Part 22

She obtained a position as teacher in the city schools and devoted her wages to the care of the home, and looked after her parents when out of school hours. There came offers of honorable marriage, for she was strong, healthy, comely and attractive. She could not consider them. Her parents could not do without her. They were declining in strength and looked to her for the care of the household. She taught on, and with her wages kept them in comfort. Two years ago the good old mother, weary of life, departed for the better land. Two years longer the old father lived, kept the house during the day while the daughter was in the schoolroom and awaited the sound of her footsteps in the evening returning from the school. In January he lay on the bed stricken with a fatal sickness, though unknown to him or her, and while they talked together as she bent over him he ceased to breathe, and she was left alone in the world, unmarried, without a home, and the prime of her good life spent in assiduous care of her parents—at the age of forty years! All hope of a home and family of her own sacrificed to her sense of duty to her father and mother! What is to be her reward? Many another has made a like sacrifice, but how is she to recoup the loss of the fourteen years spent in their service—the loss of her own home and family and children and all the sweet consolations of the state of motherhood? Was it not a heroic life? How few would have met it! Only those who know of her self-sacrifice will know how to honor her. Her fidelity, so unobtrusive, will be little noted by the world. But how grand and noble the sacrifice she has made!

_QUIET COURAGE_

Elizabeth Stanton was born about sixty-five years ago in a beautiful Southern town. She was the youngest daughter of Judge James Stanton, one of the ablest jurists of the state.

Few young ladies had superior advantages to Elizabeth, and fewer still possessed her amiable disposition and strong character. Being beautiful, accomplished and wealthy, it is no wonder she married the only son of a millionaire. A few years after their marriage her husband erected the finest residence in the state. Although built forty years ago it stands proudly today without an equal in the state.

Elizabeth had everything that heart could wish save one—her husband was dissipated and grew more so as years came on. But no ear save the Master’s ever heard her complain and she was always cheerful.

A few years after the Civil War her husband died, leaving his palatial home mortgaged and his vast estate squandered. Elizabeth was left with three children and a small amount of money. She gave up her magnificent home and wealth without a murmur and returned to her old home. In a few years she married again, a man of fine personality, a scholar and typical Southern gentleman, one born to wealth and knowing little how to acquire it. His fortune was like that of most Southern people after the Civil War. They remained in their native home till their small fortune was nearly gone. Then they removed to Florida and lived on a homestead, in a tent with a dirt floor for two years. Elizabeth had never before lived without servants, never cooked a meal or laundered a handkerchief. Now she did all her own work, even to the washing, and taught a country school several months of each year. She found time to visit and elevate the poor, rough people around her, and never by word did she let them know she was not of their class. She was greatly admired and beloved by all who knew her. During these years of hardship she was just as bright and cheerful and apparently as content as when she trod the marble floors of her former mansion. She smilingly remarked to me once that she was glad they had been chastened. It had made her a better woman and was the means of her husband’s conversion. As fortune always favors the brave, she did not always live in poverty. In a few years they had a fine orange grove bearing, and her husband was elected to a high office.

I have never known a more heroic life of any woman. When clouds have hovered over me I have thought of this brave, beautiful character and it has been my inspiration.

From a collection of recipes that dates back almost to “War-Time” we shall give a few every month. Along with them will be given new recipes of the present day.

_Bread Pudding_

One pint bread crumbs, fine, one quart milk, three or four eggs. Season and sweeten to taste, then bake. Spread a layer of jelly or jam quite thick or white of eggs a little sweetened, and brown a little.

_Ginger Snaps_

Three cups of molasses, one cup of brown sugar, two small cups of lard, four tablespoons of ginger and one of cloves, and enough flour to roll them out.

_Corn Batter Cakes_

One and a half pints of corn-meal, the same of milk, one half teaspoon of salt, five eggs beaten together and put in with the corn-meal and milk, one and a half teaspoons of baking-powder.

_Sponge Cake_

Six eggs, one pint of flour, one pint of sugar, three-fourths of a cup of water, two tablespoons of baking-powder.

_Pea Soup_

One half peck peas. Take the shells and put on with two quarts of water. When well boiled take off and put through the colander. Take the water and pour into it the peas. Let boil until very soft and tender. Take off and put through the colander again. Take a quart of cream, or cream and milk, two even tablespoons of flour and less than one ounce of butter. Put in and let come to a boil. Pepper and salt to taste.

Note: _Reviews are by Mr. Watson unless otherwise signed._

=On the Field of Glory.= By Henryk Sienkiewicz. Little, Brown & Co., Boston.

After the reader has finished reading this book he disapproves of the title. He has been taken into ancient Poland, where the winter snows lie deep, where the wolves of the forest come with the night to make danger for the traveler. He has been shown how the upper class lived in the time of the Soldier-King, John Sobieski. He follows the thread of a passionate and tender and happily ended love-story. He laughs with and at the four brothers, the huge, rude, boisterous, but brave and good-hearted foresters. He feels impressed by the genius of the author during the whole time, for he knows that this strange Polish world, with its unfamiliar men and women, is a creation born of the mental processes of a great literary artist.

It is not an historical novel in the sense that “Quo Vadis” was. There is no field of glory at all. John Sobieski does not appear before us as Nero was made to do in the book just named.

The John Sobieski of this novel might be any other King. So far as we are told about his appearance, manners, dress, personal peculiarities, he might have been Rudolph of Hapsburg or Henry of Valois.

There are no battles, no sieges, no heroic advance or retreat. As the book closes, the Polish army has set out from Cracow to Vienna; and that’s as near as we approach the field of glory.

With the heroine the reader never gets in full sympathy. She drives away the man who has always loved her and whom she loves _without knowing it_.

She then consents to wed her hideous, lecherous, old guardian. More indignant than the bride, the spirits of the Unseen World resent this unnatural union, and they prevent it by claiming the groom while the marriage feast is being eaten.

With the hero the reader is on good terms from first to last, for his is a fine character finely drawn.

When the guardian and intended husband is dead, and the rejected lover is far away, the hero is subjected to trial and temptation, beset by dangers, marked for destruction by a lustful brute, neglected and hated by family connections. It is then that human interest of the deepest kind centres in the poor orphan girl _Panna Anulka_, whom we had condemned on account of her readiness to marry old _Pan Gideon_. We follow her fortunes then with painful attention and we rejoice when she is saved.

While “On the Field of Glory” is not, perhaps, so great a book as “Quo Vadis,” its atmosphere is purer, its store of love more tender and its portrayal of ancient manners and character apparently quite as faithful.

=The Strange Story of the Quillmores.= By A. L. Chatterton. Stitt Publishing Company, New York.

To write a novel which shall hold the reader with a strong and constant grip, and yet give him no love-story, is a feat not done by everyone that tries it. Mr. Chatterton tells no story of love, but I have not read many books that interested me more than “The Strange Story of the Quillmores.” Mr. Chatterton’s pictures of life are true to life: his men are the men who wear breeches—not impossible abstractions who say or do things which no human beings ever said or did. And his women are as real as his men.

_Uncle I’_ and his store, where the neighbors buy all sorts of things, from ham to coffins, and where a group of loafers and tattlers is generally on hand, are as well known to the reader as if he had been there. _Uncle I’_ must be a character taken from life. He is full of quiet humor, homely wisdom, sound common sense, manly courage and loyalty.

Old-fashioned _Uncle I’_, keeping his old-fashioned carry-all store, swapping stories and repartee with his old-fashioned neighbors, struggling heroically with his old-fashioned telephone, and with it all, living up to the best standards of honesty and usefulness—yes, _Uncle I’_ is a complete artistic success.

So is _Doctor Gus_. True, he reminds the reader, in a general way, of Ian Maclaren’s Scotch country doctor, but _Doctor Gus_ is American, and he is stamped with sufficient individuality to make him a very live man to the reader.

What could be better than the old German woman, _Mother Treegood_? The chapter in which _Mother Treegood_ comes to visit Uncle I’s wife, who is broken with grief on account of her dying daughter, is one that is worthy of Dickens. It has the heart-throb of human sorrow, human sympathy, human love.

I don’t know of anything more touching, in its simple unpretentious way, than the story of how _Mother Treegood’s_ boys, the twins, ran away from home, and how one of them was drowned in the Ohio River, and was sent home for burial.

“My pretty boy was to our house brought, aber no one could him know—he was in the wasser—de water—so long—_oh das Kalte, Kalte Wasser!_ so many, many days. I took more of the fever—und go out of my head—und so I never my Liebling seen again.”

The cry that was heard in Ramah, “_Oh, that cold, cold water!_”

Then, later on, there came a little box of tin-iron, “mit a hole cut in the on-top side.” But let _Mother Treegood_ tell it in her own way:

“One day there came by the express company a little bundle. When it was opened—it was an oyster can—a box of tin-iron, mit a hole cut in the on-top side. The letter was from de other boy—und it say—that his brudder, who vas ver-drownded, did begin his business life in a hotel in Cincinnetty, as a bellboy, und he safe his money und put it in the oyster can. Und in dat oyster box was the shin-plasters, the five centses, und de ten centses—yoost as he take them in for noospapers and shoe-blacking—und it was yoost enough, ach mein lieber Gott!—yoost enough to pay for his grave at Brookfill.”

Surely this is very effective. It probably happened just that way. To know that it could, and perhaps _did_, is just the right impression for the author of a novel to make on the reader.

Another splendid episode is that wherein a “run on the bank” begins, as the funeral of Colonel Quillmore is in progress. The chapters which relate the tragedy, the fire in the Colonel’s laboratory, the wild ride of _Father Lessing_ and _Uncle I’_; the dramatic climax where _Mrs. Quillmore_ lashes herself into raving madness; the funeral procession whose mourners get caught up in the growing excitement of the “run on the bank,” and leave the hearse to fly to the bank for their money; the nerve and resource of _Doc. Gus_ in saving the bank, and in saving the cashier from the would-be lynchers—are chapters which bear convincing testimony to the power and creativeness of the author.

The book is so finely conceived and written that one is tempted to scold the author for a few glaring faults which are well-nigh inexcusable.

Why paint _L’Oiseau_ so black when he was to be white-washed at the end? There was no need to have him behave so brutally to the boy, _Lanny Quillmore_. It was a blunder to make him insult the boy, incur the hatred of the boy, assault the boy, and drive the boy from his own home. The lad is allowed to think and believe that _L’Oiseau_ is on terms of criminal intimacy with _Mrs. Quillmore, Lanny’s_ mother. There was no necessity for this. If _L’Oiseau_ was brother-in-law to _Mrs. Quillmore_, and was prompted by paternal interest in paying her such suspicious attention, and in being out in the woods with her at unseasonable hours in the night, why permit the lady’s son to torture himself under a misapprehension?

What earthly reason was there for keeping from her only son a knowledge of the fact that _L’Oiseau_ was her brother-in-law, and that her abnormal physical and mental condition required these unusual and suspicious attentions from him?

Again, _L’Oiseau_ was rambling about at night with _Mrs. Quillmore_ when she lost consciousness, fell by the wayside, was found by the priest, and succored by _Doc. Gus_.

What had become of her escort, _L’Oiseau_?

He had mysteriously disappeared, and _Doc. Gus_ had a right to put the worst construction upon his conduct. _Father Lessing_ knew the truth; why did _Father Lessing_ allow _Doc. Gus_ to remain in ignorance?

But the most serious blunder in the plot relates to the climax—the fire in _Colonel Quillmore’s_ laboratory.

_Doc. Gus_ sees the shadow of two men thrown upon the window shade. Only one of these men is accounted for, and the reader is left not only in doubt as to what happened, but in hopeless confusion. He cannot adopt any theory which will explain _all the facts_.

Now, _that_ is against the rules. Let the plot be ever so complicated, the mystery ever so deep, the author _must_ either clear it up himself, or furnish the reader with the clue. Wilkie Collins, in spite of his bewildering tangles, unravels everything before he quits. In “Edwin Drood,” the book which Dickens was writing when death interrupted the story, the author had constructed one of his most involved and difficult plots. Before he had furnished the key to the riddle, he died. Yet Edgar Allan Poe was able to tell, with unerring certainty, just how the story was meant to end. By a keen analysis of the facts which Dickens had already related, and by a course of reasoning that left no room for doubt, Poe demonstrated that _Jasper_, the guardian and devoted friend of _Edwin Drood_, had murdered him; that jealousy was the motive; that the body of the victim was hidden in the new tomb which the inflated ass, _Sapsea_, had recently built for the deceased _Mrs. Sapsea_; and that the corpse was located by old _Durdles_, the drunken workman whose skill with his hammer was so great that he could, by tapping, tapping, tapping on the outside or a wall, tell whether a foreign substance, such as a human body, was inclosed within.

Poe’s own matchless story, “The Gold Bug,” illustrates the rule which Mr. Chatterton broke. There are all sorts of mystifications to start with, but they are cleared up at the end.

Even in Frank Stockton’s famous “The Lady or the Tiger,” the rule is kept. The reader is left in a dilemma, but he can clear up everything by choosing one horn or the other. If he says that it is the lady who is behind the door which is about to be opened, no mystery remains. If he says that it is the tiger which is behind the door, nothing is left of the puzzle.

But in the Quillmore story there is no possible explanation _which will dispose of the facts_. If _Colonel Quillmore_ died in the laboratory, and _L’Oiseau_ did _not_ kill him, who did? What about the _two_ men quarreling in there at the time of the tragedy? What becomes of that other man? And how could _Quillmore’s_ son meet him again in Paris? With the exception of _L’Oiseau_, no one had _the motive_ to kill _Colonel Quillmore_; and the author made a point of showing that other people were afraid to go near the laboratory.

But if the _Colonel_ did _not_ die in the laboratory, how did his false teeth get into the mouth of the dead man when _Doc. Gus_ dragged him out of the flames? How did the _Colonel’s Masonic ring_ get on the dead man’s finger? How did the _Colonel_ make his escape without being seen, and, _who was it that he quarreled with and killed before he fled_? Nobody appears to have been missing from the neighborhood. Usually when somebody is killed, somebody is missed.

Had Mr. Chatterton refrained from putting another man in the laboratory, had he left the _Colonel_ dead in the flames, identified by his Masonic ring, had he left the reader to suppose that the sudden death of the _Colonel_ and the sudden blaze which broke out in the building resulted from some dangerous chemical experiment, such as the _Colonel_ delighted in—the story would have lost not a grain of interest and would have escaped a flagrant violation of the rules of literary construction.

=The Game and the Candle.= By Frances Davidge. D. Appleton & Co., New York.

Frances Davidge set herself too difficult a task when she attempted to make the characters in her novel. “The Game and the Candle,” speak in epigrams on every other page. The consequence is that the story, with its really brilliant beginning, develops into a commonplace love-story, and is only saved from absolute banality by its unforeseen and dramatic ending. In the field of literature which attempts to picture New York society the story will not find an enduring place, but it serves its purpose very well. The novelists are numberless who have sought to satirize our men and women of wealth and leisure; but few have given us any books that have lived longer than their allotted span of one brief season. The big society novel has not yet been written. Miss Davidge evidently knows a great deal of the foibles, the follies and the manners of the people of whom she writes, and her career is worth watching. At present she seems a bit immature and prolix, but there is no doubt as to her ability to write amazingly clever dialogue and to tell a story logically and well. Some of her characters are greatly overdrawn. One wishes that there were less of _Gussie Regan_, the hair-dresser; and _Emily Blair_, lovable as she is, could never have existed. Altogether, however, the story is pleasing and will find, doubtless, a large and appreciative audience.

H. C. T.

=The Carlyles.= By Mrs. Burton Harrison. D. Appleton & Co., New York.

In “The Carlyles” Mrs. Burton Harrison relinquishes the modern field which she has occupied for so long and with such marked success, and goes back to Civil War times for the scenes of her story. The Reconstruction period has been covered by innumerable writers. Indeed, it has been so frequently used by novelists and proven so fruitful a field, that one is apt to be overcome at the courage of an author who selects it now as the background for a tale; but Mrs. Harrison brings a certain freshness and charm to a subject that, it would seem, could inspire none. The opening chapter, which describes the impoverished condition of the _Carlyles_, brought on by the ravages of war, reveals the author at her best, and shows her intimate knowledge of life in Richmond in the ’60’s. The splendid fortitude of old _Mr. Carlyle_ in the face of his calamity and financial ruin, and the pride of the aristocratic Southerner are depicted with faultless art.

The story itself is the old one of a girl who is unable to choose between two lovers, one of whom, of course, is a Yankee soldier and the other a Southerner fighting as a lieutenant-colonel under Lee. The usual complications occur. _Lancelot Carlyle_, a cousin and lover of _Mona_, the heroine, is imprisoned at Fort Delaware, and of the long period of his confinement Mrs. Harrison writes graphically, describing minutely the terrible ordeal of prison life. Fine as this portion of the novel is, however, it is in the chapters dealing with quiet domestic scenes that Mrs. Harrison writes with most force and distinction. The incident of the Christmas dinner-party, with the unheralded return of _Lancelot_ and the sudden death of old _Alexius Carlyle_, is handled with consummate skill. The author has written no finer passage in any of her previous novels, nor one more certain to move her readers to tears.

H. C. T.

=The House of Mirth.= By Edith Wharton. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Undoubtedly no novel during the past season has elicited more favorable criticism and more numerous letters from constant readers than “The House of Mirth.” The book had a certain artificial success from the start, because the impression went abroad that here at last was a book about Society, meaning the smallest number of the narrowest brains in any community from Kankakee to New York. On this very account there are a few millions of people in the United States who would not care to read it; but in view of the fact that some of the most serious critics have hailed “The House of Mirth” as a great American novel—only the bookseller now speaks of _the_ American novel—a good many of the few millions, being persons of means and intelligence, would be tempted to indulge themselves in the rare luxury of such a boon. We cannot profess to treat the book as a true picture of American Society; because while we know how to wear the clothes and order the things to eat and drink, when we have the money, we have never, in our best-dressed and best-fed moments, been able to convince ourselves that we are anything but hopelessly middle class. Yet we are happy—sometimes; and we are bound to marvel at some of the things the society people in “The House of Mirth” do. For the most part they act like those people in New York who are loosely described as Fifth-avenue bohemians, which means they are people of much money, thoroughly informed about the decorative issues of life, with nothing to do but bore themselves and with a taste and intelligence that, in literature or the theatre, never craves anything more exciting than a musical show or a third-class novel, written by a man in Chicago, about lords and ladies of some corner lost and forgotten in Continental Europe. Our marvel that these society people should seem so underbred is only an exhibition of our unfamiliarity with a certain social stratum. We would have no right to make record of it, if it were not for the fact that so many people, of the better class themselves, have written letters of protest to divers publications, protesting against the impression that “The House of Mirth” is a story accurately representing New York society. We quote one letter from the _New York Times Saturday Review_: