Chapter 3 No.3

In his Fast-Day sermon Dr. Burge delivered himself of much weighty testimony against those thaumaturgical incantations of heathenism which had been revived among us. With his splendor of clerical pause and emphasis he read the denunciations against a sinful nation to which the prophet Isaiah has affixed the awful words,-"Saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts."

"And they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbor, city against city, and kingdom against kingdom."

Here the preacher's dark eyes left the sacred volume, and seemed to gaze upon some coming struggle in which the sins of the people would meet a bloody retribution. Then, referring to the page, he pronounced with bitterness of holy indignation the prophetic curse which was that day fulfilled in our cherished New England.

"And they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to the wizards."

The sermon made no more visible impression upon the sinful portion of the congregation than homilies against novel and pleasant indulgences are wont to do.

"The Apostle was right, after all," said Colonel Prowley, quoting the text upon the meeting-house steps; "we should 'try the spirits.'"

"No objection to that," said the post-master; "but here's Dr. Burge tells us to keep out of their way, and call them all humbugs, without trying them at all."

The gentleman referred to joined our party upon the meeting-house green, and accompanied us home.

As we entered the house, our ears were saluted by a sort of scuffling noise, with an accompaniment of broken English. Miss Turligood, highly charged with the Detached Vitalized Electricity, or some stimulant of equal potency, ran to meet us in the entry, to enjoin silence and a passive state of mind before entering the parlor. The manifestations during service had been most wonderful. Twynintuft had lifted the table to the ceiling, with Mr. Stellato clinging to the legs. Mrs. Colfodder had had her back-hair taken down, and the housemaid was certain that somebody tried to kiss her.

We made for the parlor with all convenient speed. Notwithstanding the solemn adjurations of Dr. Burge, we entertained guilty hopes of seeing some of the marvels which had become such positive drugs in our absence. But to see anything was, for a long time, out of the question; for the spirits had insisted upon having the shutters closed, and shawls pinned up before the cracks in the same, ere they would favor mortals with an exhibition. Finally, dim outlines revealed themselves through the obscurity. We made out a female figure (it was the cook, so Miss Prowley whispered) who was haranguing the assembly at the rate of a word every thirty seconds, or thereabouts.

Cook as Twynintuft:-"I am Mister Twynintuft. I set lots by you all. I left my bright spirit-home to come here to-day. The squashes was musty afore they was brought into the house. No blame to the cook. Them pickled termarterses couldn't keep into spring, and so I tell you now. The spheres is a dry place, and everythin' is most a-beautiful here."

Betty, the housemaid, loquitur.-(She appears in the character of Red-Jacket, a popular personation upon these occasions,-it being very easy to talk Indian by the simple recipe of transposing the nominative and objective cases of the personal pronoun.) "Me don't like what you say, old Twyney! I's name's Red-Jacket. Pale-face give fire-water to I. The squashes was good enough till cook left 'em out in the rain. Me have hunting-ground in fifth sphere. When me puts up tomatoes in the spirit-world, me rosins 'em when they bile. Great influence comes from I to-day; also, much development."

"Dr. Burge," whispered I, "you claim to have devoted some time to the examination of these delusions; but I will venture to say you have never witnessed anything so humiliating as this!"

"My dear Sir," murmured the Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose mortal teachings ever blessed mankind."

"Do you think these people voluntary impostors?"

"No; it would be nearer the truth to say that they are voluntary victims of a mental epidemic like that which developed itself in the St. Vitus's dance of the Middle Ages. The subjects of that disease went through the same spasms, convulsions, and painful racking of the limbs which accompany such cases of this personation as are not designed deceptions. Even those accidentally present, when the effects of the ancient contagion were exhibited, became infected and were irresistibly impelled to join in the extravagance. Look at Miss Turligood and Mr. Stellato, and see if the parallel is not supported."

The individuals named were seen to be twisting themselves up and making an awkward sort of obeisance to the housemaid, who (still as Red-Jacket) thus delivered herself:-

"Me goin' to dancey war-dance. Great Spirit sends lots more Indians come dancey too."

A cry of acquiescence,-perchance intended for a ghostly war-whoop,-and the beloved of my Lord Byron broke into a savage polka.

Stellato seized a paper-knife, and proceeded to scalp a chair with merciless ferocity.

Those unfortunate ladies, Miss Branly and Miss Turligood, were unable to resist the infection, and so sprang among the party, whirled about, and exhibited absurdities painful and unnecessary to relate.

"By the Muse of my ancestor the Poet!" exclaimed Colonel Prowley, indignantly, "I will no longer endure this clumsy travesty of that choric saltation with which Apollo was said to inspire his Pythian virgins. Dr. Burge, you will oblige me by pulling down that shawl! Sister, you will please to open the shutters of the south window!"

The requests were instantly complied with. The wholesome sunlight burst into the room, and checked, as if by magic, the unseemly mumming of these deluded convulsionaries. Mrs. Colfodder sank down exhausted upon the sofa. Betty ceased to be Red-Jacket. Mr. Stellato gave up his scalping-knife, flopped feebly upon a chair, and again became a transparent jelly-fish of philosophy and water. It was harder to bring Miss Turligood to herself, by reason of the singular intractability of the squaw who had taken possession of the premises, and was only to be dislodged by much tediousness of argument and adjuration. At length, however, even this was accomplished. The Indians sulked off into space, and their terrestrial mediums once more prepared to collect about the table.

"Why, bless me! past one, I declare!" said Miss Turligood, consulting her watch. "How spirits do make the time pass! A brief adjournment for dinner will now take place. The circle will meet for renewed investigation this afternoon at three o'clock. Every member will be punctual. Remember, in this place, at three o'clock."

"Stay," said Miss Prowley, in a gentle, but at the same time decided tone; "it will not be convenient to us to receive this party again. The presence of friends from the city, who are in Foxden only for the day, renders a meeting this afternoon out of the question. And having once broken up our regular sittings, it will not be worth while to resume them,-at least, here."

"But, Madam, Madam, you forget that the spirits have positively commanded us to hold sittings in your parlor three times a day till further notice!" gasped Miss Turligood, in extreme astonishment.

"I do not recognize the authority of the spirits. They have no right to dictate the uses of my parlor."

Here was a confession indeed on the part of Miss Prowley. Not recognize the authority of the spirits! Miss Turligood fairly staggered, when she heard the impious announcement. The smooth sciolist Stellato rallied his weak wits and uttered a cry of wonder at such flagitious heresy. The future Lady Byron, taking as a deliberate insult any doubts of the identity and authority of her posthumous spouse, threw up her arms in horror, and trotted out of the house.

Finally, we got rid of them all,-how, I don't exactly remember, and if I did, it would not concern the reader to know. We delivered Miss Turligood over to her Irishman, (who had brought a carryall with him this time,) and charged him never to drive her back; Betty and the cook were restored to the kitchen; Stellato and Miss Branly disappeared, no one could say where.

"And now," exclaimed Colonel Prowley, with a sigh of relief, "let us forget this nonsense, and go to dinner,-for the spirits have given me an appetite, if nothing else."

"Then you intend to follow what I understand to be the teaching of your invisible visitors," remarked Dr. Burge, pleasantly.

"How so?"

"You do not recognize Fast-Day."

"Ha! ha!" laughed the Colonel; "I doubt if the ghosts were quite unreasonable about that."

"Nay, brother, you should tell our good minister that we have but a cold collation, and that prepared on the previous day, as is our custom on the Sabbath," urged Miss Prowley, with the dignity of an exact and consistent housekeeper.

"It is as well we have," was the reply; "for those precious Indians, although wise in medicine, knew little enough about cookery. They would have made sorry work, had it been necessary to give a culinary direction to the inspirations of our damsels below-stairs."

"And yet, after all," resumed our host, meditatively, and after a moment's pause, "it seems scarcely right to make a jest of this matter; for, although the manifestations of to-day have been ridiculous enough,-yet-really-when I think of some of those instructive observations of poor Sir Joseph Barley"--

The remark was never concluded, for a sudden rattling and whoaing and bumping of baggage was heard. The interruption came from before the front-door. The "Railroad-Omnibus" had driven up to the house.

"It is, doubtless, my good friend Professor Owlsdarck," said Colonel Prowley,-courteously rebuking an exclamation of astonishment from his sister, who had gone to the window;-"to be sure, we did not expect him to-day, but he is ever a most welcome guest."

"But it is not Professor Owlsdarck!" cried the sister, in shrillest tones of feminine amazement. "That portly figure to which the pencil of the artist has done such feeble justice! the spectacles with the square glasses! the enormous seal of the Sextons!-it can be but one man!"

"What! you don't mean"--

"Yes, but I do mean! Come and see for yourself!"

"A ghost in an omnibus! Why, sister, sister, the Detached-what-you-may-call-it has got into your head,-or, heavens! can it be that our unbelief is punished with this frightful manifestation?"

"It is Sir Joseph Barley himself!" ejaculated Miss Prowley.

"Surrounded by his bank of silver-tunicked attendants?" gasped the Colonel, in desperate interrogation.

"No, no, nothing of the kind," said Dr. Burge, assuringly; "he has not brought even a footman."

And it was Sir Joseph Barley,-in the flesh,-and in a good deal of it, too;-Sir Joseph Barley, full to overflowing with talk and compliments. He had long planned a journey to America, and a surprise to his Fellow-Sexton in Foxden. The trip had been necessarily postponed from week to week, and then from month to month. Always expecting to leave by the next steamer, he had never thought it worth while to write. Had been on shore exactly nine hours, was delighted with the country, and had already written the first chapter of a book about it. Was, nevertheless, surprised to see none of the native Red Men upon the wharf when the Canada arrived. Should have thought the spectacle would have been both novel and imposing to them. After dinner, would, with permission, go into the forests about Foxden, and visit this singular people in their national wigwams.

How picture the delight of hospitable Colonel Prowley, when, volubly delivering these and other sentiments, the High Priest and Potentate over all Sextondom entered the parlor and made himself comfortable in a rocking-chair?

There is no need to dwell upon the matronly bustle of Miss Prowley, who, utterly ignoring the proper ordinances of the day, proceeded to send to the hotel for a beefsteak and a bottle of British Stout which could be warranted of genuine importation.

"And stop, stop, sister!" whispered the Colonel, pursuing her to the door; "the idea seems absurd, to be sure, but still don't you think it barely possible, that, if Betty ran down to the river and caught a few of those snapping-turtles sunning themselves upon the old log, we might boil them into something which would faintly remind Sir Joseph of the Lord Mayor's soup?"

This proposition being dismissed as impracticable,-first, by reason of the notorious unwillingness of the turtles to be caught, and, waiving that objection, because of the length of time it would take to achieve any passable imitation of the aldermanic dainty,-I was moved to an aside-declaration to the effect that my slight observation of the tastes of British tourists in the Federal States led to the suggestion of oysters as delicacies not wholly unlikely to find favor with their eminent guest.

An explosion of impulsive gratitude responded to the hint. There was a new "saloon" just opened in Main Street,-Betty should stop there and leave a generous order.

Well! it was some time before we were summoned to our amended dinner; but, when we did get it, it was a dinner worth waiting for.

Sir Joseph Barley-Heaven bless him!-knew nothing of that smattering of Cosmos into which we hungry New-Englanders are wont to thrust our wits. He bluntly declared that he had never heard of Detached Vitalized Electricity, Woman's Rights, or Harmonial Development; also, he was delightfully confident that-he, Sir Joseph Barley, British subject, not having heard of them-they could not, by any possibility, be worth hearing about. Moreover, he had not read a word of Carlyle, and positively did not know of the existence of any English poet called Browning. Dr. Burge, he thoughtfully suggested, had probably mistaken the name; it was Byron, or possibly Bulwer, about whom he wished to inquire. The former of these personages was a British Peer, and a writer of some celebrity; he was, however, no longer living, having never recovered from a fever he took at a place called Missolonghi, in Greece;-the latter had written a book entitled "Pelham," once popular, but now thought inferior to a series of romances known in Great Britain as the "Waverley Novels"; these were the work of one Scott, a native of Edinburgh, whom George IV. honored with a baronetcy,-a splendid recompense for his great literary industry.

This, and much other information, adapted to our rude plantation in the New-England wilderness, did Sir Joseph patronizingly impart. And it was good to meet a man with a sense of corporeal identity so honest and satisfactory. A cynic might have said that his mind moved in rather narrow limits. But then within those limits he was so ruddy and jubilant that I could not but remember something Shakspeare says about the ease of being bounded in a nutshell and yet counting one's self king of infinite space,-were it not for bad dreams. These "bad dreams" had never retarded the British digestion of Sir Joseph Barley. No American citizen could, by any possibility, be so shut in measureless content. It is only a very few of our well-to-do women of the Mrs. Widesworth class-ladies inclining to knitting and corpulency in the afternoon of life-who possess the like faculty of warming society with the blaze of an ecstatic egotism. Well, there are moments-why not confess it? for is not man body as well as soul?-when it is a relief to get away from our mystics, system-mongers, and peerers into the future, and claim a brotherhood after the flesh with your average Briton, who looks out of his comfortable present only to look into his comfortable past. Yet let this estate be temporary; for it is well to return to our thin diet, and, instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you, would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend, if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers sometimes seems poured out in thin dilution, it nevertheless soon hardens to a thousand shining crystals upon men of worldly enterprise and grasp. And why this digression? I think its suggestion lay in the fact that Sir Joseph, being the type of the ordinary Englishman, held and imparted a fine sunniness of temper, and a perfectly balanced serenity,-good gifts, which, so far as my experience goes, are possessed in full measure by only one or two exceptional Americans, and these men of high and acknowledged genius.

"I don't understand it, upon my honor," cried our visitor, after we had endeavored to explain to him his own spiritual intrusion on the previous evening. "I have heard of Doctor Pordage and the Dragon, and of the Drummer of Tedworth; but when you tell a sane British subject that his apparition comes before him, and takes, as it were, the froth off his welcome"--

"No, no, my dear friend," interrupted Colonel Prowley, "you must know that nothing could do that! As to the obituary I had written, it may do for some other time,-for, indeed, my felicity in such compositions has been highly commended, and this by mundane authorities of no common weight."

"Let us change the subject," said Sir Joseph, dryly; "I have no wish to test your powers in that direction; and so long as I don't give up the ghost, I suppose you must."

"I would only say this," observed the Colonel,-"that in your book upon America I hope you will not fail to declare, that, in folly, deception, and unmitigated humbug, our Foxden spirits exceed all others ever seen or heard."

"Sir Joseph Barley would be a foolish chronicler to commit himself to any such statement," said Dr. Burge, who seemed to feel it his duty to speak the moral tag to our little Fast-Day interlude. "I cannot allow that these Foxden manifestations are one whit more silly or equivocal than many I have seen elsewhere. This shamming the ghost of somebody still alive is no uncommon deception: several cases of the sort have come under my recent observation. And it is well that they sometimes occur; for they must cause reflection in all who are not victims of a mental disorder which seems to confound the reasoning powers of man,-causing its subjects to accept as teachers phantoms of their morbid imaginations, or deceiving intelligences from without. To all, I say, but such as these, an imposition of the sort here noticed must send reflections of our total inability to identify any pretended spirit merely because he flatters our vanity, or talks what may seem to us good morality or sound sense."

Dr. Burge had laid aside his knife and fork, and had launched bravely forth upon his theme. Sir Joseph moved uneasily. Things were getting serious. Our host happily interposed,-

"Very true, Doctor, all very true;-yet there is one piece of wisdom regulating the spiritual practice which now seems worth considering."

"And what is that, pray?"

"They do not recognize Fast-Day."

"Well, well," said Dr. Burge, taking the hint with the utmost good-humor, "perhaps they were not altogether wrong there; and so I will trouble Miss Prowley for a bit more of the steak, and--No, thank you, no beer for me; I am a water-drinker of twenty years' standing."

"The toast I am about to propose," observed Colonel Prowley, "may, with exceeding propriety, be drunk in water,-that is, whenever milk-and-water is not to be had:-

"Our spiritual demagogues, much weaker than our political ones, may they not be as much worse!"

"And there is one other sentiment," said good Dr. Burge, brimming over with an honest hilarity,-"a toast which I should be willing to drink in pretty strong-coffee."

"I have not forgotten that," exclaimed our host, proffering a hearty shake of the hand to the High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch of All Sextons,-

"Health and a long life to Sir Joseph Barley!"

* * *

PROSPICE.

Fear death?-to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,

The post of the foe;

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,

Yet the strong man must go:

For the journey is done and the summit attained,

And the barriers fall,

Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,

The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so-one fight more,

The best and the last!

I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,

And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers

The heroes of old,

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears

Of pain, darkness, and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,

The black minute's at end,

And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,

Shall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,

Then a light, then thy breast,

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,

And with God be the rest!

* * *

WASHINGTON IRVING.

We have, at last, a full story of the life of Mr. Irving. It is from the hand of a near relative, who has brought to the task an almost filial reverence, with a modest reserve of language, and a delicacy of treatment, which, while they disarm criticism, would of themselves suffice to attest the kinship of the writer with the distinguished subject of his biography. It is a quiet and tranquil picture that he has given us, of a serene and tranquil life. As we have turned it over delightedly, chapter after chapter, and volume upon volume, we have wished at times that the coy biographer had been endowed with a spice of garrulity or of egotism; for, say what we will, these qualities contribute largely to the interest with which we follow the story of a life about whose incidents and development the public has greed of knowledge.

If Boswell had invariably governed his biographic record by the instincts of a gentleman, we should have possessed far less wealth of gossip by which to judge of the manhood and the familiar surroundings of the great lexicographer. And we can readily imagine that a conscientious man, in setting about the task of writing the life of a favorite author, would ask himself, over and over, how much should be yielded to the eager curiosity of the public, and how much a refined courtesy of feeling should keep in reserve. There are men, indeed, whose history, by whomsoever recorded, would suggest no such questioning,-men who have elbowed their way through life, bent upon some single aim, with a grand and coarse disregard of all the heart-burnings they may have caused, and all the idols they may have brushed down. Washington Irving was by no means such a man; he was kind-hearted to the last degree; and yet, remembering as we do that sly look of humor which lurked always in the corner of his eye, we cannot believe but that in his freer moments he has pricked through many a bag of bombast, and made dashing onslaught upon noisy literary pretension. Of all this, however, we find nothing in the volumes before us,-nothing in his own books. Always, in his contact with the world, he is genial; the face of every friend is beautiful to him; every acquaintance is at the least comely; in rollicking Tom Moore he sees (what all of us cannot see) a big heart,-in Espartero a bold, frank, honest soldier,-in every fair young girl a charmer,-and in almost every woman a fair young girl.

In all these respects the biography of Mr. Pierre Irving is in fitting accord with what we had known and believed of his eminent kinsman. And we are delighted at being confirmed in the belief. We yield all measure of respect for the grace, the purity, the dignity, which Washington Irving has added to our literature; and yet we honor still more that true American heart which beams through all his writings, and throughout this record of his life. The rare kindliness of the man so hallows and sublimes his memory that we half forget his artistic power, his purity of touch, his keenness of observation, his delightful and abounding humor.

There are no storms in this life of his: it is, as we have said, a quiet picture of a career that is full of honor indeed, full of triumphs, but full of serenity. Here is no Don Quixote searching for enemies with whom to do battle,-no John Knox thwacking terribly upon all heretical pates, and sweating with his obstinacy, as much as with the vigor of his blows; but the kindly gentleman, giving tone and beauty to the common sentiment of us all, piquing our wonder by his adroitness, kindling our smiles by his arch sallies, winning our admiration by his thousand graces, and our respect by his honesty and truth.

In 1797, Washington Irving, a roguish lad of fifteen, living in William Street, in New York, and not a little rebellious against the severe orthodoxy of his father,-who was a deacon of the Presbyterian Church,-sometimes slipped out from his chamber, after evening prayers, for an hour or two at the theatre; he attended school, where he stole the reading of such books as "Robinson Crusoe," and "Sinbad the Sailor"; and he wrote compositions for such of his fellows as would make good his tasks in mathematics. This was a study which he never loved, and to the last he abjured all stringency of method. The writer of this paper remembers on one occasion asking him what system he pursued in massing his notes for the "Life of Washington." "Don't ask me for system," said he; "I never had any. If you want to know what a man can do by arrangement, talk with B--; his whole mind is pigeon-holed."

At sixteen we find him in a lawyer's office; he does not, like some of his brothers, enjoy the advantages (if there be any) of a collegiate education. But he loves law as little as he loves mathematics. Feeble health gives occasion for frequent absences and journeyings; and it is plain to see that he loves a voyage up the Hudson, and adventurous travel through the wilds of Northern New York, better than he loves Judge Livingston, or the books of his law-patron, Mr. Hoffman. He has a scribbling mood upon him at this early day, too, and contributes to the New-York "Morning Chronicle" certain letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, which are remarked for their pleasant humor. At the age of twenty-one (1804) continued ill-health suggests a sea-voyage. He leaves law and his jolly companions,-Brevoort, Kemble, Paulding, and the rest,-and sails for Bordeaux. He wanders through Southern Europe delightedly,-meets Washington Allston at Rome, and is half tempted to turn painter,-sees Humboldt, De Sta?l, Cooke, Siddons; and while all England is jubilant over Nelson's victory, and all England mourning over Nelson's death, he sails, in 1806, for home.

Arrived in New York a sound man, he goes through a process of cramming for admission to the bar, and is presently instated-attorney-at-law. But at the very time of his examination he is concocting with James Paulding the project of "Salmagundi," which presently enlivens and perplexes people with the vagaries of Launcelot Langstaff. A little after, he plans and commences the Knickerbocker History.

But meantime an interesting episode of his life is developing, which by its unfortunate issue is to give a certain color to all after-expression of his sentiment. While in the family of Mr. Hoffman, as law-student, he has conceived a strong attachment for his daughter; in certain memoranda, marked "private," which come under the eyes of the biographer only after Mr. Irving's death, he says,-"I idolized her. I felt at times rebuked by her superior delicacy and purity, and as if I was a coarse, unworthy being in comparison.... I saw her fade rapidly away, beautiful, and more beautiful, and more angelical to the very last.... I was by her when she died.... I was the last one she looked upon." The memorandum from which this extract is taken had been originally written, it appeared, for the eye of an intimate lady-friend abroad, to whom we shall have occasion to refer.

In 1809, at the age of twenty-six, is published his "History of New York." There were a few punctilious Dutch families who were offended at its sallies; but cultivated people generally welcomed its fun, its spirit, its quiet satire, with heartiness and applause.

Shortly after he entered into a commercial partnership with his brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, of whom one was established in England, the other in New York. In the War of 1812 we find him acting as military aid to Governor Tompkins; and in 1815 he embarks again for Europe. He passes many years in England, in the course of which time the commercial firm, of which he is a member goes into bankruptcy. Upon this, he is of course thrown adrift. But through the influence of his friends at home he is offered the position of Chief Clerk of the Navy Department, with a salary of twenty-four hundred dollars a year. This, however, after some misgivings, he declines. He does not like the idea of being cramped by official routine of duty. He will try what he can do with his pen. And for months after making this decision (we have heard it with unction from his own lips) he can do nothing. His friend Allston is going back to America; Leslie is making a reputation; and he, a bankrupt, and having wantonly thrown up the chance for a lucrative position at home, is suddenly bereft of all capacity for literary work; he makes trial; but it is in vain. The "Sketch-Book" is floating in his thought; but he cannot commit its graces to paper.

The months roll on; something must be done; the secretaryship at home is abandoned; he must try again; he does try; he sends off "Sketch-Book No. I." to America. We know what came of it: success, delight. Number upon number followed. There was an early republication, under the author's auspices, in London. He was fêted: it was so odd that an American should write with such control of language, with such a play of fancy, with such pathetic grace. There was a kind of social furor to meet and to see the man who, notwithstanding his Transatlantic birth, had conquered all the witchery of British speech, who knew its possible delicacies of expression, and who graced it with a humor that reminded of Goldsmith.

No American author had ever dreamed of such ovation before: an ovation not due to any incisive thought, not due to any novelty of his subject-matter,-but due to the fact that a man born overseas had suddenly appeared among British writers, who could lay hold upon their own resources of sentiment, and inwrap it in language which charmed them by its grace and provoked them by its purity.

Mr. Murray entered upon the publication of the "Sketch-Book" in 1820, Mr. Irving being at that time thirty-seven years of age. Of his pleasant intimacy with Sir Walter Scott, of his junketings in Paris, of his meeting with Tom Moore, of his unfortunate enlistment in a steamboat-enterprise upon the Seine, there is full and most lively account in the "Life and Letters" before us. "Bracebridge Hall," despatched from Paris in 1822, is received with the same favor which had attended the publication of the "Sketch-Book"; and the pecuniary returns are so liberal that he can lie upon his oars for a while, and (what pleases him more) can effectually aid his brother Peter, who was a party to the unfortunate steamboat-scheme.

After this comes a merry whirl through Europe. The Rhine, Heidelberg, Munich, Vienna, we visit again in his sparkling letters, dated forty odd years ago. His reputation, and the good offices of French and English friends, open an easy path for him; everywhere he finds hospitality and acquaintances, and everywhere, by that frank, genial manner of his, he transmutes even chance acquaintances into confidential friends. The winter of 1822-3 is passed in the delightful city of Dresden. He meets with a warm welcome at the little Saxon court; he has the entrée of a pleasant English household, where he becomes fairly domesticated. Mrs. Foster, its accomplished mistress, is a lady of fortune, who has two "lovely daughters." Mr. Irving, in concert with two or three gentlemen-friends, organizes certain home-theatricals, in which the Misses Foster engage with ready zeal and a charming grace. There are Italian readings, and country-excursions, to all of which Mr. Irving is a delighted party. He hardly knows how to tear himself away from scenes so enchanting. To Miss Foster he writes, on the occasion of a little foray into Bohemia,-"I am almost wishing myself back already. I ought to be off like your bird, but I feel I shall not be able to keep clear of the cage." Mrs. Foster, with a womanly curiosity, is eager to know how a man so susceptible as Mr. Irving, and so domestically inclined, should have reached the mature age of forty as a bachelor. Mr. Irving amiably gratifies her curiosity by detailing to her the story of his early and unfortunate attachment, in the shape of the memorandum to which we have already alluded. He closes this confidential disclosure by saying,-"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not long since.... My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon my thoughts, and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are. I feel as if I had already a family to think and provide for."

We have dwelt upon this little episode, not because it has any essential importance in itself, but because it has been the subject of a most unseemly interpolation in the British reprint of the biography. Mr. Bentley, "Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty," was, it appears, the purchaser, at a small sum, of the advance-sheets of the book; but, in order to secure English copyright, he conceived the idea of introducing extraneous matter of British origin. In prosecution of this design, he found as collaborateurs the two Misses Foster above alluded to, who are now wives of clergymen of the Church of England. Mrs. Fuller, the elder of the sisters, and the special favorite of the author, gives upon the whole a modest and pleasant account of their association with Mr. Irving, and closes with a few lines which, she says, he wrote in her scrap-book in 1832. "He declared it was impossible for him to be less in a writing-mood." And thereupon follow the well-known lines entitled "Echo and Silence." They certainly do not prove very much for the writing-mood of Mr. Irving,-whatever they may prove for Sir Egerton Brydges. The contribution of the younger sister, Mrs. Flora Dawson, is in a somewhat exaggerated and melodramatic vein, in the course of which she takes occasion to expend a great deal of pity upon "poor Irving," who is made to appear in the character of a rejected suitor for the hand of her sister. It is true that the testimony of Mr. Irving's biographer, and of his private papers, is largely against this absurdly romantic construction; but, although it had been perfectly authentic, it is almost incredible that a lady of delicacy should make such blazon of the affair, for the sake of securing a copyright to "Her Majesty's Publisher in Ordinary." We are sorry that Mrs. Dawson has not made a better début in literature. As for Mr. Bentley, we can characterize his conduct in the matter only by the word-disgraceful. In the whole history of griping literary piracies (of which Americans must bear their share) we can recall no one which shows so bad a taste, and so bad a faith, as this of Mr. Bentley, the "Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty."

In the year 1824 we find Mr. Irving at work in Paris chambers upon the "Tales of a Traveller"; then follow three or four joyous and workful years in Spain, between Madrid, Seville, and the Alhambra. We have all tasted the fruit of that pleasant sojourn; "Columbus" is on every library-shelf; and we remember a certain dog's-eared copy of the "Conquest of Granada" which once upon a time set all the boys of a certain school agog with a martial furor. How we shook our javelins at some bewildered cow blundering into the play-ground! What piratical forays we made upon the neighbors' orchards, after the manner of the brave old Muley Aben Hassan! And as for the Alhambra, the tinkle of the water in the marble basins of its court is lingering on our ears even yet.

In Spain, as elsewhere, Mr. Irving makes a circle of friends about him whom it is hard to leave; but it must be. Accusing comrades at home say he has deserted his country; he turns his face Westward at last, and, full of honors, sails for New York once more, in the year 1832, at the ripe age of forty-nine. There never was a warmer welcome given to a returning citizen. A feast is made for him, at which all the magnates of the city of Manhattan assist; and the author's sensibility is so touched that he can make only stammering acknowledgments,-at which the cheers and the plaudits are heartier than ever.

After this comes the opening of that idyllic life at Sunnyside,-the building of the gables, the gilding of the weather-cocks, the planting of the ivies. "Astoria" and "Bonneville" and the "Tour on the Prairies" keep his hand active and his brain in play. Near and dear relatives relieve his bachelor home of all loneliness. Nine years or more have passed after his return, when he is surprised-and not a little shocked-by his appointment, at the instance of Mr. Webster, as Minister to Madrid.

He cannot resist the memories of the Alhambra, of Seville, of the Guadalquivir. Many pleasant associations are revived in England, in France, and not a few in the now revolutionary Spain. But it is plain to see that the official visit is not so enjoyable as the old untrammelled life in the Peninsula. No matter how light the duties, routine is a harness that galls him. We can almost hear his cheer of thanksgiving as he breaks away from it, and comes once more to his cherished home of Sunnyside. He is not an old man yet, though he counts well into the sixties. He contrives new additions to his cottage; he dashes off the charming "Life of Goldsmith" at a heat. His older books come pouring from the press, and are met with the cordial welcome of new ones.

His brothers, to whom he had been so fondly knit, are all gone save one; Brevoort is gone; Kemble is just above him, at his forge, under the lee of the Highlands. The river by quiet Tarrytown is strung up and down with new "gentlemen's places."

He puts himself resolutely at work upon the "Life of Washington." Frequently recurring illness, and a little shakiness in his step, warn him that his time is nearly up. He knows it. There is only one more task to make good. We hear of him at Mount Vernon, at Arlington, at Saratoga. Volume by volume the work comes forward. The public welcome it,-for they love the author, and they love the subject. Three volumes,-four volumes; and there are rumors that the old gentleman is failing. But whoever finds admission to that delightful home of Sunnyside meets the old smile, the old cheer. Seventy years have shaken the frame, but have not shaken the heartiness of the man. The jest leaps from his eye before his lip can clothe it, as it did twenty years before. There is a friendly pat for his little terrier, and a friendly word for his gardener, as in the old days.

The fifth volume is in progress; but there is a cough that distresses him sorely. He pushes on, however, through his task. The step is growing feebler and the cough more annoying. It is the year 1859, and the seventy-seventh of his age, when, upon a certain November evening, with one little sharp cry of pain, he falls upon his chamber-floor-dead.

* * *

There are men whose works we admire, but for whose lives we care nothing. Mr. Irving was not one of them. There is such a manly heartiness in him that we crave close contact: we cannot know him too well. Surely, this sympathy of readers, spontaneous, inevitable, will keep his name always green. There may come greater purists,-though they must con the language well; writers of more dramatic power we have now, possibly a quainter humor,-but one more tender, that puts us in such immediate sympathy with the author, hardly in our day, or in any day, shall we see again.

It is plain enough that Mr. Irving depended largely on his friendships,-that, unconsciously, his courage for meeting and conquering whatever of difficulty lay in his path was fed very much by the encouraging words of those he loved and respected. His were no brawny shoulders to push their way, no matter what points were galled by contact,-no self-asserting, irresistible press of purpose, which is careless of opinion. Throughout, we see in his kindly nature a longing for sympathy: if from those intellectually strong, so much the better; if from dear friends, better yet; if from casual acquaintances, still it is good and serviceable to him, and helps him to keep his poise.

He is a man, too, who clearly shuns controversy, who does not like to take blows or to give blows, and whose intellectual life and development find shape and color from this dread of the combative. Not that he is without a quiet power and exercise of satire,-not that follies which strike his attention do not get a thrust from his fine rapier; but they are such follies, for the most part, as everybody condemns. By reason of this quality in him, he avoids strongly controverted points in history; or, if his course lies over them, he gives a fairly adjusted average of opinion; he is not in mood for trenchant assertions of this or that belief. This same quality, again, makes him shun political life. He has a horror of its wordy wars, its flood of objurgation. Not that he is without opinions, calmly formed, and firmly held; but the entertainment of kindred belief he does not make the measure of his friendships. His character counted on the side of all charity, of forbearance, against harsh judgments; it was largely and Christianly catholic, as well in things political as literary. He never made haste to condemn.

There is a rashness in criminating this retirement from every-day political conflicts which is, to say the least, very short-sighted. Extreme radicalism spurns the comparative inactivity, and says, "Lo, a sluggard!" Extreme conservatism spurns it, and says, "Lo, a coward!" It is only too true that cowards and sluggards both may take shelter under a shield of indifference; but it is equally true that any reasonably acute mind, if only charitably disposed, can readily distinguish between an inactivity which springs from craven or sluggish propensity, and that other which belongs to constitutional temperament, and which, while passing calm and dispassionate judgment upon excesses of opinion of either party, contributes insensibly to moderate the violence of both.

But whatever may have been Mr. Irving's reluctance to ally himself intimately with political affairs, and to assume advocacy of special measures, it is certain that he never failed in open-hearted, outspoken utterance for the cause of virtue, of human liberty, and of his country. There were vulgar assailants, indeed, who alleged at one time that he had thoroughly denationalized himself by his long absences. The charge he always regarded as an affront, and met with scorn. There are those so grossly constituted as to measure a man's love of his own country by the sneers he flings at the country of others. It was not in Mr. Irving's nature to sneer at even an enemy; it was not his way of making conquest. He recognized fully the advantages of a foreign life (at his date) in following up that career of belles-lettres study which he had marked out for himself. The free entrée of European libraries and galleries, and familiar association with a class of cultivated men of leisure, (in countries where such a class exists,) offered opportunity for refining his taste, for enlarging his stock of available material, and for stimulating his mental activity, of which he was not slow to perceive the value, and of which he has given ample account.

There is much that is interesting in the Life before us in regard to Mr. Irving's habit of work. He was, like most men of extreme sensitiveness, moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions, with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted; he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; then it passes suddenly, like a cloud, and the air (as at Seville) wooes him to his charmingest fancies.

We do not propose a critical estimate of the books of Mr. Irving. We have neither space nor present temper for this. The world has indorsed his great popularity with the heart, as much as with the brain. There are those who have objected that the last subject of his labor-the "Life of Washington"-was little suited to his imaginative tone of mind, and should have been worked up with a larger and more philosophic grasp of thought. It may well be that at some future time we shall have a more profound estimate of the relations which our great Leader held to his cause and to his time; but, however profound and just such a work may be, we feel quite safe in predicting that it will never supplant the graceful labor of Mr. Irving in the hearts of the American people. Precisely what was wanted Mr. Irving has given: such charming, faithful, truthful picture of the great hero of our Revolution as should carry knowledge of him, of the battles he fought, of his large, self-denying, unswerving patriotism, of the purity of his life, into every household. No man could have done this work better; nor do we think any other will ever do it as well.

And there is his "Sketch-Book,"-in blue and gold, in green and gold, in red and gold;-in what colors, and in what language, does it not appear? Yet the themes are of the simplest: a broken heart; a rural funeral; a Christmas among the hollies; an hour in the Abbey of Westminster: what is there new, or to care greatly for, in these things? Yet he touched them, and all the world are touched by them. Your critic says there is no serious insight, no deep probing; a pretty wind blows over,-that is all.

Yes, that is all; but how many are there who can set such sweet currents of wind aflow?

Only a bruised daisy, only a wounded hare, only Halloween,-and Burns, with all his fresh, healthy, hearty manhood, and only a peasant's pen, touches them in such way that his touch is making the nerves of men and women vibrate, where-ever our Saxon speech is uttered.

There is many a light thing that we cherish,-with which we will not easily part. That souvenir of some dear, dead one we do not value by its weight in gold; that sweet story of the Vicar we do not measure by its breadth of logic. And no American, no matter how late born he may be, but, if he wander in the Catskills, shall hear the rumble of the Dutch revellers at their bowling in the gorges of the mountains,-not one but shall read, and reading shall love, the story of Rip Van Winkle.

It was only a quiet old gentleman of six-and-seventy who was buried awhile ago from his home upon the Hudson: yet the village-shops were all closed; the streets, the houses, the station, were hung in black; thousands from the city thirty miles away thronged the high-road leading to the little church where prayers were to be said.

How shall we explain this? The author is dead, indeed, whose writings were admired by all; but there is something worthier to be said than this:-At the little church lay the body of the man whom all men loved.

* * *

THE RIM.

PART II.

Affairs went smoothly and noiselessly on for some three months. Mr. St. George had received the congratulations of the neighborhood, who, perceiving that éloise still remained at The Rim, presumed all was satisfactory; and éloise refused herself to all, the better by reason of her term of mourning. The slaves on the estate no longer infected others with the result of bad government; their association with the Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden was light, that there was a strong hand behind them that knew how to pull them up or put them in the dust, and they learned so much respect and even love for that hand as never to presume on the fact that it would not perhaps choose to exert its full power; work was well done; there was no further trespassing on other precincts; the world was in perfect order, so far as St. George's administration of it extended. He was, moreover, a man of distinction; serving, young as he was, four terms in Congress from a distant district, he was already spoken of again as the candidate of the immediate vicinity; his advice was sought in a hundred matters about which he knew nothing at all,-and always given, in spite of the last-mentioned circumstance; he had a careless, easy way of taking the life out of a man's mouth, so to speak, and disposing of it for that man's advantage as he himself pleased, so that the man felt under an infinite obligation; he had, too, an air with him of such superiority over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to follow. But Mr. Erne's supremacy had merely been a matter of birth and of kindly feeling; Mr. St. George's was, first, because he choose to have it, and secondly, because nobody was able to refuse it. Marlboro's masterliness was quite another thing, affected no clusters of men, and was felt only by those whom he owned, body and soul.

In the mean time, the family seldom saw Mr. St. George, and when they did, he was so stately that they would have been quite willing to shut their eyes. They forgot, however, that, when you insist on being yourself an iceberg, you really cool the air about you. Once, indeed, or twice, there had been brief, but notable exceptions in his conduct.

A period of heavy rains had just elapsed, and éloise, weary of confinement, had gone on the first clear day strolling round the place, as secure as in a drawing-room, since there was not one of her father's people but adored her.

"You are going out, Miss Changarnier?" Mr. St. George had remarked at the door; and, on being answered, he had added in a soliloquy, as if not deigning a second address for a second rebuff,-"It will be quite impossible to go far, for the freshet has swollen the brooks into rivers."

éloise, however, took no notice of the information, and went on her way, strolled farther than she had intended, and forded a brook because Mr. St. George had said she could not. Then she sat down under a branching tree that dropped its leaves about her and into the brook, and began to read the "Romaunt of the Rose": at least, I fancy that was the book she had. While she remained, the brook swirling ever louder between the pauses, the sunset ran red in the sky and warned her to hasten home. But she disregarded the warning till purple shadows fell softly on the page, and stars and moon stole out to peer above her shoulder and see what it was that so entranced the maiden. Rising hurriedly, she moved away; and only when she had crossed two or three of the stepping-stones did she perceive, on looking down, that, while she had been reading, the water had risen above the next ones with a depth that the failing light forbade her to see. Standing there, and bending dizzily forward to guess the strength of the dark stream now so loudly and rapidly rushing by, there came a noise like a bursting water-spout; suddenly her waist was seized, and she was swept back to the shore. The next instant, with a seething sound, a great uprooted oak tore along the very spot on which she had stood.

"Seeking danger for the pleasure of escape?" said a cool voice in her ear, as her feet were planted on dry land. "A little excitement spices our still life so well!"

"Mr. St. George! how dare you?" cried éloise, freeing herself.

"What would you have had me do? Should I have stood here, letting I dare not wait upon I would, like the cat i' the adage, while the oak caught and rushed you off to sea? Too big a broomstick for such a little witch!"

"You should not have been here at all, Sir!"

"There shall be thanks in all the churches, next Sunday, that I was."

"At least, Sir, I can spare further aid."

"Play Undine and the Knight on the island? It wouldn't be at all safe,-it wouldn't be proper, you know," said Mr. St. George, raising his eyebrows. "The dam that shuts up the irrigating waters broke an hour ago," added he, in the tone of another person. "I sent servants to find you, in every direction, and happened this way myself."

éloise was a little sobered.

"I am much obliged to you, Sir," she said.

"So it seems," he replied, dryly. "I shall be forced to offend you again," he continued, "as further delay will render the stream entirely impassable."

And before she could utter a syllable of deprecation, she had swung a brief moment in the air, and was upon the other side, up which Mr. St. George, in his high seven-league boots, clambered so soon as he had set her down. Instead of venturing any new display of indignation, as St. George expected, éloise walked on with him quietly a moment, and then, looking up, said,-

"You are very kind, and I am very ungracious."

Mr. St. George did not deny her assertion, only he glanced down at her from his height a second with an inexplicable expression, and immediately after the house became visible bowed low and left her.

"There's been such a tantrum, Miss," said the quadroon Hazel, combing out éloise's hair that night, "and Massa St. George's horse waited two mortal hours to take him to Blue Bluffs. You ought to have heard him swear! He galloped off at last like mad."

And as éloise gave no response, unless the cloud on her face spoke for her in the glass, the familiar girl added,-

"Not at you, Miss, not swearing at you,-oh, no, indeed!-but at all of us, to think we'd let you go alone."

"Mr. St. George is too solicitous. That will do, Hazel. Have you spoken to your master about buying Vane?"

"Laws, Miss, I never feels as if he was any master of mine, leastwise excep' one can't help minding him. 'S different from ole Massa,-we minded ole Massa for lub,-but I dunno if it's the music, when Massa St. George speaks, that makes you do what he says, when you just don't mean to,-as if you couldn't help it, and didn't want to help it?" suggested Hazel.

"Mr. St. George," said éloise, "is very good to his people; they ought to wish to obey him."

"Yes, Miss. On'y he a'n't no business here."

"Don't let me hear you speak so again, Hazel," said éloise, facing the suddenly cringing girl. "Now you can go."

But Hazel lingered still, over one and another odd trifle, and at length glancing up from where she stooped, with a scarlet on her young tawny cheek, she added, in a low voice,-

"You'll speak to Massa St. George now for me, won't you, Miss?"

"What? About Vane? You would do better yourself. Yes."

Two or three days passed away after this little promise to Hazel, before éloise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.

It was one afternoon that éloise sat at the drawing-room window, having recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect, just then,-her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.

"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.

éloise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek. Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other, "I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a hesitating voice came sliding towards him,-

"Mr. St. George"--

"I beg your pardon,-did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.

"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied éloise.

She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort, then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.

"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid, who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger, and I became attached to her"--

And before éloise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's riding-whip,-that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the appropriation of everything about her.

"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."

"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,-just, you know, as I might have been"--

Mr. St. George smiled so perceptibly that éloise added, throwing back her head again,-

"Just as I am, Sir! But she has behaved very nicely for several--Why, this is Mrs. Arles's whip! the one her husband gave her. I knew it by the ivory vine-stem twining the ebony; and there are her initials in the lovely gold chasing. I used to want it to play with, when I was a little girl,-and she wouldn't let me have it, of course. Pretty initials!"

"Yes," said Mr. St. George, coldly.

éloise put it down. And then she stared at him forgetfully, and, unthinkingly, with great disappointed eyes. Thereat Mr. St. George laughed.

"Don't Russian women present the knout to their bridegrooms?" asked éloise then, mischievously.

But before he could have replied, she resumed,-

"Well, Sir, Hazel is very pretty"--

"It is Hazel, then? Would you like her to be made more distinctly yours, Miss éloise?"

"Oh, dear, no, Sir, thank you. That isn't it at all. Hazel is in love."

"Indeed!"

"She is in love with Vane, a boy of Mr. Marlboro's: you may have seen him; he is here a good deal,-by stealth: and they want to be married. But Mr. Marlboro' is their terror, he may put an end to everything, and they are afraid, and-and-could you buy Vane, Mr. St. George?"

"I could, Miss Changarnier."

"And you will, then?" cried éloise, springing up.

"If Mr. Marlboro' will sell him."

"Won't he?"

"It is a pride of the Marlboro's that there never was a hand sold off the place."

"Oh, I had forgotten. They would tell too shocking stories."

"Not here. Not unless they were sold off the Cuban plantation, where the vicious ones are transported."

"But perhaps he would give him to you."

"Miss éloise, he would give him to you."

"Me? I have never seen him."

"That is of no consequence. He has seen you."

"I wonder where. Do you really suppose that Mr. Marlboro' would give Vane to me?"

"Miss éloise, I will see what I can do about it first."

"How kind you are! Thank you!"

And éloise was about to go.

"One moment, if you please," said the other.

And Mr. St. George remained in meditation. When he spoke, it was not in too assured a tone.

"I am quite aware," said he, "that you consider me in the light of an enemy. Perhaps it is a magnanimity that would be pleasant to you, should you in turn grant that enemy a favor."

"I should like to be able to serve you, Sir."

"Well, then,-I spoke very unwisely a few moments since,-promise me now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"

And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.

"A whole promise is rash," said éloise, laughing. "Half a one I give you."

"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would know it too.

It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a fire upon the hearth, and éloise sitting on the floor before it with her box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went soaring up the chimney.

"In pursuit of an ignis-fatuus?" asked he, stooping over her an instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress, that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.

"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,-but there 'a no lustre, no flicker,-I can't find out the secret of painting flame."

"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George, unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.

And éloise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and went to bed.

So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on with her tatting and contrivances.

Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each other with less frozen chill than St. George and éloise did on the succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and éloise silently cast up her accounts.

* * *

One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter, Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,-

"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests at noon, for several weeks. That is the list. I rely on Miss Changarnier's assistance." And he handed her a paper, and went out.

"It will be useless for you to keep your room now," said Mrs. Arles to éloise, on Wednesday morning. "It isn't like Mr. St. George's bachelor parties with Marlboro' and Montgomery and Mavoisie, when I like to see you keep to yourself as you do. These are all old friends."

"I shall still have my work to do," said éloise; and she went into the cabinet and sharpened her pens with a vim.

It would doubtless have relieved Mr. St. George of much annoyance and perplexity, if éloise would have assumed her old place in welcoming the guests; but that was not set down in her part, and éloise rightly felt that it would be a preposterous thing for her to do. And though, when she heard their voices in the hall, she longed just to open the door and give one glance at Laura Murray sweeping by, or draw Lottie Humphreys in through the crack and indulge in one quick squeeze, she heroically bent herself upon the debit and credit beneath her eye, and tried to forget all about it,-succeeding only in remembering who had lived and who had died since the last time that hall had rung with their voices.

It was past noon when éloise, having finished her task, and having remained for a long time with her arms upon the desk and her hands upon her eyes, suddenly glanced up and saw a gentleman entering the cabinet, where no gentleman but one was ever allowed to enter. He was in search of a book; and scanning the shelves, his eye fell on her.

He hesitated for a single atom of time, then stepped rapidly forward, and said,-

"Miss Changarnier, I am quite sure."

"Allow me," said quickly another voice at his shoulder, "to present to Miss Changarnier Mr. Marlboro'." For Mr. St. George had entered just in time.

Mr. Marlboro' was a slight man, hardly to be called tall. He wore black, of course, the coat fastened on the breast and letting out just a glimpse of ruffled linen and glancing jewel below, while the lofty brow, set in its fair curling hair, and the peaked beard curling and waving about the throat, gave him the appearance of a Vandyck stepped from the frame. He had the further peculiarity of eyes, dark hazel eyes, that would have glowed like fever, if they were not perpetually wrapped in dream. There was a certain air of careful breeding about him, different from Earl St. George Erne's high-bred bearing, inasmuch as he insisted upon his pedigree and St. George forgot his. Too fiery a Southerner to seek the advantages of Northern colleges, he had educated himself in England, and had contracted while at Oxford the habit of eating opium. Returning home at his majority, and remaining long enough to establish his own ideas, which were peculiarly despotic, upon his property,-through many subsequent travels, tasting in each an experience of all the folly and madness the great capitals of the world afford, through all his life, indeed, this habit was the only thing Marlboro' had not mastered. One other thing, albeit, there was, of which Marlboro' was the slave, and that was the Marlboro' temper.

éloise returned his salutation cordially, and with a certain naughty pleasure, since Mr. St. George was looking on, and since that person, constituting himself her grim guardian, had in a manner warned her of the other. Then she displayed her pretty little ink-stained hands, and ran away.

Mr. Marlboro' looked after her, and then turned to survey St. George.

"Who would not be the Abélard to such an éloise?" he said.

There was no answer. St. George was filling a pipe, and whistling the while a melancholy old tune.

"I'll tell you what, St. George"--

Here he paused, and thrummed on the book in time to the tune.

"You were about to impart some information?"

"Has your little nun taken the black veil?"

"It is no nun of my shriving."

"Are you King Ahasuerus himself, to have lived so long in the house with Miss Changarnier, may I ask, and to have thrown no handkerchief?"

"There is some confusion in your rhetoric. But it is not I who am tyrant,-it is she who stands for that;-I am only Mordecai the Jew sitting in the king's gate. As so many Jews do to-day," muttered St. George,-"ay, and on their thrones, too. I am afraid we are neither of us very well up in our Biblical history. She is the Grand Unapproachable."

"Tant mieux. My way is all the clearer."

"Your way to what?"

"To the altar!"

"Yes, you should have married long ago, Marlboro'," said Mr. St. George, the pipe being lighted, the face looming out of azure wreaths, and the heels taking an altitude.

"I came home," said Marlboro', "to marry éloise Changarnier."

"That is exactly what I intend to do myself."

"You!"

Mr. Marlboro's eyes glistened like a topaz in the sun; but just then a new guest arriving demanded Mr. St. George's attention.

Meantime éloise had found a feminine conclave assembled in her room, all having prepared their own toilets, and ready to inspect the preparation of hers; and as the work proceeded, Lottie Humphreys added herself to the group, in grand tenue, and pushed Hazel aside, that she might bind up éloise's already braided hair, and indulge herself in the interim with sundry fervent ejaculations.

"Isn't he splendid?" whispered Lottie, while Laura compared bracelets with Emma Houghton. "Oh, there, isn't he splendid? It's like the king coming down from his throne, when he speaks to you; it puts my heart in a flutter. How do you dare ask him to pass the butter? Now just tell me. Are you engaged to him? Tell me truly, only shake your head, yes or no. No? I don't believe a word you say. Mean to be? Then, I declare--Suppose now, only just suppose, suppose he'd look at me?"

"Oh, what a silly little goose you are, Lottie Humphreys! And you've put geraniums in my hair, when I meant to wear those beautiful blue poison-bells!"

"I never saw any one so dark as you are wear so much blue."

"But it's becoming to me, isn't it?" said éloise, turning with her smile, as radiant for Lottie as for Marlboro'.

"St. George," said Marlboro', with a beaming face bent over his shoulder, as he took éloise out to dinner, "my intention was the earlier; it will succeed!"

"As being the eldest born and heir to the succession. Does the good general expose his campaign?"

"There we are quits. It is precisely as a good general that I exposed it."

"But did the Levites unveil the sacred ark?" said Mr. St. George, severely.

"We are talking freemasonry, Miss Changarnier," said Marlboro', and they moved on.

* * *

Whether she would or not, éloise found herself in exactly the same position in the house as before her adopted father's death,-partly because almost all the company, being old friends, recognized no difference, partly because Mr. St. George silently chose it should be so. She soon forgot herself entirely in the pleasure of it, and was unconsciously, even towards Mr. St. George, so sweet and genial, so blithe and bewitching, that his scanning glance would suddenly have to fall, since an expression, he felt, entered it that he dared not have her see. There was always a certain disarray about the costume of éloise; one tress of her hair was always drooping too low, or one thrust back behind the beautiful temple and tiny ear, or a bracelet was half undone, or a mantle dropping off,-trifles that only gave one the desire to help her; she constantly wore, too, a scarf or shawl, or something of the kind, and the drapery lent her a kind of tender womanliness, which only such things do; then, too, she garnished her hair with flowers always half falling away, somewhat faded with the warmth, and emitting strong, rich fragrances in dying. When she laughed, and the brilliant little teeth sparkled a contrast with the dark smooth skin, when she thought, and her eyes glowed like tear-washed stars, Mr. St. George was wont to turn abruptly away from the vision, unwilling to be so controlled. But of that éloise never dreamed.

As for Marlboro', on the other hand, he was the moth in the candle. Of Mr. Marlboro's devotion éloise was quite aware,-and whereas, playing with it the least bit in the world, she had at first enjoyed it, it grew to irk her sadly; she used to beg her friends, in all manner of pretty ways, to take him off her hands, and would resort from her own rooms to theirs, assisting at their awful rites, and endeavoring to get them up as charmingly as possible, that they might lure away her trouble. It was in vain that Marlboro' tried to reopen the subject of their mute warfare with St. George. St. George would not condescend, neither would he sully éloise's name by bandying it about with another lover. If Marlboro' begged him to toss up for chances, St. George answered that he never threw up a chance; when he went further and offered to stake success or loss, St. George told him he had cast his last die; when he would have spoken her name to him directly, St. George withered him with flamy eyes, and let his manner become too rigid for one to dare more with him. But the ladies had already caught the spirit of the thing, and made little situations of it among themselves. Then when St. George became impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately éloise did not try to dispel the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro' bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,-

"All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"

and constant as the magnet to its poles.

It was still the steps of éloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow, he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes; to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose essence told all his philosophy:-"The great error in government," he said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government, individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."

Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening, as Marlboro' thus harangued éloise.

"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all oppose."

"Nullification is a good solvent."

"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the horizon, man!"

"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"

"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr. St. George, bowing to éloise; "and as to the last,-I'll none of it!"

And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as éloise was about to ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.

"What has that contrabandista been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St. George.

éloise looked ignorantly up.

"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says, when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let us make the best of it!"

"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"

"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.

Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged éloise to take a vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long morning with her in the cabinet, either over certain neglected arrears, or while she wrote letters under his royal dictation, and Hazel sewed a laborious seam between them, as always. Here, at length, after sufficient tantalization by its means, Marlboro' venturously intruded himself every day. Too familiar for interruption, he took another seat, and watched her swift hand's graceful progress. If her pen delayed, she found another awaiting her,-her posture wearied, a footstool was rolled towards her feet,-her side cramped, behold, a cushion,-she looked for fresh paper, it fell before her: all somewhat slavish service, and which Hazel could have rendered as well. Used to slaves, would she have preferred a master? Whether Miss Changarnier relished these abject kindnesses better than Mr. St. George's imperious exactions was precisely the thing that puzzled the two gentlemen.

Meanwhile, during all this gay season, if éloise had thought of once looking about her, which she never did, she would have seen, that, in whatever group she was, there, too, was Mr. St. George,-that, if they rode three abreast down the great park-avenues, though she laughed with Evan Murray, it was to Mr. St. George's horse that her bridle was secured,-and that, when she sang, it was St. George who jested and smiled and lightly talked the while,-not that her music was not sweet, but that its spell was too strong for him to endure beneath his mask. Yet éloise drew no deductions; if at first she noticed that it was he who laid the shawl on her shoulders, if she remembered, that, when he fastened her dropping bracelet, biting his lip and looking down, he held the wrist an instant with a clasp that left its whitened pressure there, she remembered, too, that he never spoke to her, were it avoidable, that he failed in small politenesses of the footstool or the fan, and that, if once he had looked at her in an instant's intentness of singular expression, and let a smile well up and flood his eyes and lips and face, in a heart-beat it had faded, and he was standing with folded arms and looking sternly away beyond her, while she caught herself still sitting there and bending forward and smiling up at him like a flower beneath the sun;-to atone for her remissness, she was frowning and cool and curt to Earl St. George for days.

* * *

It was about this time, that, one night, when Hazel passed the tea, éloise's eye, wandering a moment, suddenly woke from a little apathy and observed that there was no widow's cap on Mrs. Arles's hair, that it had refined away through various shades of lace till at last even the delicate cobweb on the back of the head was gone and the glossy locks lay bare, that the sables had become simply black gauze over a steely shine of silk, that the little Andalusian foot lay relieved on a white embroidered cushion, that its owner was glancing up and smiling at a gentleman who bent above her, and that that gentleman was Mr. St. George. When this change had taken place, and whether it had been abrupt or gradual, her careless eye could not tell; and, forgetting her own part momentarily in order to take in the whole of the drama in which they were all acting, éloise spilled her tea and made some work for Hazel. As the girl rectified her mishap, it flashed on éloise that she had done nothing more about her suit; she noticed, too, how pale Hazel was, and how subdued and still in all her movements; she remembered that probably Vane had found it impossible to see her and to elude his ever-present master; and she thereupon availed herself of his first disengaged moment to stand at Mr. St. George's side, and ask him if he had ever thought again of a request she had once made him.

"I was thinking of it at this moment," he replied, looking at her with something like sunshine suffusing the brown depth of his eyes; "but the truth is, I am not on such terms with Marlboro' that I may demand a favor."

"Then I shall."

"On your peril!" he cried, with hasty rigor.

But éloise escaped, trailing one end of her scarf behind, looking back at him, laughing, and shaking her threatening fan as he stepped after her. And then Mr. St. George resumed his haughty silence.

éloise went down the hall after Hazel. She found her in the empty dining-room, having just set down the salver; the last light, that, stealing in, illumined all the paintings of clusters of fruit and bunches of flowers upon the white panelling, had yet a little ray to spare for the girl where she crouched with her sobs, her apron flung above her head; and when éloise laid her hand gently on her shoulder, she sprang as if one had struck her.

"Oh, Miss 'Loise! Miss 'Loise! I'm in such trouble!" she gasped.

It did not take long for the little story to find the air. Vane and Hazel, secure of éloise's efforts, had married. It was one of the immutable Blue Bluffs laws that they had broken: there were no marriages allowed off the place there. Vane was expiating his offence no one knew where, and there were even rumors that he had already been sent away to the Cuban plantation of the Marlboro's, whither all refractory slaves were wont to journey.

éloise went slowly back to the drawing-room, then out upon the piazza, and with her went that bending grace that accompanied her least motion, and always reminded you of a flower swaying on its stem. Mr. Marlboro' leaned there, listening to Miss Murray's singing within. éloise went and took her place beside him, while his face brightened. He had been eating opium again, and his eyes were full of dreams. From where they stood upon the piazza they could see the creek winding, a strip of silvery redness, along the coast, and far in the distance where it met the sea, a film upon the sky, rose the dim castellated height of Blue Bluffs, like an azure mist.

"There is something there that I want," said éloise, archly, looking at the Bluffs.

"There? you shall not wish twice."

Then Hazel approaching, as by signal, offered Mr. Marlboro' a cup, which he declined without gesture or glance, while there gleamed in her eye a subtle look that told how easy it would have been to brew poison for this man who had such an ungodly power over her fate.

"That is my little maid," said éloise. "I have lent her to Mrs. Arles awhile, though. Is she not pretty,-Hazel?"

"That is Hazel, then? A very witch-hazel!"

"Yes."

"And you want Vane?"

"Yes, Mr. Marlboro'."

"I did not know she was your maid. But the offence of Vane, if overlooked, would be a breach of discipline entailing too hazardous effects. Authority should never relax. What creeps through the iron fingers once can creep again. The gentle dews distilling through the pores of the granite congeal in the first frost and rend the rock. I would have difficulty, Miss éloise, in pardoning such an offence to you, yourself. Ah, yes, that would be impossible, by Heaven!"

éloise laughed in her charming way, and said,-

"But, Mr. Marlboro', would it not be an admirable lesson to your people, if Vane were sold?"

"A lesson to teach them all to go and do likewise, eh, Marlboro'?" said St. George, passing, with Miss Humphreys on his arm.

"I have never sold, I never sell, a slave," replied Marlboro', in his placid tone; but St. George was out of hearing. "Yet, Miss éloise,-if-if you will accept him"--

"Mr. Marlboro'! Indeed? Truly indeed? How happy you make me!"

"And you can make me as happy,-happier, by the infinity of heaven over earth!"

"But ought I to accept such a gift?" asked éloise, oblivious of his last speech. "But can I?-may I?"-as St. George's warning stole into her memory.

"Most certainly you can! most certainly you shall! he is yours!" And before éloise could pour forth one of her multitudinous thanks, he had moved away.

Marlboro's, however, was not that noble nature that spurns to beg at the moment when it grants. Directly, he had wheeled about, and with an eager air was again beside her.

"And, éloise," he said, "if in response I might have one smile, one hope"--

Thoughtlessly enough, éloise turned her smiling face upon him, and gave him her hand.

"And you give it to me at last, this hand, to crown my life!" he said,-for to his excited brain the trifling deed seemed the weighty event, and when he looked up éloise still was smiling. Only for a second, though, for her processes of thought were not instantaneous, while to him it was one of Mahomet's moments holding an eternity, and she smiled while she was thinking, thinking simply of her little handmaiden's pleasure. She tried to release her hand. But Mr. Marlboro' did not know that his grasp upon it was that of a vice, for under an artificial stimulus every action is as intense as the fired fancy itself. And as she found it impossible to free it without visible violence, other thoughts visited éloise. Why should she not give it to him? Who else cared for it? What object had her lonely life? Speak sweetly as they might, what one of her old gallants forgot her loss of wealth? Here was a man to make happy, here was a heart to rest upon, here was a slave of his own passions to set free. Why should she continue to live with Mr. St. George for her haughty master, when here was this man at her feet? Why, but that suddenly the conviction smote her that she loved the one and despised the other, that she adored the master and despised the slave? And she snatched away her hand.

Just then Mr. St. George was coming down the piazza again, on his promenade, his head bent low as he spoke to the clinging little lady on his arm. Passing éloise, as he raised his face, their eyes met. She was doing, he thought, the very thing that he had disadvised, and, as if to warn her afresh, he looked long, a derisive smile curling his proud lip. That was enough. "He knows it!" exclaimed éloise to herself. "He believes it! He thinks I love him! He never shall be sure of it!" And turning once more, her face hung down and away, she laid her hand in Marlboro's, without a word or a glance. He bent low over it in the shadow, pressing it with his fervent lips, murmuring, "Mine! mine at last! my own!" And St. George saw the whole.

Just then a little sail crept in sight from where they stood, winding down the creek at the foot of the lawn.

"Oh, how delightful to be on the water to-night!" cried Laura Murray.

"You have but to command," said Mr. St. George, with a certain gayety that seemed struck out like sparks against the flinty fact of the late occurrence,-and half the party trooped down the turf to the shore. The boats were afloat and laden before one knew it. Mr. Marlboro' and éloise were just one instant too late. Laura Murray shook a triumphant handkerchief at them, and St. George feathered his oar, pausing a moment as if he would return, and then gave a great sweep and his boat fairly leaped over the water.

Mr. Marlboro' did not hesitate. There was the sail they had first seen, now on the point of being lowered beneath the alder-bushes by the young hunters who had sought shore for the night. Gold slipped from one hand to another, a word, a name, and a promise. éloise was on board, expecting Mrs. Arles and Mrs. Houghton to follow. Marlboro' sprang upon the end, and drew in the rope behind him, waving the other ladies a farewell; the sails were stretched again, the rudder shipped, and wing and wing they went skimming down the channel, past the little fleet of wherries, ploughing the shallow current into foam and spray on their wild career.

"Marlboro' is mad!" said St. George, with a whitening cheek.

Marlboro', standing up, one arm about the mast, and catching the slant beam of the late-rising moon on his face, that shone awfully rapt and intent, saluted them with an ironical cheer, and dashed on. éloise held the tiller for the moment, still pulsating with her late emotions, not above a trifling play of vanity, welcoming the exhilaration of a race, where she might half forget her trouble, and pleased with a vague anticipation of some intervention that might recall the word which even in these five dragging moments had already begun to corrode and eat into her heart like a rusting fetter. The oarsmen in the wherries bent their muscles to the strife, the boats danced over the tiny crests, the ladies sang their breeziest sea-songs to cheer them at the work. The sail-boat rounded a curve and was almost out of sight.

"Oars never caught sails yet," muttered St. George, and he put his boat to the shore. "There, Murray, try your lazy mettle, and take my oar. As for me, I'm off,"-and he sprang upon the bank, sending the boat spinning off into the current again from his foot. In ten minutes a horseman went galloping by on the high-road skirting the shore, with a pace like that of the Spectre of the Storm.

"Now, Mr. Marlboro'," said éloise, "shall we not turn back, victorious?"

"Turn?" said Marlboro', shaking loose another fold of the linen. "I never turn! Look your last on the tiny tribe,-we shall see them no more!"

éloise sprang to her feet. He caught her hand and replaced her; his face was so white that it shone, there was a wild glitter in his eye, and the smile that brooded over her had something in it absolutely terrific.

"We have gone far enough," said éloise, resolutely. "I wish to rejoin my friends."

"You are with me!" said Marlboro', proudly.

She was afraid to say another word, for to oppose him now in his exultant rage might only work the mood to frenzy. The creek had widened almost to a river,-the sea was close at hand, with its great tumbling surf. She looked at the horizon and the hill for help, but none came; destruction was before them, and on they flew.

Marlboro' stood now, and steadied the tiller with his foot.

"This is motion!" said he. "We fly upon the wings of the wind! The viewless wind comes roaring out of the black region of the East, it fills the high heaven, it roars on to the uttermost undulation of the atmosphere, and we are a part of it! We are only a mote upon its breath, a dust-atom driven before it, éloise,-and yet one great happiness is greater than it, drowns it in a vaster flood of viewless power, can whisper to it calm!"

How should éloise contradict him? With such rude awakening, he might only snatch her in his arms and plunge down to death. Perhaps he half divined the fear.

"Yes, éloise," he said. "They are both here, life and death, at our beck! I can take you to my heart, one instant the tides divide, then they close above us, and you are mine for ever and ever and only,-sealed mine beneath all this crystal sphere of the waters! We hear the gentle lapping of the ripples on the shore, we hear the tones of evening-bells swim out and melt above us, we hear the oar shake off its shower of tinkling drops,-up the jewel-strewn deeps of heaven the planets hang out their golden lamps to light our slumbers! Heart to heart and lip to lip, we are at rest, we are at peace, nothing comes between us, our souls have the eternities in which to mingle!"

He saw éloise shudder, and turned from his dream, blazing full upon her. "Life, then, is best!" he cried. "But life together and alone, life where we count out its throbs in some far purple island of the main, prolonged who knows how far?-love shall make for us perpetual youth, there shall no gloom enter our Eden, perfect solitude and perfect bliss! Alone, we two in our pride and our joy can defy the powers of any other heaven, we shall become gods ourselves! Up helm and away! Life is best!"

* * *

THE NEVA.

I walk, as in a dream,

Beside the sweeping stream,

Wrapped in the summer midnight's amber haze:

Serene the temples stand,

And sleep, on either hand,

The palace-fronts along the granite quays.

Where golden domes, remote,

Above the sea-mist float,

The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth;

And Peter's fortress-spire,

A slender lance of fire,

Still sparkles back the splendor of the North.

The pillared angel soars

Above the silent shores;

Dark from his rock the horseman hangs in air;

And down the watery line

The exiled Sphinxes pine

For Karnak's morning in the mellow glare.

I hear, amid the hush,

The restless current's rush,

The Neva murmuring through his crystal zone:

A voice portentous, deep,

To charm a monarch's sleep

With dreams of power resistless as his own.

Strong from the stormy Lake,

Pure from the springs that break

In Valda? vales the forest's mossy floor,

Greener than beryl-stone

From fir woods vast and lone,

In one full stream the braided currents pour.

"Build up your granite piles

Around my trembling isles,"

I hear the River's scornful Genius say:

"Raise for eternal time

Your palaces sublime,

And flash your golden turrets in the day!

"But in my waters cold

A mystery I hold,-

Of empires and of dynasties the fate:

I bend my haughty will,

Unchanged, unconquered still,

And smile to note your triumph: mine can wait.

"Your fetters I allow,

As a strong man may bow

His sportive neck to meet a child's command,

And curb the conscious power

That in one awful hour

Could whelm your halls and temples where they stand.

"When infant Rurik first

His Norseland mother nursed,

My willing flood the future chieftain bore:

To Alexander's fame

I lent my ancient name,

What time my waves ran red with Pagan gore.

"Then Peter came. I laughed

To feel his little craft

Borne on my bosom round the marshy isles:

His daring dream to aid,

My chafing floods I laid,

And saw my shores transfixed with arrowy piles.

"I wait the far-off day

When other dreams shall sway

The House of Empire builded by my side,-

Dreams that already soar

From yonder palace-door,

And cast their wavering colors on my tide,-

"Dreams where white temples rise

Below the purple skies,

By waters blue, which winter never frets,-

Where trees of dusky green

From terraced gardens lean,

And shoot on high the reedy minarets.

"Shadows of mountain-peaks

Vex my unshadowed creeks;

Dark woods o'erhang my silvery birchen bowers;

And islands, bald and high,

Break my clear round of sky,

And ghostly odors blow from distant flowers.

"Then, ere the cold winds chase

These visions from my face,

I see the starry phantom of a crown,

Beside whose blazing gold

This cheating pomp is cold,

A moment hover, as the veil drops down.

"Build on! That day shall see

My streams forever free.

Swift as the wind, and silent as the snow,

The frost shall split each wall:

Your domes shall crack and fall:

My bolts of ice shall strike your barriers low!"

On palace, temple, spire,

The morn's descending fire

In thousand sparkles o'er the city fell:

Life's rising murmur drowned

The Neva where he wound

Between his isles: he keeps his secret well.

* * *

ROBSON.

In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St. Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a horrible little court branching northward from it good old George Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter; and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses, with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest offscourings of the enormous city. Next to Napoli senza sole, Wych Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest street I know.

In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert, a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance, so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have conveyed dukes and marquises and members of Parliament to the Olympic. Frequently, but prior to the lamented death of Prince Albert, you might observe, if you passed through Wych Street in the forenoon, a little platform, covered with faded red cloth, and shaded by a dingy, striped awning, extending from one of the entrance-doors of the Olympic to the edge of the sidewalk. The initiated became at once aware that Her Most Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the French noblesse, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.

My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago, there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a rough wooden portico before it,-not unlike such a portico as I have recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,-and with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from the French. With these timbers, some lath and plaster, a few bricks, and a little money, Astley ran up a theatre dedicated to the performance of interludes and burlettas,-that is, of pieces in which the dialogue was not spoken, but sung, in order to avoid interference with the patent-rights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In our days, this edifice was known as the Olympic. When I knew this theatre first, it had fallen into a state of seemingly hopeless decadence. Nobody succeeded there. To lease the Olympic Theatre was to court bankruptcy and invite collapse. The charming Vestris had been its tenant for a while. There Liston and Wrench had delighted the town with their most excellent fooling. There many of Planche's most sparkling burlesques had been produced. There a perfect boudoir of a green-room had been fitted up by Bartolozzi's beautiful and witty daughter; and there Hook and Jerrold, Haynes Bayley and A' Beckett had uttered their wittiest sayings. But the destiny of the Olympic was indomitable. There was nae luck about the house; and Eliza Vestris went bankrupt at last. Management after management tried its fortunes in the doomed little house, but without success. Desperate adventurers seized upon it as a last resource, or chose it as a place wherein to consummate their ruin. The Olympic was contiguous to the Insolvent Debtors' Court, in Portugal Street, and from the paint-pots of the Olympic scene-room to the whitewash of the commercial tribunal there was but one step.

It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren, having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre. He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,-father and son are, alas! both dead,-and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the original Sam Weller in the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,-save in one particular,-they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to hear at clubs and in critical coteries-at the Albion and the Garrick and the Café de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Réunion in Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to reign supreme-rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing Macbeth and Shylock in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody-among the bodies who were anybody-had ever heard of him before. Whence he came, or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his name was Frederick Robson.

Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had already attained middle age,-that he had been vegetating for years in that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low comedian of a country-theatre,-that he had come timidly to London and accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the "Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had a wife and family to maintain, and drew his twenty-five or thirty shillings weekly with perfect patience and resignation.

A weary period, however, elapsed between his appearance at the Olympic and his realization of financial success. The critics and the connoisseurs talked about him a long time before the public could be persuaded to go and see him, or the manager to raise his salary. That doomed house with the wooden portico was in the way. At last the wretched remnant of the French seventy-four caught fire and was burned to the ground. Its ill-luck was consistent to the last. A poor actor, named Bender, had engaged the Olympic for a benefit. He was to pay twenty pounds for the use of the house. He had just sold nineteen pounds' worth of tickets, and trusted to the casual receipts at the door for his profits. At a few minutes before six o'clock, having to play in the first piece, he proceeded to the theatre, and entered his dressing-room. By half-past six the whole house was in a blaze. Bender, half undressed, had only time to save himself; and his coat, with the nineteen pounds in the pocket, fell a prey to the flames. After this, will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?

The Olympic arose "like a ph?nix from its ashes." To use language less poetical, a wealthy tradesman-a cheesemonger, I think-found the capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was in the old or the new Olympic-but I think it was in the new one-that the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager. He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious manner. He was a man about town, a viveur, a dandy; and it turned out one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens; and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged himself in the jail.

It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play the part of Jem Baggs, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player, who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson, who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills, considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous that such exquisite comicality had not been heard for many a long year. "Vilikins and his Dinah" created a furore. My countrymen are always going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip. Robson's portrait as Jem Baggs was in every shop-window. A newspaper began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"-

"It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."

A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible "Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in Jem Baggs. His "make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into preternatural shape.

New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years before, in Macbeth, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating, whiskey-drinking Scotchman,-and in Shylock, a servile, fawning, obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew. In the Yellow Dwarf he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,-full of mockery, mimicry, lubricity, and spite,-an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the outré, an unmistakably tragic element,-an element of depth and strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the cothurnus over his clogs. You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more apparent in his subsequent personation of Medea, in Robert Brough's parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of the abandoned wife of Jason, the diabolic loathing in which she holds Creüsa, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children whom she is afterwards to slay,-all these were portrayed by Robson, through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with astonishing force and vigor. The original Medea, the great Ristori herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him. She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue. "Uomo straordinario!" she went away saying.

I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and after Jem Baggs his brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity-which some thought would prove a magnificent one to him-of showing the grotesque side of insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities. A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine! Perhaps the piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run. A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part of Sir Giles Overreach in "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know that Sir Giles, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing on a purely "legitimate" r?le. I was half persuaded to write a burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do his very best with Sir Giles; but a feeling, half of laziness, and half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got farther than the first scene.

By this time some of the foremost dramatists in London thought they could discern in Robson latent characteristics of a nature far more elevated than those which his previous performances had brought into play. It was decided by those who had a right to render an authoritative verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in reality, a translation from the French.

The success achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended, and was genuine. In Daddy Hardacre, a skilful adaptation of the usurer in Balzac's "Eugénie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless Overreach, foiled at last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Molière's Avare I thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson's Volpone, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise most excellent: quiet, unaffected, unobtrusive, never forcing sentiment upon you, never obtaining tears by false pretences, but throughout solid, sterling, natural, admirable. I came at last, however, to the conviction, that, marked as was the distinction gained by this good actor in parts such as these, and as the lighthouse-keeper-the character originally sustained in private by Charles Dickens-in Wilkie Collins's play, domestic drama was not his forte; or, rather, that it was not his fortissimo. In fantastic burlesque, in the comic-terrible, he was unrivalled and inimitable. In the domestic drama he could hardly be surpassed, but he might be approached. Webster, Emery, Addison, could play Daddy Hardacre, or the father in "The Porter's Knot"; but none but himself could at once awe and convulse in Medea and the Yellow Dwarf. These domestic dramas interested, however, as much by their subject as by the excellence of his acting. Moreover, the public are apt sometimes to grow weary of burlesques,-their eternal grimacing and word-torturing and negro-singing and dancing. Themes for parody become exhausted, and, without long surcease, would not bear repetition. You may grow puns, like tobacco, until the soil is utterly worn out. The burlesque-writers, too, exhibited signs of weariness and feebleness. Planché retired into the Heralds' College. The cleverest of the Broughs died. His surviving brother was stupid. Talfourd went to the law before he found an early grave. Hale went to India. The younger generation were scarcely fit to write pantomimes, and it was not always Christmas. Besides, Robson had become a manager, and thought, perhaps, that weightier parts became him. In copartnership with Mr. Emden, he had succeeded Alfred Wigan as lessee of the Olympic, and there I hope he has realized a fortune. But whenever his brief vacations occurred, and actor-like he proceeded to turn them into gold by devoting to performances in country-theatres those days and nights which should properly have been given to rest and peace, he proved faithful to his old loves, and Jem Baggs and Boots at the Swan, Medea and the Yellow Dwarf, continued to be his favorite parts.

The popularity attained in England by this most remarkable of modern actors has never, since the public were first aware of his qualities, decreased. Robson is always sure to draw. The nights of his playing, or of his non-playing, at the Olympic, are as sure a gauge of the receipts as the rising and falling of the mercury in the thermometer are of the variations of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury. Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and more and more prolonged. The health of the great tragi-comedian has gradually failed him. I have been for a long period without news from him; but I much fear that the heyday of his health and strength is past. The errors which made Edmund Kean, in the prime of life, a shattered wreck, cannot be brought home to Frederick Robson. Rumors, the wildest and the wickedest, have been circulated about him, as about every other public man; but, to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are wholly destitute of foundation. Don Basilio, in Beaumarchais's play, might have added some very pregnant advice to his memorable counsel, "Calomniez, calomniez, il en résultera toujours quelque chose." He should have taught the world-if the world wants teaching-how to calumniate. The following recipe will be found, I think, infallible. If your enemy be a man of studious and retired habits, hint that he has gone mad; if you see him alone at a theatre or at church, report that he is separated from his wife; and in any case, declare that he drinks. He can't disprove it. If he drinks water out-of-doors, he may drink like a fish at home. If he walks straight on the street, he may reel in the parlor.

Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial papers-the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found-have attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water. The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has for years been overworking himself,-and that latterly prosperity has laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! you shall make fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a rice-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out, "I am rich, I have enough, Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios, I will work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me down under my own fig-tree,"-Fortune dismisses him with a sneer: "Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria and ennui, take gout and the palsy, with you."

I should be infinitely rejoiced to hear, when I go back, that Robson is once more a hale and valid man. It is the tritest of platitudes to say that he could ill be spared by the English stage. We never can spare a good actor. As well can we spare a good book or a good picture. But there would be much cause for gratulation, if Robson were spared, ere his powers definitively decline, to visit the United States. The American people ought to see Robson. They have had our tragedians, good, bad, and indifferent. They have filled the pockets of William Macready and of Charles Kean with dollars. They have heard our men-singers and our women-singers,-the birds that can sing, and the birds that can't sing, but will sing. The most notable of our drolls, Buckstone and Keeley, have been here, and have received a cordial welcome. But Robson has hitherto been lacking on this side the Atlantic. That he would be thoroughly appreciated by the theatrical public of America I cannot for one instant doubt. It is given to England to produce eccentrics, but for other nations to understand them better than the English do. The Germans are better critics of the satire of Hogarth, the French of the humor of Sterne, and the Americans of the philosophy of Shakspeare, than we to whose country those illustrious belong. In Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, crowded and enthusiastic audiences would, I venture to foretell, hang on the utterances of Robson, and expound to their own entire satisfaction his most eloquent by-play, his subtlest gestures. It would be idle, in the endeavor to give him something like a palpable aspect to people who have never seen him, to compare him with other great actors yet extant, or who have gone before. In his bursts of passion, in his vehement soliloquies, in the soul-harrowing force of his simulated invective, he is said to resemble Edmund Kean; but how are you to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the image we have formed to ourselves of Munden and Dowton, of Bannister and Suett? To say that he is a Genius, and the Prince of Eccentrics, is perhaps the only way to cut the Gordian knot of criticism in his instance.

Let me add, in conclusion, that Robson, off the stage, is one of the mildest, modestest, most unassuming of men. Painfully nervous he always was. I remember, a dozen years since, and when I was personally unacquainted with him, writing in some London newspaper a eulogistic criticism on one of his performances. I learned from friends that he had read the article, and had expressed himself as deeply grateful to me for it. I just knew him by sight; but for months afterwards, if I met him in the street, he used to blush crimson, and made as sudden a retreat round the nearest corner as was possible. He said afterwards that he hadn't the courage to thank me. I brought him to bay at last, and came to know him very well; and then I discovered how the nervousness, the bashfulness, the mauvaise honte, which made him so shy and retiring in private, stood him in wonderful stead on the stage. The nervous man became the fretful and capricious tyrant of mock tragedy; the bashful man warmed at the foot-lights with passion and power. The manner which in society was a drawback and a defect became in the pursuit of his art a charm and an excellence. What new parts may be created for Robson, and how he will acquit himself in them, I cannot presume to prophesy; but it is certain that he has already done enough to win for himself in the temple of dramatic fame a niche all the more to be envied, as its form and pattern must be, like its occupant, unprecedented and original.

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THE PARALLEL ROADS OF GLEN ROY, IN SCOTLAND.

There are phenomena in Nature which give the clue to so many of its mysteries that their correct interpretation leads at once to the broadest generalizations and to the rapid advance of science in new directions. The explanation of one very local and limited problem may clear up many collateral ones, since its solution includes the answer to a whole set of kindred inquiries. The "parallel roads" of Glen Roy offer such a problem. For half a century they have been the subject of patient investigation and the boldest speculation. To them natural philosophers have returned again and again to test their theories, and until they are fully understood no steady or permanent advance can be made in the various views which they have suggested to different observers. The theory of the formation of lakes by barriers, presented by McCulloch and Sir T. Lauder-Dick, that of continental upheavals and subsidences, advocated by Sir Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, that of inundations by great floods, maintained by Professor H. D. Rogers and Sir George Mackenzie, that of glacial action, brought forward by myself, have been duly discussed with reference to this difficult case; all have found their advocates, all have met with warm opposition, and the matter still remains a mooted point; but the one of all these theories which shall stand the test of time and repeated examination and be eventually accepted will explain many a problem besides the one it was meant to solve, and lead to farther progress in other directions.

I propose here to reconsider the facts of the case, and to present anew my own explanation of them, now more than twenty years old, but which I have never had an opportunity of publishing in detail under a popular form, though it appeared in the scientific journals of the day.

Before considering, however, the phenomena of Glen Roy, or the special glacial areas scattered over Scotland and the other British Isles, let us see what general evidence we have that glaciers ever existed at all in that realm. The reader will pardon me, if, at the risk of repetition, I sum up here the indications which, from our knowledge of glaciers as they at present exist, must be admitted, wherever they are found, as proof of their former existence. Such a summary may serve also as a guide to those who would look for glacial traces where they have not hitherto been sought.

In the first place, we have to consider the singular abrasion of the surfaces over which the glacier has moved, quite unlike that produced by the action of water. We have seen that such surfaces, wherever the glacier-marks have not been erased by some subsequent action, have several unfailing characteristics: they are highly polished, and they are also marked with scratches or fine stri?, with grooves and deeper furrows. Where best preserved, the smooth surfaces are shining; they have a lustre like stone or marble artificially polished by the combined friction and pressure of some harder material than itself until all its inequalities have been completely levelled and its surface has become glossy. Any marble mantel-piece may serve as an example of this kind of glacier-worn surface.

The levelling and abrading action of water on rock has an entirely different character. Tides or currents driven powerfully and constantly against a rocky shore, and bringing with them hard materials, may produce blunt, smooth surfaces, such as the repeated blows of a hammer on stone would cause; but they never bring it to a high polish, because, the grinding materials not being held steadily down, in firm, permanent contact with the rocky surfaces against which they move, as is the case with the glacier, but, on the contrary, dashed to and fro, they strike and rebound, making a succession of blows, but never a continuous, uninterrupted pressure and friction. The same is true of all the marks made on rocky shores against which loose materials are driven by water-currents. They are separate, disconnected, fragmentary; whereas the lines drawn by the hard materials set in the glacier, whether light and fine or strong and deep, are continuous, often unbroken for long distances, and rectilinear. Indeed, we have seen[A] that we have beneath every glacier a complete apparatus adapted to all the results described above. In the softer fragments ground to the finest powder under the incumbent mass we have a polishing paste; in the hard materials set in that paste, whether pebbles, or angular rocky fragments of different sizes, or grains of sand, we have the various graving instruments by which the finer or coarser lines are drawn. Not only are these lines frequently uninterrupted for a distance of many yards, but they are also parallel, except when some change takes place in the thickness of the ice, which may slightly modify the trend of the mass, or where lines in a variety of directions are produced by the intermittent action of separate glaciers running successively at different angles over the same surfaces. The deeper grooves sometimes present a succession of short staccato touches, just as when one presses the finger vertically along some surface where the resistance is sufficient to interrupt the action without actually stopping it,-a kind of grating motion, showing how firmly the instrument which produced it must have been held in the moving mass. No currents or sudden freshets carrying hard materials with them, even moving along straight paths down hill-sides or mountain-slopes, have ever been known to draw any such lines. They could be made only by some instrument held fast as in a vice by the moving power. Something of the kind is occasionally produced by the drag of a wheel grating over rocks covered with loose materials.

It has been said that grounded ice or icebergs floating along a rocky shore might produce similar marks; but they will chiefly be at the level of high-water mark, and, if grounded, they will trend in various directions, owing to the rocking or rotating movement of the iceberg. It has also been urged, that, without admitting any general glacier-period, icebergs and floating ice from more northern latitudes might account for the extensive transportation of the loose materials scattered in a continuous sheet over a large portion of the globe. There can be no doubt that an immense amount of débris of all sorts is carried to great distances by floating ice; where their presence is due to this cause, however, they are everywhere stranded along the shore or dropped to the sea-bottom. Large boulders are frequently left by the ice along the New-England coast, and we shall trace them hereafter among the sand-dunes of Cape Cod. But before it can be admitted that the drift-phenomena, and the polished and engraved surfaces with which they are everywhere intimately associated, are owing to floating ice or icebergs, it must be shown that all these appearances have been produced by some agency moving from the sea-board towards the land, and extending up to the very summits of the mountains, or else that all the countries exhibiting glacial phenomena have been sunk below the ocean to the greatest height at which glacier-marks are found, and have since gradually emerged to their present level. Now, though geologists are lavish of immersions when something is to be accounted for which they cannot otherwise explain, and a fresh baptism of old Mother Earth is made to wash away many obstacles to scientific theories, yet the common sense of the world will hardly admit the latter assumption without positive proof, and all the evidence of the kind we have, at the period under consideration, indicates only a comparatively slight change of relative level between sea and land within a narrow belt along the shores; and even this is shown to be posterior, not anterior, to the glacial phenomena. As to the supposition that the motion proceeded from the sea towards the land, all the facts are against it, since the whole trend of these phenomena is from inland centres toward the shore, instead of being from the coast upward.

Certainly, no one familiar with the facts could suppose that floating ice or icebergs had abraded, polished, and furrowed the bottom of narrow valleys as we find them worn, polished, and grooved by glaciers. And it must be remembered that this is a theory founded not upon hypothesis, but upon the closest comparison. I have not become acquainted with these marks in regions where glaciers no longer exist, and made a theory to explain their presence. I have, on the contrary, studied them where they are in process of formation. I have seen the glacier engrave its lines, plough its grooves and furrows in the solid rock, and polish the surfaces over which it moved, and was familiar with all this when I found afterwards appearances corresponding exactly to those which I had investigated in the home of the present glaciers. I could therefore say, and I think with some reason, that "this also is the work of the glacier acting in ancient times as it now acts in Switzerland."

There is another character of glacial action distinguishing it from any abrasions caused by water, even if freighted with a large amount of loose materials. On any surface over which water flows we shall find that the softer materials have yielded first and most completely. Hard dikes will be left standing out, while softer rocks around them are worn away,-furrows will be eaten into more deeply,-fissures will be widened,-clay-slates will be wasted,-while hard sandstone or limestone and granite will show greater resistance. Not so with surfaces over which the levelling plough of the glacier has passed. Wherever softer and harder rocks alternate, they are brought to one outline; where dikes intersect softer rock, they are cut to one level with it; where rents or fissures traverse the rock, they do not seem to have been widened or scooped out more deeply, but their edges are simply abraded on one line with the adjoining surfaces. Whatever be the inequality in the hardness of the materials of which the rock consists, even in the case of pudding-stone, the surface is abraded so evenly as to leave the impression that a rigid rasp has moved over all the undulations of the land, advancing in one and the same direction and levelling all before it.

Among the inequalities of the glacier-worn surfaces which deserve especial notice, are the so-called "roches moutonnées." They are knolls of a peculiar appearance, frequent in the Alps, and first noticed by the illustrious De Saussure, who designated them by that name, because, where they are numerous and seen from a distance, they resemble the rounded backs of a flock of sheep resting on the ground. These knolls are the result of the prolonged abrasion of masses of rocks separated by deep indentations wide enough to be filled up by large glaciers, overtopping the summits of the intervening prominences, and passing over them like a river, or like tide-currents flowing over a submerged ledge of rock. It is evident that water rushing over such sunken hills or ledges, adapting itself readily to all the inequalities over which it flows, and forming eddies against the obstacles in its course, will scoop out tortuous furrows upon the bottom, and hollow out rounded cavities against the walls, acting especially along pre?xisting fissures and upon the softer parts of the rock,-while the glacier, moving as a solid mass, and carrying on its under side its gigantic file set in a fine paste, will in course of time abrade uniformly the angles against which it strikes, equalize the depressions between the prominent masses, and round them off until they present those smooth bulging knolls known as the "roches moutonnées" in the Alps, and so characteristic everywhere of glacier-action. A comparison of any tide-worn hummock with such a glacier-worn mound will convince the observer that its smooth and evenly rounded surface was never produced by water.

Besides their peculiar form, the roches moutonnées present all the characteristic features of glacier-action in their polished surfaces accompanied with the straight lines, grooves, and furrows above described. But there are two circumstances connected with these knolls deserving special notice. They frequently present the glacial marks only on one side, while the opposite side has all the irregularities and roughness of a hill-slope not acted upon by ice. It is evident that the polished side was the one turned towards the advancing glacier, the side against which the ice pressed in its onward movement,-while it passed over the other side, the lee side as we may call it, without coming in immediate contact with it, bridging the depression, and touching bottom again a little farther on. As an additional evidence of this fact, we frequently find on the lee side of such knolls accumulations of the loose materials which the glacier carries with it. It is only, however, when the knolls are quite high, and abrupt enough to allow any rigid substance to bridge over the space in its descent from the summit to the surface below, that we find these conditions; when the knolls are low and slope gently downward in every direction, they present the characteristic glacier-surfaces equally on all sides. This circumstance should be borne in mind by all who investigate the traces of glacier-action; for this inequality in the surfaces presented by the opposite sides of any obstacle in the path of the ice is often an important means of determining the direction of its motion.

The other characteristic peculiarity of these roches moutonnées consists in the direction of the glacier-scratches, which ascend the slope to its summit in a direct line on one side, while they deviate to the right and left on the other sides of the knoll, more or less obliquely according to its steepness. Occasionally, large boulders may be found perched on the very summit of such prominences. Their position is inexplicable by the supposition of currents as the cause of their transportation. Any current strong enough to carry a boulder to such a height would of course sweep it on with it. This phenomenon finds, however, an easy explanation in the glacial theory. The thickness of such a sheet of ice is of course less above such a hill or mound than over the lower levels adjoining it. Not only will the ice melt, therefore, more readily at this spot, but, as ice is transparent to heat, the summit of the prominence will become warmed by the rays of the sun, and will itself facilitate the melting of the ice above it. On the breaking up of the ice, therefore, such a spot will be the first to yield, and allow the boulders carried on the back of the glacier to fall into the hollow thus formed, where they will rest upon the projecting rock left uncovered. This is no theoretical explanation; there are such cases in Switzerland, where holes in the ice are formed immediately above the summit of hills or prominences over which the glacier passes, and into which it drops its burdens. Of course, where the ice is constantly renewed over such a spot by the onward progress of the glacier, these materials may be carried off again; but if we suppose such a case to occur at the breaking up of the glacier-period, when the ice was disappearing forever from such a spot, it is easy to account for the poising of these large boulders on prominent peaks or ledges.

The appearances about the roches moutonnées, especially the straight scratches and grooves on the side up which the ice ascended, have led to a mistaken view of the mode in which large boulders are transported by ice. It has been supposed, by those who, while they accepted the glacial theory, were not wholly conversant with the mode of action of glaciers, that, in passing through the bottom of a valley, for instance, the glacier would take up large boulders, and, carrying them along with it, would push them up such a slope and deposit them on its summit. It is true that large boulders may sometimes be found in front of glaciers among the materials of their terminal moraines, and may, upon any advance of the glacier, be pushed forward by it. But I know of no example of erratic boulders being carried to considerable distances and raised from lower to higher levels by this means. All the angular boulders perched upon prominent rocks must have fallen upon the surface of the glacier in the upper part of its course, where rocky ledges rise above its surface and send down their broken fragments. The surface of any boulder carried under the ice, or pushed along for any distance at its terminus, would show the friction and pressure to which it had been subjected. In this connection it should be remembered that in the case of large glaciers low hills form no obstacle to their onward progress, especially when the glacier is thick enough to cover them completely, and even to rise far above them. The roches moutonnées about the Grimsel show that hills many hundred feet high have been passed over by the great glacier of the Aar, when it descended as far as Meyringen, without having seemingly influenced its onward progress.

But in enumerating the evidences of glacier-action, we have to remember not only the effects produced upon the surface of the ground by the ice itself, but also the deposits it has left behind it. The loose materials scattered over the face of the earth may point as distinctly to the source of their distribution as does the character of the rocky surfaces on which they rest indicate the different causes of abrasion. In characteristic localities the loose materials deposited by glaciers may readily be recognized at first sight, and distinguished from water-worn pebbles; nor is it difficult to distinguish both from loose materials resulting from the decomposition of rocks on the spot,-the latter always agreeing with the rocks on which they rest, while the decomposition to which they owe their separation from the solid rock is often still going on. Such débris are found everywhere about disintegrating rocks, and they constantly mingle with the loose fragments brought from a distance by various agencies. They are found upon and among the glacier-worn pebbles, especially where the latter have themselves been disturbed since their accumulation. They are also found among water-worn pebbles, wherever the rocky beds of our rivers or the rocky bluffs of our sea-shores crumble down. In investigating the character of loose materials transported from greater or less distances, either by the agency of glaciers or by water-currents, it is important at the very outset to discriminate between these deposits of older date and the local accessions mingling with them.

Occasionally we may have also to distinguish between all these deposits and the débris brought down by land-slides, or by sudden freshets transporting to a distance a vast amount of loose materials which are neither ice-worn nor water-worn. At Rossberg, for instance, in the Canton of Schwitz, the land-slide which buried the village of Goldau under a terrific avalanche, and filled a part of the Lake of Lauertz, spread an immense number of huge boulders across the valley, some of which even rolled up the opposite side to a considerable height. Many of these boulders might easily be mistaken for erratic boulders, were not the aggregate of these loose materials traceable to the hills from which they descended. In this case water had no part in loosening or bringing down this mass of fragments. They simply rolled from the declivity, and stopped when they had exhausted the momentum imparted to them by their weight. In the case of the débacle of Bagnes, above Martigny, in a valley leading to the St. Bernard, the circumstances were very different. A glacier, advancing beyond its usual limits and rising against the opposite mountain-slope, dammed up the waters of the torrent and caused a lake to be formed. The obstruction gave way in the course of time, and the waters of the lake rushed out, carrying along with them huge boulders and a mass of loose materials of all sorts, and scattering them over the plain below. Such an accumulation of débris differs from the pebbles and loose fragments found in river-beds. The comparatively short distance over which they are carried, and the suddenness of the transportation, allow no time for the abrasion which produces the smooth surfaces of water-worn pebbles or the polished and scratched surfaces of glacier-worn ones. In the latter case, we have seen that the pebbles, being so set in the ice as to expose only one side, may be only partially polished, while others, more loosely held and turning in their sockets, may receive the same high polish on every side. In such a case the lines will intersect one another, in consequence of the different position in which the stone has been held at different times. No such appearances exist in the water-worn pebbles: their blunt surfaces, smoothed and rounded uniformly by the action of the water in which they have been rolled or tossed about, present everywhere the same aspect.

The correlation between these different loose materials and the position in which they are found helps us also to detect their origin. The loose materials bearing glacier-marks are always found resting upon surfaces which have been worn, abraded, and engraved in the same manner, while the water-worn pebbles are everywhere found resting upon rocks the abrasion of which may be traced to water. It is true that in some localities, as, for instance, in the gravel-pit of Mount Auburn, near Cambridge, large masses of glacier-worn pebbles alternate with beach-shingle; but it is easy to show that there was here a glacier advancing into the sea, crowding its front moraine and the materials carried under it over and into the shingle washed up by the waves upon the beach. Not infrequently, also, river-pebbles may be found among glacial materials. This is especially the case where, after the disappearance of large glaciers, rivers have occupied their beds. Examples of this kind may be seen in all the valleys of the Alps.

But, besides the special character of the individual fragments, the true origin of any accumulation of glacier-débris, commonly called drift, may be detected by the total absence of stratification, so essential a feature in all water-deposits. This absence of stratification throughout its mass is, after all, the great and important characteristic of the drift; and though I have alluded to it before, I reiterate it here, as that which distinguishes it from all like accumulations under water. I may be pardoned for dwelling upon this point, because the great controversy among geologists respecting the nature and origin of the sheet of loose materials scattered over a great part of the globe turns upon it. The débris of which the drift consists are thrown together pell-mell, without any arrangement according to size or weight, larger and smaller fragments being mixed so indiscriminately that the heaviest materials may be on the very summit of the mass, and the lightest at the bottom in immediate contact with the underlying rock, or the larger pieces may stand at any level in the mass of finer ones. Impalpable powder, coarse sand, rounded, polished, and scratched fragments of every size are mixed together in a homogeneous paste, in which the larger materials are imbedded, to use a homely, but expressive comparison, like raisins and currants in a pudding. The adhesive paste holding all these fragments together is, no doubt, the result of the friction to which the whole was subjected under the glacier, and which has worked some of the softer materials into a kind of cement.

The mode of aggregation of water-worn materials is very different. Examine the shingle along our beaches: we find it so distributed as to show that the fading tide-wave has carried the lighter materials farther than the heavier ones, and the successive deposits exhibit an imperfect cross-stratification resulting from changes in the height of the tide and the direction of the wind. Moreover, in any materials collected under water we find the heavier ones at the bottom, the lighter on the top. It is true that large angular boulders may occasionally be found resting upon beach-shingle, but their presence in such a connection is easily explained. They may have been dropped there by floating icebergs, or have fallen from crumbling drift-cliffs.

I should add, in speaking of drift-materials, that, while we find the large angular boulders resting above them, we occasionally find boulders of unusual size mingled with them; but, when this is the case, such massive fragments are more or less rounded, polished, and marked in the same way as the smaller pebbles, or as the surfaces over which the glacier has passed. This is important to remember, because, when we examine the drift in countries where the ice, during the glacier-period, overtopped nearly all the mountains, so that few fragments could fall from them upon its surface, we find scarcely any angular boulders, while the drift is interspersed with larger fragments of this character, carried under the ice, instead of on its back. Another distinction between water-worn deposits and drift consists in the fact that the former are washed clean, while the latter always retains the mud gathered during its journey and spread throughout its mass.

In summing up the glacial evidences, I must not omit the moraines, though I have described them so fully in a previous article that I need not do more than allude to them here; but any argument for the glacial theory which did not include these characteristic walls erected by glaciers would be most imperfect. We need hardly discuss the theory of currents with reference to the formation of terminal moraines, extending across the valleys from side to side. Any current powerful enough to bring the boulders and débris of all sorts of which these walls are composed to the places where they are found would certainly not build them up with such regularity, but would sweep them away or scatter them along the bottom of the valley. That this is actually the case is seen in the lower course of the valley of the Rhone, where there are no transverse moraines, while they are frequent and undisturbed in the upper part of the valley. This is no doubt owing to the fact, that, when the main glacier had already retreated considerably up the valley, the lateral glaciers from the chains of the Combin and the Diablerets still reached the valley of the Rhone at a lower point, and barred the outlet of the waters from the glaciers above. A lake was thus formed, which, when the lower glaciers retreated up the lateral valleys, swept away all the lower transverse moraines, and formed the flat bottom of Martigny. In this case, the moraines were totally obliterated; but there are many other instances in which the materials have been only broken up and scattered over a wider surface by currents. In such remodelled moraines, the glacier-mud has, of course, been more or less washed away. We have here a blending of the action of water with that of the glacier; and, indeed, how could it be otherwise, when the colossal glaciers of past ages gradually disappeared or retreated to the mountain-heights? The wasting ice must have occasioned immense freshets, the action of which we shall trace hereafter, when examining the formation of our drift-ponds, of our river-beds and estuaries, as well as the river-terraces standing far above the present water-level.

And now, if it be asked how much of this evidence for the former existence of glaciers is to be found in Great Britain, I answer, that there is not a valley in Switzerland where all these traces are found in greater perfection than in the valleys of the Scotch Highlands, or of the mountains of Ireland and Wales, or of the lake-region in England. Not a link is wanting to the chain. Polished surfaces, traversed by stri?, grooves, and furrows, with a sheet of drift resting immediately upon them, extend throughout the realm,-the roches moutonnées raise their rounded backs from the ground there as in Switzerland,-transverse moraines bar their valleys and lateral ones border them, and the boulders from the hill-sides are scattered over the plains as thickly as between the Alps and the Jura, and are here and there perched upon the summits of isolated hills. This being the case, let us examine a little more closely the local phenomena connected with the ancient extension of glaciers in this region, and especially the parallel roads of Glen Roy.

Among the Grampian Hills, a little to the northeast of Ben Nevis, lies the valley of Glen Roy, a winding valley trending in a northeasterly direction, and some ten miles in length. Across the mouth of this valley, at right angles with it, runs the valley of Glen Spean, trending from east to west, Glen Roy thus opening directly at its southern extremity into Glen Spean. Around the walls of the Glen Roy valley run three terraces, one above the other, at different heights, like so many roads artificially cut in the sides of the valley, and indeed they go by the name of the "parallel roads." These three terraces, though in a less perfect state of preservation, are repeated for a short distance at exactly the same levels on the southern wall of the valley of Glen Spean, just opposite the opening of the Glen Roy valley; that is, they make the whole circuit of Glen Roy, stop abruptly, on both sides, at its southern extremity, and reappear again on the opposite wall of Glen Spean. I should add, however, that all three do not come to this sudden termination; for the lowest of these terraces turns eastward into the valley of Glen Spean, following the whole curve of the eastern half of the valley, while, of the two upper terraces, there is no trace whatever, nor is there any indication that either of the three ever existed in the western half of the valley. When I first visited the region, these phenomena had already been the subject of earnest discussion among English geologists. The commonly accepted explanation of the facts was that these terraces marked ancient sea-levels at a time when the ocean penetrated much farther into the interior, and Glen Roy and the adjoining valleys were as many fiords or estuaries. And though the present elevation of the locality made such an interpretation improbable at first sight, the first or highest of the terraces being eleven hundred and forty-four feet above the present sea-level, the second eighty-two feet below the first, and the third and lowest two hundred and twelve feet below the second, or eight hundred odd feet above the level of the sea, it was thought that the oscillations of the land, its alternate subsidences and upheavals, proved by the modern results of geology to have been so great and so frequent, might account even for so remarkable a change. There are, however, other objections to this theory not so easily explained away. There are no traces of organic life upon these terraces. If they were ancient sea-beaches, we should expect to find upon them the remains of marine animals, shells, crustacea, and the like. All the explanations given to lessen the significance of this absence of organic remains are futile. Again, why should the lower terrace alone be continued into the eastern end of the valley of Glen Spean, while there are no terraces at all in its western part, since both must have been as fully open to the sea as Glen Roy valley itself? This seemed the more inexplicable since all the terraces exist on the valley-wall opposite the outlet of Glen Roy, showing that this sheet of water, wherever it came from, filled the valley itself and the space between it and the southern wall of Glen Spean, but failed to spread, on either side of that space, into the eastern and western extension of Glen Spean. It is evident, that, at the time the water filled Glen Roy, some obstruction blocked the valley of Glen Spean, both to the east and west, leaving, however, that space in the centre free into which Glen Roy opens, while, by the time the water had sunk to the level of the lowest terrace, one of these barriers, that to the east, must have been removed, for the lowest terrace, as I have said, is continuous throughout the eastern part of Glen Spean.[B]

Prepossessed as I was with the idea of glacial agency in times anterior to ours, these phenomena appeared to me under a new aspect. I found the bottom of Glen Spean so worn by glacial action as to leave no doubt in my mind that it must have been the bed of a great glacier, and Dr. Buckland fully concurred with me in this impression. Indeed, the face of the country throughout that region presents not only the glacier-marks in great perfection, but other evidences of the ancient presence of glaciers. There are moraines at the lower end of Glen Spean, remodelled, it is true, by the action of currents, but still retaining enough of their ancient character to be easily recognized; and some of the finest examples of the roches moutonnées I have seen in Scotland are to be found at the entrance of the valley of Loch Treig, a lateral valley opening into Glen Spean on its southern side, and, as we shall see hereafter, intimately connected with the history of the parallel roads of Glen Roy. These roches moutonnées may very fairly be compared with those of the Grimsel, and exhibit all the characteristic features of the Alpine ones. One of them, lying on the western side of the valley where it opens into Glen Spean, is crossed by a trap-dike. The general surface of the hill, consisting of rather soft mica, has been slightly worn down by atmospheric agencies, so that the dike stands out some three-quarters of an inch above it. On the dike, however, the glacier-marks extend for its whole length in great perfection, while they have entirely disappeared from the surrounding surfaces, so as to leave the dike thus standing out in full relief. This is an instructive case, showing how little disintegration has gone on since the drift-period. All the currents that have swept over it, all the rains that have beaten upon it, have not worn away one inch from the original surface of the hill. I have observed many other roches moutonnées in Scotland, especially about the neighborhood of Loch Awe, Loch Fyne, and Loch Etive. In fact, they may be found in almost all the glens of Scotland, in the lake-region of England, and in the valleys of Wales and Ireland.

Following the glacial indications wherever we could find them in the country about Glen Roy, it became evident to me that the whole western range of the Grampian Hills had once been a great centre of glaciers, that they had come down toward Glen Spean through all the valleys on the mountain-slopes to the north and south of it, so that this valley had become, as it were, the great drainage-bed for the masses of ice thus poured into it laterally, and moving down the valley from east to west as one immense glacier. It is natural to suppose, that, at the breaking-up of the great sheet of ice which, if my view of the case is correct, must have covered the whole country at this time, the ice would yield more readily in a valley like that of Glen Roy, lying open to the south and receiving the full force of the sun, than in those on the opposite side of Glen Spean, opening to the north. At all events, it is evident that at some time posterior to this universal glacial period, when the ice began to retreat, Glen Roy became the basin of a glacial lake such as we now find in the Alps of Switzerland, where occasionally a closed valley becomes a trough, as it were, into which the water from the surrounding hills is drained. In such a lake no animals are found, such as exist in any other sheet of fresh water, and this would account for the absence of any organic remains on the terraces of Glen Roy. But at first sight it seemed that this theory was open in one respect to the same objection as the other. What prevented this sheet of water from spreading east and west in Glen Spean? If it not only filled Glen Roy, but extended to the southern side of Glen Spean immediately opposite the opening of Glen Roy, what prevented it from filling the whole of that valley also? In endeavoring to answer this question, I found the solution of the mystery.

The bed of Glen Spean, through its whole extent from east to west, is marked, as I have said, by glacial action, in rectilinear scratches and furrows. This westward track of the main glacier is crossed transversely near the centre of the valley by two other glacier-tracks cutting it at right angles. Upon tracing these cross-tracks carefully, I became satisfied, that, after the surrounding ice had begun to yield, after the masses of ice which descended from the northern and southern slopes of the mountains into Glen Spean had begun to retreat, and to form local limited glaciers, two of those lateral glaciers, one coming down from Ben Nevis on the southwest, the other from Loch Treig on the southeast, extended farther than the others and stretched across Glen Spean.[C] These two glaciers for a long time formed barriers across the western and eastern extension of this valley, damming back the waters which filled Glen Roy and the central part of Glen Spean.

Evidently the glacier descending from Loch Treig was the first to yield, for, by the time the Glen Roy lake had sunk to the level of the lowest terrace, the entrance to the eastern extension of the valley must have been free, otherwise the water could not have spread throughout that basin as we find it did; but it would seem that by the time the western barrier, or the glacier from Ben Nevis, was removed, the sheet of water was too far reduced to have left permanent marks of its outflow into the Great Glen, except by disturbing and remodelling the large moraines of the older Glen Spean glacier. There are faint indications of other terraces in Glen Roy, even at a higher level than the uppermost parallel road, owing their origin probably to the short duration of a higher level of the glacier-lake, when the great general glacier had not yet been lowered to a more permanent level determined by a limited circumscription within the walls of the valleys. There are other terraces in neighboring valleys at still different levels,-in Glen Gloy, for instance, where the one horizontal road was no doubt formed in consequence of the damming of the valley by a glacier from Loch Arkeig. Mr. Darwin has seen another in Glen Kinfillen, which I would explain by the presence of a glacier in the Great Glen, the marks of which are particularly distinct about the eastern end of Glen Garry.

The evidence of the ancient presence of glaciers is no less striking in other parts of the Scotch Highlands. Between the southeastern range of the Grampian Hills, in Forfarshire and Perthshire, and the opposite ridge of Sidlaw Hills, stretches the broad valley of Strathmore. At the time when Glen Spean received the masses of ice from the slopes of the western Grampian range, the glaciers descended from the valleys on the southern slope of the southeastern range and from those on the northern slope of Sidlaw Hills into the capacious bed of the valley which divides them. The glacial phenomena of this region present a striking resemblance in their general relations to those of the Alps and the Jura. The Grampian range on the northern side of Strathmore valley occupies the same position in reference to that of the Sidlaw Hills opposite, as does the range of the Alps to that of the Jura, while the intervening valley may be compared to the plain of Switzerland. As from the Bernese Oberland and from the valleys of the Reuss and Limmath gigantic glaciers came down and stretched across the plain of Switzerland to the Jura, scattering their erratic boulders over its summit and upon its slopes at the time of their greater extension, and, as they withdrew into the higher Alpine valleys, leaving them along their retreating track at the foot of the Jura and over the whole plain, so did the glaciers from Glen Prossen and parallel valleys on the Grampian Mountains extend across the valley of Strathmore, dropping their boulders not only on the slopes and along the base of the Sidlaw Hills, but scattering them in their retreat throughout the valley, until they were themselves reduced to isolated glaciers in the higher valleys. At the same time other glaciers came down from the heights of Schihallion on the west, and, descending through the valley of the Tay, joined the great masses of ice in the valley of Strathmore, thus combining with the eastern ice-field, just as the glacier from Mont Blanc and the valley of the Rhone formerly combined in the western part of Switzerland with those of the Bernese Oberland. The relations are identical, though the geographical position is reversed,-the higher range, or the Grampian Hills, lying to the north in Scotland, and the lower one, or the Sidlaw Hills, to the south, while in Switzerland, on the contrary, the higher range lies to the south and the lower to the north. I have alluded especially to Glen Prossen because the glacial marks in that valley are remarkably distinct, the whole bed of the valley being scratched, polished, and furrowed by the great rasp which has moved over it, while the concentric moraines at its lower extremity are very striking. But these signs, so perfectly preserved in Glen Prossen, recur with greater or less intensity in all the corresponding valleys, leaving no doubt that the same phenomena existed over the whole region.

Among the localities of Scotland where the indications of glacial action are most marked is the region about Stirling. Near Stirling Castle the polished surfaces of the rocks with their distinct grooves and scratches show us the path followed by the ice as it moved down in a northeasterly direction toward the Frith of Forth from the mountains on the northwest. To the west of Edinburgh, also, there is a broad glacier-track, showing that here also the ice was ploughing its way eastward to find an outlet on the shore.

The western slope of the great Scotch range is no less remarkable for its glacier-traces. The heads of Loch Long, Loch Fyne, Loch Awe, and Loch Leven everywhere show upon their margins the most distinct glacial polish and furrows, while from the trend of these marks and the distribution of the moraines, especially about Ben Cruachan, it is obvious that in this part of the country the glaciers moved westward and southward. About Aberdeen, on the contrary, they moved eastward, while in the vicinity of Elgin they advanced toward the north.

It thus appears that the whole range of the Grampians formed a great centre for the distribution of glaciers, and that a colossal ice-field spread itself over the whole country, extending in every direction toward the lower lands and the sea-shore. As the glaciers which now descend through all the valleys of the Alps, along their northern as well as their southern slopes, and in their eastern as well as their western prolongation, though limited, in our days, within the valley-walls, nevertheless once covered the plain of Switzerland and that of Northern Italy, so did the ice-fields of the Grampians during the greatest extension of the Scotch glaciers spread over the whole country. They also were, in course of time, reduced to local glaciers, circumscribed within the higher valleys of the more mountainous parts of the country, until they totally disappeared, as those of Switzerland would also have done, had it not been for the greater elevation of that country above the level of the sea. Scotland nowhere rises above the present level of perpetual snow, while in Switzerland the whole Alpine range has an altitude favorable to the preservation of glaciers. In the range of the Jura, however, which had at one time its local glaciers also, but which nowhere now rises above the line of perpetual snow, they have disappeared as completely as in the Grampian Hills.

It would lead me too far, were I to give here a special account of all the investigations I made in 1840 upon the distribution of glaciers in Great Britain. I will therefore only point out a few of the more distinct areas of distribution. The region surrounding Ben Wyvis formed such a centre of dispersion from which glaciers radiated, and we have another in the Pentland Hills about Edinburgh. In Northumberland, the Cheviot Hills present a glacial centre of the same kind, and in the Westmoreland Hills we have still another. In the last-named locality, the glacial tracks can be followed in various directions, some of them descending toward the northwest from the heights of Helvellyn, others moving southward toward Ambleside. In Wales the same kind of glacial distribution has been observed; but, as Professor Ramsay has treated this subject in full, I would refer my readers to his masterly work for a further account of the ancient Welch glaciers. In Ireland I had also opportunities of making extensive local investigations of glacial action. I observed the centres of distribution in the neighborhood of Belfast, in the County of Wicklow, and in Cavan.

But nowhere are these phenomena more striking than in Fermanagh County about the neighborhood of Enniskillen, and more especially in the immediate vicinity of Florence Court, the seat of the Earl of Enniskillen. On the northern slope of Ben Calcagh are five valleys lying parallel with each other and opening into the valley of Loch Nilly, which runs from east to west at the base of the mountain. A road now passes through this valley, and, where it crosses the mouth of either of the five valleys rising towards the mountain-slope, it cuts alternately through the two horns of a crescent-shaped wall which bars the lower end of every one of them. These crescent-shaped mounds are so many terminal moraines, built up by the five glaciers formerly descending through these lateral valleys into the valley of Loch Nilly. They bore the same relation to each other as the glaciers de Tour and d'Argentière, the Glacier des Bois with the Mer de Glace, the Glacier des Bossons and the Glacier de Taconet, now bear to each other in the valley of Chamouni; and were it not for the smaller dimensions of the whole, any one familiar with the tracks of ancient glaciers might easily fancy himself crossing the ancient moraines at the foot of the northern slope of the range of Mont Blanc, through which the Arve has cut its channel, the valley of Chamouni standing in the same relation to Mont Blanc as the valley of Loch Nilly does to Ben Calcagh.

I have dwelt thus at length on the glaciers of Great Britain because they have been the subject of my personal investigations. But the Scotch Highlands and the mountains of Wales and Ireland are but a few of the many centres of glacial distribution in Europe. From the Scandinavian Alps glaciers descended also to the shores of the Northern Ocean and the Baltic Sea. There is not a fiord of the Norway shore that does not bear upon its sides the tracks of the great masses of ice which once forced their way through it, and thus found an outlet into the sea, as in Scotland. Indeed, under the water, as far as it is possible to follow them through the transparent medium, I have noticed in Great Britain and in the United States the same traces of glacial action as higher up, so that these ancient glaciers must have extended not only to the sea-shore, but into the ocean, as they do now in Greenland. Nor is this all. Scandinavian boulders, scattered upon English soil and over the plains of Northern Germany, tell us that not only the Baltic Sea, but the German Ocean also, was bridged across by ice, on which these masses of rock were transported. In short, over the whole of Northern Europe, from the Arctic Ocean to the northern borders of its southern promontories, we find all the usual indications of glacial action, showing that a continuous sheet of ice once spread over nearly the whole continent, while from all the mountain-ranges descended those more limited glacial tracks terminating frequently in transverse moraines across the valleys, showing, that, as the general ice-sheet broke up and contracted into local glaciers, every cluster or chain of hills became a centre of glacial dispersion, such as the Alps are now, such as the Jura, the Highlands of Scotland, the mountains of Wales and Ireland, the Alps of Scandinavia, the Hartz, the Black Forest, the Vosges, and many others have been in ancient times.

* * *

In the next article we shall consider the glacial phenomena as they exist in America.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] See January No., p. 61.

[B] Having enumerated the characteristic features of the glacial phenomena in the preceding pages, I throw into this note some explanation which may render my views of the parallel roads more intelligible, not to interrupt again the exposition with details. It would be desirable, however, that the reader should first make himself thoroughly familiar with the localities concerned, before proceeding any farther. I would therefore state here, that, in the wood-cut opposite, G. R. indicates the valley of Glen Roy, with the three parallel roads marked 1, 2, 3. Glen Spean is designated by G. S., and the river flowing at its bottom by S. Loch Laggan, out of which the River Spean rises, is marked L. G. indicates Glen Gloy, a little valley to the northwest of Glen Roy, with a single terrace. Loch Treig is designated by T., Loch Lochy by L. O., Loch Arkeig by A., and Moeldhu Hill by M., while E. indicates Loch Eil. The Great Glen of Scotland, through which the Caledonian Canal runs, extends in the direction of L. O. and E. The position of Ben Nevis is designated by N. The dotted area between N. and M. marks the place occupied by the great glacier of Ben Nevis, when it extended as far as Moeldhu; while the close continuous lines in front of Loch Treig indicate the direction of the glacial scratches left across Glen Spean by the glacier of Loch Treig, when it extended as far as the eastern termination of the two upper terraces. It ought to be remembered, in this connection, that the bottom of the valley of the Spean, as well as that of Glen Roy, is occupied by loose materials, partly drift, that is, materials acted upon by glaciers, and partly decomposed fragments of rocks brought down by the torrents, greatly impeding the observation of the polished surfaces. The river-bed is cut through this deposit, and here and there through the underlying rock. Besides the parallel roads, there are also peculiar accumulations of loose materials in Glen Roy and Glen Spean, more particularly connected with the lowest terrace, which Mr. Darwin and Professor Jamieson have shown to be little deltas formed during the existence of the lake of Glen Roy at the bottom of the gullies intersecting the shelves of the upper roads. The outlet for the water at the period during which the second terrace was formed, not known when I visited Glen Roy, has been discovered by Mr. Milne-Holme, and also observed by Professor Jamieson. During the formation of the upper terrace, the waters escaped through the westernmost tributary of the River Spey, in the direction of the northeast corner of the wood-cut, and during that of the lowest terrace, at the eastern end of Loch Laggan, also through the valley of the Spey. The state of preservation of the parallel roads is such as to prove that no disturbance of any importance can have taken place in the country since they were formed. Far from believing, therefore, that these remarkable shelves are ancient sea-beaches, I am prepared to maintain, that, had the area occupied by them been submerged only for a few days, under an ocean rising and falling for several feet with every tide, no vestige would have been left of their former existence.

[C] The wood-cut on p. 730 is a reproduction of the little map accompanying a paper of mine upon "The Glacial Theory and its Recent Progress," printed in the "Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal" for October, 1842. I might have greatly improved the topography, and represented more accurately the details of the phenomenon, by availing myself of the much larger and very minute map recently published by Professor Thomas F. Jamieson, of Aberdeen; but I thought it advisable to leave my first sketch as I presented it twenty-two years ago, in order to show that Sir Charles Lyell is mistaken in ascribing (see "Antiquity of Man," pp. 260, 261) the discovery of the glacier of Loch Treig to Professor Jamieson. A comparison of his statements with mine will show that the solution of the problem offered by him is identical with that proposed by me, as he himself candidly admits ("Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" for August, 1863, p. 239). I have only one fault to find with his observations, and, as I have never revisited the locality since, this remark may satisfy him that my examination of its features was not so hurried as he supposes. Professor Jamieson confounds the effects of two distinct glaciers moving in different valleys as the action of one and the same glacier. In my paper, it is true, I made no allusion to the great glacier of Glen Spean, the existence of which I had recognized along the river from Loch Laggan nearly to the Caledonian Canal. I publish my observations upon this great central glacier for the first time in the present article, having omitted them in my contributions upon this subject to the scientific periodicals of the day simply because I thought best not to complicate my exposition of the facts concerning the parallel roads by considerations foreign to their origin, convinced as I was, from the manner in which the glacial theory was then received, that they would not be understood, and still less admitted. But now that all the geologists of Great Britain seem to have given their adhesion to it, I may be permitted to state that I already knew then, what Professor Jamieson has overlooked in his latest paper, that a separate glacier had occupied the valley of the Spean prior to the formation of the parallel roads, and that at that time the glacier of Loch Treig was only a lateral tributary of the same, just as the glacier of the Thierberg is a tributary of the glacier of the Aar. It was not until the Glen Spean glacier had retreated to the hills east of Loch Laggan that the glacier of Loch Treig could form a barrier across Glen Spean, and thus dam the waters in Glen Roy which produced the parallel roads. The marks left by the great Glen Spean glacier in the valley are mistaken by Professor Jamieson for indications, that, in its greatest extension, the glacier of Loch Treig not only advanced across Glen Spean, but divided into two branches, one moving westward down Glen Spean, the other eastward up Glen Spean, as far as Loch Laggan. Any one sufficiently familiar with existing glaciers to compare their action with the phenomena referred to above will at once see the impossibility of such a course for any glacier coming down from Loch Treig. At the time the Grampians had become a separate centre of glacial action a great glacier must have moved down, towards the Caledonian Canal, through Glen Spean, receiving as tributaries lateral glaciers not only from Loch Treig and Glen Roy, but also from all the other minor lateral valleys emptying into Glen Spean, the largest of which must have come from the range of Ben Nevis,-just as the great glacier of the valley of the Rhone once received as tributaries all the glaciers coming down into that valley from the southern slope of the Bernese Oberland, and from the northern slope of the Valesian Alps, and at one time also from the eastern slopes of the range of Mont Blanc. And when the large glacier occupying the lower, and therefore warmer, level gradually disappeared and retreated far away to levels where it could maintain itself against the effect of a returning milder climate, the opening spring of our era, as we may call it, the lateral glaciers, arising from the nearer high grounds, could extend across the valleys, but not before.

* * *

UNDER THE CLIFF.

"Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no?

Which needs the other's office, thou or I?

Dost want to be disburthened of a woe,

And can, in truth, my voice untie

Its links, and let it go?

"Art thou a dumb, wronged thing that would be righted,

Intrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!

No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith, requited

With falsehood,-love, at last aware

Of scorn,-hopes, early blighted,-

"We have them; but I know not any tone

So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow:

Dost think men would go mad without a moan,

If they knew any way to borrow

A pathos like thy own?

"Which sigh wouldst mock, of all the sighs? The one

So long escaping from lips starved and blue,

That lasts while on her pallet-bed the nun

Stretches her length; her foot comes through

The straw she shivers on,-

"You had not thought she was so tall; and spent,

Her shrunk lids open; her lean fingers shut

Close, close; their sharp and livid nails indent

The clammy palm; then all is mute:

That way, the spirit went.

"Or wouldst thou rather that I understand

Thy will to help me?-like the dog I found

Once, pacing sad this solitary strand,

Who would not take my food, poor hound,

But whined and licked my hand."

* * * *

All this, and more, comes from some young man's pride

Of power to see, in failure and mistake,

Relinquishment, disgrace, on every side,

Merely examples for his sake,

Helps to his path untried:

Instances he must-simply recognize?

Oh, more than so!-must, with a learner's zeal,

Make doubly prominent, twice emphasize,

By added touches that reveal

The god in babe's disguise.

Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest,

Himself the undefeated that shall be!

Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test,-

His triumph in eternity

Too plainly manifest!

Whence judge if he learn forthwith what the wind

Means in its moaning,-by the happy, prompt,

Instinctive way of youth, I mean,-for kind

Calm years, exacting their accompt

Of pain, mature the mind:

And some midsummer morning, at the lull

Just about daybreak, as he looks across

A sparkling foreign country, wonderful

To the sea's edge for gloom and gloss

Next minute must annul,-

Then, when the wind begins among the vines,

So low, so low, what shall it mean but this?

"Here is the change beginning, here the lines

Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss

The limit time assigns."

Nothing can be as it has been before;

Better, so call it, only not the same.

To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,

And keep it changeless! such our claim;

So answered,-Never more!

Simple? Why, this is the old woe o' the world,

Tune to whose rise and fall we live and die.

Rise through it, then! Rejoice that man is hurled

From change to change unceasingly,

His soul's wings never furled!

That's a new question; still remains the fact,

Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;

We moan in acquiescence: there's life's pact,

Perhaps probation,-do I know?

God does: endure His act!

Only, for man, how bitter not to grave

On his soul's hands' palms one fair, good, wise thing

Just as he grasped it! For himself, death's wave;

While time first washes-ah, the sting!-

O'er all he'd sink to save.

* * *

SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE.

It is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. To a traveller paying his first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woollen suit which his patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean. Save that in so-called winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless intervals of amber weather, and that soi-disant summer is one entire amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no inequality on which to forbid the banns between May and December. In San Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature: the wealth of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the poverty of dabblers in private theatricals,-a single flat doing service for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notes-of-hand, the Almanac of San Francisco might replace its mutable months and seasons with one great kindly, constant, sumptuous All The Year Round.

Out of this benignant sameness what glorious fruits are produced! Fruit enough metaphorical: for the scientific man or artist who cannot make hay while such a sun shines from April to November must be a slothful laborer indeed. But fruit also literal: for what joy of vegetation is lacking to the man who every month in the year can look through his study-window on a green lawn, and have strawberries and cream for his breakfast,-who can sit down to this royal fruit, and at the same time to apricots, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons, figs both yellow and purple, early apples, and grapes of three kinds?

Another delightful fact of San Francisco is the Occidental Hotel. Its comfort is like that of a royal home. There is nothing inn-ish about it. Remembering the chief hotels of many places, I am constrained to say that I have never, even in New York, seen its equal for elegance of appointment, attentiveness of servants, or excellence of cuisine. Having come to this extreme of civilization from the extreme of barbarism, we found that it actually needed an exertion to leap from the lap of luxury, after a fortnight's pleasaunce, and take to the woods again in flannel and corduroys.

But far more seductive than the beautiful bay, the heavenly climate, the paradisiacal fruits, and the royal hotel of San Francisco, were the old friends whom we found, and the new ones we made there. With but one exception, (and that an express-company, not a man,) we were received by all our San-Francisco acquaintance in a kind and helpful manner, with a welcome and a cheer as delightful to ourselves as it was honorable to them. Need I say whose brotherly hands were among the very first outstretched to us, in whose happy home we found our sweetest rest, by whose radiant face and golden speech we were most lovingly detained evening after evening and far into the night? A few days ago when we read that dreadful message, "Starr King is dead," the lightning that carried it seemed to end in our hearts. We withered under it; California had lost its soul for us; at noon or in dreams that balmy land would nevermore be the paradise it once was to us. The last hand that pressed our own, when we sailed for the Isthmus on our way home, was the same that had been first to give us our California welcome. Just before the lines were cast off, Starr King stood at the door of our state-room, and said,-

"I could not bear to have you go away without one more good-bye. Here are the cartes-de-visite I promised. They look hard-worked, but they look like me. Good bye! God bless you! I hope to make a visit to the East next summer, and then we will get together somewhere by the sea. Good bye!"

He went down the ladder. When the steamer glided off, his bright face sent benedictions after us as far as we could see; and then, for the last time on earth, that great, that good, that beloved man faded from our sight,-but, oh! never from our hearts, either in the here or the hereafter. "We shall see him, but not now." We shall be together with him "in the summer, by the sea"; but that summer shall have other glory than the sun to lighten it, and the sea shall be of crystal.

King was to have joined us in our Yo-Semite trip. We little knew that we were losing, for this world, our last opportunity of close daily intercourse with his sweet spirit, though we were grievously disappointed when he told us, on the eve of our setting out, that work for the nation must detain him in San Francisco, after all.

If report was true, we were going to the original site of the Garden of Eden,-into a region which out-Bendemered Bendemere, out-valleyed the valley of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and the Himmal'yeh in its precipices. As for the two former subjects of comparison, we never met any tourist who could adjust the question from his own experience; but the superiority of the Yo-Semite to the Alpine cataracts was a matter put beyond doubt by repeated judgments, and a couple of English officers who had explored the wildest Himmal'yeh scenery told Starr King that there was no precipice in Asia to be compared for height or grandeur with Tu-toch-anula and Tis-sa-ack.

We were going into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins's camera across the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil's window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in Starr King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,-I, let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to believe the utmost true of her till I could put my finger in her very prints. Now we were going to test her reported largess for ourselves.

No Saratoga affair, this! A total lack of tall trunks, frills, and curling-kids. Driven by the ?strum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the San-Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on") her back-hair, abandons her capillary "waterfalls" for those of the Sierra, and, like John Ph?nix's old lady who had her whole osseous system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her "skeleton" behind her. The bachelor who cares to see unhooped womanhood once more before he dies should go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three or four times presented to us during our seven weeks' camp there,-though the trip is one which might well cost a feeble woman her life.

Our male preparations were of the most pioneer description. One wintry day since my return I was riding in a train on the New-York Central, when an undaunted herdsman, returning Westward, flushed with the sale of beeves, accosted me with the question,-"Friend, yeou've travelled consid'able, and believe in the religion of Natur', don't ye?" "Why so?" I responded. "Them boots," replied my new acquaintance, pointing at a pair with high knee-caps, like those our party wore to the Yo-Semite. Otherwise, we took the oldest clothes we had,-and it is not difficult to find that variety in the trunk of a recent overland stager. We were armed with Ballard rifles, shot-guns, and Colt's revolvers which had come with us across the continent; our ammunition we got in San Francisco, together with all such commissariat-luxuries as were worth transportation: our necessaries we left to be purchased at that jumping-off place of civilization, Mariposa, whence we were to start our pack-mules into the wilderness. Let me recommend tourists like ourselves to include in the former catalogue plenty of canned fruits, sardines, and apple-butter,-in the latter, a jug of sirup for the inevitable camp slapjacks. No woodsman, as will presently appear in our narrative, can tell when a slapjack may be the last plank between him and starvation; and to this plank how powerfully sirup enables him to stick!

The only portion of our outfit which would have pleased an exquisite (and he must be rather of the Count-Devereux than the Foppington-Flutter school) was our horseflesh. That greatest of luxuries, a really good saddle-animal, is readily and reasonably attainable in California. Everybody rides there; if you wish to create a sensation with your horsemanship in the streets of San Francisco, you must ride ill, not well: everybody does this last. Even since the horse-railroad has begun to clutter Montgomery Street (the San-Franciscan Boulevards) with its cars, it is a daily matter to see capitalists and statesmen charging through that thoroughfare on a gallop, which, if repeated in Broadway by Henry G. Stebbins, would cost him his reputation on 'Change and his seat in the next Congress. The nation of beggars-on-horseback which first colonized California has left behind it many traditions unworthy of conservation, and multitudinous fleas not at all traditional, but even less keepworthy; but all honor be to the Spaniards, Greasers, and Mixed-Breeds for having rooted the noble idea of horsemanship so firmly in the country that even street-railroads cannot uproot it, and that Americans who never sat even so little as an Atlantic-State's pony, on coming here presently take to the saddle with all their hearts. In most of the smaller Californian towns, a very serviceable half- or quarter-breed saddle-horse is to be had for forty dollars,-the "breed" portion of his blood being drawn from an Eastern stallion, the remaining fraction being native or Mustang stock. This animal, if need be, will live on road-side croppings nearly as well as a mule,-travel all day long on an easy "lope," never offering to stop till fatigue makes him fall,-and, if you let him, will take you through chaparrals, and up and down precipices at whose bare suggestion an Eastern horse would break his legs. Our party, seeking rather more ambitious mounts, supplied itself, after a tour through the San-Francisco stables, with saddle-animals at an average of seventy dollars apiece. This, payable in gold, then amounted to one hundred dollars in notes; but the New-York market could not have furnished us with such horses for one hundred and fifty dollars.

It may seem as if, like most cavalcades, we should never get started, but I must linger a moment to do justice to our accoutrements. If there be a more perfect saddle than the Californian, I would ride bare-back a good way to get it. Anything more unlike the slippery little pad on which we of the East amble about parks and suburban roads cannot be imagined. It is not for a day, but for all time, and for those who spend nearly the latter in it. Its wooden skeleton is as scientifically fitted to the rider's form as an old "incroyable's" pair of pantaloons. There is no such thing as getting tired in or of it. Rising to the lower lumbar vertebrae behind, and in front terminating gracefully in a broad-topped pommel, it enables one to lean back in descending, forward in climbing, the great ridges on the path of California travel,-thus affording capital relief both to one's self and one's horse, and bringing in both from a fifty-miles' march comparatively unjaded.

The stirrups of this saddle are broad hickory hoops, shaped nearly like an Omega upside-down (U)[Transcriber's note: upside down Omega], left unpolished so as to afford the most unshakable footing, covered with a half-shoe of the stoutest leather, which renders it impossible for the toe to slip through or the ankle to foul under any circumstances. Attached to the straps from which these swing is a wide and neatly ornamented stirrup-leather, which effectually prevents the grazing of the rider's leg. The surcingle, or, Californicè, the cinch, is a broad strip of hair-cloth with a padded ring at either end through which you reeve and fasten with a half-hitch stout straps sewed to other rings under the saddle-flaps. This arrangement is not only far securer than our Eastern buckle, but enables you to graduate the tightness of your girth much more delicately, and make a far snugger fit.

The only particular in which I could not commend and adopt the native practice was the Mexican bit. It is a dreadful instrument of torture, putting immense leverage in the rider's hands, and enabling him at will to tear the mouth of his horse to pieces; indeed, the horse on which it is used is guided entirely by pressure on the opposite side of the neck from that in which one seeks to turn him. Our Eastern way of drawing his head around would so lift the bit as to drive him frantic. There are very few horses of any breed, even the Mustang, that never stumble; and as I prefer lifting my horse to letting him break his knees or neck, I want a bridle I can pull upon without tearing his mouth. So, in spite of its handsome appearance and the very manageable single white cord into which its two reins are braided, I eschewed the Mexican head-gear, and took the ordinary Eastern snaffle and curb. Immense spurs completed our accoutrement,-whips being here unknown.

I may as well make a word-map of our route before going farther. Pilgrims to the Yo-Semite ship themselves and their horses from San Francisco by steamer to Stockton. This town is on the San Joaquin, the most northerly of a series of rivers fed directly from the Sierra Nevada water-shed, and here through the middle portion of the State,-a series, indeed, continued through much of the still lower Pacific coast to the Isthmus of Nicaragua. The Sacramento drains quite a different region, that of the broad plains between the Sierra and Coast ranges, occupying the northern portion of the State,-resembling in its physical features, much more than any of the Pacific streams beside, the large isolated trunks which drain the east slope of the Alleghanies. The Colorado is almost the only other large river created from many tributaries, which debouches between the Columbia and the Isthmus,-and that rises east of the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. The Yo-Semite valley is one of the cradles through which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach the ocean; its threading stream is the Merced; and if on any good United-States Survey-map you will please to follow that river back to the mountains, when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be (or would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the Great Yo-Semite. You will then see that our course led us across three streams, after leaving the San Joaquin at Stockton en route for Mariposa,-the Stanislaus, the Tuolomne, and the Main Merced. The distance from Stockton to Mariposa is about one hundred miles, a small part of the way between fenced ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling plains, somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced between the two great ranges of the State. Here and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small settlement dropped down in this not unfruitful waste, and thrice you come to a hybrid town, with a Spanish plaza, and Yankee notions sold around it. We went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, "peep, and botanize"; besides, we were dragging with us a Jersey wagon, bought second-hand in Stockton, in which we carried our heavier outfit till we should get our extra pack-beasts at Mariposa, and to which we had harnessed for their first time an implacable white mule with an incapable white horse, to neither of which each other's society or their own new trade was congenial.

I shall not linger here as we did there. To an ornithologist the whole road is interesting,-especially to one making a specialty of owls. The only game within easy reach is the dove and the California ground-squirrel,-a big fellow, much like our Northeastern gray, barring the former's subterranean habits. On the plains threaded by the road the pasture is good, save in the extremest drought of summer, when the great herds which usually feed at large on and between the river-bottoms are driven to the rich green grass in the high valleys of the Sierra,-or ought to be: many cattle died along the San Joaquin last summer for want of this care. Occasionally the road winds through the refreshing shadow of a grove of live-oaks, standing far from any water on a sandy knoll. But the most magnificent trees of the oak family that I ever beheld were growing on the banks of the Tuolomne River, where we forded it at Roberts's Ferry. They were not merely in dimension superior to the finest white-oaks of the East, but surpassed in beauty every tradition of their genus. Their vast gnarled branches followed as exquisite curves as belong to any elm on a New-England meadow, and wept at the extremities like those of that else matchless tree,-possessing, moreover, a sumptuous affluence of leafage, an arboreal embonpoint, unknown to their graceful sister of our lowlands. Be sure that we lingered long among their shadows with book and pencil, and look for a desirable acquaintance with new Dryads when they grow into the life of color from our artists' hands.

At Princeton, a thriving suburb of Mariposa, we completed our cavalcade of pack-animals, transferred our wagon-load to their backs, (the average mule-pack weighs from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds,) roped it there in the most approved muletero-fashion, and started into the wilderness.

Let us call the roll. Beside Bierstadt and the two other gentlemen who with myself had formed the original overland-party, we numbered two young artists of great merit now sojourning for a short time in California, Williams, an old Roman, and Perry, an ancient Düsseldorf friend,-also a highly scientific metallurgist and physicist generally, Dr. John Hewston of San Francisco.

To serve the party we secured a man and a boy. Regarding the former, perhaps the more truthful assertion would be that he secured us; for, as will shortly appear, though we bought his services, he sold us in return. We picked him up in a San-Francisco employment-office, after looking all over the city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and finding that in a scarce-labor country like California even fifty gold dollars per month, with keep and expenses, were no sufficient bait for the catch we wanted. He was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair, serviceable-looking hands, and no end to self-recommendations; but then it was impossible to ask after him at his "last place," that having been General Johnston's camp during Buchanan's forcible-feeble occupation of Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew that soup-meat went into cold water, we rushed blindly into an engagement with him, marriage-service fashion, and took him for better or worse. The thing which I think finally "fired our Northern hearts" and clinched the matter was his assertion of nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance, whose name he bore, combined with unswerving personal loyalty. Lest by some future D'Israeli this be written down among the traditional greennesses of learned men, let me say that he was our pis-aller,-we finding ourselves within two hours of the Stockton boat, with nobody to help pack our mules or care for them and the horses.

The boy we obtained near Mariposa. He was an independent squire to the man of whom we got the extra animals, and accompanied them as a sort of trustee and prochein amy to an orphan family of mules. At fifteen years and in jackets, he was one of the keenest speculators in fire-arms I ever saw; could swap horses or play poker with anybody; and, take him for all in all, in the Eastern States, at least, I shall never look upon his like again.

Thus manned, and leading, turn-about, four or five pack-beasts by as many tow-lines, we struck up into the well-wooded Sierra foot-hills, commencing our climb at the very outset from Mariposa. The whole distance to the Valley was fifty miles. For twelve of these we pursued a road in some degree practicable to carts, and leading to one of those inevitable steam saw-mills with which a Yankee always cuts his first swath into the tall grass of Barbarism. Passing the saw-mill in the very act of astonishing the wilderness with a dinner-whistle, we struck a trail and fell into single file. Thenceforward our way was almost a continuous alternation of descent and climb over outlying ridges of the Sierra. Our raw-recruited mules, and the elementary condition of our intellects in the science of professional packing, spun out this portion of our journey to three days,-though allowance is to be made for the fact of our stopping at noon of the second day and not resuming our trail till the morning of the third. This interim we spent in visiting the Big Trees, which are situated four or five miles off the Yo-Semite track.

"Clark's," where tourists stop for this purpose, is just half-way between Mariposa and the great Valley. "Clark" himself is one of the best-informed men, one of the very best guides, I ever met in the Californian or any other wilderness. He is a fine-looking, stalwart old grizzly-hunter and miner of the '49 days, wears a noble full beard hued like his favorite game, but no head-covering of any kind since he recovered from a fever which left his head intolerant of even a slouch. He lives among folk, near Mariposa, in the winter, and in summer occupies a hermitage built by himself in one of the loveliest lofty valleys of the Sierra. Here he gives travellers a surprise by the nicest poached eggs and rashers of bacon, home-made bread and wild-strawberry sweetmeats, which they will find in the State.

Before reaching Clark's we had been astonished at the dimensions of the ordinary pines and firs, our trail for miles at a time running through forests where trees one hundred and fifty feet high were very common and trees of two hundred feet by no means rare, while some of the very largest must have considerably surpassed the latter measurement.

But these were in their turn dwarfed by the Big Trees proper, as thoroughly as themselves would have dwarfed a common Green-Mountain forest. I find no one on this side the continent who believes the literal truth which travellers tell about these marvellous giants. People sometimes think they do, but that is only because they fail to realize the proposition. They have no concrete idea of how the asserted proportions look. Tell a carpenter, or any other man at home with the look of dimensions, what you have seen in the Mariposa-County groves, and his eye grows incredulous in a moment. I freely confess, that, though I always thought I had believed travellers in their recitals on this subject, when I saw the trees I found I had bargained to credit no such story as that, and for a moment felt half-reproachful towards the friends who had cheated me of my faith under a misapprehension.

Take the dry statistics of the matter. Out of one hundred and thirty-two trees which have been measured, not one underruns twenty-eight feet in circumference; five range between thirty-two and thirty-six feet; fifty-eight between forty and fifty feet; thirty-four between fifty and sixty; fourteen between sixty and seventy; thirteen between seventy and eighty; two between eighty and ninety; two between ninety and one hundred; two are just one hundred; and one is one hundred and two. This last, before the storms truncated it, had a height of four hundred feet. I found a rough ladder laid against its trunk,-for it is prostrate,-and climbed upon its side by that and steps cut in the bark. I mounted the swell of the trunk to the butt and there made the measurement which ascertained its diameter as thirty-four feet,-its circumference one hundred and two feet plus a fraction. Of course the thickness of its bark is various, but I cut off some of it to a foot in depth and there was evidently plenty more below that.

To make some rough attempt at a conception of what these figures amount to, suppose the tree fallen at the gable of an ordinary two-story house. You propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to the upper side of the tree. That plank would perceptibly slope up from your roof-peak. Through another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from end to end, our whole cavalcade charged at the full trot for a distance of one hundred and fifty feet. The entire length of this tree before truncation had been about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow bases of trees still standing we easily sheltered ourselves and horses. We tried throwing to the top of some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and finally came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster not included in the above table of dimensions, as most of those measured are still living, and all have the bark upon them still, while the tree is to some extent barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter,-over one hundred and twenty in circumference! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these largest giants as far as 1200 B. C. Thus their tender saplings were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though with my mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them half a day, the artists making color-studies of the most picturesque, the rest of us izing away at something scientific,-Botany, Entomology, or Statistics. In Geology and Mineralogy there is nothing to do here or in the Valley,-the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing picture of the groves. The marvellous of size does not go into gilt frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a cramped coffin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt for comparison; but, unless you take a canvas of the size of Haydon's, your picture is quite as likely to resemble Homunculus against an average timber-tree as a large man against Sequoia gigantea. What our artists did do was to get a capital transcript of the Big Trees' color,-a beautifully bright cinnamon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety to the forest, "making sunshine in the shady place"; also, their typical figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and branchless trunk, crowned almost at the summit by a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce larger than a plover's egg. Perhaps the best idea of their figure may be obtained by fancying an Italian stone-pine grown out of recollection.

Between all the ridges we had hitherto crossed, silvery streams leaped down intensely cold through the granite chasms,-all of them fed from the snow-peaks, and charmingly picturesque,-most of them good trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a throw; and now, on leaving Clark's, we crossed the largest of these, a fork of the Merced which flows through his valley. For twelve miles farther a series of tremendous climbs tasked us and our beasts to the utmost, but brought us quite apropos at dinner-time to a lovely green meadow walled in on one side by near snow-peaks. A small brook running through it speedily furnished us with frogs enough for an entrée. Between two and three in the afternoon we set out upon the last stage of our pilgrimage. We were now nearly on a plane with the top of the mighty precipices which wall the Yo-Semite Valley, and for two hours longer found the trail easy, save where it crossed the bogs of summit-level springs.

Immediately after leaving the meadow where we dined we plunged again into the thick forest, where every now and then some splendid grouse or the beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whirring away from before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly "sign" intersected our trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the hill-sides gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless; but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This was the "Lady Washington," and much resembled a snowy day-lily with an odor of tuberoses. Our dense leafy surrounding hid from us the fact of our approach to the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail turned at a sharp angle and we stood on "Inspiration Point."

That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged translation of any Scripture of Nature.

We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in height,-a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green spicul?-they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first gilt before he made gold of all the Valley.

There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we could only guess. When Nature's lightning hits a man fair and square, it splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and five miles. Where we stood the width is about two.

I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly, for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,-broadly burning, rather than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From that sun, clear back to the first avant-courier trace of purple twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim-yes, as if it were the very butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven-ran that wall, always sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel might climb or sparrow fly,-so broad that it was just faint-lined like the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,-so lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice surpassed our immediate vis-à-vis in height.

First, a little east of our off-look, there projected boldly into the Valley from the dominant line of the base a square stupendous tower that might have been hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second Babel-experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Allah. Here and there the tools had left a faint scratch, only deep as the width of Broadway and a bagatelle of five hundred feet in length; but that detracted no more from the unblemished four-square contour of the entire mass than a pin-mark from the symmetry of a door-post. A city might have been built on its grand flat top. And, oh! the gorgeous masses of light and shadow which the falling sun cast on it,-the shadows like great waves, the lights like their spumy tops and flying mist,-thrown up from the heaving breast of a golden sea! In California at this season the dome of heaven is cloudless; but I still dream of what must be done for the bringing-out of Tu-toch-anula's coronation-day majesties by the broken winter sky of fleece and fire. The height of his precipice is nearly four thousand feet perpendicular; his name is supposed to be that of the Valley's tutelar deity. He also rejoices in a Spanish alias,-some Mission Indian having attempted to translate by "El Capitan" the idea of divine authority implied in Tu-toch-anula.

Far up the Valley to the eastward there rose far above the rest of the sky-line, and nearly five thousand feet above the Valley, a hemisphere of granite, capping the sheer wall, without an apparent tree or shrub to hide its vast proportions. This we immediately recognized as the famous To-coy-?, better known through Watkins's photographs as the Great North Dome. I am ignorant of the meaning of the former name, but the latter is certainly appropriate. Between Tu-toch-anula and the Dome, the wall rose here and there into great pinnacles and towers, but its sky-line is far more regular than that of the southern side, where we were standing.

We drew close to the edge of the precipice and looked along over our own wall up the Valley. Its contour was a rough curve from our stand-point to a station opposite the North Dome, where the Valley dwindles to its least width, so that all the intermediate crests and pinnacles which topped the perpendicular wall stood within our vision like the teeth of a saw, clear and sharp-cut against the blue sky. There is the same plumb-line uprightness in these mighty precipices as in those of the opposite side; but their front is much more broken by bold promontories, and their tabular tops, instead of lying horizontal, slope up at an angle of forty-five degrees or more from the spot where we were standing, and make a succession of oblique prism-sections whose upper edges are between three and four thousand feet in height. But the glory of this southern wall comes at the termination of our view opposite the North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered glacis of detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life save the pal?ozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a Yo-Semite crag inorganic, as I used to speak of everything not strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the débris at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and exuvi? of a stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us because silent and vastly secular? What was he who stood up before Tis-sa-ack and said, "Thou art dead rock!" save a momentary sojourner in the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived long enough to hear strike? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack himself were but one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads at a time,-if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of some one small being in the fenceless vivarium of the Universe? Let not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we bared our heads to the barer forehead of Tis-sa-ack.

I have spoken of the Great South Dome in the masculine gender, but the native tradition makes it feminine. Nowhere is there a more beautiful Indian legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it into a few short sentences from the long report of an old Yo-Semite brave. Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar goddess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was its fostering god,-the former a radiant maiden, the latter an ever-young immortal,-

"amorous as the month of May."

Becoming desperately fascinated with his fair colleague, Tu-toch-anula spent in her arms all the divine long days of the California summer, kissing, dallying, and lingering, until the Valley-tribes began to starve for lack of the crops which his supervision should have ripened, and a deputation of venerable men came from the dying people to prostrate themselves at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her nation's woes, she rose from her lover's arms, and cried for succor to the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible noise of thunder, the mighty cone split from heaven to earth,-its frontal half falling down to dam the snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the beautiful Valley-stream takes one of its loveliest branches,-its other segment remaining erect till this present, to be the Great South Dome under the in-memoriam title of Tis-sa-ack. But the divine maiden who died to save her people appeared on earth no more, and in his agony Tu-toch-anula carved her image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he had carved his own on the surface of El Capitan,-where a lively faith and good glasses may make out the effigies unto this day.

Sometimes these Indian traditions, being translated according to the doctrine of correspondences, are of great use to the scientific man,-in the present instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geological fact, and the reason of a water-course which else might become obscured by time. You may lose a rough fact because everybody is handling it and passing it around with the sense of a liberty to present it next in his own way; but a fact with its facets cut-otherwise a poem-is unchangeable, imperditable. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded subject to liberal translation; poems circulate virgin and verbatim. In some future article I may recur to this topic with reference to the Columbia River, and the capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap-rock by the lantern of Indian legend.

Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun,-chrysoprase beautiful enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's apocalyptic heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great mountain-ranges,-into a field of perfect light, misty by its own excess,-into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the ph?nix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some rich old clover-mead; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on rock, the great world might well be running back in stone-and-grassy dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet but two daughters, the crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new cycle,-spout up remorseful lavas from her long-hardened conscience, and hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins? Earth below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above, save for the shining serpent of the Merced, which silently to our ears threaded the middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset wherever for a space he gilded out of the shadow of woods.

To behold this Promised Land proved quite a different thing from possessing it. Only the silleros of the Andes, our mules, horses, and selves, can understand how much like a nightmare of endless roof-walking was the descent down the face of the precipice. A painful and most circuitous dug-way, where our animals had constantly to stop, lest their impetus should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps where the mere thought of a side-fall was terror, brought us in the twilight to a green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced.

Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp,-calling it "Camp Rosalie," after a dear absent friend of mine and Bierstadt's. Removing our packs and saddles, we dismissed their weary bearers to the deep green meadow, with no farther qualification to their license than might be found in ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep-driven pickets. We soon got together dead wood and pitchy boughs enough to kindle a roaring fire,-made a kitchen-table by wedging logs between the trunks of a three-forked tree, and thatching these with smaller sticks,-selected a cedar-canopied piece of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and as high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant baldacchini for the mattresses. I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep on evergreen-strewings.

During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the game-department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks and coffee. Then the loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought our horses up from picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and color-boxes, the sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of injunction about the dumpling in the grouse-fricassee.

Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a living landscape, color-studies on the spot; and though I am not here to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks' camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile the other two vaguely divided orders of gentlemen and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or the pool with various success for our next day's dinner, or hunting specimens of all kinds,-Agassizing, so to speak.

I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet extensive, class of sportsmen with whom fishing means nothing but catching fish,-to that select minority of illuminati who go trouting for intellectual culture, because they cannot hear Booth or a Sonata of Beethoven's,-who write rhapsodies of much fire and many pages on the divine superiority of the curve of an hyperbola over that of a parabola in the cast of a fly,-who call three little troutlings "a splendid day's sport, me boy!" because those rash and ill-advised infants have been deceived by a feather-bug which never would have been of any use to them, instead of a real worm which would. We, who can make prettier curves and deceive larger game in a dancing-party at home, did not go to the Yo-Semite for that kind of sport. When I found that the best bait or fly caught only half a dozen trout in an afternoon,-and those the dull, black, California kind, with lined sides, but no spots,-I gave over bothering the unambitious burghers of the flood with invitations to a rise in life, and took to the meadows with a butterfly-net.

My experience teaches that no sage (or gentleman) should chase the butterfly on horseback. You are liable to put your net over your horse's head instead of the butterfly. The butterfly keeps rather ahead of the horse. You may throw your horse when you mean to throw the net. The idea is a romantic one; it carries you back to the days of chivalry, when court-butterflies were said to have been netted from the saddle,-but it carries you nowhere else in particular, unless perhaps into a small branch of the Merced, where you don't want to go. Then, too, if you slip down and leave your horse standing while you steal on a giant Papilio which is sucking the deer-weed in such a sweet spot for a cast, your horse (perhaps he has heard of the French general who said, "Asses and savans to the centre!") may discover that he also is a sage, and retire to botanize while you are butterflying,-a contingency which entails your wading the Merced after him five several times, and finally going back to camp in wet disgust to procure another horse and a lariat. An experience faintly hinted at in the above suggestions soon convinced me that the great arm of the service in butterfly-warfare is infantry. After I had turned myself into a modest Retiarius, I had no end to success. Mariposa County is rightly named. The honey of its groves and meadows is sucked by some of the largest, the most magnificent, and most widely varied butterflies in the world.

At noon those of us who came back to camp had a substantial dinner out of our abundant stores, reinforced occasionally with grouse, quail, or pigeons, contributed by the sportsmen. The artists mostly dined à la fourchette, in their workshop,-something in a pail being carried out to them at noon by our Infant Phenomenon. He was a skeleton of thinness, and an incredibly gaunt mustang was the one which invariably carried the lunch; so we used to call the boy, when we saw him coming, "Death on the Pail-Horse." At evening, when the artists returned, half an hour was passed in a "private view" of their day's studies; then came another dinner, called a supper; then the tea-kettle was emptied into a pan, and brush-washing with talk and pipes led the rest of the genial way to bed-time.

In his charming "Peculiar," Epes Sargent has given us an episode called the "Story of Estelle." It is the greatest of compliments to him that I could get thoroughly interested in her lover, when he bore the name of one of the most audacious and picaresque mortals I ever knew,-our hired man, who sold us-our--But hear my episode: it is

THE STORY OF VANCE.

Vance. The cognomen of the loyal nephew with the Secesh uncle. I will be brief. Our stores began to fail. One morning we equipped Vance with a horse, a pack-mule to lead behind him, a list of purchases, and eighty golden dollars, bidding him good-speed on the trail to Mariposa. He was to return laden with all the modern equivalents for corn, wine, and oil, on the fifth or sixth day from his departure. Seven days glided by, and the material for more slapjacks with them. We grew perilously nigh our bag-bottoms.

One morning I determined to save the party from starvation, and with a fresh supply of the currency set out for Mariposa. At Clark's I learned that our man had camped there about noon on the day he left us, turned his horse and mule loose, instead of picketing them, and spent the rest of the sunlight in a siesta. When he arose, his animals were undiscoverable. He accordingly borrowed Clark's only horse to go in search of them, and the generous hermit had not seen him since.

Carrying these pleasant bits of intelligence, I resumed my way toward the settlements. Coming by the steam saw-mill, I recognized Vance's steed grazing by the way-side, threw my lariat over his head, and led him in triumph to Mariposa. There I arrived at eight in the evening of the day I left the Valley,-having performed fifty miles of the hardest mountain-trail that was ever travelled in a little less than twelve hours, making allowance for our halt and noon-feed at Clark's. If ever a California horse was tried, it was mine on that occasion; and he came into Mariposa on the full gallop, scarcely wet, and not galled or jaded in the least.

Here I found our mule, whose obstinate memory had carried him home to his old stable,-also the remaining events in Vance's brief, but brilliant career. That ornament of the Utah and Yo-Semite expeditions had entered Mariposa on Clark's horse,-lost our eighty golden dollars at a single session of bluff,-departed gayly for Coulterville, where he sold Clark's horse at auction for forty dollars, including saddle and bridle, and immediately at another game of bluff lost the entire purchase-money to the happy buyer, (Clark got his horse again on proving title,)-and finally vanished for parts unknown, with nothing in his pocket but buttons, or in his memory but villanies. Nowhere out of California or Old Spain can there exist such a modern survivor of the days of Gil Blas!

Too happy in the recovery of Clark's and our own animals to waste time in hue-and-cry, I loaded my two reclaimed pack-beasts with all that our commissariat needed,-nooned at Clark's, on my way back, the third day after leaving the Valley for Mariposa, and that same night was among my rejoicing comrades at the head of the Great Yo-Semite. That afternoon they had come to the bottom of the flour-bag, after living for three days on unleavened slapjacks without either butter or sirup. I have seen people who professed to relish the Jewish Passover-bread; but, after such an experience as our party's, I venture to say they would have regarded it worthy of a place among the other abolished types of the Mosaic dispensation. As for me and the mule, we felt our hearts swell within us as if we had come to raise the siege of Leyden. In that same enthusiasm shared our artists, savans, and gentlemen, embracing the shaggy neck of the mule as he had been a brother what time they realized that his panniers were full. Can any one wonder at my early words, "A slapjack may be the last plank between the woodsman and starvation"?

Just before I started after supplies our party moved its camp to a position five miles up the Valley beyond Camp Rosalie, in a beautiful grove of oaks and cedars, close upon the most sinuous part of the Merced margin, with rich pasture for our animals immediately across the stream, and the loftiest cataract in the world roaring over the bleak precipice opposite. This is the Yo-Semite Fall proper, or, in the Indian, "Cho-looke." By the most recent geological surveys this fall is credited with the astounding height of twenty-eight hundred feet. At an early period the entire mass of water must have plunged that distance without break. At this day a single ledge of slant projection changes the headlong flood from cataract to rapids for about four hundred feet; but the unbroken upper fall is fifteen hundred feet, and the lower thirteen hundred. In the spring and early summer no more magnificent sight can be imagined than the tourist obtains from a stand-point right in the midst of the spray, driven, as by a wind blowing thirty miles an hour, from the thundering basin of the lower fall. At all seasons Cho-looke is the grandest mountain-waterfall in the known world.

While I am speaking of waterfalls, let me not omit "Po-ho-nó," or "The Bridal Veil," which was passed on the southern side in our way to the second and about a mile above the first camp. As Tis-sa-ack was a good, so is Po-ho-nó an evil spirit of the Indian mythology. This tradition is scientifically accounted for in the fact that many Indians have been carried over the fall by the tremendous current both of wind and water forever rushing down a ca?on through which the stream breaks from its feeding-lake twelve or fifteen miles before it falls. The savage lowers his voice to a whisper and crouches trembling past Po-ho-nó; while the very utterance of the name is so dreaded by him that the discoverers of the Valley obtained it with great difficulty. This fall drops on a heap of giant boulders in one unbroken sheet of a thousand feet perpendicular, thus being the next in height among all the Valley-cataracts to the Yo-Semite itself, and having a width of fifty feet. Its name of "The Bridal Veil" is one of the few successes in fantastic nomenclature; for, to one viewing it in profile, its snowy sheet, broken into the filmy silver lace of spray and falling quite free of the brow of the precipice, might well seem the veil worn by the earth at her granite wedding,-no commemorator of any fifty-years' bagatelle like the golden one, but crowning the one-millionth anniversary of her nuptials.

On either side of Po-ho-nó the sky-line of the precipice is magnificently varied. The fall itself cuts a deep gorge into the crown of the battlement. On the southwest border of the fall stands a nobly bold, but nameless rock, three thousand feet in height. Near by is Sentinel Rock, a solitary truncate pinnacle, towering to thirty-three hundred feet. A little farther are "Eleachas," or "The Three Brothers," flush with the front-surface of the precipice, but their upper posterior bounding-planes tilted in three tiers, which reach a height of thirty-four hundred and fifty feet.

One of the loveliest places in the Valley is the shore of Lake Ah-wi-yah,-a crystal pond of several acres in extent, fed by the north fork of the Valley-stream, and lying right at the mouth of the narrow strait between the North and South Domes. By this tranquil water we pitched our third camp, and when the rising sun began to shine through the mighty cleft before us, the play of color and chiaroscuro on its rugged walls was something for which an artist apt to oversleep himself might well have sat up all the night. No such precaution was needed by ourselves. Painters, sages, and gentlemen at large, all turned out by dawn; for the studies were grander, the grouse and quail plentier, and the butterflies more gorgeous than we found in any other portion of the Valley. After passing the great cleft eastward, I found the river more enchanting at every step. I was obliged to penetrate in this direction entirely on foot,-clambering between squared blocks of granite dislodged from the wall beneath the North Dome, any one of which might have been excavated into a commodious church, and discovering, for the pains cost by a reconnoissance of five miles, some of the loveliest shady stretches of singing water and some of the finest minor waterfalls in our American scenery.

Our last camp was pitched among the crags and forests behind the South Dome,-where the Middle Fork descends through two successive waterfalls, which, in apparent breadth and volume, far surpass Cho-looke, while the loftiest is nearly as high as Po-ho-nó. About three miles west of the Domes, the south wall of the Valley is interrupted by a deep ca?on leading in a nearly southeast direction. Through this ca?on comes the Middle Fork, and along its banks lies our course to the great "Pi-wi-ack" (senselessly Englished as "Vernal") and the Nevada Falls. For three miles from our camp opposite the Yo-Semite Fall the ca?on is threaded by a trail practicable for horses. At its termination we dismounted, sent back our animals, and, strapping their loads upon our own shoulders, struck nearly eastward by a path only less rugged than the trackless crags around us. In some places we were compelled to squeeze sideways through a narrow crevice in the rocks, at imminent danger to our burden of blankets and camp-kettles; in others we became quadrupedal, scrambling up acclivities with which the bald main precipice had made but slight compromise. But for our light marching order,-our only dress being knee-boots, hunting-shirt, and trowsers,-it would have been next to impossible to reach our goal at all.

But none of us regretted pouring sweat or strained sinews, when, at the end of our last terrible climb, we stood upon the oozy sod which is brightened into eternal emerald by the spray of Pi-wi-ack. Far below our slippery standing steeply sloped the walls of the ragged chasm down which the snowy river charges roaring after its first headlong plunge; an eternal rainbow flung its shimmering arch across the mighty caldron at the base of the fall; and straight before us in one unbroken leap came down Pi-wi-ack from a granite shelf nearly four hundred feet in height and sixty feet in perfectly horizontal width. Some enterprising speculator, who has since ceased to take the original seventy-five cents' toll, a few years ago built a substantial set of rude ladders against the perpendicular wall over which Pi-wi-ack rushes. We found it still standing, and climbed the dizzy height in a shower of spray, so close to the edge of the fall that we could almost wet our hands in its rim. Once at the top, we found that Nature had been as accommodating to the sight-seer as man himself; for the ledge we landed on was a perfect breastwork, built from the receding precipices on either side of the ca?on to the very crown of the cataract. The weakest nerves need not have trembled, when once within the parapet, on the smooth, flat rampart, and looking down into the tremendous boiling chasm whence we had just climbed.

Above Pi-wi-ack the river runs for a mile at the bottom of a granite cradle, sloping upward from it on each side at an angle of about forty-five degrees, in great tabular masses slippery as ice, without a crevice in them for thirty yards at a stretch where even the scraggiest manzanita may catch hold and grow. This tilted formation, broken here and there by spots of scanty alluvium and stunted pines, continues upward till it intersects the posterior cone of the South Dome on one side and a colossal castellated precipice on the other,-creating thus the very typical landscape of sublime desolation. The shining barrenness of these rocks, and the utter nakedness of that vast glittering dome which hollows the heavens beyond them, cannot be conveyed by any metaphor to a reader knowing only the wood-crowned slopes of the Alleghany chain.

Climbing between the stunted pines and giant blocks along the stream's immediate margin,-getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us,-we came at last to the base of "Yo-wi-ye," or Nevada Fall.

This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, perhaps, the most beautiful of the Yo-Semite cataracts. Its beauty is partly owing to the surrounding rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its great height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing volume, but mainly to its exquisite and unusual shape. It falls from a precipice the highest portion of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the wall overleapt by Pi-wi-ack; but invisibly beneath its snowy flood a ledge slants sideways from the cliff about a hundred feet below the crown of the fall, and at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb-line. Over this ledge the water is deflected upon one side and spread like a half-open fan to the width of nearly two hundred feet.

At the base of Yo-wi-ye we seem standing in a cul-de-sac of Nature's grandest labyrinth. Look where we will, impregnable battlements hem us in. We gaze at the sky from the bottom of a savage granite barathrum, whence there is no escape but return through the chinks and over the crags of an Old-World convulsion. We are at the end of the stupendous series of Yo-Semite effects; eight hundred feet above us, could we climb there, we should find the silent causes of power. There lie the broad, still pools that hold the reserved affluence of the snow-peaks; thence might we see, glittering like diamond lances in the sun, the eternal snow-peaks themselves. But these would still be as far above us as we stood below Yo-wi-ye on the lowest valley-bottom whence we came. Even from Inspiration Point, where our trail first struck the battlement, we could see far beyond the Valley to the rising sun, towering mightily above Tis-sa-ack herself, the everlasting snow-forehead of Castle Rock, his crown's serrated edge cutting the sky at the topmost height of the Sierra. We had spoken of reaching him,-of holding converse with the King of all the Giants. This whole weary way have we toiled since then,-and we know better now. Have we endured all these pains only to learn still deeper Life's saddest lesson,-"Climb forever, and there is still an Inaccessible"?

Wetting our faces with the melted treasure of Nature's topmost treasure-house, Yo-wi-ye answers us ere we turn back from the Yo-Semite's last precipice toward the haunts of men:-

"Ye who cannot go to the Highest, lo, the Highest comes down to you!"

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HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.

BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.