on the blue-ringed cider pitcher of winter evenings, and, to the huge disgust of his comrades, drinks up the vial of cider vinegar placed in the pail with the boiled potatoes and sweet, buttery pork which form their lunch when they go to the forest chopping. Ralph Waldo Emerson says that an awkward man is graceful when he is asleep or at work or agreeably amused. It is perfectly evident that Emerson has never seen the Scotch hired man. When _he_ is asleep his knurly limbs are twisted to an indescribable pitch, his right elbow under his head, his left in the small of his back; when at work he humps himself out of all proportion; and when agreeably amused he canters about as does a new-born calf with its legs thrust out at different angles.

The hired girl does fall in love with the English hired man on occasion. "Stay me with flagons and comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love!" cries the farmer's wife then. 'Tis a fine thing for the hired man. He escapes the miseries human beings have to endure going courting--the "slicking up," the hair-oiling, the blacking of wrinkly, turn-up-toed fine boots, the wearing of a fine shirt that must have been made to fit a pelican, it is so bulgy-bosomed, and the awful and stiffening sensations a man feels when he goes into a stark neat parlor to see a girl. He does his courting with rolled-up sleeves and the dust of the bean-thrashing in his hair. The English hired man is a prize for the girl. When first he comes to America he wears coarse linen, heavy shoes, corduroys and a pair of broad, inelastic, red and white suspenders, capable of sustaining several tons, that he bought in Liverpool before sailing. He eats a leg of mutton and potatoes to match at a sitting; he slips the half of a custard pie on to his plate, and takes down a whole "boiled Indian" like smoke if it stands at his hand. He ignores salt-spoons, sugar-spoons and butter-knives, and, if the truth must be told, cleans his knife in his mouth. (The man whom Professor Proctor, the astronomer, saw at Des Moines putting his knife down his throat and sticking it into the butter, and wrote home to the _Gentleman's Magazine_ about, was an English hired man on his travels.) Nevertheless, living among decent people corrects these blemishes in the Englishman, and his merits soon shine undimmed. He has a hale countenance; he has length of limb, breadth of grasp, glorious plenitudes of health, English self-conceit, the taste for toil and distaste for pleasure; and he has a talent for economizing. He carries his money around until it is worked into a hard ball in his pocket-book, so that when he wants to lend some he has to peel it off. Vast are the revenues of parsimony. "Sense and economy must rule in a world that is made of sense and economy." The English hired man is the first of adventurers. His wages are waiting for him; his farm is prepared; bees, beeves, orchards and fields of wheat are his for the taking. The hired girl marries him, and her career ends in a blaze of happiness and prosperity.

MARY DEAN.

THE CHEF'S BEEFSTEAK

On the morning of the twenty-fifth of February, Mr. Nibby glanced out of the window and unhesitatingly pronounced himself the most miserable man in Mentone. There is a certain savage joy in such a conviction of supreme wretchedness, and Mr. Nibby, while he called himself the most miserable of men, experienced a feeling of satisfaction and was conscious of a pre-eminence among his fellow-creatures. At the same moment Fräulein Rottenhöfer looked forth from the window above, her blond hair dishevelled, her eyes red with weeping, and wrung her hands with a gesture of passionate despair. "Oh, why was I ever born?" she sighed.

To a casual and philosophical observer the disquiet of these two people might have seemed sufficiently perplexing, unless he had remembered that our world lies within ourselves, and not in external circumstance. They happened to gaze from their respective windows at the same time, with this abstracted aspect, unaware of their mutual propinquity and unacquainted with each other's history: the two stories of the hotel might well have represented separate worlds. Fräulein Rottenhöfer had travelled from Bonn to Mentone in the train of that distinguished invalid the Baroness von Merk: Mr. Nibby was a forlorn waif from the New World. He wore at this hour an Oriental dressing-gown of gorgeous hues, but he had laid aside his cigar unsmoked, and his face was sallow with illness as he presented it to the sun's pitiless inspection.

The beauty of the scene on which Fräulein Rottenhöfer looked with that hand-wringing of desperation, and Mr. Nibby below stairs, in the gorgeous dressing-gown, surveyed so dolefully, is unsurpassed on that coast of enchantment, the Riviera--realm of pure skies, purple mountains capped by glittering snow-peaks, the smoky gray of olive-orchards, and gleaming sea acquiring the splendor of melting jewels in the glow of fiery sunsets. The Hôtel des Jasmins was a small establishment of exquisite elegance and the highest reputation: its fame for select privacy, an irreproachable cuisine and lovely surroundings may be said to have gone forth to all lands. The _chef_ was known to be an artist for whose valuable services the proprietors of other mansions had basely plotted and conspired, as the Hôtel des Jasmins was kept by a woman; but, fortunately, their evil endeavors had been thus far frustrated by the devotion of the great man to madame's interests. Countless nobles had appended their names to the glorious record of the office register: Belgian counts, French marquises and German princes had all been sheltered beneath this roof and reflected lustre on the name of the hotel. The suite of rooms through which plain, republican Mr. Nibby now prowled like an unhappy ghost had once been tenanted by an English lord, who had been kind enough to depart this life in the state bed.

"What shall I try next?" quoth Mr. Nibby gloomily, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of the dressing-gown. Then he opened the sash and leaned one elbow on the window-ledge.

The whole garden sparkled with the morning freshness. Marble steps led down to the green sward; the balustrade was draped in a luxuriant mantle of heliotrope that loaded the air with the fragrance of clustering blossoms; the beds of roses and geranium swept like a wave of color in the direction of those nooks of shrubbery where the fervent heat of noonday was tempered by a canopy of delicate foliage. Mr. Nibby's eye roved languidly over the fountain with its column of silvery spray and gushing spouts formed by the gaping mouths of grotesque heads. Mr. Nibby detested that fountain: its babbling music kept him awake at night. Beyond the garden was a margin of rustling palms and a glimpse of blue Mediterranean sea. If any aspect of Nature could lure forth a man into the balmy beauty of a perfect day, it must be such a vision of loveliness as this one--the garden blooming with a Southern warmth of color and richness of perfume, that margin of palms affording views of the sea--a crystal shield--and on the other side a reach of orange plantation, the boughs powdered with snowy blossoms.

The weak human clay asserted itself instead, and Mr. Nibby merely groaned. He had passed a sleepless night; he was wretchedly ill; and, so far from improving his health by journeying in Europe, as he had hoped to do, he now looked back regretfully to the days when he suffered from mild dyspepsia in his native land. Constant nausea had afflicted the unfortunate gentleman since he came to the Mediterranean shore and took up his residence at the charming Hôtel des Jasmins, where madame made out the most extortionate bills, although he subsisted on the sparsest diet.

"I might be poisoned," soliloquized Mr. Nibby with another groan.

Then his idle glance fell on two persons with a suddenly awakened interest. The chef appeared for a moment at an opening in the shrubbery, and then was to be discerned strolling down a sequestered path in the direction of a kitchen-garden, where he finally paused and became absorbed in the contemplation of various hot-beds. The mighty artist possessed the beauty so largely bestowed by capricious Nature on his class in France and Italy. His bearing was dignified, his features perfect, his form as finely proportioned as that of the classical athlete; a silky black moustache drooped to his firm chin; his eye was large, tranquil and lustrous, reflecting all things and revealing nothing. He wore his linen cap and apron with grace, and his feet were encased in slippers of green carpet.

"He must be the head-cook of whom madame is so proud," murmured Mr. Nibby. "I have half a mind to call him and inquire of him if he could make me some honest gruel of Indian meal, well salted."

The second person was no other than Fräulein Rottenhöfer, her blond hair smoothed and her outward aspect composed.

"Why, that is the very girl I helped on the Cologne boat!" exclaimed Mr. Nibby with reviving animation as he put on his eye-glass.

What a light figure had the Fräulein in a blue muslin gown, with a black velvet ribbon about her throat! How pretty the sunshine rendered those fair tresses, piled high over a cushion on the top of her head, which left the low, broad forehead and round face fully revealed! She walked rapidly toward the hot-beds, where the chef lingered with a sprig of parsley in his hand. That celebrated artist, although absorbed in a professional reverie over certain herbs, became aware of the approach of maidenly charms and doffed his cap.

The Fräulein disliked excessively the task assigned her. She was a gentlewoman by birth, shy, sensitive and proud, now dependent for bread on the whims of that wicked old woman, the baroness. The latter had said on this particular morning, as she sat up in bed to sip her chocolate, looking like a witch, "Fräulein Rottenhöfer, you will have the kindness to present my compliments to the chef of this hotel, and tell him I approve of his hare ragoût. He may serve it more frequently for my déjeuner."

The Fräulein had flushed uneasily, and murmured, "Perhaps Fritz or Margret could do it better."

Whereupon the baroness, who seemed to exist solely for the pleasure of tormenting those dependent on her caprices, had rolled one black eye at the young girl and rejoined, "You will do it personally, and to-day, understand. Tut! doubtless you often gossip with the chef."

The Fräulein winced and compressed her lips. She, a born gentlewoman reduced to distressing poverty, was accused of gossiping with the hotel chef, like any other servant! However, she had watched her opportunity, dreading exceedingly to seek the kitchens, and Fate had sent him out to the hot-beds in order to be waylaid. She made her little speech concerning the ragoût, and the chef laid his hand on his heart, declaring that the lady baroness was too kind in praising his poor efforts. Then, as the Fräulein was about to turn away, a softer expression beamed from his fine, dark eyes, the tones of his voice acquired the caressing intonation of Southern races, and this knight of the copper stew-pan desired to know if mademoiselle herself had a penchant for any particular dish. She was young, pretty and amiable, ready to smile if the baroness would only permit, as she did now while assuring the chef that _all_ his efforts pleased her. She tripped back to the hotel, having accomplished the mission, and met full shock the spectacled glance of Mr. Nibby as he stood in the window, eye-glass on nose and Oriental dressing-gown glowing like the plumage of a tropical bird. The Fräulein blushed, hesitated, walked on a pace, and paused, evidently recognizing him.

"I hope you are better to-day," she said in careful English, then vanished quickly through the door.

Mr. Nibby was profoundly interested. He forgot how he felt for ten minutes at least. This was the very girl he had assisted on the Cologne boat in the autumn. The service rendered was a trifling one: her pocket had been picked coming on board the steamer; she was alone and frightened; evidently the official was sceptical as to her story, when Mr. Nibby stepped in opportunely, paid for another ticket and took the young girl under his own protection to the extent of frowning upon the advances of certain other tourists of a pronounced type. She had explained with simplicity and dignity of manner that she was journeying to Bonn for the purpose of applying to a great lady for the position of companion, and had only just quitted the school where she was educated. Then she had gone ashore at Bonn with shyly-expressed thanks, and Mr. Nibby, good Samaritan by the way, had been swept on by the Rhine to distant Mayence. Here she was again, at Mentone, tripping through that tropical garden with its palms, oranges, and mantling heliotrope, with the sunshine playing over her blond hair and fair face, the blue muslin robe a bright and charming element of color.

The garçon appeared with Mr. Nibby's déjeuner as he turned away from the window.

"Salad? No, I detest the sight and smell of oil," said Mr. Nibby pettishly in response to an inquiry: then he added, in gloomy soliloquy, "I wish there was not such an article as a beefsteak in the world."

The garçon stared at Mr. Nibby sympathetically. He was a chuckle-headed youth in a black coat with tails that threatened to sweep the ground, and a white cravat of stiffest quality and enormous dimensions. It might have wrung the chef's heart to have beheld Mr. Nibby turn over his dainty beefsteak with a fork and sniff at it disdainfully, but he was fortunately spared that spectacle. Mr. Nibby, in his truly alarming state of health, was restricted by his physician to the simplest diet: thus the chef's beefsteak had become the bane of his existence. He was like the needy adventurer who subsisted on pigeons for a month to win a wager, or the prisoner who starved on chocolate. He lost no time in making inquiries about the Fräulein Rottenhöfer, and the sympathetic garçon, although still a fledgling in years and with a down on his upper lip like that on a gosling's back, immediately saw his way clearly to fresh perquisites of office. If Mr. Nibby, occupant of the best suite of rooms in the hotel, was interested in a lady, any stray news concerning her fetched by himself would naturally result in francs. There was an abundance to impart at the outset. Mr. Nibby, kind of heart, left the detested beefsteak to grow cold while he listened, although that sacrifice was not a great one.

The Baroness von Merk was very old and paralytic, and possessed a fearful temper. The sympathetic garçon drew the cork of a wine-bottle, and opined that she was mad. She had been a celebrated court beauty in one of the German principalities, perhaps married with the left hand by the duke, and still retained fantastic caprices as the dregs in her spent cup of pleasure. Her own relatives had been driven away by her evil and malicious tongue. Her servants lived in purgatory, but then they received good wages, the garçon affirmed solemnly as he removed the cover of a potato-dish. What would monsieur think of her slapping the Fräulein with a fan for not reading distinctly or for not retrimming a lace mantle to please such a whimsical mistress? Old Margret, the lady's-maid, was kept awake night after night to watch beside the baroness's couch when she was nervous and feared the ghosts of her own past. Fritz was the gray-haired person in livery, who had served too long to permit his own digestion to be disturbed.

"The women cry, but I do not. I have lived with her forty years," Fritz observed in those kitchen regions where the faults of the great are freely criticised, with a gesture toward his cheeks, in texture like parchment.

When Mr. Nibby heard this sad tale of petty tyranny his sympathies were moved. He had bought a fresh ticket on the Cologne boat which consigned the Fräulein to the tender mercies of the baroness. He began to experience a degree of personal responsibility in the whole matter. How could he help the girl out of her painful position now?

"Dear me!" ejaculated Mr. Nibby, pushing aside the untasted beefsteak, and the garçon subsequently devoured it by stealth, seated on the back stairs with a tray balanced precariously on his knees.

Our invalid continued to say "Dear me!" during his afternoon drive, and on returning to the hotel either the lack of that matutinal beefsteak or interest in the Fräulein Rottenhöfer induced him to announce that he would dine at the _table d'hôte_. What need to add that the sympathetic garçon placed him beside the Fräulein, who appeared slightly startled at first, and then pleased? When the companion had begged to be spared the ordeal of eating alone at the table d'hôte, the baroness had insisted on compliance: her _dame de compagnie_ always dined at the table d'hôte. Good often results from evil in this world.

Mr. Nibby enjoyed the meal amazingly. The _salle-à-manger_ was decked with flowers, the table linen was snowy white, the plate glittered, and there was as a central ornament a mediæval castle of spun sugar perched on almond rocks, which must have cost the chef much time to design. It was the fête of madame's patron saint, and the church-bells which had resounded in the town since dawn meant also a dinner of unusual elegance at the Hôtel des Jasmins, concluded by champagne of inferior quality, but freely dispensed to all. The saint had brought her very good luck, madame piously observed. Thus the meal was a sort of feast to Mr. Nibby and the Fräulein. Both remembered the Cologne boat, and she required no other incentive than gratitude to prompt inquiry as to her benefactor's health. There are more unfavorable places for growth of mutual confidence than a table d'hôte. Amidst a hum of voices and clatter of dishes, with many lights twinkling before his dazzled eyes, Mr. Nibby became aware that the Fräulein had an aunt living in America, whom she desired to visit, although her ideas of distance were of the vaguest. Poor Fräulein! belonging to that vast army of educated women teeming in every land and needing to coin money out of their accomplishments, she must wait on the whimsical old baroness a while longer before making a journey to distant America.

In turn, she learned that Mr. Nibby had long promised himself the recreation of foreign travel, and had now escaped from active business-life for the realization. Alas! his health had improved in England only to suffer severely on the Continent, especially in the Hôtel des Jasmins.

"Perhaps the climate is too warm for you," she said, looking at him with mild blue eyes.

Thus the banquet concluded. Mr. Nibby was quite animated in manner, while the Fräulein was all the prettier for the additional color in her cheeks induced by a little excitement. The sympathetic garçon with the long coat-tails grinned at a sideboard where he was clashing about knives and forks. Mr. Nibby retired, carrying away the image of his fair neighbor for evening reverie over his cigar, and that night he slept so soundly, without recurrence of his afflicting nausea, that he was disposed to make of madame's saint's day one of most favorable augury for himself.

The Fräulein went up stairs, and read aloud to the baroness. Her thoughts strayed to the good-looking gentleman with a gray moustache, friendly smile and well-kept, white hands who had been so kind to her. At ten o'clock she received an unexpected gift. Lo! on the fête-day the chef had compounded for her a second edifice in the shape of a nougat house stocked with bonbons. She blushed, then laughed like a child.

* * * * *

A month later, the Fräulein again sat reading to the baroness, her thoughts astray and her tone of voice so monotonous that it acted soporifically on her listener. The baroness nodded in her arm-chair, with her pet poodle on her knee. The coquettish cap on her head was grotesquely crumpled, and her false front pushed awry, while the sneer on her pinched features only deepened their habitual expression of ill-nature in repose. The fat poodle blinked and the Fräulein yawned. In the large, gloomy house at Bonn was a florid portrait of the shrivelled old creature before her, there represented in slim youth, in blue velvet, with state jewels clasped about her throat. Outside, the garden still glowed with vivid patches of flowers, but the sky was dull and the piercing mistral swept clouds of dust over the boundary-wall occasionally. Again did the chef stroll down that remote path in the shrubbery, where the boundary of his dominions seemed marked by the forcing-beds of the kitchen-garden.

The Fräulein's eyes sparkled with a sudden determination. She closed her book softly and glanced apprehensively at the slumbering baroness. The poodle winked one eye at her, as if perfectly comprehending the situation, and laid its nose on two little folded paws. Then she slipped noiselessly out of the room, ran down stairs, and met Mr. Nibby in the hall. He looked very ill, and shook his head in response to her inquiry concerning his health. Mr. Nibby's health could scarcely be worse, and yet he lingered at the Hôtel des Jasmins, where he constantly met Fräulein Rottenhöfer. Sympathy is the first requisite of the human heart. Such sympathy as the young German lady had unexpectedly required of the American tourist on the Cologne boat she was striving to return in another fashion.

"I have a thought," she exclaimed with unusual animation of manner as she now encountered the invalid. "Will you be so kind to come in ze pavilion while I talk with ze chef?"

Mr. Nibby, rather puzzled, slid into the pavilion, and the Fräulein paused in the path beyond to accost her unconscious victim. Through the mantling vines Mr. Nibby could witness the smiles this really ingenuous young creature was prepared to lavish on the susceptible chef because already aware of her power. The Fräulein's tongue ran nimbly enough in French. It was now the turn of beefsteak to be praised. Did the baroness like his beefsteak then? the chef inquired, hand on heart, large eyes darting admiring glances, and yet with a wholly inscrutable smile. The Fräulein colored slightly: her gaze sought the ground. Unquestionably, the baroness approved. The dish was always most skilfully cooked, the gravy exquisitely flavored, and the meat fibre possessed the tenderness of game, the Fräulein said. The chef, always with a sprig of parsley twirling between his fingers to assist conversation, confessed modestly that there was skill in his treatment of the prosaic beefsteak.

Mr. Nibby listened, fascinated, and with a dawning suspicion in his mind. What was the Fräulein striving to accomplish? Actually, this daughter of Eve was begging to be instructed in the preparation of the culinary triumph. Perhaps she had never received before such a tribute to her charms as when the chef, rolling his fine eyes languishingly, confessed himself to be wax in her hands, and ready to yield up one of the secrets of his profession without the bribe of gold. The steak need not be the best quality of beef: even a tough and inferior portion would serve. The chef approached nearer his questioner while vouchsafing this explanation, and lowered his voice mysteriously. The Fräulein winced, but stood her ground. Ah, that was much to know, she assented with a bright smile, if one should be required to cook for an invalid. The chef nodded sagely. The steak must be laid in oil for twelve hours, which made it deliciously tender, then removed, dried slightly, and broiled. He never cooked with oil for foreigners, he added with scarcely veiled contempt of tone.

Mr. Nibby groaned in the summer-house. What! the chef's beefsteak was prepared in oil, and he had been born with such an antipathy to the luxury that it made him uncomfortable to sit at table opposite a castor! Could his daily illness be attributed to the simple diet selected in the belief that a beefsteak was the most harmless food for a dyspeptic?

The Fräulein returned to him radiant with success. "I have thought it must be what you eat," she exclaimed.

"How clever women are!" said Mr. Nibby fervently. "You always jump at conclusions, and now I am placed under an everlasting obligation."

"Then I am glad," she answered simply.

Mr. Nibby took her hand and kissed it. "Would you like to visit your aunt in America?" he inquired tenderly.

The mistral blew and the sky was gray. Up in her salon the baroness had awakened, and the poodle on her knee not only winked one eye, but cocked an ear apprehensively.

"Continue the reading: I am not asleep," croaked the old lady.

No response. Then the baroness opened her eyes wide, and they flashed ominously. Never had Fräulein Rottenhöfer dared to quit her seat before. The crash of an overturned chair succeeded the peal of a bell pulled by a tremulous hand, and then there was a stifled scream.

When the Fräulein came up stairs later in guilty haste, she paused to fasten an exquisite rose, gift of Mr. Nibby, in her dress, and the flower rivalled only the fine color of her own cheeks.

The baroness lay on the floor, stiff and rigid, with old Margret wringing her hands helplessly, and old Fritz looking on with solemnity. For the first time on record these two faithful retainers dared to express a candid opinion in her presence. "It's another stroke," said Fritz. "See to what a pass you have brought yourself by temper, mistress!"

"You could not walk alone," moaned Margret.

The baroness, dumb as if her features were frozen in a mask, lay in impotent and awful silence, staring back at them.

That night Mr. Nibby formed two resolutions: one was to ask the Fräulein Rottenhöfer to marry him, and the other never to eat another of the chef's beefsteaks.

In the garden of the Hôtel des Jasmins the flowers still bloom, the palms rustle and the orange trees change their snowy blossoms to balls of gold. Madame has occasion to be dissatisfied with her celebrated artist of the kitchen. He seasons his sauces savagely with excess of fiery condiments; there is no nice discrimination exercised in his vols-au-vent; the treatment of his entrées is commonplace, not to say coarse; he has been known to burn the soup hopelessly. He no longer seeks the garden in a leisure hour of the morning, but may be seen in the twilight standing with his back to the wall, smoking a cheap cigar and staring moodily at the windows once occupied by the pretty Fräulein. He sighs profoundly.

The Baroness von Merk has been carried back to her home on the Rhine by the faithful Fritz, a helpless burden, to be disposed of according to the judgment of others. What the air-castles of the chef might have been, built out of such rainbows as the Fräulein's smiles and praises, must ever remain buried in his own bosom. Ladies have been known to condescend to those of low estate before, especially when such personal beauty as his own manly perfections were in the balance. Did the chef dream of a rival Hôtel des Jasmins, with the Fräulein as attractive landlady, while he managed the whole establishment?

Alas, poor chef! left to sigh in the shadowy garden, while a most blooming bride crosses the Atlantic with fortunate bridegroom Mr. Nibby, miraculously restored in health and spirits. The first-cabin passengers are puzzled at table by the archness with which Mrs. Nibby proffers beefsteak to her husband, and his shudder of aversion as he rejects the dish.

If it is true that one man's meat is another man's poison, may not unconscious Mr. Nibby be deemed quits with the disconsolate chef in bearing away Fräulein Rottenhöfer as his wife?

VIRGINIA W. JOHNSON.

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER.

I believe it is supposed to require a good deal of courage to confess that one has spent the month of August in London; and I will therefore, taking the bull by the horns, plead guilty at the very outset to this dishonorable weakness. I might attempt some ingenious extenuation of it. I might say that my remaining in town had been the most unexpected necessity or the merest inadvertence; I might pretend I liked it--that I had done it, in fact, for the love of the thing; I might claim that you don't really know the charms of London until on one of the dog-days you have imprinted your boot-sole in the slumbering dust of Belgravia, or, gazing along the empty vista of the Drive in Hyde Park, have beheld, for almost the first time in England, a landscape without figures. But little would remain of these specious apologies save the naked fact that I had distinctly failed to retire from the metropolis--either on the first of August with the ladies and children, or on the thirteenth with the members of Parliament, or on the fifteenth when the grouse-shooting began. (I am not sure that I have got my dates right to a day, but these were about the proper opportunities.) I have, in fact, survived the departure of everything genteel, and the four millions of persons who remained behind with me have been witnesses of my shame.

I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having remained in town, I have found it a very odious or painful experience. Being a stranger, I have not felt it necessary to incarcerate myself during the day and steal abroad only under cover of the darkness--a line of conduct imposed by public opinion, if I am to trust the social criticism of the weekly papers (which I am far from doing), upon the native residents who allow themselves to be overtaken by the unfashionable season. I have indeed always had a theory that few things could be more pleasant than during the hot weather to have a great city, and a large house within it, quite to one's self. If it were necessary, I could point with some exultation to the fact that I have never come so near as on the present occasion to an opportunity of testing my theory; and I must add that I have now tested it under circumstances which have deprived the experiment of half of its value.

To make it perfect, the summer should be very hot and the house in which you live very cool. You should keep it cool by keeping it dark--just dark enough not to prevent you from reading a charming old book as you lie on the sofa in one of the lighter rooms. Your costume as you lie on the sofa and wander about from chamber to chamber should be of the most imponderable; in fact, you should have on almost no clothes at all. To increase the comfort of your undressedness you must have no fellow-inmates but the servants, who remain below stairs and adapt themselves to the temperature as best they can. They are free, of course, to sit in the cellar. And then you must have several other resources--resources which, if you are an American, you may be pardoned for believing to be most easily secured in the case of your trying your experiment in your native land. The carpets must all have been taken up and the floors covered with straw matting in pale, tender colors. There must be an everlasting gush of the coldest water into a bath big enough for you, if the fancy takes you, to drown yourself in. You must have plenty of peaches and pears, of grapes and melons. You must commit unseen excesses in the consumption of ice-cream. You must sit in the evening on a balcony and, looking up and down the empty street, see here and there in other balconies the gleam of a white robe in the darkness.

These harmless conditions have not been combined in my own metropolitan sojourn, and I have received an impression that in London it would be rather difficult for a person not having the command of a good deal of powerful machinery to find them united. English summer weather is rarely hot enough to make it necessary to darken one's house and disrobe. The present year has indeed in this respect been "exceptional," as any year is, for that matter, that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the people are, to American eyes, a sufficient indication that at the best (or the worst) the highest flights of the thermometer in the British Islands are not particularly startling. People live with closed windows in August, very much as they do in January, and there is to the eye no appreciable difference in the character of their apparel. A "bath" in England, for the most part all the year round, means a little portable tin tub and a sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a more obvious ornament of the market at mid-summer than at Christmas. This matter of peaches and melons, by the way, offers one of the best examples of that fact to which a foreign commentator on English manners finds himself constantly recurring, and to which he grows at last almost ashamed of alluding--the fact that the beauty and luxury of the country--that elaborate system known and revered all over the world as "English comfort"--is a distinctly limited and restricted, an essentially private, affair. I am not one of those irreverent strangers who talk of English "fruit" as a rather audacious _plaisanterie_, though I could see very well what was meant a short time since by an anecdote related to me in a tone of contemptuous generalization by a couple of my fellow-countrywomen. They had arrived in London in the dog-days, and, lunching at their hotel, had asked to be served with some fruit. The hotel was of the stateliest pattern, and they were waited upon by a functionary whose grandeur was proportionate. This gentleman bowed and retired, and after a long delay, reappearing, placed before them, with an inimitable gesture, a dish of gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon investigation that these acrid vegetables were the only "fruit" that the establishment could undertake to supply; and it seemed to increase the irony of the situation that the establishment was as near as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that the heroines of my anecdote seemed disposed to generalize: this was sufficiently the case, I mean, to give me a pretext for assuring them that in Devonshire, in Warwickshire, in Norfolk, in Dorset and in twenty other English counties whose names they had certainly heard, the most beautiful peaches and melons might be seen growing in considerable numbers in the most admirably organized hot-houses in the depths of the most extensive and picturesque properties. My auditors tossed their heads, of course, at the counties, the peaches and melons, the admirable hot-houses and the extensive properties; and indeed at their ascetic hostelry close to Buckingham Palace these reflections were but scantily consoling. But these are the things they have had in mind, the reasonable English people whom in other countries I have heard upholding the superiority of English fruit. I have heard them argue the case most resolutely against Frenchmen and Americans, but, in reality, the contending parties were talking about two very different things. One side was talking about fruit as a luxury, and the other about fruit as a necessity. The Englishman was thinking of the soft-colored, smooth-skinned peaches that he had been invited down into Dorsetshire to eat at eight o'clock in the evening at a brilliantly-lighted table: the American and the Frenchman were thinking of these articles as they importuned you from heaped-up fruit stalls in your daily walk. The difference brings me back to what I referred to as the "private" character of this particular branch of English comfort. A stranger may spend a summer in London and never be reminded of the existence of pears and grapes. Those establishments known in America as fruit-stalls are conspicuous by their absence, and their office is in no appreciable degree supplied by the inns, the restaurants or the clubs. I believe there are peaches of great rotundity to be obtained at Covent Garden market at half a crown apiece, but Covent Garden is hardly on the line of one's daily strolls. The irritated stranger, therefore, sitting down to gooseberries at a "palace" hotel, may be pardoned for unflattering generalizations. He gradually learns, if he remains in England, that the relation of hotels and restaurants to the life of the country is here essentially different from what it is elsewhere. It may be said, generally, that such places, at their best, represent the maximum comfort of the community. The traveller in England must teach himself that they represent the minimum, and he must learn the further lesson that "English comfort"--the comfort which, as I said just now, is known and venerated all over the world--means, strictly, the maximum comfort, the privilege, of a small minority, of the opulent and luxurious class. To make good inns and good restaurants there must be a comfortable _bourgeoisie_, for people of great fortune are able to do things in a way that makes them independent of a public fund of entertainment.

It is to this public fund of entertainment that the desultory stranger in any country chiefly appeals, especially in summer weather; and as I have implied that there is little encouragement in England to such an appeal, it may appear remarkable that I should not have found London, at this season, at least as uncongenial as orthodoxy pronounces it. But one's liking for London--a stranger's liking at least--is at the best an anomalous and illogical sentiment, of which he may feel it hardly more difficult to give a categorical account at one time than at another. I am far from meaning by this that there are not in this mighty metropolis a thousand sources of interest, entertainment and delight: what I mean is, that for one reason and another, with all its social resources, the place lies heavy on the foreign consciousness. It seems grim and dusty, fierce and unbeautiful. And yet the foreign consciousness accepts it at least with a kind of grudging satisfaction, and finds something warm and comfortable, something that if removed would be greatly missed, in its heavy pressure. It must be admitted, however, that, granting that every one is out of town, your choice of pastimes is not embarrassing. If it has been your fortune to spend a certain amount of time in foreign cities, London will seem to you but slenderly provided with innocent diversions. This, indeed, brings us back simply to that question of the absence of a "public fund" of amusement to which reference was just now made. You must give up the idea of going to sit somewhere in the open air, to eat an ice and listen to a band of music. You will find neither the seat, the ice nor the band; but, on the other hand, faithful to your profession of observant foreigner, you may supply the place of these delights by a little private meditation upon the deep-lying causes of the English indifference to them. In such reflections nothing is idle--every grain of testimony counts; and one need therefore not be accused of jumping too suddenly from small things to great if one traces a connection between the absence of ices and music and the aristocratic constitution of English society. This aristocratic constitution of English society is the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger: there is hardly a detail of English life that does not appear in some degree to point to it. It is really only in a country in which a good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of "refinement," as we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on a pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The upper classes are too genteel, and the lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten to add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as a general thing, quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own: they have those special resources which I mentioned a while since. They are always rich, and are naturally independent of communistic pleasures. If you can sit on a terrace in a high-walled garden and have your _café noir_ handed to you in Pompadour cups by servants in powder and plush, you have hardly a decent pretext for going to a public-house. In France and Italy, in Germany and Spain, the count and countess will sally forth and encamp for the evening under a row of colored lamps upon the paving-stones, but it is ten to one that the count and countess live on a single floor up several pairs of stairs. They are, however, I think, not appreciably affected by considerations which operate potently in England. An Englishman who should propose to sit down at a café-door would find himself remembering that he is exposing himself to the danger of meeting his social inferiors. The danger is great, because his social inferiors are so numerous; and I suspect that if we could look straight into the English consciousness we should be interested to find how serious a danger it appears. It is not of the fear of contact with the great herd of one's unknown fellow-citizens that I speak: it is of the possibility of meeting individuals with whom in the business of life one has had some sort of formal relations--one's grocer, one's bootmaker, one's apothecary, even one's solicitor. To an American, a Frenchman, an Italian, there is of necessity nothing alarming in such an incident: there is at the worst a way of taking it easily. But as it looms up before an Englishman it has the power of making him extremely uncomfortable; and, combined with a corresponding anxiety on the part of the inferior himself, this prospective discomfort operates as a chronically deterrent force. These, however, are mysteries which I should not have allowed myself to deal with so parenthetically. I have ventured to do so because there is a very familiar illustration of the phenomenon I speak of. It may be found in the usual demeanor of English servants. If you "meet" an English servant--that is, if you encounter him at a moment when he is not literally executing an order for you--if you are left in a room with him, if you pass him in the hall, if you are confronted with him in the portico, you perceive that his effort is immediately to spare you a possibly offensive realization of his presence. He has been taught that at such times he is uncomfortable to you--that you don't, mentally as it were, know what to do with him. His place in the universe is to answer your bell, and from your point of view he should only exist by intermission. He has been trained to adapt himself to this point of view, and he does so with remarkable success. He not only rigidly abstains from bidding you good-morning, but he abstains equally from responding to the good-morning which in a moment of culpable inconsistency you may have offered him. A couple of months since, paying a visit to a friend in the country, I drove to the door with a gentleman whom I had met at the station, and who was engaged in the same pleasant errand as myself. The butler who admitted us stood motionless and inarticulate as we crossed the threshold, with his eyes, in the manner of butlers, fixed upon our boots. He was a very admirable servant, and having, in the course of twenty-four hours, taken the measure of this fact, I on the following day called my companion's attention to it. My companion was an Englishman, but he was young and perhaps foolishly sentimental. "Oh yes, he's an excellent servant," he said, "but he might give one a faint sign of recognition when one arrives."--"You had seen him, then," I asked, "before?"--"I have stayed in the house half a dozen times, and half a dozen times on departing I have given him the sidelong tip; yet whenever I arrive he gives me a stony stare, as if I were a perfect stranger." But the stony stare, for butlers, is not simply the English custom: I think it may be said that it is the English ideal.

I have wandered very far from the potential little tables for ices in--where shall I say?--in Oxford street; but, after all, there is no reason why our imagination should hover about them. I am afraid they would not be very pleasant. In such matters everything hangs together, and I am afraid that the customs of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonize with the scenery of the great London thoroughfare. A gin-palace right and left and a detachment of the London rabble in an admiring semicircle,--these, I confess, strike me as some of the more obvious features of the affair. At this time, however, one's social studies must, at the least, be studies of low life, for wherever you may go for a stroll or to spend your summer afternoon the unfashionable side of things is uppermost. There is no one in the parks save the rough characters who are lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass. These people are always tolerably numerous in the Green Park, through which I frequently pass, and I never fail to drop a wondering glance upon them. But your wonder will go far if it begins to bestir itself on behalf of weary British tramps. You see among them some magnificent specimens of weariness. Their velveteen legs and their colossal high-lows, their purple necks and car-tips, their knotted sticks and little greasy hats, make them look like stage villains in a realistic melodrama. I may do them great injustice, but I always assume that they have had a taste of penal servitude--that they have paid the penalty of stamping on some one with those huge square heels that are turned up to the summer sky. But, actually, they are innocent enough, for they are sleeping as peacefully as the most accomplished philanthropist, and it is their look of having walked over half England, and of being confoundedly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes their romantic attractiveness. These six feet of brown grass are their present sufficiency, but how long will they sleep, whither will they go next, and whence did they come last? You permit yourself to wish that they might sleep for ever and go nowhere else at all.

The month of August is so unfashionable in London that going a few days since to Greenwich, that famous resort, I found it possible to get but half a dinner. The hotel (where you are supposed to be able to obtain one of the best dinners in England) had put out its stoves and locked up its pantry. But for this discovery I should have mentioned the little expedition to Greenwich as a charming relief to the monotony of a London August. Greenwich and Richmond are, classically, the two suburban dining-places. I don't know how it may be at this time with Richmond, but the Greenwich incident brings me back (I hope not once too often) to the element of what has lately been called "particularism" in English pleasures. It was in obedience to a perfectly logical argument that the Greenwich hotel had, as I say, locked up its pantry. All genteel people leave London after the first week in August, _ergo_ those who remain behind are not genteel, and cannot therefore rise to the conception of a "fish dinner." Why, then, should we have anything ready? I had other impressions, fortunately, of this interesting suburb, and I hasten to declare that during the genteel period the dinner at Greenwich is the best of all dinners. It begins with fish and it continues with fish: what it ends with--except songs and speeches and affectionate partings--I hesitate to affirm. It is a kind of mermaid reversed; for I do know, in a vague way, that the tail of the creature is elaborately and interminably fleshy. If it were not grossly indiscreet I should risk an allusion to the particular banquet which was the occasion of my becoming acquainted with the Greenwich _cuisine_. I should say that it is very pleasant to sit in a company of clever and distinguished men before the large windows that look out upon the broad brown Thames. The ships swim by as if they were part of the entertainment and put down in the bill: the afternoon light fades ever so slowly. We eat all the fish of the sea, and wash them down with liquids that bear no resemblance to salt water. We partake of any number of those sauces with which, according to the French adage, one could dine upon one's grandmother. To speak of the particular merits of my companions would indeed be indiscreet, but there is nothing indelicate in expressing a high appreciation of the manly frankness and robustness of English conviviality. The stranger--the American at least--who finds himself in the company of a number of Englishmen assembled for a convivial purpose becomes conscious of a certain indefinable and delectable something which, for want of a better name, he will call their superior richness of temperament. He takes note of the liberal share of the individual in the magnificent temperament of the race. This seems to him one of the finest things in the world, and his satisfaction will take a keener edge from such an incident as the single one I may permit myself to mention. It was one of those little incidents which can occur only in an old society--a society in which every one that a newcomer meets strikes him as having in some degree or other a sort of historic identity, being connected with some one or something that he has heard of. If they are not the rose, they have lived more or less near it. There is an old English song-writer whom we all know and admire--whose songs are sung wherever the language is spoken. Of course, according to the law I just hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must be his great-grandson. After dinner there are songs, and the gentleman trolls out one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming voice and the most finished art.

I have still other memories of Greenwich, where there is a charming old park, on a summit of one of whose grassy undulations the famous observatory is perched. To do the thing completely, you must take passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers that ply upon the Thames, perform the journey by water, and then, disembarking, take a stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an irresistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I am rather at a loss as to how to speak of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. It is in truth the most prosaic possible form of being afloat, and to be recommended rather to the inquiring than to the fastidious mind. It initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the crowdedness, the intensely commercial character of London. Few European cities have a finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has expended more ingenuity in producing an ugly river-front. For miles and miles you see nothing but the sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they are the sooty fronts: in these rigidly-unfeatured edifices it is impossible to distinguish. They stand massed together on the banks of the wide, turbid stream, which is fortunately of too opaque a quality to reflect their hideousness. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black barges: above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing steamer is dingy and begrimed: it belches a sable cloud that keeps you company as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who belong chiefly, indeed, to the less brilliant classes, assume an harmonious dinginess; and the whole picture, glazed over with the glutinous London mist, becomes a masterpiece of bituminous-looking color. But it is very impressive in spite of its want of lightness and brightness, and in its own sombre fashion it is extremely picturesque. Like so many of the aspects of English civilization that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the merit of being serious. Viewed in this intellectual light, the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced warehouses, the dreary people, the atmospheric impurities, become richly suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so, but all this sordid detail reminds me of nothing less than the wealth and power of the British empire at large; so that a kind of metaphysical picturesqueness hovers over the scene, and supplies what may be literally wanting. I don't exactly understand the association, but I know that when I look off to the left at the East India Docks, or pass under the dark, hugely-piled bridges, where the railway trains and the human processions are for ever moving, I feel a kind of imaginative thrill. The tremendous piers of the bridges, in especial, seem the very pillars of the British empire.

It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive reverie that the sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the Greenwich Observatory lifting its two modest little brick towers. The sight of this useful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which may at first seem unreasonable. The reason was, simply, that I used to see it as a child in woodcuts in school geographies, and in the corners of large maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended in unexpected places, in dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung so high that my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and these corners usually contained a print of a strange-looking house standing among trees upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with the most engaging steepness. I used always to think that it must be an ineffable joy to run straight down that bank. Close at hand was usually something printed about something being at such and such a number of degrees "east of Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich? The vague wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave the place a mysterious importance, and seemed to put it into relation with the difficult and fascinating parts of geography--the countries of fantastic outline and the lonely-looking pages of the atlas. Yet there it stood the other day, the spot from which longitude is calculated; there was the plain little façade with the old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be so delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old to find that I did not forthwith proceed to taste of this delight. There are indeed a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in the most picturesque fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all its own. It is filled with magnificent dwarfish chestnut trees, planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are plenty of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children; and from the tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the widening Thames, and the moving ships, and the two classic inns by the waterside, and the great pompous buildings of the old hospital, which have been despoiled of their ancient pensioners and converted into a kind of naval academy.

Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away angle in the wall of the park, where a little postern door stood ajar. I pushed the door open, and found myself, by a picturesque transition, upon Blackheath Common. One had often heard of Blackheath: well, here it was--a great green, breezy place, where various lads in corduroys were playing cricket. I always like an English common: it may be curtailed and cockneyfied, as this one was--which had lamp-posts stuck about on its turf and a fresh-painted banister all around--but it is sure to be one of the places that remind you vividly that you are in England. Even if the turf is too much trodden, there is, to foreign eyes, an English greenness about it, and there is something peculiarly insular in the way the high-piled, weather-bearing clouds hang over it and drizzle down their gray light. Still further to identify this spot, here was the British soldier emerging from two or three of the roads, with his cap upon his ear, his white gloves in one hand and his foppish little cane in the other. He wore the uniform of the artillery, and I asked him where he had come from. I learned that he had walked over from Woolwich, and that this feat might be accomplished in half an hour. Inspired again by vague associations, I proceeded to accomplish its equivalent. I bent my steps to Woolwich, a place which I knew, in a general way, to be a nursery of British valor. At the end of my half hour I emerged upon another common, where local color was still more intense. The scene was very entertaining. The open grassy expanse was immense, and the evening being beautiful it was dotted with strolling soldiers and townsfolk. There were half a dozen cricket-matches: the soldiers were playing against the lads in corduroys. At one end of this peaceful _campus martius_, which stretches over a hilltop, rises an interminable façade--one of the fronts of the artillery barracks. It has a very honorable air, and more windows and doors, I imagine, than any building in Britain. There is a great clean parade before it, and there are many sentinels pacing in front of neatly-kept places of ingress to officers' quarters. Everything that looks out upon it is military--the distinguished college (where the French prince imperial lately studied the art of war) on one side; a sort of model camp--a collection of the tidiest plank huts--on the other; a hospital, on a well-ventilated site, at the remoter end. And then in the town below there are a great many more military matters--barracks on an immense scale; a dock-yard that presents an interminable dead wall to the street; an arsenal which the gatekeeper (who refused to admit me) declared to be "five miles" in circumference; and, lastly, grogshops enough to inflame the most craven spirit. These latter institutions I glanced at on my way to the railway-station at the bottom of the hill; but before departing I had spent half an hour in strolling about the common in vague consciousness of certain emotions that are called into play (I speak but for myself) by almost any glimpse of the imperial machinery of this great country. The glimpse may be of the slightest: it stirs a peculiar sentiment. I know not what to call this sentiment unless it be simply an admiration for the greatness of England. The greatness of England: that is a very pregnant phrase, but I am not using it analytically. I use it only as it sounds in the imagination of any American who really enjoys the enjoyable parts of this head-spring of his patriotism. I mean the great part that England has played in history, the great space she has occupied, her tremendous might, her far-stretching sway. That these clumsily-general ideas should be suggested by the sight of some infinitesimal fraction of the English administrative system may seem to indicate a too hysterical cast of fancy; but if so, I must plead guilty to the weakness. Why should a sentry-box more or less set one thinking of the glory of this little island, which has manufactured the means of so vast a dominion? This is more than I can say; and all I shall attempt to say is, that in the difficult days that are now elapsing a sympathetic stranger finds his meditations singularly quickened. It is the picturesque element in English history that he has chiefly cared for, and he finds himself wondering whether the picturesque epoch is completely closed. It is a moment when all the nations of Europe seem to be doing something, and he waits to see what England, who has done so much, will do. He has been meeting of late a good many of his country-people--Americans who live on the Continent and pretend to speak with assurance of continental ways of feeling. These people have been passing through London, and many of them are in that irritated condition of mind which appears to be the portion of the American sojourner in the British metropolis when he is not given up to the delights of the historic sentiment. They have affirmed with emphasis that the continental nations have ceased to care a straw for what England thinks; that her traditional prestige is completely extinct; that General Ignatieff twisted Lord Salisbury round his finger; and that the affairs of Europe will be settled quite independently of the power whose capital is on the Thames. England will do nothing, will risk nothing: there is no cause bad enough for her not to find a selfish interest in it--there is no cause good enough for her to fight about it. Poor old England is exploded: it is about time she should haul in her nets. To all this the sympathetic stranger replies that, in the first place, he does not believe a word of it; and, in the second place, he does not care a fig for it--care, that is, what the continental nations think. If the greatness of England were really waning, it would be to him as a personal grief; and as he strolls about the breezy common at Woolwich, with all those mementoes of British dominion around him, he is quite too softly exhilarated to admit discomposure.

He wishes, nevertheless, as I said before, that England would do something--something striking and powerful and picturesque. He asks himself what she can do, and he remembers that that greatness of England which he so much admires was formerly much exemplified in her "taking" something. Can't she "take" something now? There is the _Spectator_, who wants her to occupy Egypt: can't she occupy Egypt? The _Spectator_ considers this her moral duty--inquires even whether she has a right _not_ to bestow the blessings of her beneficent rule upon the down-trodden Fellaheen. I found myself in company with a very intelligent young Frenchman a day or two after this eloquent plea for a partial annexation of the Nile had appeared in the most ingenious of journals. Some allusion was made to it, and my companion proceeded to pronounce it a masterpiece of British hypocrisy. I don't know how powerful a defence I made of it, but while I read it I certainly had been carried away by it. I recalled it while I pursued my contemplations, but I recalled at the same time that sadly prosaic speech of Mr. Gladstone's to which it had been a reply. Mr. Gladstone had said that England had much more urgent duties than the occupation of Egypt: she had to attend to the great questions of--What were the great questions? Those of local taxation and the liquor-laws. Local taxation and the liquor-laws! The phrase, to my ears, just then made a painful discord. These were not the things I had been thinking of: it was not as she should bend anxiously over these doubtless interesting subjects that the sympathetic stranger would seem to see England in his favorite posture--that, as Macaulay says, of hurling defiance at her foes. Of course, Mr. Gladstone was probably right, but Mr. Gladstone was not a sympathetic stranger.

H. JAMES, JR.

SVEN DUVA.

FROM THE SWEDISH OF JOHAN LUDVIG RUNEBERG.

Sven Duva's sire a sergeant was, with many winters white: In Eighty-eight, though past his prime, he went into the fight, And after living on his land he reared him fruit and corn, While children nine around him grew, and Sven was youngest born.

None knows if Duva's father was with sense enough endowed To still keep some part for himself, and share with such a crowd; But it must be unto the eight far more than right did fall, For scarcely to the latest born fell any share at all.

Yet, none the less, young Sven grew up broad-shouldered, strong of limb: He hewed the tree and ploughed the glebe, for toil was play to him. More mild than many a wiser man, more prompt he hied along, And turned his hand to anything, but everything turned wrong.

"In God's name, witless son of mine, what shall become of thee?" So oft the white-haired sergeant cried in his perplexity, That 'neath the burden of the tune Sven's patience fell to earth, And weighed he, far as in him lay, his own degree of worth.

So, when upon a certain day the sergeant raised again The burden of the tiresome tune, "What wilt thou be, O Sven?" The old man scarce believed his ears when, all unwontedly, Sven's massive jaws wide opened with, "A soldier I will be!"

Then loud the sergeant laughed in scorn, and answered mockingly, "What! thou wouldst bear a rifle?--thou, a booby! Shame on thee!" "Why," said the boy, "here 'neath my hands unhandy works each thing: Less handiness may serve to die for country and for king."

Old Duva stood a while amazed, then went in grieving mood, And pack on back Sven forth did fare to where the barracks stood. His stature fine, his sturdy height, all lesser needs o'erweighed, And one in Dunker's company young Sven was quickly made.

But when was need that he should learn the drill and carriage meet, God wot it was a sight to see how chance did guide his feet: The corporal laughed aloud and cried, and cried and laughed again, But still unchanged did his recruit in frown and fun remain.

Yet tireless was he, certainly, if ever mortal yet: He marched and stamped that earth did shake, and laid the dust with sweat; But at the word to change or move he missed the meaning quite: When "Left face!" called the corporal, Sven's face looked toward the right.

Now he was taught to order arms, and arms to shoulder too, To fix his bayonet, and present; and all, it seemed, he knew, But at the "Order" usually he fixed his bayonet, And at "Present" as gracefully his gun his shoulder met.

And so it came Sven Duva's drill was far and wide renowned: 'Midst all--commander, captains, men--the good jest passed around; But Sven still kept his quiet way--was patient as before, And always hoped for better times. And so broke out the war.

Now 'midst his comrades question rose, since they their land must shield, If Sven were sane enough to go with them unto the field. He let them talk, stood calmly by, and said in coolest tone, "If with the ranks I cannot go, why I can go alone."

They let him keep his soldier arms, nor put his hands away, For he was servant in the halt and soldier in the fray; But board or sword, 'twas one with him: his cool way still he had, And none might call him coward, though betimes they called him mad.

Once Sandels was in full retreat, pushed back by Russian ranks, And yielding step by step along a river's reedy banks: Ahead, a foot-bridge crossed the stream upon the army's way, Where--scarcely twenty men they were--a little outpost lay.

Sent but to mend the broken road, when all the toil was o'er At rest they lay at distance far from noises of the war: A grange near hand they made their camp, nor fared they on its least, And Sven--for he was of the band--did serve them at the feast.

But soon a change came on them there, for down a slope hard by Spurred Sandels' aide fast hurrying, and rose his sudden cry: "To arms! to arms! for God's good sake! and be the bridge your care, For word is brought a hostile force will cross the river there.

"And, sir," said he to him who led the guard, "if yet you can, Tear quickly down the bridge, or fight till falls the latest man.

'Tis ruin if the Russian can assail us in the rear; And fear ye not, for help is by: the general hurries here."

So sped he back, but to the bridge scarce reached the little band When high a Russian platoon rose upon the shore beyond. It wider grows, it thicker grows; a volley blazes wide; Beneath the blast nigh half the band are dying or have died.

A fear runs through the little band; a longer stay is vain; Again a thundering volley roars, and only five remain. Then all obeyed the swift command to shoulder arms, retreat: Sven Duva only missed the word, and fixed his bayonet.

Still more his turning to retreat th' old look of bungling wore, For, far from going with the rest, upon the bridge he bore; And there he stood, broad-shouldered, stiff, with his old coolness still, Prepared to teach to whomsoe'er the best points of his drill.

Nor long he waited ere was need he should his tactics show, For in a moment all the bridge was freighted with the foe: Fast on they pressed, man after man, but each who came was met And tumbled bleeding to the earth by Sven's good bayonet.

To push this giant down was more than single arm could do, And still his nearest foe a shield from shots of others grew: The quicker pressed the pushing foe, the more his hope was foiled, 'Till Sandels with his host appeared, and saw how Duva toiled.

"Well done!" the chieftain cried, "well done! my bravest soldier thou! Let not a devil pass the bridge: hold out a moment now. Yon brave man be a soldier called, and so a Finn should fight. Come, help him well, for well we owe our safety to his might."

The foe soon found th' attack was foiled, and without long delay The Russian forces wheeled around and slowly moved away. The chief, dismounting, sought the stream when all the din was o'er, And asked for him who held the bridge and stayed the Russian war.

They pointed to Sven Duva then: his war was overfought; Yea, manlike he had warred, and now the battle-hour was not. It seemed that he had lain to rest what time the sport was done-- Well, scarce more quiet than of old, but much more pale and wan.

Above the fallen Sandels bent, the features well to trace-- No stranger features to the chief: it was a well-known face. Beneath Sven's heart where he was laid the green grass gleamed with red: A ball had pierced the willing heart, and he was of the dead.

"That bullet knew to take effect, we must confess who see," So simply spoke the general. "It knew much more than we: It let alone his forehead, for it was his weakest part: It entered at a nobler spot--into a faithful heart."

Those words were bruited far and wide throughout the general host, And unto each one everywhere the general's words seemed just; "For surely unto Duva brains were scant in measure doled, But, though his head was rather bad, his heart was good as gold."

C. ROSELL.

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.