did. She merely went singing softly about the house, or joining in our

choruses, like a happy girl.

I remember that one morning, while a dozen of us were sitting in the shade of the terrace, the ladies with their fancy work, the gentlemen with their books and cigars, we heard from the open windows above us a burst of song, full-throated like a bird’s. It was for all the world like the notes of an English lark, which always sings in a kind of glorious ecstasy, as it mounts and mounts in the air, the merrier as it climbs the higher, until it pours from its invisible height a shower of joyous song. No one among us stirred. La Diva thought us far away up the valley, where we had planned an excursion, but we had postponed the project to a cooler day. We were afraid of disturbing Madame, so we kept silent and listened. Our unseen entertainer seemed to be bustling about her boudoir, singing as she flitted, snatching a bar or two from this opera and that, revelling in the fragment of a ballad, and trilling a few scales like my friend the lark. Presently she ceased, and we were about to stir, when she began to sing “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” She was alone in her room, but she was singing as gloriously as if to an audience of ten thousand persons in the Albert Hall. The unsuspected group of listeners on the terrace slipped from their own control and took to vigorous hand-smiting and cries of delight.

“Oh, oh, oh!” said the bird-like voice above.

We looked up, and saw Patti leaning out at the casement.

“Oh,” said she, “I couldn’t help it, really I could not. I am so happy!”

At luncheon Madame proposed an entertainment in the theatre for the evening. We were to have “Camille” in pantomime.

She persuaded Monsieur Nicolini to be the Armand Duval. Nicolini had never cared to act in the little theatre, but now he consented to make his début as a pantomimist, and he proved to be a master of the art. He had learned it, in fact, at the Conservatoire, when, as a young man, he had studied for the stage. “In those days,” says he, “the study of pantomime was part of an actor’s training. Pity it is not so now.”

The preparations for the pantomime went on apace. Among the guests were several capable amateurs. The performance began a little after ten on the evening of the following day. Some musicians were brought from Swansea. A dozen gentlefolk hastily summoned from the valley, those of us among the guests who were not enrolled for the pantomime, and a gallery full of peasantry and servants, made up the audience. We had “Camille” in five acts of pantomime, and altogether it was a capital performance, and a memorable one. Of course, Madame Patti and her husband carried off the honors. There was a supper after the play, and the sunlight crept into the Swansea Valley within two hours after we had retired.

I said to Patti after the pantomime, “You do not seem to believe that change of occupation is the best possible rest. You appear to me to work as hard at rehearsing and acting in your little theatre as if you were ‘on tour.’”

“Not quite. Besides, it isn’t work, it is play,” replied the miraculous little woman. “I love the theatre. And, then, there is always something to learn about acting. I find these pantomime performances very useful as well as very pleasant.”

Every afternoon about three o’clock Patti and her guests go for a drive, a small procession of landaus and brakes rattling along the smooth country roads. You can see at once that this is Patti-land. The cottagers come to their doors and salute her Melodious Majesty, and all the children of the country-side run out and throw kisses. “Oh! the dears,” exclaimed the kind-hearted cantatrice as we were driving toward the village of Ystradgynlais (they call it “Ist-rag-dun-las”), one afternoon, “I should like to build another castle and put all those mites into it, and let them live there amid music and flowers!” And I believe that she would have given orders for such a castle straightway, had there been a builder within sight.

On the way home Patti promised me “a surprise” for the evening. I wondered what it might be, and when the non-appearance of the ladies kept the gentlemen waiting in the drawing-room at dinner-time I was the more puzzled. Nicolini, to pass the time, showed us some of Madame’s trophies. It would be impossible to enumerate them, because Craig-y-Nos Castle is like another South Kensington Museum in the treasures it holds. Every shelf, table, and cabinet is packed with gifts which Madame Patti has received from all parts of the earth, from monarchs and millionaires, princes and peasants, old friends and strangers. There is Marie Antoinette’s watch, to begin with, and there are the new portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to end with. There is a remarkable collection of portraits of royal personages, presented to Madame Patti by the distinguished originals on the occasion of her marriage to M. Nicolini. Photographs of the Grand Old Man of Politics and the Grand Old Man of Music rest side by side, on a little table presented by some potentate. Gladstone’s likeness bears his autograph, and the inscription: “_Con tanti e tanti complimenti_;” Verdi’s, his autograph, and a fervid tribute written in Milan a year ago. There are crowns and wreaths and rare china; there are paintings and plate and I know not what, wherever one looks. If one were to make Patti a gift, and he had a king’s ransom to purchase it withal, he would find it difficult to give her anything that would be a novelty, or that would be unique, in her eyes. She has everything now. For my part, I would pluck a rose from her garden, or gather a nosegay from a hedgerow, and it would please her as truly as if it were a priceless diadem. She values the thought that prompts the giving, rather than the gift itself. She never forgets even the smallest act of kindness that is done for her sake. And she is always doing kindnesses for others. I have heard from the Welsh folk many tales of her generous charities. And to her friends she is the most open-handed of women. There was one dank, drizzly day while I was at Craig-y-Nos. To the men this did not matter. The wet did not interfere with their projected amusements. But every lady wore some precious jewel which Patti had given her that morning--a ring, a brooch, a bracelet, as the case might be. For the generous creature thought her fair friends would be disappointed because they could not get out of doors that day. How could she know that every one in the castle welcomed the rain because it meant a few hours more with Patti?

The “surprise” she had spoken of was soon apparent. The ladies came trooping into the drawing-room attired in the gowns and jewels of Patti’s operatic rôles. Patti herself came last, in “Leonora’s” white and jewels. What a dinner party we had that night--we men, in the prim black and white of “evening dress,” sitting there with “Leonora,” and “Desdemona,” and “Marguerite,” and “Rachel,” and “Lucia,” and “Carmen,” and “Dinorah,” and I know not how many more! Nobody but Patti would have thought of such merry masquerading, or, having thought of it, would have gone to the trouble of providing it.

Of course, we talked of her favorite characters in opera, and then of singers she has known. She said it would give her real pleasure to hear Mario and Grisi again, or, coming to later days, Scalchi and Annie Louise Cary. The latter being an American and a friend, I was glad to hear this appreciation of her from the Queen of Song. “Cary and Scalchi were the two greatest contraltos I have ever known; and I have sung with both of them. I remember Annie Louise Cary as a superb artist, and a sweet and noble woman.” I said “Hear, hear,” in the parliamentary manner, and then Patti added: “Now we will go into the theatre again. There is to be another entertainment.” It was, of all unexpected things, a magic-lantern show. Patti’s magic-lantern is like everything else at Craig-y-Nos, from her piano to her pet parrot, the only one of its kind. It is capable of giving, with all sorts of “mechanical effects,” a two-hours’ entertainment every night for two months without repeating a scene. Patti invited me to sit beside her and watch the dissolving views. It seemed to me that it would be like this to sit by the queen during a “state performance” at Windsor. Here was Patti Imperatrice, dressed like a queen, wearing a crown of diamonds, and attended by her retinue of brilliantly attired women and attentive gentlemen of the court. And it was so like her to cause the entertainment to begin with a series of American views, and to hum softly a verse of “Home, Sweet Home,” as we looked out upon New York harbor from an imaginary steamship inward bound.

The next morning I started from Craig-y-Nos for America. As the dog-cart was tugged slowly up the mountain-side the Stars and Stripes saluted me from the castle tower, waving farewell as I withdrew from my peep at paradise.

ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER.

BY “Q.”

Early last fall there died in Troy an old man and his wife. The woman went first, and the husband took a chill at her grave’s edge, when he stood bareheaded in a lashing shower. The loose earth crumbled under his feet, trickling over, and dropped on her coffin-lid. Through two long nights he lay on his bed without sleeping, and listened to this sound. At first it ran in his ears perpetually, but afterwards he heard it at intervals only, in the pauses of acute suffering. On the seventh day he died, of pleuro-pneumonia; and on the tenth (a Sunday) they buried him. For just fifty years the dead man had been minister of the Independent chapel on the hill, and had laid down his pastorate two years before, on his golden wedding day. Consequently there was a funeral sermon, and the young man, his successor, chose II. Samuel, i. 23, for his text: “Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.” Himself a newly married man, he waxed dithyrambic on the sustained affection and accord of the departed couple. “Truly,” he wound up, “such marriages as theirs were made in heaven.” And could they have heard, the two bodies in the cemetery had not denied it; but the woman, after the fashion of women, would have qualified the young minister’s assertion in her secret heart.

When, at the close of the year 1839, Reverend Samuel Bax visited Troy for the first time, to preach his trial sermon at Salem chapel, he arrived by Bontigo’s van, late on a Saturday night, and departed again for Plymouth at seven o’clock on Monday morning. He had just turned twenty-one, and looked younger, and the zeal of his calling was strong upon him. Moreover, he was shaken with nervous anxiety for the success of his sermon; so that it is no marvel if he carried away but blurred and misty impressions of the little port, and the congregation that sat beneath him that morning, ostensibly reverent, but actually on the lookout for heresy or any sign of weakness. Their impressions, at any rate, were sharp enough. They counted his thumps upon the desk, noted his one reference to “the original Greek,” saw and remembered the flush of his young face and the glow in his eye as he hammered the doctrine of the redemption out of original sin. The deacons fixed the subject of these trial sermons, and had chosen original sin, on the ground that a good beginning was half the battle. The maids in the congregation knew beforehand that he was unmarried, and came out of the chapel knowing also that his eyes were brown, that his hair had a reddish tinge in certain lights, that one of his cuffs was frayed slightly, but his black coat had scarcely been worn a dozen times, with other trifles. They loitered by the chapel door until he came out, in company with Deacon Snowden, who was conveying him off to dinner. The deacon, on week days, was harbor-master of the port, and on Sundays afforded himself roasted duck for dinner. Lizzie Snowden walked at her father’s right hand. She was a slightly bloodless blonde, tall, with a pretty complexion, and hair upon which it was rumored she could sit if she were so minded. The girls watched the young preacher and his entertainers as they moved down the hill, the deacon talking, and his daughter turning her head aside as if it were merely in the section of the world situated on her right hand that she took the least interest.

“That’s to show ’en the big plait,” commented one of the group behind. “He can’t turn his head hes way, but it stares ’en in the face.”

“An’ her features look best from the left side, as everybody knows.”

“I reckon, if he’s chosen minister, that Lizzie’ll have ’en,” said a tall, lanky girl. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker and engaged to a young tinsmith. Having laid aside ambition on her own account, she flung in this remark as an apple of discord.

“Tenifer Hosken has a chance. He’s fair-skinned hissel’, and Lizzie’s too near his own color. Black’s mate is white, as they say.”

“There’s Sue Tregraine. She’ll have more money than either, when her father dies.”

“What, marry one o’ Ruan!” the speaker tittered, despitefully.

“Why not?”

The only answer was a shrug. Ruan is a small town that faces Troy across the diminutive harbor, or, perhaps, I should say that Troy looks down upon it at this slight distance. When a Trojan speaks of it he says, “Across the water,” with as much implied contempt as though he meant Botany Bay. There is no cogent reason for this, except that the poorer class at Ruan earns its livelihood by fishing. In the eyes of its neighbors the shadow of this lonely calling is cast upwards upon its wealthier inhabitants. Troy depends on commerce, and employs these wealthier men of Ruan to build ships for it. Further it will hardly condescend. In the days of which I write intermarriage between the towns was almost unheard-of, and even now it is rare. Yet they are connected by a penny ferry.

“Her father’s a shipbuilder,” urged Sue Tregraine’s supporter.

“He might so well keep crab-pots, for all the chance she’ll have.”

Now there was a Ruan girl standing just outside this group, and she heard what was said. Her name was Nance Trewartha, and her father was a fisherman, who did, in fact, keep crab-pots. Moreover, she was his only child, and helped him at his trade. She could handle a boat as well as a man, she knew every sea-mark up and down the coast for forty miles, she could cut up bait, and her hands were horny with handling ropes from her childhood. But on Sundays she wore gloves, and came across the ferry to chapel, and was as wise as any of her sex. She had known before coming out of her pew that the young minister had a well-shaped back to his head, and a gold ring on his little finger with somebody’s hair in the collet, under a crystal. She was dark, straight, and lissome of figure, with ripe lips and eyes as black as sloes, and she hoped that the hair in the minister’s ring was his mother’s. She was well aware of her social inferiority; but--the truth may be told--she chose to forget it that morning, and to wonder what this young man would be like as a husband. She had looked up into his face during sermon time, devouring his boyish features, noticing his refined accent, marking every gesture. Certainly, he was comely and desirable. As he walked down the hill by Deacon Snowden’s side, she was perfectly conscious of the longing in her heart, but prepared to put a stop to it, and go home to dinner as soon as he had turned the corner and passed out of sight. Then came that unhappy remark about the crab-pots. She bit her lip for a moment, turned, and walked slowly off towards the ferry, full of thought.

Three weeks later Reverend Samuel Bax received his call.

He arrived, to assume his duties, in the waning light of a soft January day. Bontigo’s van set him down, with a carpet-bag, bandbox, and chest of books, at the door of the lodgings which Deacon Snowden had taken for him. The house stood in the North Street, as it is called. It was a small, yellow-washed building, containing just half a dozen rooms, and of these the two set apart for the minister looked straight upon the harbor. Under his sitting-room window was a little garden, and at the end of the garden a low wall, with a stretch of water beyond it and a bark that lay at anchor but a stone’s throw away, as it seemed, its masts overtopping the misty hillside that closed the view. A green painted door was let into the garden wall--a door with two flaps, the upper of which stood open; and through this opening he caught another glimpse of gray water.

The landlady, who showed him into this room and at once began to explain that the furniture was better than it looked, was hardly prepared for the rapture with which he stared out of the window. His boyhood had been spent in a sooty Lancashire town, and to him the green garden, the quay door, the bark, and the stilly water seemed to fall little short of Paradise.

“I reckoned you’d like it,” she said. “An’, to be sure, ’tis a blessing you do.”

He turned his stare upon her for a moment. She was a benign-looking woman of about fifty, in a short-skirted gray gown and widow’s cap.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, leavin’ out the kitchen, there’s but four rooms, two for you an’ two for me; two facin’ the harbor, an’ two facin’ the street. Now, if you’d took a dislike to this look-out I must ha’ put you over the street an’ moved in here mysel’. I do like the street, too, there’s so much more doin’.”

“I think this arrangement will be better in every way,” said the young minister.

“I’m main glad. Iss, there’s no denyin’ that I’m main glad. From upstairs you can see right down the harbor, which is prettier again. Would’ee like to see it now? O’ course you would--an’ it’ll be so much handier for answerin’ the door, too. There’s a back door at the end o’ the passage. You’ve only to slip a bolt an’ you’m out in the garden--out to your boat, if you choose to keep one. But the garden’s a tidy little spot to walk up an’ down in an’ make up your sermons, wi’ nobody to overlook you but the folk next door, an’ they’m churchgoers.”

After supper that evening the young minister unpacked his books and was about to arrange them, but drifted to the window instead. He paused for a minute or two, with his face close to the pane, and then flung up the sash. A faint north wind breathed down the harbor, scarcely ruffling the water. Around and above him the frosty sky flashed with innumerable stars, and behind the bark’s masts, behind the long chine of the eastern hill, a soft radiance heralded the rising moon. It was the new moon, and while he waited, her thin horn pushed up, as it were, through the furze brake on the hill’s summit, and she mounted into the free heaven. With upturned eyes the young minister followed her course for twenty minutes, not consciously observant, for he was thinking over his ambitions, and at his time of life these are apt to soar with the moon. Though possessed with zeal for good work in this small seaside town, he intended that Troy should be but a stepping-stone in his journey. He meant to go far. And while he meditated his future, forgetting the chill in the night air, it was being decided for him by a stronger will than his own. More than this, that will had already passed into action. His destiny was actually launched on the full spring tide that sucked the crevices of the gray wall at the garden’s end.

A slight sound drew the minister’s gaze down from the moon to the quay-door. Its upper flap still stood open, allowing a square of moonlight to pierce the straight black shadow of the garden wall.

In this square of moonlight were now framed the head and shoulders of a human being.

The young man felt a slight chill run down his spine. He leaned forward out of the window and challenged the apparition, bating his tone, as all people bate it at that hour.

“Who are you?” he demanded, “and what is your business here?”

There was no reply for a moment, though he felt sure his voice must have carried to the quay-door. The figure paused for a second or two, then unbarred the lower flap of the door and advanced across the wall’s shadow to the centre of the bright grassplot under the window. It was the figure of a young woman. Her head was bare and her sleeves turned up to the elbows. She wore no cloak or wrap, to cover her from the night air, and her short-skirted, coarse frock was open at the neck. As she turned up her face to the window, the minister could see by the moon’s rays that it was well-favored.

“Be you the new preacher?” she asked, resting a hand on her hip and speaking softly up to him.

“I am the new Independent minister.”

“Then I’ve come for you.”

“Come for me?”

“Iss; my name’s Nance Trewartha, an’ you ’en wanted across the water, quick as possible. Old Mrs. Slade’s a-dyin’ to-night, over yonder.”

“She wants me?”

“She’s one o’ your congregation, an’ can’t die easy till you’ve seen her. I reckon she’s got something ’pon her mind; an’ I was to fetch you over, quick as I could.”

As she spoke the church clock down in the town chimed out the hour, and immediately after, ten strokes sounded on the clear air.

The minister consulted his own watch, and seemed to be considering.

“Very well,” said he, after a pause. “I’ll come. I suppose I must cross by the ferry.”

“Ferry’s closed this two hours, an’ you needn’t wake up any in the house. I’ve brought father’s boat to the ladder below, an’ I’ll bring you back again. You’ve only to step out here by the back door. An’ wrap yourself up, for ’tis a brave distance.”

“Very well. I suppose it’s really serious.”

“Mortal. I’m glad you’ll come,” she added, simply.

The young man nodded down in a friendly manner, and going back into the room, slipped on his overcoat, picked up his hat, and turned the lamp down carefully. Then he struck a match, found his way to the back door, and unbarred it. The girl was waiting for him, still in the centre of the grassplot.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” she repeated, but this time there was something like constraint in her voice. As he pulled to the door softly, she moved and led the way down to the water side.

From the quay-door a long ladder ran down to the water. At low water one had to descend twenty feet and more; but now the high tide left but three of its rungs uncovered. At the young minister’s feet a small fishing-boat lay ready, moored by a short painter to the ladder. The girl stepped lightly down and held up her hand.

“Thank you,” said the young man, with dignity, “but I do not want help.”

She made no answer to this; but, as he stepped down, went forward and unmoored the painter. Then she pushed gently away from the ladder, hoisted the small foresail, and, returning to her companion, stood beside him for a moment with her hand on the tiller.

“Better make fast the foresheet,” she said, suddenly.

The young man looked helplessly at her. He had not the slightest idea of her meaning, did not, in fact, know the difference between a foresheet and a mainsail. And it was just to find out the depth of his ignorance that she had spoken.

“Never mind,” she said, “I’ll do it myself.”

She made the rope fast and took hold of the tiller again. The sails shook, and filled softly as they glided out from under the wall. The soft breeze blew straight behind them, the tide was just beginning to ebb. She slackened the mainsheet a little, and the water hissed as they spun down under the gray town towards the harbor’s mouth.

A dozen vessels lay at anchor below the town quay, their lamps showing a strange orange-yellow in the moonlight; between them the minister saw the cottages of Ruan glimmering on the eastern shore, and above them the coastguard station, with its flagstaff, a clear white upon the black hillside. It seemed to him that they were not shaping their course for the little town.

“I thought you told me,” he said at length, “that Mrs.--the dying woman--lived across there.”

The girl shook her head. “Not in Ruan itsel’--Ruan parish. We’ll have to go round the point.”

She was leaning back and gazing straight before her, towards the harbor’s mouth. The boat was one of the class that serves along that coast for hook and line as well as drift-net fishing, clinker built, about twenty-seven feet in the keel and nine in the beam. It had no deck beyond a small cuddy forward, on top of which a light hoarfrost was gathering as they moved. The minister stood beside the girl, and withdrew his eyes from this cuddy roof to contemplate her.

“Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that you don’t take cold wearing no wrap or bonnet on frosty nights like this?”

She let the tiller go for a moment, took his hand by the wrist and laid it on her own bare arm. He felt the flesh, but it was firm and warm. Then he withdrew his hand hastily, without finding anything to say. His eyes avoided hers. When, after half a minute, he looked at her again, her gaze was fixed straight ahead upon the misty stretch of sea beyond the harbor’s mouth.

In a minute or two they were sweeping between the tall cliff and the reef of rocks that guard this entrance on either side. On the reef stood a wooden cross, painted white, warning vessels to give it a wide berth; on the cliff a gray castle, with a battery before it, under the guns of which they spun seaward, still with the wind astern.

Outside the sea lay as smooth as within the harbor. The wind blew steadily off the shore, so that, close-hauled, one might fetch up or down channel with equal ease. The girl began to flatten the sails, and asked her companion to bear a hand. Their hands met over a rope, and the man noted with surprise that the girl’s was feverishly hot. Then she brought the boat’s nose round to the eastward, and, heeling gently over the dark water, they began to skirt the misty coast, with the breeze on their left cheeks.

“How much farther?” asked the minister.

She nodded towards the first point in the direction of Plymouth. He turned his coat-collar up about his ears, and wondered if his duty would often take him on such journeys as this. Also he felt thankful that the sea was smooth. He might, or might not, be given to seasickness; but somehow he was sincerely glad that he had not to be put to the test for the first time in this girl’s presence.

They passed the small headland, and still the boat held on its way.

“I had no idea you were going to take me this distance. Didn’t you tell me the house lay beyond the point we’ve just passed?”

To his amazement the girl drew herself up, looked him straight in the face, and said:

“There’s no such place.”

“What?”

“There’s no such place. There’s nobody ill at all. I told you a lie.”

“You told me a lie--then why in the name of common sense am I here?”

“Because, young minister--because, sir, I’m sick o’ love for you, an’ I want ’ee to marry me.”

“Great heaven!” the young minister muttered, recoiling, “is the girl mad?”

“Ah, but look at me, sir.” She seemed to grow still taller as she stood there, resting one hand on the tiller and looking at him with perfectly serious eyes. “Look at me well before your fancy lights ’pon some other o’ the girls. To-morrow they’ll be all after ’ee, an’ this’ll be my only chance; for my father’s no better’n a plain fisherman, an’ they’re all above me in money an’ rank. I be but a common Ruan girl, an’ my family is counted for naught. But look at me well; there’s none stronger nor comelier, nor that’ll love thee so dear!”

The young man positively gasped. “Set me ashore at once!” he commanded, stamping his foot.

“Nay, that I will not till thou promise, an’ that’s flat. Dear lad, listen--an’ consent, consent--an’ I swear to thee thou’ll never be sorry for’t.”

“I never heard such awful impropriety in my life. Turn back; I order you to steer back to the harbor at once!”

She shook her head. “No, lad, I won’t. An’ what’s more, you don’t know how to handle a boat, an’ couldn’t get back by yoursel’, not in a month.”

“This is stark madness. You--you abandoned woman, how long do you mean to keep me here?”

“Till thou give in to me. We’m goin’ straight t’wards Plymouth now, an’ if th’ wind holds--as ’twill--we’ll be off the Rame in two hours. If you haven’t said me yes by that, maybe we’ll go on; or perhaps we’ll run across to the coast o’ France----”

“Girl, do you know that if I’m not back by daybreak I’m ruined?”

“And oh, man, man! can’t ’ee see that I’m ruined, too, if I turn back without your word? How shall I show my face in Troy streets again, tell me?”

At this sudden transference of responsibility the minister staggered.

“You should have thought of that before,” he said, employing the one obvious answer.

“O’ course I thought of it. But for love o’ you I made up my mind to risk it. An’ now there’s no goin’ back.” She paused a moment and then added, as a thought struck her, “Why, lad, doesn’t that prove I love ’ee uncommon?”

“I prefer not to consider the question. Once more--will you go back?”

“I can’t.”

He bit his lips and moved forward to the cuddy, on the roof of which he seated himself sulkily. The girl tossed him an end of rope.

“Dear, better coil that up an’ sit upon it. The frost’ll strike a chill into thee.”

With this she resumed her old attitude by the tiller. Her eyes were fixed ahead, her gaze passing just over the minister’s hat. When he glanced up he saw the rime twinkling on her shoulders and the starshine in her dark eyes. Around them the firmament blazed with constellations, up to its coping. Never had the minister seen them so multitudinous or so resplendent. Never before had heaven seemed so alive to him. He could almost hear it breathe. And beneath it the little boat raced eastward, with the reef-points pattering on its tan sails.

Neither spoke. For the most part the minister avoided the girl’s eyes, and sat nursing his wrath. The whole affair was ludicrous; but it meant the sudden ruin of his good name, at the very start of his career. This was the word he kept grinding between his teeth: “ruin,” “ruin.” Whenever it pleased this madwoman to set him ashore he must write to Deacon Snowden for his boxes and resign all connection with Troy. But would he ever get rid of the scandal? Could he ever be sure that, to whatever distance he might flee, it would not follow him? Had he not better abandon his calling once and for all? It was hard!

A star shot down from the Milky Way and disappeared in darkness behind the girl’s shoulder. His eyes, following it, encountered hers. She left the tiller and came slowly forward.

“In three minutes we’ll open Plymouth Sound,” she said, quietly; and then, with a sharp gesture, flung both arms out towards him. “Oh, lad, think better o’t, an’ turn back wi’ me. Say you’ll marry me, for I’m perishin’ o’ love.”

The moonshine fell on her throat and extended arms. Her lips were parted, her head was thrown back a little, and for the first time the young minister saw that she was a beautiful woman.

“Ay, look, look at me,” she pleaded. “That’s what I’ve wanted ’ee to do all along. Take my hands; they’m shapely to look at and strong to work for ’ee.”

Hardly knowing what he did, the young man took them; then in a moment he let them go--but too late; they were about his neck.

With that he sealed his fate for good or ill. He bent forward a little, and their lips met.

So steady was the wind that the boat still held on her course; but no sooner had the girl received the kiss that she knew to be a binding promise than she dropped her arms, walked off, and shifted the helm.

“Unfasten the sheet here,” she commanded, “and duck your head clear o’ the boom.”

As soon as their faces were set for home, the minister walked back to the cuddy roof and sat down to reflect. Not a word was spoken till they reached the harbor’s mouth again, and then he pulled out his watch. It was half-past four in the morning.

Outside the battery point the girl hauled down the sails and got out the sweeps; and together they pulled up under the still sleeping town to the minister’s quay-door. He was clumsy at this work, but she instructed him in whispers, and they managed to reach the ladder as the clocks were striking five. The tide was far down by this time, and she held the boat close to the ladder while he prepared to climb. With his foot on the first round he turned. She was white as a ghost, and trembling from top to toe.

“Nance--did you say your name was Nance?”

She nodded.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ll--I’ll let you off if you want to be let off.”

“I’m not sure that I do,” he said, and stealing softly up the ladder stood at the top and watched her boat as she steered it back to Ruan.

Three months after they were married, to the indignant amazement of the minister’s congregation. It almost cost him his pulpit, but he held on and triumphed. There is no reason to believe that he ever repented of his choice, or, rather, of Nance’s. To be sure, she had kidnapped him by a lie; but perhaps she had wiped it out by fifty years of honest affection. On that point, however, I, who tell the tale, will not dogmatize.

SONG.

BY THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.

From “Torrismond,” Sc. iii.

_How many times do I love thee, dear?_ _Tell me how many thoughts there be_ _In the atmosphere_ _Of a new fall’n year,_ _Whose white and sable hours appear_ _The latest flake of eternity--_ _So many times do I love thee, dear._

_How many times do I love, again?_ _Tell me how many beads there are_ _In a silver chain_ _Of evening rain_ _Unravelled from the tumbling main_ _And threading the eye of a yellow star--_ _So many times do I love again._

FOUR HUNDRED DEGREES BELOW ZERO.

AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR JAMES DEWAR.

BY HENRY J. W. DAM.

The science of chemistry, like that of geography, has its undiscovered North Pole. Four hundred and sixty-one degrees below the freezing point of the Fahrenheit thermometer (−274° C.) lies a mysterious, specially indicated degree of cold which science has long been gazing toward and striving to attain, wondering meanwhile what may be the conditions of matter at this unexplored point. Its existence has long been indicated and its position established in two different ways, viz., the regularly diminishing volumes of gases, and the steady falling off in the resistance made by pure metals to the passage through them of electricity under increasing degrees of cold. This point, to which both these processes tend as an ultimate, is called the zero of absolute temperature. By more than one eminent observer it is supposed to be the temperature of inter-stellar space, the normal temperature of the universe. Whether or not this supposition be correct, the efforts which have been made and are still in progress to reach this degree of cold have been many, diverse, and ingenious; the equipment of the explorer being not boats, condensed foods, and the general machinery of ice exploration, but all the varied resources of mechanics and of chemistry which can be combined to compass the extremest degrees of cold.

All the world has heard of Professor James Dewar, and of his late great triumphs in the liquefaction of oxygen gas and the solidification of nitrogen and air. The sensation caused by his extraordinary results won him at once the congratulations of many scientific men, the profuse encomiums of the press, and the flattering recognition of appreciative royal personages. This was largely due to the fact that in the search for this unknown and mysterious point he had plunged much deeper than any chemist before him into the regions of low temperature, and had arrived within sixty degrees Centigrade of the point itself. This exciting and not uneventful journey downward did not take him beyond the confines of his own laboratory, but his description of it, as well as of the properties of matter under extreme cold, has something of the fascination, to the mind possessed of ordinary chemical curiosity, of the story of a Stanley, a Nansen, or a Peary, describing the peculiarities of countries in which they, of all men, have been the first to set their feet.

Professor Dewar, who was born in Kincardine-on-Forth in 1842, was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where his natural and special gifts as a chemist were developed by Sir Lyon Playfair, at that time Professor of Chemistry in the university. The perspicacity and tenacity of purpose which are characteristic of so many Scotchmen were eminently the inheritance of Sir Lyon’s young assistant, and between that period and the present a long series of original investigations in all departments of chemistry have won for Professor Dewar at his prime the Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, the Fullerian Professorship of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the degree of Doctor of Laws, and other dignities, which make great alphabetical richness after his name upon scientific occasions of state. Personally, he is of middle height and strong build, with a clearly cut face, full of character. His speech, faintly flavored with the accent of Scotia, is exact and emphatic; and his manner, whether he is concentrated upon a scientific demonstration in his laboratory or traversing the speculative questions of the hour in ordinary conversation in his drawing-room, has the earnestness of the profound scientist, very agreeably tempered by the polish of the traveller and cosmopolitan man of the world. His absorption in scientific pursuits has not denied him a very marked esthetic development, and his residential suite of apartments at the Royal Institution is filled with treasures, rare tapestries, bronzes, and carvings, picked up at continental dépôts or purchased at the sales of great collections, which would make a highly interesting article in themselves. To her husband’s scientific sense of the value of age in wines, Mrs. Dewar adds her original researches in the matter of choice teas, and it is averred by the eminent membership of the Royal Institution that the degree of domestic civilization which prevails on the third floor of the building is quite as high and more potentially attractive than the stage of scientific civilization which rules in the theatre, the libraries, and the laboratories of the floors below. Like most Scotchmen, however, Professor Dewar is simple in his tastes, and is more deeply stirred by a frozen gas or an antique bronze than anything in the way of bisques or _suprêmes_. His heart, which shows no signs of low temperature, is mainly in his laboratory, and he leads the way there, down a flight of stone steps to the basement, with a readiness that very clearly exhibits his latent enthusiasm.

Moreover, it is a laboratory eminently calculated to excite the enthusiasm of anybody, being, in fact, the most famous laboratory known to chemical science. The workshop of Sir Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and Doctor Thomas Young, to say nothing of lesser and still famous men, it is a nest in which more great discoveries have been hatched than any other of its kind on earth. Here it was that Young conducted the experiments which gave us the undulatory theory of light. Here Davy, covering, nearly a hundred years ago, almost the whole field of chemistry and electricity, made clear those principles which science and applied science since his time have developed to the marvellous degrees of to-day. A little room leading to the right of the main laboratory was the scene of all Faraday’s experiments in magnetism, and a cellar on its south side is known to this day as “Davy’s Froggery,” from the fact that Davy kept in it hundreds of live frogs for use in his experiments. Professor Dewar, whose sense of the inspiration of his surroundings is clearly deep, dwells upon them with interest, and tells how on one occasion a barrel of live frogs, imported by Davy from France, burst at the docks, causing astonishment there and consternation in the laboratory when Davy learned of his loss. It was in this laboratory that Faraday first liquefied chlorine gas, sending thereupon that famously curt note to Dr. Paris, the biographer of Davy, in 1823:

“DEAR SIR:--The oil you noticed yesterday turns out to be liquid chlorine.

“Yours faithfully,

“MICHAEL FARADAY.”

All of Faraday’s work in the liquefaction of gases, the discovery of new hydrocarbons, the study of the changes of steel through the slight admixture of other metals, the improvement of optical glass, and the long list of results which are to-day represented in millions of tons of products from thousands of factories, were obtained within these four walls. And nothing could better illustrate the earnestness and modesty of the great chemist than a little anecdote which Professor Dewar, standing in the centre of the room, calls to mind. “I never met Faraday,” says he, “but Tyndall told me this story of him. The first time Tyndall entered this laboratory, Faraday led him to this point and said: ‘Tyndall, this is a sacred spot. This is the spot on which Davy separated sodium and potassium.’”

The laboratory of to-day, however, looks very little like a scene of chemical industry. It has more the air of a machine shop, equipped with power and mechanical appliances of a very heavy kind. Instead of bottles and multi-colored liquids, all is metal and steam. The room is about thirty feet wide and fifty deep, the north front consisting entirely of glass windows opening on a well-lighted interior court. In the left-hand corner, at the back, is a large steam-engine, while a smaller one occupies the corner diagonally across. Shafts, wheels, and belting run to two large air-pumps and three steel compressors, each about the size and shape of a small travelling trunk, and used respectively for compressing oxygen, nitrous oxide, and ethylene. A fourth compressor, or double compressing chamber, is cylindrical in form, and is wrapped in thick white flannel. This is the source of the liquefied oxygen. The system which Professor Dewar has followed is not novel in its general principles, as he explains. Specifically, however, it contains many new inventions which he does not wish made public. They are mainly in the nature of stop-cocks and valves, which it took long study to invent, and which became perfect only after many failures and costly experiments. To liquefy oxygen, he simply used pressure at low temperatures; but as, up to 1878, both oxygen and nitrogen after repeated trials were looked upon as permanent gases, it may be imagined that the attainment of temperatures low enough was a problem which required an extraordinary command of mechanics as well as of chemistry to practically solve.

“The process of liquefying oxygen, briefly speaking,” says the professor, “is this. Into the outer chamber of that double compressor I introduce, through a pipe, liquid nitrous oxide gas, under a pressure of about 1,400 pounds to the square inch. I then allow it to evaporate rapidly, and thus obtain a temperature around the inner chamber of −90° C. (−130° F.). Into this cooled inner chamber I introduce liquid ethylene, which is a gas at ordinary temperatures, under a pressure of 1,800 pounds to the square inch. When the inner chamber is full of ethylene, its rapid evaporation under exhaustion reduces the temperature to −145° C. (−229° F.). Running through this inner chamber is a tube containing oxygen gas under a pressure of 750 pounds to the square inch. The ‘critical point’ of oxygen gas, that is, the point above which no amount of pressure will reduce it to a liquid, is −115° C., but this pressure, at the temperature of −145° C., is amply sufficient to cause it to liquefy rapidly. In drawing off the liquid under this pressure, I lose nine-tenths of it by evaporation, and I have not yet seen how to diminish that loss. Every pint of it which I collect therefore represents ten pints manufactured. In all, I have thus far collected and used about fifty gallons, and the cost of machinery and experiments, very generously met by subscription among members of the Royal Institution and others, has been about five thousand pounds sterling.” It should be here stated that one of the most generous contributors to the fund has been Professor Dewar himself, a large fraction of the sum having come out of his own pocket.

Going more into detail, he makes clear some of the mechanical and chemical difficulties which beset him in the work. “The secret of my success,” he continues, “has been the mechanical arrangements combined with the use of ethylene. This is a volatile hydrocarbon, and is the chief illuminating constituent of coal gas. The only means of keeping it liquid for any length of time is to surround it with solid carbonic acid. Faraday was the first to call attention to the properties of ethylene, and we manufacture it by heating sulphuric acid in a glass retort protected by an iron cover to 160° C. Alcohol heated to 160° C. is allowed to drip into it and ethylene results, passing off as a gas, which is stored, after being purified. It is then compressed by two pumps, the first with a six-inch plunger and six-inch stroke, and the second a two-inch plunger and six-inch stroke. This liquefies it under the pressure stated. It is nasty stuff to handle, as, whenever it becomes mixed, by leakage or otherwise, with nitrous oxide or air, an explosion is imminent, and we have had not a few explosions in the course of the work. It liquefies at −103° C. (−152.4° F.), and when boiled in a partial vacuum absorbs a large amount of latent heat. The failure of preceding attempts to liquefy oxygen is due to lack of knowledge of its ‘critical point,’ and the law which that phrase describes. As long ago as 1851, Natterer subjected oxygen to a pressure of 2,800 atmospheres, or over thirty tons to the square inch. He obtained no result, because, as I have said, no amount of pressure will affect it above −115° C. I liquefy it at −145° C. for two reasons. The lower the temperature at which it is liquefied, the less is the pressure required upon the oxygen and the greater is the amount of latent heat which it absorbs in evaporating. By evaporating, under exhaustion, oxygen liquefied at −145° C., I get as low as −200° C., which I could not do were it liquefied at a higher temperature.

“Having obtained the liquid oxygen,” he continues, turning to the long table below the windows, “the question was how to store it for working purposes, with the least possible loss by evaporation. After various trials and experiments, we devised a set of vacuum vessels, each consisting of a tube or bottle for the liquid oxygen, sealed at the neck in a second tube or bottle, from which the air had been exhausted. I found the cheapest and best method of getting a vacuum to be the old Torricellian one of driving out the air with mercury vapor and then condensing the vapor. This had a further advantage. The tube containing the liquid oxygen was so cold that it froze the mercury vapor, and coated itself with a perfect metallic mirror, which by its reflection still further diminished the loss by radiated heat from the outside.” Without more ado, he lifted from a small frame one of the vacuum vessels referred to. It was a white glass jar, inside of which was what seemed to be a round metallic ball. Open at the neck, this ball was a bottle nearly filled with liquid oxygen, and by the light which reached it through the neck of the bottle it was a very clear pale blue liquid, which was evaporating quietly in a single thread of tiny bubbles, like a glass of champagne which has become nearly still.

It was one of those moments which Faraday would doubtless have regarded as solemn. To behold, for the first time, a liquid which your professors of chemistry have assured you was a gas and always would be a gas, is an experience which does not occur many times in a lifetime. After that, a sight of perpetual motion or the square of the circle would leave you calm. To know, furthermore, that this strange gas, which is the prime agent of all life, which is eight-ninths of all water and three-fourths of the entire earth, has been laid captive by science, reduced to a form which cannot fail to shed a flood of light on any number of abstruse problems in chemistry and mechanics, excites a deeper feeling. The pale blue liquid, which is strangely lustrous, seems truly magical. Moreover, it is a great surprise to see the liquid, which you expect to find under great pressure and ready to blow its containing vessel to pieces, evaporating quietly in the air, protected from heat by a vacuum on one side and its own cold vapor on the other. And so you can do nothing but stare at it in amazement, and gently shake the bottle, and turn from it to its discoverer with a feeling which is not entirely dissociated from awe. It has lost all its impressiveness to the professor, however, for he is busy preparing to illustrate some of its properties--an interesting introduction in themselves to the conditions which prevail twice as far below the freezing point of water as its boiling point lies above.

He begins by pouring some of the oxygen into a test tube, white fumes appearing as he does so from the freezing of the moisture in the surrounding air. Then he drops into the liquid oxygen in the test tube a bit of phosphorus. Despite the flaming energy with which these two combine at ordinary temperatures, there is no action. The phosphorus is as unaffected as a chip of wood in water. He takes it out and pours in some pure alcohol, whose freezing point is much below that of mercury. It freezes with a slight sputter into what you can only call alcohol ice. He takes out the ice and holds a match to it. There is no sign of combustion. Placed on a glass dish the alcohol ice melts into a thick, oily liquid, which also declines to burn. In a few seconds, however, it warms to its ordinary thinness and burns as hungrily as ever. Then comes an exhibition of the “spheroidal state.” A drop of water thrown towards a red-hot stove does not touch the stove, because the evaporation is so rapid that the forming gas lifts the water and keeps it moving about. Precisely the same thing occurs when the oxygen is dropped over a flat glass dish at the temperature of the air, which is red-hot to the oxygen, comparatively speaking. It dances about, shaking and boiling furiously. As he pours it, a tiny drop splashes on the professor’s hand, and he flings it off with a quick jerk. “It makes a sore worse than a burn,” he explains, “if it ever touches the skin.” Then he drops some of it into water. It floats quietly, and as it boils off into gas, freezes a cup of water around it, floating about comfortably in its own boat. Then came curious evidence of its magnetic properties. Pouring a little into a flat cup of rock salt, he placed the cup between the poles of an electro-magnet, the one which Faraday used. The boiling liquid, the moment that the circuit was completed, flew to the two terminals _en masse_ and clung there, still boiling away rapidly on the two points. A piece of cotton wool soaked in the liquid was held closely to one of the points, until all the oxygen had been sucked out of it, when it hung suspended between them. Liquid oxygen has a magnetic property, he said, which is about 1,000 as compared with 1,000,000, the magnetic property of iron. It is a non-conductor of electricity, and a spark one-tenth of a millimetre long from a coil machine, which would give a long spark in the air, would not pass through the liquid. It gave a flash now and then as a bubble of oxygen vapor came between the terminals. Liquid oxygen is, in fact, a high insulator.

Liquid oxygen at atmospheric pressure boils at −184° C. (−229.2° F.). By evaporating it under a diminished pressure, he gets much higher degrees of cold, and these have enabled him to both liquefy and solidify nitrogen and air. The experiment illustrating this was not only interesting; it was difficult to believe. In a double vacuum vessel the centre of which was an open test tube, and the second compartment a reservoir of liquid oxygen connected with an exhaust pump, he so lowered the pressure that the oxygen boiled tumultuously. As it did so, drops of clear liquid began to form on the sides of the test tube and gather at the bottom. It was liquid air, the oxygen and nitrogen of the atmosphere liquefying together at a temperature of −197.2° (−322.9° F.). He poured some of the liquid air into a second tube, and then showed how the nitrogen, which liquefies at a temperature fourteen degrees below oxygen, boiled off first. A smouldering splinter of wood held at the mouth of the tube was extinguished. A few moments later when it was again held there, it burst into brilliant flame. The nitrogen had all evaporated, and the oxygen was coming off. He explained that air became solid under pressure at −207° C. (−340.6° F.). It was a structureless glass, and he had not determined whether or not the oxygen in it was solid or was held suspended as a jelly. Nitrogen solidified under pressure at −210° C. (−346° F.). It was a white crystalline substance. He had no knowledge as yet whether oxygen crystallized in solidifying, but his belief was that it would not.

Concerning hydrogen, most elusive of all the gases, he had no present expectation of attaining liquefaction. Its critical point was below −210° C., and its boiling point −250° C. He had no means as yet of attacking the problem. In fact, the only thermometer he was able to use at these low temperatures was one which used hydrogen expansion as a measure of temperature. His main reliance in measuring low temperatures was a thermo-electric junction. Deeply interesting also was his description of liquid ozone, that strange form of oxygen which though identical with it in constitution is different in molecular arrangement. He obtains twenty per cent. of ozone from liquid oxygen by electrical stimulation, the ozone being of a very dark blue color, as dark as concentrated indigo. It is highly unstable, a beam of light having caused it to explode on one occasion, and its study even in small quantities requires all the delicacy of manipulation which is one of the special directions in which Professor Dewar as a chemist occupies the foremost rank.

Through all these explanations, and others too elaborate and too technical for these pages, he had spoken in the clear, emphatic way which is characteristic of men who deal with abstruse subjects, and desire, from long habit, to present them with the maximum of clearness and the minimum of words. His speech is incisive, the utterances of an energetic and concentrated mind. Over a cup of tea upstairs, however, he spoke more slowly and dwelt with interest upon some of the many strange results which have already met his eyes in the region of −200° Centigrade.

“As we approach the zero point of absolute temperature,” said he, “we seem to be nearing what I can only call the death of matter. Pure metals undergo molecular changes which cannot yet be defined, but which entirely alter their characteristics as we know them. Tensile strength, electrical resistance, in fact, the whole character of the metal as we are acquainted with it, appears to change. At −200°, for instance, iron becomes as good an electrical conductor as copper, while it is more than probable that at the zero of absolute temperature, if not before, the electrical resistance of all metals reaches its zero point. The alloys do not follow the same rule, being much less affected. Carbon is a strange exception, its electrical resistance increasing with cold and decreasing with heat. The effect upon colors is also remarkable, and opens up a wide field for experiment and investigation. In fact, the most marked and immediate effect of my experiments will appear, I think, in the field of magneto-optics. You have seen a red oxide of mercury turn yellow when cooled to the temperature of liquid oxygen, and regain its original color upon returning to the temperature of the air. In the same way, sulphur becomes white. Bichromate of potash becomes also white. A solution of iodine in alcohol becomes colorless, as does ferric chloride, a deep red at the temperature of the air. They all regain their colors upon returning to the ordinary temperature. At these low temperatures chemical action ceases, as you have seen. I supposed the rule was invariable, but found that a photographic plate placed in liquid oxygen was still acted upon by energy from the outside, and at even −200° C. was sensitive to light.

“The effect upon bacterial life is also not what one would expect. Though it is destroyed by boiling in water, a temperature of 100° C., it can still endure unaffected a degree of cold much greater in proportion. I have submitted putrefying blood, milk, seeds, etc., for the space of an hour, to a temperature of −182° C., but found that they afterwards went on putrefying or germinating as the case happened to be. This is interesting in one way, as it gives color to Lord Kelvin’s suggestion that the first life might have been brought to this planet by a seed-bearing meteorite, though it does not explain,” he added with a smile, “how the meteorite was originally equipped with seeds. It shows, however, that spores may live upon a planet through long periods of low temperature. In the phenomena of diminishing electrical resistance and its final disappearance, I look for much new light upon the mystery of electricity itself. The changes in the characteristics of metals already observed enlock lessons whose scope we have not yet begun to measure. In fact,” said he, “for a long time to come I shall confine myself to the many fields of research which the temperatures already attained have opened up.”

Concerning the zero of absolute temperature, Professor Dewar was disinclined to theorize. As to its being the temperature of inter-stellar space, he has not yet come to any final conclusion, though he expressed the view that the strange white and shining night clouds which have puzzled the astronomers were composed of carbonic acid gas frozen solid. Nor does he yet, despite the temperatures reached, see how the zero is to be attained. He, like the Arctic explorers of the past, has reached a point beyond which no appliances of modern science can carry him. The mysteries which cluster about this point are so many, however, that the efforts to reach it will be untiring from this time forth. That its discovery will be a key to many unsolved problems in electricity, in matter, in light, and the great inscrutable mystery of life itself, is not to be doubted. This is an age of constant change in scientific conceptions and traditions, every marked advance in any one science tending to cause more or less of a readjustment of existing views in every other. Science has long been editing the Book of Genesis with an unsparing pen, and with the attainment of the zero of absolute temperature the command “Let there be light” may take on a meaning which the profoundest philosopher or scientist of the present time cannot remotely conceive.

THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH.

BY GILBERT PARKER.

No one ever visited at it except the little chemist, the avocat and Medallion; and Medallion, though merely an auctioneer, was the only one on terms of intimacy with its owner, an old seigneur who for many years had never stirred beyond the limits of his little garden. At rare intervals he might be seen sitting in the large stone porch which gave overweighted dignity to the house, itself not very large. An air of mystery surrounded the place: in summer the grass was rank, the trees seemed huddled together in gloom about the house, the vines appeared to ooze on the walls, and at one end, where the window-shutters were always closed and barred, a great willow drooped and shivered; in winter the stone walls showed naked and grim among the gaunt trees and furtive shrubs.

None who ever saw the seigneur could forget him--a tall figure with stooping shoulders; a pale, deeply-lined, clean-shaven face; and a forehead painfully white, with blue veins showing; the eyes handsome, penetrative, brooding, and made indescribably sorrowful by the dark skin around them. There were those in Pontiac, such as the curé, who remembered when the seigneur was constantly to be seen in the village; and then another person was with him always, a young, tall youth, his son. They were fond and proud of each other, and were religious and good citizens in a high-bred, punctilious way. Then the seigneur was all health and stalwart strength. But one day a rumor went abroad that the seigneur had quarrelled with his son because of the wife of Farette the miller. No one outside knew if the thing was true, but Julie, the miller’s wife, seemed rather to plume herself that she had made a stir in her little world. Yet the curious habitants came to know that the young man had gone, and after a good many years his having once lived there was almost a tradition. But the little chemist remembered whenever he set foot inside the tall porch; the avocat was kept in mind by papers which he was called upon to read and alter from time to time; the curé never forgot, because when the young man went he lost not one of his flock, but two; and Medallion, knowing something of the story, had it before him with gradually increasing frequency; besides, he had wormed a deal of truth out of the miller’s wife. He knew that the closed, barred rooms were the young man’s; and he knew, also, that the old man was waiting, waiting, in a hope which he never even named to himself.

One day the silent old housekeeper came rapping at Medallion’s door, and simply said to him, “Come--the seigneur!” Medallion went, and for hours sat beside the seigneur’s chair, while the little chemist watched and sighed softly in a corner, now and again rising to feel the sick man’s pulse and to prepare a draught. The housekeeper hovered behind the high-backed chair, and when the seigneur dropped his handkerchief--now, as always, of the exquisite fashion of a past century--put it gently in his hand, and he would incline his head ever so gently, and wipe his pale, dry lips with it.

Once when the little chemist touched his wrist, his dark eyes rested on him with inquiry, and he said: “How long?”

It was useless trying to shirk the persistency of that look. “Ten hours, perhaps, sir,” he said with painful shyness.

The seigneur seemed to draw himself up a little, and his hand grasped his handkerchief tightly for an instant; then he said: “So long? Thank you.” Then, after a little, his eyes turned to Medallion, and he seemed about to speak, but still kept silent. His chin dropped on his breast, and for a time he was motionless and shrunken; but still there was a strange little curl of pride--or disdain--to his lips. At last he drew up his head, his shoulders heavily came erect to the carved back of the chair, where, strange to say, the stations of the cross were figured, and he said with a cold, ironical voice: “The angel of patience has lied.”

The evening wore on, and there was no sound save the ticking of the clock, the beat of rain upon the windows, and the deep breathing of the seigneur. Presently he started, his eyes opened wide, and his whole body seemed to listen. “I heard a voice,” he said.

“No one spoke, my master,” said the housekeeper.

“It was a voice without,” he said.

“Monsieur,” said the little chemist, “it was the wind in the eaves.”

His face was almost painfully eager and sensitively alert. “Hush,” he said, “I hear a voice in the tall porch.”

“Sir,” said Medallion, laying a hand respectfully on his arm, “it is nothing.”

With a light on his face and a proud, trembling energy, he got to his feet. “It is the voice of my son,” he said. “Go, go, and bring him in.”

No one moved. But he was not to be disobeyed. His ears had been growing keener as he neared the subtle atmosphere of that brink where a man strips himself to the soul for a lonely voyaging, and he waved the woman to the door. “Wait,” he said, as her hand fluttered at the handle, “take him to another room. Prepare a supper such as we used to have. When it is ready I will come. But listen, and obey me. Do not tell him that I have but half a dozen hours of life. Go, and bring him in.”

It was as he said. She found the son, weak and fainting, fallen within the porch, a worn, bearded man, returned from failure and suffering and the husks of evil. They clothed him and cared for him, and strengthened him with wine, while the woman wept over him, and at last set him at the loaded, well-lighted table. Then the seigneur came in, leaning his arm very lightly on that of Medallion, with a kingly air, and, greeting his son before them all as if they had parted yesterday, sat down. For two hours they sat there, and the seigneur talked gayly, with a color, and his fine eyes glowing; at last he rose, lifted his glass, and said: “The angel of patience is wise: I drink to my son.” He was about to say something more, but a sudden whiteness passed over his face. He drank off the wine and, as he put the glass down, shivered, and fell back in his chair. “Three hours short, chemist,” he said, and smiled, and was still--forever.

STRANGER THAN FICTION.

THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO. THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS. THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT. THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.

BY DOCTOR WILLIAM WRIGHT.

I.

THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO.

I proceed with this chapter in the first person, though the story came to me at second-hand. My tutor, the Reverend W. McAllister, narrated it to me, in the words in which he had heard it from a youthful cousin, and I am able to give it almost in the same words and in the form in which I wrote it out as an exercise in composition.

The scene described does not, however, rest on the authority of Mr. McAllister or his friend, but on the testimony of all who knew the Brontës in their home life. The same scene has been described to me by old men whose memory extended back to matters in the last century, and quite recently, when visiting the place, an aged neighbor pointed out the exact spot where he himself had witnessed the Brontës engaged in their amusements. The story is so characteristic that I give it _in extenso_, and with all details, as I got it:

“In 1824 I made my first great journey out into the big world, accompanied by my elder brother. I was then very young. The nature of our business obliged us to go on foot, and the distance traversed was two or three miles.

“Our errand brought us into the midst of the Brontës, and as we had to remain there six or seven hours, I had an opportunity of seeing, under various aspects, that extraordinary and unique family, whose genius came to be revealed a few years later by three little girls, on English soil.

“I first saw a group of the Brontë brothers together. I think there were six of them, and they were marching, in step, across a field towards a level road. Their style of marching, and whole appearance, arrested my attention. They were dressed alike, in home-spun and home-knitted garments, that fitted them closely, and showed off to perfection their large, lithe, and muscular forms. They were all over six feet high, but, with their close-fitting apparel and erect bearing, they appeared to me to be men of gigantic stature. They bounded lightly over all the fences that stood in their way, all springing from the ground and alighting together, and they continued to march in step without an apparent effort, until they reached the public road, and then they began, in a business-like way, to settle conditions, in preparation for a serious contest.

“A few men and boys watched the little group of Brontës timorously, from a distance, but curiosity drew my brother and myself close up to where they were assembled. They did not seem to notice us, or know that we were present, but proceeded with a match of rolling a large metal ball along the road. The ball seemed to be about six pounds weight, and the one who could make it roll furthest along the road would be declared the winner.

“The contest was to them an earnest business. Every ounce of elastic force in the great, muscular frames was called into action, and there was a profusion of strange, strong language that literally made my flesh to creep, and my hair to stand on end. The forms of expression which they used were as far from commonplace as anything ever written by the gifted nieces; and as the uncles’ lives were on a lower plane of civilization, and their scant education had not reduced their tongues to the conventional forms of speech, they gave utterance to their thoughts with a pent-up and concentrated energy never equalled in rugged force by the novelists.

“I had never seen men like the Brontës, and I had never heard language like theirs. The quaint conceptions and glowing thoughts and ferocious epithets that struggled for utterance, at the unlettered lips of the Irish Brontës, revealed the original quarry from which the vicar’s daughters chiselled the stones for their artistic castle-building, and disclosed the original fountain from which they drew their pathos and passion. Similar fierce originality and power are felt to be present in everything produced by the English Brontës, but in their case the intensity of energy is held in check by the Branwell temperament, and kept under restraint by education and culture.

“The match over, and the sweep-stakes secured, the brothers returned to their harvest labor as they went, clearing, like greyhounds, every fence that stood in their way. At that time no fame attached to the Brontë name, but the men that I had come upon were so different from the local gentry, farmers, flax-dressers, and such like people, who lived around them, that I became, all at once, deeply interested in them.

“From a distance I watched their shining sickles flashing among the golden grain, and caught snatches of song, which I afterwards found to be from Robert Burns. My interest, however, in the Brontës was shared by no one. They were then neither prophets nor heroes in their own country, and they were regarded with a kind of superstitious dread by their neighbors, rather than with interest or curiosity.

“Young as I then was, I persevered with my inquiries, and my curiosity was rewarded. I learned that the Brontës had a brother a clergyman in England, ‘a fine gentleman,’ then on a visit with them, and that the Brontë family were in the habit of holding an open-air concert every favorable afternoon in a secluded glen below their house. I remember wondering if the clergyman ever broke out in the vigorous vernacular of his kith and kin, but I was especially interested in the open-air concert.

“My brother and I, by the nature of our errand, could not return home till late in the evening, and as we were at leisure we made up our minds to assist at the concert. On pretence of gathering blackberries we explored the glen and discovered the place. No one would accompany us, and we were told, with looks of terror, that it would be at our peril if we went to the concert, as the brothers had ‘the black art,’ and were, above all men, to be avoided. We resolved notwithstanding to go as spectators, and waited with impatience till the day’s work should be over.

“About six o’clock a horn was blown, and the reapers suddenly dropped their sickles and strolled down leisurely to the concert glen. We had already preceded them, and taken our places on a high ridge bordering the glen, in a thicket of low brushwood.

“Three sisters were the first to arrive on the scene. They brought a spinning-wheel, a supply of oat-bread and buttermilk, and a green satchel which contained a violin. The men sat astride the trunk of a prostrate tree, and disposed of their afternoon collation in an incredibly short space of time, one wooden bowl, or _noggin_, supplying milk to each.

“Scarcely had the frugal meal been ended when one of the brothers began to thrum the fiddle, and quick as lightning two of the sisters and the other brothers were whirling and spinning airily over the grass. The other sister was busily plying her spinning-wheel and watching the moving scene. In turns each of the sisters took her place at the wheel, and the one relieved instantly plunged into the mazes of the dance.

“The girls were tall, like their brothers, and picturesque in their red tippets. Like their brothers, they were handsome and graceful. They were mature maidens, but they had not lost their elegant figures, or their fresh white and red complexions. Their homemade dresses, though of plain woollen material and simply made, fitted them well, and were in perfect harmony with their rustic surroundings. Their hair hung in ringlets round their shoulders, and they moved with unconscious gracefulness, whirling over the greensward as if they scarcely touched it, or mazing through a ‘country dance’ or an ‘eight-part reel,’ or waltzing round and round in a manner to make the onlooker giddy.

“There was nothing in the whole performance suggestive of the rough peasant, or the country clown. All was exquisite grace and courtesy. The musician was also relieved from time to time, each of the brothers taking his turn at the violin.

“The scene was of the most weird and romantic character. The place selected for the family dance was in a secluded widening of the glen, down which flows a little stream that makes a murmuring noise as it tumbles over stones, and among the roots of alder and willow. It was wide enough to give full scope for extended galops, and sufficient for all the exigencies of Sir Roger de Coverley. The ground was thickly carpeted with grass, and surrounded by large trees with overhanging branches. The trees were festooned with ivy and honeysuckle. Sweetbrier and wild roses overflowed the hedges in great profusion, and ‘Flowering Sally,’ in pink bunches, fringed the brook.

“The sun was sinking in the west, throwing dark shadows down the sides of the Newry mountains, and shedding a pale glory on Slieve Donard and the other lofty peaks of the Mourne range. Close by stood the Knock Hill, generally sombre and unpicturesque, but on that occasion it glowed in the parting rays. The little valley, as it dipped downward, opened out to the west, and through the opening the setting sun poured a rich flood of light on the animated groups, mating each dancer with a long, dark shadow, and doubling the number of figures that tripped lightly over the grass.

“As the sun dropped behind the ridge of Armagh the concert came to an end, after a long bout of Scotch jigs, in which two and two in a row danced opposite to each other, chased by their tall, unearthly shadows. The closing scene was a great effort of endurance, but none seemed to weary, and with a few skips into the air, the arms raised in curves above the head, and the fingers being made to crack, all was still.

“There were four spectators of this wonderful family gathering--my brother and myself, a goat that was quietly barking a tree beside us, and pausing occasionally to look at the frantic display, and, on the other side of the valley from where we were, the clergyman brother, who walked to and fro, in solemn black, apparently in meditation, and taking no notice of the gleeful recreation of his brothers and sisters.

“There was no dawdling when the dance was over. Each of the brothers bowed with an air of gallantry to each of the sisters, and then one of the brothers caught up the spinning-wheel, and, poising it on his shoulder, strode up the homeward side of the glen. All followed smartly and disappeared, in company with the sober figure in black.

“We slipped out of the bower where we had sat entranced, and hurried homeward, with feelings of uncertainty as to the reality of things, in the gathering darkness.”

This is the most complete account I have ever heard of the summer-evening concerts held by the Brontës. Others had often seen these large-limbed, sinewy children of Anak dancing on the green with their flying shadows; but they had failed to appreciate the sylphlike motions of the maidens, or the stately curvetting of the gigantic brothers, and looked on the whole exhibition as something uncanny, and as tending to confirm the popular belief that the Brontës had dealings with the powers of the nether world.

The unique forms and forceful language of the Brontës were lost on their commonplace neighbors, who looked on them as strange and dangerous people. In fact, they were not regarded with much favor by the people of the district, from whom they carefully held aloof; and the belief that they were in league with the devil received a certain amount of confirmation, as we shall see by and by.

When I first began to take an interest in the Brontës I was admonished, in a mysterious manner, to have nothing to do with such people. I was advised to keep out of their way, lest I should hear their odious language, and it was even hinted that they might in some Satanic way do me bodily harm.

I am bound to say that matters in this respect have not altered much since for the better. My attempts, recently, to get accurate information on special points, regarding the Brontës and their ways, have been looked upon as a kind of craze, out of which, I have been assured, I was never likely to reap much credit. And even educated people, when replying to my inquiries on matters of fact, have sometimes felt called on to remind me that I was taking much pains with regard to a dangerous and outlandish family.

In fact, the Brontës paid the penalty for being a little cleverer than the people with whom they came in contact, and with whom they never associated. The Brontës looked down on the people of their own rank in life, and permitted no familiarities of any kind; and the only person who ever joined in their dances, as far as is known, was Farmer Burns. As they held aloof from everybody, they were only known by their strange language and odd ways. Imagination filled up the unknown, and gossips, as usual, made the most of every little circumstance. The fact that Mrs. Brontë had once been a Catholic prejudiced in no small degree the minds of Protestants against the children.

The clergyman’s presence in no way restrained the mirthful exuberance of the dancers. Before he left home he was always one of the party, and on his visits from college and from his living he often joined in their mirth, as formerly. But on the occasion referred to by Mr. McAllister he seemed uninterested in the familiar scene.

He was probably thinking of his precocious little women, Maria and Elizabeth, whom he had left at Cowan Bridge school a month before; or his heart may have been in the Haworth vicarage with the motherless little girls, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who were under the care of their prim maiden aunt. Even then the children were wise beyond their years, though, in their narrow world, they had scarcely begun to accumulate the experience which enabled them to give local form and color to their father’s stories.

II.

THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT.

The concert glen and romantic brook witnessed very different ceremonies from that just described. At one period an awful drama took the place of lissome glee, when Hugh Brontë, “the giant,” in wild passion, sought to come into actual bodily conflict with the devil.

The potato blight fell as a crushing blow on the hopes of the Brontës, and proved the turning-point of their fortunes. They were growing in prosperity, and had enlarged their farm by the savings of many years. Through industry and frugality they had added field to field until their material success seemed to be assured; but while they were rejoicing in the position to which they had attained, the potato crop blackened, and melted away before their eyes.

Ireland at that period had two kinds of tenant farmers. One resembled the drowsy oriental, who basks in the sun, and seems content, not to live, but to exist.

In Ireland a large number of people on the land simply existed in those days. They knew that if they drained or improved their farms the landlords would raise their rents, so as to sweep away the entire profits arising from their improvements. They were well aware that any enlargement or brightening of their homesteads would cause the agent to scent superfluous money, and put on the screw; for a tenant would be more likely to make an effort to hold on to a comfortable house than to an uncomfortable one. Every staple of thatch put upon the leaky roof, or bucket of whitewash brushed on to the sooty walls of the cabin, gave the landlord a new hold on the tenant, and supplied the agent with a new pretext for increasing the rent for his master, or securing a present for himself. And there were agents so kindly disposed towards the miserable tenants that they preferred one pound as a present to themselves to two pounds added to the landlord’s rent-roll.

Under these circumstances tenants of the indolent type did not drain their lands or improve the appearance of their houses; and if they had thriving cattle they kept them concealed in remote fields when the agent was about; and when they were obliged to meet either agent or landlord, they decked themselves out like Jebusites, in ragged and squalid garments. It thus happened that landlords and land agents never saw their tenantry except in rags, and thus the tenants contrived to order themselves lowly and reverently to their betters.

The land of the thriftless brought forth potatoes in plenty. A little lime and dike scourings, mixed together, sufficed for manure. The potato seed was planted on the lea-sod, and covered up in ridges four or five feet wide. The elaborate preparation for planting potatoes in drills was then unheard of. Cabbage plants were dibbled into the edges of the ridges, and the potatoes and cabbages grew together. Abundant supplies of _West-reds_ and _Yellow-legs_ and _Copper-duns_, with large Savoy and Drumhead cabbages, only needed to be dug and gathered, to maintain existence.

Oats, following the potato crop, provided rough, wholesome bread, and little yellow rats of Kerry cows supplied milk. Great stalwart men and women lived on potatoes three times a day, with bread and buttermilk and an occasional egg. Sometimes, in the autumn, a lean and venerable cow would be fed for a few weeks on the after grass (flesh put on in a hurry being considered more tender) and then killed, salted, and hung up to the black back in the kitchen for family use. This _pièce de résistance_ was the only flesh-meat ever known in the homes of such people.

Two pigs, fattened yearly on potatoes, and a few lambs, taken from the early clover, met the demands of the landlord. The wool of the sheep, spun, knitted, or woven at home, supplied scant, but sufficient, wardrobes. For fuel they had whins, or furze, cut from the fences, and turf from the bogs. The fire was preserved by _raking_ a half-burned turf every night in the ashes, but a coal to light the fire was occasionally borrowed from more provident neighbors, and carried by a pair of tongs from house to house. Matches were unknown in those days.

The men broke stones by the roadsides, on warm days, for pocket-money or tobacco, and the women obtained their little extras by the produce of their surplus eggs, which they carried to market in little osier hand-baskets.

Existence in such homes flowed smoothly, one year being exactly like another. The people had no prospects, no hopes, no ambitions. They lived from hand to mouth, and, while all went well, the fulness of each day was sufficient for their simple wants. In their diurnal rounds they gathered their _creels_ of potatoes, and drove their Kerry cows to the fields, golden with tufted ragweeds and purple with prickly thistles.

Such people seldom had their rents raised or their improvements confiscated, for the simple reason that they never made improvements, and never sought, through sustained effort, to better their conditions. They had no margin beyond the bare necessaries of life, no resources to fall back upon, in case of calamity. With barely enough to supply their daily wants, they lived on the verge of starvation, and when the famine came they starved.

The Brontës were people of a different fibre. They would not succumb without a struggle. They had advanced from the Emdale cabin to the Lisnacreedy cottage, and thence to the house and farm in Ballynaskeagh. The primitive corn-kiln, with its insignificant and precarious profits, had been abandoned for the lucrative occupation of macadamizing roads, and cultivating the land.

The Brontës worked hard, and were frugal as well as industrious. They had hoarded the savings of many years, and invested all in a new farm, and they felt that they had a right to look forward to a condition of prosperity and independence.

The class to which the Brontës belonged differed widely from the inert and feckless farmers that encumbered many a bankrupt estate. They did not live from hand to mouth, spending each day’s efforts on each day’s wants, and passing the summer in an easy doze. No people on earth slaved and saved as they did. They worked late and early. Their wives and daughters and little children rose with the sun, and labored the live-long day. Every good thing raised on the farm went to market, to meet the landlord’s exactions, and to add to the little store. Butter, bacon, fowl, eggs, and such like, raised by the laborious housewife, were sacred to the landlord, and to the hoard accumulated against the rainy day.

For such slaves there was little recreation except a half holiday on Christmas Day, with a party display on the Twelfth of July or the Seventeenth of March. No toil, however, could crush out of them the desire to better their lot, but their moiling and saving seldom resulted in anything more brilliant than a five-pound note to pay a son’s passage to America, or a twenty-pound portion for the daughter.

The industry of the Brontës was not in vain. They lived under the best landlords that Ireland has ever produced. “The Sharman estate,” now known as “the Sharman-Crawford property,” has been blessed by a succession of Christian landlords, who recognized that landed property had duties as well as privileges, and who have made it their life work to propagate their doctrines by peaceful persuasion.

On the Sharman estate the Brontës had a fair field for their industries. They worked in absolute harmony, as far as appeared to the outside world. They were a loving family in their way, but without the shows of love. Their home was all the world to them, and they clung to it, in early life, with something of the affectionate attachment that Emily Brontë and her sisters afterwards manifested towards the sombre parsonage at Haworth. They were healthful, hopeful and happy in their farm, with the growing signs of plenty around them.

At this juncture the potato blight, which cracked the framework of Ireland’s economic arrangements, blasted the Brontë paradise. The affection of the farmer towards his growing crops is in proportion to the solicitude with which he has watched over them; but the Brontës only learned fully what a treasure the potato crop had been to them when it was taken away. Never had their farm seemed so beautiful, or the potatoes appeared so bountiful, but, in a night, the fields were smitten black, and the stench of rotting leaves filled the air. The tubers became rotten and repulsive, instead of being white and floury.

Many theories were advanced to account for the calamity. Pamphlets were published and sermons preached, to show that national disaster had followed on the heels of national wrongdoing. Seasons for humiliation and fasting and prayer were set apart, to supplicate Almighty God to take away the awful judgment.

The Brontë mind never ran smoothly with the common current. To them the evil appeared to be simply the work of the devil. The Brontës held the simple old Zoroastrian creed that everything beneficent was the work of God, and everything maleficent the work of the Evil One.

Such opinions were not confined to the Brontës. As children we were given to understand that frosted blackberries were _clubbed_ by the devil, who had blown his breath upon them as he passed by; and of course we all knew that the old Enemy, with the club foot, lurked in the blackberry bushes.

Servants and common laborers held to the belief, no doubt prompted and fortified by the action of the Brontës, that the devil went bodily from potato field to potato field, in his work of destruction; and many reports got into circulation, that he had been actually seen among the potatoes, in the form of a black dog or black bull, but that he always vanished in a flash of lurid light when challenged.

Hugh Brontë no more doubted that the devil, in bodily form, had destroyed the potato crop than he doubted his own existence. He saw the prop struck from under the family by a malignant enemy, and he would not tamely submit to the personal injury. It was both cruel and unjust that the devil, who never did any work, should pollute the fruits of their toil. He would shame the fiend out of his foul work; and for this purpose he would go deliberately to the field, and gather a basketful of rotten potatoes. These he would carry solemnly to the brink of the glen, and, standing on the edge of a precipice, call on the fiend to behold his foul and filthy work; and then, with great violence, dash them down as a feast for the fetid destroyer. This ceremony of feasting the fiend on the proceeds of his own foul work was often repeated, with fierce and desperate energy; and the Devil’s Dining-room is still pointed out by the neighbors.

I knew a man who witnessed one of these scenes. He spoke of Hugh Brontë’s address to the devil as being sublime in its ferocity. With bare, outstretched arms, the veins in his neck and forehead standing out like hempen cords, and his voice choking with concentrated passion, he would apostrophize Beelzebub, as the bloated fly, and call upon him to partake of the filthy repast he had provided. The address ended with wild, scornful laughter as Brontë hurled the rotten potatoes down the bank.

The dramatic power of the ceremony was so real, and the spell of Brontë’s earnestness was so contagious, that my informant, who was not a superstitious man, declared that for a few seconds after the challenge was given he watched in terror, expecting the fiend to appear.

III.

THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.

The fight between Welsh Brontë and Sam Clarke of Ballynaskeagh was an era-making event. The contest took place long before my time, but I had a precise and full account of the battle from two eye-witnesses. No encounter of the kind in County Down ever made such a noise, or left such a lasting impression. Like the flight of Mahomet or the founding of Rome, it became a fixed point around which other events ranged themselves.

Women would speak of their children as born, or their daughters married, so many years before or after the fight; and old men, in referring to their ages, would tell how they had been present when Welsh Brontë licked Sam Clarke, and that they must have been of such an age at the time. It was one of those famous encounters which only required the pen of Pindar to give it immortality in epic form.

The history of the affair which I here submit embodies the conclusions at which I have arrived, after comparing twenty or thirty versions; but I am specially indebted to the late Mr. John Todd of Croan, who was present at the battle with his brother James, and who narrated the incidents of the contest, with many picturesque details. I should add, however, that the Todds were friends of the Brontës, and told the story with the warmth of partisans.

Welsh Brontë had a sweetheart called Peggy Campbell, and she had a little, delicate, deformed brother who used to go to Ballynafern school on crutches. Some of the big healthy boys thoughtlessly amused themselves by tormenting the little cripple. He often arrived home with his clothes torn and daubed with mud, and sometimes showing in his person the signs of ill-treatment. After the manner of school-boys, he would never tell on his tormentors. Welsh’s sweetheart, however, had discovered the cowardly and cruel treatment to which her little brother had been subjected, and appealed to Welsh to protect him.

Welsh had, no doubt, often heard the story of his father’s wrongs, when a child, and, at a hint from Peggy, constituted himself the champion of the injured boy. He went to Sam Clarke, who was a near relative of the chief offenders, and begged him to interfere.

Clarke, who was said to be something of a bully, advised Brontë to mind his own business, and Brontë replied that that was the exact thing he was doing; and then he added, as a threat, that unless Clarke restrained his brutal relatives he would chastise them himself. Hot words ensued, and Brontë and Clarke parted with expressions of mutual defiance.

Welsh Brontë’s blood was up. His sense of justice was roused on behalf of an ill-used child, and his feelings of chivalry impelled him to become the champion of his sweetheart’s brother.

Meanwhile the boys were meditating vengeance on their victim, who, in addition to the crime of meek endurance, had, they believed, proved a _sneak_, by telling of their misdeeds.

Welsh Brontë resolved to watch the children on their way home from school on the following day. He took up his position in a clump of trees somewhere near the glen. He waited long, but the school-children did not appear, and, thinking that perhaps they had returned home by another path, he left his ambush to resume his work. Suddenly he heard hilarious cheering and piteous cries, and hurrying towards the spot from which the noise came, he found the school engaged in the ceremony of “_ducking_ the _clash beg_,” or tale-bearer.

They had taken the poor little cripple’s crutches from him, and had placed him in the middle of a pond of water, up to his neck, and then, having taken hands, they danced round the pond, chanting, “Clash beg!” “Clash beg!” “Clash beg!”

Welsh Brontë took in the situation at a glance, and captured the two biggest Clarkes before they knew he was near. He then compelled them to wade into the pond, and support gently to the edge their victim. When they had placed him on the dry ground, he was so exhausted that he could neither stand nor support himself on his crutches, and Brontë obliged the Clarkes to carry him home on their backs, time about, the water dripping down their clothes. They did as Brontë directed them, but only after considerable chastisement.

The other children had fled home in alarm, and had given a highly colored description of the inhuman manner in which Brontë was treating the Clarkes. Some of them reported that he had actually drowned them in the pond. On that night a challenge from Sam Clarke reached Welsh Brontë, and was instantly accepted.

The time for angry words had gone, and all preliminary formalities were carried out according to rule, and with perfect courtesy. “Seconds” were appointed, the day was fixed, and a professional pugilist, who resided at Newry, was engaged to act as referee. Both men went into close training, and the event was awaited with the most intense excitement for ten miles round.

The day, a charming summer day, at last arrived. A crowd numbering ten thousand--some estimated the number at from thirty to fifty thousand--assembled. They came together from Newry, Banbridge, Rathfriland, Dromore, Hilltown, Warrenpoint, Loughbrickland, and other towns and districts. Such an assemblage of the scoundrelism of that region had never been drawn together before. But they were not all scoundrels, for public opinion had not, at that time, affixed the stamp of infamy indelibly to the brutal exhibitions of the ring; and it was said that a number of sporting clergymen and country gentlemen were present, undisguised and unashamed.

Many circumstances rendered the field famous. The mothers of the combatants had fed their sons for the fray like gamecocks; oat-bread and new milk were the staple food which was supposed to give muscle, strength, and endurance.

Shortly before the fight Clarke’s mother, when giving him his last meal before the encounter, said to him, “Sam, my son, may you never get bit or sup from me more, if you do not lick the mongrel.”

This Spartan speech spread through the field like wildfire, and such was the code of honor, on that occasion, that the exhortation was much blamed, and led to a strong current of popularity in favor of Brontë. The word “mongrel,” referring to the fact that her son’s antagonist had had a Catholic mother, was considered unfitting to be used in connection with the noble encounter that was about to take place.

The ring was roped off in the hollow of a green field; the multitude stood on the rising ground around, and all could see the entire ring. Three or four hundred men were enrolled as “special order preservers,” and stood in a circle round the ring, two or three deep. The seconds and referee and umpire were in their places at the opposite sides of the ring.

The hour fixed to begin was twelve o’clock, and prompt to the minute the two combatants strode down leisurely through the crowd, each with his sweetheart leaning on his arm; their mothers already occupied seats of honor outside the ring.

Clarke was an older and maturer man than Brontë, and much bigger. Beside him, Brontë, in his tight-fitting homespun, looked slender and youthful and overmatched.

In consequence of the ungenerous and unguarded words spoken by Clarke’s mother, sympathy, as we have seen, was already on Brontë’s side, and this was greatly increased by the natural feeling that prompts the generous to take the weak side.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, the original cause of the quarrel was wholly lost sight of before the fight began. No one seemed to give a thought to the circumstance that Brontë had got into the affair by espousing the cause of a helpless boy. After listening to an account of the fight, from some old man who had witnessed it, I have often asked what it was about, and I have generally got for answer, “Oh, it was just a fight,” my question being evidently deemed irrelevant, and somewhat silly.

The champions stepped into the ring, and their sweethearts with them. As each stripped he handed his clothes to his future wife, and these two women stood, each with her lover’s garments on her arm, till the matter was decided.

Time was not accurately kept, but the battle was said to have lasted three or four hours. At first Clarke had the advantage in strength and weight, but Brontë, who had long arms, was lithe and active and wiry, and did not seem to weary as the day wore on. On the contrary, Clarke began to show signs of fatigue, but the spectators thought he was simply husbanding his strength. Throughout the whole contest not a word was heard. Suddenly, Miss Campbell’s voice rang out clear in the silence: “Welsh, my boy, go in and avenge my brother, and the mongrel.”

Peggy Campbell, by her woman’s instinct, discerned that the hour for the final effort and victory had come. Welsh responded like a lightning flash. A few awful moments followed. The spectators held their breaths and some fainted, others covered their eyes with their hands, or averted their faces. Terrific crushing and crashing blows were heard all over the field, and when the blows ceased to resound, Sam Clarke was lying a motionless heap in the ring.

The crowd, after the long suspense and hushed silence, lost all control of themselves, and wanted to rush in and chair the victor, but the “special order preservers” held the ring, and the sea of human beings surged against them in vain.

Welsh Brontë declined to receive congratulations until he had deposited his antagonist safely at home in bed. The fight was followed by no evil consequences, and Sam Clarke and Welsh Brontë became fast friends from that day forth.

All were agreed as to the closing scene. During the last few seconds the fight became so fierce and furious that the blood of the spectators ran cold. Nothing like it for wild fury and Titanic ferocity had ever been witnessed, and no such battle has ever, since or before, been fought in County Down.

IV.

THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS.

The glen, on the edge of which the Brontës lived, lay secluded among the hills, remote from the more frequented thoroughfares of the country. It was a beautiful and romantic spot by day, but lonesome and desolate at night. For miles round it had the reputation of being haunted, and few passed that way after dark. Those who were obliged to do so heard unnatural splashes in the stream, and rustlings among the bracken, and strange moanings and sobbings among the trees, when there was not a breath of air stirring.

Strange and fitful cries were said to be heard in the glen, and doleful wailings, as of some one in agony.

Long ago, according to tradition, a woman had been murdered in the glen by her false lover and betrayer. Hugh Brontë had told the story, with minute details and local color, till everybody who frequented the gatherings at the kiln knew it by heart.

The villain had enticed his victim to Rathfriland fair, on pretence of getting the wedding ring. He had there attempted to strangle her, but she had escaped from his grasp, and was making her way home to her mother, through fields and byways, when, according to one of Patrick Brontë’s unpublished songs:

“Over hedges and ditches he took the near way, Until he got before her on that dismal day.”

He waylaid her in the lonely glen, and murdered her under circumstances of great atrocity. On that night the ghost of the murdered woman rushed upon the assassin, and, with a wild scream, dragged him from his bed and through the window of his cabin, and down, down, down, with unearthly yells, to the bottomless pit. The whole story was told in verse, I believe, by Patrick Brontë, and sung to a sad air at local gatherings. It ran partly thus:

“This young man he went to his bed all in a dreadful fright. And Kitty’s ghost appeared to him, it was an awful sight. She clasped her a-rums round him, saying, You’re a false young man, But now I’ll be avenged of you, so do the best you can.”

The punishment was, according to local sentiment, well deserved; but both were doomed to walk the earth for a thousand years. They had made their abode in the glen, hence the doleful and dismal voices.

Another circumstance added to the horror with which the glen was regarded at night. It was said that, at a remote period, a man who had been robbed committed suicide, at a crossing of the brook. He was still living when found with his throat cut, and up to his last breath he continued to moan, with a gurgling sound, “There were ten tenpennies in my pocket at the river.”

I believe the story was founded on fact. A man had committed suicide under the circumstances narrated, but in quite a different part of the country. The deed, however, had come to be located in the Brontë glen, and increased the superstitious awe with which the place was then regarded. A snipe frequented the spot at night, and as people attempted to cross, it would start with a sudden screech from almost beneath their feet. The bird with the unearthly yell was supposed to be the spirit of the unfortunate man.

On one occasion Hugh Brontë was riding home with a neighbor. When they had reached the glen a headless man appeared on the road in front of them. The neighbor’s horse stood shivering, as if rooted to the ground, but Brontë’s horse, without any appearance of fear, walked up to the dreadful object, and Brontë, unmoved, and without pause or word, simply cracked his whip at it, and it disappeared in a flash of light.

Ghost baiting became a passion with the Brontës, and though they were too proud to associate much with their neighbors, they were not averse to being stared at and talked of by them.

The mill at the lower end of the glen, where now stand Mr. Ratcliffe’s dwelling-house and offices, was haunted. Lights flitted through it at night, and no one would go near it after sunset. When the terror was at its height Hugh Brontë armed himself with a sword and a Bible, and went alone to encounter the ghost or devil, or whatever it might be.

The neighbors, who saw Brontë marching to his doom, stood afar off in the darkness, and awaited the result. Unearthly noises were heard, and it was clear that a serious contest was proceeding. After a long delay Brontë returned, bruised and battered and greatly exhausted, but he would give no account of what had transpired.

His secrecy regarding his adventure increased the terror of the superstitious, for it was given out and believed that Brontë, having been worsted in the encounter, saved his life by making some compact with the fiend or ghost. And some even believed that he was ever after in league with the powers of darkness.

This fearsome theory seemed to be confirmed by Hugh Brontë’s subsequent action. One dark and dismal night, the ghost in the glen began to wail like a child in distress. The people barred their doors, covered their heads in bed with their blankets, and stopped their ears, to keep out the unearthly sounds; but Hugh Brontë went down quietly to the glen, and soothed the ghost until by little and little its moaning died away.

On several occasions it was believed that Hugh was actually seen in the glen, standing with his hand on the mane of a magnificent black horse, but when any neighbor drew near, the black horse dwindled into a great black cat, which kept purring around Brontë, and rubbing itself against his legs. As soon as the neighbor withdrew, the cat would again develop into the large black horse, and Brontë was often seen riding up and down upon it, near precipices and ravines where there was no path!

There was also supposed to be a white-sheeted figure that used to frequent the glen, carrying a little child in her arms. It was said that she was in the habit of asking for a night’s lodging, but never seemed disposed to accept it. She generally kept her face covered, or averted, but when it was exposed it proved to be a toothless, grinning skull, with a light shining from each eyeless socket.

One of the Brontë sisters and her daughter lived in a house near by, in which a man called Fraser had hanged himself. The house was declared to be haunted. Apparitions appeared in it, both by day and night, but especially at night. Noises were heard in the rooms during the hours of darkness. When the inmates slept at night, something like a huge frog with claws used to rush up the clothes from the foot of the bed, settle on their chests, and almost suffocate them.

Hugh went to his sister’s house one night, taking his gun with him. He upbraided Fraser for his ungallant and mean conduct in frightening lone women, and then called on him to come out like a man and face him. But nothing appeared, the ghost evidently declining to face a loaded musket.

Brontë was importunate in his challenge, taunting Fraser’s ghost with all kinds of sarcastic gibes and accusations, that he might irritate it into appearing, but the ghost would not be drawn. Then he fired off his gun, and challenged the ghost to meet him face to face, using every scornful and reproachful epithet to drive it into a passion, but all in vain.

On the following night Hugh returned to the haunted house with a fiddle, and tried to coax the ghost to appear in response to the music. The ghost, however, remained obdurate, regardless alike of threats, reproaches, and blandishments. Brontë returned home that night in a state of wild excitement. All the way he incessantly called on Fraser to come and shake hands with him, and make up their quarrel.

He retired to bed in a delirium of frenzy, and during the night the ghost appeared to him, and gave him a terrific squeeze, from which he never recovered. He died shortly after in great suffering, upbraiding Fraser for his heartless cruelty and cowardice, and he declared, dying, that when he reached the land of shadows he would take measures to prevent Fraser from haunting his sister and niece. After Hugh’s death the rumblings and apparitions ceased to trouble his sister’s house.

The great horror, however, of the haunted glen was the _Headless Horseman_. The phantom generally made its appearance among thickets of tangled bushes, which no horse could penetrate, and glided silently over uneven and broken ground, where no horse could have gone.

It always appeared to be ridden and guided by a man in flowing robes, whose feet were firmly in the stirrups and whose hands held the bridle, but whose head had been chopped off, leaving only a red and jagged stump.

The ghastly spectacle was so minutely described by the Brontës that others carried the picture of it in their imaginations, and it is not to be wondered at if many thought they saw the spectre among the shimmering shadows of the trees.

A neighbor of the Brontës, Kaly Nesbit, a very old and, I believe, a very good man, once gave to a number of us a vivid account of the apparition. He told the story with great earnestness, and with apparent conviction as to its truth. I give his account as nearly as I can in his own quaint language:

“I heerd the horse nichering in the glen. It was not the voice of a horse but of a fiend, for it came out of the bowels of the earth, and shook the hills, and made the trees quake. Besides, there was no room for a horse on the steep bank, and among the bushes and brablack.

”I had just had a drap of whiskey, about a noggin, and I wasn’t a bit afeard of witch or warlock, ghost or devil, and so I stepped into the glen to see for myself whatever was to be seen.

“At first I could not see any inkling of a horse, but I heerd the branches swishing along his sides, at the lower end of the glen. Then I saw a large dark object as big as a haystack coming nixt me, and walking straight through trees and bushes as if they were mere shadows.

“I juked down behind a hedge of broom, and as I hunkered in the shadow he came on in the slightly dusk light. The horse was as big as four horses, and at a distance I thought the rider was a huge blackavised man; but when he came fornenst me the moon fell full upon him through a break in the trees, and then I saw that he was crulged up on the saddle, and that only a red and ghastly stump stuck up between his shoulders, where his head should have been.

”I escaped unseen, but just as the terrible thing passed me it nichered again horribly, and I saw sparks of fire darting out of its mouth.

“It then turned and cut triangle across the valley, passing over the cockpit, and walking upon the air, as it emerged into the moonlight. It walked up straight against the steep edge of the quarry-pit, and vanished into the bank. I saw it vanishing by degrees, like a shadow, at first black, but growing lighter and lighter, till it entirely disappeared, and there was nothing on the high bank where it stopped but the bright moonlight.”

Kaly Nesbit had the reputation of being a very good man. I knew him pretty well, especially as a near relative of his had been my kind old nurse, who imparted to me much Brontë lore. I am sure he believed the fascinating story he told; but a noggin of whiskey is a rather indefinite quantity, and Kaly Nesbit, on that night, may have had his faculties for hearing and seeing in a rather sensitive condition.

However that may have been, his sober and earnest account of the monstrous spectre, confirming, as it did, the wildest stories of the Brontës, created a profound impression.

THE HYPNOTIC EXPERIMENTS OF DOCTOR LUYS.

BY R. H. SHERARD.

(Illustrated with photographs of Doctor Luys’s patients, taken at the Charity Hospital in Paris.)

The scientific world is greatly interested in the dispute between the believers in the value of hypnotic experiments for purposes of therapeutics and psychology, and those who stigmatize the wonderful results which the former claim to have obtained, as the mere outcome of delusion or fraud.

Ever since the possibility of producing phenomena by the effect of animal magnetism was established, and their medical value asserted, by Frederick Anthony Mesmer, in his theory of mesmeric cures, the most violent hostility has been provoked. Volumes of controversy have been written, the most ardent of the writers being Nees Von Esenbeck, Kieser, Enemoser, Carus and Kluge amongst the Germans, and Deleaze and Foissac among the French.

The report made by the commission appointed by the French Academy of Sciences, the principal members of which were Benjamin Franklin, Lavoisier, Bailly, and Guillotin, pronounced the whole theory of Mesmer charlatanry, asserting that “there is no proof of the existence of the animal magnetic fluid; that this fluid, having no existence, is consequently without utility; and that the violent effects to be observed are due to the manipulations, to the excitement of the imagination, and to that sort of mechanical imitation which leads us to repeat anything which produces an impression on the senses.”

The consensus of opinion among scientists was opposed to the soundness of the theory of hypnotism. Yet such men as Laplace, Agassiz, Hufeland, Sir William Hamilton, and Doctor William Carpenter were always among its stanch supporters, so far as the fundamental facts were concerned.

THE NEW MESMERISM.

The novel development of the subject on sharply defined lines of scientific method owes itself to J. Braid, a surgeon of Manchester, England, who first published the results of his studies in 1840. But it was many years before his studies became widely known and had their due weight. He now shines _primus inter pares_ among those who have shed most light on a perplexing problem. But just as the modern French art school built itself upon the work of the Englishman Constable, so it took the genius and enthusiasm of such investigators as Doctors Charcot and Luys, and of Colonel Rochas d’Aiglun to carry on Braid’s beginnings. These three scientists of recognized worth never proclaimed that the secrets of hypnotism have been solved, or that its possibilities have been more than foreshadowed; they simply asserted that the results already obtained, many being practical in an eminent degree, give encouragement to pursue their investigations.

It is my purpose to simply set forth that which has come under my personal observation at the Charité Hospital, whose doctor-in-chief, Doctor Luys, is to-day the most enthusiastic believer in experiments on the hypnotic phenomena.

METHODS OF LA CHARITÉ HOSPITAL.

The hypnotic experiments practised by the doctor-in-chief of the Charité Hospital, may be roughly divided into two classes. The first are experiments of a speculative kind, that is to say, such as do not produce practical effects. The second class includes such as often produce such results. These last experiments are mainly the diagnosis of patients by subjects in the hypnotic state, the cure of nervous disorders by the transfer of the same from patients to subjects in the hypnotic state, and the cure of moral and physical maladies by the power of suggestion.

The hypnotic state is divided by Doctor Luys into five phases of intensity: somnambulism, fascination, catalepsy, lethargy, and hypo-lethargy, with various intermediary phases which have not yet been tabulated. The hypnotic state in one or other of its phases is produced in the subject or patient in two ways; by word of command or by the use of the rotative mirror. The rotative mirror is often used where hypnotic influence is first applied to an individual. This mirror much resembles that used by bird catchers for snaring larks. It is composed of four arms, overlaid with bright, polished metal. The arms revolve by clockwork on a pivot, at a tremendous rate of speed. The patient is seated in a high-backed chair with his back to the light, which shines full on the mirror, and is bidden to keep his eyes fixed upon it, and simultaneously to desire to be sent to sleep. The clockwork sets the mirror in rotary motion with a dazzling effect. Sleep is not invariably produced. Many persons are refractory; but, as a rule, in about twenty per cent. of the cases the operation is successful, and after a period varying from five to twenty minutes the patient is seen to drop to sleep.

“The eyes,” says a writer on the subject, “are first attracted by the rays of light which flash from the wings of the mirror, then little by little, and at the end of a period which varies according to the temperament of the patient, a kind of fascination is produced, the lids get tired and imperceptibly close, the head falls back, and the patient sleeps a sleep which seems natural, but which is really one of the first phases of the hypnotic sleep.” In other cases, that is to say, in the case of patients who are more predisposed, a slight shock is manifested during the state of fascination, due, no doubt, to the sudden contraction of some muscle or system of muscles, and the patient falls into a deep sleep, breathing hard. He is then completely insensible, and apt for the reception of suggestion, having passed quickly through the several stages of the hypnotic sleep, sometimes to the last. In most cases, however, where the doctor has to do with subjects who have often been hypnotized, the simple word of command, without passes or gestures of any kind, suffices. With these he has but to say, “Go to sleep,” and they fall at once into a hypnotic state of greater or lesser profundity. Doctor Luys is, however, the sole possessor of hypnotism I have seen who has this power; and both Charcot and his assistant, Doctor Encausse, as well as Colonel Rachas, are obliged to enforce their commands with certain gestures of the hands and influence of the eyes.

THE DANGER OF HYPNOTISM.

Doctor Luys says: “From the social point of view, these new states of instantaneous loss of consciousness into which hypnotic or merely fascinated subjects may be made to pass deserve to be considered with lively interest. As I shall have to explain to you later, the individual in these novel conditions no longer belongs to himself; he is surrendered, an inert being, to the enterprise of those who surround him. He may be induced to become a homicide, an incendiary or suicide, and all these impulses deposited in his brain during sleep become forces stored up silently, which will then burst forth at a given moment, causing acts like those performed by the really insane. All these are real facts which you may meet with this very day in ordinary life.”

This is, indeed, one of the most dangerous features of hypnotism, that a being, apparently in perfect possession of himself, may be forced to do things by the potency of a command given to him in a trance, a fatal edict which he does not in the least remember, but is constrained mechanically to obey. Doctor Luys and his _confrères_ insist that, unjust as it may appear, the plea of having acted irresponsibly under the effect of a hypnotic suggestion cannot, when the safety of society is involved, be admitted as an excuse any more than drunkenness. This justifies the French law that none but licensed physicians should practise hypnotic experiments.

Fortunately for the science of hypnotism the same energy towards useful acts can be stimulated, and it is just this entire obedience of which the professors take advantage for the practice of their healing art. Thus the confirmed drunkard, the man of vicious habits, the lazy child, the kleptomaniac, the suicidal or homicidal maniac can be cured. More wonderful things have been achieved. The patient’s willpower can be so intensified as to enable him to resume mastery of parts of the body which, as the result of such nervous disorders as paralysis, he may have entirely lost. Cases of ague, tic nerveux, neuralgia, and analogous disorders have been cured by repeatedly enjoining the patient, while in the hypnotic state, to conquer his trouble.

HOW CURATIVE PROCESSES ARE PURSUED.

These cures may be divided into two classes, the first effected by auto-suggestion, that is to say, by inspiring the patient with the determination to get the better of his disorder; and, second, those effected by the transfer of the disorder from the patient in his ordinary state to a subject in the hypnotic state.

In the same class may be named numerous cases of persons to whom hypnotism has been administered, just as chloroform is in other cases, as an anæsthetic: as, for instance, the case of a girl who came to the hospital maddened with toothache, and who, once in the hypnotic state, into which she was thrown by the influence of the revolving mirrors, allowed two molar teeth, which till then had caused her the most excruciating agony, to be removed without a sign of discomfort.

The second class of cures are, however, by far the most interesting and the most wonderful. These are the “direct cures,” which are called cures by transfer. This is the method used. One of the subjects attached to Doctor Luys’ clinic--such subjects being persons who have proved themselves very susceptible--is sent to sleep by a word of command from the doctor, and in this state grasps the hands of the patient who desires to be cured. In some cases the hands of the subject are laid upon the patient’s head. The subject is now described as “tapping” the patient of the nervous disorder that affects him. During the process of the transfer an assistant passes a magnetized iron bar over the arms and bodies of both patient and subject. The transfer usually lasts about three minutes. During this period the subject, or the person in the hypnotic state, assumes the individuality of the patient for the nonce, and can answer the doctor’s questions as to the patient’s state and progress. Thus it is the former and not the latter whom the doctor will question how the case is progressing and what ameliorations may be felt, and the subject will answer. In the cases which I saw, the patient in every case described what the subject had said about his state, symptoms, and progress as absolutely true and exact. It is further stated that no injury whatever is wrought on the substitute. While relieving the patient from whom the transfer is made, this vicarious agent is considerably benefited.

The detection of imposture on the part of the subject has invariably resulted in immediate dismissal.

EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENA.

All the experiments described above are, if genuine (but scientific camps are divided on the question of their genuineness), of practical value. The same thing may be said of another series of test studies, which are also being pursued, though the value is less in degree. Doctor Luys says that the subject in the hypnotic state has an intensely increased visual faculty. Indeed, one of the symptoms of this state is a very noticeable alteration of the appearance of the eye. It is stated by the doctor, and the experiments publicly made may be considered as convincing, that, thanks to this increased visual faculty, the hypnotic subject is able to see in the human face what is entirely hidden to ordinary sight.

For some time past the doctor had established that when a magnet is presented to a hypnotic subject in one of the phases of trance, the effect produced varies, according as the north or south pole, that is to say, the negative or the positive end of the magnet, is offered. The north pole in all cases produces a state of intense delight, expressed by gestures and outcries of pleasure. The subjects in this case declare that they see at the end of the magnet emanations of a beautiful blue light. When the bar is reversed the greatest horror and disgust at once affect the subject. If asked what it is that causes this dismay the subject will answer that it is the sight of a fearful red light playing around the end of the magnet.

Investigating further in this direction the doctor has discovered that the same subjects can detect in the human face emanations corresponding to those seen at the ends of the magnetic bar. Thus from the left eye and left ear and left corner of the mouth in persons in a good state of health, blue emanations can be seen by the hypnotized person, according to the declarations of such subjects.

In cases of persons, however, suffering from nervous disorders, or from the results of diseases or accidents, the colors vary. Thus, according to one of the subjects, the red light proceeding from the right eye of a person affected with shortsightedness and fatigue of the organ was largely spotted with violet. Violet is the characteristic color in all cases of great nervous fatigue. Black, green, and multi-colored flames have been described by the subjects as showing from persons suffering with various forms of nervous disorder. A man who had been wounded in the eye with a rapier was characterized, at an interval of three months, by two different subjects, who, according to Doctor Luys, had had no means of inter-communication, as emitting a green light from the injured organ.

If it can be established that certain diseases produce in those suffering from them a variation in the color of the emanations, which are perceptible to the hypnotic subject, the existence and nature of the disease will be certified by the tint.

Amongst the experiments which have been classified as of a speculative kind, and distinct from those of practical worth, none are more interesting than those that involve the presentation to subjects in the hypnotic state, of various substances and medicines contained in hermetically sealed tubes. The manifestations, according as the tube is presented on the right or the left side of the subject, indicate emotions of a diametrically opposite nature. Thus, when a tube containing ordinary red pepper was offered to the left, or, as the doctor calls it, the blue side, of a girl subject in the hypnotic state, symptoms of keen pleasure were discernible, which changed suddenly to an expression of violent disgust when the tube was carried to the red or right side. According to the doctor, the human being is double, and does not feel the same on his red as on his blue side. Thyme presented to one patient produced terrifying hallucinations; in another it called forth an expression of calm delight. Singularly, in the application of thyme there was a physiological effect, also, on the thyroid gland of the throat, the size of the neck being increased from thirty to thirty-three centimetres, or somewhat more than an inch. Morphine in one patient bred fancies of an evidently terrifying nature; in another, an intense drowsiness. The effect of frankincense presented to the left of the neck was an emotion of terror. Some water in a tube, held near the left side of a hypnotic subject’s head, caused a series of spasms resembling those usual to patients suffering from hydrophobia.

The doctor maintains that in each case the patient was in total ignorance of the contents of the tube. Indeed, in looking over the illustrations of this article, which are direct reproductions from _unretouched_ photographs, one can hardly help believing, with Doctor Luys, that the effect is actual, not simulated. In conclusion, who can tell but that these strange experiments will be looked upon some day as the first lisps of a new science?

THE SURGEON’S MIRACLE.

BY JOSEPH KIRKLAND,

Author of “Zury,” “The Captain of Company K,” etc.

“Poor Abe Dodge.”

That’s what they called him, though he wasn’t any poorer than other folks--not so poor as some. How could he be poor, work as he did and steady as he was? Worth a whole grist of such bait as his brother, Ephe Dodge, and yet they never called Ephe poor--whatever worse name they might call him. When Ephe was off at a show in the village, Abe was following the plough, driving a straight furrow, though you wouldn’t have thought it to see the way his nose pointed. In winter, when Ephe was taking the girls to singing school or spelling bee or some other foolishness--out till after nine o’clock at night, like as not--Abe was hanging over the fire, holding a book so the light would shine, first on one page and then on the other, and he turning his head as he turned the book, and reading first with one eye and then with the other.

There, the murder’s out! Abe couldn’t read with both eyes at once. If Abe looked straight ahead he couldn’t see the furrow--nor anythin’ else, for that matter. His best friend couldn’t say but what Abe Dodge was the cross-eyedest cuss that ever was. Why, if you wanted to see Abe, you’d stand in front of him; but if you wanted Abe to see you, you’d got to stand behind him, or pretty near it. Homely? Well, if you mean downright “humbly,” that’s what he was. When one eye was in use the other was out of sight, all except the white of it. Humbly ain’t no name for it. The girls used to say he had to wake up in the night to rest his face, it was so humbly. In school you’d ought to have seen him look down at his copybook. He had to cant his head clear over and cock up his chin till it pointed out of the winder and down the road. You’d really ought to have seen him, you’d have died. Head of the class, too, right along; just as near to the head as Ephe was to the foot; and that’s sayin’ a good deal. But to see him at his desk! he looked for all the world like a week-old chicken, peekin’ at a tumblebug! And him a grown man, too, for he stayed to school winters so long as there was anything more the teacher could teach him. You see, there wasn’t anything to draw him away; no girl wouldn’t look at him--lucky, too, seein’ the way he looked.

Well, one term there was a new teacher come--regular high-up girl, down from Chicago. As bad luck would have it, Abe wasn’t at school the first week--hadn’t got through his fall work. So she got to know all the scholars, and they was awful tickled with her--everybody always was that knowed her. The first day she come in and saw Abe at his desk, she thought he was squintin’ for fun, and she upped and laughed right out. Some of the scholars laughed too, at first; but most of ’em, to do ’em justice, was a leetle took back; young as they was, and cruel by nature. (Young folks is most usually always cruel--don’t seem to know no better.)

Well, right in the middle of the hush, Abe gathered up his books and upped and walked outdoors, lookin’ right ahead of him, and consequently seeing the handsome young teacher unbeknown to her.

She was the worst cut up you ever did see; but what could she do or say? Go and tell him she thought he was makin’ up a face for fun? The girls do say that come noon-spell, when she found out about it, she cried--just fairly cried. Then she tried to be awful nice to Abe’s ornery brother Ephe, and Ephe he was tickled most to death; but that didn’t do Abe any good--Ephe was jest ornery enough to take care that Abe shouldn’t get any comfort out of it. They do say she sent messages to Abe, and Ephe never delivered them, or else twisted ’em so as to make things worse and worse. Mebbe so, mebbe not--Ephe was ornery enough for it.

’Course the school-ma’am she was boardin’ round, and pretty soon it come time to go to ol’ man Dodge’s, and she went; but no Abe could she ever see. He kept away, and as to meals, he never set by, but took a bite off by himself when he could get a chance. (’Course his mother favored him, being he was so cussed unlucky.) Then when the folks was all to bed, he’d come in and poke up the fire and peek into his book, but first one side and then the other, same as ever.

Now what does school-ma’am do but come down one night when she thought he was abed and asleep, and catch him unawares. Abe knowed it was her, quick as he heard the rustle of her dress, but there wasn’t no help for it, so he just turned his head away and covered his cross-eyes with his hands, and she pitched in. What she said I don’t know, but Abe he never said a word; only told her he didn’t blame her, not a mite; he knew she couldn’t help it--no more than he could. Then she asked him to come back to school, and he answered to please excuse him. After a bit she asked him if he wouldn’t come to oblige her, and he said he calculated he was obligin’ her more by stayin’ away.

Well, come to that she didn’t know what to say or do, so, woman-like, she upped and cried; and then she said he hurt her feelings. And the upshot of it was he said he’d come, and they shook hands on it.

Well, Abe kept his word and took up schoolin’ as if nothing had happened; and such schoolin’ as there was that winter! I don’t believe any regular academy had more learnin’ and teachin’ that winter than what that district school did. Seemed as if all the scholars had turned over a new leaf. Even wild, ornery, no-account Ephe Dodge couldn’t help but get ahead some--but then he was crazy to get the school-ma’am; and she never paid no attention to him, just went with Abe. Abe was teachin’ her mathematics, seeing that was the one thing where he knowed more than she did--outside of farmin’. Folks used to say that if Ephe had Abe’s head, or Abe had Ephe’s face, the school-ma’am would have half of the Dodge farm whenever ol’ man Dodge got through with it; but neither of them did have what the other had, and so there it was, you see.

Well, you’ve heard of Squire Caton, of course; Judge Caton, they call him, since he got to be Judge of the Supreme Court--and Chief Justice at that. Well, he had a farm down there not far from Fox River, and when he was there he was just a plain farmer like the rest of us, though up in Chicago he was a high-up lawyer, leader of the bar. Now it so happened that a young doctor named Brainard--Daniel Brainard--had just come to Chicago and was startin’ in, and Squire Caton was helpin’ him, gave him desk-room in his office and made him known to the folks--Kinzies, and Butterfields, and Ogdens, and Hamiltons, and Arnolds, and all of those folks--about all there was in Chicago in those days. Brainard had been to Paris--Paris, France, not Paris, Illinois, you understand--and knew all the doctorin’ there was to know then. Well, come spring Squire Caton had Doc Brainard down to visit him, and they shot ducks and geese and prairie chickens and some wild turkeys and deer, too--game was just swarmin’ at that time. All the while Caton was doin’ what law business there was to do; and Brainard thought he ought to be doin’ some doctorin’ to keep his hand in, so he asked Caton if there wasn’t any cases he could take up--surgery cases especially he hankered after, seein’ he had more carving tools than you could shake a stick at. He asked him particularly if there wasn’t anybody he could treat for “strabismus.” The squire hadn’t heard of anybody dying of that complaint; but when the doctor explained that strabismus was French for cross-eyes, he naturally thought of poor Abe Dodge, and the young doctor was right up on his ear. He smelled the battle afar off; and ’most before you could say Jack Robinson the squire and the doctor were on horseback and down to the Dodge farm, tool-chest and all.

Well, it so happened that nobody was at home but Abe and Ephe, and it didn’t take but few words before Abe was ready to set right down, then and there, and let anybody do anything he was a mind to with his misfortunate eyes. No, he wouldn’t wait till the old folks come home; he didn’t want to ask no advice; he wasn’t afraid of pain, nor of what anybody could do to his eyes--couldn’t be made any worse than they were, whatever you did to ’em. Take ’em out and boil ’em and put ’em back if you had a mind to, only go to work. He knew he was of age and he guessed he was master of his own eyes--such as they were.

Well, there wasn’t nothing else to do but go ahead. The doctor opened up his killing tools and tried to keep Abe from seeing them; but Abe he just come right over and peeked at ’em, handled ’em, and called ’em “splendid”--and so they were, barrin’ havin’ them used on your own flesh and blood and bones.

Then they got some cloths and a basin, and one thing and another, and set Abe right down in a chair. (No such thing as chloroform in those days, you’ll remember.) And Squire Caton was to hold an instrument that spread the eyelid wide open, while Ephe was to hold Abe’s head steady. First touch of the lancet, and first spirt of blood, and what do you think? That ornery Ephe wilted, and fell flat on the floor behind the chair!

“Squire,” said Brainard, “step around and hold his head.”

“I can hold my own head,” says Abe, as steady as you please. But Squire Caton, he straddled over Ephe and held his head between his arms, and the two handles of the eye-spreader with his hands.

It was all over in half a minute, and then Abe he leaned forward, and shook the blood off his eyelashes, and looked straight out of that eye for the first time since he was born. And the first words he said were:

“Thank the Lord! She’s mine!”

About that time Ephe he crawled outdoors, sick as a dog; and Abe spoke up, says he:

“Now for the other eye, doctor.”

“Oh,” says the doctor, “we’d better take another day for that.”

“All right,” says Abe; “if your hands are tired of cuttin’, you can make another job of it. My face ain’t tired of bein’ cut, I can tell you.”

“Well, if you’re game, I am.”

So, if you’ll believe me, they just set to work and operated on the other eye, Abe holding his own head, as he said he would, and the squire holding the spreader. And when it was all done, the doctor was for putting a bandage on to keep things quiet till the wounds all healed up, but Abe just begged for one sight of himself, and he stood up and walked over to the clock and looked in the glass, and says he:

“So that’s the way I look, is it? Shouldn’t have known my own face--never saw it before. How long must I keep the bandage on, doctor?”

“Oh, if the eyes ain’t very sore when you wake up in the morning, you can take it off, if you’ll be careful.”

“Wake up! Do you s’pose I can sleep when such a blessing has fallen on me? I’ll lay still, but if I forget it, or you, for one minute this night, I’ll be so ashamed of myself that it’ll wake me right up!”

Then the doctor bound up his eyes and the poor boy said “Thank God!” two or three times, and they could see the tears running down his cheeks from under the cloth. Lord! It was just as pitiful as a broken-winged bird!

How about the girl? Well; it was all right for Abe--and all wrong for Ephe--all wrong for Ephe! But that’s all past and gone--past and gone. Folks come for miles and miles to see cross-eyed Abe with his eyes as straight as a loon’s leg. Doctor Brainard was a great man forever after in those parts. Everywhere else, too, by what I heard.

When the doctor and the squire come to go, Abe spoke up, blindfolded as he was, and says he:

“Doc, how much do you charge a feller for savin’ his life--making a man out of a poor wreck--doin’ what he never thought could be done but by dyin’ and goin’ to kingdom come?”

“Oh,” says Doc Brainard, says he, “that ain’t what we look at as pay practice. You didn’t call me in; I come of myself, as though it was what we call a clinic. If all goes well, and if you happen to have a barrel of apples to spare, you just send them up to Squire Caton’s house in Chicago, and I’ll call over and help eat ’em.”

What did Abe say to that? Why, sir, he never said a word; but they do say the tears started out again, out from under the bandage and down his cheeks. But then Abe he had a five-year-old pet mare he’d raised from a colt--pretty as a picture, kind as a kitten, and fast as split lightning; and next time Doc come down Abe he just slipped out to the barn and brought the mare round and hitched her to the gate-post, and when Doc come to be going, says Abe:

“Don’t forget your nag, doctor; she’s hitched at the gate.”

Well, sir, even then Abe had the hardest kind of a time to get Doc Brainard to take that mare; and when he did ride off, leadin’ her, it wasn’t half an hour before back she came, lickety-split. Doc said she broke away from him and put for home, but I always suspected he didn’t have no use for a hoss he couldn’t sell nor hire out, and couldn’t afford to keep in the village--that was what Chicago was then. But come along toward fall Abe he took her right up to town, and then the doctor’s practice had growed so much that he was pretty glad to have her; and Abe was glad to have him have her, seeing all that had come to him through havin’ eyes like other folks--that’s the school-ma’am, I mean.

How did the school-ma’am take it? Well, it was this way. After the cuttin’ Abe didn’t show up for a few days, till the inflammation got down and he’d had some practice handlin’ his eyes, so to speak. He just kept himself to himself, enjoying himself. He’d go around doin’ the chores, singing so you could hear him a mile. He was always great on singin’, Abe was, though ashamed to go to singin’-school with the rest. Then, when the poor boy began to feel like other folks, he went right over to where school-ma’am happened to be boardin’ round, and walked right up to her and took her by both hands, and looked her straight in the face, and said:

“Do you know me?”

Well, she kind of smiled and blushed, and then the corners of her mouth pulled down, and she pulled one hand away, and--if you believe me--that was the third time that girl cried that season, to my certain knowledge--and all for nothin’ either time!

What did she say? Why, she just said she’d have to begin all over again to get acquainted with Abe. But Ephe’s nose was out of joint, and Ephe knowed it as well as anybody, Ephe did. It was Abe’s eyes to Ephe’s nose.

Married? Oh, yes, of course; and lived on the farm as long as the old folks lived, and afterwards, too; Ephe staying right along, like the fool he always had been. That feller never did have as much sense as a last year’s bird’s nest.

Alive yet? Abe? Well, no. Might have been if it hadn’t been for Shiloh. When the war broke out Abe thought he’d ought to go, old as he was, so he went into the Sixth. Maybe you’ve seen a book written about the captain of Company K of the Sixth. It was Company K he went into--him and Ephe. And he was killed at Shiloh--just as it always seems to happen. He got killed, and his worthless brother come home. Folks thought Ephe would have liked to marry the widow, but, Lord! she never had no such an idea! Such bait as he was compared to his brother. She never chirked up, to speak of, and now she’s dead too, and Ephe he just toddles round, taking care of the children--kind of a he dry-nurse; that’s about all he ever was good for, anyhow.

My name? Oh, my name’s Ephraim--Ephe they call me, for short; Ephe Dodge. Abe was my brother.