two consuls. His two sons were detected in a conspiracy to restore
Tarquin, and he, as consul, himself condemned them to death.]

[Illustration: THE BURIAL OF ATALA. FROM A PAINTING BY GIRODET, IN THE
LOUVRE.

Atala, the heroine of a romance by Châteaubriand, was the daughter of
a North American Indian chief, passionately in love with the chief
of another tribe, with whom she fled into the desert. But having been
religiously vowed to virginity by her mother, she remains faithful to
the vow, and finally in despair poisons herself.]

[Illustration: MADAME LEBRUN AND HER DAUGHTER. FROM A PAINTING BY
MADAME LEBRUN HERSELF.

This picture, painted for a private patron, passed, at the period of
the French Revolution, into the possession of the French nation, and
is now in the Louvre. There is in the Louvre also another by Madame
Lebrun, representing herself and her daughter, one which the artist
bequeathed to the Louvre at her death, in 1842. Of the two, while
both are charming, the one here printed represents the painter at her
best.]

Fortune favored her in Italy, whence she went to Vienna, Prague,
Dresden, and Berlin. In each and every capital the same success,
due to her talent, beauty, and amiability, followed her; and at last
arriving in St. Petersburg, she remained there until 1801, when she
returned to Paris. Some time after, she visited England, where she
remained three years, and then returned by way of Holland to France
in 1809. The Academy of France and the academies of all other European
countries admitted her to membership.

Indefatigable as a worker during her long career, she produced an
immense number of portraits; and while she painted comparatively few
subject pictures, she arranged her models in so picturesque a fashion
that, as in the example here given, her portraits have great charm of
composition. With a virile grasp of form, tempered though it be with
grace, Madame Lebrun offers an interesting example of woman's work
in art; and, while she has nothing to concede to the painters of her
time, is no less interesting as showing that by force of native
talent the woman of the early part of the century had in her power the
conquest of nearly all the desired rights of the New Woman. She has
left extremely interesting memoirs of her life, written in her old
age, and there are many anecdotes bearing testimony to her wit. One of
these goes back to the time when Louis XVIII., then a youth, enlivened
the sittings for his portrait by singing, quite out of tune. "How do
you think I sing?" inquired he. "Like a prince," responded the amiable
artist.

With Antoine Jean Gros we come to the last and the greatest of the
pupils of David. Born in Paris March 16, 1771, he competed but once,
in 1792, for the Prix de Rome, was unsuccessful, but undertook the
voyage thither on his own slender resources the next year. Italy was
in a troubled state--he who troubled all Europe in the early years
of the century being there at the head of his army; and in 1796, at
Genoa, Gros attracted the attention of Madame Bonaparte. It was she
who proposed that Gros should paint Napoleon; and Gros consequently
went to Milan, and after the battle of Arcole painted the hero
carrying the tricolor across the bridge at the head of his grenadiers.
The picture pleased Bonaparte, who had it engraved, and gave Gros a
commission to collect for the Louvre the chief artistic treasures of
Italy. These functions occupied him until 1801, during which period,
however, he executed a number of successful portraits.

Returning to Paris after nine years, he painted the Hospital at
Jaffa, representing Napoleon visiting the fever-stricken soldiers.
The success of this picture, exhibited in 1804, was very great; and
it remains Gros's best title to remembrance. In it is something of
the reality poetized and seen through the eyes of an artist which
characterizes the work of Eugene Delacroix.

The force of David, however, was too great for Gros; at fifty years of
age we find him demanding counsel of the master, who sternly bids him
leave his "futile subjects," and devote his time to great historical
epochs of the past. When David was sent into exile in 1816, it was to
Gros that he confided the direction of his school; and this task, and
the production of immense canvases like the Battle of the Pyramids,
filled his life. The picture here reproduced, the Visit of Charles the
Fifth and Francis the First to the Tombs of the Kings in the Cathedral
of St. Denis, was painted in 1812.

[Illustration: FRANCIS I., KING OF FRANCE, AND CHARLES V., EMPEROR OF
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, VISITING THE TOMBS OF THE FRENCH KINGS AT ST.
DENIS. FROM A PAINTING BY BARON GROS, IN THE LOUVRE.

Between 1520 and 1545 all Europe was kept in distress and turmoil by
a quarrel between Francis I. and Charles V., the chief subject of
contention being the duchy of Milan, which Charles held and Francis
claimed. Four separate wars were waged by Francis against Charles,
all of them unsuccessful. But their majesties had intervals of outward
friendship, and in one of these Francis invited Charles, then setting
out from Spain for the Low Countries, to pass through France and visit
him. The visit was duly paid, was one of great state and ceremony,
and from it is derived the incident portrayed in the above picture.
Francis is the figure in the centre; Charles, suited in black,
standing at his right.]

The revolt which was already making itself felt in French art was
a thorn in the flesh of the sensitive Gros. In vain were all the
artistic honors showered upon him. In 1824 he was made a baron; since
1816 he had been a member of the Institute; and the crosses of most of
the orders of Europe, and the medals of all the exhibitions were his.
Nevertheless, about him younger painters revolted. In his secret soul,
doubtless, he felt sympathy with their methods. But the commands of
the terrible old exile of Brussels were still in his ears.

Finally a portrait of King Charles X., the decorations in the Museum
of Sovereigns, and a picture exhibited in the Salon of 1835 were in
turn harshly criticized by the press, which looked with favor on the
younger men; and Gros, full of years, and of honors which had brought
fortune in their train, was found drowned in a little arm of the Seine
near Meudon, June 26, 1835. In despair he had taken his own life. With
him died David's greatest pupil and a part of David's influence. But
that portion of the teachings of the master most consonant with
French character is not without effect to-day. Less strong than in the
generation following David, absolutely extinct if we are to believe
the extremists among the men of to-day, it yet remains a leaven to the
fermenting mass of modern production. Perhaps its healthy influence
is the best monument to the man who "restored to France the purity of
antique taste."

[Illustration: JAMES G. BLAINE.

From a photograph by Handy, Washington.]

THE DEFEAT OF BLAINE FOR THE PRESIDENCY.

BY MURAT HALSTEAD.

The fame of Blaine does not decline, but increases and will endure.
It was not his destiny to fill the greater office created by our
Constitution, but with a distinction exceeding that of the majority of
Presidents, he is enrolled, with Clay, Webster, and Seward, among the
illustrious Secretaries of State. The defeat of James G. Blaine for
the Presidency in 1884 will rank among the memorable disappointments
and misfortunes of the people with that of Henry Clay, forty years
before.

Late in the week before the meeting of the Chicago National Republican
Convention in 1884, I received in Cincinnati a telegram from Mr.
Blaine requesting me to call on him in Washington, where he lived on
the opposite side of Lafayette Square from that of the celebrated
old house where he spent his last days. He was engaged on his "Twenty
Years in Congress." I called on him the day after his despatch reached
me, making haste, for I was about to go to Chicago; and he first said
he feared he had sent for me on an insufficient errand, and after
a moment's pause began to speak of the approaching convention, and
quickly used the expression--"I am alarmed."

[Illustration: MR. BLAINE IN 1891.

This is accounted one of the best portraits of Mr. Blaine in
existence. It is from a photograph taken at Bar Harbor in the autumn
of 1891 by Mr. A. von Mumm Schwartzenstein, then _Charge d'Affaires_
of the German Empire at Washington, and is here reproduced by the kind
permission of Mr. W.E. Curtis.]

"Concerning what are you frightened?" I inquired; and added: "You
surely are not afraid you are not going to be nominated?"

He responded with a flash of his eyes and a smile: "Oh, no; I am
afraid I shall be nominated, and have sent for you for that reason,
and want you to assist in preventing my nomination." I shook my head,
and Mr. Blaine asked: "Why not?"

I said I had not been so long in his confidence and known by his
friends to be of them, to venture upon such an enterprise as working
in opposition. If I should appear actively against him, no matter how
I presented the matter, the easy answer to any argument of mine would
be that I had relapsed into personal antagonism to him. I then said:
"I have not heard of this;" and asked: "Are there many who know that
you are against your candidacy?" He said he had talked freely to
that effect, and mentioned William Walter Phelps as one who was fully
acquainted with his views, and also Colonel Parsons, of the Natural
Bridge, Virginia, then in the house. I said: "Mr. Blaine, I think
it is too late. I have looked over the field, and your nomination is
almost certain--the drift is your way. Why precisely do you object,
and what exactly do you think should happen?" He replied in his
rapid way with much feeling, and I believe his very words were: "The
objection to my nomination is that I cannot be elected. With the South
solid against us we cannot succeed without New York, and I cannot
carry that State. There are factions there and influences before
voting and after voting, such that the party cannot count upon
success with me. I am sure of it--I have thought it all over, and my
deliberate judgment is as I tell you. I know, too, where I am strong
as well as where I am weak--and we might, if we should get into the
campaign with my name at the head of the ticket, think we were going
to win. We would get to believing it, perhaps, but we should miss it
in the end, if not by a great deal, just a little. With everything
depending on New York," he continued, "it would be a mistake to
nominate me. This is not new to me--I have weighed all the chances.
Besides"--and here he kindled--"why should we let the country go into
the hands of Democrats when we can name a ticket that is certain to be
elected--one that would sweep every Northern State?"

"What is it?" I asked.

The answer came with vivid animation: "William T. Sherman and Robert
T. Lincoln." This idea was instantly amplified. "The names of Sherman
and Lincoln put together would be irresistible. That ticket would
elect itself. We should have a campaign of marching and song. We need
the inspiration, and 'Marching Through Georgia' and 'We Are Coming,
Father Abraham,' would give it. We must not lose this campaign, and I
am alarmed by the prospect of losing it in my name."

"But," I interposed, "it is the report and the public opinion that
General Sherman would not consent to be a candidate; that he would
throw the party down that would nominate him. Why not try the other
Sherman?"

Mr. Blaine's response was that John Sherman would have the like
difficulty in carrying New York that he would have himself. The
element of military heroism was wanting. He had written to General
Sherman on the subject, and of course the General thought he could
not consent to be President--for that was what it amounted to--but his
reasoning was fallacious. If General Sherman had the question put to
him--whether to be President himself or turn the office over to the
Democratic party, with the Solid South dominant--he would see his duty
and do it, though his reluctance was real.

I said General Sherman could not consent to appear in competition with
his brother John at Chicago, though he had a funny way of looking
on John in West Point style as a "politician," and that was an
insuperable difficulty; and that, Mr. Blaine did not seem to have
thought of as a serious element in the case, but he realized the force
of it. I was anxious to hear more about the correspondence between
Blaine and General Sherman; but was only told that the letter to the
General was a call to consider that circumstances might arise, and
should do so, in which the General's sense of duty could be appealed
to, and be as strong as that to take up arms had been when the Union
demanded defenders.

[Illustration: MR. BLAINE AT HIS DESK IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT.

From a photograph by Miss F.B. Johnston.]

Arrived at Chicago, I soon ascertained that Mr. Blaine had been doing
a good deal of talking of the same kind I had heard, but he had
not been able to impress the more robust of those favorable to his
nomination with the view that he should be heeded. They insisted that
he was not wise, but timid; that he did not like war and would do too
much for peace; that he especially miscalculated when he said he could
not carry New York, for he was the very man who could carry it;
that his personal force was far beyond his own estimation; that his
intuitions were like those of a woman, but were not infallible; that
his singing the campaign was a fancy; that "Marching Through
Georgia" would wear out, and was of the stuff of dreams. Mr. Blaine's
accredited friends felt that things had gone too far to permit a
change to be contemplated. They were half mad at Blaine for his
Sherman and Lincoln proposal, which was confidentially in the air,
regarding it as not favorable to themselves. They said they could
carry the country more certainly with Blaine than Sherman, for Sherman
was an uncertain political quantity, and might turn out to be almost
the devil himself. Some of them said he would proclaim martial law and
annihilate the Constitution! They were sure the force of the celebrity
of General Sherman in a campaign had been overestimated by Blaine, who
had the caprice and high color in his imagination that produce
schemes too fine for success. In a word, Sherman and Lincoln were not
practical politicians. Blaine's idea was not politics, but poetry.
What they wanted was the magnetism and magic of Blaine. The country
was at any rate safely in the hands of the Republican party. They had
nearly lost the election because they had not nominated Blaine eight
years before, and won with Garfield because he was a Blaine man. The
wisdom of the Republican politicians was thus against Blaine's ticket
so far as it was known; and those favorable to President Arthur, John
Sherman, John A. Logan, and George F. Edmunds did not give the least
credit to the statement that Blaine did not want the nomination. His
rumored objection to making the race--of course the real reasons
were not known--was regarded as a mere "play" in politics, if not
altogether fantastic; and they pursued their own courses heedless of
the real conditions. There was a singular complication of errors of
judgment in the Blaine opposition. The friends of Arthur took the
complimentary resolutions from a majority of the States to mean his
nomination. In truth, the significance of that unanimity was quite
otherwise. Ohio was not solid for Sherman. It is a State that has been
very hard to manage in national conventions--was so in the time when
Chase was the Republican leader--divided in '60, nominating Lincoln,
and rarely presented a front without a flaw for a national candidate.
The energy of Logan's friends was not sufficiently supported to give
confidence. The reformers by profession and of prominence were for
Edmunds; and they were a body of men who had force, if judiciously
applied, to have carried the convention, provided they divested
themselves of the peculiarities of extreme elevation that prevent
efficiency. While they assumed to have soared above practical politics
and to abhor the ways of the "toughs" in championing candidates, they
subordinated their own usefulness to a sentiment that was limited to
a senator--Mr. Edmunds. It was clear at an early hour that the
nomination of Mr. Edmunds was impossible. He was put into the combat
by Governor Long with a splendid speech, and the mellow eloquence of
George William Curtis was for him, and Carl Schurz was a counsellor
who upheld the banner of the lawyer statesman of Vermont. The
conclusion was to stick to Edmunds; and they stuck until the last, and
frittered away their influence. They were in such shape they might,
by going in force, at a well-selected time and in a dramatic way, have
carried the convention with them. They could not, however, get their
own consent to go for Logan, or Arthur, or either of the Shermans; and
so Blaine was overruled and nominated.

He did a wonderful work in the campaign, and was himself apparently
satisfied at last that his apprehensions as to New York had been
unwarranted. Still his words came back to me often during the heat of
the summer and the fierce contest. "I cannot carry New York; we shall
lose it, perhaps by just a little--but we shall lose it;" and so we
did. As the vote was counted the plurality of Mr. Cleveland over Mr.
Blaine in the decisive State was one thousand and forty-seven. Gail
Hamilton says, in her "Life of Blaine," of the New York election, that
there was a plurality claimed on election day for Cleveland of
fifty thousand, and "the next day the figures came down to seventeen
thousand; then to twelve thousand; the next day to five thousand, and
at length dwindled to four hundred and fifty-six." The election was on
the 4th, and it was nearly two weeks before a decision was announced.
General Butler "openly proclaimed that the New York vote for himself
was counted to Cleveland." The "just a little" by which Blaine was
beaten was on the face of the returns one thousand and forty-seven,
and John Y. McKane was ten years afterward convicted of frauds that
were perpetrated as he willed, that amounted to thousands. There was
a fraud capacity in the machines of many times the plurality by which
Blaine was defeated, and there never was a rational doubt that it was
exerted. A change of six hundred votes would have given the Plumed
Knight the Presidency, and outside the Solid South he had a popular
majority, "leaving out the protested vote of New York and Brooklyn, of
nearly half a million." Mr. Blaine, when it became known that the New
York vote was held to be against him, and civil war was threatened
if the returns were rectified, telegraphed to friends asking their
opinion of the New York situation; and I had the honor to be one
consulted. My reply was that the New York influences that had
prevailed to cause the declaration of a plurality for Cleveland
would be sufficient to maintain that determination. Then came the
opportunity of those unkindly toward Mr. Blaine to charge him with
forcing himself on the Republican party and ruining it with his
reckless candidacies, and I thought the facts within my knowledge
should be given the public, and wrote to General Sherman, asking him
to allow me to publish the correspondence between himself and Blaine,
proving that the nomination, instead of being forced by Blaine for
himself, was forced upon him; and I wrote to Blaine also, to the same
effect. I received from the General the remarkable letters following:

GENERAL SHERMAN TO MR. HALSTEAD.

    912 GARRISON AVENUE,

    ST. LOUIS, MO., _November 17, 1884._

    DEAR HALSTEAD:--After my former letter, when I went to put the
    newspaper slip into my scrap-book, I discovered my mistake
    in attributing the article to the "Louisville" instead of the
    "London Times." My opinion is nevertheless not to contest the
    matter, as the real truth will manifest itself.[I]

    I think Arthur could have carried the Republicans past the
    last election[J]--but no man can tell what issues would have
    been made in case of his nomination. So the wisest conclusion
    is to accept gracefully the actual result, and to profit
    by the mistakes and accidents sure to attend the new
    administration, handicapped as it will surely be by the hot
    heads of the South. Truly yours,

    W.T. SHERMAN.

    912 GARRISON AVENUE,

    ST. LOUIS, MO., _November 21, 1884._

    DEAR HALSTEAD:--I have yours of the 19th. The letter of Blaine
    to me was meant as absolutely confidential, and of course I
    would not allow any person to see it without his consent. I
    am not sure that I would, even with his consent, because
    I believe the true policy is to look ahead and not behind.
    Blaine's letter without any answer would be incomplete, and
    surely I will not have my letter published, as it contained
    certain points purely personal which the public has no right
    to. New questions will arise, and these will give you plenty
    of occupation without raking up the past.

    Wishing you always all honor and fame, I am,

    Truly yours,

    W.T. SHERMAN.

The letters that passed between Blaine and Sherman have appeared
in Gail Hamilton's "Biography of Blaine," but have not commanded
attention according to their interest, because they have not
been framed by the relation of the circumstances that gave them
significance and that are supplied in this article.

MR. BLAINE TO GENERAL SHERMAN.

    (Confidential.)

    Strictly and absolutely so.

    WASHINGTON, D.C., _May 25, 1884._

    MY DEAR GENERAL:--This letter requires no answer. After
    reading it carefully, file it away in your most secret drawer,
    or give it to the flames.

    At the approaching convention in Chicago it is more than
    possible--it is indeed not improbable--that you may be
    nominated for the Presidency. If so you must stand your hand,
    accept the responsibility, and assume the duties of the place
    to which you will surely be chosen if a candidate. You must
    not look upon it as the work of the politicians. If it comes
    to you, it will come as the ground-swell of popular demand;
    and you can no more refuse than you could have refused to obey
    an order when you were a lieutenant in the army. If it comes
    to you at all, it will come as a call of patriotism. It would,
    in such an event, injure your great fame as much to decline it
    as it would for you to seek it. Your historic record, full
    as it is, would be rendered still more glorious by such an
    administration as you would be able to give the country. Do
    not say a word in advance of the convention, no matter who may
    ask you. You are with your friends, who will jealously guard
    your honor.

    Do not answer this.

    JAMES G. BLAINE.

GENERAL SHERMAN TO MR. BLAINE.

    ST. LOUIS, _May 28, 1884._

    HON. J.G. BLAINE.

    MY DEAR FRIEND:--I have received your letter of the 25th;
    shall construe it as absolutely confidential, not intimating
    even to any member of my family that I have heard from you;
    and though you may not expect an answer, I hope you will not
    construe one as unwarranted. I have had a great many letters
    from all points of the compass to a similar effect, one or
    two of which I have answered frankly; but the great mass
    are unanswered. I ought not to subject myself to the cheap
    ridicule of declining what is not offered; but it is only fair
    to the many really able men who rightfully aspire to the high
    honor of being President of the United States to let them know
    that I am not, and must not be construed as, a rival. In every
    man's life there occurs an epoch when he must choose his
    own career, and when he may not throw the responsibility,
    or tamely place his destiny in the hands of friends. Mine
    occurred in Louisiana when, in 1861, alone in the midst of a
    people blinded by supposed wrongs, I resolved to stand by the
    Union as long as a fragment of it survived to which to cling.
    Since then, through faction, tempest, war, and peace, my
    career has been all my family and friends could ask. We are
    now in a good home of our choice, with reasonable provision
    for old age, surrounded by kind and admiring friends, in a
    community where Catholicism is held in respect and veneration,
    and where my children will naturally grow up in contact
    with an industrious and frugal people. You have known and
    appreciated Mrs. Sherman from childhood, have also known each
    and all the members of my family, and can understand, without
    an explanation from me, how their thoughts and feelings should
    and ought to influence my action; but I will not even throw
    off on them the responsibility. I will not, in any event,
    entertain or accept a nomination as a candidate for President
    by the Chicago Republican convention, or any other convention,
    for reasons personal to myself. I claim that the Civil War,
    in which I simply did a man's fair share of work, so perfectly
    accomplished peace, that military men have an absolute right
    to rest, and to demand that the men who have been schooled in
    the arts and practice of peace shall now do their work equally
    well. Any senator can step from his chair at the Capitol into
    the White House, and fulfil the office of President with more
    skill and success than a Grant, Sherman or Sheridan, who were
    soldiers by education and nature, who filled well their office
    when the country was in danger, but were not schooled in
    the practices by which civil communities are, and should be,
    governed. I claim that our experience since 1865 demonstrates
    the truth of this my proposition. Therefore I say that
    "patriotism" does not demand of me what I construe as a
    sacrifice of judgment, of inclination, and of self-interest.
    I have my personal affairs in a state of absolute safety and
    comfort. I owe no man a cent, have no expensive habits
    or tastes, envy no man his wealth or power, [have] no
    complications or indirect liabilities, and would account
    myself a fool, a madman, an ass, to embark anew, at sixty-five
    years of age, in a career that may, at any moment, [become]
    tempest-tossed by the perfidy, the defalcation, the
    dishonesty, or neglect of any one of a hundred thousand
    subordinates utterly unknown to the President of the United
    States, not to say the eternal worriment by a vast host of
    impecunious friends and old military subordinates. Even as it
    is, I am tortured by the charitable appeals of poor distressed
    pensioners; but as President, these would be multiplied beyond
    human endurance. I remember well the experience of Generals
    Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes and Garfield, all
    elected because of their military services, and am warned, not
    encouraged, by their sad experiences. No--count me out. The
    civilians of the United States should, and must, buffet with
    this thankless office, and leave us old soldiers to enjoy the
    peace we fought for, and think we earned.

    With profound respect, your friend,

    W.T. SHERMAN.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE LETTER WRITTEN BY MR. BLAINE TO MR.
HALSTEAD JUST AFTER MR. BLAINE'S DEFEAT FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN 1884,
AND NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED--THE SAME LETTER THAT IS EMBODIED IN THE
TEXT OF THIS ARTICLE ON PAGE 169.]

[Illustration: CONTINUATION OF FACSIMILE OF LETTER.]

[Illustration: CONTINUATION OF FACSIMILE OF LETTER.]

There is intrinsic evidence that these letters were not written with a
thought of possible publication. That which General Sherman says
about Catholicism could only have been told to a close and sympathetic
friend. Mrs. Sherman and Mr. Blaine were cousins, and their mothers
were Catholics. Mrs. Sherman was one whose devotion to the Church was
intense; and General Sherman could not endure the thought that her
religion should be subjected to such discussions as were certain to
arise in a Presidential campaign. She was a very noble and gifted
woman, and the happiness of herself and husband in their domestic life
was beautiful and elevated.

James G. Blaine was nearer the Presidency than any other man who did
not reach the office. It was by a very narrow margin that he
missed the nomination in Cincinnati in 1876; and the opposition he
encountered there from Republican editors was regretted by all of
them, because they believed when the storm ceased that he had been
accused excessively, sensationally, and maliciously, and condemned--by
those who did not appreciate his vindication--on evidence that was
indicated but not presented--on letters supposed to have been taken
from the original package, and that were not produced because they
never existed. The investigations were largely instigated and carried
on to continue agitation with the purpose to strike down a brilliant
man whose genius gave him almost incredible promotion, and to assail
him because he was lofty and aspiring. The personal fight that he made
in Congress when cruelly set upon was one of the most effective that
ever took place in a public body. A competent observer, who was a
spectator of the scene in the House when the Mulligan letters were
read, said as Blaine came down the aisle, the letters in his hand,
and called upon all the millions of his countrymen to be witnesses: "I
thought his fist was going right up through the dome." Unhappily, his
exciting experiences in the course of these fierce controversies, with
the conduct of his Cincinnati campaign, and the sultry weather, caused
his prostration, attended with hours of unconsciousness, just at
the critical time when the delegates were assembling in national
convention. The local influences; the Republican editorial antagonism;
the enthusiastic efforts for Bristow; the strenuous perseverance of
Morton of Indiana; the prestige of Conkling, backed with the high
favor of Grant; the solidity of Ohio for Hayes--all would have been
overwhelmed but for the incident of the fall of Blaine in a swoon at
the door of the church which he was in the habit of attending and that
he was about to enter with his wife. It is reasonable to believe,
if he had been the candidate that year, he could have carried the
election unequivocally, and that his administration would have vastly
strengthened the Republican party. It is due President Hayes, however,
to say that his administration of the great office was an era of good
for the country, and that he was succeeded by a Republican; but the
fact of a disputed Presidency had a far-reaching evil influence, and
prevented showing fair play in New York in 1884. Blaine lost in his
illness coincident with the Cincinnati convention the confidence of
the country in his firm health and strength, and that handicapped him
to his grave. Perhaps it is even more important that he lost faith
in himself as a strong man, and had almost a superstition that if he
became President it would be for him personally a fatality. And yet
he was intellectually a growing man for fifteen years after his
Cincinnati defeat. His greater works, his most influential ideas, the
full fruition of his gifts, were after that catastrophe.

Mr. Blaine was so strong and so weak, so delicate and so tenacious,
that he was as constant a puzzle to those who loved him as to his
enemies, to the best-informed as to the most ill-informed. Those
very near to him took the liberty of laughing at him about his two
overcoats, and his going to bed and sending for a doctor in the
afternoon, and getting off with gayety to the opera in the evening;
about an alleged indigestion followed by eating a confection that
would have tested the hardihood of a young candy-eater. One who
studied him with affection wrote of him that he had an association
of qualities giving at once sensitiveness and endurance, and we were
indebted to this for the faculties, the capacities, that made up
the man whose influence had been so remarkable and his popularity a
phenomenon. He was of fine sensibilities, and there was nothing on
earth or in the air that did not tell him something. He was like an
instrument of music that a breath would move to melody, and that was
ever in tune for any wind that blew, and yet had patient strength, and
wore like steel. He had a rare make-up of refinement and power, and
life was sweeter and brighter and more costly far to him than to the
ordinary man.

It was after his first and, as it turned out, final defeat for the
Presidency, in his earliest effort for the office, that his fame grew
splendid. His campaigning was fascinating, and his speeches, as the
years passed, took greater variety. In his tour when a candidate in
1884, his addresses were marvellous in aptitude and in a thousand
felicities. There was much said of the fact that he was not a lawyer,
and an affected superiority to him by gentlemen whose profession
permitted "fees," and there was a system of deprecation to the effect
that he only harangued, that he had neither originality nor grace. But
after Garfield's death and the retirement of the Secretary from the
Cabinet, he turned to writing history "as a resource," and his great
work is of permanent value to the country, while his Garfield oration
is one of the masterpieces of the highest rank; and there came
straight from his brain two far-flashing ideas--that of the union
of American nations, and to protect the policy of protection with
reciprocity--and in the two there is the manifestation of that
crowning glory of public life which enters the luminous atmosphere
of immortality--statesmanship. That he had not the opportunity of the
execution of these policies--of guiding and shaping their triumph--was
not his fault but his fate. Their time may be coming but slowly,
yet it surely will come. His zeal in behalf of making the protective
principle irresistible by associating it intimately with reciprocity,
was so strong that he grew impatient when others were tedious in
comprehension; and there was a story of his concluding a sharp
admonition to the laborers on the tariff schedules by "smashing his
new silk hat on a steam-heater in the committee-room." He was asked by
a friend who rode out with him to see the statue that he thought the
most accurate and impressive of all the likenesses of Lincoln and was
fond of driving to see, located in a park east of the Capitol--that
by Story--whether he had "smashed a new silk hat" on a steam-heater
on behalf of reciprocity; and he softly responded, "It was not a new
hat."

That Mr. Blaine was keenly disappointed when defeated for the
Presidency at Cincinnati, there is no doubt; and that he began then to
see that it was not his destiny to be President, is certain.

There is a great contrast in his favor in his manner of bearing this
disappointment with that of Clay and Webster under somewhat similar
circumstances. Clay was furious at the nomination of General William
Henry Harrison, and greeted with unmeasured denunciation those
responsible for that judicious act; and Webster was bitter when Taylor
and Scott were nominated in the first instance, but came, after a
time, grandly out of the clouds. It is an interesting coincidence that
Webster when Secretary of State was a candidate for the Presidential
nomination against his chief, President Fillmore, and died, on the
24th of October, 1852, a few months after Scott's triumph at Baltimore
and a few days before the popular election of Pierce. The enduring
memory of Mr. Blaine appeared in the last October he lived, in the
precise remark, when something was said of the death of Webster, "Ah!
day after to-morrow it will be forty years since Webster died." The
news of the nomination of Hayes, Blaine received serenely, and before
the vote was declared in the convention sent the nominee a cordial
telegram of congratulation. When he knew at Augusta in 1884 that he
was beaten, he said: "Personally I care less than my nearest friends
would believe, but for the cause and for many friends I profoundly
deplore the result." And that was the entire truth. He felt that he
had not been fairly beaten, but he gave utterance only to the public
wrong done in the unfairness, and left that expression as a warning to
the country. He did not, as we have seen, follow the example of Clay,
who persistently favored his own candidacy. On the contrary, Blaine
did not covet the Presidency, and tried to avoid the personal strife
of 1884, and not for any of the apprehensive motives attributed to
him by those who acted upon the feeling in his case that the spirit of
justice was malevolent.

I feel that I should not now deal fairly with the public if I did
not give here the letter from Blaine in my possession, that more
completely than any published gives expression to his personal bearing
when defeated.

LETTER FROM MR. BLAINE TO MR. HALSTEAD.

    (Personal.)

    AUGUSTA, MAINE, _16th Nov., '84._

    DEAR MR. HALSTEAD:--I think there would be no harm to the
    public and no personal injustice if you should insert the
    three enclosed items in your editorial columns.

    I feel quite serene over the result. As the Lord sent upon us
    an ass in the shape of a preacher, and a rainstorm, to lessen
    our vote in New York, I am disposed to feel resigned to the
    dispensation of defeat, which flowed directly from these
    agencies.

    In missing a great honor I escaped a great and oppressive
    responsibility. You know--perhaps better than any one--how
    _much I didn't want_ the nomination; but perhaps, in view of
    all things, I have not made a loss by the canvass. At least I
    try to think not. The other candidate would have fared hard in
    Maine, and would have been utterly broken in Ohio.

    Sincerely,

    JAMES G. BLAINE.

    Of course all this is private.

    _P.S._--This note was written before receipt of yours. Pray
    publish nothing of the kind you intimate unless you first
    permit me to see the proof. Don't be afraid of the enclosed
    items. They are rock-ribbed for truth and for a good rendering
    of public opinion.

Mr. Blaine refers in the closing paragraph to the proposition I made
to him to publish the true story of his candidacy--substantially the
same pressed upon the attention of General Sherman. Between them they
suppressed me, but it is due them that this chapter of history should
be known now that they are gone.

I had the privilege of walking with Mr. Blaine in the beautiful and
fragrant parks at Homburg, in Southern Germany, in the summer of 1887,
and discussing with him the question whether he should be a candidate
for the Republican nomination the next spring. He then seemed to be
very well, but exertion speedily fatigued him. He was on sight a very
striking personage, and always instantly regarded with interest by
strangers. His personal appearance was of the utmost refinement and of
irreproachable dignity. His absolute cleanliness was something dainty,
his dress simple but fitting perfectly and of the best material. His
face was very pale, but his sparkling eyes contradicted the pallor.

His form was erect, and his figure that of youth. His hair and beard
were exquisitely white. His mouth had the purity of a child's, and
he never had tasted tobacco or used spirituous liquors, save when his
physician had recommended a little whiskey, and then not enough to
color a glass. He drank sparingly of claret and champagne, caring only
for the flavor. He was gentle, kindly, genial, and in a manly sense
beautiful. There are many distinguished English people at Homburg in
the season, and they were gratified to meet Mr. Blaine, and charmed
with him. It required no ceremony to announce him as a personage--a
man who had made events--and he never posed or gave the slightest
hint, in his movements, of conscious celebrity. I never saw him
bothered by being aware of himself but once, and that was when, across
the street from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the dusk of an evening, he
shaded his face with his hand, and looked curiously at ten thousand
people who were gazing at the house, and shouting madly for him,
expecting that he would appear at a window and make acknowledgment of
their enthusiasm. Suddenly he saw in the glance of one beside him that
he was curiously yet doubtfully regarded, and hastened away in fear of
his friends, who in their delight at discovering him would have become
a mob.

In Homburg he seemed to care for others' opinions about the proper
course for him to take; and the substance of that which I had to
say--and he seemed to think me in a way representative--was that he
alone must decide for himself, as he only knew all the circumstances
and elements that must be considered in a decision. Once we walked
the main street of the town in the night--and it is then a very lonely
place, for it is the fashion to get up in the morning at six o'clock,
and take the waters and the music--and that time I was impressed, and
the impression abided, that the inner conviction of Mr. Blaine was he
had not the vitality to safely take the Presidency if he held it in
his hand; that he believed the office would wear him out--that it was
a place of dealing with persons who would worry away his existence;
that he felt he could not endure the wear and tear and pressure of
the first position, and preferred the Secretaryship of State, with
the hope of going on with his South American policy, which he had
developed in Garfield's time, brief as that was; and I conjectured
that all this had been in his mind when he wanted Sherman and Lincoln
to be the ticket in 1884. And it occurred to me with so much force as
the logic of many things he said, that I accepted it as true, and was
reminded of his weary exclamation once of a good friend whose moods
were changeable: "Now that he is right, stay with him. He takes the
health out of me with his uncertainties."

The Secretaryship of State he cared for; in that office the world was
all before him, and he was fully himself, and was not fretted by
a perpetual procession of favor-seekers. The argument his urgent
admirers used with him was that it would be easier to make up his mind
than to convince a President, and that as the Chief of State he could
throw the work on the Cabinet; but he was not satisfied. The Florence
letter to me seemed familiar, for it was a reminder of Homburg, and
its sincerity was in all the lines and between the lines; and it was
addressed to a friend in Pittsburg, that it might not be suppressed in
New York. He had very close and influential friends who did not divine
his true attitude, or would not admit that they had, and insisted that
he was really well and strong and tough, better than he had been, and
that he should not be humored in his fancy that he was an invalid.
This feeling continued even to 1892, though he had been meantime
painfully broken by a protracted illness. It will be remembered that
in the correspondence between General Harrison as President-elect and
Mr. Blaine, when the Secretaryship of State was offered and accepted,
there appeared harmony of views concerning Pan-Americanism; that Mr.
Blaine enjoyed the office and that his official labors during the
Harrison Administration were of the highest distinction, showing
his happiest characteristics. The difference as to duties that arose
between the President and the Secretary was forgotten, and their
mutual sympathies abounded, when there came upon them, in their
households, the gravest, tenderest sorrows.

[Illustration: BLAINE'S GRAVE AT WASHINGTON, D.C. THE TREE AT THE LEFT
MARKS THE HEAD OF THE GRAVE, AND THE FIRST OF THE THREE LOW STONES IN
THE FOREGROUND, NUMBERING FROM THE LEFT, MARKS THE FOOT.

From a photograph by Miss F.B. Johnston.]

When Mr. Blaine was for the last time in New York on his way to
Washington, stopping as was his habit at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,
he asked me to walk with him to his room, fronting on Twenty-third
Street, on the parlor floor; and he slowly, as if it were a task,
unlocked the door. There was a sparkle of autumnal crispness in
the air, and he had a fire, that glittered and threw shadows about
fitfully. There was not much to say. It was plain at last that Mr.
Blaine was fading, that he had within a few weeks failed fast. His
great, bright eyes were greater than ever, but not so bright. His face
was awfully white; not that brainy pallor that was familiar--something
else! He seated himself in the light of the fire, on an easy-chair.
There was a knock at his door, and a servant handed him a card, and
he said: "No;" and we were alone. I could not think of a word of
consolation; and in a moment he appeared to have forgotten me, and
stared in a fixed, rapt dream at the flickering flame in the grate.
It occurred to me to get up and go away quietly, as conversation was
impossible--for there was too much to say. It came to me that I ought
not to leave him alone. Something in him reminded me of the mystical
phrases of the transcendent paragraph of his oration on Garfield,
picturing the death of the second martyred President, by the ocean,
while far off white ships touched the sea and sky, and the fevered
face of the dying man felt "the breath of the eternal morning."

Some weeks earlier Mr. Blaine and I had had a deep talk about men and
things, and he was very kind, and his boundless generosity of
nature never revealed itself with a greater or sadder charm. He now
remembered that conversation--as a word disclosed--and said: "I could
have endured all things if my boys had not died." The door opened,
and his secretary walked in--and I took Mr. Blaine's hand for the
last time, saying, "Good-night," and he said, with a look that meant
farewell--"Good-by."

His grave is on a slope that when I saw it was goldenly sunny, and
the turf was strewn by his wife's hand with lilies--for it was Easter
morning! Close at his left was a steep, grassy bank, radiantly blue
with violets, and there was in the shining air the murmurous hum
of bees, making a slumbrous, restful music. Blaine's monument is a
hickory tree whose broken top speaks of storms, and at his feet is
a stone white as new snow, and on it only--and they are enough--the
initials "J.G.B.," that were the battle-cry of millions, and are and
shall be always to memory dear.

[Footnote I: This related to a matter General Sherman had mentioned in
another letter, and did not refer to the subject I was trying to get
him to consider.]

[Footnote J: General Sherman differed in this judgment with Blaine and
many Republicans who were not unfriendly to Arthur.]

THE NEW STATUE OF WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.

BY FRANK B. GESSNER.

The erection of an equestrian statue of General William Henry
Harrison, in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a fitting but also a tardy
commemoration of a man who rendered his State and the nation most
distinguished services. For fifty years there has been talk of doing
him honor in some such fashion, and even the statue which as this
Magazine goes to press is being formally dedicated in Cincinnati
(in the presence of a grandson of the subject who is himself an
ex-President), has been completed for some years, and has been stowed
away in dust and darkness because there was not public interest enough
in the matter to meet the cost of setting it up.

Although now almost a forgotten figure, General Harrison was one
of the ablest and worthiest of our public men. Born in Berkeley,
Virginia, February 9, 1773, he grew to manhood with the close of
the Revolution and the establishment of the national government. His
father was the friend of Washington, and when the son went into the
Western wilds he held a commission as ensign signed by the first of
the Presidents. At the age of thirty he was a delegate in Congress
from the Northwest Territory. For a succeeding decade he was governor
of that wide stretch of country which in time he saw carved into
States all owing much to his genius as warrior and statesman. In the
second war with Great Britain he commanded the Western armies, and won
the notable victories of Tippecanoe and the Thames. The first gave him
a name which became the slogan of the Whigs in the memorable campaign
of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." At the battle of the Thames fell
Tecumseh, whose death broke the Indian power east of the Mississippi.
After the war of 1812 General Harrison was successively Congressman,
Senator of the United States, and Minister to Colombia.

[Illustration: STATUE OF WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, MADE FOR THE CITY OF
CINCINNATI BY MR. L.T. REBISSO.

From a photograph by Landy, Cincinnati.]

Returning in 1830 to his home at North Bend, on the line between
Indiana and Ohio, he lived more or less in retirement until 1836, when
he was made the Whig candidate for President. He was defeated; but in
1840 he was again the nominee, and, after the greatest campaign of the
century, was elected, defeating Martin Van Buren. The campaign of 1840
was called the "log-cabin and hard-cider" campaign, though the
reputed log-cabin home of the Whig candidate was in reality a spacious
mansion. General Harrison was inaugurated March 4, 1841, and on April
4, a month later, he died in the White House, a victim of exposure and
the wearing importunities of office-seeking constituents. Something of
the character of the man is disclosed in his last words, spoken four
hours before his death. To whom he thought himself speaking can only
be conjectured--Vice-President Tyler, some authorities claim; but he
was heard by his physician to say: "Sir, I wish you to understand
the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask
nothing more."

Physically, General Harrison has been described as "about six feet
high," straight and rather slender, and of "a firm, elastic gait,"
even in his last years. He had "a keen, penetrating eye," a "high,
broad and prominent" forehead, and "rather thin and compressed lips."

[Illustration: ANNA SYMMES HARRISON, WIFE OF PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY
HARRISON, AND GRANDMOTHER OF PRESIDENT BENJAMIN HARRISON.

From a painting in possession of the Harrison family.]

Mrs. Harrison was not with her husband at his death, and never became
an inmate of the White House. For that reason there hangs on its walls
no portrait of her, among those of the various ladies of the mansion.
She was the daughter of John Cleves Symmes, a scion of the Colonial
aristocracy. She loved better than the excitement of social life in
Washington the domestic peace of her North Bend home and the society
of her thirteen children, growing up in usefulness and honor. In her
youth she had been a great belle, and she remained a beautiful
woman even in her declining years. She was educated in that first
fashionable school for young women in America founded by Isabella
Graham in the city of New York. A sister, Polly Symmes, was also a
famous beauty. They went together to share their father's fortunes
in the unsettled West, and both found their fates in the hand of the
Miamis. Polly married Peyton Short, who became a millionaire.

Mrs. Harrison had been detained by illness from going with her husband
to witness the proudest event of his life, his inauguration; and she
had purposed following him to Washington later in the spring, when the
weather should be more favorable for the long, wearisome journey by
stage-coach. But, alas! before the spring fully opened, instead of
following him to Washington she was following his body to its silent,
stone-walled tomb, overlooking the wide sweep of the Ohio southward.
This noble woman lived to be eighty-nine and to see her grandson,
Benjamin Harrison, now ex-President, a general in the Union army.
She retained to the last much of her beauty and that sweetness of
disposition which has endeared her memory to those of her blood who
knew her best. She sleeps by the side of her husband in the old vault
at North Bend.

The Cincinnati statue of General Harrison is the work of L.T. Rebisso,
who made the statue of General McPherson which stands in one of the
circular parks in Washington, and the equestrian statue of General
Grant for the city of Chicago. Its cost, which, exclusive of the
pedestal, is twenty-seven thousand dollars, is paid by the city.
Mr. Rebisso has given a portrayal of Harrison unlike any of the more
familiar pictures. These usually present a decrepit old man, from
whose eye have vanished that fire of youth and flash of soul which
made Harrison a leader of men. The Rebisso statue, as will be seen by
the reproduction of it given herewith, presents a soldier in the full
flower of vigorous manhood. And this conception is no mere ideal of
fancy, but is taken from a portrait painted in 1812, which now hangs
in the house of a grandchild of General Harrison near the old North
Bend homestead.

[Illustration: THE SILENT WITNESS.]

THE SILENT WITNESS

BY HERBERT D. WARD

There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more
from the railroad station. To the chance summer visitor the seclusion
and the rest seem entrancing. The glamour of mountain scenery and
trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle
from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure. He
carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted
farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and
asks the name of a distant peak. If he should notice, how would he
know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the
empty stall? Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners
of the stone farm. His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife
plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in
a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes
contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of
anxiety.

There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to
be straightened by men of a mountain birth. The question whether the
hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law
to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one. So the grand
old stock is run out of the soil? And is it replaced by the sons and
grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety
homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?

Michael Angelo said that "men are worth more than money," and if what
was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship,
Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount
Kearsarge. For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the
tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred
acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the
poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of
boulders in the mountains.

It was situated upon the cold shoulder of a hill, sixteen miles from
the nearest station. The three-mile trail which led from the village
would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy
road. What a site for a hotel! Yet the hotel did not materialize, and
the "view" neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors
of the desolate spot.

"Never mind, I reckon we'll pull through," Isaac used to comfort his
mother.

"You're a good boy, Ikey. If the Lord is willin', I guess I am," she
answered with quaint devoutness.

But the Lord did not seem to be willing, and one spring He caused a
late frost in June to kill most of the seed, and a drouth in July and
August to wither what was left, and starvation stared in the faces of
the widow and her son. At this time, Isaac began to "keep company,"
and to talk of getting married in the next decade. He was twenty-two,
and had a faithful, saving disposition, when there was anything to
save. And whether he became engaged because there was nothing but love
to harvest, or whether, woman-like, Abbie Faxon loved him better than
she did her other suitors because of his poverty and misery, and was
willing to tell him so, I cannot pretend to decide. At any rate, Isaac
brought Abbie one afternoon from the village, three miles below, and
the two women kissed and wept, and Isaac went out and stood alone
facing the view; the apple in his throat rose and fell, and great
tears blinded his sight.

We can make no hero of Isaac, for he was none. His heart was as simple
and as clean as a pebble in a brook. Country vices had not smirched
him. He had a mind only for his mother, and the farm, and earning a
living--and a heart for Abbie. Great thoughts did not invade his head.
But this afternoon, as he stood there on the gray rock, his heart
bursting with his happiness, which was made perfect by his mother's
blessing, an apprehension for the future--bitter, breathless, began
to arouse him. The promise of the horizon suddenly became revealed to
him. The distant line of green, now bold, now sinuous, now uncertain,
had never asked him questions before, had never exasperated him with a
meaning.

But now he saw the tips of spires flecking the verdure of the far-off
valleys. He saw the hurrying smoke of a locomotive. He saw with
awakening vision, starting from that dead farm of his, the region of
trade and life. A film had fallen from his eyes. The energetic arrow
of love had touched his ambition, and his round, rosy face became
indented with lines of resolve. He turned and walked with a new tread
into the house.

"Mother! Abbie!" he blurted out, "I'm going away. I'm going to
Boston." He stopped and stammered as he saw the horror-stricken faces
before him.

"Lord a-mercy!"

"Ikey! Air you teched?"

"No," he resumed stoutly, "I be'ant. There's Dan Prentiss--he
went--see what he done; and Uncle Bill, he--"

"We hain't heard nothing from your Uncle Bill since he sot out. That
was twelve years ago, the spring your father built them three feet on
the shed." Mrs. Masters spoke firmly.

"Never mind, mother, I'm going to Boston, and I will come back. I'm
going to earn my livin'. I'm strong and willin', and as able as Dan
Prentiss. Ye needn't be scared, I ain't going yet. I'll finish up the
fall work fust. I'm going for the winter anyway, and Abbie'll come an'
live with you, mother--won't you, Abbie, dear? She's the only mother
you've got now. Your folks can spare you."

Here Abbie announced bravely, "I will, Ikey, if you must go."

She blushed deeply as she said it, and the sight of her pretty color
so moved the young man that, having the bashfulness of his native
crops, he rushed out into the glory of the sunset, and sat upon the
granite boulder watching until the gray, the purple, and then the
black had washed out the white steeples from the distant valley.

Isaac Masters was of the boulder type. How many decades was the
smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a
glacier until it reached its halt? But now it would need a double
charge of dynamite to shake it from its base. It generally took the
mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such
a simple problem as the quantity of grain his horse should have at a
feed when the spring planting began; but when once his intention was
fixed it withstood all opposition. But this time he was astonished at
his own temerity of mind, as his mother and sweetheart were; and the
more profoundly he pondered over the gravest decision of his life,
the more did it seem to him an inspiration, perhaps from the Deity
himself.

But Isaac was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the
two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success. He had worked
on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly. He had fought the rocks, and
the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for
his life, and never had a thought of food or of comfort visited him
unaccompanied by the necessity for labor.

"I can work fourteen hours a day, mother, and live upon pork and
beans, as well as the next man." He stood to his full height,
displaying to the pale woman the outlines of massive muscular
development. His hands were huge and callous, their grip the terror of
his mates after a husking bee. He had measured his great strength but
once; that was in the dead of winter, with the snow drifted five feet
deep between the barn and the house. A heifer, well grown, had been
taken sick, and needed warmth for recovery. Isaac swung the sick beast
over his shoulders, holding its legs two in each hand before his head,
and strode through the storm, subduing the battling snow with as much
ease as he did the bellowing calf. His mother met him at the woodshed
door. Behind the gladiator rose the forbidding background of a stark
mountain range; but to her astonished and unfocussed sight, her son
seemed greater than the mountain, and more compelling than its peaks.
From that hour his whisper was her law; and from that day--for how
could the adoring mother help telling her quarterly caller all about
the heifer?--Isaac had no more wrestling matches in the valley.

August burned into September, and September, triumphant in her
procession of royal colors, marched into October, the month of months.
Mrs. Masters had already completed her pathetic preparations for her
son's departure. There, in the family carpet-bag, which his father had
carried with him on his annual trip to Portland, were stowed a half
dozen pairs of well-darned woollen stockings, the few decent shirts
that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served
six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his
mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed
a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties
that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac
naïvely considered masterpieces of the haberdasher's art.

At the mouth of the deep bag Mrs. Masters tucked a Bible which fifty
years ago had been presented to her husband by his Sunday-school
teacher as a prize for regular attendance. This inscription was
written in a wavering hand upon the blank page:

    "_In the eighth year of the reign of Josiah, while he was yet
    young, he began to seek after the God of David his father_.--
    2 Chron. xxxiv. 3."

"For," said Mrs. Masters softly to Abbie, after she had read the
inscription aloud, and had patted the book affectionately, "this is
the first prize my Josiah ever had, an' the Lord knows he thought more
on it than he did of Lucy, his mare. An' if there should happen any
accident to Isaac, they'd find by opening of his bag that ef he
was alone in a far country he was a Christian, nor ashamed of it,
neither."

Isaac had only money enough saved up to take him as far as Boston, and
to board him in the cheapest way for several days.

"If I can't work," he said proudly, straightening to his full height,
"no one can!"

It is just such country lads as this--strong, self-reliant,
religious--who, when poverty has projected them out of her granite
mountains upon granite pavements, each as hard and bleak as the other,
by massive determination have conquered a predestined success.

Too soon, for those who were to be left behind, the day of separation
came. Mrs. Masters's haggard face and Abbie's red eyes told of
unuttered misery.

But Isaac did not notice these signs of distress. He was absorbed in
his future. The last bustle was over, the last breakfast gulped down
amid forced smiles and ready tears, the last button sewed on at the
last moment; and now Mrs. Masters's lunch of mince pie, apples, and
doughnuts was tenderly tucked into the jaws of the carpet-bag; thereby
disturbing a love letter that Abbie had hidden there. A young neighbor
had volunteered to drive Isaac down the mountain to the station.

[Illustration: "MOVE ON, WILL YER!"]

"All aboard! Hurry up, Ike!" cried this young person, consulting his
silver watch, and casting a look of mingled commiseration and envy
upon the giant, locked in the arms of the two women, who hardly
reached to the second button of his coat. Isaac caught the glance,
and started to tear himself away. But his mother laid her gnarled hand
gently upon his arm, and led him into the unused parlor.

"Just a minute, Abbie dear, I want to be alone with my boy," she waved
the girl back. "Then you can have him last. It's my right an' your'n!"

She closed the door, and led him under the crayon portrait of his
father, framed in immortelles. She raised her arms, and he stooped
that they might clasp about his neck.

"Isaac," she said hoarsely, "I ain't no longer young nor very strong.
Remember 'fore you go away from the farm that you're the son of an
honest man, an' a pious woman, and"--dropping with great solemnity
into scriptural language--"I beseech you, my son, not to disgrace your
godly name."

With partings like this the primitive Christians must have sent their
sons into the whirlwind of the world.

Then Isaac broke down for the first time, and with the tears
streaming, he lifted his mother bodily in his arms, and promised her,
and kissed her. "Mother trusts you, Ikey," was all she could say. But
his time had come. There was a crunching of wheels.

"Now go to Abbie. Leave me here! Good-by; you have always been a good
boy, dear." Mrs. Masters's voice sank into a whisper; the strong man,
moved as he was, could not comprehend her exhaustion.

Abbie was waiting for him at the door, and he went to her. The
impatient wagon had gone down the road. They were to cut through the
pasture, and meet it at the brook. There they were to part.

They clasped hands. Isaac turned. A gaunt, gray face, broken,
helpless, hopeless, peered out beneath the green paper shade of the
parlor window. If he had known--a doubt crossed his brain, but the
girl twitched his hand, and the cloud scattered. Down the hill they
ran, down, until the brook was reached. There they stood, panting,
breathless, listening. There were only a few minutes left, and they
hid behind an oak tree and clasped.

It was long after dark when the train came to its halt in its vaulted
terminus. It was due at seven, but an excursion on the road delayed it
until after nine. However, this did not disconcert Isaac Masters.
He hurried out to the front of the station, where the row of herdics
greeted him savagely. Carrying his father's old carpet-bag, he looked
from his faded hat to his broad toes the ideal country bumpkin; yet
his head was not turned by the rumbling of the pavements, the whiz
of the electrics, the blaze of the arc lights, nor by the hectic
inhalations that seem to comprehend all the human restlessness of a
city just before it retires to sleep. His breath came faster, and
his great chest rose and fell; these were the only indications of
acclimation. Isaac had started from home absolutely without any "pull"
or introduction but his own willingness to work. Utterly ignorant of
the city, and knowing no one in it, on the way down in the train he
had marked out a line of conduct from which he determined not to be
swerved.

To the mountain mind the policeman becomes the embodiment of a
righteously executed law. At home, their only constable was one of the
most respected men in the community. Isaac argued from experience--and
how else should he? This was his syllogism:

A policeman is the most respectable of men in my town.

This man before me is a policeman.

Therefore he must be the most upright man in the city. I will go to
him for advice.

The city casuist might have smiled at the major premise--and laughed
at the ingenuous conclusion. Yet if brass buttons, a cork hat and a
"billy" are the emblems of guardianship and probity, the country boy
has the right argument on his side, and the casuist none at all.

It never occurred to Isaac that the policeman could either make a
mistake of judgment, or meditate one. Therefore he approached the
guardian of the peace confidently.

This gentleman, who had noticed the traveller as soon as he had
emerged from the depot, awaited his approach with becoming dignity.
The patronage and disdain that the metropolis feels for the hamlet
were in his air.

"Excuse me, sir--I want to ask you--" began Isaac, after a proper
obeisance.

"Move on, will yer!"

"But I wanted to ask you--"

"Phwat are ye blockin' up the road fur, young man?"

"I want you to help me!"

"The ---- you do!" He looked about ferociously. "Look here, sonny, if
ye don't move along, an' have plenty of shtyle about it, I'll help ye
to the lock-up--so help me--!"

Isaac looked down upon the man, whom he could have crushed with
one swoop of his hands. The consternation of his first broken ideal
possessed his heart. With a deadly pallor upon his face, he hurried up
the clanging street, and the coarse laughter of brutes tingled in his
ears. He swallowed this rough inhospitality, which is the hemlock that
poisons country faith. Take from the pavement enough dust to cover
the point of a penknife, and insert it in the arm of a child, and in a
week it will be dead with tetanus. After this first encounter with the
protectors of the people, Isaac felt as if his soul had been bedaubed
with mud. He experienced a contracting tetanus of the heart. Had he
not planned all the lonesome day to cast himself upon the kindness
of the first policeman whom he saw? What other guide or protector
was there left for him in the strange city? The rebuff which he had
received half annihilated his intelligence.

[Illustration: "AM--I--IMPRISONED BECAUSE I AM FRIENDLESS AND POOR? IS
THIS YOUR LAW?"]

Isaac could no more put up at the great hotel he saw on his right than
the majority of us can take a trip to Japan. Isaac hurried on. Why
did he leave home? The fear of a great city is more teasing than the
terror of a wilderness or of a desert. There the trees or the rocks or
the sand befriends you. But in the city the penniless stranger has no
part in people or home or doorsteps. Every one's heart is against him.
It is the anguish of hunger amid plenty, the rattling of thirst amid
rivers of wine, the serration of loneliness amid humanity thicker than
barnacles upon a wharf pile. Such a terror--not of cowardice, but of
friendlessness--seized Isaac Masters, and a foreboding that he might
possibly fail after all made his spine tingle. Still he drove on.
He had passed through the main street--or across it--he did not
know--until the electric lights cast dim shadows, until stately banks
had given way to unkempt brick fronts, until the glittering bar-rooms
had been exchanged for vulgar saloons--until--

Masters came to a sudden halt, and dropping his bag, uttered a loud
cry. The curtained door of a grog-shop opened upon him. A hatless man
dashed out, swearing horribly, and all but fell into Isaac's arms.
With a cry of terror the runner dodged the pedestrian, and bolted down
the street. Not twenty feet behind him bounded his pursuer.

By this time the country boy had slipped into the shadow of the
building, where he could see without being seen. In that moment Isaac
caught sight of a dazed group of men within, and the profile of the
pursuer against the hot light of the saloon. He saw a brute holding
a pistol in his out-stretched hand. Before Isaac understood the
situation, the weapon shot out two flames and two staccato reports.
These were followed by the intense silence which is like the darkness
upon the heels of lightning.

Isaac's eyes were now strained upon the creature who was shot. He saw
the man stagger, throw up his hands, and fall. He heard a groan. At
that time the murderer with the smoking revolver was not more than ten
paces away. As he fired, he had stopped. When he saw his victim fall,
he gave a hoarse laugh.

By this time the lights in the saloon were put out, and its occupants
had fled. The rustle of human buzzards flocking to the tragedy had
begun. A motion that the murderer made to escape aroused the New
Hampshire boy to a fierce sense of justice. A few bounds brought him
by the side of the ruffian, who looked upon him with astonishment, and
then with inflamed fear. Isaac furiously struck the pointed pistol to
the pavement, and grasped the fellow's waist. Then he knew that he had
almost met his match. Isaac held his opponent's left arm by the wrist,
and tightened the vise. The murderer held the boy around his neck with
a contracting grip such as only a prize-fighter understands. Neither
spoke a word. It was power--power against skill.

There was a crash and a cry and a fall. But not until Isaac knew that
the man under him was helpless did he utter a sound. Then he called:
"Police! Police!"

The answer was a blinding blow upon the crown of his head. Then,
before his head swam away into unconsciousness, he felt a strange
thing happen to his wrists.

The first lieutenant, the captain, and the superintendent are
different beings from the officer of the street, who has no gilt
stripes upon his sleeves. The one, having passed through all grades,
is supposed to have been chosen not only because of his fidelity
and bravery, but because of his discriminating gentleness or
gentlemanliness. The other, a private of the force, often a foreigner,
with foreign instincts, and eager for promotion (that is, he means
to make as many arrests as possible), confuses the difference between
rudeness and authority, brutality and law. By the time he is a
sergeant sense has been schooled into him, and he ought to know
better.

The superintendent looked at Isaac steadily and not unkindly, while he
listened to the officer's story.

"Off with those bracelets!" he said, sternly.

Isaac Masters regarded the superintendent gratefully. For the first
time since he had been rebuffed by the station policeman, his natural
expression of trust returned to his face.

"I'll forgive him," said the boy of a simple, Christian education. "It
was dark--and he made a mistake." Isaac wiped the clotted blood from
his cheeks. "Can I go now?"

Even a less experienced man than the white-haired superintendent would
have known that the young man before him could no more have committed
a crime or told an untruth than an oak. The policeman who had clubbed
him, perhaps with the best intentions in the world, hung his head.

"Let me hear your story first." The superior officer spoke in his most
fatherly tones. He really pitied the country lad.

"What is your name? Where do you come from? How did you get there?
Tell me all about it. Here, sergeant, get him a glass of water,
first."

"Perhaps a little whiskey would do him good," suggested a night-hawk
who had just opened the door of the reporters' room. Blood acts
terribly upon even the most stolid imagination. Beneath that
red-streaked mask it needed all the experience of the superintendent
to recognize the innocence of a juvenile heart. As Isaac in indignant
refusal turned his disfigured head upon the youthful representative of
an aged paper, he seemed to the thoughtless reporter the incarnation
of a wounded beast. The young fellow opened the door, and beckoned his
mates in to see the new show that was enacting before them. It is only
fair to say that it is due to the modern insanity of the press for
prying into private affairs that the worst phase of the tragedy I am
relating came to pass.

Isaac Masters told his story eagerly and simply.

"I have done nothing to be arrested for," he ended, looking at the
superintendent with his round, honest eyes. "I only did my duty as
anybody else would. Now let me go. Tell me, Mr. Officer, where I can
get a decent night's lodging, for I am going home to-morrow. I've had
enough of this city. I want to go home!"

Something like a sob sounded in the throat of the huge boy as he came
to this pathetic end. Every man in the station, from the most hardened
observer of crime to the youngest reporter of misery, was moved. Isaac
himself, still dizzy from the effects of the blow, nauseated by the
prison smell, the indescribable odor of crime which no disinfectants
can overcome, confounded by the surroundings into which he had been
cast, and trembling with the nameless apprehension that all honest
people feel when drawn into the arms of the law, swayed and swooned
again.

The sergeant and the reporters (for they were not without kind hearts)
busied themselves with bringing him to. From an opposite bench the
murderer lowered, between scowls of pain, upon the man who had crushed
him. There had been revealed to him a simplicity of soul residing in
a body of iron. He saw that the country lad had fainted, not from
physical weakness, but because of mental anguish. Such an apparent
disparity between mind and body had not been brought to the
saloon-keeper's experience before.

"He is the only witness, you say, officer?" inquired the chief. "Are
you sure?"

"Yes, sorr!"

"We'll have to hold him, then. It's a great pity. I don't suppose he
could get a ten-dollar bail." The superintendent shook his gray head
thoughtfully. His subordinates did the same, with an exaggerated air
of distress.

"Where am I? Oh!" What horror in that exhalation, as Isaac realized
the place he was in! He staggered to his feet.

"Give me my bag, quick!" he exclaimed. "I will go."

"I'm afraid you can't go yet." The superintendent spoke as if he hated
to do his duty.

"Not go? Why not? You have no right to hold an innocent man!"

"In cases of assault and murder, the witnesses must be held until they
can furnish bail. That is the law." The white-haired man hurried his
explanation, as if he were ashamed of it.

"I will come back."

The officer shook his head.

"I give you my word I will." Isaac clasped the rail pleadingly.

"I'll have to lock you up to-night; the judge will settle the amount
of your bail to-morrow."

"Lock me up? I tell you I have no friends here! How can I get bail?
Where will you put me?"

"Show him his cell," replied the chief to his sergeant.

"Come along," said the policeman kindly. "All witnesses are treated
that way. We'll give you the most comfortable quarters we've got."

He took Isaac by the arm after the professional manner. The young
man flung off the touch. For an instant his eyes swept the station
menacingly. What if he should exert his strength! There were
two--three--four officers in the room. He might even overpower these,
and dash for liberty. He saw the livid reflection of electric lights
through the windows. Unconsciously he contracted his sinews, and
tightened his muscles until they were rigid. Then the hopelessness of
his position burst upon him like a red strontian fire. He felt blasted
by his disgrace.

"What are you doing to me?" he cried out. "Put me in prison? My God!
This will kill my mother!"

The next morning at ten o'clock Tom Muldoon was released on ten
thousand dollars bail. The surety was promptly furnished by the
alderman of the--th Ward. Muldoon was to present himself before the
grand jury, which met the first Monday in each month. As this was the
beginning of the month, his appearance could not be required for three
weeks at least, and by mutual agreement of the district attorney and
the counsel for the defendant, action might be put off for one or even
for two months more, pending the recovery or eventual death of the
assaulted. This would give the saloon-keeper plenty of time for the
two ribs that Isaac Masters had crushed, to mend!

There are sensitive men and women who would go insane after spending
an innocent night in a cell. In the dryest, the largest, the best of
them there is everything to debase the manhood and nauseate the soul.
The tin cup on the grated window-sill, half-filled with soup which the
last occupant left; the cot to the right of the hopeless door, made
of two boards and one straw mattress; and that necessity which is the
nameless horror of such a narrow incarceration--that which suffocates
and poisons; then the flickering jet up the concrete corridor, casting
such fitful shadows by the prisoner's side that he starts from his cot
in terror to touch the phantoms lest they be real; the alternate waves
of choking heat and harrowing cold; the hammering of the steam-pipes;
the curses, the groans, and the eruptive breathing of the sleeping
and the drunken; the thoughts of home, and friends, and irreparable
disgrace; the feeble hope that, after all, the family will not hear
of this so far away; and the despair because they will--mad visions
of suicide; blasphemy, repentant tears and prayers, each chasing the
other amid the persistent thought that all things are impotent but
freedom. Oh, what a night! What a night!

There are souls that have existed five, ten years under the courtine
of Catharine in the Petropavlovskaya Fortress--drugged, tortured, at
last killed like rats in a hole. All the while the maledict banner
of the Romanoffs writhes above them. What has been the power to keep
alive thousands of prisoners in those bastions, beyond the natural
endurance of the flesh? The glory of principle.

No wonder that a ghastly face and haggard eyes and wavering steps
followed the keeper to the American court-room the next morning;
for nothing could be tortured into a principle to stimulate Isaac's
courage. It is easy to die for right, but not for wrong.

There were three short flights of iron that led past tiers of cells,
through the tombs, into the prisoner's dock. Isaac dully remembered
the huge coils of steam-pipe that curled up the side of the wall. He
thought of pythons. As he passed by, the prisoners awaiting sentence
held the rods of their doors in their hands, like monkeys, and swore,
and laughed, and shot questions at the keeper as he passed along.

"Have you no friends in the city?" proceeded the judge, after he had
examined the witness.

Isaac shook his head disconsolately. "I have about five dollars; that
is all, and my bag--and, sir, my character."

"Then I am afraid I shall have to hold you over in default of bail
until the trial." The judge nodded to the sheriff to bring on the next
case.

"Where are you taking me?"

"To the City Jail," answered the sheriff curtly. "Come along!" With a
mighty effort Isaac wrenched himself loose, and strode to the bar.

"Judge!" he cried. "Judge, you wouldn't do that! Let me go! I will
come back on the trial. Look at me, Judge! What have I done? Why
should I be sent to prison? I am an honest man!"

But the judge was used to such scenes, and he turned his head wearily
away.

"The law requires the government to hold the witness in default of
bail, in cases of capital crime." The judge was a kind man, and he
tried to do a kind act by explaining the subtle process of the law
again to the lad. When he had done this, he nodded. And now the men
approached Isaac to remove him, by force if necessary. But the New
Hampshire boy stood before the bar of justice stolidly. His eyes
wandered aimlessly, and his lips muttered. Paralysis swept near him at
that instant.

"Am--I--imprisoned because I am friendless and poor? Is this your
law?"

The judge shrugged his shoulders, but many in the court-room felt
uncomfortable.

"Then," spoke Isaac Masters, rising to his greatest height, and
uplifting his hand as if to call God to witness, "if this is law--damn
your law!" It was his first and last oath. Every man in the room
started to his feet at the utterance of that supreme legal blasphemy.
But the judge was silent. What sentence might he not inflict for such
contempt of court? What sentence could he? The witness had no money,
wherewith to be fined, and he was going to prison at any rate. The
judge was great enough to put himself in Isaac's place. He stroked his
beard meditatively.

"Remove the witness," he said. This was sentence enough. Although
two officers advanced cautiously, as if prepared for a tussle, a babe
might have led the giant unto the confines of Hades by the pressure of
its little finger. For Isaac wept.

[Illustration: "OH, MY GOD!" HE SOBBED. "MY GOD! MY GOD!"]

There were two other witnesses in the white-washed cell to which Isaac
was assigned. It was on the south side, and large, and sunny, and
often the door was left unlocked; but the cell looked out into a
crumbling grave-yard. One of these witnesses was a boy of about
eighteen, pale to the suggestion of a mortal disease. It did not
take Isaac long to find out that this complexion did not indicate
consumption, but was only prison pallor. The other prisoner was less
pathetic as to color, but he was listless and discouraged. The only
amusement of these men consisted in chewing tobacco in enormous
quantities, playing surreptitious games of high-low-jack, in reading
the daily paper, a single magazine, and waiting for the sun to enter
the barred window, and watching it in the afternoon as it slipped
away. These two men tried to cheer the new comer in a rude, hearty
way; but when the country lad learned that they had been in detention
for six months already, held by the government as main witnesses
against the first mate of their brig, their words were as dust. They
only choked him.

"What did you do," Isaac asked, "to get you in such a scrape?"

"We saw the mate shoot the cook; that's all."

"If I'd known," said the pale boy, with, a look out of the window,
"how Uncle Sam keeps us so long--I wished I hadn't said nothing. But
we get a dollar a day; that's something." And with a sigh that he
meant to engulf with his philosophy, the boy turned his face away, so
that Isaac should not suspect the tears that salted the flavor of the
coarse tobacco.

The dark outlook, the blind future, the hopeless cell, the disordered
table, the lazy life that deadened all activity but that of the
imagination, the lack of vigorous air, the lounging companionship,
but, above all things, the thought of his mother and Abbie, and the
brooding over what he dared to call an outrage perpetrated, in the
name of the law, upon himself--these things made a turmoil of Isaac's
brain. There was a daily conflict between the Christian and the
criminal way of looking at his irreparable misfortune which he was
surprised to find that even the possession of his father's Bible could
not control.

There were times when it needed all his intelligence to keep him from
springing on the keeper, and running amuck in the ward-room, simply
for the sake of uttering a violent, brutal protest. Then there were
hours when he was too exhausted to leave his cot. At such a time he
wrote a letter, his first letter to his mother, and he made the keeper
promise to have it mailed so that no one could possibly suspect that
it started from a prison.

    "DEAR MOTHER"--it ran--"I have not written to you for three
    weeks since I have been here, because I have been sick. I am
    now in a very safe place, and am doing pretty well. I clear my
    food and board and seventy-five cents a day. I have not been
    paid yet. I think you had better not write to me until I can
    give you a permanent address. I read my Bible every day and
    love you more dearly than ever. I have tried to do my duty as
    you would have me. Give my love to Abbie. I will write soon
    again.

    "Ever your affectionate son,

    "ISAAC."

The simpleton! Could he not suspect that country papers copy from city
columns all that is of special local interest, and more? And did he
not know that it is one of the disgraces of modern journalism that no
department is so copiously edited, annotated, and illustrated as that
of criminal intelligence?

Could he not surmise that on the Saturday following his incarceration
the very mountains rang with the news? That it should be mangled
and turned topsy-turvy, and that in the eyes of his simple-minded
neighbors he should be thought of as the murderer, by reason of
his great strength? For how could it come into the intelligence of
law-abiding citizens and law-respecting people, that a man should be
shut up in prison, no matter what the newspapers said, unless he had
_done_ something to deserve it? What did the mountaineers know about
the laws of bail, and habeas corpus? And could such news, gossiped by
one neighbor, repeated by another, confirmed by a third, fail to reach
the desolate farm-house in which a woman, feeble, old and faint of
heart, lay trembling between life and death?

The grand jury meets on the first Monday of each month to indict those
for trial against whom reasonable proofs of guilt are obtained. The
saloon loafer had been shot in the groin, and pending his injuries
indictment was waived. In proportion as the wound proved serious and
the recovery prolonged, trial was postponed.

Isaac Masters had now been locked up six weeks. He had not yet heard
from home, and had only written once. About noon, one day, the keeper
came to tell him that a woman wished to see him. Isaac thought that
it was his mother, and the shame of meeting her in the guard-room
surrounded by tiers upon tiers of murderers and thieves and petty
criminals overcame him. The man of strength sat down on his cot, and
putting his hands over his white face, trembled violently. The guard,
who knew that Isaac was an innocent man, spoke to him kindly.

"Go! go!" said the prisoner in a voice of agony, "and tell my mother
that I will be right there."

"Mother!" ejaculated the guard. "She's the youngest mother for a man
of your size I ever see." He winked at the sailor, and went.

Then Isaac knew that it was Abbie, who had come alone, and he
tightened his teeth and lips together, and went down.

Isaac slowly came down the perforated iron stairs that were attached
to his prison wing like an inside fire-escape. On the bench in the
middle of the guard-room sat Abbie--a little, helpless thing she
seemed to him--facing the entrance, as if she feared to remove her
eyes from the door that led to freedom.

Abbie was greatly changed. She was dressed in black. If Isaac had been
a free man, this fact would have startled him. As it was, he was so
spent with suffering that his dulled mind could not understand it.
At first Abbie did not recognize her hearty lover. His huge frame was
gaunt and wasted. His ruddy face was white, and his cheeks hung
in folds like moulded putty. His country clothes dropped about him
aimlessly. From crown to foot he had been devastated by unmerited
disgrace. Grief may glorify; but the other ravages.

This meeting between the lovers was singularly undramatic. Each shrank
a little from the other. They shook hands quietly. His was burning;
her's like a swamp in October dew. He sat down beside her on the bench
awkwardly, while the deputy looked at them with careless curiosity. He
was used to nothing but tragedy and crime, and to his experienced mind
the two had become long ago confused.

"Mother?" asked Isaac, nervously moving his feet. "Didn't she get my
letter?"

The girl nodded gravely, tried to meet his eyes, and then looked away.
Tears fell unresisted down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe
them off. It was as if she were too well acquainted with them to check
their flow.

Then the truth began to filter through Isaac's bewebbed intellect. He
spread his knees apart, rested his arms upon them, and bent his head
to his hands. His great figure shook.

"Oh, my God!" he sobbed. "My God! My God!"

"Oh, don't, Isaac, don't!" Abbie put her hand upon his head as if he
had been her boy. "Your mother was as happy as could be. She was happy
to die. We buried her yesterday!"

How could she tell him that his mother had died of grief--too sorely
smitten to bear it--for his sake?

But Isaac's head rose and fell--rose and fell rhythmically between his
hands. His breath came in low groans, like that of an animal smitten
dead by a criminally heavy load.

"She sent her love before she passed away. She wanted you to come back
to the farm as soon as you could. She believed in you, Ikey, even if
you were in prison. She said Paul was in prison, and that it was a
terrible mistake. She knew your father's son would not depart from his
God!"

As Abbie uttered this simple confession of country faith, the
pitiful man lifted up his eyes from the tiled floor and looked at her
gratefully. His dry lips moved, and he tried to speak.

"Yes," was all he said, with fierce humility. Then the lack of breath
choked him.

"She made me promise not to give you up, and to come and see you. Of
course you are innocent, Ikey?" Abbie did not look at him.

"Yes," he answered mechanically.

"I know," she said softly.

Of what use were more words? They would only beat like waves against
the granite of his broken heart. The two sat silent for a time. Then
Abbie said, "I must go." She edged a little towards him, and touched
his coat.

"When will you come out? I will explain it all to the minister and the
neighbors. We will be married as soon as you come home. She wanted us
to! Oh, Ikey! Oh, Ikey! My poor--poor boy!"

Isaac arose unsteadily. It was time for her to go, for the turnkey had
nodded to him.

A fierce, mad indignation at his fate and what it had wrought upon his
mother and upon his honorable name blinded him. He did not even say
good-by, but left the girl standing in the middle of the guard-room
alone. At any cost he must get back to his cell. Supposing his mind
should give way before he got there? He staggered to the stairway. He
threw his hands up, and groped on the railing. A blindness struck him
before he had mounted two steps. He did not hear a woman's shriek, nor
the rushing of feet, nor the sound of his own fall.

When he awaked, he was alone in the witness cell; and when he put his
white hands to his hair, he felt that his head was shaven. The chipper
prison doctor told him that he was getting nicely over a brain fever.

It was three months after this before the case of Tom Muldoon came
upon the docket. The man whom the saloon-keeper had shot had but just
been declared out of clanger and on the road to recovery.

When the case was called, the district attorney arose from his
desk under the bench, and represented to the court that as for some
unforeseen reason the said Frank Stevens, who had been maliciously and
wilfully assaulted and shot by the said Tom Muldoon, had refused to
prosecute, the prosecution rested upon the government, which would
rely upon the direct evidence of one witness to sustain the case.

The district attorney, who was an unbought man, and whose future
election depended upon the number of convictions he secured for the
State, now opened his case with such decision, vigor, and masterful
certainty that the policemen and other friends of the defendant began
to quake for the boss of the--th Ward.

"And now, your honor, I will call to the witness-stand a young man of
stainless life, whom the government has held as a witness since the
brutal assault was committed. He is in the custody of the sheriff of
the county, Isaac Masters!"

All eyes turned to the door at the left of the bench. There was a
bustle of expectancy, and a pallor upon the face of Tom Muldoon.

"Isaac Masters!" repeated the attorney impatiently. "Will the court
officer produce the witness?"

The judge rapped his pencil on the desk in a nervous tattoo. Above all
things he detested delay.

"I hope Your Honor will grant me a few moments," said the attorney,
annoyed. "The witness must surely be here directly."

"It can go over--" began the judge indulgently, when he was
interrupted by the entrance of the sheriff of the county himself. This
man beckoned to the district attorney, and the two whispered together
with the appearance of great excitement.

"Well?" said the judge, yawning. "Produce your witness."

But the attorney for the government came back to his place slowly,
with head bent. He was very pale, and evidently much shaken. The
saloon-keeper's face expanded with hope, as he leaned aside and
whispered to a friendly wardman.

What was the evidence? Where was the witness? Silent? Why? The
question flashed from face to face in the court-room. Had he escaped?
Or been spirited away? Such things had been known to happen. Or had he
become insane during his incarceration? Such things had been known to
happen, too. Gentlemen of the law! Gentlemen of the jury! Sheriff
of the county! Judge of the Superior Court! Where is the witness? We
demand him on penalty of contempt. Contempt of your Honorable Court?
Contempt of court!

What? Is he not here? After all this cost to the State, and to the
man? Why has he not met his enforced appointment? If not here, why
was the innocent witness suffocated behind bars and walls, while the
murderer was free to dispense rum?

"Your Honor," began the attorney, with white lips, "a most unfortunate
occurrence has happened, one that the government truly deplores. The
witness has been suddenly called away. In fact, Your Honor--hem!--in
short, I have been informed by the sheriff that the witness cannot
answer to the summons of the court. He is disqualified from subpoena.
In fact, Your Honor, the witness died this morning."

The lawyer took out his handkerchief ostentatiously. He then bent to
his papers with shaking hands. He looked them over carefully while the
court held its breath.

"As the government is not in possession of any evidence against
Muldoon, I move to nolle prosequi the case."

"It is granted," said the judge, with a keen glance at the bloated
prisoner, whom wardmen and officers of the law were already
congratulating profusely.

"Order!" continued the judge. "Prisoner, stand up! You are allowed
to go upon your own recognizance in the sum of two hundred and fifty
dollars."

The next case was called, a new crowd entered the vitiated room,
and the court proceeded with its routine as if nothing unusual had
happened.

And the silent witness has passed out of every memory but mine, and
that of one poor girl mourning in the New Hampshire hills.

[Illustration: THE SUN'S LIGHT]

THE SUN'S LIGHT

BY SIR ROBERT BALL,

LOWNDEAN PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY AND GEOMETRY AT CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND;
FORMERLY ROYAL ASTRONOMER OF IRELAND.

The light of the great orb of day emanates solely from a closely
fitting robe of surpassing brightness. The great bulk of the sun which
lies within that brilliant mantle is comparatively obscure, and might
at first seem to play but an unimportant part so far as the dispensing
of light and heat is concerned. It may indeed be likened to the
coal-cellar from whence are drawn the supplies that produce the warmth
and brightness of the domestic hearth; while the brilliant robe where
the sun develops its heat corresponds to the grate in which the coal
is consumed. With regard to the thickness of the robe, we might liken
this brilliant exterior to the rind of an orange, while the gloomy
interior regions would correspond to the edible portion of the fruit.
Generally speaking, the rind of the orange is rather too coarse for
the purpose of this illustration. It might be nearer the truth to
affirm that the luminous part of the sun may be compared to the
delicate filmy skin of the peach. There can be no doubt that if this
glorious veil were unhappily stripped from the sun, the great luminary
would forthwith lose its powers of shedding forth light and heat. The
spots which we see so frequently to fleck the dazzling surface, are
merely rents in the brilliant mantle through which we are permitted to
obtain glimpses of the comparatively non-luminous interior.

As the ability of the sun to warm and light this earth arises from the
peculiar properties of the thin glowing shell which surrounds it, a
problem of the greatest interest is presented in an inquiry as to the
material composition of this particular layer of solar substance.
We want, in fact, to ascertain what that special stuff can be which
enables the sun to be so useful to us dwellers on the earth. This
great problem has been solved, and the result is extremely interesting
and instructive; it has been discovered that the material which
confers on the sun its beneficent power is also a material which
is found in the greatest abundance on the earth, where it fulfils
purposes of the very highest importance. Let us see, in the first
place, what is the most patent fact with regard to the structure
of this solar mantle possessed of a glory so indescribable. It is
perfectly plain that it is not composed of any continuous solid
material. It has a granular character which is sometimes perceptible
when viewed through a powerful telescope, but which can be seen more
frequently and studied more satisfactorily on a photographic plate.
These granules have an obvious resemblance to clouds; and clouds,
indeed, we may call them. There is, however, a very wide difference
between the solar clouds and those clouds which float in our own
atmosphere. The clouds which we know so well are, of course, merely
vast collections of globules of water suspended in the air. No doubt
the mighty solar clouds do also consist of incalculable myriads
of globules of some particular substance floating in the solar
atmosphere. The material of which these solar clouds are composed
is, however, I need hardly say, not water, nor is it anything in
the remotest degree resembling water. Some years ago any attempt to
ascertain the particular substance out of which the solar clouds were
formed would at once have been regarded as futile; inasmuch as such a
problem would then have been thought to lie outside the possibilities
of human knowledge. The advance of discovery has, however, shed a
flood of light on the subject, and has revealed the nature of that
material to whose presence we are indebted for the solar beneficence.
The detection of the particular element to which all living creatures
are so much indebted is due to that distinguished physicist, Dr. G.
Johnstone Stoney.

In the whole range of science, one of the most remarkable discoveries
ever made is that which has taught us that the elementary bodies of
which the sun and the stars are constructed are essentially the same
as those of which the earth has been built. This discovery was indeed
as unexpected as it is interesting. Could we ever have anticipated
that a body ninety-three millions of miles away, as the sun is, or a
hundred million of millions of miles distant, as a star may be, should
actually prove to have been formed from the same materials as those
which compose this earth of ours and all which it contains, whether
animate or inanimate? Yet such is indeed the fact. We are thus, in
a measure, prepared to find that the material which forms the great
solar clouds may turn out to be a substance not quite unknown to the
terrestrial chemist. Nay, further, its very abundance in the sun might
seem to suggest that this particular material might perhaps prove to
be one which was very abundant on the earth.

[Illustration: THE SUN'S CORONA.

From a photograph taken by Professor Schaeberle, at Mina Bronces,
Chili, in April, 1893, and kindly loaned by Professor E.S. Holden,
director of the Lick Observatory.]

I had occasion to make use of the word carbon in a lecture which
I gave a short time ago, and I thought when I did so that I was of
course merely using a term with whose meaning all my audience must be
well acquainted. But I found out afterwards that in this matter I had
been mistaken. I was told that my introduction of the word carbon had
quite puzzled some of those who were listening to me. I learned that a
few of those who were unfamiliar with this word went to a gentleman
of their acquaintance who they thought would be likely to know, and
begged from him an explanation of this mysterious term; whereupon he
told them that he was not quite sure himself, but believed that carbon
was something which was made out of nitro-glycerine! Even at the risk
of telling what every schoolboy ought to know, I will say that
carbon is one of the commonest as well as one of the most remarkable
substances in nature. A lump of coke only differs from a piece
of carbon by the ash which the coke leaves behind when burned. As
charcoal is almost entirely carbon, so wood is largely composed of
this same element. Carbon is indeed present everywhere. In various
forms carbon is in the earth beneath our feet, and in the air which we
breath. This substance courses with the blood through our veins; it is
by carbon that the heat of the body is sustained; and the same element
is intimately associated with life in every phase. Nor is the presence
of carbon merely confined to this earth. We know it abounds on other
bodies in space. It has been shown to be eminently characteristic of
the composition of comets. Carbon is not only intimately associated
with articles of daily utility, and of plenteous abundance, but with
the most exquisite gems of "purest ray serene." More precious than
gold, more precious than rubies, the diamond itself is no more than
the same element in crystalline form. But the greatest of all the
functions of carbon in the universe has yet to be mentioned. This same
wonderful element has been shown to be in all probability the material
which constitutes those glowing solar clouds to whose kindly radiation
our very life owes its origin.

[Illustration: At 10.34 A.M. The height of the eruption at this stage
was 135,200 miles.]

[Illustration: At 10.40 A.M. Height, 161,500 miles.]

[Illustration: At 10.58 A.M. Height, 280,800 miles.

THREE VIEWS OF AN ERUPTIVE PROMINENCE OF THE SUN.

From photographs taken at Kenwood Observatory, Chicago, March 25,
1895, and kindly loaned by Professor George E. Hale, of the Chicago
University.]

In the ordinary incandescent electric lamp, the brilliant light is
produced by a glowing filament of carbon. The powerful current of
electricity experiences so much resistance as it flows through this
badly conducting substance, that it raises the temperature of the
carbon wire so as to make it dazzlingly white-hot. Indeed the carbon
is thus elevated to a temperature far in excess of that which could
be obtained in any other way. The reason why carbon is employed in
the electric lamp, in preference to any other substance, may be easily
understood. Suppose we tried to employ an iron wire as the glowing
filament within the well-known glass globe. Then when the current was
turned on that iron would of course become red-hot and white-hot;
but ere a sufficient temperature had been attained to produce the
requisite illumination, the iron wire would have been fused into drops
of liquid, the current would have been broken, and the lamp would have
been destroyed. Nor would the attempt to make an incandescent lamp
have proved much more successful had the filament been made of
any other metal. The least fusible of metals is the costly element
platinum, but even a wire of platinum, though it would stand much
more heat than a wire of iron or of steel, would not have retained the
solid form by the time it had been raised to the temperature necessary
for an incandescent lamp.

There is no known metal, and perhaps no substance whatever, which
demands so high a temperature to fuse it as does the element carbon.
A filament of carbon, and a filament of carbon alone, will remain
unfused and unbroken when heated by the electric current to the
dazzling brilliance necessary for effective illumination. This is
the reason why this particular element is so indispensable for our
incandescent electric lamps. Modern research has now taught us that,
just as the electrician has to employ carbon as the immediate agent in
producing the brightest of artificial lights down here, so the sun in
heaven uses precisely the same element as the immediate agent in
the production of its transcendent light and heat. Owing to the
extraordinary fervor which prevails in the interior parts of the sun,
all substances there present, no matter how difficult we may find
their fusion, would have to submit to be melted, nay, even to be
driven off into vapor. If submitted to the heat of this appalling
solar furnace, an iron poker, for instance, would vanish into
invisible vapor. In the presence of the intense heat of the inner
parts of the sun, even carbon itself is unable to remain solid.
It would seem that it must assume a gaseous form under such
circumstances, just as the copper and the iron and all the other
substances do which yield more readily than it to the fierce heat of
their surroundings.

The buoyancy of carbon vapor is one of its most remarkable
characteristics. Accordingly immense volumes of the carbon steam
in the sun soar at a higher level than do the vapors of the other
elements. Thus carbon becomes a very large and important constituent
of the more elevated regions of the solar atmosphere. We can
understand what happens to these carbon vapors by the analogous case
of the familiar clouds in our own skies. It is true, no doubt, that
our terrestrial clouds are composed of a material totally different
from that which constitutes the solar clouds. The sun evaporates the
water from the great oceans which cover so large a proportion of our
earth. The vapor thus produced ascends in the form of invisible gas
through our atmosphere, until it reaches an altitude thousands of
feet above the surface of the earth. The chill that the watery vapor
experiences up there is so great that the vapor collects into little
liquid beads, and it is, of course, these liquid beads, associated in
countless myriads, which form the clouds we know so well.

We can now understand what happens as the buoyant carbon vapors
soar upwards through the sun's atmosphere. They attain at last to an
elevation where the fearful intensity of the solar heat has so
far abated that, though nearly all other elements may still remain
entirely gaseous, yet the exceptionally refractory carbon begins to
return to the liquid state. At the first stage in this return, the
carbon vapor conducts itself just as does the ascending watery vapor
from the earth when about to be transformed into a visible cloud.
Under the influence of a chill the carbon vapor collects into a myriad
host of little beads of liquid. Each of these drops of liquid carbon
in the glorious solar clouds has a temperature and a corresponding
radiance vastly exceeding that with which the filament glows in the
incandescent electric lamp. When we remember further that the entire
surface of our luminary is coated with these clouds, every particle
of which is thus intensely luminous, we need no longer wonder at that
dazzling brilliance which, even across the awful gulf of ninety-three
millions of miles, produces for us the indescribable glory of
daylight.

_Sir Robert Ball will contribute a series of articles on "The Marvels
of the Universe." Six or eight of these articles may be expected
during the coming year_.

[Illustration: THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY BUILDINGS, ANDOVER,
MASSACHUSETTS.]

CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.

BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS,

AUTHOR OF "THE GATES AJAR," "THE MADONNA OF THE TUBS," ETC.

LIFE IN ANDOVER BEFORE THE WAR.

Andover is--or Andover was--like the lady to whom Steele gave
immortality in the finest and most famous epigram ever offered to
woman.

To have loved Andover; to have been born in Andover--I am brought up
short, in these notes, by the sudden recollection that I was _not_
born in Andover. It has always been so difficult to believe it, that I
am liable any day to forget it; but the facts compel me to infer that
I was born within a mile of the State House. I must have become a
citizen of Andover at the age of three, when my father resigned his
Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric in Andover Seminary.
I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the
large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund
horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old--to
this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological
trustee--and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green,
so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her
father and demanded that he go build her a brick sidewalk to play
upon.

What, I wonder, may be the earliest act of memory on record? Mine is
not at all unusual--dating only to two and a half years; at which time
I clearly remember being knocked down by my dog, in my father's area
in Boston, and being crowed over by a rooster of abnormal proportions
who towered between me and the sky, a dragon in size and capabilities.

My father always maintained that he distinctly remembered hearing the
death of Napoleon announced in his presence when he was one year and a
half old.

Is the humiliating difference between the instinctive selection of
Napoleon and that of the rooster, one of temperament or sex? In either
case, it is significant enough to lead one to drop the subject.

Next to having been born in a university town, comes the advantage--if
it be an advantage--of having spent one's youth there. Mr. Howells
says that he must be a dull fellow who does not, at some time or
other, hate his native village; and I must confess that I have not, at
all stages of my life, held my present opinion of Andover. There have
been times when her gentle indifference to the preoccupations of the
world has stung me, as all serenity stings restlessness. There have
been times when the inevitable limitations of her horizon have seemed
as familiar as the coffin-lid to the dead.

[Illustration: PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS'S STUDY.

Drawn from a photograph taken after Professor Phelps's death, when the
study had been somewhat dismantled.]

There was an epoch when her theology--But, nevertheless, I certainly
look back upon Andover Hill with a very gentle pleasure and heartfelt
sense of debt.

It has been particularly asked of me to give some form to my
recollections of a phase of local life which is now so obviously
passing away that it has a certain historical interest.

That Andover remains upon the map of Massachusetts yet, one does not
dispute; but the Andover of New England theology--the Andover of a
peculiar people, the Andover that held herself apart from the world
and all that was therein--will soon become an interesting wraith.

The life of a professor's daughter in a university town is always a
little different from the lives of other girls; but the difference
seems to me--unless she be by nature entirely alien to it--in favor of
the girl. Were I to sum in one word my impressions of the influences
of Andover life upon a robust young mind and heart, I should call them
_gentle_.

As soon as we began to think, we saw a community engaged in studying
thought. As soon as we began to feel, we were aware of a neighborhood
that did not feel superficially; at least, in certain higher
directions. When we began to ask the "questions of life," which all
intelligent young people ask sooner or later, we found ourselves in a
village of three institutions and their dependencies committed to the
pursuit of an ideal of education for which no amount of later, or
what we call broader, training ever gives us any better word than
Christian.

Such things tell. Andover girls did not waltz, or suffer summer
engagements at Bar Harbor, a new one every year; neither did they read
Ibsen, or yellow novels; nor did they handle the French stories that
are hidden from parents; though they were excellent French scholars in
their day.

I do not even know that one can call them more "serious" than their
city sisters--for we were a merry lot; at least, _my_ lot were. But
they were, I believe, especially open-hearted, gentle-minded girls.

If they were "out of the world" to a certain extent, they were, to
another, out of the evil of it. As I look back upon the little
drama between twelve and twenty--I might rather say, between two and
twenty--Andover young people seem to me to have been as truly and
naturally innocent as one may meet anywhere in the world. Some of
these private records of girl-history were so white, so clear, so
sweet, that to read them would be like watching a morning-glory open.
The world is full, thank Heaven, of lovely girls; but though other
forms or phases of gentle society claim their full quota, I never saw
a lovelier than those I knew on Andover Hill.

One terrible tragedy, indeed, befell our little "set;" for we had our
sets in Andover, as well as they of Newport or New York.

A high-bred girl of exceptional beauty was furtively kissed one
evening by a daring boy (not a native of Andover, I hasten to
explain), and the furore which followed this unprecedented enormity
it would be impossible to describe to a member of more complicated
circles of society. Fancy the reception given such a commonplace at
any of our fashionable summer resorts to-day!

On Andover Hill the event was a moral cataclysm. Andover girls were
country girls, but not of rustic (any more than of metropolitan)
social training. Which of them would have suffered an Academy boy,
walking home with her from a lecture or a prayer-meeting, any little
privilege which he might not have taken in her father's house, and
with her mother's knowledge? I never knew one. The case of which I
speak was historic, and as far as I ever knew, unique, and was that of
a victim, not an offender.

The little beauty to whom this atrocity happened cried all night and
all the next day; she was reported not to have stopped crying for
twenty-six hours. Her pretty face grew wan and haggard. She was too
ill to go to her lessons.

The teachers--to whom she had promptly related the
circumstance--condoled with her; the entire school vowed to avenge
her; we were a score of as disturbed and indignant girls as ever wept
over woman's wrongs, or scorned a man's depravity.

Yet, for aught I know to the contrary, this abandoned young man may
have grown up to become a virtuous member of society; possibly even
an exemplary husband and father. I have never been able to trace his
history; probably the moral repulsion was too great.

Yet they were no prigs, for their innocence! Andover girls, in the
best and brightest sense of the word, led a gay life.

The preponderance of young men on the Hill gave more than ample
opportunity for well-mannered good times; and we made the most of
them.

[Illustration: VIEW LOOKING FROM THE FRONT OF ELIZABETH STUART
PHELPS'S HOME IN ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.]

Legends of the feminine triumphs of past generations were handed
breathlessly down to us, and cherished with awe. A lady of the
village, said to have been once very handsome, was credibly reported
to have refused nineteen offers of marriage. Another, still plainly
beautiful, was known to have received and declined the suits of nine
theologues in one winter. Neither of these ladies married. We watched
their whitening hairs and serene faces with a certain pride of sex,
not easily to be understood by a man. When we began to think how
many times they _might_ have married, the subject assumed sensational
proportions. In fact, the maiden ladies of Andover always, I fancied,
regarded each other with a peculiar sense of peace. Each knew--and
knew that the rest knew--that it was (to use the Andover phraseology)
not of predestination or foreordination, but of free will absolute,
that an Andover girl passed through life alone. This little social
fact, which is undoubtedly true of most, if not all, university towns,
had mingled effects upon impressionable girls. For the proportion of
masculine society was almost Western in its munificence.

Perhaps it is my duty to say just here that, if honestly put to
the question, I should admit that this proportion was almost too
munificent for the methods of education then--and still to an extent
now--in vogue.

A large Academy for boys, and a flourishing Seminary for young men,
set across the village streets from two lively girls' schools, gave
to one observer of this little scholastic world her first argument for
co-education.

I am confident that if the boys who serenaded (right manfully) under
the windows of Abbott Academy or of "The Nunnery," or who tied
their lady's colors to the bouquets that they tossed on balconies of
professors' houses, had been put, class to class, in competition with
us, they would have wasted less time upon us; and I could not deny
that if the girls who cut little holes in their fans through which one
could look, undetected and unreproved, at one's favorite Academy boy,
on some public occasion, had been preparing to meet or pass that boy
at Euclid or Xenophon recitation next morning, he would have occupied
less of their fancy. Intellectual competition is simpler, severer, and
more wholesome than the unmitigated social plane; and a mingling of
the two may be found calculated to produce the happiest results.

"Poor souls!" said a Boston lady once to me, upon my alluding to a
certain literary club which was at that time occupying the enthusiasm
of the Hill. "Poor souls! I suppose they are so starved for society!"
We can fancy the amusement with which this comment would have been
received if it had been repeated--but it never was repeated till this
moment--in Andover.

For Andover had her social life, and knew no better, for the most
part, than to enjoy it. It is true that many of her diversions took on
that religious or academic character natural to the place. Of village
parish life we knew nothing, for our chapel was, like others of its
kind, rather an exclusive little place of worship. We were ignorant
of pastoral visits, deacons, parochial gossip, church fairs, and what
Professor Park used to call "the doughnut business;" and, though we
cultivated a weekly prayer-meeting in the lecture-room, I think its
chief influence was as a training-school for theological students
whose early efforts at public exhortation (poor fellows!) quaveringly
besought their Professors to grow in grace, and admonished the
families of the Faculty circle to repent.

But we had our lectures and our concerts--quite distinct, as orthodox
circles will understand, from those missionary festivals which went, I
never discovered why, by the name of Monthly Concerts--and our
Porter Rhets. I believe this cipher stood for Porter Rhetorical; and
research, if pushed far enough, would develop the fact that Porter
indicated a dead professor who once founded a chair and a debating
society for young men. Then we had our anniversaries and our
exhibitions, when we got ourselves into our organdie muslins or best
coats, and listened to the boys spouting Greek and Latin orations in
the old, red brick Academy, and heard the theological students--but
here this reporter is forced to pause. I suppose I ought to be ashamed
of it, but the fact is, that I never attended an anniversary exercise
of the Seminary in my life. It would be difficult to say why. I think
my reluctance consisted in an abnormal objection to Trustees. So far
as I know, they were an innocent set of men, of good reputations and
quite harmless. But I certainly acquired, at a very early age,
an antipathy to this class of Americans from which I have never
recovered.

Our anniversaries occurred, according to the barbaric custom of the
times, in the hottest heat of August; and if there be a hotter place
in Massachusetts than Andover was, I have yet to simmer in it. Our
houses were, of course, thrown open, and crowded to the shingles.

I remember once sharing my tiny room with a little guest who would not
have the window open, though the thermometer had stood above ninety,
day and night, for a week; and because she was a trustee's daughter,
I must not complain. Perhaps this experience emphasized a natural lack
of sympathy with her father.

At all events, I cherished a hidden antagonism to these excellent and
useful men, of which I make this late and public confession. It seemed
to me that everybody in Andover was afraid of them. I "took it out" in
the cordial defiance of a born rebel.

Then we had our tea-parties--theological, of course--when the students
came to tea in alphabetical order; and the Professor told his best
stories; and the ladies of the family were expected to keep more or
less quiet while the gentlemen talked. But this, I should say, was of
the earlier time.

And, of course, we had the occasional supply; and as for the clerical
guest, in some shape he was always with us.

I remember the shocked expression on the face of a not very eminent
minister, because I joined in the conversation when, in the absence
of my father's wife, the new mother, it fell to me to take the head of
the table. It was truly a stimulating conversation, intellectual, and,
like all clerical conversations, vivaciously amusing; and it swept
me in, unconsciously. I think this occurred after I had written "The
Gates Ajar."

This good man has since become an earnest anti-suffragist and opposer
of the movement for the higher education of women. I can only hope he
does not owe his dismal convictions to the moral jar received on that
occasion; and I regret to learn that his daughter has been forbidden
to go to college.

[Illustration: DR. EDWARDS A. PARK, FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN
THEOLOGY IN ANDOVER SEMINARY.

From a photograph taken in 1862 by J.W. Black, Boston.]

We had, too, our levees--that was the word; by it one meant what is
now called a reception. I have been told that my mother, who was a
woman of marked social tastes and gifts, oppressed by the lack of
variety in Andover life, originated this innocent form of dissipation.

These festivities, like others in academic towns, were democratic to
a degree amusing or inspiring, according to the temperament of the
spectator.

The professors' brilliantly-lighted drawing-rooms were thrown open to
the students and families of the Hill. Distinguished men jostled the
Academy boy who built the furnace fire to pay for his education, and
who might be found on the faculty some day, in his turn, or might
himself acquire an enviable and well-earned celebrity.

Eminent guests from out of town stood elbow to elbow with poor
theologues destined to the missionary field, and pathetically
observing the Andover levee as one of the last occasions of civilized
gayety in which it might be theirs to share. Ladies from Beacon Street
or from New York might be seen chatting with some gentle figure in
black, one of those widowed and brave women whose struggles to sustain
life and educate their children by boarding students form so large a
part of the pathos of academic towns.

One such I knew who met on one of these occasions a member of the
club for which she provided. The lady was charming, well-dressed,
well-mannered.

The young man, innocent of linen, had appeared at the levee in a gray
flannel shirt. Introductions passed. The lady bowed.

"I am happy," stammered the poor fellow, "I am happy to meet the woman
who cooks our victuals."

If it be asked, Why educate a man like that for the Christian
ministry?--but it was _not_ asked. Like all monstrosities, he grew
without permission.

Let us hasten to call him the exception that he was to what, on the
whole, was (in those days) a fair, wholesome rule of theological
selection. The Professor's eyes flashed when he heard the story.

"I have never approved," I think he said, "of the Special Course."

For the Professor believed in no short-cut to the pulpit; but pleaded
for all the education, all the opportunity, all the culture, all
the gifts, all the graces, possible to a man's privilege or energy,
whereby to fit him to preach the Christian religion. But, like other
professors, he could not always have his way.

It ought to be said, perhaps, that, beside the self-made or
self-making man, there always sat upon the old benches in the
lecture-room a certain proportion of gentlemen born and bred to ease
and affluence, who had chosen their life's work from motives which
were, at least, as much to be respected as the struggles of the
converted newsboy or the penitent expressman.

Take her at her dullest, I think we were very fond of Andover; and
though we dutifully improved our opportunities to present ourselves in
other circles of society, yet, like fisher-folk or mountain-folk, we