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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

Three weeks later Reverend Samuel Bax received his call.

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

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

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

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

“Why do you say that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am the new Independent minister.”

“Then I’ve come for you.”

“Come for me?”

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

“She wants me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much farther?” asked the minister.

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

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

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

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

“There’s no such place.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this sudden transference of responsibility the minister staggered.

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

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

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

“I can’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded.

“What’s the matter?”

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

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

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

SONG.

BY THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.

From “Torrismond,” Sc. iii.

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

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

FOUR HUNDRED DEGREES BELOW ZERO.

AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR JAMES DEWAR.

BY HENRY J. W. DAM.

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE LABORATORY OF DAVY AND FARADAY AT THE ROYAL
INSTITUTION.]

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

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

        “Yours faithfully,

            “MICHAEL FARADAY.”

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

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

[Illustration: PROFESSOR DEWAR IN THE LABORATORY OF THE ROYAL
INSTITUTION. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN FOR M’CLURE’S MAGAZINE BY FRADELLE
AND YOUNG, LONDON.]

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

[Illustration: THE LECTURE-ROOM OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTION.]

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

[Illustration: PROFESSOR DEWAR’S LECTURE-TABLE. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN
OF PROFESSOR DEWAR’S FIRST LECTURE ON THE LIQUEFACTION OF OXYGEN.]

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

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

[Illustration: EARLY AND LATEST FORMS OF VESSELS FOR HOLDING LIQUEFIED
OXYGEN.]

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

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

[Illustration: THE “COMPRESSORS.”]

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

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

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

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

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

THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH.

BY GILBERT PARKER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was a voice without,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

STRANGER THAN FICTION.

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

BY DOCTOR WILLIAM WRIGHT.

I.

THE BRONTËS AL FRESCO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

THE DEVIL AND THE POTATO BLIGHT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

THE GREAT BRONTË FIGHT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV.

THE BRONTËS AND THE GHOSTS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE HYPNOTIC EXPERIMENTS OF DOCTOR LUYS.

BY R. H. SHERARD.

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

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

[Illustration: DOCTOR LUYS.]

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

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

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

THE NEW MESMERISM.

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

[Illustration: PLEASING EFFECT OF THE NORTH POLE OF A MAGNET.]

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

METHODS OF LA CHARITÉ HOSPITAL.

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

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

[Illustration: REPULSIVE EFFECT OF THE SOUTH POLE OF A MAGNET.]

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

THE DANGER OF HYPNOTISM.

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

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

[Illustration: ESTHER, DOCTOR LUYS’ SUBJECT.]

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

HOW CURATIVE PROCESSES ARE PURSUED.

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

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

[Illustration: ESTHER IN THE LETHARGIC STATE.]

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

[Illustration: ATTRACTION OF THE HAND IN THE LETHARGIC STATE.]

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

EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENA.

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

[Illustration: THE ACTION OF WATER; THE HANDS ARE CLENCHED AND THE JAW
SET; THE SUBJECT CAN NEITHER SWALLOW NOR SPEAK.]

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

[Illustration: EXPRESSION OF PLEASURE CAUSED BY PEPPER PRESENTED TO THE
LEFT SIDE.]

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

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

[Illustration: EXPRESSION OF ANXIETY CAUSED BY PEPPER PRESENTED TO THE
RIGHT SIDE.]

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

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

[Illustration: EXPRESSION OF PLEASURE CAUSED BY FENNEL PRESENTED TO THE
RIGHT EYE.]

[Illustration: EXPRESSION OF ANXIETY CAUSED BY HELIOTROPE.]

[Illustration: THE EFFECT OF THYME: THE PATIENT CANNOT SPEAK; THE
EYES BECOME PROMINENT; THE THYROID GLAND ENLARGES, INCREASING THE
CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE NECK AN INCH.]

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

[Illustration: EXPRESSION OF FRIGHT PRODUCED BY SULPHATE OF SPARTEINE.]

[Illustration: EXPRESSION OF TERROR CAUSED BY FRANKINCENSE.]

THE SURGEON’S MIRACLE.

BY JOSEPH KIRKLAND,

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

“Poor Abe Dodge.”

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

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

[Illustration: ABE WAS FOLLOWING THE PLOUGH.]

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: AND EPHE HE WAS TICKLED.]

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

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

[Illustration: AND SHE PITCHED IN.]

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

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

[Illustration: FIRST SPIRT OF BLOOD.]

Well, there wasn’t nothing else to do but go ahead. The doctor opened