CHAPTER XV.

Worn out and jaded, I began my travels. I strove to make these travels as inexpensive as possible. I walked much, and at times lived both cheaply and luxuriously, as one learns to do after a little experience abroad. At first I resolved to make this tour one long summer day of pleasure through the outward senses. I took no books with me. I painted no picture. I rarely even sketched. Brain and heart rested, while there flowed into them, through the outward avenues of eye and ear, new pictures and harmonies,--I fancied, for present enjoyment merely, but in reality for future use.

When I reached Rome, my funds, which had even previously been eked out by the sale of the few sketches I had made, were quite exhausted. Anticipating this, I had, after great hesitation, written to Mr. Leopold, desiring letters of introduction to some artists, in the hope of obtaining work from them. I found his reply to this letter awaiting my arrival in Rome; and though I had not hinted at my destitution, he must have guessed it, for he inclosed a check and all the information I desired. I provided myself with a humble studio and recommenced work. How fresh and charming was this return to my old mode of life! I even bought a few choice books at the old stalls, and revelled in poetry. Dante opened his Purgatory to me just as I escaped from my own, and I basked in the returning sun-light of a free and happy life.

Copying in a painting-gallery one day, I beheld with pain, albeit he was my benefactor, a ghost of my former life arising to haunt me. Mr. Leopold, having arrived the night before, was enjoying the pictures preparatory to hunting me up. His greeting was cordial; he cheered me by most favorable opinions as to my progress in my art, and was dumb about the past. He desired that I should again work in connection with himself; and the profound respect I had always felt for his abilities was confirmed and heightened by the affection he inspired in me. His really harmonious character guided mine without the absolute surrender of my individuality. One by one I resumed the old interests, and began to feel the old heart which has throbbed through the centuries, from Adam downward, beating within me. How very much I was like other men, after all!

"Sandy," Mr. Leopold said to me one day, as we sat sketching some old ruin on the Campagna, "is it your wish to be silent as to the past? Are you restrained by fear of yourself or me?"

For only answer I exclaimed,--

"How and where is Miss Darry?"

"She is well, and at Munich," he answered, smiling pleasantly,--"developing in herself the powers with which she invested you. As a sculptress she gives great promise; her figures show wonderful anatomical knowledge."

"And you, Mr. Leopold," I asked breathlessly, "how could you forgive and befriend one who had so weakly treated the woman you alone were worthy to love?"

"You are indeed breaking silence, Sandy," he replied; "it is with you the Chinese wall or illimitable space. Perhaps you have not really wronged either her or me. She worked off some extravagant theories on you. You exhausted your weakness, I trust, on her; and as for me, I have learned to conquer through both."

I have lived several years since that morning in Rome, where, at the headquarters of the confessional, I opened my heart to Mr. Leopold. Standing, as he does, at the head of his art, I follow him. Those who prefer fancy to vigorous thought and imagination, the lovely and familiar in Nature to the sublime, sometimes rank me above him. Time has not evolved the genius which Miss Darry prophesied, yet I am as fully convinced that I occupy my true position and do my appropriate work in the world as though it had. Mrs. Leopold professes occasionally to me, with a smile, that her opinion is unaltered, that my weakness was only an additional proof of genius, but that her husband is a hero worth all the geniuses in the world. She holds this subtile essence more lightly in estimation now than formerly. Some think she possesses it; and her groups of statuary fairly entitle her to more laurels than in her happy domestic life she is likely to win. She laughs at my wife, and calls her sentimental, because her Art instincts, like vines over a humble dwelling, embroider only the common domestic life. Her many fanciful ways of adorning our home, and her own sweet, sunny self, its perpetual light and comfort, are to me just so many 'traps to catch the sunbeams' of life, especially as I see beneath all this the earnest, developed womanhood of the blacksmith's daughter. Do you ask me how I won her? I can describe my passionate admiration, even the weakness and limitations of my nature; but I will not unveil my love. Is it not enough that I am a thorough democrat, have little faith in the hereditary transmission of good or evil, and welcome Mr. and Mrs. Bray to my home and hearth? I am not hurried now.

"You have only this lifetime to make a _man_ in, Sandy," Annie pleads occasionally, when a call for service outside my profession presents itself; "but any special power of mind, it seems to me, will have the mending ages in which to unfold."

To love men, to labor for them and for the ideas which free and redeem them, seems the special mission of our times; and my little wife has caught its spirit, and so helps me to recognize the virtue which eighteen hundred years ago was crucified to rise again, which has been assailed in our country, and is rising again to be the life and inspiration of Christendom, the death-blow to slavery and oppression, the light of many a humble home and simple heart. Unselfishness! keystone to the arch through which each pure soul looks heavenward!

KING JAMES THE FIRST.

A merry monarch two years and four months old.

If we could have stood by when the world was a-making,--could have sniffed the escaping gases, as they volatilized through the air,--could have seen and heard the swash of the waves, when the whole world was, so to speak, in hot water,--could have watched the fiery tumult gradually soothing itself into shapely, stately palms and ferns, cold-blooded Pterodactyles, and gigantic, but gentle Megatheriums, till it was refined, at length, into sunshine and lilies and Robin Redbreasts,--we fancy we should have been intensely interested. But a human soul is a more mysterious thing than this round world. Its principles firmer than the hills, its passions more tumultuous than the sea, its purity resplendent as the light, its power too swift and subtile for human analysis,--what wonder in heaven above or earth beneath can rival this mystic, mighty mechanism? Yet it is formed almost under our eyes. The voice of God, "Let there be light," we do not hear; the stir of matter thrilled into mind we do not see; but the after-march goes on before our gaze. We have only to look, and, lo! the mountains are slowly rising, the valleys scoop their levels, the sea heaves against its barriers, and the chaotic soul evolves itself from its nebulous, quivering light, from its plastic softness, into a world of repose, of use, of symmetry, and stability. This mysterious soul, when it first passed within our vision, was only not hidden within its mass of fleshly life, a seed of spirituality deep-sunk in a pulp of earthliness. Passing away from us in ripened perfection, we behold a being but little lower than the angels, heir of God and joint heir with Christ, crowned with glory and honor and immortality.

Come up, then, Jamie, my King, into the presence of the great congregation! There are poets here, and philosophers, wise men of the East who can speak of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes. But fear them not, little Jamie! you are of more value, even to science, than many fishes. Wise as these Magi are, yesterday they were such as you, and such they must become again or ever they shall enter the kingdom of heaven. Come up, little Jamie, into the hall of audience! Blue eyes and broad brow, sunny curls, red lips, and dainty, sharp teeth, stout little arm, strong little hand, sturdy little figure, and most still and steadfast gaze: truly it is the face and form of a king,--sweetness in power, unconsciousness in royalty.

"Jamie, you are a little beauty! You are too handsome to live!"

"No!" says Jamie, vehemently, for the fiftieth time, stamping the royal foot and scowling the royal brows. "Gamma say _not_ too ha'some!"

"But you are a young Apollo."

"_No_ my 'Pollo!"

"What are you, then?"

"I goo e baw," which is Jametic for good little boy.

This microcosm, like the macrocosm, may be divided into many departments. As the world is viewed geographically, geologically, historically, astronomically, so in this one little Jamie we have many Jamies. There is the Jamie philological, Jamie theological, Jamie psychological, Jamie emotional, Jamie social; in fact, I can hardly think of any natural, moral, or mathematical science, on which a careful study of Jamie will not throw some light. Would you frame a theory of metaphysics? Consult Reid, and Locke, and Hamilton warily, for they are men, subject to like mistakes as we are; but observe Jamie with utmost confidence and the closest care, for he is the book of God, and will teach only truth, if your eye is single to perceive truth. Theologically, Jamie has points superior to both Andover and Princeton; he is never in danger of teaching for doctrine the commandments of men; nor have passion and prejudice in him any power to conceal, but, on the contrary, they illuminate truth. For the laws of language, mark how the noble tree of human speech springs in his soul from mustard-seed into fair and fruitful symmetry. In good sooth, one marvels that there should be so much error in the world with children born and growing up all over it. If Jamie were, like Jean Paul, the Only, I should expect philosophers to journey from remotest regions to sit at his feet and learn the ways of God to man. Every one who presumed to teach his fellows should be called upon to produce his diploma as a graduate of Jamie, or forfeit all confidence in his sagacity. But, with a baby in every other house, how is it that we continually fall out by the way? It must be that children are not advantageously used. We pet them, and drug them, and spoil them; we trick them out in silks and fine array; we cross and thwart and irritate them; we lay unholy hands upon them, but are seldom content to stand aside and see the salvation of the Lord.

Tug, tug, tug, one little foot wearisomely ranging itself beside the other, and two hands helping both: that is Jamie coming up stairs. Patter, patter, patter: that is Jamie trotting through the entry. He never walks. Rattle, clatter, shake: Jamie is opening the door. Now he marches in. Flushed with exertion, and exultant over his brilliant escapade from the odious surveillance below, he presents himself peering on tiptoe just over the arm of the big chair, and announces his errand,--

"Come t' see Baddy."

"Baddy doesn't want you."

"Baddy _do_."

Then, in no wise daunted by his cool welcome, he works his way up into the big chair with much and indiscriminate pulling: if it is a sleeve, if it is a curtain, if it is a table-cloth whereon repose many pens, much ink and paper, and knick-knacks without number, nothing heeds he, but clutches desperately at anything which will help him mount, and so he comes grunting in, all tumbled and twisted, crowds down beside me, and screws himself round to face the table, poking his knees and feet into me with serene unconcern. Then, with a pleased smile lighting up his whole face, he devotes himself to literature. A small, brass-lined cavity in the frame of the writing-desk serves him for an inkstand. Into that he dips an old, worn-out pen with consequential air, and assiduously traces nothing on bits of paper. Of course I am reduced to a masterly inactivity, with him wriggling against my right arm, let alone the danger hanging over all my goods and chattels from this lawless little Vandal prowling among them. Shall I send him away? Yes, if I am an insensate clod, clean given over to stupidity and selfishness; if I count substance nothing, and shadow all things; if I am content to dwell with frivolities forever, and have for eternal mysteries nothing but neglect. For suppose I break in upon his short-lived delight, thrust him out grieved and disappointed, with his brave brow clouded, a mist in his blue eyes, and--that heart-rending sight--his dear little under-lip and chin all quivering and puckering. Well, I go back and write an epic poem. The printers mangle it; the critics fall foul of it; it is lost in going through the post-office; it brings me ten letters, asking an autograph, on six of which I have to pay postage. There is vanity and vexation of spirit, besides eighteen cents out of pocket, and the children crying for bread. I let him stay. A little, innocent life, fearfully dependent on others for light, shines out with joyful radiance, wherein I rejoice. To-morrow he will have the measles, and the mumps, and the croup, and the whooping-cough, and scarlatina; and then come the alphabet, and Latin grammar, and politics, and his own boys getting into trouble: but to-day, when his happiness is in my hands, I may secure it, and never can any one wrest from him the sunshine I may pour into his happy little heart. Oh! the time comes so soon, and comes so often, that Love can only look with bitter sorrow upon the sorrow which it has no power to mitigate!

Language is unceremoniously resolved into its original elements by Jamie. He is constitutionally opposed to inflection, which, as he must be devoid of prejudice, may be considered indisputable proof of the native superiority of the English to other languages. He is careful to include in his sentences all the important words, but he has small respect for particles, and the disposition of his words waits entirely upon his moods. _My_ usually does duty for _I_. "Want the Uncle Frank gave me hossey," with a finger pointing to the mantel-piece is just as flexible to his use as "Want the hossey that Uncle Frank gave me." "Where Baddy _can_ be?" he murmurs softly to himself, while peering behind doors and sofas in playing hide-and-seek. Hens are cud-dah, a flagrant example of Onomatopoeia. The cradle is a cay-go; corn-balls are ball-corn; and snow-bird, bird-snow; and all his rosy nails are toe-nails. He has been drilled into meet response to "how d' ye do?" but demonstrates the mechanical character of his reply by responding to any question that has the _you_ and _how_ sounds in it, as "What do you think of that?" "How did you do it?" "How came you by this?" "Pit-_tee_ well."

But his performances are not all mechanical. He has a stock of poetry and orations, of which he delivers himself at bedtime with a degree of resignation,--that being the only hour in which he can be reduced to sufficient quietude for recitation; nor is that because he loves quiet more, but bed less. It is a very grievous misfortune, an unreasonable and arbitrary requisition, that breaks in upon his busy life, interrupts him in the midst of driving to mill on an inverted chair, hauling wood in a ditto footstool, and other important matters, and sweeps him off to darkness and silence. So, with night-gown on, and the odious bed imminent, he puts off the evil day by compounding with the authorities and giving a public entertainment, in consideration of a quarter of an hour's delay. He takes large liberties with the text of his poems, but his rhetorical variations are of a nature that shows it is no vain repetition, but that he enters into the spirit of the poem. In one of his songs a person

"Asked a sweet robin, one morning in May, That sung in the apple-tree over the way,"

what it was he was singing.

"Don't you know? he replied, you cannot guess wrong; Don't you know I am singing my cold-water song?"

This Jamie intensifies thus:--

"Do' know my sing my co'-wotta song, hm?"

When he reaches the place where

"Jack fell down Boke cown,"

he invariably leaves Gill to take care of herself, and closes with the pathetic moral reflection, "'At _too_ bad!" Little Jack Horner, having put in his thumb and picked out a plum, is made to declare definitely and redundantly,--

"My _ga-ate_ big boy, jus' so big!"

He persists in praying,--

"'F I should die 'fore I wake up."

Borne off to bed a last, in spite of every pretext for delay, tired Nature droops in his curling lashes, and gapes protractedly through his wide-dividing lips.

"I seepy," he cries, fighting of sleep with the bravery of a Major-General,--observing phenomena, _in articulo somni_, with the accuracy and enthusiasm of a naturalist, and reasoning from them with the skill of a born logician.

A second prolonged and hearty gape, and

"I two seepies," he cries, adding mathematics to his other accomplishments.

And that is the last of Jamie, till the early morning brings him trudging up stairs, all curled and shining, to "hear Baddy say 'Boo!'"

Total depravity, in Jamie's presence, is a doctrine hard to be understood. Honestly speaking, he does not appear to have any more depravity than is good for him,--just enough to make him piquant, to give him a relish. He is healthy and hearty all day long. He eats no luncheon and takes no nap, is desperately hungry thrice a day and sleeps all night, going to bed at dark after a solitary stale supper of bread and butter, more especially bread; and he is good and happy. Laying aside the revelations of the Bible and of Doctors of Divinity, I should say that his nature is honest, simple, healthful, pure, and good. He shows no love for wrong, no inclination towards evil rather than good. He is affectionate, just, generous, and truthful. He just lives on his sincere, loving, fun-loving, playful, yet earnest life, from day to day, a pure and perfect example, to my eye, of what God meant children to be. I cannot see how he should be very different from what he is, even if he were in heaven, or if Adam had never sinned. There is so fearful an amount of, and so decided a bent towards, wickedness in the world, that it seems as if nothing less than an inborn aptitude for wickedness can account for it; yet, in spite of all theories and probabilities, here is Jamie, right under my own eye, developing a far stronger tendency to love, kindness, sympathy, and all the innocent and benevolent qualities, than to their opposites. The wrong that he does do seems to be more from fun and frolic, from sheer exuberance of animal spirits and intensity of devotion to mirth, than anything else. He seems to be utterly devoid of malice, cruelty, revenge, or any evil motive. Even selfishness, which I take to be the fruitful mother of evil, is held in abeyance, is subordinate to other and nobler qualities. Candy is dearer to him than he knows how to express; yet he scrupulously lays a piece on the mantel for an absent friend; and though he has it in full view, and climbs up to it, and in the extremity of his longing has been known, I think, to chip off the least little bit with his sharp mouse-teeth, yet he endures to the end and delivers up the candy with an eagerness hardly surpassed by that with which he originally received it. Can self-denial go farther?

It seems to me that the reason of Jamie's gentleness and cheerfulness and goodness is, that he is comfortable and happy. The animal is in fine condition, and the spirit is therefore well served; consequently, both go on together with little friction. And I cannot but suspect that a great deal of human depravity comes from human misery. The destruction of the poor is his poverty. Little sickly, fretful, crying babies, heirs of worn nerves, fierce tempers, sad hearts, sordid tastes, half-tended or over-tended, fed on poison by the hand of love, nay, sucking poison from the breasts of love, trained to insubordination, abused by kindness, abused by cruelty,--that is the human nature from which largely we generalize, and no wonder the inference is total depravity. But human nature, distorted, defiled, degraded by centuries of misdealing, is scarcely human _nature_. Let us discover it before we define it. Let us remove accretions of long-standing moral and physical disease, before we pronounce sentence against the human _nature_. If it ever becomes an established and universally recognized principle, as fixed and unquestionable as the right and wrong of theft and murder, that it is a sin against God, a crime against the State, an outrage upon the helpless victim of their ignorance or wickedness, for an unhealthy man or woman to become the parent of a child, I think our creeds would presently undergo modification. Disease seems to me a more fertile source of evil than depravity; at least it is a more tangible source. We must have a race of healthy children, before we know what are the true characteristics of the human race. A child suffering from scrofula gives but a feeble, even a false representation of the grace, beauty, and sweetness of childhood. Pain, sickness, lassitude, deformity, a suffering life, a lingering death, are among the woful fruits of this dire disease, and it is acknowledged to be hereditary. Is not, then, every person afflicted with any hereditary disease debarred as by a fiat of the Almighty from becoming a parent? Every principle of honor forbids it. The popular stolidity and blindness on these subjects are astonishing. A young woman whose sisters have all died of consumption, and who herself exhibits unmistakable consumptive tendencies, is married, lives to bear three children in quick succession, and dies of consumption. Her friends mourn her and the sad separation from her bereaved little ones, but console themselves with the reflection that these little ones have prolonged her life. But for her marriage, she would have died years before. Of the three children born of this remedial marriage, two die in early girlhood of consumption. One left, a puny infant, languishes into a puny maturity. Even as a remedy, what is this worth? To die in her youth, to leave her suffering body in the dust and go quickly to God, with no responsibility beyond herself, or to pine through six years, enduring thrice, besides all her inherited debility, the pain and peril, the weariness and terror of child-bearing, to be at last torn violently and prematurely away from these beloved little ones,--which is the disease, and which the remedy? And when we look farther on at the helpless little innocents, doomed to be the recipients of disease, early deprived of a mother's care, for which there is no substitute, dragging a load of weakness and pain, and forced down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death before years shall have blunted the point of its terrors, or religion robbed them of their sting,--it is only not atrocious because so unwittingly wrought.

And bodily health is only one of the possessions which every child has a right to claim from its parents. Not merely health, but dispositions, traits, lie within human control far beyond the extent of common recognition. We say that character is formed at fourteen or sixteen, and that training should begin in infancy; but sometimes it seems to me, that, when the child is born, the work is done. All the rest is supplementary and subordinate. Subsequent effort has, indeed, much effect, but it cannot change quality. It may modify, but it cannot make anew. After neglect or ignorance may blight fair promise, but no after wisdom can bring bloom for blight. There are many by-laws whose workings we do not understand; but the great, general law is so plain, that wayfaring folk, though fools, need not err therein. Every one sees the unbridled passions of the father or mother raging in the child. Gentleness is born of gentleness, insanity of insanity, truth of truth. Careful and prayerful training may mitigate the innate evil; but how much better that the young life should have sprung to light from seas of love and purity and peace! Through God's mercy, the harsh temper, the miserly craving, the fretful discontent may be repressed and soothed; but it is always up-hill work, and never in this world wholly successful. Why be utterly careless in forming, to make conscious life a toilsome and thankless task of reforming? Since there is a time, and there comes no second, when the human being is under human control,--since the tiny infant, once born, is a separate individual, is for all its remaining existence an independent human being, why not bring power to bear where form is amenable to power? Only let all the influences of that sovereign time be heavenly,--and whatever may be true of total depravity, Christ has made such a thing possible,--and there remains no longer the bitter toil of thwarting, but only the pleasant work of cultivating Nature.

It is idle, and worse than idle, to call in question the Providence of God for disaster caused solely by the improvidence of man. The origin of evil may be hidden in the unfathomable obscurity of a distant, undreamed-of past, beyond the scope of mortal vision; but by far the greater part of the evil that we see--which is the only evil for which we are responsible--is the result of palpable violation of Divine laws. Humanity here is as powerful as Divinity. The age of miracles is past. God does not interfere to contravene His own laws. His part in man's creation He long ago defined, and delegated all the rest to the souls that He had made. Man is as able as God to check the destructive tide. And it is mere shuffling and shirking and beating the wind, for a people to pray God to mitigate the ill which they continually and unhesitatingly perpetuate and multiply.

The great mistake made by the believers in total depravity is in counting the blood of the covenant of little worth. We admit that in Adam all die; but we are slow to believe that in Christ all can be made alive. We abuse the doctrine. We make it a sort of scapegoat for short-coming. But Christ has made Adamic depravity of no account. He came not alone to pardon sin, but to save people from sinning. Father-love, mother-love, and Christ-love are so mighty that together they can defy Satan, and, in his despite, the soul shall be born into the kingdom of heaven without first passing through the kingdom of hell. And in this way only, I think, will the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.

* * * * *

"Now, Jamie, having set the world right,--you and I, for which the world will be deeply grateful,--let us see what you are about, for you have been suspiciously still lately. What doing, Jamie?"

"Hay-puh!" says Jamie, very red, eager, and absorbed, with no intermission of labor.

"Making hasty pudding! Oh, yes! I know what that means. Only taking all the chips and shavings out of the wood-box in the closet and carrying them half across the room by the eminently safe conveyance of his two fat hands, and emptying them into my box of paper, and stirring all together with a curling-stick. That's nothing. Keep on, Jamie, and amuse yourself; but let us hear your geography lesson.

"Where are you going one of these days?"

"Min-nee-so-toh."

"Where is Minnesota?"

Jamie gives a jerk with his arm to the west. He evidently thinks Minnesota is just beyond the hill.

"Where is papa going to buy his horses?"

"Ill-noy."

"And where does Aunt Sarah live?"

"Cog-go."

"What river are you going to sail up to get to Minnesota?"

"Miss-iss-ipp-ee."

"That's a _good_ little boy! He knows ever so much; and here is a peppermint. Open his mouth and shut his eyes, and pop! it goes."

There is, however, a pretty picture on the other side, that Jamie thrusts his iconoclastic fists through quite as unconcernedly; and that is the dignity of human nature. The human being can be trained into a dignified person: that no one denies. Looking at some honored and honorable man bearing himself loftily through every crisis, and wearing his grandeur with an imperial grace, one may be pardoned for the mistake, but it is none the less a mistake, of reckoning the acquirement of an individual as the endowment of the race. Behold human nature unclothed upon with the arts and graces of the schools, if you would discover, not its possibilities, but its attributes. The helplessness of infancy appeals to all that is chivalric and Christian in our hearts; but to dignity it is pre-eminently a stranger. A charming and popular writer--on the whole, I am not sure that it was not my own self--once affirmed that a baby is a beast, and gave great offence thereby; yet it seems to me that no unprejudiced person can observe an infant of tender weeks sprawling and squirming in the bath-tub, and not confess that it looks more like a little pink frog than anything else. And here is Jamie, not only weeks, but months and years old, setting his young affections on candy and dinner, and eating in general, with an appalling intensity. It is humiliating to see how easily he is moved by an appeal to his appetite. I blush for my race, remembering the sparkle of his eyes over a dainty dish, and the abandonment of his devotion to it,--the enthusiasm with which his feet spring, and his voice rings through the house, to announce the fact, "Dinnah mo' weh-wy! dinnah mo' weh-wy!" To the naked eye, he appears to think as much of eating as a cat or a chicken or a dog. Reasons and rights he is slow to comprehend; but his conscience is always open to conviction, and his will pliable to a higher law, when a stick of candy is in the case. His bread-and-butter is to him what science was to Newton; and he has been known to reply abstractedly to a question put to him in the height of his enjoyment, "Don' talk t' me now!" This is not dignity, surely. Is it total depravity? What is it that makes his feet so swift to do mischief? He sweeps the floor with the table-brush, comes stumbling over the carpet almost chin-deep in a pair of muddy rubber boots, catches up the bird's seed-cup and darts away, spilling it at every step; and the louder I call, the faster he runs, half frightened, half roguish, till an unmistakable sharpness pierces him, makes him throw down cup and seed together, and fling himself full length on the floor, his little heart all broken. Indeed, he can bear anything but displeasure. He tumbles down twenty times a day, over the crickets, off the chairs, under the table, head first, head last, bump, bump, bump, and never a tear sheds he, though his stern self-control is sometimes quite pitiful to see. But a little slap on his cheek, which is his standing punishment,--not a blow, but a tiny tap that must derive all its efficacy from its moral force,--oh, it stabs him to the heart! He has no power to bear up against it, and goes away by himself, and cries bitterly, sonorously, and towards the last, I suspect, rather ostentatiously. Then he spoils it all by coming out radiant, and boasting that he has "make tear," as if that were an unparalleled feat. If you attempt to chide him, he puts up his plump hand with a repelling gesture, turns away his head in disgust, and ejaculates vehemently, "Don' talk t' me!" After all, however, I do not perceive that he is any more sensitive to reproof than an intelligent and petted dog.

His logical faculty develops itself somewhat capriciously, but is very prompt. He seldom fails to give you a reason, though it is often of the Wordsworthian type,--

"At Kilve there was no weathercock, And that's the reason why."

"Don' talk t' me! I little Min-nee-so-toh boy!"--as if that were an amnesty proclamation. You invite him to stay with you, and let Papa go to Minnesota without him. He shakes his head dubiously, and protests, with solemn earnestness, "Mus' go Min-nee-so-toh ca'y my fork," which, to the world-incrusted mind, seems but an inadequate pretext. I want him to write me a letter when he is gone away; but, after a thoughtful pause, he decides that he cannot, "'cause I got no pen." If he is not in a mood to repeat the verse you ask for, he finds full excuse in the unblushing declaration, "I bashful." He casts shadows on the wall with his wreathing, awkward little fingers, and is perfectly satisfied that they are rabbits, though the mature eye discerns no resemblance to any member of the vertebrate family. He gazes curiously to see me laugh at something I am reading,--"What 'at? my want to see,"--and climbs up to survey the page with wistful eyes; but it is "a' a muddle" to him. He greets me exultantly after absence, because I have "come home pay coot with Jamie"; and there is another secret out: that it is of no use to be sentimental with a child. He loves you in proportion as you are available. His papa and mamma fondly imagine they are dearer to him than any one else, and it would be cruel to disturb that belief; but it would be the height of folly to count yourself amiable because Jamie plants himself firmly against the door, and pleads piteously, "Don' go in e parly wite!" He wants you to "pay coot" with him,--that is all. If your breakfast shawl is lying on a chair, it would not be sagacious to attribute an affectionate unselfishness to him in begging leave to "go give Baddy shawl t' keep Baddy back warm." It is only his greediness to enter forbidden ground. Sentiment and sensibility have small lodgement in his soul.

But when Jamie is duly forewarned, he is forearmed. Legally admitted into the parlor to see visitors, he sits on the sofa by his mother's side, silent, upright, prim, his little legs stuck straight out before him in two stiff lines, presenting a full front view of his soles. By the way, I wonder how long grown persons would sit still, if they were obliged to assume this position. But Jamie maintains himself heroically, his active soul subdued to silence, till Nature avenges herself, not merely with a palpable, but a portentous yawn. "You may force me to this unnatural quiet," she seems to say; "but if you expect to prevent me from testifying that I think it intolerably stupid, you have reckoned without your host."

And here Jamie comes out strongly in favor of democracy, universal suffrage, political equality, the Union and the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the rights of man. Uncontaminated by conventional rules, he recognizes the human being apart from his worldly state. He is as silent and abashed in the presence of the day-laborer, coarsely clad and rough of speech and manners, as in that of the accomplished man of the world, or the daintiest silken-robed lady. With simple gravity, and never a thought of wrong, he begs the poet, "Pease, Missa Poet, tie up my shoe." He stands in awe before the dignity of the human soul; but dress and rank and reputation receive no homage from him. He is reverent, but to no false gods. The world finds room for kingdoms and empires and oligarchies; but undoubtedly man is born a democrat.

Is there only one Jamie here? Can one little urchin about as high as the table so fill a house with mirth and mischief, so daguerrotype himself in every corner, possess, while claiming nothing, so large a share of the household interest? For he somehow bubbles up everywhere. Not a mischance or a misplacement but can pretty surely be brought home to him. Is a glass broken? Jamie broke it. Is a door open that ought to be shut? Jamie opened it. Or shut that ought to be open? Jamie shut it. Is there a mighty crash in the entry? It is Jamie dropping the crowbar through the side-lights. The "Atlantic" has been missing all the morning.

"Jamie,"--a last, random resort, after fruitless search,--"where is the 'Atlantic Monthly'?"

"In daw."

"In the drawer? No, it is not in the drawer. You don't know anything about it."

Not quite so fast. Jamie knows the "Atlantic Monthly" as well as you; and if you will open the drawer for him, he will rapidly scatter its contents till he comes to the missing "Monthly," safe under the shawls where he deposited it.

If you are hanging your room with ground-pine, he lays hold of every stray twig, and tucks it into every crack he can reach. Will you have some corn out of the barrel? It is Jamie for balancing himself on the edge, and reaching down into the depths after it, till little more than his heels are visible. If, in a sudden exuberance, you make a "cheese,"--not culinary, but _whirligig_--round go his little bobtail petticoats in fatuous imitation. You walk the floor awhile, lost in day dreaming, to find this little monkey trotting behind you with droll gravity, his hands clasped behind his head, like yours; and he breaks in upon your most serious meditations with, "Baddy get down on floor, want wide on Baddy back," as nonchalantly as if he were asking you to pass the salt. All that he says, all that he does, has its peculiar charm. Not that he is in the least a remarkable child.

"I trust we have within our realme Five [thousand] as good as hee."

Otherwise what will befall this sketch?

I do not expect anything will ever come of him. In a few years he will be just like everybody else; but now he is the _peculiar_ gift of Heaven. Men and women walk and talk all day long, and nobody minds them; while this little ignoramus seldom opens his lips but you think nothing was ever so winsomely spoken. I suspect it is only his complete simplicity and sincerity. What he says and what he does are the direct, unmistakable effusions of his nature. All comes straight from the secret place where his soul abideth. Even his subterfuges are open as the day. You know that you are looking upon virgin Nature. Just as it flashed from its source, you see the unadulterated spirit. If grown-up persons would or could be as frank as he,--if they had no more misgivings, concealments, self-distrust, self-thought than he,--they would doubtless be as interesting. Every separate human being is a separate phenomenon and mystery; and if he could only be unthinkingly himself, as Jamie is, that self would be as much more captivating as it is become great and subtle by growth and experience. But we--fashion, habit, society, training, all the culture of life, mix a sort of paste, and we gradually become coated with it, and it hardens upon us; so it comes to pass by-and-by that we see our associates no longer, but only the casing in which they walk about; and as one is a good deal like another, we are not deeply fascinated. Sometimes a Thor's hammer breaks this flinty rock in pieces. Sometimes a fervid sun melts it, and you are let in to where the vigilant soul keeps watch and ward. Sometimes, alas! the hardening process seems to have struck in, and you find nothing but petrifaction all the way through.

Perhaps, after all, it is just as well; for, if our neighbors won upon us unawares as Jamie does, when should we ever find time to do anything? On the whole, it is a great deal better as it is, until the world has learned to love its neighbor as itself. For the present, it would not be safe to go abroad with the soul exposed. You fetch me a blow with your bludgeon, and I mind it not at all through my coat-of-mail; but if it had fallen on my heart, it would have wounded me to death. Nay, if you did but know where the sutures are, how you would stab and stab, dear fellow-man and brother, not to say Christian! No, we are not to be trusted with each other yet,--I with you, nor you with me; so we will keep our armor on awhile, please Heaven.

And as I think of Jamie frisking through the happy, merry days, I see how sad, unnatural, and wicked a thing it is, that mothers must so often miss the sunshine that ought to come to them through their little ones. We speak of losing children, when they die; but many a mother loses her children, though they play upon her threshold every day. She loses them, because she has no leisure to bask, and loiter, and live in them. She is so occupied in providing for their wants, that she has no time to sun herself in their grace. She snatches from them sweetness enough to keep herself alive, but she does not expand and mellow and ripen in their warmth for all the world. And the hours go by, and the days go by, evening and morning, seed-time and harvest, and the little frocks are outgrown, and the little socks outworn, and the little baby--oh! there is no little baby any more, but a boy with the crust formed already on his soul.

I marvel what becomes of these small people in heaven. They cannot stay as they are, for then heaven would be a poorer place than earth, where all but idiots increase in wisdom and stature. And if they keep growing,--why, it seems but a sorry exchange, to give up your tender, tiny, clinging infant, that is still almost a part of your own life, and receive in return a full-grown angel a great deal wiser and stronger than you. Perhaps it is only a just punishment for our guilty ignorance and selfishness in treating the little things so harshly, that they die away from us in sheer self-defence. And how good is the All-Father thus to declare for His little ones, when the strife waxes too hot, and the odds too heavy against them! We can maltreat them, but only to a certain limit. Beyond that, the lovely, stern angel of Death steps in, and bears them softly away to perpetual peace. I read our vital statistics,--so many thousands under five years of age dying each year; and I rejoice in every one. If their chances were fair for purity and happiness, the earth is too beautiful to slip so quickly from their hold; but, with sin and suffering, twin beasts of prey, lying in wait to devour, oh! thrice and four times happy are they who escape swiftly from the struggle in which they are all too sure to fail. So many, at least, are safe within the fold.

And thus, too, it seems providential, that the sin of pagan nations should take the form of infanticide. It is Satanic work, but God overrules it for good. Evil defeats itself, and hatred crowds the lists of love. From misery and wickedness, from stifled cities, over-full, from pagan lands, steeped centuries long in vice and crime, from East and West and North and South, over all the world, the innocent souls go up,--little lily-buds, swelling white and pure from earthly slime to bloom in heavenly splendor.

Jamie, Jamie, do you see birdie has put his head under his wing and gone to sleep? What does that mean? It means "Good night, Jamie." Now come, let us have "Cr-e-e-p, cr-e-e-p, cr-e-e-p!" And two fingers go slowly, measuring Jamie from toe to neck, and Jamie cringes and squirms and finally screams outright, and almost flings himself upon the floor; but, as soon as his spasm is over, begs again, "Say, 'K-e-e-p, k-e-e-p, k-e-e-p!'" and would keep it going longer than I have time to wait.

In this very passion for reiteration may be found a sufficient answer to those uneasy persons who are perpetually attempting to bring new singing-books into our churches, on pretext that people are tired of the old tunes. You never hear from Jamie's pure taste any clamor for new songs or stories. Whenever he climbs up into your lap to be amused, he is sure to ask for the story of "Kitty in Ga'et Window," though he knows it as Boston people know oratorio music, and detects and condemns the slightest departure from the text. And when you have gone through the drama, with all its motions and mewings, he wants nothing so much as "Kitty in Ga'et Window 'gen." Let us keep the old tunes. It is but a factitious need that would change them.

Gentle and friendly reader, I pray your pardon for this childish record. Some things I say of set purpose for your good, and the more you do not like them, the more I know they are the very things you need; and I shall continue to deal them out to you from time to time, as you are able to bear them. But this broken, rambling child-talk--with "a few practical reflections, arising naturally from my subject," as the preachers say--was penned only for your pleasure--and mine; and if you do not like it, I shall be very sorry, and wish I had never written it. For we might have gone away by ourselves and enjoyed it all alone;--could we not, Jamie, you and I together? Oh, no, no! Never again! Never, never again! for the mountains that rise and the prairies that roll between us. Ah! well, Jamie, I shall not cry about it. If you had stayed here, it would have been but a little while before you would have grown up into a big boy, and then a young fellow, and then a man, and been of no account. So what does it signify? Good night, little Jamie! good night, darling! Do I hear a sleepy echo, as of old, wavering out of the West, "_Goo-i-dah-ing_"?

THE SLEEPER.

I.

The glen was fair as some Arcadian dell, All shadow, coolness, and the rush of streams, Save where the dazzling fire of noonday fell Like stars within its under-sky of dreams. Rich leaf and blossomed grape and fern-tuft made Odors of Life and Slumber through the shade.

II.

"O peaceful heart of Nature!" was my sigh, "How dost thou shame, in thine unconscious bliss, Thy calm accordance with the changing sky, O quiet heart, the restless life of this! Take thou the place false friends have vacant left, And bring thy bounty to repair the theft!"

III.

So sighing, weary with the unsoothed pain From insect-stings of women and of men, Uneasy heart and ever-baffled brain, I breathed the silent beauty of the glen, And from the fragrant shadows where she stood Evoked the shyest Dryad of the wood.

IV.

Lo! on a slanting rock, outstretched at length, A woodman lay in slumber, fair as death,-- His limbs relaxed in all their supple strength, His lips half-parted with his easy breath, And by one gleam of hovering light caressed His bare brown arm and white uncovered breast.

V.

"Why comes he here?" I whispered, treading soft The hushing moss beside his flinty bed: "Sweet are the haycocks in yon clover-croft,-- The meadow turf were light beneath his head: Could he not slumber by the orchard-tree, And leave this quiet unprofaned for me?"

VI.

But something held my step. I bent, and scanned (As one might view a veiny agate-stone) The hard, half-open fingers of his hand, Strong cords of wrist, knit round the jointed bone, And sunburnt muscles, firm and full of power, But harmless now as petals of a flower.

VII.

The rock itself was not more still: yet one Light spray of grass shook ever at his wrist, Counting the muffled pulses. Where the sun The open fairness of his bosom kissed, I marked the curious beauty of the skirt, And dim blue branches of the blood within.

VIII.

There lay the unconscious Life, but, ah! more fair Than ever blindly stirred in leaf and bark,-- Warmth, beauty, passion, mystery everywhere, Beyond the Dryad's feebly burning spark Of cold poetic being: who could say If here the angel or the wild beast lay?

IX.

Then I looked up and read his helpless face: Peace touched the temples and the eyelids, slept On drooping lashes, made itself a place In smiles that gently to the corners crept Of parting lips, and came and went, to show The happy freedom of the heart below.

X.

A holy rest! wherein the man became Man's interceding representative: In Sleep's white realm fell off his mask of blame, And he was sacred, for that he did live. His presence marred no more the quiet deep, But all the glen became a shrine of sleep!

XI.

And then I mused:--How lovely this repose! How the shut sense its dwelling consecrates! Sleep guards itself against the hands of foes: Its breath disarms the Envies and the Hates Which haunt our lives: were this mine enemy, My stealthy watch could not less reverent be!

XII.

Here lie our human passions, sung to rest By tender Nature, anxious to restore Some hours of innocence to every breast, To part the husks around the untainted core Of life, and show, in equal helplessness, The hearts that wound us and the hearts that bless!

XIII.

How swiftly in this frame the primal seeds Of purity and peace revive anew! One wave of sleep the stain of evil deeds Effaces, as with Heaven's baptismal dew. The pure white flame through all its ashes burns: The effluent being to its source returns.

XIV.

So hang their hands that would have done me wrong; So sweet their breathing whose unkindly spite Provoked the bitter measures of my song; So they might slumber, sacred in my sight, As I in theirs:--why waste contentious breath? Forget, like Sleep, and then forgive, like Death!

XV.

I bowed my head: the sleeper gently smiled,-- How far he lay from every sting and smart! Some sinless dream his wandering thought beguiled, And left its sweetness in his open heart. The God that watched him in the lonely glen Sent me, consoled and patient, back to men.

DOCTOR JOHNS.

XL.

It would lead us far too widely from the simple order of our narrative to detail the early history of Madame Arles; and although the knowledge of it might serve in some degree to explain the peculiar interest which that poor woman has shown in the motherless Adele, we choose rather to leave the matter unexplained, and to regard the invalid enthusiast as one whose sympathies have fastened in a strange way upon the exiled French girl, and grow all the stronger by the difficulties in the way of their full expression.

Madame Arles did not forego either her solicitude or the persistence of her inquiry under the harsh rebuff of the Doctor. Again and again, after nightfall, he saw her figure flitting back and forth upon the street, over against Adele's window; and the good man perplexed himself vainly with a hundred queries as to what such strange conduct could mean. The village physician, too, had been addressed by this anxious lady with a tumult of questionings; and the old gentleman--upon whose sympathies the eager inquirer had won an easier approach than upon those of the severe parson--had taken hearty satisfaction in assuring her, within a few days after the night interview we have detailed, that the poor girl was mending, was out of danger, in fact, and would be presently in a condition to report for herself.

After this, and through the long convalescence, Madame Arles was seen more rarely upon the village street. Yet the town gossips were busy with the character and habits of the "foreign lady." Her devotion to the little child of the outcast Boody woman was most searchingly discussed at all the tea-tables of the place; and it was special object of scandal, that the foreign lady, neglectful of the Sabbath ministrations of the parson, was frequently to be seen wandering about the fields in "meeting-time," attended very likely by that poor wee thing of a child, upon whose head the good people all visited, with terrible frowns, the sins of the parents. No woman, of whatever condition, could maintain a good reputation in Ashfield under such circumstances. Dame Tourtelot enjoyed a good sharp fling at the "trollop."

"I allers said she was a bad woman," submitted the stout Dame; and her audience (consisting of the Deacon and Miss Almiry) would have had no more thought of questioning the implied decision than of cutting down the meeting-house steeple.

"And I'm afeard," continued the Dame, "that Adeel isn't much better; she keeps a crucifix in her chamber!--needn't to look at me, Tourtelot!--Miss Johns told me all about it, and I don't think the parson should allow it. I think you oughter speak to the parson, Tourtelot."

The good Deacon scratched his head, over the left ear, in a deprecating manner.

"And I've heerd this Miss Arles has been a-writin' to Mr. Maverick, Adeel's father,--needn't to look at me, Tourtelot!--the postmaster told me; and she's been receivin' furren letters,--filled with Popery, I ha'n't a doubt."

In short, the poor woman bore a most execrable reputation; and Doctor Johns, good as he was, took rather a secret pride in such startling confirmation of his theories in respect to French character. He wrote to his friend Maverick, informing him that his suspicions in regard to Madame Arles were, he feared, "only too well-founded. Her neglect of Sabbath ordinances, her unhallowed associations, her extreme violence of language, (which was on a signal occasion uttered in my hearing,) have satisfied me that your distrust was only too reasonable. I shall guard Adaly from all further intercourse with extreme care."

Indeed, Miss Eliza and the Doctor (the latter from the best of motives) had scrupulously kept from Adele all knowledge of Madame Arles's impatient and angry solicitude during her illness. And when Adele, on those first sunny days of her convalescence, learned incidentally that her countrywoman was still a resident of the village, it pained her grievously to think that she had heard no tender message from her during all that weary interval of sickness, and she was more than half inclined (though she did not say this) to adopt the harshest judgments of the spinster. There was not a visitor at the parsonage, indeed, but, if the name were mentioned, sneered at the dark-faced, lonely woman, who was living such a godless life, and associating, as if from sheer bravado, with those who were under the ban of all the reputable people of Ashfield.

When, therefore, Adele, on one of her early walks with Reuben, after her recovery was fully established, encountered, in a remote part of the village, Madame Arles, trailing after her the little child of shame,--and yet darting toward the French girl, at first sight, with her old effusion,--Adele met her coolly, so coolly, indeed, that the poor woman was overcome, and, hurrying the little child after her, disappeared with a look of wretchedness upon her face that haunted Adele for weeks and months. Thereafter very little was seen of Madame Arles upon the principal street of the village; and her avoidance of the family of the parsonage was as studied and resolute as either the Doctor or Miss Eliza could have desired. A moment of chilling indifference on the part of Adele had worked stronger repulse than all the harsh rebuffs of the elder people; but of this the kind-hearted French girl was no way conscious: yet she _was_ painfully conscious of a shadowy figure that still, from time to time, stole after her in her twilight walks, and that, if she turned upon it, shrank stealthily from observation. There was a mystery about the whole matter which oppressed the poor girl with a sense of terror. She could not doubt that the interest of her old teacher in herself had been a kindly one; but whatever it might have been, that interest was now so furtive, and affected such concealment, that she was half led to entertain the cruellest suspicions of Miss Eliza, who did not fail to enlarge upon the godlessness of the stranger's life, and to set before Adele the thousand alluring deceits by which Satan sought to win souls to himself.

Rumor, one day, brought the story, that the foreign woman, who had been the subject of so much village scandal, lay ill, and was fast failing; and on hearing this, Adele would have broken away from all the parsonage restraints, to offer what consolations she could: nor would the good Doctor have repelled her; but the rumor, if not false, was, in his view, grossly exaggerated; since, on the Sunday previous only, some officious member of his parish had reported the Frenchwoman as strolling over the hills, decoying with her that little child of her fellow-lodger, which she had tricked out in the remnants of her French finery, and was thus wantoning throughout the holy hours of service.

A few days later, however, the Doctor came in with a serious and perplexed air; he laid his cane and hat upon the little table within the door, and summoned Adele to the study.

"Adaly, my child," said he, "this unfortunate countrywoman of yours is really failing fast. I learn as much from the physician. She has sent a request to see you. She says that she has an important message, a dying message, to give you."

A strange tremor ran over the frame of Adele.

"I fear, my child, that she is still bound to her idolatries; she has asked that you bring to her the little bauble of a rosary, which, I trust, Adaly, you have learned to regard as a vanity."

"Yet I have it still, New Papa; she shall have it"; and she turned to go.

"My child, I cannot bear that you should go as the messenger of a false faith, and to carry to her, as it were, the seal of her idolatries. You shall follow her wishes, Adaly; but I must attend you, my child, were it only to protest against such vanities, and to declare to her, if it be not too late, the truth as it is in the Gospel."

Adele was only too willing; for she was impressed with a vague terror at thought of this interview, and of its possible revelations; and they set off presently in company. It was a chilly day of later autumn. Only a few scattered, tawny remnants of the summer verdure were hanging upon the village trees, and great rows of the dead and fallen leaves were heaped here and there athwart the path, where some high wall kept them clear of the winds; and as the walkers tramped through them, they made a ghostly rustle, and whole platoons of them were set astir to drift again until some new eddy caught and stranded them in other heaps. Adele, more and more disturbed in mind, said,--

"It's such a dreary day, New Papa!"

"Is it the thought that one you know may lie dying now makes it dreary, my child?"

"Partly that, I dare say," returned Adele; "and then the wind so tosses about these dead leaves. I wish it were always spring."

"There is a country," said the parson, "where spring reigns eternal. I hope you may find it, Adaly; I hope your poor countrywoman may find it; but I fear, I fear."

"Is it, then, so dreadful to be a Romanist?"

"It is dreadful, Adaly, to doubt the free grace of God,--dreadful to trust in any offices of men, or in tithes of mint and anise and cumin,--dreadful to look anywhere for absolution from sin but in the blood of the Lamb. I have a conviction, my child," continued he, in a tone even more serious, "that the poor woman has not lived a pure life before God, or even before the world. Even at this supreme moment of her life, if it be such, I should be unwilling to trust you alone with her, Adaly."

Adele, trembling,--partly with the chilling wind, and partly with an ill-defined terror of--she knew not what,--nestled more closely to the side of the old gentleman; and he, taking her little hand in his, as tenderly as a lover might have done, said,--

"Adaly, at least _your_ trust in God is firm, is it not?"

"It is! it is!" said she.

The house, as we have said, lay far out upon the river-road, within a strip of ill-tended garden-ground, surrounded by a rocky pasture. A solitary white-oak stood in the line of straggling wall that separated garden from pasture, and showed still a great crown of leaves blanched by the frosts, and shivering in the wind. An artemisia, with blackened stalks, nodded its draggled yellow blossoms at one angle of the house, while a little company of barn-door fowls stood closely grouped under the southern lea, with heads close drawn upon their breasts, idling and winking in the sunshine.

The young mother of the vagrant little one who had attracted latterly so much of the solitary woman's regard received them with an awkward welcome.

"Miss Arles is poorly, to-day," she said, "and she's flighty. She keeps Arthur" (the child) "with her. You hear how she's a-chatterin' now." (The door of her chamber stood half open.) "Arty seems to understand her. I'm sure I don't."

Nor, indeed, did the Doctor, to whose ear a torrent of rapid French speech was like the gibberish of demons. He never doubted 't was full of wickedness. Not so Adele. There were sweet sounds to her ear in that swift flow of Provencal speech,--tender, endearing epithets, that seemed like the echo of music heard long ago,--pleasant banter of words that had the rhythm of the old godmother's talk.

"Ah, you're a gay one! Now--put on your velvet cap--so. We'll find a bride for you some day--some day, when you're a tall, proud man. Who's your father, Arty? Pah! it's nothing. You'll make somebody's heart ache all the same,--eh, Arty, boy?"

"Do you understand her, Miss Maverick?" says the mother.

"Not wholly," said Adele; and the two visitors stepped in noiselessly.

The child, bedizened with finery, was standing upon the bed where the sick woman lay, with a long feather from the cock's tail waving from his cap. Madame Arles, with the hot flush of the fever upon her, looked--saving the thinness--as she might have looked twenty years before. And as her flashing eye caught the newcomers, her voice broke out wildly again,--

"Here's the bride, and here's the priest! Where's the groom? Where's the groom? Where's the groom, I say?"

The violence of her manner made poor Adele shiver.

The boy laughed as he saw it, and said,--

"She's afraid! _I'm_ not afraid."

"Oh, no!" said the crazed woman, turning on him. "You're a man, Arty: men are not afraid,--you wanton, you wild one! Where's the groom?" said she again, addressing the Doctor, fiercely.

"My good woman," says the old gentleman, "we have come to offer you the consolations that are only to be found in the Gospel of Christ."

"Pah! you're a false priest!"--defiantly. "Where's the groom?"

And Adele, hoping to pacify the poor woman, draws from her reticule the little rosary, and, holding it before the eyes of the sufferer, says, timidly,--

"My dear Madam, it is I,--Adele; I have brought what you asked of me; I have come to comfort you."

And the woman, over whose face there ran instantly a marvellous change, snatched the rosary, and pressed it convulsively to her lips; then, looking for a moment yearningly, with that strange double gaze of hers, upon the face of Adele, she sprang toward her, and, wreathing her arms about her, drew her fast upon her bosom,--

"_Ma fille! ma pauvre fille!_"

The boy slipped down from the bed,--his little importance being over,--and was gone. The Doctor's lips moved in silent prayer for five minutes or more, wholly undisturbed, while the twain were locked in that embrace. Then the old gentleman, stooping, says,--

"Adaly, will she listen to me now?"

And Adele, turning a frightened face to him, whispers,--

"She's sleeping; unclasp her hands; she holds me tightly."

And the Doctor, with tremulous fingers, does her bidding.

Adele, still whispering, says,--

"She's calm now; she'll talk with us when she wakes, New Papa."

"My poor child," said the Doctor, solemnly, and with a full voice, "she'll never wake again."

And Adele, turning,--in a maze of terror, as she thought of that death-clasp,--saw that her eyes had fallen open,--open, and fixed, and lustreless. So quietly Death had come upon his errand, and accomplished it, and gone; while without, the fowls, undisturbed, were still blinking idly in the sunshine under the lea of the wall, and the yellow chrysanthemums were fluttering in the wind.

XLI.

In the winter of 1838-9, Adele, much to the delight of Dr. Johns, avowed at last her wish to join herself to the little church-flock over which the good parson still held serenely his office of shepherd. And as she told him quietly of her desire, sitting before him there in the study of the parsonage, without urgence upon his part, it was as if a bright gleam of sunshine had darted suddenly through the wintry clouds, and bathed both of them in its warm effulgence. The good man, rising from his chair and crossing over to her place, touched her forehead with as tender and loving a kiss as ever he had bestowed upon the lost Rachel.

He had seen too closely the development of her Christian faith to disturb her with various questionings. She rejoiced in this; for even then, with all the calm serenity of her trust, it was doubtful if her answers could have fully satisfied the austerities of his theological traditions. Nay, she doubted, even, if the exuberance of her spirits would not sometimes, in days to come, bound over the formalities of his Sunday observance, and startle a corrective glance; but withal she knew her trust was firm, and on this had full repose. Even the little rosary, so obnoxious to the household of the parsonage, was, by its terrible association with the death-scene of Madame Arles, endeared to her tenfold; and she could not forbear the hope that the poor woman, at the very last, by that clinging kiss upon the image of Christ, told a prayer that might give access to His abounding mercy.

Nor did Adele seek to comprehend in their entireness all those wearisome dogmatic utterances which were familiar to her tongue, and which she could understand might form the steps to fulness of belief for the rigorous mind of the Doctor: for herself there was other ladder of approach, in finding which the emotional experiences of Reuben had been of such signal service.

To Reuben himself those experiences, brought a temporary exhilaration, but as yet no peace. He has a vague notion creeping over him, with fearfully chilling effect, that his sensibilities have been wrought upon rather than his reason; a confused sense of having yielded to enthusiasms, which, if they once grow cool, will leave him to slump back into a mire worse than the old. Therefore he must, by all possible means, keep them at fever-heat. A dim consciousness, however, possessed him, that, for the feeding of the necessary fires, there would be needed an immense consumption of fuel,--such stock as an ordinary experience could hardly hope to supply. By degrees, this consciousness took the force of conviction, and he became painfully sensible of his own limitations. There was a weary, matter-of-fact world to struggle with, in whose homely cares and interests he must needs be a partner. He could not wear the gyves of a Gabriel on the muddy streets of life, or carry the ecstatic language of praise into the world's talk: if he could, he would be reckoned insane, and not unjustly, since sanity is, after all, but a term to express the average normal condition of mind. He looked with something like envy upon the serene contentment of Adele. He lived like an ascetic; he sought, by reading of all manner of exultant religious experience, to keep alive the ferment of the autumn. "If only death were near," he said to himself, "with what a blaze of hope one might go out!" But death was not near,--or, at least, life and its perplexing duties were nearer. The intensity of his convictions somehow faded, and they lost their gorgeous hue, under the calm doctrinal sermons of the parson. If the glory of the promises and the tenderness of Divine entreaty were to be always dropping mellifluously on his ear, as upon that solemn Sunday of the summer, it might be well. But it is not thus; and even were the severe quiet of the Ashfield Sundays lighted up by the swift and burning words of such fiery evangelism, yet six solid working-days roll over upon the heel of every Sunday,--in which he sees good Deacon Tourtelot in shirt-sleeves driving some sharp bargain for his two-year-old steers, or the stout Dame hectoring some stray peddler by the hour for the fall of a penny upon his wares, and wonders where their Christian largeness of soul is gone. Is the matter real to him? And if real, where is the peace? Shall he consult the good Doctor? He is met straightway with an array of the old catechismal formulas, clearly stated, well argued, but brushing athwart his mind like a dusty wind. The traditional dislikes of his boyhood have armed him against all such, _cap-a-pie_. In this strait, he wanders over the hills in search of loneliness, and a volume of Tillotson he carries with him is all unread. Nature speaks more winningly, but scarce more helpfully.

Adele, with a quick eye, sees the growing unrest, and, with a great weight of gratitude upon her heart, says, timidly,--

"Can I help you, Reuben?"

"No, thank you, Adele. I understand you; I'm in a boggle,--that's all."

The father, too, at a hint from Adele, (whose perceptions are so much quicker,) sees at last how the matter stands.

"Reuben," he says, "these struggles of yours are struggles with the Great Adversary of Souls. I trust, my son, you will not allow him to have the mastery."

It was kindly said and earnestly said, but touched the core of the son's moral disquietude no more than if it were the hooting of an owl. Yet, for all this, Reuben makes a brave struggle to wear with an outward calm the burden of the professions he has made,--a terrible burden, when he finds what awful chasms in his faith have been overleaped by his vaulting Quixotic fervor. Wearily he labors to bridge them across, with over-much reading, there in the quiet study of the parsonage, of Newton and Tillotson and Butler; and he takes a grim pleasure (that does not help him) in following the amiable argumentation of Paley. It pains him grievously to think what humiliation would possess the old Doctor, if he but knew into what crazy currents his boy's thoughts were drifting over the pages of his beloved teachers. But a man cannot live a deceit, even for charity's sake, without its making outburst some day, and wrecking all the fine preventive barriers which kept it in.

The outburst came at last in the quiet of the Ashfield study, Reuben had been poring for hours--how wearily! how vainly!--over the turgid dogmas of one of the elder divines, when he suddenly dashed the book upon the floor.

"Confound the theologies! I'll have no more of them!"

The Doctor dropped his pen, and stared as if a serpent had stung him.

"My son! Reuben! Reuben!"

It was not so much the expression that had shocked him, as it was the action and the defiance in his eye.

"I can't help it, father. It's the Evil One, perhaps. If it be, I'll cheat him, by making a clean breast of it. I can't abide the stuff; I can't see my way through it."

"My son, it is your sin that blinds you."

"Very likely," says Reuben.

"It was not thus with you three months ago, Reuben," continues the Doctor, in a softened tone.

"No, father, there was a strange light around me in those days. It seemed to me that the path lay clear and shining through all the maze. If Death had caught me then, I think I could have sung hosannas with the saints. It was a beautiful dream. It's faded dismally, father,--as if the Devil had painted it."

The old man shuddered, and lifted his hands, as he was wont to do in his most earnest pleas at the Throne of Grace.

"The muddle of the world and the theologies has come in since," continued Reuben, "and the base professions I see around me, and the hypocrisies and the cant, have taken away the glow. It's all a weariness and a confusion, and that's the solemn truth."

The Doctor said, measuredly, (as if the Book were before him,)--

"'_Some seeds fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth; and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away._' Reuben! Reuben! we must agonize to enter into the strait gate!"

"It's a long agony," said Reuben; and he rose and paced back and forth for a time; then suddenly stopping before the Doctor, he laid his hand upon his shoulder, (the boy was of manly height now, and overtopped the old gentleman by an inch,)--"Father, it grieves me to pain you,--indeed it does; but truth is truth. I have told you my story; but if you wish it, I will live outwardly as if no such talk had passed. I will respect as much as ever all your religious observances, and no person shall be the wiser."

"I would not have you practise hypocrisy, my son; but I would not have you withdraw yourself from any of the appointed means of grace."

And at this Reuben went out,--out far upon the hills, from which he saw the village roofs, and the spire, and the naked tree-tops, the fields all bare and brown, the smoke of a near house curling lazily into the sky; and the only sound that broke the solemn stillness was the drumming of a partridge in the woods or the harsh scream of a belated jay.

Never had Reuben been more kind or attentive to the personal wants of the old gentleman than on the days which followed upon this interview. There was something almost like a daughter's solicitude in his watchfulness. On the next Sunday the Doctor preached with an emotion that was but poorly controlled, and which greatly mystified his people. Twice in the afternoon his voice came near to failing. Reuben knew where the grief lay, but wore a composed face; and as he supported the old gentleman home after service, he said, (but not so loudly that Adele could hear, who was tripping closely behind,)--

"Father, I grieve for you,--upon my soul I do; but it's fate."

"Fate, Reuben?" said the Doctor, but with a less guarded voice,--"fate? God only is fate!"

The Doctor was too much mortified by this revelation of Reuben's present state of feeling to make it the subject of conversation, even with Miss Eliza, and much less with the elders of his flock. To Squire Elderkin, indeed, whose shrewd common-sense he had learned to value even in its bearings upon the "weightier matters of the law," he had dropped some desponding reflections in regard to the wilful impetuosity of his poor son Reuben, from which the shrewd Squire at once suspected the difficulty.

"It's the blood of the old Major," he said. "Let it work, Doctor, let it work!"

From which observation, it must be confessed, the good man derived very little comfort.

Miss Eliza, though she is not made a confidant in these latter secrets of the study, cannot, however, fail to see that Reuben's constancy to the Doctor's big folios is on the wane, and that symptoms of his old boyish recklessness occasionally show themselves under the reserve which had grown out of his later experiences. She has hopes from this--true to her keen worldly wisdom--that the abandoned career of the city may yet win his final decision. But her moral perceptions are not delicate enough to discover the great and tormenting wrangle of his thought. She ventures from time to time, as on his return, and from sharp sense of duty, some wiry, stereotyped religious reflections, which set his whole moral nature on edge. Nor is this the limit of her blindness: perceiving, as she imagines she does, the ripening of all her plans with respect to himself and Adele, she thinks to further the matter by dropping hints of the rare graces of Adele and of her brilliant prospects,--assuring him how much that young lady's regard for him has been increased since his conversion, (which word has to Reuben just now a dreary and most detestable sound,) and in a way which she counts playful, but which to him is _agacant_ to the last degree, she forecasts the time when Reuben will have his pretty French wife, and a rich one.

Left to himself, the youth would very likely have found enough to admire in the face and figure and pleasantly subdued enthusiasm of Adele; but the counter irritant of the spinster's speech drove him away on many an evening to the charming fireside of the Elderkins, where he spent not a few beguiling hours in listening to the talk of the motherly mistress of the household, and in watching the soft hazel eyes of Rose, as they lifted in eager wonderment at some of his stories of the town, or fell (the long lashes hiding them with other beauty) upon the work where her delicate fingers plied with a white swiftness that teased him into trains of thought which were not wholly French.

Adele has taken a melancholy interest in decking the grave of the exiled lady, which she has insisted upon doing out of her own resources, and thus has doubled the little legacy which Madame Aries had left to the outcast woman and child with whom she had joined her fate, and who, with good reason, wept her death bitterly. Hour upon hour Adele pondered over that tragic episode, tasking herself to imagine what message the dying woman could have had to communicate, and wondering if the future would ever clear up the mystery. To the good Doctor it seemed only a strange Providence, by which the religious convictions of Adele should be deepened and made sure. And in no way were the results of those convictions more beautifully apparent than in the efforts of Adele to overcome her antipathies to the spinster. It is doubtful, indeed, if a bolder challenge can be made to the Christian graces of any character whatever than that which demands the conquest of social prejudices which have grown into settled aversion. With all the stimulus of her new Christian endeavor, Adele sought to think charitably of Miss Eliza. Yet it was hard; always, that occasional cold kiss of the spinster had for Adele an iron imprint, which drove her warm blood away, instead of summoning it to response.

For her, Miss Eliza's staple praises of Reuben, and her adroit stories of the admiration and attachment of Mrs. Brindlock for her nephew, were distasteful to the last degree. Coarse natures never can learn upon what fine threads the souls of the sensitive are strung.

Adele felt a tender gratitude toward Reuben, which it seemed to her the boisterous affection of the spinster could never approach. She apprehended his spiritual perplexities more keenly than the austere aunt, and saw with what strange ferment his whole nature was vexed. Had he been a brother by blood, she could not have felt for him more warmly. And if she ever allowed herself to guess at a nearer tie, it was not to Miss Eliza that she would have named the guess,--not even, thus far, to herself. As yet there was a soft fulness in her heart that felt no wound,--at least no wound in which her hope rankled. Whether Reuben were present or away, her songs rose, with a sweeter, a serener, and a loftier cheer than of old under the roof of the parsonage; and, as of old, the Doctor laid down his book and listened, as if an angel sang.

XLII.

In the summer of 1840 the Doctor received a letter from Maverick which overwhelmed him with consternation; and its revelations, we doubt not, will, prove as great a surprise to our readers.

"My good friend Johns," he wrote, "I owe you a debt of gratitude which I can never repay; you have shown such fatherly interest in my dear child,--you have so guided and guarded her,--you have so abundantly filled the place which, though it was my duty, I had never the worthiness to fill, that I have no words to thank you. And now you have crowned all by giving her that serene trust"----

"Not I! not I!" says the Doctor to himself,--"only God's mercy,--God's infinite mercy!"--and he continues, "that serene trust in Heaven which will support her under all trials. Poor child, she will need it all!"

"And that this man," pursues the Doctor meditatively, "who thinks so wisely, should be given over still to the things of this world!"

"I hear still further,--from what sources it will be unnecessary for me now to explain,--that a close intimacy has grown up latterly between your son Reuben and my dear Adele, and that this intimacy has provoked village rumors of the possibility of some nearer tie. These rumors may be, perhaps, wholly untrue; I hope to Heaven they are, and my informant may have exaggerated only chance reports. But the knowledge of them, vague as they are, has stimulated me to a task which I ought far sooner to have accomplished, and which, as a man of honor, I can no longer defer. I know that you think lightly of any promptings to duty which spring only from a sense of honor; and before you shall have finished my