Chapter 5

ONLY A DREAM.

Of all those who lived through the fever, poor Alick Corfield's case had been the most desperate while it lasted. Mr. Gryce, his fellow-sufferer, had been up and about his usual work, extracting Aryan roots and impaling Lepidoptera for a month and more, while Alick was still in bed among ice-bags and Condy's Fluid, and as bad as at the beginning--indeed, worse, having had a relapse which nothing but his wiry constitution, backed by his mother's scientific nursing, could have pulled him through. Gradually the danger passed, and this time his convalescence was solid, and, though slow, uninterrupted. He began to creep about the house by the aid of sticks and arms, and he came down stairs for the first time on the day when the Harrowbys and Birketts returned home; but he remained in strict quarantine, and Steel's Corner was scrupulously avoided by the neighbors as the local lazaretto which it would be sinful to invade. By all but Leam, who went daily to ask after the invalid, and to keep the mother company for exactly half an hour by the clock.

One day when she went on her usual errand Mrs. Corfield met her at the hall-door, "Alick will be glad to see you, my dear," she called out, radiant with happiness, as the girl crossed the threshold. "We are in the drawing-room to-day, as brisk and bonny as a bird: such a treat for him, poor dear!"

"I am glad," said Leam, who held a basket of early spring flowers in her hand. "Now you are happy." Tears came into the poor mother's haggard eyes. "Happy, child! You do not know what I feel," she said with tremulous emotion. "Only a mother who has been so near to the loss of her dearest, so near to heartbreak and despair, as I have been, can know the blessed joy of the reprieve."

"How you love him!" said Leam in a half whisper. "I loved mamma like that."

"Yes, poor child! I remember," said Mrs. Corfield with compassion. She forgot that at the time she had thought the girl's love and despair, both the one and the other, exaggerated and morbid. She met her now on the platform of sympathy, and her mind saw what it brought to-day as it had seen what it had brought before, but she was not conscious of the contradiction.

"I thought I should have died too when she did. I wish I had," said Leam, looking up to the sky with dreamy love, as if she still thought to meet her mother's face in the blue depths.

"My poor dear! it was terrible for you," sighed the elder woman sympathetically. "But you must not always mourn, you know. There is a time for everything, even for forgetting, and for being happy after sorrow."

"Never a time for me to forget mamma, nor to be happy," said Leam.

"Why not?" answered Mrs. Corfield in her impatient way. "You are young, nice-looking, in tolerably good health, but you are black round your eyes to-day. You have friends: I am sure all of us, from my husband downward, think a great deal of you. And Alick has always been your friend. Why should you not be happy?"

Leam put the question by. "Yes, you have always been kind to me," she answered. "I remember when mamma died how you wanted to be kind then. But I did not understand you as I do now. And how good Alick was! How sorry I should have been if anything had happened to him now!" Her beautiful face grew tender with the thought. She did really love Alick in her girlish, sisterly way.

Mrs. Corfield looked at her. "Have you never loved any one else as you loved your poor mother?" she asked.

Leam lifted her eyes. "Never," she answered simply. "I have liked a few people since, but love as I loved mamma? No!"

"Leam, I am going to ask you a straightforward question, and you must give me a straightforward answer: Which do you like best, my boy or Edgar Harrowby?" Mrs. Corfield asked this suddenly, as if she wanted to surprise the girl's secret thought rather than have a deliberate answer.

"I like them differently," began Leam without affectation. "Alick is so unlike Major Harrowby in every way. And then I have known him so long--since I was a mere child. I feel that I can say what I like to him: I always did. But Major Harrowby is a stranger, and I am--I don't know: it is all different. I cannot say what I mean." She hesitated, stopped, grew pale, glanced aside and looked disturbed; then putting on her old air of cold pride, she drew herself a few paces away and said, "Why do you ask me such a question, Mrs. Corfield? You should not."

Mrs. Corfield sighed. If Edgar was undecided between his personal desires and conventional fitness, she was undecided between her longing to see Alick happy and her dislike to his being happy in any way but the one she should design for him. He had raved a good deal during his illness, and had said many mad things connected with Leam--always Leam; and since his convalescence his mother had seen clearly enough how his heart was toward her. His pleasure when he heard that she had been there, his childish delight in anything that she had brought for him, the feverishness with which he waited to hear her step, her voice from a distance, always demanding that the doors should be left open so that he might hear her,--all betrayed to his mother as plainly as confession would have done the real thoughts of his heart, and cast a trouble into her own whence she saw no present satisfactory issue. Though she was fond of Leam now, and grateful to her for her faithful visits during Alick's illness, yet, just as Edgar doubted of her fitness as a wife for the master of the Hill, so did she doubt of her fitness as a daughter-in-law for Steel's Corner. As a friend she was pleasant enough, with her quaint ways and pretty face; but as one of the Corfield family, bound to them for ever--what then would she be? But again, if Alick really loved her, she would not like to see him disappointed. So, what between her dislike to the marriage should it ever be, and her fear for Alick's unhappiness should he ask and be refused, the poor mother was in a state of confused feelings and contradictory wishes which did not agree with a nature like hers, given to mathematical certainties and averse to loose ends and frayed edges anywhere. As nothing more was to be got out of Leam at this moment, and as Mrs. Corfield knew that Alick would be impatient, they went into the drawing-room together, Leam carrying her basket of spring flowers for her old friend.

It was pitiful to see the poor fellow. Thin, gaunt, plainer than ever, if also ennobled by that almost saintly dignity which is given by illness, the first impression made on Leam was one of acute physical repulsion: the second only gave room to compassion. Fortunately, that little shudder of hers was unnoticed, and Alick saw only the beloved face, more beautiful to him than anything out of heaven, with its grave intensity of look that seemed so full of thought and feeling, turned to him--saw only those glorious eyes fixed once more straight on his--felt only the small hand which seemed to give him new life to touch lying clasped in his own, weak, wasted, whitened, like a dead hand for color against the warm olive of her skin. It was almost worth while to have been separated so long to have this joy of meeting; and he thought his pain and danger not too dearly bought by this exquisite pleasure of knowing that she had pitied him and cared for him.

He raised himself from his pillows as he took her small, warm, fibrous hand, and his pallid face brightened into a tearful smile. "Ah!" he said, drawing a deep breath, "I am so glad to see you again!"

"I am glad to see you too," said Leam with a certain sudden embarrassment, she did not know why, but it came from something that she saw in his eyes and could not explain even to herself.

"Are you?" He pressed her hand, which he still held. "It does me good to hear you say so," he replied.

"I have brought you some flowers," then said Leam, a little coldly, drawing away her hand, which she hated to have either held or pressed.

He took them with a pleased smile. "Our pretty wild-flowers!" he said gratefully, burying his face in them, so cool and fresh and fragrant as they were. "They are like the giver," he added after a pause, "only not so sweet."

"Do you remember when I persisted to you there were no wild-flowers in England?" asked Leam, wishing that Alick would not pay her compliments.

"Do I remember? That was the first time I saw you," cried Alick. "Of what else have I thought ever since?"

"You like wild-flowers and celandine, do you not?" asked poor Leam, desperately disturbed. "I found them in the wood as I came here."

"And picked them for me?--up in the corner there by Barton's? I know. And you went up the lane for them--for me?" he repeated.

"Yes," said Leam.

"For me?" he asked again.

"Why, yes: for whom else could it have been?" answered Leam in the tone of grave rebuke he knew so well--the tone which always expressed, "You are stupid."

Alick's lip quivered. "You are so good," he said.

"Am I?" asked Leam seriously.

Then something passed over her face, a kind of gray shadow of remembrance, and she dropped her eyes. Was she good? and could he think so?

A silence fell between them, and each knew of what the other was thinking; then Leam said suddenly, to break that terrible silence, which she felt was more betraying than even speech would have been, "I am sorry you have been so ill. How dreadfully ill you have been!"

"Yes," he said, "I have been bad enough, I believe, but by God's grace I have been spared."

"It would have been more grace not to have let you get ill in the beginning," said Leam gravely.

Alick looked distressed. Should he never Christianize this pagan? "Don't say that, dear," he remonstrated. "We must not call in question His will."

"Things are things," said Leam with her quiet positiveness. "If they are bad, they are bad, whoever sends them."

"No. God cannot send us evil," cried Alick.

"Then He does not send us disease or sorrow," answered Leam. "If He does, it is silly to say they are good, or that He is kind to make us ill and wretched. I cannot tell stories. And all you people do."

"Leam, you pain me so much when you talk like this. It is bad, dear--impious and unchristian. Ah! can I never bring you to the true way?" he cried with real pain.

"You cannot make me tell stories or talk nonsense because you say it is religious," replied Leam, impervious and unconvinced. "I like better to tell the truth and call things by their right names."

"And you cannot feel that we are little children walking in the dark and that we must accept by faith?" said Alick.

She shook her head, then answered with a certain tone of triumph in her voice, "Well, yes, it is the dark: so let it be the dark, and do not pretend you understand when you do not. Do not say God made you ill in one breath, and in another that He is kind. It is silly."

"Now, my boy, don't excite yourself," said Mrs. Corfield, bustling into the room and noting how the thin cheek had flushed and how bright and feverish the hollow eyes of her invalid were looking. "You know the doctor says you are not to be excited or tired. It is the worst thing in the world for you."

"I am neither, mother: don't alarm yourself," he answered; "but I must have a little talk with Leam. I have not seen her for so long. How long is it, mother?"

"Well, my dear, you have been ill for over ten weeks," she said as she went to the window with a sudden gasp.

"Ten weeks gone out of my life!" he replied.

"We have all been sorry," said Leam a little vaguely.

His eyes grew moist. He was weak and easily moved. "Were you very sorry?" he asked.

"Very," she answered, for her quite warmly.

"Then you did not want me to die?" He said this with a yearning look, raising himself again on his elbow to meet her eyes more straightly.

"Want you to die?" she repeated in astonishment. "Why should I want you to die? I want you to get well and live."

He took her hand again. "God bless you!" he said, and turned his face to the pillow to conceal that he was weeping.

Again that gray look of remembrance, passed over her face. She knew now what he had meant. "No," she said slowly, "I do not want you to die. You are good, and would harm no one."

After this visit Leam saw Alick whenever she called at the house, which, however, was not so often as heretofore, and week by week became still more seldom. Something was growing up in her heart against him that made his presence a discomfort. It was not fear nor moral dislike, but it was a personal distaste that threatened to become unconquerable. She hated to be with him; hated to see his face looking at her with such yearning tenderness as abashed her somehow and made her lower her eyes; hated his endeavors to convert her to an orthodox acceptance of mysteries she could not understand and of explanations she could not believe; hated his sadness, hated his joy: she only wished that he would go away and leave her alone. What did he mean? What did he want? He was changing from the blushing, awkward, subservient dog of his early youth, and from the still subservient if also more argumentative pastor of these later days alike, and she did not like the new Alick who was gradually creeping into the place of the old.

When Mrs. Corfield spoke of taking him to the sea for change of air, her heart bounded as if a weight had been suddenly removed, and she said, "Yes, he ought to go," so warmly that the mother was surprised, wondering if she cared so much for him that the idea of his getting good elated her beyond herself and made her forget her usual reserve. She instinctively contrived not to see him alone now when she went to Steel's Corner during his tedious convalescence, for the poor fellow mended but slowly, if surely. Either she had only a short time to stay, and so stood for a moment, making serious talk impossible, or she took little Fina with her, or maybe she entangled Mrs. Corfield in the conversation so that she should not leave them alone, the vague fear and distaste possessing her making her strangely _rusée_ and on the alert. But one day she was caught. It had to come, and it was only a question of time. She knew that, as we know when our doom is upon us.

Leam had not intended to go in to-day, but Alick, who was in the garden rejoicing in the warmth and freshness of this tender April noontide, came to meet her at the second gate, and asked her to come and sit with him on the garden-seat, there where the budding lilacs began to show their bloom, and there where they sat on that fatal day when she had hidden the little phial in her hair and bade him tell her of flowers till she tired.

She hesitated, and was on the point of refusing, when he took her by the upper part of her arm as if to hold her. "Do," he pleaded. "I want to say something to you."

"I have no time to stay," she answered, shrinking from his touch.

"Yes, yes, time enough for all I have to say," he returned. "I beg you to come with me to-day, Leam--I beg it; and I do not often ask a favor of you."

There was something in his manner that seemed to compel Leam to consent in spite of herself. True, he besought, but also he seemed almost to command; and if he did not command, then his earnestness was so strong that she was forced to yield to it. Trembling, but with her proud little head held straight--wondering what was coming, and vaguely conscious that whatever it was it would be pain--Leam let him take her to the garden-seat where the budding lilacs spoke of springtime freshness and summer beauty. Alick was trembling too, but from excitement, not from fear. He had made up his mind now, and when he had once resolved he was not wavering. He would ask her to share his life, accept his love, and he would thus take on himself half the burden of her sin. This was how he felt it. If he married her, knowing all that he knew, he would make himself the partner of her crime, because he would accept her past like her present--like her future; and thus he would be equally guilty with her before God. But he would trust to prayer and the Supreme Mercy to save her and him. He would carry no merits of devotion as his own claim, but he would have freed her of half her guilt, and he would be content to bear his own portion of punishment for this unfathomable gain. It was the man's love, but also the soul's passionate promise of sacrifice and redemption, that gave him boldness to plead, power to ask for a grace to which, had this deep stain of sin never tainted her, he would not have dared to aspire. But, as it was, his love was her greater safety, and what he gained in earthly joy he would lose in spiritual peace, while her partial forgiveness would be bought by the loss of his security of salvation. Not that she understood all this or ever should, but it gave him courage.

"When you first saw me, Leam, after my illness you said that you wanted me to live," he began in a low voice, husky with emotion. "Do you mean this?"

"Yes," she said, looking straight before her.

"Live for you?" he asked.

"For us all," she answered.

"No, not for us all--for you," he returned with insistence.

"That would be silly," said Leam quietly. "I am not the only person in the world: you have your mother."

"For my mother, perhaps; but for the world, nothing. You are the world to me," said Alick. "Give me your love, and I care for nothing else. Tell me you will be my wife, and I can live then--live as nothing else can make me. Leam, can you love me, dear? I have loved you from the first moment I saw you. Will you be my wife?"

"Your wife!" cried Leam with an involuntary gesture of repulsion. "You are dreaming."

"No, no: I am in full earnest. Tell me that you love me, Leam. Oh, I believe that you do. Surely I have not deceived myself so far. Why should you have come every day--every day, as you have done--if you do not love me? Yes, you do--I know you, do. Say so, Leam, my darling, my beloved, and put me out of my misery of suspense."

"You are my good friend: I love you like a friend; but a wife--that is different," faltered Leam.

"Yes, but it will come if you try," pleaded Alick, shifting his point from confidence to entreaty. "Won't you try to love me as I love you, Leam? Won't you try to love me as a wife loves her husband?"

She turned away. "I cannot," she answered in a low voice, yet firm and distinct. It was a voice in which even the most sanguine must have recognized the accent of hopeless certainty, inevitable despair.

"Leam, it will be your salvation," cried Alick, taking her hands. He meant her spiritual salvation, not her personal safety: it was a prayer, not a threat.

"You would not force me by anything you may know?" asked Leam in the same low, firm, distinct voice. "Not even for safety, Alick."

"Which I would buy with my own," he answered--"with my eternal salvation."

"I am not worthy of such love," said Leam trembling. "And oh, dear Alick, do not blame me, but I cannot return it," she added piteously.

She saw him start and heard him moan when she said this, but for a moment he was silent. He seemed half stunned as if by a heavy blow, but one that he was doing his best to bear. "Tell me so again, Leam. Let me be convinced," he then said with pathetic calmness, looking into her face. "You cannot love me?--never? never?"

"Never," she said, her voice breaking.

Alick covered his face in his hands, and she saw the tears trickle slowly through his fingers. He made no com-plaint, no protestation, only covered up his face and prayed, weeping, recognizing his fate.

She was sorry and heart-struck. She felt cruel, selfish, ungrateful, but for all that she could not yield nor say that she would marry him, trying to love him. Confused images of something dearer than this as the love of her life passed before her mind. They were images without recognizable form or tangible substance, but they were the true love, and this was not like them. No, she could not yield. Sorry as she might be for him, and was, she could not promise to marry him.

"Yes," he then said after a pause, lifting up his wan face, tear-stained and disordered, but making a sad attempt to smile--"yes, dear Leam, I was, as you say, dreaming. We shall always be friends, though--brother and sister, as we have been--to the end of our lives, shall we not?"

"Yes," was her answer, tears in her own eyes and a kind of wonder at her hardness running through her repugnance.

"Thank you, darling, thank you! If you want a friend, and I can be that friend and can serve you, you will come to me, will you not? You may want me some day, and you know that I shall not fail you. Don't you know that, my royal Leam?"

"I am sure of you," she half whispered, shuddering. To be in his power and to have rejected him! It all seemed very terrible and confused to Leam, to whom things complex and entangled were abhorrent.

"And now forget all this. I was only dreaming, dear. Why, no, of course you could not have married me--never could--never, never! I know that well enough now. You see I have been ill," nervously plucking at his hands, "and have had strange fancies, and I do not know myself or anything about me quite yet. But forget it all. It was only a sick fancy, and I thought what did not exist"

"I am sorry to have hurt you even in fancy," said Leam; giving a sigh of relief. "I do not like to see you unhappy, Alick. You are so-good to me."

"And to the end of my life I shall be what I have been," he said earnestly. "You can trust me, Leam."

"I am sorry I have hurt you," she said again, bending forward and looking up into his face. "But it was only a dream, was it not?" pleadingly.

He smiled pitifully, "Yes, dear, only a dream," he answered, turning away his head. After a while he took her hand and looked into her face, "And now it has passed," he said, calm that she should not be sorry.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

LOVE'S SEPULCHRE.

Build for my love a costly sepulchre; Not underneath cathedral arches dim, Where the sad soul may wake to comfort her The stately music of a funeral hymn;

Nor on some wind-swept hill, whose wavering grass Sways to the summer breezes blowing free, While the great cedars, rustling as they pass, Murmur a cadence of the mournful sea;

Not in the arched depths of the solemn woods, Within the flickering shadows cool and deep, Where the still wing of silence ever broods, And woos the weary soul to dreamless sleep.

But build it in the temple of my heart, And from the sacred and mysterious shrine A flame of deathless memory shall start, Tended by Sorrow and by Love divine.

All sweetest recollections of past joy Shall haunt that shrine, to make it heavenly fair: All memories of bliss without alloy Shall cluster in undying beauty there.

There quiet peace shall hold resistless sway: Softer than snow the holy hush shall be. Till even Sorrow gently glide away, And Love divine alone keep watch with me.

KATE HILLARD.

LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA.

BY LADY BARKER.

ALGOA BAY, October 23, 1875.

Two days ago we steamed out of Table Bay on just such a gray, drizzling afternoon as that on which we entered it. But the weather cleared directly we got out to sea, and since then it has carried us along as though we had been on a pleasant summer cruise. All yesterday we were coasting along the low downs which edge the dangerous sea-board for miles upon miles. From the deck of the Edinburgh Castle the effect is monotonous enough, although just now everything is brightly green; and, with their long ribbon fringe of white breaker-foam glinting in the spring sunshine, the stretches of undulating hillocks looked their best. This part of the coast is well lighted, and it was always a matter of felicitation at night when, every eighty miles or so, the guiding rays of a lighthouse shone out in the soft gloom of the starlight night. One of these lonely towers stands more than eight hundred feet above the sea-level, and warns ships off the terrible Agulhas Bank.

We have dropped our anchor this fresh bright morning a mile or so from the shore on which Port Elizabeth stands. Algoa Bay is not much of a shelter, and it is always a chance whether a sudden south-easter may not come tearing down upon the shipping, necessitating a sudden tripping of anchors and running out to sea to avoid the fate which is staring us warningly in the face in the shape of the gaunt ribs or rusty cylinders of sundry cast-away vessels. To-day the weather is on its good behavior; the south-easter rests on its

aëry nest As still as a brooding dove;

and sun and sea are doing their best to show off the queer little straggling town creeping up the low sandy hills that lie before us. I am assured that Port Elizabeth is a flourishing mercantile place. From the deck of our ship I can't at all perceive that it is flourishing, or doing anything except basking in the pleasant sunshine. But when I go on shore an hour or two later I am shown a store which takes away my breath, and before whose miscellaneous contents the stoutest-hearted female shopper must needs _baisser son pavilion_. Everything in this vast emporium looked as neat and orderly as possible, and, though the building was twice as big as the largest co-operative store in London, there was no hurry or confusion. Thimbles and ploughs, eau-de-cologne and mangles, American stoves, cotton dresses of astounding patterns to suit the taste of Dutch ladies, harmoniums and flat-irons,--all stood peaceably side by side together. But these were all "unconsidered trifles" next the more serious business of the establishment, which was wool--wool in every shape and stage and bale. In this department, however, although for the sake of the dear old New Zealand days my heart warms at the sight of the huge packages, I was not supposed to take any interest; so we pass quickly out into the street again, get into a large open carriage driven by a black coachman, and make the best of our way up to a villa on the slope of the sandy hill. Once I am away from the majestic influence of that store the original feeling of Port Elizabeth being rather a dreary place comes back upon me; but we drive all about--to the Park, which may be said to be in its swaddling-clothes _as_ a park, and to the Botanic Gardens, where the culture of foreign and colonial flowers and shrubs is carried on under the chronic difficulties of too much sun and wind and too little water. Everywhere there is building going on--very modest building, it is true, with rough-and-ready masonry or timber, and roofs of zinc painted in strips of light colors, but everywhere there are signs of progress and growth. People look bored, but healthy, and it does not surprise me in the least to hear that though there are a good many inhabitants, there is not much society. A pretty little luncheon and a pleasant hour's chat in a cool, shady drawing-room, with plenty of new books and music and flowers, gave me an agreeable impression to carry back on board the ship; which, by the way, seemed strangely silent and deserted when we returned, for most of our fellow-passengers had disembarked here on their way to different parts of the interior.

As I saunter up and down the clean, smart-looking deck of what has been our pleasant floating home during these past four weeks, I suddenly perceive a short, squat pyramid on the shore, standing out oddly enough among the low-roofed houses. If it had only been red instead of gray, it might have passed for the model of the label on Bass's beer--bottles; but, even as it is, I feel convinced that there is a story connected with it: and so it proves, for this ugly, most unsentimental-looking bit of masonry was built long ago by a former governor as a record of the virtues and perfections of his dead wife, whom, among other lavish epithets of praise, he declares to have been "the most perfect of women." Anyhow, there it stands, on what was once a lonely strip of sand and sea, a memorial--if one can only believe the stone story, now nearly a hundred years old--of a great love and a great sorrow; and one can envy the one and pity the other just as much when looking at this queer, unsightly monument as when one stands on the pure marble threshold of the exquisite Taj Mahal at Agra, and reads that it too, in all its grace and beauty, was reared "in memory of an undying love."

Although the day has been warm and balmy, the evening air strikes chill and raw, and our last evening on board the dear old ship has to be spent under shelter, for it is too cold to sit on deck. With the first hours of daylight next morning we have to be up and packing, for by ten o'clock we must be on board the Florence, a small, yacht-like coasting-steamer which can go much closer into the sand-blocked harbors scooped by the action of the rivers all along the coast. It is with a very heavy heart that I, for one, say good-bye to the Edinburgh Castle, where I have passed so many happy hours and made some pleasant acquaintances. A ship is a very forcing-house of friendship, and no one who has not taken a voyage can realize how rapidly an acquaintance grows and ripens into a friend under the lonely influences of sea and sky. We have all been so happy together, everything has been so comfortable, everybody so kind, that one would indeed be cold-hearted if, when the last moment of our halcyon voyage arrived, it could bring with it anything short of a regret.

With the same chivalrous goodness and courtesy which has taken thought for the comfort of our every movement since we left Dartmouth, our captain insists on seeing us safely on board the Florence (what a toy-boat she looks after our stately ship!) and satisfying himself that we can be comfortably settled once more in our doll's house of a new cabin. Then there comes a reluctant "Good-bye" to him and all our kind care-takers of the Edinburgh Castle; and the last glimpse we catch of her--for the Florence darts out of the bay like a swallow in a hurry--is her dipping her ensign in courteous farewell to us.

In less than twenty-four hours we had reached another little port, some hundred and fifty miles or so up the coast, called East London. Here the harbor is again only an open roadstead, and hardly any vessel drawing more than three or four feet of water can get in at all near the shore, for between us and it is a bar of shifting sand, washed down, day by day, by the strong current of the river Buffalo. All the cargo has to be transferred to lighters, and a little tug steamer bustles backward and forward with messages of entreaty to those said lighters to come out and take away their loads. We had dropped our anchor by daylight, yet at ten o'clock scarcely a boat had made its appearance alongside, and every one was fuming and fretting at the delay and consequent waste of fine weather and daylight. That is to say, it was a fine bright day overhead, with sunshine and sparkle all round, but the heavy roll of the sea never ceased for a moment. From one side to the other, until her ports touched the water, backward and forward, with slow, monotonous heaving, our little vessel swayed with the swaying rollers until everybody on board felt sick and sorry. "This is comparatively a calm day," I was told: "you can't possible imagine from this what rolling really is." But I _can_ imagine quite easily, and do not at all desire a closer acquaintance with this restless Indian Ocean. Breakfast is a moment of penance: little G---- is absolutely fainting from agonies of sea-sickness, though he has borne all our South-Atlantic tossings with perfect equanimity; and it is with real joy that I hear the lifeboat is alongside, and that the kind-hearted captain of the Florence (_how_ kind sailors are!) offers to take babies, nurse and me on shore, so as to escape a long day of this agonizing rolling. In happy unconsciousness of what landing at East London, even in a lifeboat, meant when a bar had to be crossed, we were all tumbled and bundled, more or less unceremoniously, into the great, roomy boat, and were immediately taken in hand by the busy little tug. For half a mile or more we made good progress in her wake, being in a position to set at naught the threatening water-mountains which came tumbling in furious haste from seaward. It was not until we seemed close to the shore and all our troubles over that the tug was obliged to cast us off, owing to the rapidly shoaling water, and we prepared to make the best of our own way in. Bad was that best, indeed, though the peril came and went so quickly that it is but a confused impression I retain of what seemed to me a really terrible moment. One instant I hear felicitations exchanged between our captain--who sits protectingly close to me and poor, fainting little G----, who lies like death in my arms--and the captain of the lifeboat. The next moment, in spite of sudden panic and presence of danger, I could laugh to hear the latter sing out in sharpest tones of terror and dismay, "Ah, you would, would you?" coupled with rapid orders to the stout rowers and shouts to us of "Look out!" and I _do_ look out, to see on one side sand which the retreating wave has sucked dry, and in which the boat-seems trying to bury herself as though she were a mole: on the other hand there towers above us a huge green wave, white-crested and curled, which is rushing at us like a devouring monster. I glance, as I think, for the last time, at the pale nurse, on whose lap lies the baby placidly sucking his bottle. I see a couple of sailors lay hold of her and the child with one hand each, whilst with the other they cling desperately to the thwarts. A stout seafaring man flings the whole weight of his ponderous pilot-coated body upon G---- and me: I hear a roar of water, and, lo! we are washed right up alongside of the rude landing-place, still _in_ the boat indeed, but wet and frightened to the last degree. Looking back on it all, I can distinctly remember that it was not the sight of the overhanging wave which cost me my deadliest pang of sickening fright, but the glimpse I caught of the shining, cruel-looking sand, sucking us in so silently and greedily. We were all trembling so much that it seemed as impossible to stand upright on the earth as on the tossing waters, and it was with reeling, drunken-looking steps that we rolled and staggered through the heavy sand-street until we reached the shelter of an exceedingly dirty hotel. Everything in it required courage to touch, and it was with many qualms that I deposited limp little G---- on a filthy sofa. However, the mistress of the house looked clean, and so did the cups and saucers she quickly produced; and by the time we had finished a capital breakfast we were all quite in good spirits again, and so sharpened up as to be able to "mock ourselves" of our past perils and present discomforts. Outside there were strange, beautiful shrubs in flower, tame pigeons came cooing and bowing in at the door, and above all there was an enchanting freshness and balminess in the sunny air.

In about an hour "Capting Florence" (as G---- styles our new commander) calls for us and takes us out sight-seeing. First and foremost, across the river to the rapidly-growing railway lines, where a brand-new locomotive was hissing away with full steam up. Here we were met and welcomed by the energetic superintendent of this iron road, and, to my intense delight, after explaining to me what a long distance into the interior the line had to go and how fast it was getting on, considering the difficulties in the way of doing anything in South Africa, from washing a pocket-handkerchief up to laying down a railway, he proposed that we should get _on_ the engine and go as far as the line was open for anything like safe traveling. Never were such delightful five minutes as those spent in whizzing along through the park-like country and cutting fast through the heavenly air. In vain did I smell that my serge skirts were getting dreadfully singed, in vain did I see most uncertain bits of rail before me: it was all too perfectly enchanting to care for danger or disgrace, and I could have found it in my heart to echo G----'s plaintive cry for "More!" when we came to the end and had to get off. But it consoled us a little to watch the stone-breaking machine crunching up small rocks as though they had been lumps of sugar, and after looking at that we set off for the unfinished station, and could take in, even in its present skeleton state, how commodious and handsome it will all be some day. You are all so accustomed to be whisked about the civilized world when and where you choose that it is difficult to make you understand the enormous boon the first line of railway is to a new country--not only for the convenience of travelers, but for the transport of goods, the setting free of hundreds of cattle and horses and drivers--all sorely needed for other purposes--and the fast-following effects of opening up the resources of the back districts. In these regions labor is the great difficulty, and one needs to hold both patience and temper fast with both one's hands when watching either Kafir or Coolie at work. The white man cannot or will not do much with his hands out here, so the navvies are slim-looking blacks, who jabber and grunt and sigh a good deal more than they work.

It is a fortunate circumstance that the delicious air keeps us all in a chronic state of hunger, for it appears in South Africa that one is expected to eat every half hour or so. And, shamed am I to confess, we _do_ eat--and eat with a good appetite too--a delicious luncheon at the superintendent's, albeit it followed closely on the heels of our enormous breakfast at the dirty hotel. Such a pretty little bachelor's box as it was!--so cool and quiet and neat!--built somewhat after the fashion of the Pompeian houses, with a small square garden full of orange trees in the centre, and the house running round this opening in four corridors. After lunch a couple of nice, light Cape carts came to the door, and we set off to see a beautiful garden whose owner had all a true Dutchman's passion for flowers. Here was fruit as well as flowers. Pine-apples and jasmine, strawberries and honeysuckle, grew side by side with bordering orange trees, feathery bamboos and sheltering gum trees. In the midst of the garden stood a sort of double platform, up whose steep border we all climbed: from this we got a good idea of the slightly undulating land all about, waving down like solidified billows to where the deep blue waters sparkled and rolled restlessly beyond the white line of waves ever breaking on the bar. I miss animal life sadly in these parts: the dogs I see about the streets are few in number, and miserably currish specimens of their kind. "Good dogs don't answer out here," I am told: that is to say, they get a peculiar sort of distemper, or ticks bite them, or they got weak from loss of blood, or become degenerate in some way. The horses and cattle are small and poor-looking, and hard-worked, very dear to buy and very difficult to keep and to feed. I don't even see many cats, and a pet bird is a rarity. However, as we stood on the breezy platform I saw a most beautiful wild bird fly over the rose-hedge just below us. It was about as big as a crow, but with a strange iridescent plumage. When it flitted into the sunshine its back and wings shone like a rainbow, and the next moment it looked perfectly black and velvety in the shade. Now a turquoise-blue tint comes out on its spreading wings, and a slant in the sunshine turns the blue into a chrysoprase green. Nobody could tell me its name: our Dutch host spoke exactly like Hans Breitmann, and declared it was a "bid of a crow," and so we had to leave it and the platform and come down to more roses and tea. There was so much yet to be seen and to be done that we could not stay long, and, laden with magnificent bouquets of _gloire de Dijon_ roses and honeysuckle, and divers strange and lovely flowers, we drove off again in our Cape carts. I observed that instead of saying "Whoa!" or checking the horses in anyway by the reins, the driver always whistles to them--long, low whistle--and they stand quite still directly. We bumped up and down, over extraordinarily rough places, and finally slid down a steep cutting to the brink of the river Buffalo, over which we were ferried, all standing, on a big punt, or rather pontoon. A hundred yards or so of rapid driving then took us to a sort of wharf which projected into the river, where the important-looking little tug awaited us; and no sooner were we all safely on board--rather a large party by this time, for we had gone on picking up stragglers ever since we started, only three in number, from the hotel--than she sputtered and fizzed herself off up-stream. By this time it was the afternoon, and I almost despair of making you see the woodland beauty of that broad mere, fringed down to the water's edge on one side with shrubs and tangle of roses and woodbine, with ferns and every lovely green creeping thing. That was on the bank which was sheltered from the high winds: the other hillside showed the contrast, for there, though green indeed, only a few feathery tufts of pliant shrubs had survived the force of some of these south-eastern gales. We paddled steadily along in mid-stream, and from the bridge (where little G---- and I had begged "Capting Florence" to let us stand) one could see the double of each leaf and tendril and passing cloud mirrored sharp and clear in the crystalline water. The lengthening shadows from rock and fallen crag were in some places flung quite across our little boat, and so through the soft, lovely air, flooded with brightest sunshine, we made our way, up past Picnic Creek, where another stream joins the Buffalo, and makes miniature green islands and harbors at its mouth, up as far as the river was navigable for even so small a steamer as ours. Every one was sorry when it became time to turn, but there was no choice: the sun-burned, good-looking captain of the tug held up a warning hand, and round we went with a wide sweep, under the shadows, out into the sunlight, down the middle of the stream, all too soon to please us.

Before we left East London, however, there was one more great work to be glanced at, and accordingly we paid a hasty visit to the office of the superintendent of the new harbor-works, and saw plans and drawings of what will indeed be a magnificent achievement when carried out. Yard by yard, with patient under-sea sweeping, all that waste of sand brought down by the Buffalo is being cleared away; yard by yard, two massive arms of solidest masonry are stretching themselves out beyond those cruel breakers: the river is being forced into so narrow a channel that the rush of the water must needs carry the sand far out to sea in future, and scatter it in soundings where it cannot accumulate into such a barrier as that which now exists.

Lighthouses will guard this safe entrance into a tranquil anchorage, and so, at some not too far distant day, there is good hope that East London may be one of the most valuable harbors on this vast coast; and when her railway has reached even the point to which it is at present projected, nearly two hundred miles away, it will indeed be a thriving place. Even now, there is a greater air of movement and life and progress about the little seaport, what with the railway and the harbor-works, than at any other place I have yet seen; and each great undertaking is in the hands of men of first-rate ability and experience, who are as persevering as they are energetic. After looking well over these most interesting plans there was nothing left for us to do except to make a sudden raid on the hotel, pick up our shawls and bags, pay a most moderate bill of seven shillings and sixpence for breakfast for three people and luncheon for two, and the use of a room all day, piteously entreat the mistress of the inn to sell us half a bottle of milk for G----'s breakfast to-morrow--as he will not drink the preserved milk--and so back again on board the tug. The difficulty about milk and butter is the first trouble which besets a family traveling in these parts. Everywhere milk is scarce and poor, and the butter such as no charwoman would touch in England. In vain does one behold from the sea thousands of acres of what looks like undulating green pasturage, and inland the same waving green hillocks stretch as far as the eye can reach: there is never a sheep or cow to be seen, and one hears that there is no water, or that the grass is sour, or that there is a great deal of sickness about among the animals in that locality. Whatever the cause, the result is the same--namely, that one has to go down on one's knees for a cupful of milk, which is but poor, thin stuff at its best, and that Irish salt butter out of a tub is a costly delicacy.

Having secured this precious quarter of a bottle of milk, for which I was really as grateful as though it had been the Koh-i-noor, we hastened back to the wharf and got on board the little tug again. "Now for the bridge!" cry G---- and I, for has not Captain Florence promised us a splendid but safe tossing across the bar? And faithfully he and the bar and the boat keep their word, for we are in no danger, it seems, and yet we appear to leap like a race-horse across the strip of sand, receiving a staggering buffet first on one paddle-wheel and then on the other from the angry guardian breakers, which seem sworn foes of boats and passengers. Again and again are we knocked aside by huge billows, as though the poor little tug were a walnut-shell; again and again do we recover ourselves, and blunder bravely on, sometimes with but one paddle in the water, sometimes burying our bowsprit in a big green wave too high to climb, and dashing right through it as fast as if we shut our eyes and went at everything. The spray flies high over our heads, G---- and I are drenched over and over again, but we shake the sparkling water off our coats, for all the world like Newfoundland dogs, and are all right again in a moment, "Is that the very last?" asks G---- reluctantly as we take our last breaker like a five-barred gate, flying, and find ourselves safe and sound, but quivering a good deal, in what seems comparatively smooth water. Is it smooth, though? Look at the Florence and all the other vessels. Still at it, see-saw, backward and forward, roll, roll, roll! How thankful we all are to have escaped a long day of sickening, monotonous motion! But there is the getting on board to be accomplished, for the brave little tug dare not come too near to her big sister steamboat or she would roll over on her. So we signal for a boat, and quickly the largest which the Florence possesses is launched and manned--no easy task in such a sea, but accomplished in the smartest and most seamanlike fashion. The sides of the tug are low, so it is not very difficult to scramble and tumble into the boat, which is laden to the water's edge by new passengers from East London and their luggage. When, however, we have reached the rolling Florence it is no easy matter to get out of the said boat and on board. There is a ladder let down, indeed, from the Florence's side, but how are we to use it when one moment half a dozen rungs are buried deep in the sea, and the next instant ship and ladder and all have rolled right away from us? It has to be done, however, and what a tower of strength and encouragement does "Capting Florence" prove himself at this juncture! We are all to sit perfectly still: no one is to move until his name is called, and then he is to come unhesitatingly and do exactly what he is told.

"Pass up the baby!" is the first order which I hear given, and that astonishing baby is "passed up" accordingly. I use the word "astonishing" advisedly, for never was an infant so bundled about uncomplainingly. He is just as often upside down as not; he is generally handed from one quartermaster to the other by the gathers of his little blue flannel frock; seas break over his cradle on deck, but nothing disturbs him. He grins and sleeps and pulls at his bottle through everything, and grows fatter and browner and more impudent every day. On this occasion, when--after rivaling Léotard's most daring feats on the trapeze in my scramble up the side of a vessel which was lurching away from me--I at last reached the deck, I found the ship's carpenter nursing the baby, who had seized the poor man's beard firmly with one hand, and with the finger and thumb of the other was attempting to pick out one of his merry blue eyes. "Avast there!" cried the long-suffering sailor, and gladly relinquished the mischievous bundle to me.

Up with the anchor, and off we go once more into the gathering darkness of what turns out to be a wet and windy night. Next day the weather had recovered its temper, and I was called upon deck directly after breakfast to see the "Gates of St. John," a really fine pass on the coast where the river Umzimvubu rushes through great granite cliffs into the sea. If the exact truth is to be told, I must confess I am a little disappointed with this coast-scenery. I have heard so much of its beauty, and as yet, though I have seen it under exceptionally favorable conditions of calm weather, which has allowed us to stand in very close to shore, I have not seen anything really fine until these "Gates" came in view. It has all been monotonous, undulating downs, here and there dotted with trees, and in some places the ravines were filled with what we used to call in New Zealand _bush_--i.e., miscellaneous greenery. Here and there a bold cliff or tumbled pile of red rock makes a landmark for the passing ships, but otherwise the uniformity is great indeed. The ordinary weather along this coast is something frightful, and the great reputation of our little Florence is built on the method in which she rides dry and safe as a duck among these stormy waters. Now that we are close to "fair Natal," the country opens out and improves in beauty. There are still the same sloping, rolling downs, but higher downs rise behind them, and again beyond are blue and purpling hills. Here and there, too, are clusters of fat, dumpy haystacks, which in reality are no haystacks at all, but Kafir kraals. Just before we pass the cliff and river which marks where No-Man's Land ends and Natal begins these little locations are more frequently to be observed, though what their inhabitants subsist on is a marvel to me, for we are only a mile or so from shore, and all the seeing power of all the field-glasses on board fails to discern a solitary animal. We can see lots of babies crawling about the hole which serves as door to a Kafir hut, and they are all as fat as little pigs; but what do they live on? Buttermilk, I am told--that is to say, sour milk, for the true Kafir palate does not appreciate fresh, sweet milk--and a sort of porridge made of _mealies_. I used to think "mealies" was a coined word for potatoes, but it really signifies maize or Indian corn, which is rudely crushed and ground, and forms the staple food of man and beast.

In the mean time, we are speeding gayly over the bright waters, never very calm along this shore. Presently we come to a spot clearly marked by some odd-colored, tumbled-down cliffs and the remains of a great iron butt, where, more than a hundred years ago, the Grosvenor, a splendid clipper ship, was wrecked. The men nearly all perished or were made away with, but a few women were got on shore and carried off as prizes to the kraals of the Kafir "inkosis" or chieftains. What sort of husbands these stalwart warriors made to their reluctant brides tradition does not say, but it is a fact that almost all the children were born mad, and their descendants are, many of them, lunatics or idiots up to the present time. As the afternoon draws on a chill mist creeps over the hills and provokingly blots out the coast, which gets more beautiful every league we go. I wanted to remain up and see the light on the bluff just outside Port d'Urban, but a heavy shower drove me down to my wee cabin before ten o'clock. Soon after midnight the rolling of the anchor-chains and the sudden change of motion from pitching and jumping to the old monotonous roll told us that we were once more outside a bar, with a heavy sea on, and that there we must remain until the tug came to fetch us. But, alas! the tug had to make short work of it next morning, on account of the unaccommodating state of the tide, and all our hopes of breakfasting on shore were dashed by a hasty announcement at 5 A.M. that the tug was alongside, the mails were rapidly being put on board of her, and that she could not wait for passengers or anything else, because ten minutes later there would not be water enough to float her over the bar.

"When shall _we_ be able to get over the bar?" I asked dolefully.

"Not until the afternoon," was the prompt and uncompromising reply, delivered through my keyhole by the authority in charge of us. And he proved to be quite right; but I am bound to say the time passed more quickly than we had dared to hope or expect, for an hour later a bold little fishing-boat made her way through the breakers and across the bar in the teeth of wind and rain, bringing F---- on board. He has been out here these eight months, and looks a walking advertisement of the climate and temperature of our new home, so absolutely healthy is his appearance. He is very cheery about liking the place, and particularly insists on the blooming faces and sturdy limbs I shall see belonging to the young Natalians. Altogether, he appears thoroughly happy and contented, liking his work, his position, everything and everybody; which is all extremely satisfactory to hear. There is so much to tell and so much to behold that, as G---- declares, "it is afternoon directly," and, the signal-flag being up, we trip our anchor once more and rush at the bar, two quartermasters and an officer at the wheel, the pilot and captain on the bridge, all hands on deck and on the alert, for always, under the most favorable circumstances, the next five minutes hold a peril in every second, "Stand by for spray!" sings out somebody, and we do stand by, luckily for ourselves, for "spray" means the top of two or three waves. The dear little Florence is as plucky as she is pretty, and appears to shut her eyes and lower her head and go _at_ the bar. Scrape, scrape, scrape! "We've stuck! No, we haven't! Helm hard down! Over!" and so we are. Among the breakers, it is true, buffeted hither and thither, knocked first to one side and then to the other; but we keep right on, and a few more turns of the screw take us into calm water under the green hills of the bluff. The breakers are behind us, we have twenty fathoms of water under our keel, the voyage is ended and over, the captain takes off his straw hat to mop his curly head, everybody's face loses the expression of anxiety and rigidity it has worn these past ten minutes, and boats swarm like locusts round the ship. The baby is passed over the ship's side for the last time, having been well kissed and petted and praised by every one as he was handed from one to the other, and we row swiftly away to the low sandy shore of the "Point."

Only a few warehouses, or rather sheds of warehouses, are to be seen, and a rude sort of railway-station, which appears to afford indiscriminate shelter to boats as well as to engines. There are leisurely trains which saunter into the town of D'Urban, a mile and a half away, every half hour or so, but one of these "crawlers" had just started. The sun was very hot, and we voyagers were all sadly weary and headachy. But the best of the colonies is the prompt, self-sacrificing kindness of old-comers to new-comers. A gentleman had driven down in his own nice, comfortable pony-carriage, and without a moment's hesitation he insisted on our all getting into it and making the best of our way to our hotel. It is too good an offer to be refused, for the sun is hot and the babies are tired to death; so we start, slowly enough, to plough our way through heavy sand up to the axles. If the tide had been out we could have driven quickly along the hard, dry sand; but we comfort ourselves by remembering that there had been water enough on the bar, and make the best of our way through clouds of impalpable dust to a better road, of which a couple of hundred yards land us at our hotel. It looks bare and unfurnished enough, in all conscience, but it is a new place, and must be furnished by degrees. At all events, it is tolerably clean and quiet, and we can wash our sunburned faces and hands, and, as nurse says, "turn ourselves round."

Coolies swarm in every direction, picturesque fish- and fruit-sellers throng the verandah of the kitchen a little way off, and everything looks bright and green and fresh, having been well washed by the recent rains. There are still, however, several feet of dust in the streets, for they are _made_ of dust; and my own private impression is, that all the water in the harbor would not suffice to lay the dust of D'Urban for more than half an hour. With the restlessness of people who have been cooped up on board ship for a month, we insist, the moment it is cool enough, on being taken out for a walk. Fortunately, the public gardens are close at hand, and we amuse ourselves very well in them for an hour or two, but we are all thoroughly tired and worn out, and glad to get to bed, even in gaunt, narrow rooms on hard pallets.

The two following days were spent in looking after and collecting our cumbrous array of boxes and baskets. Tin baths, wicker chairs and baskets, all had to be counted and recounted, until one got weary of the word "luggage;" but that is the penalty of drafting babies about the world. In the intervals of the serious business of tracing No. 5 or running No. 10 to earth in the corner of a warehouse, I made many pleasant acquaintances and received kindest words and notes of welcome from unknown friends. All this warm-hearted, unconventional kindness goes far to make the stranger forget his "own people and his father's house," and feel at once at home amid strange and unfamiliar scenes. After all, "home" is portable, luckily, and a welcoming smile and hand-clasp act as a spell to create it in any place. We also managed, after business-hours, when it was of no use making expeditions to wharf or custom-house after recusant carpet-bags, to drive to the Botanic Gardens. They are extensive and well kept, but seem principally devoted to shrubs. I was assured that this is the worst time of year for flowers, as the plants have not yet recovered from the winter drought. A dry winter and wet summer is the correct atmospheric fashion here: in winter everything is brown and dusty and dried up, in summer green and fragrant and well watered. The gardens are in good order, and I rather regretted not being able to examine them more thoroughly. Another afternoon we drove to the Berea, a sort of suburban Richmond, where the rich semi-tropical vegetation is cleared away in patches, and villas with pretty pleasure-grounds are springing up in every direction. The road winds up the luxuriantly-clothed slopes, with every here and there lovely sea-views of the harbor, with the purpling lights of the Indian Ocean stretching away beyond. Every villa must have an enchanting prospect from its front door, and one can quite understand how alluring to the merchants and business--men of D'Urban must be the idea of getting away after office-hours, and sleeping on such; high ground in so fresh and healthy an: atmosphere. And here I must say that we Maritzburgians (I am only one in prospective) wage a constant and deadly warfare with the D'Urbanites on the score of the health and convenience of our respective cities. _We_ are two thousand feet above the sea and fifty-two miles inland, so we talk in a pitying tone of the poor D'Urbanites as dwellers in a very hot and unhealthy place. "Relaxing" is the word we apply to their climate when we want to be particularly nasty, and they retaliate by reminding us that they are ever so much older than we are (which is an advantage in a colony), and that they are on the coast, and can grow all manner of nice things which we cannot compass, to say nothing of their climate being more equable than ours, and their thunderstorms, though longer in duration, mere flashes in the pan compared to what we in our amphitheatre of hills have to undergo at the hands of the electric current. We never can find answer to that taunt, and if the D'Urbanites only follow up their victory by allusions to their abounding bananas and other fruits, their vicinity to the shipping, and consequent facility of getting almost anything quite easily, we are completely silenced, and it is a wonder if we retain presence of mind enough to murmur "Flies." On the score of dust we are about equal, but I must in fairness confess that D'Urban is a more lively and a better-looking town than Maritzburg when you are in it, though the effect from a distance is not so good. It is very odd how unevenly the necessaries of existence are distributed in this country. Here at D'Urban anything hard in the way of stone is a treasure: everything is soft and friable: sand and finest shingle, so fine as to be mere dust, are all the available material for road-making. I am told that later on I shall find that a cartload of sand in Maritzburg is indeed a rare and costly thing: there we are all rock, a sort of flaky, slaty rock underlying every place. Our last day, or rather half day, in D'Urban was very full of sightseeing and work. F---- was extremely anxious for me to see the sun rise from the signal-station on the bluff, and accordingly he, G---- and I started with the earliest dawn. We drove through the sand again in a hired and springless Cape cart down to the Point, got into the port-captain's boat and rowed across a little strip of sand at the foot of a winding path cut out of the dense vegetation which makes the bluff such a refreshingly green headland to eyes of wave-worn voyagers. A stalwart Kafir carried our picnic basket, with tea and milk, bread and butter and eggs, up the hill, and it was delightful to follow the windings of the path through beautiful bushes bearing strange and lovely flowers, and knit together in patches in a green tangle by the tendrils of a convolvulus or clematis, or sort of wild, passion-flower, whose blossoms were opening to the fresh morning air. It was a cool but misty morning, and though we got to our destination in ample time, there was never any sunrise at all to be seen. In fact, the sun steadily declined to get up the whole day, so far as I knew, for the sea looked gray and solemn and sleepy, and the land kept its drowsy mantle of haze over its flat shore; which haze thickened and deepened into a Scotch mist as the morning wore on. We returned by the leisurely railway--a railway so calm and stately in its method of progression that it is not at all unusual to see a passenger step calmly out of the train when it is at its fullest speed of crawl, and wave his hand to his companions as he disappears down the by-path leading to his little home. The passengers are conveyed at a uniform rate of sixpence a head, which sixpence is collected promiscuously by a small boy at odd moments during the journey. There are no nice distinctions of class, either, for we all travel amicably together in compartments which are a judicious mixture of a third-class carriage and a cattle-truck. Of course, wood is the only fuel used, and that but sparingly, for it is exceedingly costly.

There was still much to be done by the afternoon--many visitors to receive, notes to write and packages to arrange, for our traveling of these fifty-two miles spreads itself over a good many hours, as you will see. About three o'clock the government mule-wagon came to the door. It may truly and literally be described as "stopping the way," for not only is the wagon itself a huge and cumbrous machine, but it is drawn by eight mules in pairs, and driven by a couple of black drivers. I say "driven by a couple of drivers," because the driving was evidently an affair of copartnership: one held the reins--such elaborate reins as they were! a confused tangle of leather--and the other had the care of two or three whips of differing lengths. The drivers were both jet black--not Kafirs, but Cape blacks--descendants of the old slaves taken by the Dutch. They appeared to be great friends, these two, and took earnest counsel together at every rut and drain and steep pinch of the road, which stretched away, over hill and dale, before us, a broad red track, with high green hedges on either hand. Although the rain had not yet fallen long or heavily, the ditches were all running freely with red, muddy water, and the dust had already begun to cake itself into a sticky, pasty red clay. The wagon was shut in by curtains at the back and sides, and could hold eight passengers easily. Luckily for the poor mules, however, we were only five grown-up people, including the drivers. The road was extremely pretty, and the town looked very picturesque as we gradually rose above it and looked down on it and the harbor together. Of a fine, clear afternoon it would have been still nicer, though I was much congratulated on the falling rain on account of the absence of its alternative--dust. Still, it was possible to have too much of a good thing, and by the time we reached Pine Town, only fourteen miles away, the heavy roads were beginning to tell on the poor mules, and the chill damp of the closing evening made us all only too thankful to get under the shelter of a roadside inn (or hotel, as they are called here), which was snug and bright and comfortable enough to be a credit to any colony. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be told that this inn was not only a favorite place for people to come out to from D'Urban to spend their holiday time in fine weather (there is a pretty little church in the village hard by), but also that it was quite _de rigueur_ for all honeymoons to be spent amid its pretty scenery.

A steady downpour of rain all through the night made our early start next day an affair of doubt and discouragement and dismal prophecy; but we persevered, and accomplished another long stage through a cold persistent drizzle before reaching an inn, where we enjoyed simply the best breakfast I ever tasted, or at all events the best I have tasted in Natal. The mules were also unharnessed, and after taking, each, a good roll on the damp grass, turned out in the drizzling rain for a rest and a nibble until their more substantial repast was ready. The rain cleared up from time to time, but an occasional heavy shower warned us that the weather was still sulky. It was in much better heart and spirits, however, that we made a second start about eleven o'clock, and struggled on through heavy roads up and down weary hills, slipping here, sliding there, and threatening to stick everywhere. Our next stage was to a place where the only available shelter was a filthy inn, at which we lingered as short a time as practicable--only long enough, in fact, to feed the mules--and then, with every prospect of a finer afternoon, set out once more on the last and longest stage of our journey. All the way the road has been very beautiful, in spite of the shrouding mist, especially at the Inchanga Pass, where round the shoulder of the hill as fair a prospect of curved green hills, dotted with clusters of timber exactly like an English park, of distant ranges rising in softly-rounded outlines, with deep violet shadows in the clefts and pale green lights on the slopes, stretches before you as the heart of painter could desire. Nestling out of sight amid this rich pasture-land are the kraals of a large Kafir location, and no one can say that these, the children of the soil, have not secured one of the most favored spots. To me it all looked like a fair mirage. I am already sick of beholding all this lovely country lying around, and yet of being told that food and fuel are almost at famine-prices. People say, "Oh, but you should see it in winter. _Now_ it is green, and there is plenty of feed on it, but three months ago no grass-eating creature could have picked up a living on all the country-side. It is all as brown and bare as parchment for half the year. _This_ is the spring." Can you not imagine how provoking it is to hear such statements made by old settlers, who know the place only too well, and to find out that all the radiant beauty which greets the traveler's eye is illusive, for in many places there are miles and miles without a drop of water for the flock and herds; consequently, there are no means of transport for all this fuel until the days of railways? Besides which, through Natal lies the great highway to the Diamond Fields, the Transvaal and the Free States, and all the opening-up country beyond; so it is more profitable to drive a wagon than to till a farm. Every beast with four legs is wanted to drag building materials or provisions. The supply of beef becomes daily more precarious and costly, for the oxen are all "treking," and one hears of nothing but diseases among animals--"horse sickness," pleuro-pneumonia, fowl sickness (I feel it an impertinence for the poultry to presume to be ill), and even dogs set up a peculiar and fatal sort of distemper among themselves.

But to return to the last hours of our journey. The mules struggle bravely along, though their ears are beginning to flap about any way, instead of being held straight and sharply pricked forward, and the encouraging cries of "Pull up, Capting! now then, Blue-bok, hi!" become more and more frequent: the driver in charge of the whips is less nice in his choice of a scourge with which to urge on the patient animals, and whacks them soundly with whichever comes first. The children have long ago wearied of the confinement and darkness of the back seats of the hooded vehicle; we are all black and blue from jolting in and out of deep holes hidden by mud which occur at every yard; but still our flagging spirits keep pretty good, for _our_ little Table Mountain has been left behind, whilst before us, leaning up in one corner of an amphitheatre of hills, are the trees which mark where Maritzburg nestles. The mules see it too, and, sniffing their stables afar off, jog along faster. Only one more rise to pull up: we turn a little off the high-road, and there, amid a young plantation of trees, with roses, honeysuckle and passion-flowers climbing up the posts of the wide verandah, a fair and enchanting prospect lying at our feet, stands our new home, with its broad red tiled roof stretching out a friendly welcome to the tired, belated travelers.

A SYLVAN SEARCH.

I.

From tales of rural gods I rose, And sought them through the woody deeps, Where, held in shadowy, sweet repose, The sunshine, like Endymion, sleeps-- Where murmurous waters softly sing To listening branches, bended low, And tuneful birds on waving wing, As Zephyrus, gently come and go.

II.

Vainly I sought the gods, yet heard Their whispering spirits say to mine, "Who seeks us finds the forests stirred By myriad voices all divine, And learns that still the mystic spell Of fauns and dryads fills the place With beauty myths have failed to tell-- One god in every hidden face."

MARY B. DODGE.

THE SONGS OF MIRZA-SCHAFFY.

It was in Vienna during the stormy days of October, 1848. The sky was lurid with the glow of surrounding conflagrations: roof and turret were illumined by the glaring reflection of the sea of fire, while the broad Danube madly stretched forth its blood-red tongue to the blood-red walls of the city. The clashing of weapons and rolling of drums resounded through the streets. Every house became in its turn a fortress, every window a porthole. During these days of horror there assembled in the evening at the dwelling of Friedrich Bodenstedt a circle of friends, who sought in conversation on literary topics some relief after the agitating experiences of the day.

"Bodenstedt," exclaimed Auerbach on one of these occasions, "tell us of your adventures in the East. Awake with blithesome touch the memories of your past: transport us into a new world where will be dispelled the gloom of the present."

"Yes, do," chimed in the rest, drawing their chairs closer together.

"Tell us, above all, of your famous teacher, Mirza-Schaffy," added Kaufmann.

One usually narrates one's experiences best in a circle of sympathetic listeners, and even under ordinary circumstances Bodenstedt was esteemed a good talker. Soon a spirit of cheerfulness prevailed, and as the friends sat far into the night, the tumult without, the burning suburbs, the beat of drums and the firing of cannons were forgotten.

Night after night the friends met--poets, philosophers, men of learning, artists--and sat, to use Bodenstedt's own words, "on the carpet of expectation, smoked the pipe of satisfaction, saw the sunshine of wine sparkle up from the flask, and fished for words of pearls with the delicate nets of the ears." The story of Eastern life grew and rounded in its proportions, and Auerbach, who seemed most of all entranced, insisted that the source of so fascinating a narrative should be guided through the "canal of the pen into the sea of publicity." Bodenstedt demurred, maintaining that the "art-hewn path from the head to the hand" was far more difficult to traverse than the natural one from the mouth to the ear.

"Yes, but it leads farther," rejoined Auerbach, "and what pleases us, who listen, you may rest assured, with critical ears, cannot fail to please in more extended circles."

Upon this foundation arose that delightful book, _A Thousand and One Days in the Orient_, which was the occasion of one of the most amusing mystifications and controversies that ever occupied the German literary world.

Friedrich Bodenstedt was born at Peine in Hanover, April 21, 1819. Notwithstanding his precocious intellectuality and remarkable poetic talents, he was condemned by his parents to a mercantile career. After a mournful apprenticeship he managed, however, to escape from this uncongenial employment, and pursued a course of study at Göttingen, Munich and Berlin, devoting himself chiefly to philology and history. The year 1840 found him in Moscow as private tutor in the family of Prince Galitzin, and shortly after he published his first volume of poetry. Later, he was appointed teacher of languages at the Tiflis Gymnasium, and the result of his learned investigations here were given to the world in his _People of Caucasus_, in which, however, were wholly thrust into the background poetical reminiscences evoked, as we have seen, by gifted and genial friends.

During his sojourn in Tiflis, the mountain-encompassed capital of Georgia, Bodenstedt undertook the study of the Tartar language, finding it to be a universally-employed means of communication with the many-tongued races of Caucasus. Among the numerous teachers recommended to him, he selected one called Mirza-Schaffy, "the wise man of Gjändsha," being attracted to him partly because of his calm, dignified demeanor, partly because he possessed a sufficient knowledge of Russian, with which Bodenstedt was perfectly familiar, to render intercourse easy and agreeable.

Here it may not be amiss to observe that "Mirza" is a title which placed before a proper name signifies "scribe"--after a name it designates a prince. Thus, Mirza-Schaff[^y] means "Scribe Schaffy," but Schaffy-Mirzâ would mean "Prince Schaffy." Each word, when pronounced separately, has the accent on the last syllable, but together they are pronounced as one word, with the accent on the final syllable.

The Tartars possess no such brilliant stores of literature as the Persians, but they are endowed with a manly vigor which the latter have lost. Mirza-Schaffy was a Tartar by birth, nurtured with Persian culture, and was, when Bodenstedt made his acquaintance, in December, 1843, a man of some forty years of age, of very stately appearance and excessive neatness. He wore a soft silken suit, about which he carelessly draped a blue Turkish cloak, while a tall black sheep-skin hat of sugar-loaf form adorned his shapely head. A dark, well-tended beard framed his handsomely chiseled face, whose calm, earnest expression was heightened by the deep, rich hue of his complexion, and his large, serious eyes were void of the usual cunning of his class. His high-heeled slippers, whose purity he miraculously preserved unimpaired when mud was at its height in the streets of Tiflis, he left always at the threshold of his pupil's room, pressing carpet and divan only with his immaculate variegated stockings.

But Mirza-Schaffy's main charm lay in his thorough genuineness, his earnestness of purpose and the tranquillity of his whole being. Misfortune and sorrow had visited him in many forms, leaving their impress on his brow, yet he had not been crushed; and thoroughly as he appreciated the refined enjoyments of life, he could most gracefully renounce luxuries attainable only by Fortune's favorites. So long as he could have his _tschibuq_ filled with good tobacco and his goblet with good wine, both of which were plentiful in Tiflis, he seemed content with the entire dispensation of the world. Highly as he prized, however, the beneficent effects of wine, he was an enemy to excess, having made moderation in all things the law of his life.

The whole atmosphere surrounding the man produced a deep and lasting impression on Bodenstedt, who, longing to immortalize the name of one who had unfolded to him the treasures of Eastern lore, and from whom he had derived so much pleasure and profit, conceived the idea of representing his teacher in his public characterization with poetic freedom, as a type of the Eastern poet and man of learning. Poet, Mirza-Schaffy was not in reality, for although he was skilled in the art of rhyming, and could translate with ease any simple song from the Persian into the Tartar language, Bodenstedt found only one of his original efforts which was worthy of preservation. The song referred to was one hurled, as it were, at the head of an offending mullah who had derided Mirza-Schaffy for his tenderness to wine, and reads as follows:

Mullah! pure is our wine: It to revile were sin. Shouldst thou censure my word, May'st find truth therein!

No devotion hath me To thy mosque led to pray: Through wine render'd free, I have chanced there to stray.

All other poems introduced into the _Thousand and One Days in the Orient_ are entirely of Bodenstedt's own composition, were designed to add flavor to the picture of an Eastern divan of wisdom, and were usually written while the impression was fresh of intercourse with the wise man of Gjändsha. Shortly after the appearance of the book, which was well received by the public, the publisher proposed to Bodenstedt to issue separately the poems contained in it; and this was finally done in an attractive volume entitled _The Songs of Mirza-Schaffy_, many additions being made to the original collection. Of these, one of the most fresh and sparkling is a spring song, which has never before appeared in English, and which we present as a fitting introduction:

When young Spring up mountain-peaks doth hie, And the sunbeams scatter stores of snow-- When the trees put forth their leaflets shy, And amid grass the first wild flower doth blow-- When in yonder vale Fleeth in a gale All the dolesome rain and wintry wail, Rings from upland air Forth to many a clime, "Oh, how wond'rous fair Is the glad spring-time!"

When the glaciers quail 'neath hot sunbeams, And all Nature into life doth spring-- When from mountain-sides gush forth cool streams, And with sounds of glee the forests ring-- Fragrant zephyrs too Stray the green meads through And the heavens smile, serene and blue. While from upland air Rings to many a clime, "Oh, how wond'rous fair Is the glad spring-time!"

And was it not in the days of spring That thy heart and mine, O maiden fair! Were united, while our lips did cling In their first long kiss, so sweet and rare? What the glad grove sang Through the wide vale rang, And the fresh stream from the mountain sprang. While the upland air Wafted forth its rhyme, "Oh, how wond'rous fair Is the glad spring-time!"

Seldom has a volume of poems been received with more general applause. Their renown spread rapidly through their native land; constantly increasing demand for copies rendered needful frequent new editions, to which at divers times were added by the author freshly-created poems; and the interest is still alive, now nearly quarter of a century after their first appearance, when they have passed their fiftieth edition. They have been at one time or other translated into most of the modern tongues of Europe; and that they have never gained popularity with us is due probably to the fact that in those which have been translated into our tongue neither the essence nor the form of the original has been preserved. By the title no mystification was ever designed: it came, as it were, of itself, and the purport of the narrative through which the main songs were interwoven being well known, it was never, supposed that a doubt concerning the authorship could arise. Nevertheless, the critics accepted them as translations from the Persian, and sharp lines of distinction were drawn between the poet, Mirza-Schaffy, and his translator, Friedrich Bodenstedt, not precisely to the advantage of the latter. Many a hearty laugh did Bodenstedt indulge in on reading in one or another learned dissertation that he was the possessor of a very neat poetic talent, and frequently reminded one in his original compositions of the works of his genial teacher, Mirza-Schaffy, of which he had given admirable translations, though without attaining to the excellence of the original. Now, a poet, in the wildest flights of his imagination, could not hope for a more brilliant success for the poetic fiction of his own creation than to have it accepted by the world as a living reality. In this he would naturally delight, even though his own personality were for a time thrust into the background, precisely like a loving father whose children meet with better fortune in life than himself. Sundry renditions into foreign tongues were even announced as direct translations from the Persian.

After the death of the real Mirza-Schaffy in 1852, which was duly announced by the press, sundry efforts were made by Eastern travelers to visit his grave in Tiflis and gain those particulars concerning him and his writings which Bodenstedt was supposed to have selfishly withheld from the public. Of these, one of the most prominent was Professor H. Brugsch, secretary of the Prussian embassy to Persia in 1860, who in his book of travels thus descants on his futile efforts: "No one could inform us where the last earthly remains of a certain Mirza-Schaffy were laid to rest. We consoled ourselves with the reflection that neither mounds nor monuments are requisite to preserve a poet's fame, but that through his songs is his name transmitted to posterity. Yet even here we were doomed to disappointment. No one whom we encountered knew aught of the songs of the jovial, genial Mirza-Schaffy which in our German Fatherland have penetrated to the very life of the people."

Some years later the Russian imperial state counselor Bergé, while chief of educational institutions in Caucasus, also made the matter a subject of investigation, and in the year 1870 gave the history thereof to the world in the _Journal of the German Oriental Society_. He tells of his vain efforts to learn something of the genius of Mirza-Schaffy in his own land, and the amusement he created by his queries concerning possible posthumous works, and finally settles the question beyond dispute concerning the authorship of the poems.

After this, Bodenstedt yielded to the solicitations of friends to give in the pages of the popular German magazine _Daheim_ a correct version of the whole affair.

Let the reader present to his mind's eye a picture of the Eastern scribe, clad in the apparel before described, seated on the comfortable divan, with legs crossed after the fashion of the country, the long _tschibuq_ caressingly held in one hand, the other uplifted, and with finger pointed to his brow, haranguing the German man of letters at his side on the advantages to be enjoyed under his tuition, and on the idle pretensions of those who call themselves learned without so much as comprehending the sacred languages. He cherished, however, the pious hope that in the course of time, thanks to his efforts, the enlightenment of the East might take effect in the West, which hope was strengthened by the encouraging fact that Bodenstedt was the fifth scholar who had felt the need of migrating to Tiflis to profit by his instructions. In his excess of national modesty the wise man of Gjändsha only styled himself the first wise man of the East, but since the children of the West dwelt under a dark cloud of unbelief, it resulted as a matter of course that he must be the wisest of all men.

"I, Mirza-Schaffy," said he to his pupil, "am the first wise man of the East, consequently thou, as my disciple, art the second. But misunderstand me not. I have a friend, Omar Effendi, an extremely wise man, who verily is not third among the learned scribes of the land. Did not I live, and were Omar Effendi thy teacher, he would be first, and thou the second wise man."

On being asked what he should do if told that the wise men of the West would consider him as deficient in enlightenment as he did them, he rejoined, "What could I do but be amazed at their folly? What new thing can I learn from their opinions when they merely repeat my own?" Hence the song:

Shall I laugh or fall to wailing That the most of men so dumb are, Ever borrowed thoughts retailing, And in mother-wit so mum are?

No: thanksgiving heavenward rise That fools so crowd this generation, Else the wisdom of the wise Would be lost to observation.

Numerous rivals envied Mirza-Schaffy his lessons, for each of which he was paid a whole silver ruble--an unusually high tuition-fee. Most formidable among these was Mirza-Jussuf (Joseph), the wise man of Bagdad, who called one day on Bodenstedt and boldly informed him that the revered Mirza-Schaffy was an Ischekj ("an ass") among the bearers of wisdom--that he could not write properly, and could not sing at all. "And what is wisdom without song?" he exclaimed. "What is Mirza-Schaffy compared with me?" With bewildering eloquence he set forth his own superior accomplishments, dwelling largely on his name, which had been exalted by the Hebrew poet Moses as well as by the Persian poet Hafiz, and exerting himself to prove that the significance of a great name must be transmitted to all future bearers thereof. He was still speaking when a measured tread was heard in the ante-chamber, and Mirza-Schaffy himself drew near. He appeared to comprehend intuitively the cause of the guest's presence, for he cast on Jussuf, who had become suddenly stricken with modesty, a glance of withering contempt, and was about giving vent to his emotions when Bodenstedt interposed with the words, "Mirza-Schaffy, wise man of Gjändsha, what have my ears heard? You undertake to instruct me, and you can neither write nor sing! You are an Ischekj among the bearers of wisdom: thus sayeth Mirza-Jussuf, the wise man of Bagdad."

Without deigning a word of reply, Mirza-Schaffy clapped his hands, a sign at which the servant usually brought him a fresh pipe, but this time he demanded his thick-soled slippers. With one of these he proceeded to so unmercifully belabor the wise man of Bagdad that the latter besought mercy with the most appealing words and gestures. But the chastiser was inexorable. "What?" said he. "I cannot sing, dost thou say? Wait, I will make music for thee! And I cannot write, either? Let it be, then, on thy head!" Whimpering and writhing beneath the blows accompanying these words, the wise man of Bagdad staggered toward the door and vanished from sight.

More calmly than might have been anticipated did Mirza-Schaffy return from the contest of wisdom, and promptly taking his usual seat on the divan, he began to exhort his German disciple to lend no ear to such false teachers as Jussuf and his fellows, whose name, he said, was legion, whose avarice was greater than their wisdom, and whose aim was to plunder, not teach, their pupils.

Later, Jussuf strove to win Bodenstedt by repeated messages, accompanied by songs in the most exquisite handwriting. Mirza-Schaffy's opinion concerning these compositions is embodied in quite a number of songs, of which space must be found for one:

Forsooth! is Mirza-Jussuf a very well-read man! Now searcheth he Hafiz, now searcheth the Koran, Now Dshamy and Chakany, and now the _Gülistan_. Here stealeth he a symbol, and there doth steal a flower, Here robbeth precious thoughts, and there a true word's power. He giveth as his own what has been said before, Transplanted! the whole world into his tedious lore; And proudly decketh he his prey with borrowed plumes, Then flauntingly that this is poetry assumes.

How differently lives and sings Mirza-Schaffy! A glowing star his heart to lighten paths of gloom, His mind a blooming garden, filled with sweet perfume, And in his rich creations no plagiarist is he: His songs are full of beauty, and perfect as can be.

Mirza-Schaffy himself was a miracle of skill in chirography: none could equal him in wielding the _kalem_. His aim was not to impart a precise regularity to the characters, but to indicate by the writing the matter and style. Proverbs or utterances of wisdom were indited by him in a firm, bold hand with unadorned simplicity; love-songs with delicate, clear-cut lines, attractive capricious curves, enigmatical, almost illegible minuteness, designed to set forth the type of female character. The chirography of the songs to wine and earthly pleasure is full of fire and flourish--that of the songs of lamentation neat, legible and unadorned. To impart this skill to his pupil was one of his most earnest endeavors.

One day, when inspired by choice wine and soothed by the fragrant fumes of his _tschibuq_, Mirza-Schaffy was moved to tell of the love his heart had cherished--love such as man had never before known. The object of his adoration was Zuléikha, daughter of Ibrahim, the chan of Gjändsha. Her eyes, darker than the night, shone with a brighter glow than the stars of heaven: passing description were the graceful loveliness of her form, the dainty perfection of hands and feet, her soft hair long as eternity, and the sweet mouth whose breath was more fragrant than the roses of Schiraz. He who was destined to be her slave had watched her daily for six months--as she sat on the housetop at midday with her companions, or on moonlight evenings when she amused herself with the dancing of her slaves--before he received so much as a sign that she deemed him worthy of her regard. He rejoiced in the splendor of her countenance, but dared no more approach her than the sun in whose warm rays he might bask. By day he was compelled to exercise the utmost caution, as his life would have been in jeopardy had Ibrahim Chan descried him casting loving looks at Zuléikha, but in the evening he was safe to draw attention to himself, as after eight o'clock the old man never crossed his threshold. Then the flames of the lover's heart burst into song, and he gave utterance to a _ghazel_ now of Hafiz, now of Firdusa, while still more frequently he sang his own songs.

Finally, Ibrahim Chan set forth on an expedition against the enemies of Moscow, and thus was afforded a rare opportunity for the enamored Mirza to present himself and his songs to the fair one's notice. One dark evening, when the ladies had failed to appear on the housetop, as Mirza-Schaffy was turning disappointed away he was accosted by a closely-veiled female, who, bidding him follow her, led the way to a secluded spot where interruption would be improbable, and thus addressed him: "I am Fatima, the confidential attendant of Zuléikha. My mistress hath gazed on thee with the eye of satisfaction. The resonance of thy voice hath delighted her ear, the purport of thy songs touched her heart. I am come of my own accord, without my lady's bidding, to let thee drink hope from the fountain of my words, because I wish thee well."

"Has, then, Zuléikha not closed her ear to the poorest of her slaves?" exclaimed the overjoyed Mirza. "And will my heart not be lacerated by the thorn of her displeasure? Allah min! Allah bir! The God of thousands is one only God! Great is His goodness and wonderful are His ways! What have I done that He hath guided the stream of my songs to the sea of beauty?"

Fatima told him he did well to prize the merciful goodness of Allah and the loveliness of her mistress, who was a "jewel in the ring of beauty, a pearl in the shell of fortune." Her noble lady, she said, would have given token of her favor before had not her virtuous modesty exceeded her beauty, and had she not feared the displeasure of her father, who tenderly loved her and would never consent to her stooping to a poor mirza. Then she proceeded to tell how Achmed Chan of Avaria, who was at the war with Ibrahim Chan, was suing for Zuléikha's hand, which was promised by the father should he return triumphant from the campaign. This would render prompt action desirable, and Fatima suggested that Mirza-Schaffy should appear on the following evening, when the call to prayer resounded from the minaret, before the garden with his choicest offering of song, to which, the messenger was ready to wager, would be accorded a rosebud. Intoxicated with joy, Mirza-Schaffy bestowed on the friendly Fatima his purse, his watch and all the valuables about him, also promising a talisman to cure a black spot on her left cheek; and they parted with the understanding that they should meet, again for further communication.

And here, in exemplification of the learned scribe's rejoinders to his pupil's queries concerning the significance of the thorn of displeasure and the rosebud, is introduced the song:

The thorn is token of rejection, Of disapproval and of scorn: If she to union hath objection, She giveth me as sign a thorn.

Yet if, instead, the maiden throws me A tender rosebud as a token, That fate propitious is it shows me, And bids me wait with faith unbroken.

But if a full-blown rose she tenders, Its open chalice is a token Which boldest hope in me engenders; Through it her love is clearly spoken.

On the ensuing evening Mirza-Schaffy presented himself promptly at the appointed place, prepared with a love-song which he knew none of womankind could resist. The evening was calm and clear, and on the housetop, alone with Fatima, was plainly discernible Zuléikha, her veil slightly drawn aside in token of favor. Taking courage, the enamored Mirza pushed back his cap in order to display his freshly shaven head, of whose whiteness he was excessively proud, and which he felt to be irresistible to maidens' eyes, and began to sing his song, having first cast a written copy folded about a double almond-kernel, as a keepsake at the feet of beauty. The song given at this point is excessively flowery, and declares the maiden's eyes to be brighter than those of the wild gazelle, her form more ethereal than the slender pine, and pronounces the wooer, his heart and his tuneful lay to be but slaves of her loveliness. This by way of preparation, the highest point of the offering being the concluding stanzas:

With faithful heart and hopefully Approach I now Love's sacred bower, And cast this wistful song at thee, This fragrant song, as question-flower.

Accept with joy or scornfully, Give my heart death or consolation, Cast rosebud, rose, or thorn at me, I humbly wait thy revelation.

Smilingly the maiden cast a rosebud at her waiting suitor, and for the first time fully displayed to him her beauteous face. From this moment new life dawned on our Mirza, and for six weeks he basked in the sunshine of felicity ere threatening clouds loomed up in his horizon. Then Ibrahim Chan returned from the war, and with him came his daughter's suitor. A troop of horsemen had been despatched to Avaria for the bridal gift, and on their return they were to conduct Achmed Chan and his chosen lady home. Prize combats and festivities were planned to celebrate the return of the heroes, and at Zuléikha's request a singing festival was likewise to take place. All the singers of the land were invited and bidden to prepare their choicest lays extolling the sovereign lady of the fête: to the victorious competitor would be accorded the right to break the instruments of his opponents.

Now was the time for Mirza-Schaffy to gather all his courage, for he knew the crisis of his destiny to be at hand. He arranged with Fatima that the day of the singing festival should be likewise that of his flight with Zuléikha, for he was troubled with no doubt concerning the success of his lyrical efforts. An Armenian who was about setting forth with a caravan was confided in, and engaged to reserve camels for and accord protection to the fugitives.

The minutes seemed like days, the hours like years, until the announcement was heralded that Ibrahim Chan had sallied forth with his guests to the prize combat, and that the ladies awaited the minstrels. They were assembled on the housetop, lovely matrons and maidens, and there was spread a large carpet on which set two players on the _sass_ and _tshengir_, between whom each singer in turn took his place to sing his offering to the sound of strings. The handsomest boy in Gjändsha was appointed to hand to each singer a silver plate, wherewith to conceal from the eye of beauty the emotions depicted in his countenance while singing. Twenty singers stood in a circle and stepped forth one after the other, Mirza-Schaffy, as the youngest of the number, coming last. All other emanations he felt to be faint sparks in comparison with the fire of his own. How could it be otherwise, considering the source of his inspiration? As he sang his heart swelled with ecstasy, and when he concluded there lay at his feet a full-blown rose. He was victor of the festival, yet so filled was he with thoughts of his beloved that he remembered not to break the instruments of the vanquished.

The flight was effected; the bride, although awaiting the coming of the bridegroom in bridal array, offering all due resistance as he led her from her home; indeed, so zealous was she to be faithful to the customs of her country that her cries would have roused the household had not the prudent Fatima interposed. On reaching the caravan a double security seemed to arise from the Armenian proving to be the accepted lover of Fatima; and Zuléikha, although deeming it a degradation for a daughter of Ali to unite her destinies with an unbeliever, was herself too strongly in the bondage of love to withhold her consent. Then how happy were they all! and what precautions were taken for their safety! Nevertheless, they were overtaken by the angry father and the outraged suitor of his choice. Zuléikha and Fatima were rudely snatched from the protection of their lovers, and the learned scribe--we blush to write it--received on the very soles which had borne him to the summit of bliss the ignominious blows of the bastinado.

From that day Mirza-Schaffy had felt indisposed to bestow his affections on mortal woman, and since the sun of his hopes had set dwelt serenely in the moonlight of remembrance. As Zuléikha, the embodiment of all virtue and beauty, had loved him, he believed himself to be an object of adoration to all feminine hearts, and grimly resolved that all womankind must suffer in expiation of his own sufferings.

During the winter there arrived another student from Germany, who, becoming acquainted with Bodenstedt, arranged to share with him the lessons in Tartar and Persian, which Mirza-Schaffy was pleased to call "hours of wisdom." In course of time other friends joined the circle, so that finally arose a formal divan, where the wise man of Gjändsha discoursed less on personalities, dwelling chiefly on general effusions of wisdom, interspersed with many a song. One of the latter reads as though designed by Bodenstedt to indicate the relation borne by Mirza-Schaffy to his own productions:

Thou art of my song the begetter; Its drapery putteth my wand on; Thou yieldest the purest of marble, And I lay the sculpturing hand on.

Thou givest the spirit, the essence: Me for utt'rance alone mak'st demand on-- Oft my power's deficient, and madly Thy crude thoughts I haste to expand on.

Sundry songs extolling the beneficence of wine and earthly pleasure arose at this period. Of these we find none more attractive than that which owed its origin to a conversation held in the divan of wisdom concerning certain Russians and Georgians who drank wine more freely than the camels drank water, yet had gained no inspiration therefrom:

From wine's fiery fascination From the goblet's mystic pleasure, Poison foams, and sweet refreshment, Beauty flows, and degradation, As the drinker's worth may measure, According to his brain's assessment.

In debasement deeply sunken Lies the fool, through wine's might captur'd: When _he_ drinks becomes he drunken; When _we_ drink we are enraptured. Sparkling gleams of wit, worth dreaming, Flash from tongues like angel's seeming, And with ardor we are teeming, And alone with beauty drunken.

Well resembles wine the shower Which to mire fresh mire amasses, But to fair fields brings a dower Rich in blessing as it passes.

One evening Bodenstedt discovered his worthy teacher singing before a house on whose roof sat a graceful maiden, and from the man's whole manner then and thereafter concluded that in the long-faithful heart had been at last replaced the image of Zuléikha. And so it proved. On the very evening when he was returning home with softened heart after the recital of the joys and sorrows of his first love, Mirza-Schaffy's attention had been arrested by a lovely maiden who, as he pushed back his cap--solely, of course, to cool his heated brow--gave incontestable evidences of being smitten with him. When he went to his couch that night sleep refused to visit his eyelids, and as he restlessly tossed to and fro, the image of Zuléikha haunting him with reproachful mien, his thoughts turned ever to the peerless maiden who menaced further fidelity to the old love. Ere morning dawned he had resolved to break the spell, and for several days avoided the locality of the fair enticer. But the attraction became finally too strong to resist. He went, he saw the maiden, and she bestowed on him a glance which rendered him her slave for life;

A wond'rous glance hath met my eyes: The magic of this moment rare Worketh for aye a fresh surprise, A miracle beyond compare.

A question, therefore, ask I thee-- Pay heed, sweet life whom I adore-- Was that fond glance bestowed on me? A token give, then, I implore.

And round thee could my strong arm cling, Might I to thee life consecrate, Loud jubilees my heart would sing, And these to thee I'd dedicate.

The first interview presents decidedly a comical side. By a confidential attendant Mirza-Schaffy was introduced on the roof disguised in female costume, his face and flowing beard modestly covered with a long veil. Luckily, he was not doomed long to such undignified concealment, for he soon managed, through his beauty and genius, to win favor in the eyes of the lady's mother, and she promised to intercede in his behalf with the stern old father. The latter, however, having eyes neither for beauty nor poetry, thought only to demand what means of support the bold intruder had to offer his daughter, and when he learned how small these were, withheld his consent until the suitor could secure a professorship in some institution of learning. Although loath to renounce his freedom, Mirza-Schaffy determined for Hafisa's sake to make application, as he had often been advised to do, at the Tiflis Gymnasium for the position of teacher of Tartaric. But, alas! there was prepared for our poor Mirza a humiliation second only to the bastinado. His reply was a portentous document in the Russian language, of which he could not read a word. Hafisa's father demanded sight of it, had it interpreted by a learned mullah, and it proved to be a summons for the applicant to appear at an appointed hour for examination. This was too much. Mirza-Schaffy, the first wise man of the East, the pride of his race, the pearl in the shell of poetry, to be examined in his own language! Hafisa's father declared his belief that the mirza's wisdom was as doubtful as his fortune, and the wise man himself began to wonder whether his wisdom had not gone "pleasuring in the dusk of the evening." Moreover, during the conference with the mullah certain revelations came to light concerning the lack of orthodoxy in the mirza's belief and the frequent slurs it was his wont to cast on the powerful mullahs; and this set the old father hopelessly against him, causing him to revoke all promise of possible consent. Such being the case, Mirza-Schaffy had no heart to brave the humiliation of an examination. Shortly after, however, he was honored with a call to the new school at Gjändsha, and Hafisa's father dying about the same time, all obstacles were removed to a union with the maiden of his choice. And so with his bride he returned to his native place, and felt that the summit of earthly bliss was attained.

Friedrich Bodenstedt has been a very prolific author, having published several volumes of poetry, besides numerous romances, tales and miscellaneous works. He is one of a committee of poets and men of learning appointed not long since to retranslate the works of Shakespeare. At present he is adding to his well-earned laurels through his volume _Aus dem Nachlasse Mirza-Schaffys_. The book is divided into seven parts, the first of which is dedicated to love. Then there are songs of earthly pleasure, songs of consolation, sayings of wisdom, stories in rhyme of Eastern romance, a series of problems and a "bouquet of cypresses and roses."

AUBER FORESTIER.

TO CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN.

Look where a three-point star shall weave his beam Into the slumb'rous tissue of some stream, Till his bright self o'er his bright copy seem Fulfillment dropping on a come-true dream; So in this night of art thy soul doth show Her excellent double in the steadfast flow Of wishing love that through men's hearts doth go: At once thou shin'st above and shin'st below. E'en when thou strivest there within Art's sky (Each star must round an arduous orbit fly), Full calm thine image in our love doth lie, A Motion glassed in a Tranquillity. So triple-rayed, thou mov'st, yet stay'st, serene-- Art's artist, Love's dear woman, Fame's good queen!

SIDNEY LANIER.

CHARLES KINGSLEY: A REMINISCENCE.

The heat of London in the midsummer of 1857, even to my American apprehension, was intense. The noise of the streets oppressed me, and perhaps the sight now and again of freshly-watered flowers which beautify so many of the window-ledges, and which seem to flourish and bloom whatever the weather, filled me the more with a desire for the quiet of green fields and the refreshing shade of trees. I had just returned from Switzerland, and the friends with whom I had been journeying in that land of all perfections had gone back to their home among the wealds and woods of Essex. I began to feel that sense of solitude which weighs heavily on a stranger in the throng of a great city; so that it was with keen pleasure I looked forward to a visit to Mr. Kingsley. A most kind invitation had come from him, offering me "a bed and all hospitality in their plain country fashion."

At four in the afternoon of a hot July day I started for Winchfield, which is the station on the London and Southampton Railway nearest to Eversley--a journey of an hour and a half. I took a fly at Winchfield for Eversley, a distance of six miles. My way lay over wide silent moors: now and then a quiet farmstead came in view--_moated granges_ they might have been--but these were few and far between, this part of Hampshire being owned in large tracts. It was a little after six when I drew near to the church and antique brick dwelling-house adjoining it which were the church and rectory of Eversley. There were no other houses near, so that it was evidently a wide and scattered parish. Old trees shaded the venerable irregularly-shaped parsonage, ivy and creeping plants covered the walls, and roses peeped out here and there. Mr. Kingsley himself met me at the open hall-door, and there was something in his clear and cheerful tone that gave a peculiar sense of welcome to his greeting. "Very glad to see you," said he. Then taking my bag from the fly, "Let me show you your room at once, that you may make yourself comfortable." So, leading the way, he conducted me up stairs and along a somewhat intricate passage to a room in the oldest part of the house. It was a quaint apartment, with leaden casements, a low ceiling, an uneven floor--a room four hundred years old, as Mr. Kingsley told me, but having withal a very habitable look. "I hope you'll be comfortable here," said my host as he turned to go--"as comfortable as one can be in a cottage. Have you everything you want? There will be a tea-dinner or a dinner-tea in about half an hour." Then, as he lingered, he asked, "When did you see Forster last?"

"Six weeks ago," I said--"in London. He had just received news of the vacancy at Leeds, and at once determined to offer himself as the Liberal candidate. He went to Leeds for this purpose, but subsequently withdrew his name. I gather from his speech at the banquet his supporters gave him afterward that this was a mistake, and that if he had stood he would have been elected."

"Ah," said Kingsley, "I should like to see Forster in Parliament. He is not the man, however, to make head against the _tracasseries_ of an election contest."

Some other talk we had, and then he left me, coming back before long to conduct me to the drawing-room. Two gentlemen were there--one a visitor who soon took leave; the other, the tutor to Mr. Kingsley's son. Mrs. Kingsley came in now and shook hands with me cordially, and I had very soon the sense of being at one with them all. Our having mutual friends did much toward this good understanding, but it was partly that we seemed at once to have so much to talk of on the events of the day, and on English matters in which I took keen interest.

India was naturally our first subject, and the great and absorbing question of the mutiny. I told what the London news was in regard to it, and how serious was the look of things. Kingsley said there must be great blame somewhere--that as to the British rule in India, no man could doubt that it had been a great blessing to the country, but the individual Englishman had come very far short of his duty in his dealings with the subject race: a reckoning was sure to come. _Oakfield_ was mentioned--a story by William Arnold of which the scene was laid in India, and which contained evidence of this ill-treatment of the Hindoos by their white masters. Kingsley spoke highly of this book. I said I thought it had hardly been appreciated in England. Kingsley thought the reason was it was too didactic--there was too much moralizing. Only the few could appreciate this: the many did not care for it in a novel.

Our tea-dinner was announced: it was served in the hall. Mrs. Kingsley spoke laughingly of their being obliged to make this their dining-room. The talk at the table fell on American affairs. Sumner's name was mentioned. I said he was in London, and that I had had a long conversation with him a few days before. Would I give them his address? they asked: they must have a visit from him. I said he would be glad to visit them, I was sure, for when I told him I was coming here he said he envied me. He was at present engaged in a round of dinners--expected to go to France in August to stay with De Tocqueville, but would be again in England in the autumn. Kingsley spoke of Brooks's death--of the suddenness of it seeming almost a judgment. I said Brooks, as I happened to know, was thought a good fellow before the assault--that he really had good qualities, and was liked even by Northern men. "So we have heard from others," said Kingsley, "and one can well believe it. The man who suffers for a bad system is often the best man--one with attractive qualities." Charles I. and Louis XVI. were instances he gave to illustrate this. A recent article in the _Edinburgh Review_ on slavery was spoken of. I said it had attracted a good deal of attention with us, because we saw immediately it could only have been written by an American. Of slavery Mr. Kingsley spoke in calm and moderate words. I told him his introductory chapter to _Two Years Ago_ showed that he appreciated the difficulties with which the question was encumbered. He said it would be strange if he did not see these difficulties, considering that he was of West Indian descent (his grandfather had married a West Indian heiress). He admitted that the result of emancipation in the West Indies was not encouraging as it regarded the material condition of the islands, especially of Jamaica, and he was quite able to understand how powerfully this fact would weigh on our Southern planters, and how it tended to close their ears to all anti-slavery argument. They could hardly be expected to look beyond this test of sugar-production to the moral progress of the black race which freedom alone could ensure.

Our pleasant meal being over, we strolled out on the lawn and sat down under one of the fine old trees, where we continued our talk about slavery. Mr. Kingsley said he could quite believe any story he might hear of cruelty practiced upon slaves. He knew too well his own nature, and felt that under the influence of sudden anger he would be capable of deeds as violent as any of which we read. This, of course, was putting out of view the restraints which religion would impose; but it was safe for no man to have the absolute control of others.

He left us to go into the house, and Mrs. Kingsley then spoke of his parochial labors. She wished I could spend a Sunday with them--"I should so like you to see the congregation he has. The common farm-laborers come morning and afternoon: the reason is, he preaches so that they can understand him. I wish you could have been with us last Sunday, we had such an interesting person here--Max Müller, the great linguist and Orientalist. But we can't have pleasant _meets_ here: we have only one spare room."

"How old is Max Müller?" I asked.

"Twenty-eight, and he scarcely looks to be twenty-two."

"How long has Mr. Kingsley been here?" I asked.

"Fifteen years--two years as curate, and then the living becoming vacant, it was given to him."

She told me a funeral was to take place directly--that of a poor woman who had been a great sufferer. "Ah, here it comes," she said.

There was the bier borne on men's shoulders and a little company of mourners, the peasantry of the neighborhood, the men wearing smock-frocks. They were awaiting the clergyman at the lichgate. Mr. Kingsley appeared at the moment in his surplice, and the procession entered the churchyard, he saying as he walked in front the solemn sentences with which the service begins. It was the scene which I had witnessed in another part of Hampshire some years before, when the author of _The Christian Year_ was the officiating clergyman. Mrs. Kingsley and I joined the procession and entered the church. It was a small, oddly-arranged interior--brick pavements, high-backed pews, the clerk's desk adjoining the reading-desk, but a little lower. Mr. Kingsley read the service in a measured tone, which enabled him to overcome the defect in his utterance noticeable in conversation. At the grave the rest of the office was said, and here the grief of the poor mourners overcame them. The family group consisted of the husband of the deceased, a grown-up daughter and a son, a boy of fifteen. All were much moved, but the boy the most. He cried bitterly--a long wail, as if he could not be comforted. Mr. Kingsley tried to console him, putting his arm over his shoulders. He said words of sympathy to the others also. They went their way over the heath to their desolate home. Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley spoke of the life of toil which had thus ended, and of the patience with which long-continued bodily pain had been borne. It was clear that the popular author was first of all a parish priest.

We now went into his study, where he lighted a long pipe, and we then returned to a part of the lawn which he called his quarter-deck, and where we walked up and down for near an hour. What an English summer evening it was!--dewy and still. Now and then a slight breeze stirred in the leaves and brought with it wafts of delicate odors from the flowers somewhere hidden in the deep shadows, though as yet it was not night and the sweet twilight lay about us like a charm. He asked if I knew Maurice. I did slightly--had breakfasted with him six weeks before, and had seen enough of him to understand the strong personal influence he exerted. "I owe all that I am to Maurice," said Kingsley, "I aim only to teach to others what I get from him. Whatever facility of expression I have is God's gift, but the views I endeavor to enforce are those which I learn from Maurice. I live to interpret him to the people of England."

A talk about the influence of the Oxford writers came next: on this subject I knew we should not agree, though of course it was interesting to me to hear Mr. Kingsley's opinion. He spoke with some asperity of one or two of the leaders, though his chief objection was to certain young men who had put themselves forward as champions of the movement. Of Mr. Keble he spoke very kindly. He said he had at one time been much under the influence of these writings. I mentioned Alexander Knox as being perhaps the forerunner of the Oxford men. "Ah," he said, "I owe my knowledge of that good man to Mrs. Kingsley: you must talk with her about him." We joined the party in the drawing-room, and there was some further conversation on this subject.

At about ten o'clock the bell was rung, the servants came in, prayers were said, and the ladies (Mrs. Kingsley and their daughter's governess) bid us good-night. Then to Mr. Kingsley's study, where the rest of the evening was spent--from half-past ten to half-past twelve--the pipe went on, and the talk--a continuous flow. Quakerism was a subject. George Fox, Kingsley said, was his admiration: he read his _Journal_ constantly--thought him one of the most remarkable men that age produced. He liked his hostility to Calvinism. "How little that fellow Macaulay," he said, "could understand Quakerism! A man needs to have been in Inferno himself to know what the Quakers meant in what they said and did." He referred me to an article of his on Jacob Boehme and the mystic writers, in which he had given his views in regard to Fox.

We talked about his parish work: he found it, he said, a great help to him, adding emphatically that his other labor was secondary to this. He had trained himself not to be annoyed by his people calling on him when he was writing. If he was to be their priest, he must see them when it suited them to come; and he had become able if called off from his writing to go on again the moment he was alone. I asked him when he wrote. He said in the morning almost always: sometimes, when much pushed, he had written for an hour in the evening, but he always had to correct largely the next morning work thus done. Daily exercise, riding, hunting, together with parish work, were necessary to keep him in a condition for writing: he aimed to keep himself in rude health. I asked whether _Alton Locke_ had been written in that room. "Yes," he said--"from four to eight in the mornings; and a young man was staying with me at the time with whom every day I used to ride, or perhaps hunt, when my task of writing was done."

A fine copy of St. Augustine attracted my attention on his shelves--five volumes folio bound in vellum. "Ah," he said, "that _is_ a treasure I must show you;" and taking down a volume he turned to the fly-leaf, where were the words "Charles Kingsley from Thomas Carlyle," and above them "Thomas Carlyle from John Sterling." One could understand that Carlyle had thus handed on the book, notwithstanding its sacred associations, knowing that to Kingsley it would have a threefold value. My eye caught also a relic of curious interest--a fragment from one of the vessels of the Spanish Armada. It lay on the mantelpiece: I could well understand Kingsley's pleasure in possessing it.

At the breakfast-table the next morning we had much talk in regard to American writers. Kingsley admitted Emerson's high merit, but thought him too fragmentary a writer and thinker to have enduring fame. He had meant that this should be implied as his opinion in the title he gave to _Phaethon_--"Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers"--a book he had written in direct opposition to what he understood to be the general teaching of Emerson. I remarked upon the great beauty of some of Emerson's later writings and the marvelous clearness of insight which was shown in his _English Traits_. Kingsley acquiesced in this, but referred to some American poetry, so called, which Emerson had lately edited, and in his preface had out-Heroded Herod. Kingsley said the poems were the production of a coarse, sensual mind. His reference, of course, was to Walt Whitman, and I had no defence to make. Of Lowell, Mr. Kingsley spoke very highly: his _Fable for Critics_ was worthy of Rabelais. Mr. Froude, who is Kingsley's brother-in-law, had first made him acquainted with Lowell's poetry. Hawthorne's style he thought was exquisite: there was scarcely any modern writing equal to it. Of all his books he preferred the _Blithedale Romance_.

We talked of Mr. Froude, whom Kingsley spoke of as his dearest friend: he thought Froude sincerely regretted ever having written the _Nemesis of Faith_. Mr. Helps, author of _Friends in Council_, he spoke of as his near neighbor there in Hampshire, and his intimate friend. Mr. Charles Reade he knew, and I think he said he was also a neighbor: his _Christie Johnston_ he thought showed high original power. Mrs. Gaskell we talked of, whose _Life of Charlotte Bronté_ had just then been published: Mr. Kingsley thought it extremely interesting and "slightly slanderous." He told me of the author of _Tom Brown's School-days_, a copy of which, fresh from the publishers, was lying on his table. Mr. Hughes is now so well known to us I need only mention that Mr. Kingsley spoke of him as an old pupil of Arnold's and a spiritual child of Maurice. He spoke most warmly of him, and offered me a letter of introduction to him. I could not avail myself of this, having so little time to remain in London.

I must mention, as showing further Mr. Kingsley's state of mind toward Maurice, that he had named his son after him. He spoke of the boy as being intended for the army: the family, he said, had been soldiers for generations. "That is the profession England will need for the next five-and-twenty years." Of Forster he said, "What a pity he had not been put in the army at the age of eighteen!--he would have been a general now. England has need of such men." I note this as showing the curious apprehension of war which he, an Englishman, felt eighteen years ago, and which he expressed to me, an American. How little either of us thought of the struggle which men of English blood were to engage in in three years from that time! How little I could dream that one of the decisive battles of the world was so soon to be fought in my own State, Pennsylvania!

Our morning was spent in all this varied talk, walking partly on the lawn, partly in the study. His pipe was still his companion. He seemed to need to walk incessantly, such was his nervous activity of temperament. He asked me if it annoyed me for him to walk so much up and down his study. The slight impediment in his speech one forgot as one listened to the flow of his discourse. He talked a volume while I was with him, and what he said often rose to eloquence. There was humor too in it, of which I can give no example, for it was fine and delicate. But what most impressed me was his perfect simplicity of character. He talked of his wife with the strongest affection--wished I could remain longer with them, if only to know her better. Nothing could be more tender than his manner toward her. He went for her when we were in the study, and the last half hour of my stay she sat with us. She is one of five sisters who are all married to eminent men.

It occurs to me to note, as among my last recollections of our talk, that I spoke of Spurgeon, whom I had heard in London a short time before, and was very favorably impressed with. I could not but commend his simple, strong Saxon speech, the charm of his rich full voice, and above all the earnest aim which I thought was manifest in all he uttered. Mr. Kingsley said he was glad to hear this, for he had been told of occasional irreverences of Spurgeon's, and of his giving way now and then to a disposition to make a joke of things. Not that he objected altogether to humor in sermons: he had his own temptations in this way. "One must either weep at the follies of men or laugh at them," he added. I told him Mr. Maurice had spoken to me of Mr. Spurgeon as no doubt an important influence for good in the land, and he said this was on the whole his own opinion. He told me, however, of teaching of quite another character, addressed to people of cultivation mainly, and to him peculiarly acceptable. His reference was to Robertson's _Sermons_: he showed me the volume--the first series--just then published. The mention of this book perhaps led to a reference by Mr. Kingsley to the Unitarians of New England, of whom he spoke very kindly, adding, in effect, that their error was but a natural rebound from Calvinism, that dreary perversion of God's boundless love.

But I had now to say good-bye to these new friends, who had come to seem old friends, so full and cordial had been their hospitality, and so much had we found to talk of in the quickly-passing hours of my visit. Mr. Kingsley drove me three miles on my way to Winchfield. His talk with me was interspersed with cheery and friendly words to his horse, with whom he seemed to be on very intimate terms. "Come and see us again," he said as we parted: "the second visit, you know, is always the best."

ELLIS YARNALL.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A WOMAN'S OPINION OF PARIS AND THE PARISIANS.

I have now lived in Paris two consecutive years, and during this time the question has often been put to me, "How do you like Paris and the Parisians?" That question I will now try to answer.

Like Paris? Of course I do--heartily and truly. Cold indeed must the heart be that does not find space in its depths for a true affection for the fair queen-city which welcomes all strangers so kindly and hospitably, which has a smile for all, and which at the wide banquet of her bounty sets forth food for every phase of mental hunger. Do you wish to study? Her libraries lie open to your research--her monuments, her galleries, her public institutions are given to your inspection, freely and without price. Do you seek amusement? Paris, in that respect, is like the rollicking heroine of _Barbe-Bleu:_ there is none like Boulotte, "quand il s'agit de batifoler." Do you wish to hide yourself in depths of unbroken quiet? There are in her very heart lonely streets where scarce a cart ever penetrates, and in her suburbs green shaded nooks where the spirit of Solitude reigns supreme.

Life runs on such smooth and well-oiled wheels for all humanity in Paris that half the cares that torture us are cast aside as soon as we enter her precincts. Take, for instance, the grand question of housekeeping. Fancy living in a land where all the servants are skilled and civil, if not all trustworthy and honest; where washing-days and ironing-days and baking-days are unknown; where there are no staircases to sweep down and no front-door steps to scour; where rents and eating and all other household expenses may be gauged in accordance with one's purse. If you wish to entertain, you may give a soirée that will cost ten dollars if you cannot afford to give a ball that costs five thousand. Nothing is _de rigueur_ in Paris. It is neither incumbent upon you to be housed splendidly nor to feast sumptuously--to drive your own carriage nor to entertain an army of servants. "Do the best you can" is the motto of Parisian life. And so it often happens that in a small room, up half a dozen flights of stairs, with a cup of tea for sole refreshment and music or conversation for sole amusement, one will find some of the pleasantest society in Paris. You do not get champagne and boned turkey and the German, but you hear sometimes a little music, such as one pays untold gold to hear at the opera, or a fragment of declamation by some noted elocutionist, or a new poem fresh from the pen of some celebrated writer. And you have always conversation; that is to say, the wit and sparkle of the wittiest and brightest nation on the face of the earth. In a world that is becoming more and more a Paradise of Fools the charm of sheer brain and brightness is irresistible. To live in such an intellectual centre is in itself delightful. Paris is a veritable _Foire aux Idées_. Its criticism, keen as the sword of Saladin, overwhelming as the battle-axe of Coeur de Lion, is in itself a study. It is not so much the intellectual productions of Paris as the comments they call forth that are at once instructive and fascinating.

When we turn from the world of intellect to that of ordinary life the same charm haunts our footsteps. Everything is so well done, so gracefully and so winningly presented! The exquisite perfume of refinement hangs about every trivial detail. Your washerwoman is a lady, and your coalman a Chesterfield. If a Frenchman is ever rude, he is rude with malice prepense and aforethought. He knows better, we may be sure. Patrick may err on the score of politeness from ignorance, but Alphonse is a beast only because he chooses to be bestial. All the traditions of his race run counter to his conduct when he forgets the supreme suavity that should characterize a Gaul.

And yet it is possible for an American--or rather an Anglo-Saxon--to live for years in the midst of this brilliant, polished, fascinating people, and never to feel specially interested in them, either individually or nationally. What is the reason? Why is it that, loving Paris like a second home, we do not take the Parisians to our hearts as brothers and sisters, or at least as dear first cousins? The causes are many and various. In the first place, the Parisians do not like us. The popularity which Americans were said to possess in Paris has vanished with the Empire--that is, if it really existed. It probably was nothing more at any time than the courtesy shown by an astute sovereign of a nation of shopkeepers to a nation of purchasers. To-day Americans are not popular in Parisian society. It is almost impossible that they should be. Our ideas, our social customs, our notions of right and wrong, are diametrically opposed to all the social theories of France. Our girls, with their free frank ways and their liberty of speech and action, are so many disreputable horrors in Parisian eyes. Madame la Comtesse de St. Germain would as soon think of taking her daughters to see Schneider as of permitting them to associate with young ladies who are allowed to receive morning calls from gentlemen without the presence of their parents--who call the male friends of their childhood by their first names--and who are suffered to witness _Faust_ at the opera and _La Haine_ at La Gaîté. Americans, especially wealthy ones, usually draw around them a vast circle of French acquaintances, it is true, but these are mostly sponges and adventurers, well born and well bred, it may be, but decidedly, to use a vulgar but expressive American idiom, "on the make." Of the pure and inner sanctuary of French society scarce a glimpse is afforded to these alien eyes. It would not amuse them very much if it were, for, by all accounts, this hallowed inner circle is as dull as it is exclusive. The charm of French society is to be found in those salons which are frequented by the kings of Parisian Bohemia--journalists, poets, dramatists, artists--wherein the Republic is queen and Victor Hugo a god.

Two great and ineradicable defects underlie the brightness and fascination of the external part of French character--namely, selfishness and insincerity. Perfect in manner, in dress, in grace, in suavity, in sweetness it may be, the French are utterly and wholly unreliable. They resemble the phantom woman in the story told by Leigh Hunt, that was only a suit of clothes, with no face beneath the hood and no body inside of the robes; or rather those malignant spirits that look like fair women when seen in front, but when seen from behind show only as hollow shells.

And the tradespeople, the bourgeoisie--your dressmaker, your milliner, your tailor, your butcher and baker and candlestick-maker--skilled and suave and generally charming--O heaven and earth! how they do lie! Not occasionally, not when hard-pressed, not when truth will not do as well, but persistently, calmly, eternally. "I swear to you, monsieur," will your Parisian say, "that your work shall be done in two hours," Esteem yourself fortunate if it is finished in two days: very probably two weeks will see it still uncompleted. Send for a workman to execute some little job about your house. "He will come at once--yes, at once." Days roll round, and he never comes at all. Your dressmaker agrees to make you a dress for a certain price: your bill comes home for half as much again. An American in Paris ordered an extra door-key, giving the original key as a pattern. The key was to cost four francs. Here is a copy of the bill as presented:

Francs. For taking off lock (a process wholly unnecessary, by the by), 1-1/2 For putting it on again, 1-1/2 Workman's time, 1 Journey from shop (about half a square), 1 Key, 4 ____ Total 9

Another American sent for a bell-hanger to inspect an electric bell which was thought to be out of order, but which proved on inspection to be all right. He got a bill of five francs, whereof one item ran thus: "_For looking at the bell_, 2 francs." He had not touched the thing, be it borne in mind.

I cannot refrain from here making answer to a remark too often heard from American lips, that America is as immoral as France--that American society is every whit as depraved as the French. It is _not_. The immorality of America is as a festering wound on an otherwise healthy body: the immorality of France is like a scrofulous taint that poisons the whole life-current. One gets weary and heartsick with the old eternal song, the everlasting theme, which is sung and told and dramatized and written about and painted--that flies in your face at every corner and stares up at you from every inch of printed paper, every square of colored canvas, in the whole nationality. And to sum up at last this, "a woman's opinion," I will freely state that the longer I live in France the more I admire the Parisians and the less I like them.

L.H.H.

THE COLLEGIO ROMANO.

The Collegio Romano was always worth a visit, because it contained the celebrated Kircherian Museum and the admirable observatory presided over by Father Secchi, the world-celebrated astronomer. But these are matters sufficiently treated of by the guide-books, and may be left to them. Of the story of the enormous building they have less to tell, though there is much of curious interest to be told. But neither is that my object on the present occasion. My purpose is to speak of the strangely-changed fortunes and destinies of the old historic pile, and of what it now is and is to be. But little in Rome, as we all know, has remained unchanged in these strange latter days. But few things--at least few material things--have experienced such a change as the Collegio Romano. The "Collegio Romano" was in fact nothing more than the principal convent of the Jesuits. The establishment was founded immediately after the institution of the order, and mainly by the care and energy of Saint Francisco Borgia, the third general of the order. The present building, however, was raised in the pontificate of Gregory XIII. by the Florentine architect Ammanati, the first stone having been laid in 1582. It is an enormous mass of building--enormous even among the huge structures for which Rome above all other cities is remarkable--situated near the church of the Gesù and not far from the Piazza di Venezia. There is nothing remarkable in its outward appearance save the vast size, the object of the builders having evidently been only to adapt it in a business-like way to the purposes to which it was destined. These included not only the provision of a residence for the fathers of the order resident in Rome, and for the all-but all-powerful general of the terrible order--the "Black Pope," as the Romans were wont to call him--but also all the _locale_ necessary for a very large educational establishment, whence the building took its name.

The Jesuits, like all other members of the almost innumerable monastic establishments in Rome, have, as we all know, been turned out of their homes, their property has been--or rather is being--sold, and the convents have become national property. Many of these are vast buildings, but no one of them is to be compared with the great Jesuit convent, which was the central home and head-quarters of the "Company of Jesus." And a memorable day it was in Rome, and a very singular sight, when, the dreaded fathers of the terrible "Company" having taken their departure, the few remaining goods and chattels in the convent were sold by public auction. Few and not of much value were the articles to be sold; for the fathers are not men to take no heed of those shadows which coming events cast before them, and they had long foreseen that their day in Rome was at an end, and had contrived to leave as little as might be to the spoiler. None the less was it a strange sight, as I say, to see the _profanum vulgus_ of the buyers of old furniture, and the still more numerous herd of the curious, looking on with very diversified feelings--some with bitterness enough in their hearts--pushing and tramping through those noble corridors and vast halls and secret cells, on which no profane gaze had rested for more than three hundred years.

There has been abundance of doubt, but no difficulty, in disposing of the great number of buildings which have thus come into the possession of the nation. Many of the smaller convents have been sold in the same manner as the other property of the ousted communities. But this has not been done--and indeed could hardly have been done--in the case of the larger buildings; and there has been a competition very much in the nature of a scramble for the appropriation of them by the heads of the several governmental departments. That of Public Instruction, now worthily represented by Signor Bonghi, has succeeded in laying hands on perhaps the grandest prize of all, the great Jesuit establishment of the Collegio Romano; and, looking to the uses to which it is being put by Signor Bonghi, it may, I think, be said that it could not have been better bestowed. Under his auspices it is intended to assume, and is indeed rapidly assuming, the functions of the still vaster pile of building in Great Russell street, London, known to all the world as the British Museum, as will be seen from the following statement of the purposes it is intended to serve and of the various matters to be housed in it.

On the ground-floor there is already established a "Museo Scolastico-Pedagogico"--a museum of all the means and appurtenances that are used, or have been used, in different countries for the ends and purposes of instruction. This is the idea and the creation of Signor Bonghi; and it will, I think, be admitted that it is a very happy one and likely to be fruitful in good results. A visit to it is more interesting than might perhaps at first sight be imagined. I may mention that on asking the very competent and enlightened director of the establishment what people he considered to have done most and as foremost in the work of educating the masses, he said that the Germans had done most theoretically and in the way of thinking on the philosophy of the matter, but that the Americans had done most practically in the way of improving the material means for popular education.

On the first and second floors the great national library, the "Biblioteca Vittorio Emmanuele," is--or, it would perhaps be more accurate to say, will be--placed and made accessible to the public. At Florence there exists the celebrated Magliabecchian Library, which when Florence became the capital of Italy was called the National Library--somewhat ungratefully, it will probably be thought, to the learned and indefatigable collector who gave his life and his means to the formation of it, and then bequeathed it to his native city. And I am inclined to believe that this library is still, for all the general working purposes of a nineteenth-century student, the best in Italy. In Rome, when the Eternal City in its turn became the capital of a New Italy, there existed nothing that deserved to be called a national library, and the present minister of Public Instruction set about doing what was possible to supply the want. The Company of Jesus possessed a fine and valuable library, containing about one hundred and seventy thousand volumes. This, when the Jesuits were turned out, was declared national property, and it forms the nucleus of the new Victor Emmanuel Library. While the Jesuits inhabited their old home it was arranged in one very fine hall built in the form of a cross, which will continue to be one of the principal receptacles, in the new establishment. It was in the middle of 1874 that the Italian government took possession of this collection. To this have been added forty-eight other libraries, the former property of the suppressed convents of the city and provinces of Rome. They were placed for the nonce in the cells which had been inhabited by the Jesuit fathers. The mass of books thus collected amounts to about four hundred thousand volumes. It will be seen at once that the labor of reducing to order, classifying and arranging such a confused mass must be truly herculean. But the first librarian of the Victor Emmanuel Library, Signor Carlo Castellani, well known in the literary world as a palaeographer of great eminence, is laboring at the colossal task with an energy and a zeal that have already accomplished much, and is daily making sensible advances in the work. It is, however, also evident that four hundred thousand volumes thus collected must include an immense number of duplicates; and, worse still, that (as may be readily supposed from the sources whence the books have come) one special branch of general literature will be represented in very undue proportion. Of course, the greater portion of the conventual libraries was theological. It may be presumed that classical and (old) historical literature will be found to exist, the former in tolerable completeness (so far as regards old and in many cases now obsolete editions), and the latter in considerable abundance. But of modern literature little or nothing can be expected, even of Italian, and still less of any other language. Among the number of volumes which has been mentioned there are some seven or eight thousand manuscripts, and perhaps an equal number of the editions of the fifteenth century, which go far to make the library an interesting one to the learned and to the student and lover of bibliography, but are of very little avail toward rendering the collection worth much as a national _working_ library. The question then arises, What means has Italy of procuring such a library for her capital? Something may be probably expected from the liberality of her Parliament in furtherance of this great national object. But for the present, in the depressed (though improving) state of the Italian finances, this cannot be much. There exists in Italy a law similar to that on the same subject in England, by which every publisher is obliged to deposit one copy of every book published in the national library. But this copy at present is sent to the Magliabecchian Library at Florence. Signor Castellani hopes that the privilege may be transferred, as seems but reasonable, to Rome. But I do not see why it should be necessary thus to impoverish Florence to enrich the capital. In England the law requires eleven copies which are distributed to the great libraries of the three kingdoms. It is true that this exaction has sometimes been complained of, and it is said that in the case of very costly illustrated works the tax is a very heavy one, and that in some instances it has operated to make the production of certain books impossible. And perhaps it may be reasonable to make some regulation by which such works should be exempted from the obligation. But in ordinary cases the tax is an almost inappreciable one, and, such as it is, must of course fall ultimately on the writers and readers of books--mainly on the latter--for the benefit of which classes libraries exist. It seems to me, therefore, that a somewhat larger number of copies than one or two might reasonably and advantageously be exacted from publishers. And if three or four copies were delivered to the great Roman library, there would be the means of effecting very advantageous exchanges with other countries. I asked Signor Castellani what increase in the number of volumes the _locale_ now at the disposal of the library would be capable of accommodating. He said that there would be room for about seven hundred thousand volumes, evidently a quite inadequate provision for the future. Many years will not elapse before the measure which is now demanded at the British Museum--viz., the removal of all the various collections housed there to other localities, and the dedication of the entire building to the library--will become necessary at the old Collegio Romano. Vast as the building is, the entirety of it is not at all too large for the Roman library of the future. Or--since we _are_ allowing our thoughts to consider events which cast their shadows before as if they were accomplished facts--may it not perhaps be found better some of these days to move the whole of the present collection to the Vatican, to be united with the colossal and almost unknown hoards there buried in one collection? As it is, a new reading-room, after the model of that existing at the National Library in Paris, is about to be built in the courtyard of the Collegio Romano. The classification, arrangement and methods of working the library will be copied in great measure from those introduced by Mr. Panizzi at the British Museum. Unlike the liberal practice of the great German libraries, no volume will be on any account permitted to leave the library. I was sorry to find that in one all-important respect the Roman practice as regards the national library will differ from that of London. The collection is being catalogued in slips, to be kept, after the fashion of booksellers, in boxes made for the purpose, and there is no present intention of making any catalogue in volumes accessible to the public. Of course it is impossible to allow the public to have access to the slips; and all who have ever really used a great library know but too well that a library the catalogue of which is not accessible to the student is at least _half_ useless. Even putting aside the numerous cases in which an inquirer knows of the existence of such or such a work, but is not aware of the author's name, and cannot therefore ask for or obtain the book in question, it happens more often than not that a person inquiring on any given subject finds his best guide to the available sources of information in the catalogue.

I have not left myself room, I fear, to say anything on the present occasion of the other highly interesting collections which are at present lodged, or in the course of being placed, under the all-sheltering roof of the Collegio Romano. I must content myself with simply enumerating them, with the hope of giving some account of them at some future time. I may briefly state, then, that the celebrated Kircherian Museum, formed toward the close of the sixteenth century by the learned Jesuit father Kircher, still occupies the rooms on the ground-floor, with a somewhat improved arrangement, which it occupied when the fathers of the Company inhabited the building. The collection of ancient Roman marbles discovered in the excavations of the buried city of Ostia have been brought thence, and arranged in rooms also on the third floor--a fact which strikes one as not a little to the credit of the handiwork of Ammanati, the Florentine architect. Also on the third floor there is an exceedingly interesting collection, of which I hope to speak somewhat more at length another time. It is called a palaeo-ethnographical museum, and consists of a large collection of the implements of all sorts of the people belonging to the pre-historic period, together with a similar gathering of articles used by the uncivilized races of the present day. The interest of such a comparative study as is here suggested is, as may be readily understood, very great. On the fourth floor there is a very considerable collection of objects illustrating Italian art of the ante-Roman period, and also a Museum of Industrial Art, conceived on the plan of the English School of Art at South Kensington.

T.A.T.

TRADES UNIONISM IN ITS INFANCY.

In these days of trades unionism and strikes an account of the germ of such associations in this country is not without interest. So far back as 1806 a remarkable trial arising out of such a combination took place before the recorder of Philadelphia and a jury. It lasted three days and excited extraordinary interest. Jared Ingersoll and Joseph Hopkinson were counsel for the prosecution, and Caesar A. Rodney and Walter Franklin for the defence.

The defendants, eight in number, were indicted for not being content to work at the usual prices, but contriving to increase and augment them, and for endeavoring to prevent by threats, menaces and other unlawful means other artificers from working at the usual rate, and uniting into a club or combination to make and ordain unlawful and arbitrary rules to govern those engaged in their trade, and unjustly exact great sums of money by means thereof.

The evidence went to show in the clearest manner that a system of frightful thralldom had been put in force. A witness named Harrison stated that when he reached the United States in 1794 he found this system of terrorism prevalent. He went to work for a Mr. Bedford, and presently got a hint that if he did not join the association of journeymen shoemakers he was liable to be "scabbed," which meant that men would not work in the same shop, nor board or lodge in the same house, nor would they work at all for the same employer. The case of this man seemed exceptionally hard. He made shoes exclusively, and when "a turn-out came to raise the wages on boots" he remonstrated, pleading that shoes did not enter into the question, and urging that he had a sick wife and a large family. But it was all to no purpose. He then resolved that he would turn a "scab" unknown to the association, and continue his work; but having a neighbor whom it was impossible for him to deceive, he went to him and said that he knew his circumstances, and that his family must perish or go to "the bettering-house" unless he continued to work. This neighbor, Swain, replied that he knew his condition was desperate, but that a man had better make any sacrifice than turn a "scab" at that time. He presently informed against him, and Mr. Bedford (his employer) was warned that he must discharge his "scabs." He refused, saying that, "Let the consequence be what it might, we should sink or swim together." However, one Saturday night, when all but Harrison and a man named Logan had left him, Bedford's resolution gave way, and he exclaimed, "I don't know what the devil I am to do: they will ruin me in the end. I wish you would go to the body and pay a fine, if not very large, in order to set the shop free once more." The fine offered was refused, and Mr. Bedford's shop remained "under scab" for a year. Still, Mr. Bedford, who must have been a very plucky fellow, would not give Harrison up, but removed in 1802 to Trenton. Harrison stated that although he could not, had Mr. Bedford given him up, have got work anywhere else, and that he might have ground him down to any terms, yet he (Bedford) very nobly always gave him full price. At length, by paying a fine, Harrison became reconciled to his persecutors, and Bedford's shop was once more free.

William Forgrave said that "the name of a 'scab' is very dangerous: men of this description have been hurt when out at night." He had been threatened, and joined the association from fear of personal injury. A vast deal more of evidence was given and eloquent speeches delivered by counsel, but the foregoing gives the sum and substance of the case.

In the course of the summing up Recorder Levy said: "To make an artificial regulation is not to regard the excellence of the work or quality of the material, but to fix a positive and arbitrary price, governed by no standard, but dependent on the will of the few who are interested.... What, then, is the operation of this kind of conduct upon the commerce of the city? It exposes it to inconveniences, if not to ruin: therefore it is against the public welfare. How does it operate upon the defendants? We see that those who are in indigent circumstances, and who have families to maintain, have declared here on oath that it was impossible for them to hold out. They were interdicted from all employment in future if they did not continue to persevere in the measures taken by the journeymen shoemakers. Does not such a regulation tend to involve necessitous men in the commission of crimes? If they are prevented working for six weeks, it might lead them to procure support for their wives and children by burglary, larceny or highway robbery."

The jury found the defendants "guilty of a combination to raise their wages," and the court sentenced them to pay a fine of eight dollars each, with costs of suit, and to stand committed till paid.

MORAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

One of our popular clergymen, in a late Sunday discourse upon the Bible in the public schools, labored to show that the question was a very unimportant one. because none were much interested in it except infidels and politicians--a sufficiently absurd position for a professed teacher of the people to assume. Doubtless it is a folly to fan into flame the slumbering embers of a quarrel, but it is a greater folly to pretend, in the face of the common sense of the people, that all signs of fire are extinguished or never existed where there is so much inflammable material about and the "wind of doctrine" running high.

This question of secular education for our public schools is in fact one of the most difficult of solution. Chicago has met it in a summary manner by excluding the Bible from all her free schools, but this does not settle the question, because both believers and unbelievers in the various creeds of the churches admit that there should be provision made for the training of the moral faculties of the children in our public schools. Many of them, especially in cities and large manufacturing centres, come out of the dark alleys where intemperance, poverty and ignorance tend to arrest the development of their higher sentiments. For the unfortunate children of such homes the sessions of the public school afford the only glimpse of a better life, the only chance for moral and æsthetic culture. Protestants, as a rule, honestly believe that the reading of the Bible at the opening of school tends to waken and develop the moral aspirations of the child. Just as honestly and conscientiously do Catholics disbelieve in the efficacy of Bible reading, while they boldly condemn secular education as a principle. Father Muller, priest of the congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, in his work upon public school education, published three years ago in Boston, says: "The language of the Vicar of Christ in regard to godless education is very plain and unmistakable".... "Our Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., has declared that Catholics cannot approve of a system of educating youth unconnected with the Catholic faith and the power of the Church".... "The voice of common sense, the voice of sad experience, the voice of Catholic bishops, and especially the voice of the Holy Father, is raised against and condemns the public school system as a huge humbug, injuring and not promoting personal virtue and good citizenship, and as being most pernicious to the Catholic faith and life and all good morals. A pastor, therefore, cannot maintain the contrary opinion without incurring guilt before God and the Church. He cannot allow parents to send their children to such schools of infidelity. He cannot give them absolution and say, _Innocens sum_."

According to the _American Annual Cyclopædia_ for 1875, the Roman Catholic Church has in the United States 1 cardinal, 8 archbishops, 54 bishops, 4872 priests, 4731 churches, 1902 chapels, 68 colleges, 511 academies, and a lay membership numbering over 6,000,000. This shows a great and increasing prosperity of that Church in this country; yet our institutions have nothing to fear from that prosperity unless the principles of Catholicity support the "one-man power" against the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, the foundation-principle of republicanism. Patriotic Catholic citizens claim that there is no conflict. They love their Church and their country, and will labor to preserve peace and harmony. Yet how can harmony be maintained while a large and increasing number of our tax-paying citizens, accepting their Church and its head as infallible, are forced by their spiritual allegiance to send their children to Catholic schools, though at the same time paying taxes to support those "godless" public schools condemned by the infallible Church? To take the ground that these two powers, the Catholic Church and our government, do not conflict, because one is a spiritual and the other a civil power, is simply absurd. We see that they _do_ conflict. The pope interferes with the civil rights of our citizens when--as, for example, in his encyclical letter of December 8, 1874--he commands all Catholics to treat the liberty of speech, of the press, of conscience and of worship, the separation of Church and State and the secular education of youth, as "_reprobatas, proscriptas, atque damnatas_."

THE EARLIEST PRINTED BOOKS.

A recent lecture of the Rev. Dr. Storrs in New York, before the Society for the Advancement of Science and Art, must have been very interesting to an ordinary audience, but for one composed of professed promoters of learning it could hardly have been sufficiently exact to give general satisfaction if the newspaper reports of it were at all correct. They represent the lecturer as saying that an immense number of books date back to 1450. Now, the first printed book bearing a date is the _Psalter_ of Füst and Schoeffer, 1457. A _portion_ of the Bible was printed by Gutenberg and Füst in 1450, but the work was so expensive and so imperfect that it was abandoned. In 1452, after Schoeffer joined the firm, another Bible is supposed to have been printed, but no copy of it is known to exist. Of course it is well known that many of the earliest printed books are without date, but none could have been printed before 1450; and there is no proof, we believe, that the Bible said to be of 1455 bore that or any date. In that year the firm of Gutenberg, Füst and Schoeffer dissolved. L. Grégoire in his _Dictionnaire Encyclopédique_, published in Paris in 1817, says that there are only three or four copies of the Füst Bible known to exist. Dr. Storrs, however, says, without giving his authority, that there are fifteen.

The sole idea of the early printers was to imitate exactly the manuscript characters of the scribes. The initial letters of the Bibles and the numbers of the chapters were therefore added with a pen in blue and red ink alternately; and there is not the slightest doubt that these first books were palmed off upon an unsuspecting public as manuscripts. All the servants or employés of Füst and Schoeffer were put under solemn oath to divulge nothing of the secret concerning printing. It is to the policy which the first printers exerted to conceal their art that we owe the tradition of the Devil and Dr. Faustus. Füst having printed off quite a number of Bibles, and had the large initial letters added by hand, he took them to Paris and sold them for about fifty dollars apiece. The scribes demanded about ten times that sum, and they earned the money, for it must have been an herculean task to copy, as they did, every letter of the Bible with such exquisite care, and then draw and illuminate the heads of the chapters and the initial letters. It was a marvel how this new man could produce these ponderous books at so low a rate. And then the uniformity of the letters and the pages increased the wonder, until the cry of "sorcerer" was raised: complaints before the magistrates were made against him, his lodgings were searched and a great number of copies were found and confiscated. The populace in their ignorance and superstition declared that he was in league with the devil, and that the red ink with which the books were embellished was his blood. It is a satisfaction to know that the Parliament of Paris passed an act to discharge the sorcerer from all prosecution in consideration of _the usefulness of his art_.

M.H.

FLOWERS VS. FLIES.

An Irish clergyman is said to have discovered last autumn a charming antidote to flies, which it is only a pity he could not have lighted on rather earlier in the season. Having occasion to change his abode, he sent on his window-plants, calceolarias and geraniums, to that which he intended to occupy several days before he went himself, and immediately found that he was pestered with flies, whereas previously he had enjoyed perfect immunity from the nuisance. A more agreeable remedy cannot be conceived. Next autumn let our windows be a blaze of brilliancy, so that all visitors to the Centennial may say, at all events, "There are no flies in Philadelphia."

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Shakespeare Hermeneutics; or, The Still Lion. Being an Essay towards the Restoration of Shakespeare's Text. By C.M. Ingleby, M.A., LL.D. London: Trübner & Co.

Setting aside those who care merely to see a play on the stage, it may be said that of Shakespeare there are readers and readers; and both classes have rights and privileges which should be treated with deference. The reader who studies every line should not fleer at him who studies not at all. Have we not a right to read a play of Shakespeare's through in two short hours, surrendering ourselves, unvexed by logic or grammar, to the enchantment which scenes and phrases and words conjure up as they glide through our minds? When all the atmosphere is tremulous with airs from heaven or blasts from hell, must we, forsooth! stop and philosophically investigate what Hamlet means by a "_dram of eale"_? Must we lose a scruple of the sport by turning aside to find out what Malvolio means by the "_lady of the Strachey_"? If Timon chooses to invite _Ullorxa_ to his feast, are we to bar the door because no one ever heard the name before? No: let us have our Shakespeare (is he not as much ours as yours?) free from all notes, on a page purified from the musty cobwebs of black-letter pedants. We want no jargon of bickering critics to drown the music that sings at Heaven's gate. Give us those immortal plays just as Shakespeare wrote them, that we may read them without let or hinderance.

But, fair and softly, is not this the very point at which we are striving? With all our twistings and turnings, our patchings and piecings, have we aught else in view than to decipher just what Shakespeare wrote? Where are Shakespeare's exact words to be found? Not in the so-called Quartos; for they are said by Shakespeare's intimate and dear friends to have been "maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors," and taken down perhaps from the lips of some of the actors, bribed by stoops of liquor at _Yaughan's_ (and from the gibberish here and there set down it is to be feared that the potations were at times pottle deep). Nor can we take the Folio in which all his dramas were first collected: Shakespeare never saw a line of it; for seven years he had been hid in death's dateless night when that volume was printed. What, then, is to be done? The Quartos and Folios are all the authority we have, and none of them present what can be held to have been undeniably Shakespeare's exact words. In dealing with the text we must never for a moment forget that there stands, and will for ever stand, as interpreters between us and Shakespeare, a crew of dishonest actors or of more or less ignorant compositors. Is such a text, thus transmitted, to be held in reverence so deep that not a syllable is to be changed for fear of the cry that we are tampering with the words of Shakespeare? Is the curse in his epitaph on the mover of his bones to hang over his text? Small reverence for Shakespeare does it betoken, in our opinion, to believe this. Rather, let us regard these pages of the Folio as what they virtually are in so many cases--namely, as but little better than our modern proof-sheets. And they should be dealt with accordingly by a modern critic; but only on one condition precedent: he must be Shakespeare's peer. In default of this we can only humbly erase here, and reverently suggest there, summoning to our aid all possible knowledge, lest in plucking up the tares we pluck up the wheat also.

And this is really all that textual criticism for the last hundred and forty years has aimed at--merely to get at what Shakespeare really wrote. We know that he could not write sheer nonsense, and yet at times sheer nonsense mows at us from his printed page. Those who clamor for Shakespeare's text, pure and simple, divested of all notes and annotations, have no idea how much thought and time have been expended on every line,--nay, on every word, on every comma,--in the text of any good modern edition of his dramas, and with the single aim, be it remembered, of revealing exactly what the poet wrote.

It must not, however, be thought that since the original texts of Shakespeare's plays are so corrupt, any criticaster has good leave to expunge or expand at will, under a roving commission to hack and hew wheresoever and howsoever it may please him, under the plea of restoring the text. On the contrary, since we cannot fulfill the condition precedent of being Shakespeare's peers, we must exercise the greatest caution in changing a reading of the Quartos or Folios, lest in condemning the text as corrupt we pass judgment on our own wit.

He who the sword of Heaven would bear Must be as holy as severe.

And we must be very sure that the passage is corrupt before we set about amending it. First and last, we must remember that primal elder law, that of two readings the more difficult is to be preferred. _Durior lectio preferenda 'st_ should be a frontlet between our brows. The weaker reading or the plainer meaning is more likely to be a printer's interpretation of what he failed to comprehend.

But to understand Shakespeare's meaning in a degree that will authorize us to amend the text, we must understand Shakespeare's speech; that is, we must be thoroughly familiar with the words and usages of Elizabethan English; and not only with Elizabethan words and phrases, but also, as far as possible, with the very pronunciation.

This fundamental principle is well enforced and illustrated in Dr. Ingleby's book, which was originally published in one of the Annuals of the German Shakespeare Society under the title of _The Still Lion_, a title suggested by a passage in De Quincey, where the danger of meddling with Milton's text is compared to that of meddling with a still lion, which may be neither dead nor sleeping, but merely shamming. Dr. Ingleby substitutes Shakespeare for Milton, and maintains that the mass of Shakespearian emendations that have been proposed during the last twenty years are needless; and that corruptions have been assumed where none exist, owing to the limited knowledge possessed by the critics. Thus, for instance, in the _Comedy of Errors_ (I. i. 152) the Duke bids Aegeon to "seek thy _help_ by beneficial _help_." At once there is a chorus from all of us, sciolists, of "Corruption!" "Sophistication!" "Cacophonous repetition!" etc. etc. "But gently, friends," says Dr. Ingleby: "may not 'help' have borne a different or a special meaning in Elizabethan English?" and turning to medical writers and books on medicine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (among them Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare's own son-in-law), he proves that _heal_ and _help_ having a common origin, _help_ was used by Shakespeare's contemporaries as a synonym for _cure, deliverance_. The text, then, is perfectly correct, Ægeon being bid to seek his _deliverance_ from the doom of death by the _help_ of what friends he can find. The lion's slumbers were here of the lightest, and happy men be our dole to have escaped with whole skins. Thus Dr. Ingleby takes up passage after passage of Shakespeare that has been pronounced corrupt, and shows that the fault imputed to it lies not in the text, but in the lack of requisite knowledge, be it of language, of usage, of manners and customs, or even of Elizabethan spelling and grammar, on the part of the critic. The mischief that ignorance has done in the past is irrevocable, but such impressive warnings as Dr. Ingleby gives us may help, in both senses of the word, in the future. We may be spared, hereafter, the infliction of numberless "felicitous" conjectures, on which the following is scarcely a parody. It was proposed many years ago in sport by the late deeply-lamented Chauncey Wright, and, as far as we know, has never yet appeared in print, though it may live to be gravely noted down in some future Variorum, being a genuine echo of many a note by Zachary Jackson or Andrew Beckett. In _As You Like It_ occur the familiar lines, "And thus our life ... finds ... books in the running brooks, sermons in stones," etc. "This is stark nonsense, and must be remedied. Who ever found a _book_ in a _rivulet_ or a _sermon_ in a _rock?_ It is clearly an error of a most ignorant or careless compositor, who has transposed the nouns. Read, '_stones in the running brooks and sermons in books_.' Sense is vindicated. Stones are frequently found in brooks. David chose smooth _pebbles from the brook_, and sermons are quite frequently printed and sold in a book-form. By this restoration Shakespeare's wonderful observation is," etc., etc., etc.

Great as is the service done in particular cases, the most valuable part of _The Still Lion_ is the moral which it points, that "successful emendation is the fruit of severe study and research on the one hand, and of rare sensibility and sense on the other." And in our opinion Dr. Ingleby might have gone even farther, and demanded for it a spark of that creative power which is genius. But it must not be inferred that all the difficult passages in Shakespeare can be thus explained away. Despite all learning, or acuteness, or genius, there remains a considerable number that have never yet been solved, and never will be, in general acceptation, till the crack of doom. These, however, bear so small a proportion to the vast mass of perplexing riddles that have been satisfactorily settled that, like an infinitely small quantity in mathematics, they may be neglected. Therefore, let not him who wishes to read his Shakespeare unalloyed by notes and textual comment, despise the painful critic or accuse him of playing at loggats with the words of Shakespeare. It is through the labors of critics that the text is in such a shape that the work-a-day reader can read it at all. In the Folios and Quartos we see Shakespeare as through a glass darkly, but, thanks to those drudges, the commentators, in numberless places we can now see him face to face.

The Orphan of Pimlico, and other Sketches, Fragments and Drawings. By William Makepeace Thackeray. With some notes by Anne Isabella Thackeray. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

The artistic sense--the vivid conception of things and persons in their external aspects and with a constant regard to their groupings and the effect upon the spectator--made itself peculiarly prominent in all that Thackeray wrote. It is not that he gives us elaborate descriptions: this, indeed, is the resource of writers who are lacking in the faculty mentioned, and are consequently obliged to reach the result, if at all, by inferior means. His power lay in the selection of traits which were strictly characteristic, in making every act or phrase indicative of individuality. An astute critic, therefore--one gifted with that keenness of vision to which the exercise of the office unhappily implies a claim--should have been able to infer Thackeray's dexterity with the pencil from the methods of his literary work. There was, however, no room for conjecture on this point, as the fact was early a matter of notoriety, and many of the illustrations in his books were known to be from his own sketches. Recently, too, a publication containing some of his earliest and slightest work in this way attracted considerable attention, with the fortunate result of calling out the volume before us, which embodies the best specimens of his skill reproduced by a method that renders every line an exact transcript, and accompanied by facsimiles of whatever written text or comment appeared on the same page. Many of them partake more or less of the nature of caricature, and if the execution alone be considered, they show that Thackeray might, in default of talents of a different order, have pursued this line with as much success as some of its cleverest cultivators. But what distinguishes the drolleries in this book is the inventiveness shown in the conception and the characteristic ingenuity of the details. The designs for "Playing Cards," in which the tray of spades is represented by the figures of Johnson, Boswell and Gibbon, and a scene at "Dr. Birch's School" does duty for the seven of hearts, are especially felicitous in this way; while a different but not less familiar trait is exhibited in some carefully-drawn "Initial Letters," embodying charming bits of child-life and quaint allusions to well-known scenes in history and romance. "Othello" in the form of "Dandy Jim of Souf Caroline," and "The Little Assessor of Tübingen"--a mysterious personage of whom the author refused to reveal the secret--are equally amusing and suggestive. There are some half hundred subjects of the same or other kinds in the volume, which, as a mere picture-book, is full of entertainment for readers of all ages, while for those with whom the name of Thackeray is a dear household word it will have a still higher charm, calling up as it does so many associations connected with the author and the man, and seeming like a fragment of the biography which has been vainly looked for.

_BOOKS RECEIVED_.

The Illustrated Annual Register of Rural Affairs for 1876. By J.J. Thomas. Albany: Luther Tucker & Son.

The Chevalier Casse-Cou: The Red Camellia. By Fortuné Du Boisgobey. Translated from the French by Thos. Picton. New York: Robert M. De Witt.

Household Elegancies. By Mrs. C.S. Jones and Henry T. Williams. New York: Henry T. Williams.

The Children's Treasury of English Song. By Francis Turner Palgrave. New York: Macmillan & Co.

Stories from the Lips of the Teacher. By O.B. Frothingham. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Songs of Three Centuries. Edited by J.G. Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

Roddy's Reality. By Helen Kendrick Johnson. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.