Part 2

_Boyesen._ You will never suspect what an influence you exerted upon my fate by your friendliness and sympathy in those never-to-be-forgotten days. You Americanized me. I had been an alien, and felt alien in every fibre of my soul, until I met you. Then I became domesticated. I found a kindred spirit who understood me, and whom I understood; and that is the first and indispensable condition of happiness. It was at your house, at a luncheon, I think, that I met Henry James.

_Howells._ Yes; James and I were constant companions. We took daily walks together, and his father, the elder Henry James, was an incomparably delightful and interesting man.

_Boyesen._ Yes; I remember him well. I doubt if I ever heard a more brilliant talker.

_Howells._ No; he was one of the best talkers in America. And didn't the immortal Ralph Keeler appear upon the scene during the summer of '71 or '72?

_Boyesen._ Yes; your small son "Bua" insisted upon calling him "Big Man Keeler" in spite of his small size.

_Howells._ Yes, Bua was the only one who ever saw Keeler life-size.

_Boyesen._ I remember how he sat in your library and told stories of his negro minstrel days and his wild adventures in many climes, and did not care whether you laughed with him or at him, but would join you from sheer sympathy, and how we all laughed in chorus until our sides ached!

_Howells._ Poor Keeler! He was a sort of migratory, nomadic survival; but he had fine qualities, and was well equipped for a sort of fiction. If he had lived he might have written the great American novel. Who knows?

_Boyesen._ Was not it at Cambridge that Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson visited you?

_Howells._ No; that was in 1881, at Belmont, where we went in order to be in the country, and give the children the benefit of country air. When I met Bjoernson before, we had always talked Italian; but the first thing he said to me at Belmont, was: "Now we will speak English." And when he had got into the house, he picked up a book and said in his abrupt way: "We do not put enough in;" meaning thereby, that we ignored too much of life in our fiction--excluded it out of regard for propriety. But when I met him, some years later, in Paris, he had changed his mind about that, for he detested the French naturalism, and could find nothing to praise in Zola.

_Boyesen._ I am going to ask you one of the interviewer's stock questions, but you need not answer, you know: Which of your books do you regard as the greatest?

_Howells._ I have always taken the most satisfaction in "A Modern Instance." I have there come closest to American life as I know it.

_Boyesen._ But in "Silas Lapham" it seems to me that you have got a still firmer grip on American reality.

_Howells._ Perhaps. Still I prefer "A Modern Instance." "Silas Lapham" is the most successful novel I have published, except "A Hazard of New Fortunes," which has sold nearly twice as many copies as any of the rest.

_Boyesen._ What do you attribute that to?

_Howells._ Possibly to the fact that the scene is laid in New York; the public throughout the country is far more interested in New York than in Boston. New York, as Lowell once said, is a huge pudding, and every town and village has been helped to a slice, or wants to be.

_Boyesen._ I rejoice that New York has found such a subtly appreciative and faithful chronicler as you show yourself to be in "A Hazard of New Fortunes." To the equipment of a great city--a world-city as the Germans say--belongs a great novelist; that is to say, at least one. And even though your modesty may rebel, I shall persist in regarding you henceforth as _the_ novelist _par excellence_ of New York.

_Howells._ Ah, you don't expect me to live up to _that_ bit of taffy!

PARABLES OF A PROVINCE.--I.

THE NYMPH OF THE EDDY.

BY GILBERT PARKER.

It lay in the sharp angle of a wooded shore near Pontiac. When the river was high it had all the temper of a maelstrom, but in the hot summer, when the logs had ceased to run, and the river wallowed idly away to the rapids, it was like a molten mirror which, with the regularity of a pulse, resolved itself into a funnel, as though somewhere beneath there was a blowhole. It had a look of hunger. Even the children noticed that, and they fed it with many things. What it passed into its rumbling bowels you never saw again. You threw a stick upon the shivering surface, and you saw it travel, first slowly, then very swiftly, round and round the sides, till the throat of the eddy seemed to open suddenly, and it ran straight down into darkness, and presently the funnel filled up again. It was shadowed by a huge cedar tree. If you came suddenly into the thicket above it, you were stilled with wonder. The place was different from all others on the river. It looked damp, it was so strangely green; the grass and trees showed so juicy; you fancied you could slice the fallen logs through with a penknife. Every sound there carried with a peculiar distinctness, yet the air was almost painfully still. Through the stillness there ran ever a sound, metallic, monotonous, pleasant--a clean cling-clung, cling-clung. It never varied, was the river high or low. If you lay down in the mossy grass you were lulled by that sing-song vibration, behind which you heard the low sucking breath of the eddy. The two sounds belonged to each other, and had a peculiar sympathy of tone. The birds never sang in the place, not because it was gloomy, maybe, but as though not to break in upon other rights.

There was nothing mysterious about that unceasing cling-clung, it was merely the ram of a force-pump. If you followed the pipe that led from the ram up the hill, you came to a large white house.

Many a summer day, and especially of a morning, a young girl came dancing down to the eddy, to sit beside it. She and it were very good friends; she used to tell it her secrets, and she made up a little song about it--a simple, almost foolish little song such as a clever young girl can write--Laure had been to the convent in Montreal, so she was not a common village maid.

"Green, so green, is the cedar tree, And green is the moss that's under; Can you hear the things that he says to me? Do you like them? O Eddy, I wonder."

It was very foolish. But she had such a soft, thrilling voice that you would have thought it beautiful. She was young--about sixteen--and her hair was so light that it fell about her like spray. But suddenly she ceased to be quite happy.

Armand, the avocat's clerk, was a Protestant, and she had been meeting him at the eddy secretly. What did she care about the Catechism, or the _cure_, or an unblessed marriage, if Armand blessed her? She was afraid of nothing; she would dare anything while she was certain of him. But the _cure_ discovered something--she ceased to go to confession, and, though he was a kind man, he had his duty to do.

There was trouble, and the ways of Laure's people were devious and hard. It was said that she must go to the convent again, and they kept her prisoner in the house. One day they brought her a letter which, they said, was from Armand. It told her that he was going away, and that he had given her up. She had never seen his writing--they had trusted nothing to the village post-office--and she believed that the letter was from him. She had wept so much that tears were all done; her eyes only ached now. At first she thought that she would get away and go to him, and beg him not to give her up--what does a child know of pride all at once? But the pride came to her a little later, and she tried to think what she must do. While her thoughts went waving to and fro, and she could make nothing of them, she heard all the time the long, sighing breath of the eddy and the cling-clung of the force-pump. She never slept, and after a time it grew in her mind that she never would sleep till she went down to the cedar tree and the eddy; they seemed always calling her. She had said her Ave Marias over and over again, but they seemed to do her no good. Nothing could quiet her, not even the music of the twelfth mass, played on the little reed organ by the organist of St. Savior's, when they took her to church against her will--a passive rebel. The next day she was to go to the convent again.

That night she stole from the house into the light of the soft harvest moon, and ran down through the garden, over the road, and into the cedar thicket. She did not hear behind her the footsteps of a man who, night after night, had watched the house, hoping that she would come out. She hastened to the cedar tree, and looked down into the eddy. From far up the river there came the plaintive cry of a loon; but she heard no other sound in the night, save this and the cling-clung of the ram muffled by fallen branches, and the loud-breathing eddy which invited--until an arm ran round her waist and held her fast.

A minute later he said: "You will come, then? And we shall be man and wife very quick."

"Wait a minute," she said, and she picked up handfuls of leaves and dropped them softly into the funnel of water.

"What's that for?" he asked.

"I am a cock-robin," she said with her old gayety. "There's a girl drowned there. Yes, but it's true. She was a good Catholic and unhappy. I'm a heretic now, and happy."

But she said her Ave Marias again just the same; being happy, they did her more good. And she says that the eddy is spiteful to her now. It had counted on a different end to her wooing.

HUMAN DOCUMENTS.

AN INTRODUCTION BY SARAH ORNE JEWETT.

To give to the world a collection of the successive portraits of a man is to tell his affairs openly, and so betray intimate personalities. We are often found quarrelling with the tone of the public press, because it yields to what is called the public demand to be told both the private affairs of noteworthy persons and the trivial details and circumstances of those who are insignificant. Some one has said that a sincere man willingly answers any questions, however personal, that are asked out of interest, but instantly resents those that have their impulse in curiosity; and that one's instinct always detects the difference. This I take to be a wise rule of conduct; but beyond lies the wider subject of our right to possess ourselves of personal information, although we have a vague remembrance, even in these days, of the belief of old-fashioned and decorous people, that subjects, not persons, are fitting material for conversation.

But there is an honest interest, which is as noble a thing as curiosity is contemptible; and it is in recognition of this, that Lowell writes in the largest way in his "Essay on Rousseau and the Sentimentalists."

"Yet our love of minute biographical details," he says, "our desire to make ourselves spies upon the men of the past, seems so much of an instinct in us, that we must look for the spring of it in human nature, and that somewhat deeper than mere curiosity or love of gossip." And more emphatically in another paragraph: "The moment he undertakes to establish ... a rule of conduct, we ask at once how far are his own life and deed in accordance with what he preaches?"

This I believe to be at the bottom of even our insatiate modern eagerness to know the best and the worst of our contemporaries; it is simply to find out how far their behavior squares with their words and position. We seldom stop to get the best point of view, either in friendly talk or in a sober effort, to notice the growth of character, or, in the widest way, to comprehend the traits and influence of a man whose life in any way affects our own.

* * * * *

Now and then, in an old picture gallery, one comes upon the grouped portraits of a great soldier, or man of letters, or some fine lady whose character still lifts itself into view above the dead level of feminine conformity which prevailed in her time. The blurred pastel, the cracked and dingy canvas, the delicate brightness of a miniature which bears touching signs of wear--from these we piece together a whole life's history. Here are the impersonal baby face; the domineering glance of the school-boy, lord of his dog and gun; the wan-visaged student who was just beginning to confront the serried ranks of those successes which conspired to hinder him from his duty and the fulfilment of his dreams; here is the mature man, with grave reticence of look and a proud sense of achievement; and at last the older and vaguer face, blurred and pitifully conscious of fast waning powers. As they hang in a row they seem to bear mute witness to all the successes and failures of a life.

This very day, perhaps, you chanced to open a drawer and take in your hand, for amusement's sake, some old family daguerreotypes. It is easy enough to laugh at the stiff positions and droll costumes; but suddenly you find an old likeness of yourself, and walk away with it, self-consciously, to the window, with a pretence of seeking a better light on the quick-reflecting, faintly impressed plate. Your earlier, half-forgotten self confronts you seriously; the youth whose hopes you have disappointed, or whose dreams you have turned into realities. You search the young face; perhaps you even look deep into the eyes of your own babyhood to discover your dawning consciousness; to answer back to yourself, as it were, from the known and discovered countries of that baby's future. There is a fascination in reading character backwards. You may or may not be able easily to revive early thoughts and impressions, but with an early portrait in your hand they do revive again in spite of you; they seem to be living in the pictured face to applaud or condemn you. In these old pictures exist our former selves. They wear a mystical expression. They are still ourselves, but with unfathomable eyes staring back to us out of the strange remoteness of our outgrown youth.

"Surely I have known before Phantoms of the shapes ye be-- Haunters of another shore 'Leaguered by another sea."

It is somehow far simpler and less startling to examine a series of portraits of some other face and figure than one's own. Perhaps it is most interesting to take those of some person whom the whole world knows, and whose traits and experiences are somewhat comprehended. You say to yourself, "This was Nelson before ever he fought one of his great sea battles; this was Washington, with only the faintest trace of his soldiering and the leisurely undemanding aspect of a country gentleman!" _Human Documents_--the phrase is Daudet's, and tells its own story, with no need of additional attempts of suggestiveness.

It would seem to be such an inevitable subject for sermon writing, that no one need be unfamiliar with warnings, lest our weakness and wickedness leave traces upon the countenance--awful, ineffaceable hieroglyphics, that belong to the one universal primitive language of mankind. Who cannot read faces? The merest savage, who comprehends no written language, glances at you to know if he may expect friendliness or enmity, with a quicker intelligence than your own.

The lines that are written slowly and certainly by the pen of character, the deep mark that sorrow once left, or the light sign-manual of an unfading joy, there they are and will remain; it is at length the aspect of the spiritual body itself, and belongs to the unfolding and existence of life. We have never formulated a science like palmistry on the larger scale that this character-reading from the face would need; but to say that we make our own faces, and, having made them, have made pieces of immortality, is to say what seems trite enough. A child turns with quick impatience and incredulity from the dull admonitions of his teachers, about goodness and good looks. To say, "Be good and you will be beautiful," is like giving him a stone for a lantern. Beauty seems an accident rather than an achievement, and a cause instead of an effect; but when childhood has passed, one of the things we are sure to have learned, is to read the sign-language of faces, and to take the messages they bring. Recognition of these things is sure to come to us more and more by living; there is no such thing as turning our faces into unbetraying masks. A series of portraits is a veritable Human Document, and the merest glance may discover the progress of the man, the dwindled or developed personality, the history of a character.

These sentences are written merely as suggestions, and from the point of view of morals; there is also the point of view of heredity, and the curious resemblance between those who belong to certain professions. Just what it is that makes us almost certain to recognize a doctor or a priest at first glance is too subtle a question for discussion here. Some one has said that we usually arrive, in time, at the opposite extreme to those preferences and opinions which we hold in early life. The man who breaks away from conventionalities, ends by returning to them, or out of narrow prejudices and restrictions grows towards a late and serene liberty. These changes show themselves in the face with amazing clearness, and it would seem also, that even individuality sways us only for a time; that if we live far into the autumnal period of life we lose much of our individuality of looks, and become more emphatically members of the family from which we spring. A man like Charles the First was already less himself than he was a Stuart; we should not fail in instances of this sort, nor seek far afield. The return to the type compels us steadily; at last it has its way. Very old persons, and those who are dangerously ill, are often noticed to be curiously like their nearest of kin, and to have almost visibly ceased to be themselves.

All time has been getting our lives ready to be lived, to be shaped as far as may be by our own wills, and furthered by that conscious freedom that gives us to be ourselves. You may read all these in any Human Document--the look of race, the look of family, the look that is set like a seal by a man's occupation, the look of the spirit's free or hindered life, and success or failure in the pursuit of goodness--they are all plain to see. If we could read one human face aright, the history not only of the man, but of humanity itself, is written there.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES TO ACCOMPANY THE "HUMAN DOCUMENTS" GIVEN IN THIS NUMBER.

GENERAL LEW WALLACE was born in Brookville, Indiana, in 1827. After receiving a common school education, he studied law. He distinguished himself in the Civil War, and was made a brigadier-general. After the war he practised law in Crawfordsville, Indiana. A few years later he was for a time Governor of New Mexico. From 1878-81 he was Governor of Utah, and from 1881-85 Minister to Turkey. His first book, "A Fair God," appeared in 1877. "Ben Hur," published in 1880, has reached a sale of several hundred thousand copies. General Wallace's home is in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, March 11, 1837. His father was the editor of a country newspaper, and young Howells learned the printer's trade. He began to write at an early age. At nineteen he was Columbus correspondent of the "Cincinnati Gazette," and at twenty-two, news editor of the "Ohio State Journal." A campaign "Life of Lincoln," gained him the consulship at Venice, where he seriously devoted his leisure hours to literature. "Venetian Life" gave him reputation. On his return to America in 1865, he wrote for newspapers and magazines. In 1866 Mr. Howells joined the editorial staff of "The Atlantic." In 1872 he became the editor. About this time the success of "Their Wedding Journey" determined his career as a novelist.

HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN was born at Frederiksvaern, Norway, September 23, 1848. When twenty-one years of age he came to the United States. In 1874 he was appointed professor of German at Cornell University, and is now professor of Germanic languages and literature at Columbia College, New York. It was in the early seventies that Professor Boyesen's name began to appear in the magazines. In 1873 he published his first long romance, "Gunnar," and other novels followed, well known to the reading world.

ALPHONSE DAUDET was born at Nimes, May 13, 1840. His early life was full of hardship and deprivation. In 1857 he arrived in Paris, with some manuscript poems and no money. He almost starved, but kept on writing and hoping. His volume of verse, "Les Amoureuses" (1858), attracted some attention. He persisted, took to writing novels, and achieved greatness. The story of his life and struggles, as told by himself, will be given in an early number of MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE.

GENERAL LEW WALLACE.

_Born in Brookville, Indiana, April 10, 1827._

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.

HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN.

_Born September 23, 1847, Frederiksvaern, Norway._

ALPHONSE DAUDET.

WILD ANIMALS.--I

HOW THEY ARE CAPTURED, TRANSPORTED, TRAINED, AND SOLD.

BY RAYMOND BLATHWAYT.

The greatest wild animal trader in the world is Karl Hagenbeck of Hamburg. To hear, therefore, how he captures and transports the brutes that compose his stock in trade, how he trains them, and some of the peculiarly strange adventures which have befallen him in dealing with them, cannot fail to be of interest. A few days ago I went to his Hamburg menagerie, where, on opening a door, I found myself in a great shed full of caged wild beasts. As visitors, except those on business, are not allowed within those notable precincts, my unexpected appearance excited the cages' occupants to set up a grand concerto of roars and howls. Awestruck at the sight and sounds, I stood dazed until suddenly recalled to myself by a Nubian lion, who laid hold of my cloak-flaps with unsheathed claws. At once I leaped forward, while the beast retired snarling to the farthest corner of its cage, where in the dark shadows its eyes glared like two living coals. At this moment Mr. Hagenbeck came forward and gave me a hearty welcome, coupled with a word of warning against venturing too near the cages. He is a tall man, singularly pleasant looking, with keen eyes and a decisive manner. Later we sat in his office, and there I heard many incidents of the interesting life which he has led for so many years.