Bits of Gossip:
Electronic Edition

Davis, Rebecca Harding, 1831-1910

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Call number PS1517 .B5 1904 (Davis Library, UNC-CH)

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Library of Congress Subject Headings, 21st edition, 1998

LC Subject Headings:
• Davis, Rebecca Harding, 1831-1910 -- Childhood and youth.
• Southern States -- Social life and customs.
• Women -- Southern States -- Social life and customs.

• 1997-12-09,
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  finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing.
  
  
• 1997-12-01,
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  finished TEI/SGML encoding
  
  
• 1997-09-20,
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Bits of Gossip

By

Rebecca Harding Davis

Author of "Silhouettes of American Life"
"Doctor Warrick's Daughters"

Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin& Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1904

COPYRIGHT 1904 BY REBECCA HARDING DAVIS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October 1904

        IT always has seemed to me that each human being, before going out into the silence, should leave behind him, not the story of his own life, but of the time in which he lived, - as he saw it, - its creed, its purpose, its queer habits, and the work which it did or left undone in the world.

        Taken singly, these accounts might be weak and trivial, but together, they would make history live and breathe. Think what flesh and color the diaries of an English tailor and an Italian vagabond have given to their times!

        Some such vague consideration as this has made me collect these scattered remembrances of my own generation, and of some of the men and women in it whom I have known.

        I have, of course, only spoken of the dead, whose work is done.

CONTENTS

• I. IN THE OLD HOUSE . . . . . 1
• II. BOSTON IN THE SIXTIES . . . . . 28
• III. IN THE FAR SOUTH . . . . . 65
• IV. THE SCOTCH-IRISHMAN . . . . . 84
• V. THE CIVIL WAR . . . . . 109
• VI. THE SHIPWRECKED CREW . . . . .140
• VII. A PECULIAR PEOPLE . . . . . 161
• VIII. ABOVE THEIR FELLOWS . . . . .196

BITS OF GOSSIP

I.
IN THE OLD HOUSE

        THE world that we lived in when I was a child would seem silent and empty to this generation. There were no railways in it, no automobiles or trolleys, no telegraphs, no sky-scraping houses. Not a single man in the country was the possessor of huge accumulations of money such as are so common now. There was not, from sea to sea, a trust or a labor union. Even the names of those things had not yet been invented.

        The village in Virginia which was our home consisted of two sleepy streets lined with Lombardy poplars, creeping between a slow-moving river and silent, brooding hills. Important news from the world outside was brought to us when necessary by a man on a galloping horse.

        But such haste seldom was thought necessary. Nobody was in a hurry to hear the

news. Nobody was in a hurry to do anything, least of all to work or to make money. It mattered little then whether you had money or not. If you were born into a good family, and were "converted," you were considered safe for this world and the next.

        Incomes were all small alike. Indeed, among gentlefolk it was considered vulgar to talk of money at all - either to boast that you had it, or to complain of your lack of it. This was a peculiar trait of the times, and, I suspect, grew out of one dogma of the religious training which then was universal. Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil. As he grew up it was his duty as a Christian and a gentleman to appear to despise filthy lucre, whatever his secret opinion of it might be.

        Besides, the country was so new, so raw, that there were few uses for wealth. You must remember that in the early thirties Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were in the same condition as to population, wealth, and habits of life as the fourth-rate country

town of to-day. Richmond and St. Louis boasted loudly of their eight thousand inhabitants. San Francisco was a bear den, and Chicago a hamlet. The majority of Americans, both men and women, were then busy with farming or other manual labor, and the so-called gentry had no operas, no art galleries, no yearly trips to Europe to drain their thin incomes.

        Between the small towns scattered over the continent stretched the wilderness, broken here and there by the farms of squatters. Through this wilderness the rivers, canals, and one solitary road carried travelers and trade.

        Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North. Every morning two stage-coaches with prancing horses and shrill horns dashed down the sleeping streets to the wharf, full of passengers from the East, who hurried on board the steamboats bound for St. Louis or New Orleans. Huge vans often passed, laden with merchandise for

the plantations or with bales of cotton for the Northern mills. Now and then a white-topped Conestoga wagon drawn by eight horses, each carrying a chime of bells, came through the streets, bearing an emigrant family to the West. The mother and children peeped out of the high front, and the father, carrying a gun, walked with his dog. These emigrants often were from Norway or Poland or Germany, and wore their national costumes, as European peasants still did then. They put on their velvet jackets and high caps when they came near the town, and went about begging, in order to save the little hoard of money which they had brought with them until they reached "the Ohio," as the whole West was then vaguely called.

        These wagons were full of romance to us children. They came up with these strange people out of far-off lands of mystery, and took them into the wilderness, full of raging bears and panthers and painted warriors, all to be fought in turn. We used to look after the children peeping out at us with bitter envy; for, naturally, as we never left home, the

world outside of our encircling hills was a vast secret to us. Boys and girls now usually rush in the course of every year through a dozen states, to the mountains or the seacoast. Most of them have been to Europe. Every morning before breakfast they can read what happened yesterday in Korea or South Africa.

        But with us, after a presidential election, a month often passed before the man on a galloping horse brought us the name of the successful candidate.

        Honest old Timothy Flint, in his "Account of the United States," published at that time, boasts that "the immense number of fifteen hundred newspapers and periodicals are now published in this country." Of these I only remember two, the "United States Gazette" and the "Gentleman's Monthly Magazine," which was always expurgated for my use by pinning certain pages together.

        You may guess from these hints how isolated and calm life was in that time. The development of a child then was as different a process from the same work now, as is the

growth of an acorn which falls in a forest and slowly thrusts out its root and leaf into earth and sun, from the culture of a thousand seedlings massed and tended in a hothouse.

        My easy-going generation did not push the world's work on very far perhaps; we did not discover wireless telegraphy, nor radium. But neither did we die of nerve prostration.

        Certain things were close and real to us then, as children, which to boys and girls now are misty legends. What do they care for the Revolution or the Indian wars?

        But then, the smoke of the battles of Monmouth and Yorktown was still in the air. The old Indian forts were still standing in the streets. It was part of your religion to hate the British. It was your own grandfather who, when he was ten years old, had gone into the swamp, killed the huge beast that had threatened the settlement, and so won the proud title of Panther Jim. He showed you the very sword which he had carried at Valley Forge. It was your own grandmother who had danced with Lafayette, and who hinted that "Lady Washington" had an ugly

habit of loudly scolding her husband and of boxing Nelly Custis's ears, which was hardly befitting a gentlewoman.

        These things made you feel that you had rocked the cradle of the new-born nation with your own hand. It was your duty to hate the British.

        Another odd peculiarity of that time, which I never have seen noticed, was our familiarity with the heathen gods and goddesses. If you talked of war you said Mars, of a beautiful woman you called her Venus; you accused your rhyming neighbor of "courting the Nine." Sermons, letters, and ordinary talk were larded with scraps of Latin and Greek, which now would be laughed at. The reason is plain. Then, the educated boy and girl, first of all, must study the classics. Science, geography, even the history of their own people, were but secondary matters. Jupiter, Juno, and Cæsar still held the stage. The rest of the world as yet were behind the curtain.

        But perhaps if I tell you some trifling incidents of my own childhood, they will show

you more clearly the difference between life then and now. These little happenings are quite true except in the names of persons and places.

        The house in which we children lived may have seemed very plain and homely to other people, but it had certain mysterious peculiarities which put it, for us, alongside of Macbeth's Castle Glamis or the witch-haunted stronghold in Sintram. We know now that they were not mysteries, but they still give a certain significance to the old house which was then the background of our lives.

        I don't remember now what taxes were paid on it, nor what was the condition of the plumbing, nor even how many chambers it had - but these things I always shall remember: -

        In each room was a huge fire of bituminous coal. The black soot hung and swayed in the great chimneys like a mass of sable mosses, and, beneath, yellow and red and purple flames leaped up from an inky base of coal to reach them, while on this base, black and shining as jet, was a gray lettering

that incessantly formed itself almost into words and then crumbled away. You knew that the words, if you could read them, would tell you the secret of your life, and you would watch them late into the night, until you fell asleep and woke to watch again. But the words always crumbled away before you could read them.

        These flames and gray ashes have burned always in my memory, and made the wood-fires, of which poets talk so much, seem thin and meaningless to me.

        Then there were the hillocks in the garden, on which melons grew in summer, but which, in winter, turned into the Alps sheeted with glaciers. We always "made the ascent" just at dusk, equipped with alpenstocks and with bottles of spruce beer and brown jumbles. The alpenstocks and the cakes and the beer all were made with her own hands by our good Angel (though we called her by a better name than that): it was She who packed the cakes and little bottles into bags hung to our waists, and gave us our staffs and shut us out into the twilight to make our perilous

journey, setting a candle in the window to light us home again across the icy mountain wastes.

        The old house had its historic points, too. There were the big wooden chairs on which the three Indian chiefs had sat when they stopped to see my father on their way to Washington. These warriors were in state dress, their faces painted in scarlet streaks; they wore crowns of eagle feathers and robes embroidered with beads and quills. They were live horrors to remember for years, and to shiver over when you were in bed and the candles were out and you pulled the clothes over your head.

        She urged us to come and welcome them and not to be outdone in good-breeding by savages. So we went into the room and sat on a row of chairs, stiff with terror when they laughed and grunted "papoose." One of us even carried a plate of our own jumbles to them, and the big warrior dumped cakes, plate and all, into the corner of his robe and carried them away. When they were going they turned on the threshold and the great

chief made a farewell speech. The meaning of that oration always remained a family mystery. Had he pronounced a curse or a blessing on us? Even at this late day I should really like to know what he did say.

        Then there was that green field with its old trees at the right of the house in which - Something - had wailed and made moans the night when one of us lay dead. The night was clear, the moon being full. Every one of the family heard the strange sobbing and cries. But there was no living thing in the field, - nothing but the voice. No stranger not of our blood heard it.

        But this we never talked of.

        But of all the mysteries in that house the most real was Monsieur Jean Crapeaud.

        There was a narrow high closet cut into the side of the dining-room chimney, of which the door was always kept locked. There were six shelves in it. On the lower three were medicines, almanacs, all the odds and ends of an orderly housekeeper's treasures; then came two shelves, empty, because

they were too high for even grown folks to reach. And on the dark upper shelf which nobody could touch even by standing on the highest chair dwelt Monsieur Crapeaud.

        I don't know who first told us of him or his history. We seemed to have known him always. He was an old nobleman, and had been driven out of France by Napoleon. Every day now he went forth for adventures. We were sure that there was no place in the world where fighting was going on that Monsieur Jean would not be found, in full armor, mounted on a gray steed, carrying a drawn sword and a banner blazoned with the lilies of France. But at night he always came home to his quarters on the top shelf. That was, of course, only the entrance to his citadel. Who could tell how many gilded salons and high towers and dungeons for his enemies he had there, back of the chimney? He was, we believed, but twelve inches high, and we saw no difficulty in his entertaining many guests in his small quarters. Naturally, the size of these nobles of France - émigrés - would have shrunken with their fortunes.

Barbara, our nurse, boasted that she had often seen them, and described them as perpetually busy with eating frogs' legs and smoking corn-cob pipes. We said nothing, but secretly we did not believe Barbara's story. That statement about cob pipes such as the negroes smoked lacked common-sense. We could not be taken in by it.

        When we had anything especially good to eat, such as taffy or black cake, we would throw bits of it up to the upper shelf, and when the evening readings touched on wars or deeds of derring-do, we opened the closet door that Monsieur Jean might hear. I remember that in the midst of the great tournament in "Ivanhoe" somebody gasped in a whisper, "Maybe he was there!" The idea was so tremendous that we had to stop reading that night to think it over.

        Nobody had ever seen Jean, and there was only one person in the house to whom he would speak. It was very seldom that we could persuade this friend of the exiled nobleman to seek an audience. When he consented, how our hearts throbbed and our feet grew cold as

he would rise, lay down his cigar, and gravely unlock the closet door.

        Three little taps. "Monsieur!"

        Silence. Other taps. "Monsieur, will you permit the children to bid you good-evening?"

        "Oui - oui! " in a shrill little voice, thin and sharp as the stab of a penknife. It came from the closet, from the floor, from the open window, and our blood ran cold as we listened.

        "What would they ask of poor Jean Crapeaud?"

        "Go on. Speak!" the interpreter would say, nodding solemnly to us.

        That was the awful moment!

        Usually the boldest boy would gasp, "Where did you fight to-day, General?"

        Sometimes the answer was "With the Indians," or "Against the Turks," or, most blood-curdling of all, "In Africa, with lions." But he always quickly added: "I am tired now with the fight. I go to sleep. Bon soir, mes enfants" - the shrill pipe of a voice retreating up and up into the air.

        "Bon soir, Monsieur," we would shout in chorus. Oh, the fearful joy and relief as the

last thin "Adieu" died out and the interpreter locked the door, invariably coughing violently.

        I see now that the village was a picturesque old place. On a bluff by the river were the ruins of the fort in which the first settlers took shelter from the Indians. One of these first settlers was still living, long past eighty, and each year used to give a ball in his barnlike house, when he would appear in an old Continental uniform and bare feet. The descendants of these old hunters and surveyors then made up the rich class of most of the settlements. The pay of a surveyor in Washington's day usually was as much land as he could ride around in a given time. During the first century land appreciated rapidly in value. Many of the most influential families in the South and Middle West to-day might adopt a galloping pony as their crest with accuracy.

        In some of our old houses lived quiet folk, who frowned upon balls and card parties. In each of their households were a few slaves, some family portraits and plate, a shelf or two of Latin and English classics - and very little money. The owners stood as serenely secure

on their pedigree as though they traced their blood back through nobles of Castile for fifty generations. They had a fine simplicity and gentleness of speech which I remember as I do songs heard in my childhood. Father Vaughan, the Catholic priest, was one of them, and Doctor Morris, the old Episcopal minister, who christened and married and buried us all - was another. The two men used to meet sometimes in our house, but they were formal and stately to each other as to nobody else, and neither man ever spoke of religion when the other was by.

        In the largest of the old houses lived Colonel Richard Stuart. The colonel was the only man I ever saw who wore knee breeches and a queue. Mistress Stuart, too, when she came to drink tea with us, wore a velvet gown with ruby buttons, and a lawn turban folded above her whiter hair. They were a most simple-minded, gentle old couple, and, being childless, were happy when we visited them, and they could stuff us with plum-cake and syllabub. Yet we always felt that they were not quite real human beings, but had come down from that far-off age where

everything was old, where George Washington was the father of his country and Elijah was carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot.

        Suddenly a mysterious disaster befell the old people. It never was explained to us. Even now I can but guess at the facts.

        There was in the village a certain Squire Hiram McCall, our one man of business. The town was proud of him. We children used to hear men boast that "Hiram was a financier known from New York to St. Louis." "Hiram could hold his own on any exchange in the country." He was a loud-voiced, hook-nosed, keen-eyed man. We knew that he had a Bank and Capital. We used to hear him bragging on the street corners of his plans to make his fellow citizens rich. He never spoke to us, but would stumble over us and push us out of his way.

        One day the whole town whispered together as at a funeral. Many of the women cried. We listened, of course, wherever we could. Some of the men we found "had gone on McCall's paper" - whatever that might be - "and were ruined. But the ruin of old

Dick Stuart," they said, "was the most complete of all."

        We hurried at once to the Stuart place and peeped through the fence. What was ruin? Were our old friends dead? No, there they were on the porch, and my mother was with them. Her face was pale and her eyes burned. She was urging them to take the benefit of some bankrupt law which Henry Clay had made for the help of poor debtors.

        "Are you to starve in your old age," we heard her say, "to pay the debts of that villain?"

        "I signed my name. I gave my word," was all that the old man said.

        We thought it wiser to go home. She might look at the fence. But we were satisfied. If she and Henry Clay had taken the matter in hand it was all right.

        There is a blur of time. Then came a day of horror. The Stuarts had nothing. The old man gave up houses, money, land - all; there was a terrible rumor that even the velvet gowns and ruby buttons were sent to Philadelphia and sold.

        The story was told to us a hundred times. "You must understand," she said, the tears in her eyes. "The Colonel is penniless and homeless. But he has kept his honor!" She urged us to take this thing to heart and when we were grown up to go and do likewise.

        I don't think the lesson struck home. Honor, with no house, nor plum-cake, nor knee-breeches, looks mean and cold when one is nine years old. Later we heard that the Colonel had asked for, and been given, the post of toll-gate keeper on the turnpike, and was actually there, taking the tolls.

        For years after that, on every fair Sunday afternoon we were dressed and taken to the toll-house to "pay our respects." There was always a certain solemnity in the visit, something like a presentation at court. The whole town delighted to honor the old people. You always found some of their friends on the vine-covered little porch, where Mistress Stuart sat in her soft gray gown. There was no lawn turban now to hide her white hair. But the Colonel still wore his knee-breeches and queue. This comforted us greatly. The

tollgate was on a lonely mountain road. Hours might pass before a wagon or horseman would be seen coming up out of the fog. But then it was a fine sight to see the Colonel lay down his pipe, step solemnly out on the road, and taking off his hat pass the time of day with the traveler, while the "levy" or "fip" was handed to him.

        His story was known throughout that part of Virginia and great reverence was shown by all passers-by to the old gate-keeper.

        Another figure belonging to our first days in the world was "Knocky-luft." I heard, forty years later, that her real name was Cathy Warren, and that long before I was born she had come from County Cork with her boy Jim to seek their fortune here. Jim went on to the West and his mother waited in our village for him to come back with the fortune. I remember her chubby face and blue eyes often bent greedily over some new gown or hat of my mother's. "Ah-h!" she would mutter, with breathless delight. "I do be thinkin' Jim would be cravin' the like for his old Knocky-luft when he comes back

wid his big bags of goold! He's such a fool boy!"

        Jim wrote one day that he was "pushin' on to the Rockies and would write again when he came back."

        Long before our childhood Knocky was waiting for that letter. Still waiting, she grew, as the years went by, into a lean, yellow old woman, with a red nose and hungry, frightened eyes. Every day she stopped at the house on her way down the street.

        "Where are you going, Knocky?" we always cried.

        "To the po - stoffis, children," she would say, with dignity. "There'll be a letter to-day from my son James, I'm thinkin'."

        We used to watch for her at the garden gate as she crept back again, to comfort her with a plate of good things saved from the midday meal. If we could show her, too, a gay gown or bit of finery the cure was complete. She would turn it over and over eagerly shaking her head, muttering: "I doubt I'm too old - I don't want to be redickelous. But Jim 'll be havin' his own way! He allays

called me his pretty Knock." Then she would go away, cheerfully calling out that we would see her in the morning.

        As years went by she grew more lean and gray and silent. At last she gave up work altogether. Nobody dared to offer her alms. I remember the shudder that went through the family when we heard that she had left her snug little room and was living in a hut on the Commons. We knew now that she had given up hope and had gone out there to die.

        The Commons was the plague spot of the village, a collection of wretched cabins tenanted by drunken free negroes and Irish. Among its other horrors were goats and jimson weeds and a foul pond covered with yellow slime.

        Knocky-luft found shelter in one of these hovels. Never by a word did she hint that her hope was gone, or that she had lost faith in Jim.

        Every morning she crept down to the post-office and back again. There was a certain drunken old hag known in the village as Widdy Kate, who sometimes followed her

with jeers, desiring to know whether "her ladyship's son was coming to-day in his charyut an' six?"

        Knocky took refuge from her in our garden one day. "To think, childher," she cried, "that I've sunk down to livin' in the same house wid Widdy Kate! Only she has the big room an' I hev the kitchen!"

        How could we comfort such misery as that? It was raining. We dragged her into the house and showed her my new frock of nankin embroidered in linen floss. That was comforting, and when we reached the pantry and displayed a row of smoking mince pies - Knocky was laughing.

        It was Thanksgiving Day.

        We tried to make this clear to Knocky, with the pies, real and smoking, in sight. But she grew restless again.

        "What for shud I be thankin' God?" she cried. "Christmas I know, an' the battle of N-Yorleens, an' the Fourth of July I know. But I can't be givin' thanks - I'll go home, childher. No, I want no dinner."

        She would not even take a pie. We tried

to hold her back, but she shook us off and went down the street under the dripping trees again, back to her home with Kate. We were still, I remember, at the window looking miserably out at the rain when my mother came up the path. She was very pale and she held something white in her hand.

        "Is Knocky here?" she said. "It is the letter from Jim."

        "Jim" came that afternoon. He was a stout, oldish man, with a worn face but kind eyes. He was handsomely dressed, and stated to my father that he had grown rich in the West and had come to take his mother home. "I'll make her happy!" he said. Why he had not come before I do not know to this day.

        Feeling that the Commons was the centre of public interest, we found our way there in the afternoon, braving the terrors of Widdy Kate and the butting billy-goats. Knocky saw us far off. "Come in, childher!" she called. "Come in. It's Jim! I mean it's my son, Mr." -

        She stopped and looked at him. She was

frightened, uncertain. He stroked her hand gently, humoring her like a baby.

        "Yes, it's Jim. I came a little while ago, you know, mother."

        Knocky started up. "Look at my gown, childher! Silk, d' ye see, as ud stan' alone! Jim had it made up in the latest fashion. An' the lace in the bosom, d' ye see? An' flowin' sleeves! An' the goold watch!"

        "I thought she'd be pleased," he said awkwardly, looking at us.

        "I'll tell ye what'll plaze me!" she cried shrilly. "If you'll go out I'll put them all on. An' Jim'll get a carriage - an open phayton like a charyut an' two horses an' we'll drive past Widdy Kate's dure through the streets to the Travelers' Inn, an' we'll take dinner there!"

        "Very well, mother," said her son, watching her uneasily.

        "You've got enough money? None but rich folks can dine at the Travelers' Inn. They drink wine for dinner. Can we have wine? An' you'll drive slow through the streets. Past the po - stoffis! I want to stop an' tell them that my letter's come!"

        Jim came out with us and shut the door. We took time to notice that he looked white and sick and that Widdy Kate was waiting with all the other neighbors at the pond, and then we scurried home to tell the news.

        An hour later we saw the phaeton making its triumphal way down the street. The sun had come out and shone on the wet trees.

        Suddenly the horses stopped. Jim jumped out of the phaeton and lifted Knocky-luft in his arms. He carried her into a house.

        "She is not well!" he cried. "Where is a doctor!"

        In a minute she was lying on a couch and they were rubbing her hands, and I was running for old Doctor Tanner, whose shop (with the terrible skeleton) was at the back of our garden.

        Then everybody knew and came. When they saw Knocky the men took off their hats and the women cried and went out again. Doctor Morris, our old minister, came up the path, thinking that he was needed, but seeing who it was he ran to find Father Vaughan.

        "It is you who is wanted," he cried. "Go - make haste!"

        All this time Knocky was looking at Jim. When I saw her eyes I thought, "She knows him now!"

        "Dear boy!" she whispered, "you've come!"

        He was holding her in his arms. Presently he kissed her and laid her down.

        "I came too late," he said, and went out to another room.

II.
BOSTON IN THE SIXTIES

        IN the garden of our old house there were some huge cherry-trees, with low growing branches, and in one of them our nurse, Barbara, having an architectural turn of mind, once built me a house. Really, even now, old as I am, and after I have seen St. James's and the Vatican, I can't imagine any house as satisfactory as Barbara's.

        You went up as far as you could by a ladder to the dizzy height of twelve feet, and then you kicked the ladder down and climbed on, up and up, breathless with terror and triumph, and - there it was. All your own. Not a boy had ever heard of it. There was a plank nailed in for the floor and another for a seat, and there was a secret box with a lid. You could hide your baby in that box, if there were danger of an attack by the Indians, or you could store your provisions in

it in case you had been on a long journey in the wilderness, and had gained this refuge from the wolves in the jungle of currant bushes below. All around you, above and below, were the thick wall of green leaves and the red cherries. They were useful, in case there was danger of starving when the siege by the redskins or wild beasts lasted long.

        After I had grown old enough to be ashamed of my dolls, or of looking for wolves in the currant bushes; I used to carry my two or three books up to the tree-house. There were but two or three books then for children; no magazines, nor Kiplings, nor Stevensons, nor any of the army of cheery storytellers who beset the young people to-day; only Bunyan and Miss Edgeworth and Sir Walter.

        Still, when Apollyon roared in the celery pits below, and Mercy and Christiana sat under the locust-trees, and the tents and glittering legions of the crusaders stretched away to the hills, I don't know that any girl now, in a proper modern house, has better

company than was mine up in Barbara's lodge.

        One day I climbed up with a new book, the first cheap book, by the way, that I ever saw. It was in two volumes; the cover was of yellow paper and the name was "Moral Tales." The tales, for the most part, were thin and cheap as the paper; they commanded no enchanted company, bad or good, into the cherry-tree.

        But among them were two or three unsigned stories which I read over so often that I almost know every line of them by heart now. One was a story told by a town-pump, and another the account of the rambles of a little girl like myself, and still another a description of a Sunday morning in a quiet town like our sleepy village. There was no talk of enchantment in them. But in these papers the commonplace folk and things which I saw every day took on a sudden mystery and charm, and, for the first time, I found that they, too, belonged to the magic world of knights and pilgrims and fiends.

        The publisher of "Moral Tales," whoever

he was, had probably stolen these anonymous papers from the annuals in which they had appeared. Nobody called him to account. Their author was then, as he tells us somewhere, the "obscurest man of letters in America."

        Years afterward, when he was known as the greatest of living romancers, I opened his "Twice-Told Tales" and found there my old friends with a shock of delight as keen as if I had met one of my own kinsfolk in the streets of a foreign city. In the first heat of my discovery I wrote to Mr. Hawthorne and told him about Barbara's house and of what he had done for the child who used to hide there. The little story, coming from the backwoods, touched his fancy, I suppose, for I presently received a note from him saying that he was then at Washington, and was coming on to Harper's Ferry, where John Brown had died, and still farther to see the cherry-trees and - me.

        Me.

        Well, I suppose Esther felt a little in that way when the king's sceptre touched her.

I wish he had come to the old town. It would have seemed a different place forever after to many people. But we were in the midst of the Civil War, and the western end of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was seized just then by the Confederates, and he turned back.

        A year later I saw him. It was during my first visit to New England, at the time when certain men and women were earning for Boston its claim to be called the modern Athens.

        I wish I could summon these memorable ghosts before you as I saw them then and afterward. To the eyes of an observer, belonging to the commonplace world, they did not appear precisely as they do in the portraits drawn of them for posterity by their companions, the other Areopagites, who walked and talked with them apart - always apart from humanity.

        That was the first peculiarity which struck an outsider in Emerson, Hawthorne, and the other members of the "Atlantic" coterie; that while they thought they were guiding the

real world, they stood quite outside of it, and never would see it as it was.

        For instance, during the Civil War, they had much to say of it, and all used the same strained high note of exaltation. It was to them "only the shining track," as Lowell calls it, where

                        . . . "heroes mustered in a gleaming row,
                        Beautiful evermore, and with the rays
                        Of morn on their white shields of expectation."

        These heroes were their bravest and their best, gone to die for the slave or for their country. They were "the army" to them.

        I remember listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott's father as he chanted pæans to the war, the "armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before."

        We were in the little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr. Alcott stood in front of the fireplace, his long gray hair streaming over his collar, his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with the orotund sentences

which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated before. Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing, sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.

        I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields.

        Mr. Hawthorne at last gathered himself up

lazily to his feet, and said quietly: "We cannot see that thing at so long a range. Let us go to dinner," and Mr. Alcott suddenly checked the droning flow of his prophecy and quickly led the way to the dining-room.

        Early that morning when his lank, gray figure had first appeared at the gate, Mr. Hawthorne said: "Here comes the Sage of Concord. He is anxious to know what kind of human beings come up from the back hills in Virginia. Now I will tell you," his eyes gleaming with fun, "what he will talk to you about. Pears. Yes. You may begin at Plato or the day's news, and he will come around to pears. He is now convinced that a vegetable diet affects both the body and soul, and that pears exercise a more direct and ennobling influence on us than any other vegetable or fruit. Wait. You'll hear presently."

        When we went in to dinner, therefore, I was surprised to see the sage eat heartily of the fine sirloin of beef set before us. But with the dessert he began to advocate a vegetable diet and at last announced the spiritual influence of pears, to the great delight of his

host, who laughed like a boy and was humored like one by the gentle old man.

        Whether Alcott, Emerson, and their disciples discussed pears or the war, their views gave you the same sense of unreality, of having been taken, as Hawthorne said, at too long a range. You heard much sound philosophy and many sublime guesses at the eternal verities; in fact, never were the eternal verities so dissected and pawed over and turned inside out as they were about that time, in Boston, by Margaret Fuller and her successors. But the discussion left you with a vague, uneasy sense that something was lacking, some back-bone of fact. Their theories were like beautiful bubbles blown from a child's pipe, floating overhead, with queer reflections on them of sky and earth and human beings, all in a glow of fairy color and all a little distorted.

        Mr. Alcott once showed me an arbor which he had built with great pains and skill for Mr. Emerson to "do his thinking in." It was made of unbarked saplings and boughs, a tiny round temple, two storied, with chambers in

which were seats, a desk, etc., all very artistic and complete, except that he had forgotten to make any door. You could look at it and admire it, but nobody could go in or use it. It seemed to me a fitting symbol for this guild of prophets and their scheme of life.

        Mr. Alcott at that time was their oracle, appointed and held in authority by Emerson alone. His faith in the old man was so sincere and simple that it was almost painful to see it.

        He once told me, "I asked Alcott the other day what he would do when he came to the gate, and St. Peter demanded his ticket. 'What have you to show to justify your right to live?' I said. 'Where is your book, your picture? You have done nothing in the world.' 'No,' he said, 'but somewhere on a hill up there will be Plato and Paul and Socrates talking, and they will say: "Send Alcott over here, we want him with us." ' And," said Emerson, gravely shaking his head, "he was right! Alcott was right."

        Mr. Alcott was a tall, awkward, kindly old man, absolutely ignorant of the world, but

with an obstinate faith in himself which would have befitted a pagan god. Hearing that I was from Virginia, he told me that he owed his education wholly to Virginian planters. He had traveled in his youth as a peddler through the State, and finding how eager he was to learn they would keep him for days in their houses, turning him loose in their libraries.

        His own library was full of folios of his manuscripts. He had covered miles of paper with his inspirations, but when I first knew him no publisher had ever put a line of them into print. His house was bleak and bitter cold with poverty, his wife had always worked hard to feed him and his children. In any other town he would have been more respected if he had tried to put his poor carpentering skill to use to support them. But the homelier virtues were not, apparently, in vogue in Concord.

        During my first visit to Boston in 1862, I saw at an evening reception a tall, thin young woman standing alone in a corner. She was plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant

air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her. Presently she came up to me.

        "These people may say pleasant things to you," she said abruptly; "but not one of them would have gone to Concord and back to see you, as I did to-day. I went for this gown. It's the only decent one I have. I'm very poor;" and in the next breath she contrived to tell me that she had once taken a place as "second girl." "My name," she added, "is Louisa Alcott."

        Now, although we had never met, Louisa Alcott had shown me great kindness in the winter just past, sacrificing a whole day to a tedious work which was to give me pleasure at a time when every hour counted largely to her in her desperate struggle to keep her family from want. The little act was so considerate and fine, that I am still grateful for it, now when I am an old woman, and Louisa Alcott has long been dead. It was as natural for her to do such things as for a pomegranate-tree to bear fruit.

        Before I met her I had known many women and girls who were fighting with poverty and loneliness, wondering why God had sent them into a life where apparently there was no place for them, but never one so big and generous in soul as this one in her poor scant best gown, the "claret-colored merino," which she tells of with such triumph in her diary. Amid her grim surroundings, she had the gracious instincts of a queen. It was her delight to give, to feed living creatures, to make them happy in body and soul.

        She would so welcome you in her home to a butterless baked potato and a glass of milk that you would never forget the delicious feast. Or, if she had no potato or milk to offer, she would take you through the woods to the river, and tell you old legends of colony times, and be so witty and kind in the doing of it that the day would stand out in your memory ever after, differing from all other days, brimful of pleasure and comfort.

        With this summer, however, the darkest hour of her life passed. A few months after I saw her she went as a nurse into the war,

and soon after wrote her "Hospital Sketches." Then she found her work and place in the world.

        Years afterward she came to the city where I was living and I hurried to meet her. The lean, eager, defiant girl was gone, and instead, there came to greet me a large, portly, middle-aged woman, richly dressed. Everything about her, from her shrewd, calm eyes to the rustle of her satin gown told of assured success.

        Yet I am sure fame and success counted for nothing with her except for the material aid which they enabled her to give to a few men and women whom she loved. She would have ground her bones to make their bread. Louisa Alcott wrote books which were true and fine, but she never imagined a life as noble as her own.

        The altar for human sacrifices still stands and smokes in this Christian day of the world, and God apparently does not reject its offerings.

        Of the group of famous people in Concord in 1862, Mr. Emerson was best known to the

country at large. He was the typical Yankee in appearance. The tall, gaunt man, with the watchful, patient face and slightly dazed eyes, his hands clasped behind his back, that came slowly down the shady village street toward the Wayside that summer day, was Uncle Sam himself in ill-fitting brown clothes. I often have wondered that none of his biographers have noticed the likeness. Voice and look and manner were full of the most exquisite courtesy, yet I doubt whether he was conscious of his courtesy or meant to be deferential. Emerson, first of all, was a student of man, an explorer into the dim, obscure regions of human intelligence. He studied souls as a philologist does words, or an entomologist beetles. He approached each man with bent head and eager eyes. "What new thing shall I find here?" they said.

        I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in the belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.

        When I heard him coming into the parlor

at the Wayside my body literally grew stiff and my tongue dry with awe. And in ten minutes I was telling him all that I had seen of the war, the words tumbling over each other, so convinced was I of his eagerness to hear. He was eager. If Edison had been there he would have been just as eager to wrench out of him the secret of electricity, or if it had been a freed slave he would have compelled him to show the scars on his back and lay bare his rejoicing, ignorant, half-animal soul, and an hour later he would have forgotten that Edison or the negro or I were in the world - having taken from each what he wanted.

        Naturally Mr. Emerson valued the abnormal freaks among human souls most highly, just as the unclassable word and the mongrel beetle are dearest to the grammarian or the naturalist. The only man to whose authority he bowed was Alcott, the vague, would-be prophet, whose ravings he did not pretend to fathom. He apparently shared in the popular belief that eccentricity was a sign of genius.

He said to me suddenly once, "I wish Thoreau had not died before you came. He was an interesting study."

        "Why?" I asked.

        "Why? Thoreau?" He hesitated, thinking, going apparently to the bottom of the matter, and said presently: "Henry often reminded me of an animal in human form. He had the eye of a bird, the scent of a dog, the most acute, delicate intelligence - but no soul. No," he repeated, shaking his head with decision, "Henry could not have had a human soul."

        His own perception of character was an intuition. He felt a fine trait as he would a fine strain of music. Coming once to Philadelphia, he said, almost as soon as he entered the house, "So Philip Randolph has gone! That man had the sweetest moral nature I ever knew. There never was a man so lacking in self-consciousness. The other day I saw in the London 'Times' that 'the American, Randolph, one of the three greatest chess players in the world was dead.' I knew Philip intimately since he was a boy, and I

never heard him mention the game. I did not even know that he played it. How fine that was!" he said, walking up and down the room. "How fine that was!"

        Emerson himself was as little likely to parade his merits as Randolph, but not from any lack of self-appreciation. On the contrary, his interest in his Ego was so dominant that it probably never occurred to him to ask what others thought of him. He took from each man his drop of stored honey, and after that the man counted for no more to him than any other robbed bee. I do not think that even the worship which his disciples gave him interested him enough to either amuse or annoy him.

        It was worship. No such homage has ever been paid to any American. His teaching influenced at once the trend of thought here and in England; the strongest men then living became promptly his disciples or his active antagonists.

        But outside of this central circle of scholars and original thinkers, there were vast outlying provinces of intelligence where he reigned

absolutely as does the unseen Grand Llama over his adoring votaries. New England then swarmed with weak-brained, imitative folk who had studied books with more or less zeal, and who knew nothing of actual life. They were suffering under the curse of an education which they could not use; they were the lean, underfed men and women of villages and farms, who were trained enough to be lawyers and teachers in their communities, but who actually were cobblers, mill-hands, or tailoresses. They had revolted from Puritanism, not to enter any other live church, but to fall into a dull disgust, a nausea with all religion. To them came this new prophet with his discovery of the God within themselves. They hailed it with acclamation. The new dialect of the Transcendentalist was easily learned. They talked it as correctly as the Chinaman does his pigeon English. Up to the old gray house among the pines in Concord they went - hordes of wild-eyed Harvard undergraduates and lean, underpaid working-women, each with a disease of soul to be cured by the new Healer.

        It is quite impossible to give to the present generation an idea of the devout faith of these people. Keen-witted and scholarly as some of them were, it was as absolute as that of the poor Irishman tramping over the bogs in Munster to cure his ailments by a drink of the water of a holy well.

        Outside of these circles of disciples there was then throughout the country a certain vague pride in Emerson as an American prophet. We were in the first flush of our triumph in the beginnings of a national literature. We talked much of it. Irving, Prescott, and Longfellow had been English, we said, but these new men - Holmes and Lowell and Hawthorne - were our own, the indigenous growth of the soil. In the West and South there was no definite idea as to what truth this Concord man had brought into the world. But in any case it was American truth and not English. Emerson's popularity, therefore, outside of New England was wide, but vague and impersonal.

        It was very different with Dr. Holmes.

Everybody who cared for books, whether in New York clubs, California ranches, or Pennsylvania farms, loved and laughed with "the little doctor," as he was fondly called. They discussed his queer ways and quoted his last jokes as if he had been the autocrat at their own breakfast-table that morning. His output of occasional verses was enormous and constant. The present generation, probably, regard most of them as paste jewels, but they shone for us, the purest of gems. He was literally the autocrat of the young men and women of his time. He opened the depths of their own hearts to them as nobody else had done, and they ran to him to pour out their secrets. Letters - hundreds in a day - rained down on him with confidences, tragic, pathetic, and ridiculous, but all true. The little man was alive with magnetism; it fired his feeblest verse, and drew many men and all women to him.

        Physically, he was a very small man, holding himself stiffly erect - his face insignificant as his figure, except for a long, obstinate upper lip ("left to me," he said one day, "by

some ill-conditioned great-grandmother"), and eyes full of a wonderful fire and sympathy. No one on whom Dr. Holmes had once looked with interest ever forgot the look - or him. He attracted all kinds of people as a brilliant, excitable child would attract them. But nobody, I suspect, ever succeeded in being familiar with him.

        Americans at that time seldom talked of distinction of class or descent. You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it. But the Autocrat was patrician enough to represent the descent of a daimio, with two thousand years of ancestry behind him. He was the finest fruit of that Brahmin order of New England which he first had classified and christened. He had too keen an appreciation of genius not to recognize his own. He enjoyed his work as much as his most fervent admirers, and openly enjoyed, too, their applause. I remember one evening that he quoted one of his poems, and I was forced stupidly to acknowledge that I did not know it. He fairly jumped to the book-cases, took out the volume and read the

verses, standing in the middle of the room, his voice trembling, his whole body thrilling with their meaning.

        "There!" he cried at the end, his eyes flashing, "could anybody have said that better? Ah-h!" with a long, indrawn breath of delight as he put the book back.

        He had the fervor, the irritability, the tenderness of a woman, and her whimsical fancies, too. He was, unlike women, eager to help you out with your unreasonable whims. One day I happened to confess to a liking for old graveyards and the strange bits of human history to be found or guessed at in them. The result was that he became my cicerone the next day to Mount Auburn. It was an odd bit of luck to fall to a young woman from the hills that she should have the Autocrat, to whom the whole country was paying homage, all to herself for a whole summer morning. He took me to none of the costly monuments, nor graves of famous folk, but wandered here and there among the trees, his hands clasped behind him, stopping now and then at a green mound, while he told me curious fragments

of the life which was ended below. He mentioned no names - they would have meant nothing to me if he had - but he wrested the secret meaning out of each life, pouncing on it, holding it up with a certain racy enjoyment in his own astuteness. It was a marvelous monologue, full of keen wit and delicate sympathy and acrid shrewdness. I must confess that I think he forgot the country and its homage and me that morning, and talked simply for his own pleasure in his own pathos and fun, just as a woman might take out her jewels when she was alone, to hold up the glittering strings and take delight in their shining. Once, I remember, he halted by a magnificent shaft and read the bead roll of the virtues of the man who lay beneath: "A devoted husband, a tender father, a noble citizen - dying triumphant in the Christian faith."

        "Now this dead man," he said, in a high, rasping tone, "was a prize fighter, a drunkard, and a thief. He beat his wife. But she puts up this stone. He had money!"

        Then he hurried me across the slopes to an obscure corner where a grave was hidden by

high, wild grasses. He knelt and parted the long branches. Under them was a little headstone with the initials "M. H.," and underneath the verse: -

                        She lived unknown and
                        few could know
                        When Mary ceased to be,
                        But she is gone, and Oh!
                        The difference to me!

        "Do you see this?" he asked, in a whisper.

        "Do you know who she was?" I asked.

        "No, I would n't try to find out. I'd like to know, but I could n't uncover that grave. No, no! I could n't do that."

        He put back the leaves reverently so as to hide the stone again and rose, and as he turned away I saw that the tears stood in his eyes.

        As we drove home he said: "I believe that I know every grave in the old villages within a radius of thirty miles from Boston. I search out the histories of these forgotten folk in records and traditions, and sometimes I find strange things - oh, very strange things! When I have found out all about them they

seem like my own friends, lying there forgotten. But I know them! And every spring, as soon as the grass begins to come up, I go my rounds to visit them and see how my dead men do!"

        But with all his whims Dr. Holmes was no unpractical dreamer like his friends in Concord. He was far in advance of his time in certain shrewd, practical plans for the bettering of the conditions of American life.

        One of his hobbies was a belief in a hobby as an escape valve in the over-heated, over-driven career of a brain worker.

        The doctrine was almost new then. The pace of life was as yet tranquil and moderate compared to the present headlong American race. But the doctor foresaw what was coming - both the danger and its remedy.

        His camera and violin were two of his own doors of escape from work and worry. Under his library table, too, was a little box, furnished with a jig-saw, lathe, etc. It ran in and out on grooves, like a car on a railway. He showed it one day with triumph.

        "I contrived that!" he said. "But only

my friends know about it. People think I am shut in here, hard at work, writing poetry or lectures. And I am making jim-cracks. But if any of the dunces make their way in, I give it a shove - so! Away it goes under the table and I am discovered - Poet or Professor, in character - pen in hand!" and he chuckled like a naughty boy over his successful trick.

        Holmes, Longfellow, Emerson, and George Ticknor, all chiefs of differing literary clans, formed a fraternity then in New England which never since has found its parallel in America.

        There can be no doubt that their success as individuals or as a body in influencing American thought was largely due to their friend and neighbor, James T. Fields, the shrewdest of publishers and kindest of men. He was the wire that conducted the lightning so that it never struck amiss.

        His little house in Charles Street, with the pretty garden sloping to the river, was then the shelter to which hied all wandering men of letters, from Thackeray and Dickens down

to starving poets from the western prairies.

        They were wisely counseled and sent upon the right path, but not until they had been warmed and fed in body and mind. Mr. Fields was a keen man of business, but he had a kindly, hospitable soul.

        Hawthorne was in the Boston fraternity but not of it. He was an alien among these men, not of their kind. He belonged to no tribe. I am sure that wherever he went during his whole life, from the grassy streets of Salem to the docks of Liverpool, on Parisian boulevards or in the olive groves of Bellosguardo, he was always a foreigner, different from his neighbors. He probably never knew that he was different. He knew and cared little about Nathaniel Hawthorne, or indeed about the people around him. The man next door interested him no more than the man in Mozambique. He walked through life, talking and thinking to himself in a language which we do not understand.

        It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed

to call great. I have found that most of these royalties seem to sink into ordinary citizens at close approach.

        You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do. You are disappointed in every word and look from them. You expect to see the divine light shining through their talk to the office-boy or the train-man, and you never catch a glimmer of it; you are aggrieved because their coats and trousers have not something of the cut of kingly robes.

        Hawthorne only, of them all, always stood aloof. Even in his own house he was like Banquo's ghost among the thanes at the banquet.

        There is an old Cornish legend that a certain tribe of mountain spirits were once destroyed by the trolls, all except one, who still wanders through the earth looking for his own people and never finding them. I never looked at Hawthorne without remembering the old story.

        Personally he was a rather short, powerfully

built man, gentle and low voiced, with a sly, elusive humor gleaming sometimes in his watchful gray eyes. The portrait with which we all are familiar - a curled barbershop head - gives no idea of the singular melancholy charm of his face. There was a mysterious power in it which I never have seen elsewhere in picture, statue, or human being.

        Wayside, the home of the Hawthornes in Concord, was a comfortable little house on a shady, grassy road. To please his wife he had built an addition to it, a tower into which he could climb, locking out the world below, and underneath, a little parlor, in whose dainty new furnishings Mrs. Hawthorne took a womanish delight. Yet, somehow, gay Brussels rugs and gilded frames were not the background for the morbid, silent recluse.

        Mrs. Hawthorne, however, made few such mistakes. She was a soft, affectionate, feminine little woman, with intuitions subtle enough to follow her husband into his darkest moods, but with, too, a cheerful, practical

Yankee "capacity" which fitted her to meet baker and butcher. Nobody could have been better fitted to stand between Hawthorne and the world. She did it effectively. When I was at Wayside, they had been living there for two years - ever since their return from Europe, and I was told that in that time he had never once been seen on the village street.

        This habit of seclusion was a family trait. Hawthorne's mother had managed to live the life of a hermit in busy Salem, and her sister, meeting a disappointment in early life, had gone into her chamber, and for more than twenty years shut herself up from her kind, and dug into her own soul to find there what truth and life she could. During the years in which Nathaniel, then a young man, lived with these two women, he, too, chose to be alone, going out of the house only at night, and finding his food on a plate left at his locked door. Sometimes weeks passed during which the three inmates of the little gray wooden house never saw each other.

        Hawthorne was the product of generations of solitude and silence. No wonder that he had the second sight and was naturalized into the world of ghosts and could interpret for us their speech.

        America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

        The natural feeling among healthy, commonplace people toward the solitary man was a tender sympathy such as they would give to a sick child.

        "Nathaniel," an old blacksmith in Salem once said to me, "was queer even as a boy. He certainly was queer. But you humored him. You wanted to humor him."

        One person, however, had no mind to humor him. This was Miss Elizabeth Peabody, Mrs. Hawthorne's sister. She was the mother of the kindergarten in this country, and gave to its cause, which seemed to her first in importance, a long and patient life of noble self-sacrifice. She was a woman of wide research and a really fine intelligence, but she had the discretion of a six-year-old child.

She loved to tell the details of Hawthorne's courtship of her sister, and of how she herself had unearthed him from the tomb of the little gray house in Salem, and "brought him into Sophia's presence." She still regarded him as a demi-god, but a demi-god who required to be fed, tutored, and kept in order. It was her mission, she felt, to bring him out from solitudes where he walked apart, to the broad ways of common sense.

        I happened to be present at her grand and last coup to this end.

        One evening I was with Mrs. Hawthorne in the little parlor when the children brought in their father. The windows were open, and we sat in the warm twilight quietly talking or silent as we chose. Suddenly Miss Peabody appeared in the doorway. She was a short, stout little woman, with her white stockinged feet thrust into slippers, her hoop skirt swaying from side to side, and her gray hair flying to the winds.

        She lighted the lamp, went out and brought in more lamps, and then sat down and waited with an air of stern resolution.

Presently Mr. Emerson and his daughter appeared, then Louisa Alcott and her father, then two gray old clergymen who were formally presented to Mr. Hawthorne, who now looked about him with terrified dismay. We saw other figures approaching in the road outside.

        "What does this mean, Elizabeth?" Mrs. Hawthorne asked aside.

        "I did it. I went around and asked a few people in to meet our friend here. I ordered some cake and lemonade, too."

        Her blue eyes glittered with triumph as Mrs. Hawthorne turned away. "They've been here two years," she whispered, "and nobody has met Mr. Hawthorne. People talk. It's ridiculous! There's no reason why Sophia should not go into society. So I just made an excuse of your visit to bring them in."

        Miss Elizabeth has been for many years among the sages and saints on the heavenly hills, but I have not yet quite forgiven her the misery of that moment.

        The little room was quite full when there

rustled in a woman who came straight to Mr. Hawthorne, as a vulture to its prey. I never heard her name, but I knew her at sight as the intellectual woman of the village, the Intelligent Questioner who cows you into idiocy by her fluent cleverness.

        "So delighted to meet you at last!" she said, seating herself beside him. "I have always admired your books, Mr. Hawthorne. I was one of the very first to recognize your power. And now I want you to tell me about your methods of work. I want to hear all about it."

        But at that moment his wife came up and said that he was wanted outside, and he escaped. A few moments later I heard his steps on the floor overhead, and knew that he was safe in the tower for the night.

         . . . . . . . .

        He did not hold me guilty in the matter, for the next morning he joined his wife and me in a walk through the fields. We went to the Old Manse where they had lived when they were first married, and then wandered on to the wooded slopes of the Sleepy Hollow Valley

in which the Concord people had begun to lay away their dead.

        It was a cool morning, with soft mists rolling up the hills, and flashes between of sudden sunlight. The air was full of pungent woody smells, and the undergrowth blushed pink with blossoms. There was no look of a cemetery about the place. Here and there, in a shady nook, was a green hillock like a bed, as if some tired traveler had chosen a quiet place for himself and lain down to sleep.

        Mr. Hawthorne sat down in the deep grass and then, clasping his hands about his knees, looked up laughing.

        "Yes," he said, "we New Englanders begin to enjoy ourselves - when we are dead."

        As we walked back the mists gathered and the day darkened overhead. Hawthorne, who had been joking like a boy, grew suddenly silent, and before we reached home the cloud had settled down again upon him, and his steps lagged heavily.

        Even the faithful woman who kept always close to his side with her laughing words and anxious eyes did not know that day how

fast the last shadows were closing in upon him.

        In a few months he was lying under the deep grass, at rest, near the very spot where he sat and laughed, looking up at us.

        I left Concord that evening and never saw him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly, and then, holding out his hand, said: -

        "I am sorry you are going away. It seems as if we had known you always."

        The words were nothing. I suppose he forgot them and me as he turned into the house. And yet, because perhaps of the child in the cherry-tree, and the touch which the Magician laid upon her, I never have forgotten them. They seemed to take me, too, for one moment, into his enchanted country.

        Of the many pleasant things which have come into my life, this was one of the pleasantest and best.

III.
IN THE FAR SOUTH

        BEFORE we came to Virginia we lived in one of the Gulf States, in a district given up to cotton plantations. In the middle of these plantations, in a wide basin formed by the sloping hills, lay the village of Big Spring. Near it was the spring, a huge gush of brown water which made itself into a creek and lapped its crooked way through the woods. The principal house was a store where everything could be bought, from a plow to stale sugar-plums, and the pelts brought by the Indian tribe that still lingered on the other side of the hills.

        Along the grassy road which led from the store were the forge, the house of the horse-trader, the shoemaker's cabin, and the tavern, kept by Ody Peay. No decent traveler had ever been known to stay overnight in Ody's dirty, dark chambers. But the foremost men

and the best judges of liquor in the State came to try his mint juleps and sherry cobblers. You would hear no better talk in the South than that which purled lazily along on a rainy afternoon on Ody's gallery.

        This was the village. The woods crept in year by year as if they wanted to close down upon it altogether and smother out its torpid life; live oaks grew in the midst of the streets; the moss covered the roofs and edged the huge trough into which the water from the spring dripped, and about which the sleepy oxen stood in the hot sunshine and drank lazily.

        Some of the planters who daily rode into town for a smoke and a gossip at Ody's were the descendants of good Protestant Irish families; and others, still Catholic, traced back their ancestry to French émigrés who had escaped the guillotine.

        The planters were not energetic cotton-growers. Most of their capital and knowledge went into their stables, in which were some of the most famous running horses then in the country. Their owners traveled every

year with them and a great following of friends, jockeys, and grooms, to New Orleans and up to the northern race-courses.

        The southern king of the turf, Gray Eagle, was partly owned by Major Delasco, one of our neighbors, though Kentucky claimed the great racer, and was as proud of him as of any of her sons, Marshall or Clay though he might be.

        When Kentucky was challenged by Louisiana on the course in 1840, it was Gray Eagle who was chosen to uphold its honor. The whole country stood breathless as that race was run. The Major backed the horse with every dollar and acre that he owned. Thousands of Kentuckians risked their whole fortunes on him, and when it was certain that he would lose, not a man from that State, to save himself, would hedge or bet a penny against him. The ruin of many an old family dated from that race.

        In his old age the great southern champion was taken by Major Delasco to the course at Lexington, where his chief triumphs had been won. When the races were over, the

audience waited in silence while the old horse, blind and tottering, was led in. He was stripped; the bugle sounded the start. He understood. His sightless eyes kindled, his nostrils quivered as he was led around the course. Roar after roar of frantic shouts greeted him; every head was uncovered. He stepped slowly and proudly, his head high, his breath coming hard.

        He knew that he was the conqueror, and that these were his friends come to welcome him. Twice he marched around the track, and then passed out of sight forever.

        "He knows!" the Major said, as he led him out, patting him with a shaking hand. "He knows it's the last time. He has bid the world good-by." The tears ran down over his huge tobacco-stained jaws as he talked.

        Gray Eagle died two days later.

        I have often heard my mother describe the mixed magnificence and squalor of the life on the plantations among which we lived; the great one-storied wooden houses built on piles; the pits of mud below them in which the pigs wallowed; the masses of crimson

roses heaped high on the roofs, a blaze of pure and splendid color; the bare floors, not too often scrubbed; the massive buffets covered with magnificent plate, much of it cups and salvers won on the turf.

        The women of these families did not lead the picturesque idle life which their northern sisters imagined and envied. Much of the day was spent in weighing provisions or cutting out clothes for the field hands. They had few books - an odd volume of poems and their Bibles, which they read devoutly - and no amusements but an occasional hot supper, to which they went in faded gowns of ancient cut. But their jewels, as a rule, were diamonds of great purity and value.

        In our quiet life afterwards in Virginia, our sojourn in the far South was remembered as an uneasy dream. The thick shade of the semi-tropical forests, the mile-long hedges of roses through which crawled rattlesnakes and the deadly upland moccasin, the darting birds like jewels, the extravagant slovenliness of both nature and man, the fleas, the ticks, the chiggers, and countless other creatures that

bite and sting, and through all and over all the intolerable heat, made up for us children a strange, enchanted page of the past family history.

        The planters welcomed strangers with ardent kindness. They served God with the same fervor. Dancing and card-playing were regarded as devices of the devil, the southern "church member" being then, as now, much more strict in abjuring these carnal delights than is the descendant of the Puritan.

        While we were in this neighborhood Major Delasco's wife gave a small supper, after which there was a carpet dance. On the following Sunday there was a celebration of the Holy Communion in the Presbyterian church of which she was a member. When she went, according to custom, for a silver token admitting her to the table it was refused. Early on Monday morning the Major sent a challenge to each of the elders and members of the session, eighteen in all. Most of the men whom he had challenged were his cronies, with whom he supped daily, and exchanged

gossip, receipts for drinks, or the eggs of fancy poultry.

        "I may die on the field," he said, "but I shall have vindicated Maria's honor, thank God!"

        This washing of reputations clean by blood was going on perpetually.

        On the day when my father first arrived at the village he was passing down the street when he observed that a gentleman was following him rapidly. He halted, coming abreast of him, and, drawing a pistol, pointed it at his head. Naturally my father started back.

        "Thank you, sir," said the stranger courteously. "It is the gentleman on the other side of the street I wish to shoot."

        He pulled the trigger, and the gentleman on the other side fell dead, with the bullet in his heart. During the next six months more than thirty men were shot on the same grassy highway. Every one of these deaths was the outcome of the creed which rated honor higher than life - a creed which scarcely has a place among the motives of any man nowadays.

One fact will show how stringent it was then.

        There was a family whom I shall call Impey, because that was not their name, and because they claimed kinship with Sir Elijah Impey, the judge in India famous as the murderer of Nuncomar. Some French blood of a finer strain than that of the English butcher had some time been mixed in the race.

        One branch of the family ended in an old man of eighty, his daughter, a widow, his granddaughter, a delicate girl of sixteen, and her baby brother.

        Many years after we had left the neighborhood, Judge Mabury, one of the planters, with his wife, visited us on their way home from the North. They had much to tell us of our old friends.

        "And Mary Impey?" some one asked at last.

        "Oh, little Mary?" exclaimed Mrs. Mabury. "She had a very tryin' experience, poh child! But it all ended right. You know she lived alone with her grandfather and

little brother, quite remote. She heard one day that Colonel Dupree had spoken - well, coarsely of her. I can't go into details. The remark left a stain on her character. She heard it in the mohnin', an' she considered about it. She had no father. Willy was only seven; thah was nobody but her grandfather, an' he was imbecile. So she called foh her pony an' rode into the village, an' stopped at the tahvern, where the colonel was likely to be. Some gentlemen she knew were on the gallery.

        " 'Is Colonel Dupree inside?' she said, very scared to speak out before them all.

        "So they called him, and then came around the horse to talk to Miss Mary.

        "When he came out o' the doh, smilin' an' bowin', she said, 'Colonel, I've been told you spoke of me yesterday in wohds that I can't repeat. Thah's no man to come an' ask about it. What grounds had you foh speaking of me so?'

        "He could n't deny it in the face of the men standin' thah who had heard him, so he said: -

        " 'I was drunk when I did that.'Fore Almighty God, Miss Mary,' he said solemnly, 'thah's no ground foh it. Thah's no woman in the State more deservin' of honor than you.'

        " 'That is enough foh me,' she said. 'Now, foh you' - She put her hand in her pocket and took out a little pistol and shot him through the head. Then she rode back home again."

        "She killed him! Did n't they arrest her?" we cried.

        "Arrest her? Why, you don't understand. Thah was nobody to do it but her. Of course she was sorry about it," said my friend, stroking the fringe of her overskirt, "but it had to be done. She married soon after that. Oh, I forgot to tell you," she pattered on, smiling. "Little Willy cried when he understood whah Mary had been.

        " 'That was my business, sister,' he said.

        "Bless the child! of cohse, if he had been a little bigger - But they would probably have disarmed the boy, and not have given him fair play."

        And as she talked, my mind swung dizzily back to the old point of view. What, after all, was the Colonel's life, or any life, if honor was at stake?

        "Poh Mary!" Aunt Dody was saying. "She's dead now. Died six years ago, just tired out. Her husband was a rampagious kind of creature, and so were her daughters. Mary was always a timid little body, and she spent her life tryin' to make the world easy for them."

        "Did she ever regret what she had done?"

        "Oh, no! Why, certainly not! I never heard her speak of Colonel Dupree but once. She said, 'I am sorry, Aunt Dody, it was I who had to do that. He made much mischief in the world. But perhaps he's doin' better now - elsewhere.' Perhaps he is," sighed Aunt Theodora, doubtfully shaking her head.

        "Of course you remember," said the Judge, now joining in the discussion, "that there was a strained feeling between the Impeys and the Delascos?"

        "A vendetta - yes. Is it still going on?"

        "Well, we don't call it that. Vendetta's

too big a name. The low-class whites in your Virginia hills here have vendettas, and are always in the papers. That was just a - difficulty between those families. They said little about it, but it has been going on since the opening of the country. Thah don't seem to have been any reason foh it - no insult - nothing tangible. But the two families are different, and apparently they can't tolerate each other on the same earth. Foh fifty years not a Delasco died in his bed. Yes, they certainly ran it pretty hard then."

        As he spoke, the forgotten story came back to me. Neither family had allowed the feud to absorb their lives. They were planters, lawyers, or speculators, many of them busy and useful men. But when one of their natural enemies came on their path they rid it of him as they would of any other noxious vermin. Their neighbors had always looked on with mild regret. It was a pity, they thought, that two such important and agreeable families felt it to be their duty to kill each other on sight. But nothing in their code could have been more underbred than interference.

        "There are families," the Judge said ponderously, "that die of consumption, and some are mowed down by scrofula. But it does n't seem to be God's law that an Impey or a Delasco should die of disease. They were meant to make an end of each other. And of cohse you can't run against God's law."

        "What became of Major Delasco?" we asked. "When we left Big Spring he had eighteen duels on hand."

        The Judge laughed. "Oh, he came through them without a scratch, and others - others. Gentlemen shot wide with the Major. He was a friendly old soul, pottering about, always bragging of his fancy poultry or his brew of apple toddy. One of the Texan Impeys made an end of him. Picked a quarrel on the road, and used his knife on the old man. I never asked the details. I could n't hear them. The Major's death was a great shock to me - a great shock."

        "And then, the Texas Impey?"

        "Well, of course the Major's sons set out at once after him. But Dan, their old coachman, met him on the street in Huntsville, and

shot him on sight. He was the last of that branch, fortunately. A bad lot."

        "Then the Impey family is extinct?"

        "No. There's Willy, Mary's brother," growled the Judge, with a sniff. "I've nothing to say against Willy. He's a pleasant, affectionate lad. But somehow he'll never raise cotton."

        I never knew the man whom I call Willy Impey, except through our mutual friends. He was for years a favorite leader of the German at Saratoga and the White Sulphur Springs, and was always a prominent figure at the Mardi Gras - a little, gay, fair man, as nervous and affectionate as a woman. He went reluctantly into the war, "not wanting to kill anybody, not even the Yankees," but once in he fought with a blind fury.

        The end of the struggle left him ruined. He tried once or twice weakly to earn his living, but soon collapsed into the old routine of dancing and card-playing. He could n't, as the Judge expressed it, "raise cotton" - a more venial fault of character always in the South than in the North. His mother had a

small income, and he lived with her. But she never was satisfied with him. She was a woman of fine presence, and much fluency. She talked a good deal of "men who etched their names high on the roll of southern chivalry."

        But Willy did not trouble himself with etching his name anywhere.

        Mrs. Mabury, on one of her visits, years later, told us of his death.

        "Willy," she said, "was just going seriously to work, when he was cut off. He was quite in earnest that time. Of cohse he had his jokes and songs as always - it would n't have been Willy if he had n't. As for drink - he did n't take to it regularly - no. But occasionally, of cohse -

        "He owned a large track at Big Spring, and he decided to come back and grow cotton thah. He was n't goin' to do it in the old way, either. He looked into the new methods, and hired an expert as overseer, and spent what little he had in machinery and the like. Well, the overseer arrived and began work. Willy was to come next week. But, you see, in all these years the Delascos had seated

themselves firmly at the Spring. They used the old methods, and the word got about that this Impey fellow meant to run them out with his modern improvements. The Judge heard the storm risin', and he wrote to Willy begging him not to come.

        " 'Foh God's sake,' he said, 'don't open up the old grudge! Thah'll be trouble!' But Willy appeared on the day set, smilin' an' funnin' away as usual.

        " 'Pretty talk,' he says, 'that a man cahn't fahm his own ground as he likes in this year of the nineteenth century, in a Christian community. Why, bless yoh soul, Aunt Dody, I've no grudge against the Delascos!' he says.

        "But the Delascos met in their houses an' wohked each other up to a fury. It was n't Willy's fahm they were against, it was Willy. They are reasonable men - some of them. But it was the old hate comin' up again in their blood. They could n't help it, I suppose. Well" - she glanced around, suddenly pale, "it was done, an' I was thah."

        "You?"

        "Yes. I heard what was planned early in

the mohnin'. The Judge had gone to the city, so I went myself to the tahvern whah Willy was - Ody Peay's, you know, only it's another house, an' Ody's dead. Willy was upstahs eatin' his breakfast. He laughed at me. I told him they said he should not leave the town alive. 'Dear Aunt Dody,' he said, 'they've been scaring you because you're a woman.'

        "Then the landlord came in, out of breath. 'Mr. Impey,' he said, 'the Delascos are below in the hall six of them. They sent word foh you to come down. Every man of 'em has his gun!' Willy stood up. He had no blood in his face. You know Willy never was a fighter.

        " 'I am not armed, Mr. Pomeroy,' he said. 'Do the gentlemen know that I am not armed?'

        " 'Yes. They don't keer. They bid me tell you thah was but one Impey livin', and the earth was tired of carrying him.'

        "Pomeroy ran into a back room. 'Hyah, sir,' he says; 'thah's a ladder down into the kitchen. I can hide you in the cellar. Come. Thah's a chance!'

        "Willy ran to the ladder an' then stopped. 'Mother would n't have me skulk like a rat in a hole,' he said, standin' thah.

        "I was so wild, I ran out on the stairs. They were all below. 'Men,' I screamed, 'are you goin' to murder him in cold blood? Six against one! Are you devils?' I don't know what I said to them.

        "Old John Delasco answered me. 'Mistress Mabury,' he said, 'go back. Don't meddle hyah. It's the last of a bad breed goin' to be wiped out!'

        "An' that man had eaten at my table an' walked with me to church!

        "I went back. Willy was standin' thah. His thin little face was like that of a corpse. I begged him to go down the ladder. It would have been a sure escape. But he shook his head.

        " 'Mother will be satisfied with this,' he said. 'I could n't live like a man, but I can die like one;' and he gave a queer smile. 'Tell her, Aunt Dody,' he said.

        "Then he flung the door open and stopped at the head of the stairs.

" 'I am here, gentlemen,' he said, drawing himself up, and he folded his arms and walked slowly down the steps.

        "They let him come halfway, and then -

        "The poor little man was lyin', all blood, where he fell when I ran down. I lifted his head in my arms, but he only spoke once.

        " 'Tell mother,' he said."

IV.
THE SCOTCH-IRISHMAN

        SITTING by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.

        Now here beside me, for instance, is an old high clock - the kind whose one weight hangs on groaning chains - such as the first Swedish settlers brought with them on their barkentine, the Key of Calmar, the first vessel to sail up Delaware Bay yonder, then a silent and nameless flood of water.

        It reminds me of just such a clock which stood in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania fifty years ago, and of a little circumstance concerning it which has a curious significance.

        I was a visitor one fall in this house, a large stone homestead set on a low hill, with its barns and corn ricks and cider presses, hedged

in by orchards and rolling wheat fields, while beyond stretched miles of forests of oak and sycamore. Nowhere in this country, from sea to sea, does nature comfort us with such assurance of plenty, such rich and tranquil beauty as in those unsung, unpainted hills of Pennsylvania.

        The farmer's family belonged to what in England would be called the upper middle class, and in France the haute bourgeoisie. They were of Scotch-Irish blood. Their kinsfolk were the small lawyers, doctors, ministers, and farmers of country places; these men drove the plow, the women milked, cooked, and sewed. But there was a Knabe Grand in the parlor and fine damask in the linen closet and on a couple of shelves some books, - Scott, and the "Spectator," and Bunyan's Complete Works, cook books and Cæsar, and Black on the Horse. I don't believe you could find just that kind of people now in the whole country.

        One cool September afternoon the clock mender came to the farm on his rounds. He drove a stout gray mare, in a little wagon with

one seat and a box at the back, in which were his tools and a basket of provisions, for he made long journeys across the Alleghany Mountains, and there were few country inns in those days. Each farmer's wife when he was going away gave him a plentiful "piece" for two or three meals. He managed to visit each farmhouse once in a year, gathering the cream of the gossip from the Juniata to the Ohio.

        We saw him coming up the long avenue of oaks and sycamores, waving his whip cheerfully. He had, too, a little horn, which he tooted to give notice of his arrival. The farmer was in the meadows a mile away, but his wife welcomed him, and bade him carry his carpet sack upstairs, for it was a matter of course that he would stay all night.

        Then he went into the living-room and hurried, box in hand, to the high clock in the corner. His hostess ran after him with an anxious face.

        "Yes, yes, I understand," he said, and stepping on a chair put his hand behind a gilt dragon on the top of the clock and brought

out a black earthen teapot with a broken spout, and gave it to her.

        "I know," he said, with a significant nod as she hurried away. "I doctor all the clocks in Pennsylvania west of the Alleghanies, and there is not one in a hundred which has not an old teapot on the top. It is the farmer's bank."

        Later in the day my hostess beckoned me into her room, and lifting the lid of the old pot held it before me. It was full to the brim of coins, gold eagles, silver dollars, Spanish "levies" and "fips," even copper cents.

        "This is our bank," she said, with a proud smile. "We started it the day after we were married. Penny by penny. All John could scrape up. My money for butter and for the calves. Jem never could have got through college but for this old pot, and all Molly's plenishing when she was married came out of it."

        The broken teapot was significant of the business habits of the American of that day of the Middle States. He worked steadily, he had scarcely heard of speculation; if he

became a "warm" man it was by dint of saving. The old teapot held countless comforts denied, countless innocent pleasures given up. His object in work or in saving was to educate his children - to push them on. He must add acre to acre to the farm for Joe; he must help Bill into the law - "Bill had a gift of the gab;" he must give Harry his schooling for the ministry. There was a feeling in his class, almost universal then, that one son in a family should be given to the work of the Lord.

        I must interrupt myself to say just here that the character and manners of the Scotch-Irish settler in the Middle States were always very different from those of the Southerner and New Englander. It is worth while to mention the fact, because there is a vague popular belief that in the early times there were neither manners nor character in the country outside of New England and eastern Virginia.

        The cause of this popular error is easy to understand. The Puritan and Cavalier both were keen-sighted, self-conscious men. During

the early years of the Colonies they made anxious interminable notes of their own feelings and doings. These notes afterwards furnished welcome material to American historians for comment, and the accumulation of both notes and comments is now so great, that we have come to think that American history in our first century concerned only the people of those two small sections.

        We are often told that the American derives his intelligence from his New England ancestor and his courage from the Virginian. But has not the Scotch-Irishman contributed to the national character his shrewd common sense, his loyalty to his wife, his family, and his country? Narrow, homely qualities, perhaps. But they have their uses, after all.

        Even to this day the Scotch-Irishman does not trouble himself to talk about his work, or to set forth his merits or those of his forefathers. He is an able, reticent, pig-headed, devout fellow, and cares little what the world thinks of him. His natural traits have been strengthened by circumstances.

        So, also, with the New Englander. He

landed on a stony, barren tract, and a large share of his strength during two centuries has gone to force a living out of it. Hence he has come to regard economy - a necessary unpleasant quality at best - as the chief of virtues. He has cultivated habits which verge on closeness in dealing with food, and with the expression of feeling, and even - his enemies think - with feeling itself.

        Why did he not in the beginning push on away from the barren coast to the lands below - rich as the garden of the Lord? It was no doubt a very poetic, picturesque thing to land on Plymouth Rock; but surely it was a stupid thing to stay there.

        The Scotch-Irish new-comer took possession of the fat hillsides and plains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He has had to spend but little of his force in earning a living. He brought with him as a rule some little capital, and with it took up large tracts and built cabins and forts.

        His son settled himself more firmly on the land. He built - not the thin wooden

cottages of the Northern States - but solid houses of brick or gray uncut stone.

        Many of these old homesteads are still standing on the hills which slope from the heights of the Alleghanies down to the rich river-bottoms below. They are surrounded by huge barns, offices, and cider presses inclosed in great gardens and orchards. Beyond these stretch fields of waving corn and pasture lands. More than all the dwellings in the world, - from English castle to Swiss hut, - these old homesteads seem to me to express the protection and peace of home.

        Their builders managed to bring into them many comforts and even luxuries from the old country. The woodwork in the one that I knew best was mahogany, imported from England when it had to be carried in a sailing vessel to the colonies and across the Alleghany Mountains in wagons. I must confess that the cleanly zeal of its owners put a coat of white paint at once on the rich wine-colored doors and mantels, and repeated it every spring.

        The mistress had, too, her silver plate and

delicate china, which was brought to her in the same way. The great establishment was self-supporting - pork, beef, and venison were salted down for winter use; pickles, vegetables, and preserves stored; there was a great dairy; a loom room where all the linen was woven; the kitchens swarmed with servants, bound apprentices, Redemptorists, and black bondsmen, for Pennsylvania as yet had not rid herself of slavery.

        The mother of the family was expected not only to know how to weave, to cook, to spin, but to control this great household in a Christian spirit. Her daughters were sent to Philadelphia for "a year's finishing." They went and came across the mountains on horseback. They learned in this year to play a couple of tunes on the guitar, to embroider, to make lace and wax flowers, and they each brought home huge pictures done by them in filagree of "Washington's Tomb guarded by Faith, Hope, and Charity."

        They belonged to the generation before mine. Their city training did not unfit them for the work of pickling, weaving, and cooking,

or the control of their own households, when the time came for them to marry.

        The habits of these folk, as I remember them when I was a child, were generous and hospitable. There was much rivalry between women in household matters. Certain receipts in pastry and pickles and medicine were handed down in families from generation to generation. There were few formal dinners, but cover for the accidental guest was always laid on the supper table. Everyday life then was merry and cordial, but it needed a wedding or a death to bring out the deeper current of friendly, tender feeling in these people. Death was then really an agreeable incident to look forward to, when one was sure to be lauded and mourned with such fervent zeal.

        The belief in education as the chief good was as fervent and purblind as now. Every county had its small sectarian college: the boy, if he were poor, worked or taught in summer to push his way through.

        But while the ordinary life of these people was thus wholesome and kindly, their religion,

oddly enough, was a very different matter. The father of that day believed that his first duty toward his child was to save him from hell. The baby, no matter how sweet or fair, was held to be a vessel of wrath and a servant of the devil, unless he could be rescued.

        To effect this rescue the father and mother prayed and labored unceasingly. The hill of Zion, up which they led the boy, was no path of roses. Above was an angry God; below was hell. They taught him to be honest, to be chaste and truthful in word and act, under penalty of the rod. The rawhide hung over the fireplace ready for instant use in most respectable families. The father who spared it on his son felt that he was giving him over to damnation. Often the blows cut into his own heart deeper than into the child's back, but he gave them with fiercer energy, believing that it was Satan who moved him to compassion.

        As most pleasant things in life were then supposed to be temptations of the devil, they were forbidden to the young aspirant to Heaven. The theatre and the ballroom were

denounced; cards, pretty dresses, and, in some sects, music and art, were purveyors of souls for the devil. To become a Christian meant to give up forever these carnal things.

        Parents who were not members of any church also taught their children self-denial. Did a boy cut his finger, the first howl was silenced with: "Not a word! Close your mouth tight! A man never cries!" The same adjurations were given when the whip was being applied to his back.

        A high-tempered child was held by many intelligent parents to be possessed with a kind of demon, which required strong measures for its expulsion.

        "You must break his spirit and then he will obey you," was the universal rule. In my childhood I once heard a bishop, who I am sure was a kindly, godly man, say: -

        "Whipping does not always conquer a child's spirit, but I never have known a dash of ice water on his spine to fail."

        It was believed that, once conquered, the child would yield implicit obedience to his parents and in that unreasoning, unquestioning

obedience lay his one chance of safety. Had not God appointed them his guardians during the years when his brain and soul were immature?

        Then there came to parents successive pauses of doubt, of inquiry. There were heard at first timorous suggestions of "moral suasion." Was the soul really reached by a rawhide on the back? Why not appeal to the higher nature of the child? Why not give up thrashing and lure him to virtue by his reason? The child who was old enough to sin was old enough to be redeemed. Why not then bring about the awful change of soul called conversion, in infancy?

        This theory, urged in practice by pious, zealous people, caused, half a century ago, a sudden outbreak of infant piety. I do not speak irreverently. There is nothing on earth so near akin to God as one of his little ones. Our Lord, when he would set before his apostles an example for their lives, placed a child, pure, humble, and innocent, in their midst. But he did not send that child out to preach the Gospel.

        The children of fifty years ago, if they were nervous and imitative, soon caught the religious dialect of the hour. They lisped of regeneration and sanctification; every village boasted of its baby saint, usually an anæmic inheritor of consumption, whose diseased brain fed on his body. Tales of his super-human virtue and piety were carried by eager grandparents and aunts far and wide, and often crept into print. I remember especially one popular book, - a memoir of Louisa B., who was hopefully converted at three, and died, triumphant, praying for her unregenerate neighbors, at four years of age!

        The Sunday-school libraries were flooded with fictitious tales of boy and girl evangelists, who invariably were weighted in life by drunken fathers, fashionable mothers, or infidel uncles. The conversion of these sinners by pious infants was the motive of most of the Sunday-school books of that day.

        Boy preachers were another product of this phase of education. Lads of twelve or fourteen, driven by excitement into hysterical raptures, were carried from pulpit to pulpit

to kindle revivals. Such boys usually continued in the public eye, voluble and zealous, for a few years, and then lapsed into obscurity, carrying with them an overweening vanity, a bitter sense of failure, and abnormally dull brains which yielded them nothing but headaches.

        It seems incredible to the shrewd, practical, unimaginative American of to-day that his forefathers could ever have led their children to such spiritual intoxication.

        But, after all, it was the methods, not the motives, of the man of that day that were at fault.

        The Almighty, you must remember, was always present with him. He appealed to God when he lay down to sleep and when he arose, when he ate or when he fasted, when he wanted rain and when he had too much rain. If he should die suddenly it would be by the visitation of God; if he sent out a cargo he invoked God, on the bill of lading, to bring the good ship into a safe harbor. He held that this Supreme Power took a personal interest in his crops, his rheumatism,

and his choice of a wife. He tried, naturally, to make his children the servants of this Omnipotent Ruler. Whether he set his boy in a pulpit or took him to the barn and whipped him like a dog, his motive was the same - to make him a Christian, and a faithful follower of God.

        Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror. He was not forced, as we are, by daily friction with crowds, by telegraphs, railways, and morning papers, to take it into his decent jog-trot life and grow familiar with it. He was not familiar with it. A murder became a traditional horror in a neighborhood for generations. The whole nation sat up shuddering night after night to hear the end of the Parkman-Webster trial. People then looked at an atheist or a divorcee as we would at the Gila monster.

        Religious dogma was the chief food for the brain of that long-ago Quaker, or Presbyterian, or Baptist. He wrangled over predestination or immersion at the table, in the shop, as he got up, and as he went to bed. He was ready to give his life, as