Fifteen or twenty feet behind the row of Shakspeare gravestones is the great east-window of the church, now brilliant with stained glass of recent manufacture. On one side of this window, under a sculptured arch of marble, lies a full-length marble figure of John a' Combe, clad in what I take to be a robe of municipal dignity, and holding its hands devoutly clasped. It is a sturdy English figure, with coarse features, a type of ordinary man whom we smile to see immortalized in the sculpturesque material of poets and heroes; but the prayerful attitude encourages us to believe that the old usurer may not, after all, have had that grim reception in the other world which Shakspeare's squib foreboded for him. By-the-by, till I grew somewhat familiar with Warwickshire pronunciation, I never understood that the point of those ill-natured lines was a pun. "'Oho!' quoth the Devil, ''tis my John a' Combe!'"—that is, "my John has come!"

Close to the poet's bust is a nameless, oblong, cubic tomb, supposed to be that of a clerical dignitary of the fourteenth century. The church has other mural monuments and altar-tombs, one or two of the latter upholding the recumbent figures of knights in armor and their dames, very eminent and worshipful personages in their day, no doubt, but doomed to appear forever intrusive and impertinent within the precincts which Shakspeare has made his own. His renown is tyrannous, and suffers nothing else to be recognized within the scope of its material presence, unless illuminated by some side-ray from himself. The clerk informed me that interments no longer take place in any part of the church. And it is better so; for methinks a person of delicate individuality, curious about his burial-place, and desirous of six feet of earth for himself alone, could never endure to lie buried near Shakspeare, but would rise up at midnight and grope his way out of the church-door, rather than sleep in the shadow of so stupendous a memory.

I should hardly have dared to add another to the innumerable descriptions of Stratford-on-Avon, if it had not seemed to me that this would form a fitting framework to some reminiscences of a very remarkable woman. Her labor, while she lived, was of a nature and purpose outwardly irreverent to the name of Shakspeare, yet, by its actual tendency, entitling her to the distinction of being that one of all his worshippers who sought, though she knew it not, to place the richest and stateliest diadem upon his brow. We Americans, at least, in the scanty annals of our literature, cannot afford to forget her high and conscientious exercise of noble faculties, which, indeed, if you look at the matter in one way, evolved only a miserable error, but, more fairly considered, produced a result worth almost what it cost her. Her faith in her own ideas was so genuine, that, erroneous as they were, it transmuted them to gold, or, at all events, interfused a large proportion of that precious and indestructible substance among the waste material from which it can readily be sifted.

The only time I ever saw Miss Bacon was in London, where she had lodgings in Spring Street, Sussex Gardens, at the house of a grocer, a portly, middle-aged, civil, and friendly man, who, as well as his wife, appeared to feel a personal kindness towards their lodger. I was ushered up two (and I rather believe three) pair of stairs into a parlor somewhat humbly furnished, and told that Miss Bacon would come soon. There were a number of books on the table, and, looking into them, I found that every one had some reference, more or less immediate, to her Shakspearian theory,—a volume of Raleigh's "History of the World," a volume of Montaigne, a volume of Lord Bacon's letters, a volume of Shakspeare's plays; and on another table lay a large roll of manuscript, which I presume to have been a portion of her work. To be sure, there was a pocket-Bible among the books, but everything else referred to the one despotic idea that had got possession of her mind; and as it had engrossed her whole soul as well as her intellect, I have no doubt that she had established subtile connections between it and the Bible likewise. As is apt to be the case with solitary students, Miss Bacon probably read late and rose late; for I took up Montaigne (it was Hazlitt's translation) and had been reading his journey to Italy a good while before she appeared.

I had expected (the more shame for me, having no other ground of such expectation than that she was a literary woman) to see a very homely, uncouth, elderly personage, and was quite agreeably disappointed by her aspect. She was rather uncommonly tall, and had a striking and expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes, which shone with an inward light as soon as she began to speak, and by-and-by a color came into her cheeks and made her look almost young. Not that she really was so; she must have been beyond middle-age: and there was no unkindness in coming to that conclusion, because, making allowance for years and ill-health, I could suppose her to have been handsome and exceedingly attractive once. Though wholly estranged from society, there was little or no restraint or embarrassment in her manner: lonely people are generally glad to give utterance to their pent-up ideas, and often bubble over with them as freely as children with their new-found syllables. I cannot tell how it came about, but we immediately found ourselves taking a friendly and familiar tone together, and began to talk as if we had known one another a very long while. A little preliminary correspondence had indeed smoothed the way, and we had a definite topic in the contemplated publication of her book.

She was very communicative about her theory, and would have been much more so, had I desired it; but, being conscious within myself of a sturdy unbelief, I deemed it fair and honest rather to repress than draw her out upon the subject. Unquestionably, she was a monomaniac; these overmastering ideas about the authorship of Shakspeare's plays, and the deep political philosophy concealed beneath the surface of them, had completely thrown her off her balance; but at the same time they had wonderfully developed her intellect, and made her what she could not otherwise have become. It was a very singular phenomenon: a system of philosophy growing up in this woman's mind without her volition,—contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition,—and substituting itself in the place of everything that originally grew there. To have based such a system on fancy, and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually find it there. Shakspeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many faces of truth, each with scope enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years hence, a world of new readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in these volumes old already. I had half a mind to suggest to Miss Bacon this explanation of her theory, but forbore, because (as I could readily perceive) she had as princely a spirit as Queen Elizabeth herself, and would at once have motioned me from the room.

I had heard, long ago, that she believed that the material evidences of her dogma as to the authorship, together with the key of the new philosophy, would be found buried in Shakspeare's grave. Recently, as I understood her, this notion had been somewhat modified, and was now accurately defined and fully developed in her mind, with a result of perfect certainty. In Lord Bacon's letters, on which she laid her finger as she spoke, she had discovered the key and clue to the whole mystery. There were definite and minute instructions how to find a will and other documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which were concealed (when and by whom she did not inform me) in a hollow space in the under surface of Shakspeare's gravestone. Thus the terrible prohibition to remove the stone was accounted for. The directions, she intimated, went completely and precisely to the point, obviating all difficulties in the way of coming at the treasure, and even, if I remember right, were so contrived as to ward off any troublesome consequences likely to ensue from the interference of the parish-officers. All that Miss Bacon now remained in England for—indeed, the object for which she had come hither, and which had kept her here for three years past—was to obtain possession of these material and unquestionable proofs of the authenticity of her theory.

She communicated all this strange matter in a low, quiet tone; while, on my part, I listened as quietly, and without any expression of dissent. Controversy against a faith so settled would have shut her up at once, and that, too, without in the least weakening her belief in the existence of those treasures of the tomb; and had it been possible to convince her of their intangible nature, I apprehend that there would have been nothing left for the poor enthusiast save to collapse and die. She frankly confessed that she could no longer bear the society of those who did not at least lend a certain sympathy to her views, if not fully share in them; and meeting little sympathy or none, she had now entirely secluded herself from the world. In all these years, she had seen Mrs. F. a few times, but had long ago given her up,—Carlyle once or twice, but not of late, although he had received her kindly; Mr. Buchanan, while minister in England, had once called on her, and General Campbell, our consul in London, had met her two or three times on business. With these exceptions, which she marked so scrupulously that it was perceptible what epochs they were in the monotonous passage of her days, she had lived in the profoundest solitude. She never walked out; she suffered much from ill-health; and yet, she assured me, she was perfectly happy.

I could well conceive it; for Miss Bacon imagined herself to have received (what is certainly the greatest boon ever assigned to mortals) a high mission in the world, with adequate powers for its accomplishment; and lest even these should prove insufficient, she had faith that special interpositions of Providence were forwarding her human efforts. This idea was continually coming to the surface, during our interview. She believed, for example, that she had been providentially led to her lodging-house and put in relations with the good-natured grocer and his family; and, to say the truth, considering what a savage and stealthy tribe the London lodging-house keepers actually are, the honest kindness of this man and his household appeared to have been little less than miraculous. Evidently, too, she thought that Providence had brought me forward——a man somewhat connected with literature—at the critical juncture when she needed a negotiator with the booksellers; and, on my part, though little accustomed to regard myself as a divine minister, and though I might even have preferred that Providence should select some other instrument, I had no scruple in undertaking to do what I could for her. Her book, as I could see by turning it over, was a very remarkable one, and worthy of being offered to the public, which, if wise enough to appreciate it, would be thankful for what was good in it and merciful to its faults. It was founded on a prodigious error, but was built up from that foundation with a good many prodigious truths. And, at all events, whether I could aid her literary views or no, it would have been both rash and impertinent in me to attempt drawing poor Miss Bacon out of her delusions, which were the condition on which she lived in comfort and joy, and in the exercise of great intellectual power. So I left her to dream as she pleased about the treasures of Shakspeare's tombstone, and to form whatever designs might seem good to herself for obtaining possession of them. I was sensible of a lady-like feeling of propriety in Miss Bacon, and a New-England orderliness in her character, and, in spite of her bewilderment, a sturdy common-sense, which I trusted would begin to operate at the right time, and keep her from any actual extravagance. And as regarded this matter of the tombstone, so it proved.

The interview lasted above an hour, during which she flowed out freely, as to the sole auditor, capable of any degree of intelligent sympathy, whom she had met with in a very long while. Her conversation was remarkably suggestive, alluring forth one's own ideas and fantasies from the shy places where they usually haunt. She was indeed an admirable talker, considering how long she had held her tongue for lack of a listener,—pleasant, sunny and shadowy, often piquant, and giving glimpses of all a woman's various and readily changeable moods and humors; and beneath them all there ran a deep and powerful under-current of earnestness, which did not fail to produce in the listener's mind something like a temporary faith in what she herself believed so fervently. But the streets of London are not favorable to enthusiasms of this kind, nor, in fact, are they likely to flourish anywhere in the English atmosphere; so that, long before reaching Paternoster Row, I felt that it would be a difficult and doubtful matter to advocate the publication of Miss Bacon's book. Nevertheless, it did finally get published.

Months before that happened, however, Miss Bacon had taken up her residence at Stratford-on-Avon, drawn thither by the magnetism of those rich secrets which she supposed to have been hidden by Raleigh, or Bacon, or I know not whom, in Shakspeare's grave, and protected there by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship of a fiend. She took a humble lodging and began to haunt the church like a ghost. But she did not condescend to any stratagem or underhand attempt to violate the grave, which, had she been capable of admitting such an idea, might possibly have been accomplished by the aid of a resurrection-man. As her first step, she made acquaintance with the clerk, and began to sound him as to the feasibility of her enterprise and his own willingness to engage in it. The clerk apparently listened with not unfavorable ears; but, as his situation (which the fees of pilgrims, more numerous than at any Catholic shrine, render lucrative) would have been forfeited by any malfeasance in office, he stipulated for liberty to consult the vicar. Miss Bacon requested to tell her own story to the reverend gentleman, and seems to have been received by him with the utmost kindness, and even to have succeeded in making a certain impression on his mind as to the desirability of the search. As their interview had been under the seal of secrecy, he asked permission to consult a friend, who, as Miss Bacon either found out or surmised, was a practitioner of the law. What the legal friend advised she did not learn; but the negotiation continued, and certainly was never broken off by an absolute refusal on the vicar's part. He, perhaps, was kindly temporizing with our poor countrywoman, whom an Englishman of ordinary mould would have sent to a lunatic-asylum at once. I cannot help fancying, however, that her familiarity with the events of Shakspeare's life, and of his death and burial, (of which she would speak as if she had been present at the edge of the grave,) and all the history, literature, and personalities of the Elizabethan age, together with the prevailing power of her own belief, and the eloquence with which she knew how to enforce it, had really gone some little way towards making a convert of the good clergyman. If so, I honor him above all the hierarchy of England.

The affair certainly looked very hopeful. However erroneously, Miss Bacon had understood from the vicar that no obstacles would be interposed to the investigation, and that he himself would sanction it with his presence. It was to take place after nightfall; and all preliminary arrangements being made, the vicar and clerk professed to wait only her word in order to set about lifting the awful stone from the sepulchre. So, at least, Miss Bacon believed; and as her bewilderment was entirely in her own thoughts, and never disturbed her perception or accurate remembrance of external things, I see no reason to doubt it, except it be the tinge of absurdity in the fact. But, in this apparently prosperous state of things, her own convictions began to falter. A doubt stole into her mind whether she might not have mistaken the depository and mode of concealment of those historic treasures; and after once admitting the doubt, she was afraid to hazard the shock of uplifting the stone and finding nothing. She examined the surface of the gravestone, and endeavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it were of such thickness as to be capable of containing the archives of the Elizabethan club. She went over anew the proofs, the clues, the enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon's letters and elsewhere, and now was frightened to perceive that they did not point so definitely to Shakspeare's tomb as she had heretofore supposed. There was an unmistakably distinct reference to a tomb, but it might be Bacon's, or Raleigh's, or Spenser's; and instead of the "Old Player," as she profanely called him, it might be either of those three illustrious dead, poet, warrior, or statesman, whose ashes, in Westminster Abbey, or the Tower burial-ground, or wherever they sleep, it was her mission to disturb.

But she continued to hover around the church, and seems to have had full freedom of entrance in the daytime, and special license, on one occasion at least, at a late hour of the night. She went thither with a dark-lantern, which could but twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity that filled the great dusky edifice. Groping her way up the aisle and towards the chancel, she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement above Shakspeare's grave. If the divine poet really wrote the inscription there, and cared as much about the quiet of his bones as its deprecatory earnestness would imply, it was time for those crumbling relics to bestir themselves under her sacrilegious feet. But they were safe. She made no attempt to disturb them; though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices between Shakspeare's and the two adjacent stones, and in some way satisfied herself that her single strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She threw the feeble ray of her lantern up towards the bust, but could not make it visible beneath the darkness of the vaulted roof. Had she been subject to superstitious terrors, it is impossible to conceive of a situation that could better entitle her to feel them, for, if Shakspeare's ghost would rise at any provocation, it must have shown itself then; but it is my sincere belief, that, if his figure had appeared within the scope of her dark-lantern, in his slashed doublet and gown, and with his eyes bent on her beneath the high, bald forehead, just as we see him in the bust, she would have met him fearlessly, and controverted his claims to the authorship of the plays, to his very face. She had taught herself to contemn "Lord Leicester's groom" (it was one of her disdainful epithets for the world's incomparable poet) so thoroughly, that even his disembodied spirit would hardly have found civil treatment at Miss Bacon's hands.

Her vigil, though it appears to have had no definite object, continued far into the night. Several times she heard a low movement in the aisles: a stealthy, dubious foot-fall prowling about in the darkness, now here, now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at the intruder. By-and-by the clerk made his appearance, and confessed that he had been watching her ever since she entered the church.

About this time it was that a strange sort of weariness seems to have fallen upon her: her toil was all but done, her great purpose, as she believed, on the very point of accomplishment, when she began to regret that so stupendous a mission had been imposed on the fragility of a woman. Her faith in the new philosophy was as mighty as ever, and so was her confidence in her own adequate development of it, now about to be given to the world; yet she wished, or fancied so, that it might never have been her duty to achieve this unparalleled task, and to stagger feebly forward under her immense burden of responsibility and renown. So far as her personal concern in the matter went, she would gladly have forfeited the reward of her patient study and labor for so many years, her exile from her country and estrangement from her family and friends, her sacrifice of health and all other interests to this one pursuit, if she could only find herself free to dwell in Stratford and be forgotten. She liked the old slumberous town, and awarded the only praise that ever I knew her to bestow on Shakspeare, the individual man, by acknowledging that his taste in a residence was good, and that he knew how to choose a suitable retirement for a person of shy, but genial temperament. And at this point, I cease to possess the means of tracing her vicissitudes of feeling any farther. In consequence of some advice which I fancied it my duty to tender, as being the only confidant whom she now had in the world, I fell under Miss Bacon's most severe and passionate displeasure, and was cast off by her in the twinkling of an eye. It was a misfortune to which her friends were always particularly liable; but I think that none of them ever loved, or even respected, her most ingenuous and noble, but likewise most sensitive and tumultuous character, the less for it.

At that time her book was passing through the press. Without prejudice to her literary ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, among many other reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out. Every leaf and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep a conviction of truth as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration. A practised book-maker, with entire control of her materials, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation,—criticisms which quite take the color and pungency out of other people's critical remarks on Shakspeare,—philosophic truths which she imagined herself to have found at the roots of his conceptions, and which certainly come from no inconsiderable depth somewhere. There was a great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would have shovelled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud; for they were the hack critics of the minor periodical press in London, than whom, I suppose, though excellent fellows in their way, there are no gentlemen in the world less sensible of any sanctity in a book, or less likely to recognize an author's heart in it, or more utterly careless about bruising, if they do recognize it. It is their trade. They could not do otherwise. I never thought of blaming them. From the scholars and critics of her own country, indeed, Miss Bacon might have looked for a worthier appreciation, because many of the best of them have higher cultivation and finer and deeper literary sensibilities than all but the very profoundest and brightest of Englishmen. But they are not a courageous body of men; they dare not think a truth that has an odor of absurdity, lest they should feel themselves bound to speak it out. If any American ever wrote a word in her behalf, Miss Bacon never knew it, nor did I. Our journalists at once republished some of the most brutal vituperations of the English press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was deserved. And they never have known it, to this day, nor ever will.

The next intelligence that I had of Miss Bacon was by a letter from the mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. He was a medical man, and wrote both in his official and professional character, telling me that an American lady, who had recently published what the mayor called a "Shakspeare book," was afflicted with insanity. In a lucid interval she had referred to me, as a person who had some knowledge of her family and affairs. What she may have suffered before her intellect gave way, we had better not try to imagine. No author had ever hoped so confidently as she; none ever failed more utterly. A superstitious fancy might suggest that the anathema on Shakspeare's tombstone had fallen heavily on her head in requital of even the unaccomplished purpose of disturbing the dust beneath, and that the "Old Player" had kept so quietly in his grave, on the night of her vigil, because he foresaw how soon and terribly he would be avenged. But if that benign spirit takes any care or cognizance of such things now, he has surely requited the injustice that she sought to do him—the high justice that she really did—by a tenderness of love and pity of which only he could be capable. What matters it, though she called him by some other name? He had wrought a greater miracle on her than on all the world besides. This bewildered enthusiast had recognized a depth in the man whom she decried, which scholars, critics, and learned societies, devoted to the elucidation of his unrivalled scenes, had never imagined to exist there. She had paid him the loftiest honor that all these ages of renown have been able to accumulate upon his memory. And when, not many months after the outward failure of her life-long object, she passed into the better world, I know not why we should hesitate to believe that the immortal poet may have met her on the threshold and led her in, reassuring her with friendly and comfortable words, and thanking her (yet with a smile of gentle humor in his eyes at the thought of certain mistaken speculations) for having interpreted him to mankind so well.

I believe that it has been the fate of this remarkable book never to have had more than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only in insulated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But, since my return to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me,—whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her, she declared unworthy to meddle with her work,—it belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her so much justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due position before the public and posterity.

This has been too sad a story. To lighten the recollection of it, I will think of my stroll homeward past Charlecote Park, where I beheld the most stately elms, singly, in clumps, and in groves, scattered all about in the sunniest, shadiest, sleepiest fashion; so that I could not but believe in a lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoyment which these trees must have in their existence. Diffused over slow-paced centuries, it need not be keen nor bubble into thrills and ecstasies, like the momentary delights of short-lived human beings. They were civilized trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages past. There is an indescribable difference—as I believe I have heretofore endeavored to express—between the tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary, the richer and more luxuriant) Nature of England, and the rude, shaggy, barbarous Nature which offers us its racier companionship in America. No less a change has been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit what the English call their forests. By-and-by, among those refined and venerable trees, I saw a large herd of deer, mostly reclining, but some standing in picturesque groups, while the stags threw their large antlers aloft, as if they had been taught to make themselves tributary to the scenic effect. Some were running fleetly about, vanishing from light into shadow and glancing forth again, with here and there a little fawn careering at its mother's heels. These deer are almost in the same relation to the wild, natural state of their kind that the trees of an English park hold to the rugged growth of an American forest. They have held a certain intercourse with man for immemorial years; and, most probably, the stag that Shakspeare killed was one of the progenitors of this very herd, and may himself have been a partly civilized and humanized deer, though in a less degree than these remote posterity. They are a little wilder than sheep, but they do not snuff the air at the approach of human beings, nor evince much alarm at their pretty close proximity; although, if you continue to advance, they toss their heads and take to their heels in a kind of mimic terror, or something akin to feminine skittishness, with a dim remembrance or tradition, as it were, of their having come of a wild stock. They have so long been fed and protected by man, that they must have lost many of their native instincts, and, I suppose, could not live comfortably through even an English winter without human help. One is sensible of a gentle scorn at them for such dependency, but feels none the less kindly disposed towards the half-domesticated race; and it may have been his observation of these tamer characteristics in the Charlecote herd that suggested to Shakspeare the tender and pitiful description of a wounded stag, in "As You Like It."

At a distance of some hundreds of yards from Charlecote Hall, and almost hidden by the trees between it and the road-side, is an old brick archway and porter's lodge. In connection with this entrance there appears to have been a wall and an ancient moat, the latter of which is still visible, a shallow, grassy scoop along the base of an embankment of the lawn. About fifty yards within the gate-way stands the house, forming three sides of a square, with three gables in a row on the front and on each of the two wings; and there are several towers and turrets at the angles, together with projecting windows, antique balconies, and other quaint ornaments suitable to the half-Gothic taste in which the edifice was built. Over the gate-way is the Lucy coat-of-arms, emblazoned in its proper colors. The mansion dates from the early days of Elizabeth, and probably looked very much the same as now when Shakspeare was brought before Sir Thomas Lucy for outrages among his deer. The impression is not that of gray antiquity, but of stable and time-honored gentility, still as vital as ever.

It is a most delightful place. All about the house and domain there is a perfection of comfort and domestic taste, an amplitude of convenience, which could have been brought about only by the slow ingenuity and labor of many successive generations, intent upon adding all possible improvement to the home where years gone by and years to come give a sort of permanence to the intangible present. An American is sometimes tempted to fancy that only by this long process can real homes be produced. One man's lifetime is not enough for the accomplishment of such a work of Art and Nature, almost the greatest merely temporary one that is confided to him; too little, at any rate,—yet perhaps too long, when he is discouraged by the idea that he must make his house warm and delightful for a miscellaneous race of successors, of whom the one thing certain is, that his own grandchildren will not be among them. Such repinings as are here suggested, however, come only from the fact, that, bred in English habits of thought, as most of us are, we have not yet modified our instincts to the necessities of our new forms of life. A lodging in a wigwam or under a tent has really as many advantages, when we come to know them, as a home beneath the roof-tree of Charlecote Hall. But, alas! our philosophers have not yet taught us to see what is best, nor have our poets sung us what is beautifullest, in the kind of life that we must lead; and therefore we still read the old English wisdom, and harp upon the ancient strings. And thence it happens, that, when we look at a time-honored hall, it seems more possible for men who inherit such a home, than for ourselves, to lead noble and graceful lives, quietly doing good and lovely things as their daily work, and achieving deeds of simple greatness when circumstances require them. I sometimes apprehend that our institutions may perish before we shall have discovered the most precious of the possibilities which they involve.

* * * * *

MR. AXTELL.

PART VI.

"The leaves of the second autumn were half-shrivelled in drawing near to the winter of their age.

"I had been to see your mother. She was ill. Mary's death was slowly, surely bringing her own near. We had had a long talk that afternoon. Her visions of life were rare and beautiful. She was like Mrs. Wilton, the embodiment of all that is purely woman. She had wrought a solemn spell over me,—made Eternity seem near. I had been changed since that prayer on the sea-shore, fourteen months before, but now I felt a longing to go away. Earth seemed so drear,—mother was sick,—Abraham unhappy,—my father deep in the perplexing cares of his profession, mostly from home,—Mrs. Percival was dying,—the year was passing away,—and I, too, would be going; and as I went out of the house to go home, I remembered the day wherein I had waited in the viny arbor for Mary to awaken from sleep, how I had gone down to the sea to waken myself to a light that burned before it blessed. Since then I had avoided the place, barred with so many prison-wires. Now I felt a longing to go into it. The leaves were frost-bitten. I sympathized with them. Autumn winds went sighing over their misfortunes; spirit-winds blew past me, on their way to and from the land that is and the land that is not to us. The arbor was dear with a newborn love. I went out to greet it, as one might greet a ship sailing the same great ocean, though bound to a different port. There was a something in that old vine-clad arbor that was in me. I felt its shadows coming out to meet me. They chilled a little, but I went in. I looked at the little white office, across the yard, in the corner. I thought of the face that came out that day to see me,—the face that drank up my heart in one long draught, begun across Alice dead, finished when I read that letter. The cup of my heart was empty,—so empty now! I looked down into it; it was fringed with stalactites, crystallized from the poison of the glass. Oh! what did I see there? A dead, dead crater, aching for the very fire that made it what it was, crying out of its fierce void for fiery fusion. Why did our God make us so,—us, who love, knowing we should not? I knew from the beginning that Bernard McKey ought not to be cared for by me; but could I help it? Now the veil of death, I believed, hung between, and the cup of my heart might be embalmed: the last change, I thought, had come to it, and left it as I that day found.

"Chloe came around the corner, throwing her apron over her head. She looked up and down the way, as if in search of some one, went down the walk to the gate, looked as I had once seen her do at our house, taking it window by window, and finding no one, (the day seemed deserted,) she was walking back. I called to her from the arbor.

"'I was just looking for you, Miss Lettie. I've got a letter here. Mistress is too sick to read it for me, and Master's away. Would you?'

"It was addressed to Chloe. I broke the seal and opened it. It seemed a long letter. I gave a sigh at the task before me, and looked over to the end. I saw the signature: it was Bernard H. McKey. After that I saw Chloe's troubled black face written on my vision, and felt dripping drops about my head.

"'There, Miss Lettie, it's all over, now. I's so glad you're come to! I won't bother you with reading anymore letters. It would have to be much good in it that 'ud pay me for seeing you so.'

"I was sitting in the arbor a little later, alone, reading the letter. Through the rending of the cup dew stole in; the mist was stifling. Still't was better than the death that reigned before. The contents of my life were not poured out beyond the earth. The thought gave me comfort. It is so sad to feel the great gate shut down across the flame of your heart! to have the stilled waters set back, never more to join those that have escaped, gone on, to turn the wheel of Eternity! In that hour it was joy enough for me to know that he lived, even if the life was for another. I, too, had my bright portion in it.

"Chloe came back. She had forgotten the letter, when she went in to Mrs. Percival. She said 'faintin' must be good for me; she hadn't seen me look so fine in a many days.'

"I told Chloe that the letter had been written to me, that it was not meant for her. At first she did not comprehend; after that I felt sure that a perception of the truth dawned in her mind, she watched me so closely.

"I carried my letter home. That night I compared the two,—the one Abraham had found (where I knew not, I never questioned him) with this. They bore no resemblance: but I remembered that two years make changes in all things; they might have effected this. The signatures were unlike; the latter contained the initial H. What if they were not written by the same person? The question was too mighty for me. I was compelled to await the answer.

"Bernard would be in Redleaf in November. He named the day,—appointed the place of meeting. It was the old tower in the church-yard. I had a fancy, as you have, for the dreary dimness there. As children, we made it our temple for all the worships childhood knows. The door had long been gone; it was open to every one who chose to enter in. Before the coming of the day, I was in continual fear lest the new joy that had come into my life should trace itself visibly on my outward seeming. I took it in as the hungry do food, and tried to hide the sustenance it gave. I saw that my mother's eyes were often upon me,—that she was trying to follow my joy to its source. One day,—it was the very one before his coming,—she came suddenly upon me when I was wrapt in my mantle of exquisite consciousness. I had gone down to the river: you know it runs at the foot of the place. Tired of stirring up dry, dead leaves, I leaned against a tree,—one arm was around it,—and with my eyes traversing the blue of the sky, on and on, in quick, constant, flashing journeys, like fixed heat-lightning, I suddenly became conscious of a blue upon the earth, orbed in my mother's cool eyes. I don't know how I came out of the sky. She said only, 'Your thoughts harmonize with the season'; but I knew she meant much more. It was long since she had wandered so far from the house; but of late she had had my joy to trace,—my mother, to whom I could not intrust it, in all of whose nature it had no place, whose spirit mine was not formed to call out echoes from. The result of her walk to the river was a subsequent day of prostration and a nervous headache. All the morning of that November day I sat beside her in the darkened room. I bathed her head, until she said there was too much life in my hands, and sent for Abraham. Thus my time of release came."

A quick, involuntary smile crossed Miss Axtell's face at the memory of her first sight of Mr. McKey. I watched her now. She changed the style of her narration, taking it on quickly, in nervous periods, with electric pauses, which she did not fill as formerly.

"We met in the tower, happily without discovery. I told him of my mother's knowledge, showed him the notice of his (as I had thought) death.

"'It is my cousin,' he said carelessly,—adding, with a sigh, 'poor fellow! he was to have married soon.'

"I gave him the letter, the key of all my agony.

"'I remember when he wrote this,' he went on, as carelessly as if his words had all been known to me. 'You did not see him, perhaps; he was with me the first time I came to Redleaf,—was here the night he describes.'

"It was so strange that he did not ask where I obtained the letter! but he did not. He gave me an epitome of his cousin's life and death. The two were named after an uncle; each had received the baptismal sign ere it was known that the other received the name; in after-time the Herbert was added to one.

"We sat in the window of the tower all through the short November afternoon. We saw Chloe come into the church-yard; she came to take up some roses that had blossomed in summer beside Mary's grave. We heard her knife moving about in the pebbly soil, and watched her going home. She was the only comer. In November, people never visit such places, save from necessity.

"Mr. McKey and I had discovered the passage leading from church to tower. Mary was with us then. There was a romance in keeping the secret, poetry in the knowledge that we three were sole proprietors; one was gone,—now it became only ours.

"How came you to know of it?" she suddenly asked.

Questioned thus, I twined my story in with hers, she listening in a rapt way, peculiarly her own. I told her of my prisonment on the day of her visit. I confessed entirely, up to the point she had narrated. When I ended, she said,—

"You have kept this secret twenty-five days; mine has been mine eighteen years. Mr. McKey has wandered in the time over the world of civilization, coming here at every return, making only day-visits, wandering up and down familiar places, meeting people whom he knew, but who never saw him through his disguises. He met my mother twice; even her quick eyes had no ray of suspicion in them.

"Four years ago we went to Europe: father's health demanded it. There, by accident, I met Mr. McKey. Fourteen years had so changed him from the medical student in Doctor Percival's office, that, although without disguise, neither mother nor Abraham recognized him. It was in England that father died,—there that we met Mr. McKey. It was he who, coming as a stranger, proved our best friend, whom mother and Abraham called Mr. Herbert. It was his hand lifted up for the last time my father's head just before he died. It was he who went to and fro making all needful arrangements for father's burial. At last we prepared to leave. He came to the steamer to say parting words. Mother and Abraham, with tearful eyes, thanking him for his past kindness, begged, should he ever come to America, a visit from him. When their farewells were ended, he looked around for me. I was standing apart from them; the place where my feet then were is to-day fathoms deep under iceberg-soil: it was upon the Pacific's deck. I wonder if just there where I then stood it is as cold as elsewhere,—if Ocean's self hath power to congeal the vitality of spirit."

Miss Axtell paused one moment, as if answering the question to herself. In that interval I remembered the face that only three weeks agone I had looked upon, over which Dead-Sea waves had beat in vain. After the pause, she went on:—

"I gave Mr. McKey the farewell, silent of all words. A few moments later, and we were on our homeward way, leaving a friend and a grave in England.

"After our coming home, an intense longing came to speak of Herbert,—to tell my proud mother to whom she was indebted for so many acts of kindly friendship; but often as I said, 'I will,' I yet did not. To-day I would wait for the morrow; on the morrow indecision came; and at last, when the intent was stronger than ever, when I had laid me down to sleep after an interview with Mr. McKey, solemnly promising Heaven that with the morning light I would confess all and leave the consequences with my God, in that night-time He sent forth His angel to gather in her spirit."

Miss Axtell covered her face with the hands so long rigidly clasped about her precious package, and the very air that was in the room caught the thrill and quiver of her heart, strong to suffer, strong to love. When she again spoke, it was in low, murmurous tones.

"I wanted my mother to know what God had permitted me to be to this man, his great anchor of clinging in all storms,—how, in loving him, I had been permitted to save him. Do you think it is good," she asked,—"my story? It isn't a story of what the world calls 'happy love'; I don't think I should find it happy even now. I have come to a solemn bridge in the journey of Time. I know it must be crossed,—only how? It is high; my head is dizzied by the very thought. It has none of the ordinary protective railings; I must walk out alone, and—I cannot see the other end; it is too far, too misty. My mother's face fills up all the way; it comes out to meet me, and I do not rightly hear what she says, for my ears are filled with the roar of the life-current that frets over rocks below. I try to stay it while I listen; it only floods the way. There is time given me; there is no immediate cause for action: for this I am thankful. Mr. McKey left me at the tower on the day you heard us there. He is a surgeon in the naval service. His ship sailed last week on a three years' voyage. I shall have time to think, to decide what I ought to do; perhaps the roar will cease, and I shall hear what my mother tries to say.

"I have one great thought of torment. Abraham, what if he should die, too,—die without knowing? that I could not bear"; and the face, still looking toward Zoar, lifted up itself from the little City of Refuge, and looked into the face of Anna Percival. "Poor Abraham!" she said, "he has suffered, perhaps even more than I. He will hear you. Will you tell him this for me? Tell him all; and when you tell how Mary came to die, give him this,"—and she handed to me the very package I had twice journeyed with,—"it will prove to him the truth of what I say."

I hesitated to take that which she proffered.

"You must not disappoint me," she said. "I have spent happy hours since you went away, in the belief that Providence sent you here to me in the greatness of my need. I cannot tell Abraham; I could not bear the joy that will, that must come, when he lays down the burden of his crime,—for, oh! it will be at the feet of Bernard McKey. You will not refuse me this?" she pleaded.

Anna Percival, in the silence of that upper room where so much of life had come to her, sat at Miss Axtell's side, and thought of the dream that came one Sunday morning to her, sleeping, and out of the memory of it came tolling down to her heart the words then spoken, and, taught by them, she answered Miss Axtell's pleading by an "I will."

"Good little comfort-giver!" Miss Lettie said; and she left the package, containing the precious jewel, in my hands.

Bewildered by the story, filled with sorrow for sufferers passed away from the great, suffering earth, aching for those that still were in the void of misery, I arose to go. "It was near to mid-day; Aaron and Sophie would wait dinner for me," I said to Miss Lottie's pleading for another hour. Ere I went, the conventionalities that signalled our meeting were repeated, and, wrapped in the web and woof Miss Axtell had woven, I went down the staircase and through the wide hall and out of the solemn old house, wondering if ever again Anna Percival would cross its entrance-porch. Kino heard the noise of the closing of the door, and came around the corner to see who it might be. I stayed a moment to say a few comforting words to the dog. Kino saw me safely outside of the gate by way of gratitude. I walked on toward the parsonage.

Redleaf seemed very silent, almost deserted. I met none of the villagers in my homeward walk. "It will be ten minutes yet ere Sophie and Aaron will, waiting, say, 'I wonder why Anna does not come,'" I thought, as I drew near, and my fingers held the tower-key. I had not been there since the Sunday morning memorable to me through all coming time. I lifted the fastening to the church-yard, and went in. My sister Mary lay in this church-yard now. I had until this day known only sister Sophie, and in my heart I thanked Miss Axtell for her story. I went in to look at Mary's grave. A sweet perfume filled the inclosure; it came to me through the branching evergreens; it was from Mary's grave, covered with the pale pink flowers of the trailing-arbutus. I knew that Abraham Axtell had brought them hither. I gathered one, the least of the precious fragments. I knew that Mary, out of heaven seeing me, would call it no sacrilege, and with it went to my tower.

Spring fingers had gathered up the leaves of snow, winter's growth, from in among the crevices of stone. I noticed this as I went in. The great stone was over the passage-opening, just where Mr. Axtell had dropped it, lest Aaron should see. Something said to me that my love for the tower was gone, that never more would I care to come to it; and I think the voice was speaking truly, everything did seem so changed. The time moss was only common moss to me, the old rocks might be a part of any mountain now. I had caught up all the romance, all the poetry, which is mystery, of the tower, and henceforth I might leave it to stand guard over the shore of the Sea of Death, white with marble foam. I went up to the very window whence I had taken the brown plaid bit of woman's wear. I looked out from where I had seen the dying day go down. I heard the sound, from the open door of the parsonage, of Sophie's voice, humming of contentment; I saw the little lady come and look down the village—street for me; I saw her part those bands of softly purplish hair, with fingers idly waiting the while she stood looking for me. I looked up at the window, down at the floor, down through the winding way of stair, where once I had trembling gone, and, with a farewell softly spoken, I left my churchyard tower with open door and key in the lock. Henceforth it was not mine. I left it with the hope that some other loving soul would take up my devotion, and wait and watch as I had done.

Aaron chanced at dinner-time to let fall his eyes on the door, swinging in the wind. Turning, he looked at me. I, divining the questioning intent of his eyes, answered,—

"It is I, Aaron. I've left the key in the door. I resign ownership of the tower."

The grave minister looked pleased. Sophie said,—

"Oh, I am so glad, you are growing rational, Anna!"—and Anna Percival did not tell these two that she had emptied the tower of all its mystery, and thrown the cup afloat on the future.

Aaron and Sophie were doomed to wonder why I came to Redleaf. Sophie begged my longer stay; Aaron thought, with his direct, practical way of looking at all things, save Sophie, that I "had better not have come at all, if only to stay during the day-journey of the sun."

The stars were there to see, when I bade good—bye to Chloe at the parsonage, and went forth burdened with many messages for Jeffy. Aaron and Sophie went with me to the place of landing. It was past Miss Axtell's house. Only one light was visible; that shone from Miss Lettie's room. Aaron said,—

"I saw Mr. Axtell this morning. He was going across the country, he said."

No one asked him "Where?" and he said no more.

We were late at the steamboat. I had just time to bid a hasty farewell, and hear a plank-man say, "Better hurry, Miss, if you're going on," and in another minute I was at sea.

I had so much to think of, I knew it would be impossible for sleep to come to me; and so I went on deck to watch the twinkling lights of Redleaf and the stars up above, whilst my busy brain should plan a way to keep my promise to Miss Axtell. I could not break up her fancied security; I could not deprive her of the "time to think" before crossing the great bridge, by telling her of the stranger sick in Doctor Percival's house, and so I let her dream on. It might be many weeks, nay, months, ere Mr. McKey would recover, hence there was no need that she should know; by that time she would be quite strong again.

Once on deck, and well wrapped from the March sea-breeze, blowing its latest breath over the sea, I took a seat near a large party who seemed lovers of the ocean, they sat so quietly and so long.

My face was turned away from all on deck. I heard footsteps going, coming, to and fro, until these steps came into my reverie. I wished to turn and see the owner, but, fearing that the charm would vanish, I kept my eyes steadily seaward. I scarcely know the time, it may have been an hour, that thus I had sat, when once again the footsteps drew near. The owner paused an instant in passing me. I fancied some zephyr of emotion made his footsteps falter a little. Nothing more came. He walked, as before, and once, when I was certain that all the deck lay between my eyes and him who so often had drawn near, I turned to look. I saw only a gentleman far down the boat, wrapped in an ordinary travelling-shawl. Neither form nor walk was, I thought, familiar, and I lost my interest.

I began to dream of other things,—of the going home, and should I find Mr. McKey improved during my absence? The party near me began to talk; it was pleasant to hear soft home words spoken by them,—it gave me, alone as I was, a sense of protection.

When the owner of the footsteps again came near, I scarcely noticed it. I had reason to do so a moment later. Instead of going straight on, as before, the gentleman stopped an instant,—then, with a strong gesture of excitement, stepped quite near to me, and saying hurriedly, as one does in sudden emergencies, "I beg your pardon, Madam," he bent to look at the railing of the guard, just beside me. It so happened that a boat-light illumined a little space just there, and that within it lay a hand whose glove I had a few moments before removed, to put back some stray hairs the sea-breeze had brought from their proper place. No sooner did I divine his intent than I took my hand from off the railing. The gentleman looked up suddenly; he was quite near then, and no more light than that the stars gave was needful for me. I saw Mr. Axtell, and Mr. Axtell must have seen Miss Percival, for he said,—

"This is a great surprise. I did not hear of your being in Redleaf, Miss Anna."

"Why should you, when I have only been there one day?"

"Did you see my sister?" he asked.

"I was with her during the morning," I said.

"And she was as usual?"

"Better, I thought."

"I trust so, for I have not been home since morning. I received a letter, as I came through the village, from your father, desiring to see me, and I had time only to send a message to Lettie. I hope Doctor Percival is well?"

"Oh, yes,—else I should not be here."

I had gloved my hand again during these words of recognition. Mr. Axtell noticed it, and asked to see a ring that had attracted his attention.

"Excuse me," I said,—"it is one of my father's gifts to me,—I cannot take it off,—it is a simple ring, Mr. Axtell"; and I held it out for him to see.

"I knew it!" he exclaimed; "there could not be two alike; years have not changed its lustre. Mary wore it first on the day we were engaged."

"Was it your gift to her, Mr. Axtell?"

He answered, "Yes"; and I, drawing it off, handed it to him, saying, "It should have been returned to you long ago."

"No, no," he said, quite solemnly, "it is in better keeping"; and he took the tiny circlet of gold, and looked a moment at it, with its shining cluster of brilliants, then gave it back to me.

"Have you no claim upon this?" I asked.

"On the ring? Oh, no,—none."

I put back with gladness the gift my father gave.

My time had come. The opportunity was most mysteriously given me to redeem the promise made in the morning to Miss Lettie. I began, quite timidly at first, to say that I had a message for Mr. Axtell, one from his sister,—that I was to tell him of events whose occurrence he never knew. He listened quietly, and I went on, commencing at the afternoon of my imprisonment in the tower. I told every word that I had heard from Miss Axtell,—no more. I trembled, it is true, when I came to the death of Alice, and the new life that came to his elder sister. I came at last to Mary. I told it all, the night when he came home, the very words he had spoken to his sister I repeated in his ears, and he was quiet, with a quietness Axtells know, I took out the package and opened it, saying,—

"Your sister bade me give this to you."

The careful folds were unwrapped, and within a box lay only a silver cup. Mr. Axtell took it into his hands, turned it to the light, and read on it the name of my sister. I said to him,—

"Look on the inside."

He did. It was the fatal cup from which Mary Percival drank the death-drops. Poisonous crystals lay in its depth. I told him so. I told him how Bernard McKey, driven to despair, had made the fatal mistake.

I thought to have seen the sunlight of joy go up his face. I looked for the glance whose coming his sister so dreaded; but it came not. My story gave no joy to this strange man. He asked a few questions only, tending to illumine points that my statement had left in uncertainty, and then, when my last words were said, he rose up, and, standing before me, very lowly pronounced these words:—

"Until to-night, Abraham Axtell never knew the weight of his guilt. He must work out his punishment."

"How can you, Mr. Axtell? Heaven hath appointed forgiveness for the repentant."

"And freedom from punishment, Miss Percival, is that, too, promised?"

"Strength to bear is freely offered in forgiveness."

"May it come to me! In all God's earth to-night there dwells not one more needy of Heaven's mercy."

"Mary forgives you," I said.

"Bernard McKey, whom I have made most miserable, Lettie's life-long suffering, is there any atonement that I can offer to them?"

"Yes, Mr. Axtell"; and I, too, arose, for the party had gone whilst I was telling my story.

"Will you name it?"

"Give unto the two a brother's love. Good night, Mr. Axtell."

"I will," said a deep, solemn voice close beside me. I turned, and Mr. Axtell was gone. I heard footsteps all that night upon deck. They sounded like those that came and stood beside me hours before.

Day was scarcely breaking when we came to land in New York. I waited for the carriage to come from home. Mr. Axtell, was it he who came, with whitened hair, to ask for Miss Percival, to know if he could offer her any service? What a night of agony he must have lived through! He saw my look of astonishment, and said,—

"It is but the beginning of my punishment."

Ere I had answered Mr. Axtell's question, my father appeared. He had come for me so early on this March morning,—or was it to meet Mr. Axtell? He said more, in words, to him than to his child. It was several years since my father had met Mr. Axtell, therefore he did not note the change last night had wrought. As I looked at him, during our homeward drive, I repented not having said words of comfort, not telling him that I believed Bernard McKey was at that hour in my father's house; but I had not exceeded my instructions, by one word I had not gone beyond Miss Lettie's story. Until Mr. McKey chose to reveal himself, he must exist as a stranger.

Jeffy reported the "hospital man" as "behaving just like other people." Jeffy evidently regretted, with all the intensity of his Ethiopian nature, the subsiding of the delirium.

Not long after our arrival home, father went, with Mr. Axtell, into his own room, where, with closed doors, the two remained through half the morning. What could my father have to say to the "incomprehensible man," his daughter Anna asked herself; but no answer breathed through mahogany, as several times she passed near. All was silent in there to other ears than those inside.

At last I heard the door open, and footsteps along the hall. "Surely," I thought, "they are going the way to Mr. McKey's room." I was right. They went in. What transpired in there I may never know, but this much was revealed to me: there came thence two faces whereon was written the loveliness of the mercy extended to erring man. My father looked, like all who feel intensely, older than he did in the morning, and yet withal happier. Mr. Axtell went away without seeing me. Father made apology for him by saying that it was important that he should return home immediately, and asked "could I make ready to receive some visitors the following day?"

"Who, papa?" I asked.

"Mr. Axtell and his sister."

Mr. McKey was able that evening to cross the room, and sit beside the fire. I went in to inquire concerning his comfort. Papa was away. Mr. Axtell must have told him something of me, for I had not been long there, when he, turning his large, luminous eyes from the coals, into which he had been peering, said,—

"Do you know the sweetness of reconciliation, young lady? If not, get angry with some one immediately."

"I never had an enemy in my life, Mr. McKey," I replied.

He started a little at the name, and only a little, and he questioned,—

"Where did you learn the name you give to me?"

"From Miss Axtell, yesterday."

Question and answer succeeded, until I had told him half the story that I knew. I might have said more, but father's coming in interrupted me.

"I expect our visitors by the day-boat," papa said to me the day following. The carriage went for them. I watched its coming from afar down the street. I knew the expression of honest Yest's hat out of all the street-throng. The carriage came laden. I saw faces other than the Axtells', even Aaron's and Sophie's.

What glad visitors they were, Aaron and Sophie! and what a surprise to them to see Miss Axtell there! I took off her wrappings, drew an easy-chair, made her sit in it, and she actually looked quite comfortable, outside of the solemn old house. "She had endured the journey well," she said. Abraham was so anxious that she should come that she would not refuse his request. "Abraham has forgiven me," she whispered, as I bent over her to adjust some stray folds,—"forgiven me for all my years of silent deceit."

I shook my head a little at the word; speak I could not, for the minister's wife was not deaf.

Aaron called her away a moment later.

"It was deceit, Miss Percival," Miss Axtell said, so soon as she found our two selves alone. "I could not well avoid it; if I were tried again, I might repeat the sin; but, thank Heaven, two such trials never come into a single life. I sometimes wish Bernard were not at sea, that he were here to know my release and his forgiveness; it will be so sweet to feel that no longer I have the sin to bear of concealing his wrong."

I knew from this that Miss Axtell did not know of Mr. McKey's presence in the house; but she ought to know. What if a sound from his voice should chance to come down the passage-way, as I often had heard it? I watched the doors painfully, to see that not one was left open a hair's-breadth, until the time Miss Axtell went up to her own room. Talking rapidly, giving her no time to speak, I went on with her. Safely ignorant, I had her at last where ears of mortals could not intrude. Then I said,—

"We all of us are become wonderful story-tellers. Now it comes to pass that I have a little story to tell; my time is come at last"; and, watching every muscle of her face, and all the little veins of feeling that I had learned so well, I began.

Carefully I let in the light, until, without a shock, Miss Axtell learned that the room below contained Bernard McKey.

"They did not understand me," she said, "or they would not have brought me here thus."

After a long, long lull, Miss Axtell thanked me for telling her alone, where no one else could see how the knowledge played around her heart. Dear Miss Axtell, sitting there, in my father's house, only last March, with a holy joy stealing up, in spite of her endeavor to hide it from my eyes even, and suffusing her white face with warm, rosy tints, dear Miss Axtell, I hoped your day-dawn drawing near.

Miss Axtell said "she hated to have other people see her feel"; she asked "would I manage it for her, that no one should be nigh when she met Mr. McKey?"

It was that very evening that papa, calling Sophie and me into his room, told us a little of the former history of the people in his house.

"I want you to help me, children," he said; "ladies manage such things better than we men know how to."

I said, close to papa's astonished hearing, "I know all about it; just let me take care of this mission"; and he appointed me diplomate on the occasion.

Sophie was strangely disconcerted; she had such fearsome awe of the Axtells, "she couldn't think of interfering," she said, "unless to make gruel or some condiment."

I coaxed Miss Lettie to have her tea in her own room: she certainly did not look like going down. Under pretext of having the care of her, I seated sister Sophie at my station, and thus I had the house, outside of the tea-room, under my control.

"Come down now; don't lose time," I said to Miss Axtell, running up to her, half breathless from my haste.

"What for? What is it?" she said.

"Papa is anticipating some grand effort in the managerial line from me, regarding two people in his house, and I don't choose to manage at all. Mr. McKey is waiting to see you. I knocked to see, as I came up, and all the family are at tea."

I went down with her. There was no trembling, only a stately calm in her manner, as she drew near.

I knocked. Mr. McKey answered, "Come in," in his low, musical, variant tones. I turned the knob; the door opened. A moment later, I stood alone within the hall. I walked up and down, a true sentinel on true duty, that no enemy might draw near to hear the treaty of true peace which I knew was being written out by the Recording Angel for these two souls. They must have had a pleasant family-talk in the tea-room, they stayed so long.

At last I heard footsteps coming. I told Miss Lettie, thinking that she would leave; but no, she said "she would stay awhile"; and so, later on, the two were sitting there in quietness of joy, when my father came up to see his patient. Mr. Axtell was with him. They went in; indifferent words were spoken,—until, was it Abraham Axtell that I saw as I kept up my walking in the hall? What mysterious change had come to transfigure his face so that I scarcely believed the evidence of my own eyes? He came to the door and said, "Will you come in, Miss Percival?" I obeyed his request. He closed the door, and turned the key.

"In the presence of those against whom he had sinned he would confess his fault," were his first words; and he went on, he of whom they had asked a pardon, and drew a fiery picture of all that he had done, of the murder that he had doubly committed, for he had made another soul to bear his sin.

It was terrible to hear him accuse himself. It was touching to see this proud Axtell begging forgiveness. He offered the fatal cup to my father,—

"Therein lies the evidence of my murder. It was I who killed your daughter, Doctor Percival. Although no court on earth condemns me, the Judge of all the Earth holds me responsible for her death."

Doctor Percival tried to reason with him, said words of comfort, but he heeded them not: they might as well have fallen on the vacant air.

"Blessings be upon you two! if, out of suffering, God will send joy, it will be yours," Mr. Axtell said; and he offered his hand to Mr. McKey and his sister, as one does when taking farewell.

He went from them to my father, and offered his hand doubtingly, as if afraid it might be refused.

Papa took it in both his own. An instant later Mr. Axtell came to me. Surely he had no forgiveness to ask of Anna Percival. No; he only said, and I am certain that no one heard, save me, "I thank God that He has not let me shadow your life. Farewell!"

He left the room. We all looked, one at another, in that dim astonishment which is never expressed in words. Papa broke the spell by putting on fresh coals.

Miss Lettie said, "Poor Abraham!" and yet she looked so happy, so as I had never seen her yet!

A few moments later Jeffy came rushing in, his eyes dilate with amazement.

"The gentleman is gone," he said, "gone entirely."

It was even so. Mr. Axtell had gone, no one knew whither. It was late at night, when a letter came for Doctor Percival by a special messenger.

I never saw it. I only know that in it Mr. Axtell explained his intention of absence, and wrote, for his sister's sake, to make arrangements for her future. She was to return to Redleaf, at such time as she chose to go hence, with Mr. McKey; and to Aaron's and Sophie's care Mr. Axtell committed her.

Papa gave the letter to Miss Lettie. She read it in silence, and her face was immovable. I could divine nothing from it.

Last March! how long the time seems! Scarce six months have gone since I gave the record, and now the summer is dying.

I thought Miss Axtell would have ventured out on the bridge, far and high, ere now; but no, she says "the time is not yet,—that she will wait until Abraham comes home"; and Bernard McKey is content.

The solemn old house is closed. No longer Katie opens the door and Kino looks around the corner. Kino died, perhaps of grief: such deaths have been.

Miss Axtell has put off the old Dead-Sea-wave face. She has just put a calm, beautiful, happy one in at my door, to ask Anna Percival "why she sits and writes, when the last days of summer are drawing nigh?" Miss Axtell stays with me, and a great contentment sings to those who have ears to hear through all her life. If only Mr. Axtell would come home! Why does he stay away so long, and take such a dreary line of travel, where old earth is seamed in memoriam of man's rebellion? I'll send to him the althea-bud, when next his sister writes.

The leaves are fallen now. Winter is almost come. There is no need that I should send out the althea-fragment. Mr. Axtell wrote to me. Last night I received these words only,—and yet what need I more?

"God hath given me peace. I am coming home."



THE LEGEND OF RABBI BEN LEVI.

Rabbi Ben Levi, on the Sabbath, read A volume of the Law, in which it said, "No man shall look upon my face and live." And as he read, he prayed that God would give His faithful servant grace with mortal eye To look upon His face and yet not die.

Then fell a sudden shadow on the page, And lifting up his eyes, grown dim with age, He saw the Angel of Death before him stand, Holding a naked sword in his right hand. Rabbi Ben Levi was a righteous man, Yet through his veins a chill of terror ran, With trembling voice he said, "What wilt thou here?" The Angel answered, "Lo! the time draws near When thou must die; yet first, by God's decree, Whate'er thou askest shall be granted thee." Replied the Rabbi, "Let these living eyes First look upon my place in Paradise."

Then said the Angel, "Come with me and look." Rabbi Ben Levi closed the sacred book, And rising, and uplifting his gray head, "Give me thy sword," he to the Angel said, "Lest thou shouldst fall upon me by the way." The Angel smiled and hastened to obey, Then led him forth to the Celestial Town, And set him on the wall, whence gazing down, Rabbi Ben Levi, with his living eyes, Might look upon his place in Paradise.

Then straight into the city of the Lord The Rabbi leaped with the Death Angel's sword, And through the streets there swept a sudden breath Of something there unknown, which men call death. Meanwhile the Angel stayed without, and cried, "Come back!" To which the Rabbi's voice replied, "No! in the name of God, whom I adore, I swear that hence I will depart no more!"

Then all the Angels cried, "O Holy One, See what the son of Levi here has done! The kingdom of Heaven he takes by violence, And in Thy name refuses to go hence!" The Lord replied, "My Angels, be not wroth; Did e'er the son of Levi break his oath? Let him remain; for he with mortal eye Shall look upon my face and yet not die."

Beyond the outer wall the Angel of Death Heard the great voice, and said, with panting breath, "Give back the sword, and let me go my way." Whereat the Rabbi paused and answered, "Nay! Anguish enough already has it caused Among the sons of men!" And while he paused, He heard the awful mandate of the Lord Resounding through the air, "Give back the sword!"

The Rabbi bowed his head in silent prayer; Then said he to the dreadful Angel, "Swear, No human eye shall look on it again; But when thou takest away the souls of men, Thyself unseen and with an unseen sword Thou wilt perform the bidding of the Lord."

The Angel took the sword again, and swore, And walks on earth unseen forevermore.

* * * * *

MY FRIEND THE WATCH.

For two years I have had a most faithful, intimate, and useful friend, whom I have constantly worn next my heart. I do not know him for a Spiritualist, but by some mysterious sympathy he hears the incessant, ghostly foot-falls of Time, and repeats them accurately to my ear. While I wake he tells me how Time is passing. While I sleep he is still marking his steps, so that sometimes I have a feeling of awe, as if my mysterious friend were counting my own life away. Then again I am sure that in the faint, persistent monotone of his voice I hear the singing of the old mower's inevitable scythe. The Imagination contemplates this friend of mine with wonder. But Science sees him holding the hand of a captain in his ship at sea, or of a conductor in a train on shore, and honors in him the friend of civilization.

His native place is Waltham, in Massachusetts, and he invited me but a few days since to accompany him in a little visit thither. I cheerfully assented, and we took the cars in Boston, at the Worcester Depot, and after passing a range of unsavory back-yards and ill-favored houses, and winding beneath streets and by the side of kennels, we emerged upon the broad meadows and marshes from which rise in the distance the Roxbury and Brookline hills. The whole region is covered with bright, wooden houses. The villages have a pert, thrifty, contented air, which no suburbs in the world surpass. If the houses are very white and a village looks like a camp, it is because the instinct of the inhabitants assures them that they may strike their tents to-morrow and move Westward or elsewhere to a greater prosperity. In older countries the stained and ancient stone houses are symbols of the inflexible state of society to which they belong. The dwellers are anchored to that condition. There is no "Westward ho" for them. Like father, like son. The hod-carrier's son carries hods. Even the headsman's office is hereditary.

"Yes, yes," hummed my friend, in his patient, persistent monotone, "the American citizen is an aerial plant. He has no roots. There is no wrenching, when he changes place. If there were, how could he overrun the continent in time? He must carry lighter weight than Caesar's soldiers. What has he to do with old houses? His very inventions would make his house intolerable to him in twenty or thirty years."

"But we are going at this very moment to see your ancestral halls, are we not?" I modestly inquired.

"Yes," he replied; "but they are not ten years old, and every year changes them."

By this time we were gliding through the gardens of Brookline and Brighton, which have been afflicted of late years with the Mansard epidemic. It has swept the whole region. Scarcely a house has escaped. Even the newest are touched,—sometimes only upon the extremities or outbuildings, but more frequently they are covered all over with the Mansard.

"That affection of the house-top," whispered I to my friend, "was originally derived from the dome of the Invalides, and has raged now for a century and a half."

"Yes," replied my companion, gravely, "we are not very fastidious in our importations."

He went on murmuring to himself as usual. Then he resumed more audibly,—

"I suppose that most people, upon looking at me, would take me for a foreigner. But you know how peculiarly native American I am. I am indeed only a watch, and," added my modest friend, glancing at the gold chain which hung from my waistcoat button-hole to the pocket, "if you will pardon my melancholy joke, I am for putting Americans only upon guard."

This military expression suddenly sent my thoughts elsewhere; and for some time the rattling of the cars sounded in my ears like another rattling, and the gentle Charles River was to my eyes the historic Rapidan or Rappahannock.

"Don't you think," unobtrusively ticked my watch, "that the exhortation to encourage home-industry has a peculiar force just now? I mean nothing personal; and I hope you will not think me too forward or fast."

"I have never had reason to think so," I answered; "and I am so used to look upon your candid face to know exactly what the hour is, that I shall be very much obliged, if you will tell me the time of day in this matter also; unless, indeed, you should find the jar of the cars too much for you, and prefer to stop before you talk."

"If I stopped, I certainly could not talk," my watch answered; "and did you ever know me to stop on account of any jar?"

I hastened to exculpate myself from any intention of unkind insinuation, and my watch ticked steadily on.

"If your mill turns only by a stream that flows to you through your neighbor's grounds, your neighbor has your flour at his mercy. You can grind your grist when he chooses, not when you will."

I nodded. My watch ticked on,—

"When you live on a marsh where the tide may suddenly rise house-high without warning, if you are a wise man, you will keep a boat always moored at the door."

"I certainly will," responded I, with energy.

"Very well. Every nation lives on that marsh which is called War. While war is possible,—that is to say, in any year this side of the Millennium,—there is but one sure means of safety, and that is actual independence. At this moment England is the most striking illustration of this truth. She is the most instructive warning to us, because she is the least independent and the most hated nation in the world. England and France and the United States are the three great maritime powers. We all know how much love is lost just now between England and ourselves. How is it with her ancient enemy across the Channel? The answer is contained in the reported remark of Louis Napoleon: 'Why do the English try to provoke a war with me? They know, if I should declare war against England, that there is not an old woman in France who would not sell her last shift to furnish me with means to carry it on.' Great Britain is at this moment under the most enormous bonds to keep the peace. They are the bonds of vital dependence upon the rest of the world.—Shall I stop?" asked my watch.

"No, no; lose no time; go regularly on," answered I.

"Very well; while England sneers and rages at us, let us be warned by her. She lives by her looms; but her looms and her laborers are fed from abroad. Therefore she lies at the mercy of her enemies, and she takes care never to make friends. She snarls and shows her teeth at us. She sees us desperately fighting, and yet she can neither spring nor bite. It is the moment most favorable for her to strike, but she cannot improve it. She hopes and prays for the ruin of our government, seeing, that, if it falls from internal disease, and not from a foreign blow, her most threatening political and commercial rival is overthrown. And she does not shrink from those hopes and prayers, although she knows that the result she so ardently desires will be the establishment by military power of a huge slave-empire, a counter-civilization to that of Christianity. Fear of her life makes England false and timid. Her dependence upon other nations has compelled her to abdicate her position as the head of Saxon civilization, which is the gradual enlarging of liberty as the only permanent security of universal international prosperity and peace. Indeed, it is not denied that the tone of British opinion in regard to human slavery is radically changed. That change is the measure of the timidity and sophistication, the moral deterioration inevitably produced in any people by the consciousness of its dependence for the means of labor and life upon other nations. The crack of the plantation-whip scares Washington no longer, but it pierces the heart of Westminster with terror.

"See how utterly mean and mortifying is her attitude toward us. John Bull looks across the highway of the world into his neighbor's house. 'D' ye see,' he mutters, 'that man chastising his son in his house yonder? Let's play that they are not related, and ask him what he means by assaulting an innocent passenger.' Then he turns to the rest of the people in the street, who know exactly how virtuous and mild John Bull is in his own family-relations, who have watched his tender forbearance with his eldest son Erin, and his long-suffering suavity with his youngest son India, and says to them,—'To a moral citizen of the world it is very shocking to see such an insolent attack upon a peaceable person. That man is an intolerable bully. If he were smaller, I'd step over and kick him.'—Do you feel drowsy?" asked my watch.

"I was never more awake," I answered; "but you seem to me,—although, when I look at you and think of Waltham, it is the most natural thing in the world,—yet you do seem hard upon Old England, Mother England, spite of all."

"Ah!" ticked my American watch, "not even I would for a moment seem to be unjust to all that is manly and noble and friendly in England and among Englishmen. There are two nations there, as Disraeli had already said in one sense, when Gasparin said it in another. There is the sound old stock from which flowers the finest modern civilization. From that come the sweetness, the candor, the perception and sympathy of men like Mill and Cairnes and Bright. From that springs all the nobler thought of England. It is to that thought, to that spirit of lofty humanity and pure justice, that Garibaldi appeals in his address to the English people from his prison,—an appeal which seems utterly ludicrous, if you think of it as addressed to the historic John Bull, but which is perfectly intelligible and appropriate, if you remember that Sir Philip Sidney was an Englishman as well as George IV., and that John Stuart Mill is no less English than Lord Palmerston or Russell. It is with that spirit that American civilization is truly harmonious. But there is the other, merely trading, short-sighted, selfish spirit, which is typified by the coarse John Bull of the pictures, and which has touched almost to a frenzy of despair Carlyle in the "Latter-Day Pamphlets" and Tennyson in "Maud." That is the dominant England of the hour. That is the England which lives at the mercy of rivals. And that is the England which, consequently, with feverish haste, proclaims equal belligerence between the leaders of an insurrection for the extension and fortification of slavery and the nation which defends its existence against them. That is the England whose prime-minister alleges that a friendly power has authorized an insult, while at the very moment in which he speaks he carries in his pocket the express disclaimer of that power. That is the England which incessantly taunts and reviles and belies a kindred people, whose sole fault is that they were too slow to believe their brothers parricides, and who were credulous enough to suppose that England loved not only the profit, but the principle, of Liberty under Law."

"It is very sad; but it certainly seems so," said I.

"Seems, my dear friend? nay, it is," ticked my watch, persistently. "It is the inevitable penalty of national deterioration which any people must pay that in its haste to be rich forgets to secure its actual independence. Thus Richard Cobden, the most sagacious of English statesmen, is the most unflinching apostle of peace, because he knows that England has put it out of her power to go to war. I saw you reading his late argument against a blockade. Did you reflect that it was really an argument against war? 'How absurd,' he cries, 'that a commercial nation, which lives by imports and exports, paying for the one by the other, should, by shutting up ports in which it wishes to buy and sell, cut its own hands and feet off, and so bleed to death!' 'In a commercial nation,' says the orator, 'the system of blockade is mere suicide.'

"But a blockade may be clearly as effective a means of warfare as a cannonade. If you can cut off your enemy from all that he gives and all that he gets from without, you have taken the first great step in war. Unless he can supply himself, he must presently surrender or perish. For war is brute force. It is a process of terrible compulsion. 'Do this,' says War, 'or you shall burn, and starve, and hunger, and be shot, and die.'

"The point to be settled between the two combatants is, which can stand starving and shooting longest. If one of them depends for his food upon the sale to others of what he makes, and depends for what he makes upon what he can get from others, it is easy enough to see, that, if the other is self-supporting, his victory is sure, if he have only the means to cut off supplies. England is at the mercy of a skilful and effective blockade. No wonder her shrewdest statesman implores her to see it.

"'My dear John Bull,' says Cobden, 'an honorable member of your Parliament, a miller and grain-merchant, estimates that the food imported into England between September of last year and June of this year was equal to the sustenance of between three and four millions of people for a twelve-month; and his remark to me was, that, if that food had not been brought from America, all the money in Lombard Street could not have purchased it elsewhere, because elsewhere it did not exist.'

"That is the position of a nation with the hand of another upon its throat.—Do I tire you?" ticked my watch.

"Not at all. I am listening intently, and trying to see what you are coming to," I answered.

"We are coming, and very rapidly, to West Newton and the Waltham Watch-Factory," ticked my companion.

"I hope so. It was where I understood you to invite me to go," said I.

"Courage, my friend! Before we get to the factory, let us understand the reason of it. Let me finish showing you why I have a national pride in my ancestral halls, and why I think that the American flag floats over that building as appropriately as over Fort Adams or Monroe."

"I have always trusted you implicitly," I answered.

"Well, then, England is a nation whose mill grinds at the will of a neighbor. Is it wonderful that so sagacious a statesman as Cobden says that the blockade is a terrible thing for a commercial people? Take the estimate of his authority, and imagine the supply of food from this country into England stopped, and the bumptious little island necklaced with Monitors to cut off the Continental supply. Do we not hold one of her hands with our grain, and the other with our cotton? The grain she gets, but the cotton is substantially stopped; what is the consequence? Listen to Mr. Cobden. The case, he says, 'is so grave, so alarming, and presents itself to those who reflect upon what may be the state of things six months hence in such a hideous aspect, that it is apt to beget thoughts of some violent remedy.' He computes that by Christmas the Government must come to the aid of the pauper operatives, of whom there are now seven hundred and fifty thousand, a number which will then have increased to nearly a million.

"Of all nations, then, the industrial example of England is to be avoided by every sensible people. She has been willing to wear chains, because they were gold. But the pre-Millennial nations must be able to stand alone; and we at this moment know more than ever that we must work out our own national salvation, not only without aid, which we had no reason to ask, but without sympathy, which we had every honorable right to expect. But, to be a truly independent people, we must practically prove our self-sufficiency; and at this moment patriotism shows itself not only in defending the nation against the Rebellion, but in the heartiest encouragement of every art and manufacture for which our opportunities and capacities fit us."

My watch here ticked so loudly and defiantly that I feared some neighboring passenger might have a Frodsham or Jurgensen in his pocket and feel insulted.

"A nation like ours," steadily ticked my watch, "seated upon a continent from sea to sea, with so propitious a variety of climate and with such imperial resources of every kind, if it brought all its powers to bear upon its productions and opportunities, would be absolutely invincible, because entirely independent. It need not, therefore, sit a cynic recluse on the Western sea. It need not, therefore, deny nor delay the dawn of the Millennial day, which the poet beheld, when

'The war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled, In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.'

"Tick, tick, tick," urged my watch. But I made no reply.

"Why, then," it continued, "do we consent to look longer to Europe for any of the essential conveniences of life? Why are our clothes not made of American cloth or of American silk? Why are our railroads not laid with American iron? Yes, and why,—pardon me, but we are very near Waltham,—why is our time not told by American watches? Tea and coffee, doubtless, we cannot grow, nor do lemons and bananas ripen in our sun. But has not the time come when every hearty American will say, 'All that I can get here which is good enough and cheap enough for the purpose, I will not look for elsewhere; and all that I can do to develop every resource and possibility, I will do with all my heart'?"

"I do not wish to dampen your enthusiasm," answered I, "but I remember a story of that friend of Southern liberty and author of the Fugitive-Slave Bill, Mason of Virginia. He appeared in the Senate during the Secession winter, in a suit of Southern-made clothes. The wool was grown and spun and woven in Virginia, and Mason wore it to show that Virginia unassisted could clothe her children. But a shrewder man than Mason quietly turned up the buttons on the Secession coat and showed upon them the stamp of a Connecticut factory."

"Have you ever found me unreasonable?" ticked my friend. "Have you ever seen even my hand tremble, as it pointed out to you so many hours in which you have been earnestly interested? I am not excited even by my own existence, and I claim nothing extravagant. There will always be some things that we may not be able to make advantageously. Absolute independence of the rest of the world is no more possible than desirable. But everything which tends to increase instead of diminishing a vital dependence is nationally dangerous. I think, if you will consider me attentively, you will agree that I ought to know that trade is everywhere controlled by positive laws; nor will any wise watch expect them to be long or willingly disregarded by the most enthusiastic patriotism. Knowing that, we do not need to go far to discover why so many important conveniences are still made for us by foreign hands. The immense and compact population of Europe compels a marvellous division of labor, whereby the detail of work is more perfected, and it also forces a low rate of wages, with which in a new country sparely peopled like ours the manufacture of the same wares can scarcely compete. This is the great practical difficulty; but it can be obviated in two ways. If a people assume that the fostering of its own manufactures is a cardinal necessity, it can secure that result either by the coarse process of compulsory duties upon all foreign importations, or by developing the ingenuity and skill which will so cheapen the manufacture itself as to make up the difference of outlay in wages.

"Then, if the work is as well done and as cheaply furnished"——ticked my watch, a little proudly and triumphantly.

"Then it needs only to be known, to be universally and heartily welcomed," said I. "Patriotism and the laws of trade will coincide, and there will be no excuse for depending longer upon the foreign supply."

"But the fact must be made known," ticked my watch, thoughtfully.

"It certainly must," I answered.

"Well, it is a fact that a man can get a better watch more cheaply, if he buys an American instead of a foreign one."

Friendship and gratitude inspired my reply.

"I will put my mouth to the 'Atlantic Trumpet,'—I mean 'Monthly,'—and blow a blast."

"That is not necessary; but as we are very near the station at West Newton where we leave the railroad, and as I have endeavored to show you the national importance of doing everything for ourselves that we reasonably can, you will probably interest your hearers more, if you give them a little description of your visit to my birthplace. Excuse me, but I have watched you pretty constantly for two years, and, if you will be governed by me, as you have generally been during that time, you will not undertake any very elaborate mechanical description, but say a few words merely of what you are going to see."

This sensible advice was but another proof of the accuracy of my watch.

While it was yet ticking, the train stopped at West Newton, and we stepped out upon the platform. The station nearest to the Watch-Factory is that at Waltham upon the Fitchburg Railroad; but by taking the Worcester cars to West Newton, you secure a pleasant drive of a mile or two across the country. If you can also secure, as my watch took care to do for me, the company of the resident manager of the factory, the drive is entirely pleasant and the talk full of value.

We import about five millions of dollars' worth of watches every year, mainly from England and Switzerland through France, and then pay about as much more to get them to go. Of course inquisitive Yankee ingenuity long ago asked the question, Why should we do it? If anything is to be made, why should not we make it better than anybody in the world? The answer was very evident,—because we could not compete with the skilled and poorly paid labor of Europe. But during the last war with England the question became as emphatic as it is now, and a practical answer was given in the excellent watches made at Worcester in Massachusetts, and at Hartford in Connecticut.

But these were merely prophetic protests. The best watches in use were Swiss. Four-fifths of the work in making them was done by hand in separate workshops, subject of course to the skill, temper, and conscience of the workmen. The various parts of each were then sent in to the finisher. Every watch was thus a separate and individual work. There could be no absolute precision in the parts of different watches even of the same general model; and only the best works of the best finishers were the best watches. The purchase of a watch became almost as uncertain as that of a horse, and many of the dealers might be called watch-jockeys as justly as horse-dealers horse-jockeys.

A.L. Dennison, of Maine, seems to have been the first who conceived American watch-making as a manufacture that could hold its own against European competition. It was clear enough that to put raw and well-paid American labor into the field against European skill and low wages, with no other protection than four per cent., which was then the tariff, was folly. But why not apply the same principle to making watches that Eli Whitney applied to making fire-arms, and put machinery to do the work of men, thereby saving wages and securing uniform excellence of work? There was no reason whatever, provided you could make the machinery. Mr. Dennison supplied the idea; who would supply the means of working it out? He was an enthusiast, of course,—visionary, probably; for in all inventors the imagination must be so powerful that it will sometimes disturb the conditions essential to the practical experiment; but he interested others until the necessary tools began to appear, and enough capital being willing to try the chances, the experiment of making American watches by machinery began in Roxbury in the year 1850. After various fortunes, the manufacture passed from the original hands into those of the present company, which is incorporated by the State of Massachusetts.

"Do you think," whispered I to my watch, as I listened to these facts, "that the experiment is still doubtful?"

My companion ticked so indignantly that my friend the manager evidently suspected what question I had asked, and he answered at once,—

"The experiment is already perfectly successful. We have had our critical moments, but"——

"But now," proudly ticked my watch, "now we have weathered the Cape Horn of adversity and doubt, and ride secure upon the deep Pacific sea of prosperity and certainty. You had better blow a note like that through your Atlantic Bugle. Set your tune high, and play it up loud and lively."

"It seems to me," answered I, "that the tune plays itself. There is no need of puffing at the instrument."