"But finally they sent the story, and it was bulletined in Boston and created a great sensation. It was wired back to New York and pronounced a canard by the papers there, since the steamer from Charleston was in and they had no news from her.

"They were set right, though, when about noon the purser, having finished his own work, delivered the stories entrusted to him."

The despatch, which was received in the Journal office soon after 9 o'clock A. M., was issued as an extra, containing about sixty-five lines, giving the outline of the great series of events. This telegram was the first intimation that President Lincoln and the Cabinet at Washington received of the glorious news. Being signed "Carleton," its truth was assured.

The next day, in the city "where Secession had its birth," Carleton walked amid the burning houses and the streets deserted of its citizens, saw the entrance of the black troops, and went into the empty slave-market, securing its dingy flag—the advertisement of sale of human bodies—as a relic. During several days he wrote letters, in which the notes of gratitude and exultation, mingled with pity and sympathy with the suffering, and full of scarcely restrainable joy in view of the speedy termination of the war, are discernible.



CHAPTER XVI.

WITH LINCOLN IN RICHMOND.

Whither now should Carleton go? There were but few fields to conquer, for the slaveholders' rebellion was swiftly nearing its end, and Carleton felt his work with armies and amid war would soon and happily be over. He knew it was now time for Grant to deliver his blows, and make the anvil at Petersburg ring. Eager to be in at the death of treason, he hastened home, shortened his stay with wife and friends, and hurried on to City Point. As usual, he was present in the nick of time. He was able to write his first letter from the Army of the Potomac, descriptive of the attack on Fort Steadman, March 25th. On the 26th he saw again the sparkling-eyed Sheridan. Once more he began to use his whip of scorpions upon the editors and people who were bestowing all praises upon the Army of the West, with only criticism or niggardly commendation for the Armies of the Potomac and the James, with many a sneer and odious comparison. He witnessed the tremendous attack of the rebel host upon the Ninth Corps, hearing first the signal gun, next the rebel yell, then the rattling fire of musketry deepening into volleys, and finally the roar of the cannonade. Carleton, within three minutes after the firing of the first gun, took position with his glass and note-book, upon a hill. One hundred guns and mortars were in full play, surpassing in beauty and grandeur all other night scenes ever witnessed by him. In some moments he could count thirty shells at once in the air, which was filled with fiery arcs crossing each other at all angles. Between the flaming bases, at the muzzle and the explosion, making two ends of an arch, there were thousands of muskets flashing over the entrenchments. Yet, despite the awful noise and the spectacle so magnificent to the eye, there were few men hurt within the Union lines.

After forty hours of rain, the wind blew from the northwest, and the mud rapidly disappeared. Then Carleton began to look out for the great event, in which such giants as Lee and Johnston on one hand, and Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, and Hancock on the other, were to finish the game of military mathematics which had been progressing during four years. Carleton wrote, March 31, 1865, "How inspiring to watch the close of such a game." He expected a great battle. "The last flicker of a candle is sometimes its brightest flame."

He was not disappointed. On mid-afternoon of April 1st, Carleton was at Sheridan's headquarters witnessing the battle of Five Forks, and the awful bombardment of Saturday night. Then went out Grant's order to "attack along the whole line." Now began the bayonet war. At 4 o'clock on that eventful Sunday, like a great tidal wave, the Union Army rolled over the rebel entrenchments. This is the way Carleton describes it in Putnam's Magazine:

"Lee attempted to retrieve the disaster on Saturday by depleting his left and centre, to reinforce his right. Then came the order from Grant, 'Attack vigorously all along the line.' How splendidly it was executed! The Ninth, the Sixth, the Second, the Twenty-fourth Corps, all went tumbling in upon the enemy's works, like breakers upon the beach, tearing away chevaux-de-frise, rushing into the ditches, sweeping over the embankments, and dashing through the embrasures of the forts. In an hour the C. S. A.,—the Confederate Slave Argosy,—the Ship of State launched but four years ago, which went proudly sailing, with the death's-head and cross-bones at her truck, on a cruise against Civilization and Christianity, hailed as a rightful belligerent, furnished with guns, ammunition, provisions, and all needful supplies, by England and France, was thrown a helpless wreck upon the shores of time."

On April 2d, he wrote from Petersburg Heights telling of the movements of Sheridan's cavalry and the Ninth, Second, and Twenty-fourth Corps.

On the 3d, he was in Richmond, writing, "There is no longer a Confederacy."

He had been awakened by the roar of the Confederate blowing up of ironclads in the James River. A few minutes later he was in the Petersburg entrenchments. He rode solitary and lone from City Point to Richmond, entering the city by the Newmarket road, and overtaking a division of the Twenty-fifth Corps. Dismounting at the Spottswood House, he registered his name on the hotel book, so thickly written with the names of Confederate generals, as the first guest from a "foreign country," the United States. The clerk bade him choose any room, and even the whole house, adding that he would probably be burned out in a few minutes. Parts of the city had already become a sea of flame, but Richmond was saved, and the fire put out by Union troops. Military order soon reigned, and plundering was stopped. He met President Lincoln, and helped to escort him through the streets lined with the black people whom he had set free. Later, Carleton saw and talked with Generals Weitzel and Devens in the capitol, shaking hands also with Admiral Farragut. From the top of the capitol building, he reflected on the fall of Secession. He saw Libby Prison inside and out, as well as the old slave-mart, holding the key of the slave-pen in his hand. He has told the story of his Richmond experiences in lectures, magazine articles, and in his book, "Freedom Triumphant." His verbal descriptions enabled Thomas Nast to paint his famous picture of Lincoln in Richmond.

Carleton's last letter, completing his war correspondence, is dated April 12th, 1865. It depicts the scene of the surrender, thus completing a series of about four hundred epistles, not counting the ten or a dozen lost in transmission. In these he not only wrote history and furnished material for it, but he kept in cheer the heart of the nation.

Finally the great rebellion was crushed by the navy and army. Foote, Farragut, Dupont, and Porter, with their men on blockade and battle-deck duty, made possible the victories of Grant, Thomas, Sheridan, and Sherman. Carleton as witness and historian on the ships, in water fresh and salt, as well as in the camps and field, appreciated both arms of the service. His letters were read by thousands far beyond the Eastern States, and often his telegrams were the only voice crying out of the wilderness of suspense, and first heard at Washington and throughout the country, proclaiming victory.



CHAPTER XVII.

THE GLORIES OF EUROPE.

After four years of strenuous activity of body and brain, it was not easy for Carleton to settle down at once to commonplace routine. Having exerted every nerve and feeling in so glorious a cause as our nation's salvation, every other cause and question seemed trivial in comparison. Succeeding such a series of excitements, it was difficult to lessen the momentum of mind and nerve in order to live, just like other plain people, quietly at home. One could not be drinking strong coffee all the time, nor could battle shocks come any longer every few weeks. The sudden collapse of the Confederacy, and the ending of the war, was like clapping the air-brakes instantaneously upon the Empire State Express while at full speed. While the air pressure might stop the wheels, there was danger of throwing the cars off their trucks.

It took Carleton many months, and then only after strong exertion of the will, careful study of his diet and physical habits, to get down to the ordinary jog-trot of life and enjoy the commonplace. He occupied himself during the latter part of 1865 in completing his first book, which he entitled "My Days and Nights upon the Battle Field." This was meant to be one in a series of three volumes. He had written most of this, his first book, in camp and on the field. In form, it was an illustrated duodecimo of 312 pages, and was published by Ticknor and Fields, and later republished by Estes and Lauriat.

It carries the story of the war, and of Carleton's personal participation in it in the Potomac and Mississippi River regions, down to the fall of Memphis in the summer of 1862.

After this, followed another volume, entitled "Four Years of Fighting," full of personal observation in the army and navy, from the first battle of Bull Run to the fall of Richmond. This was a more ambitious work, of five hundred and fifty-eight, with an introduction of fifteen, pages. It contained a portrait and figure of the war correspondent, with pencil and note-book in hand. Published by Ticknor and Fields, it was reissued in 1882, by Estes and Lauriat, under the title of "Boys of '61." Carleton completed a careful revision of this work about a fortnight before his golden wedding, for another edition which appeared posthumously in October, 1896.

Meanwhile, Mr. Coffin had reentered the work of journalism in Boston. This, with his books and public engagements, as a lecturer and platform speaker, occupied him fully. In the summer of 1866 the shadows of coming events in Europe began to loom above the horizon of the future. The great Reform movement in England was in progress. The triumph of the American war for internal freedom, the vindication of Union against the pretensions of State sovereignty, the release of four million slaves, the implied honor put upon work, as against those who despised workmen as "mudsills," had had a powerful reaction upon the people of Great Britain. These now clamored for the rights of man, as against privileged men. British liberty was once more "to broaden down from precedent to precedent." In France, the World's Exposition was being held. Prussia and Austria had rushed to arms.

The evolution of a modern German empire had begun. Austria and Hungary were being drawn together. Should Prussia humble her Austrian foe, then Italy would throw off the yoke, and the Italians, once more united as a nation, would see the temporal power of the Pope vanish. Victor Emmanuel's troops would enter Venice and perhaps even the Eternal City.

To tell the story of storm and calm, of war and peace, Carleton was again summoned by the proprietors of the Boston Journal, and at a salary double that received during the war. This time his wife accompanied him, to aid him in his work and to share his pleasure. On one of the hottest days of the summer, they sailed on the Cunard steamer Persia, from New York. This was to be Carleton's first introduction to a foreign land. The chief topic of conversation during the voyage was the Austro-Prussian War, which, it was generally believed, would involve all Europe. The storm-cloud seemed to be vast and appalling.

They arrived in Liverpool, the cloud had burst and disappeared, and the sky was blue again. The battle of Sadowa had been fought. Prussian valor and discipline in handling the needle-gun had won on the field. Bismarck and diplomacy were soon to settle terms of peace, and change the map of Europe.

Carleton hastened on to London to hear the debate in Parliament on the extension of the suffrage, to see the uprising of the people, and to notice how profoundly the great struggle in America and its results had affected the English people. Great Britain's millions were demanding cheaper government, without so many costly figureheads, both temporal and spiritual, and manhood suffrage. The long period of nearly constant war from 1688 to 1830 had passed. In area of peace, men were thinking of, and discussing openly, the relation of the middle classes and the laboring men to the nobility and landed estates. Agitated crowds thronged the streets, singing "John Brown's Soul is Marching on."

Mr. Gladstone's bill was defeated. Earl Russell was swept out of office, and Disraeli was made chancellor. It was a field-day in the House of Commons when Carleton heard Gladstone, Bright, Lowe, and the Conservative and Liberal leaders. These were the days when such men as Governor Eyre, after incarnating the most brutish principle of that worse England, which every American and friend of humanity hates, could be defended, lauded, and glorified. Indeed, Eyre's bloody policy in Jamaica was approved of by such men as John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and other literary men, to the surprise and pain of Americans who had read their books. On the other hand, the men of science and thinking people in the middle and laboring classes condemned the red-handed apostle of British brutishness. All through this, his first journey in Great Britain, as in other countries years afterward, Carleton clearly distinguished between the Great Britain which we love, and the Great Britain which we do not love,—the one standing for righteousness, freedom, and progress; the other allied with cruelty, injustice, and bigotry.

After studying British finance, political corruption, the army, and the system of purchasing commissions then in vogue, and visiting the homes of the Pilgrims in Lincolnshire, and the county fairs, the land of Burns, and the manufactures of Scotland, Carleton turned his face towards Paris. Before leaving the home land of his fathers, he dined and spent an afternoon with the great commoner, John Bright. Mrs. Coffin accompanied him and enjoyed Mrs. Bright, who was as modest, unassuming, kind, and genial as her husband. John Bright listened with intense interest and profound emotion to Carleton's personal reminiscences of Mr. Lincoln, and of his entrance into Richmond. Before leaving for France, on the 5th of September, Carleton wrote:

"The thunder of Gettysburg is shaking the thrones of Europe. English workmen give cheers for the United States. The people of Germany demand unity. Louis Napoleon, to whom Maximilian had said, 'Mexico and the Confederacy are two cherries on one stalk,' was already sending steamers to Vera Cruz, to bring back his homesick soldiers. Monarchy will then be at an end in North America." Maximilian's wife was in France, expecting soon to see her husband. In a few weeks, the corpse of the bandit-emperor, sustained by French bayonets and shot by Mexican republicans, and an insane widow startled Carleton, as it startled the world.

The Journal correspondent passed over to Napoleon's realm, spending a few weeks in Paris, Dijon, and other French cities. In Switzerland he enjoyed mightily the home of Calvin and its eloquent memories, Mont Blanc and its associated splendors, the mountains, the glaciers, the passes, and valleys, and, above all, his study of the politics of "The freest people of Europe." How truly prophetic was Carleton, when he wrote, "This republic, instead of being wiped off from the map, ... will more likely become a teacher to Europe,"—a truth never so large as now. He rode over the Spluegen pass, and saw Milan and Verona. From the city of Romeo and Juliet, he took a carriage in order to visit and study, with the eye of an experienced engineer and veteran, the details of the battle of Custozza, where, on June 24th, 1866, the Archduke Albert gained the victory over the Italian La Marmora.

He reached Venice October 13th. In the old city proudly called the Queen of the Adriatic, and for centuries a republic, until ground under the heel of Austrian despotism, Carleton arrived in time to see the people almost insane with joy. The Austrian garrison was marching out and the Italian troops were moving in. The red caps and shirts of the Garibaldians brightened the throng in the streets, and the old stones of Venice, bathed in salt water at their bases, were deluged with bunting, flags, and rainbow colors. When King Victor Emmanuel entered, the scenes of joy and gladness, the sounds of music, the gliding gondolas, the illuminated marble palaces and humble homes, the worshipping hosts of people in the churches, and the singing bands in the streets, taxed to the utmost even Carleton's descriptive powers. The burden of joy everywhere was "Italy is one from the Alps to the Adriatic, and Venice is free."

Turning his attention to Rome, where French bayonets were still supporting the Pope's temporal throne, Carleton discussed a question of world-wide interest,—the impending loss of papal power and its probable results. Within a fortnight after his letter on this subject, the last echoes of the French drum-beat and bugle-blast had died away. The red trousers of the Emperor's servants were numbered among Rome's mighty list of things vanished. In the Eternal City itself, Carleton attended mass at St. Peter's, and then re-read and retold the story of both the Roman and the Holy Roman Empire. Some of his happiest days were passed in the studios of American artists and sculptors. There he saw, in their beginning of outlines and color, on canvas or in clay, some of the triumphs of art which now adorn American homes and cities. Fascinated as he was in Pompeii and in Rome with the relics and revelations of ancient life, he was even more thrilled by the rapid strokes of destiny in the modern world. The separation of church and state was being accomplished while Italy was waking to new life. The Anabaptists were avenged and justified.

About the middle of February, Carleton was again in Paris, seeing the Exposition and the Emperor of the French and his family. Then crossing to England, he heard a great debate over the Reform measures, in which Disraeli, Lowe, Bright, and Gladstone spoke. The results were the humiliation of Disraeli, and the break-up of the British ministry. Re-crossing the channel to Paris, he spent eight weeks studying the Exposition and the country, writing many letters to the Journal. After examination of the great fortresses in the Duchy of Luxembourg, he went into Germany, tarrying at Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna. He then passed down "the beautiful blue Danube" to Buda-Pesth, where, having been given letters and commendations from J. L. Motley, the historian of the Netherlands and our minister at Vienna, he saw the glittering pageant which united the crowns of Austria and Hungary. This was performed in the parish church in Buda, an edifice built over six hundred years ago. It had been captured by the Turks and made into a mosque, where the muezzin supplanted the priest in calls of prayer. After the great victory won by John Sobieski, cross and altar were restored. Here, amid all the glittering and bewildering splendor of tapestry, banners, dynastic colors, national flags, jewels, and innumerable heraldic devices, "the iron crown of Charlemagne," granted by Pope Sylvester II. in the year 1000, and called "the holy and apostolic crown," was placed by Count Andrassy upon the head of the Emperor Francis Joseph. The ruler of Austria practically acknowledged the righteousness of the revolution of 1849, and his own mistake, when he accepted the crown from the once rebel militia-leader and then exiled Andrassy, having already given to the Hungarians the popular rights which they clamored for. Most gracious act of all, Francis Joseph contributed, with the Empress (whom Mrs. Coffin thought the handsomest woman in Europe), 100,000 ducats ($200,000) to the widows and children of those who were killed in 1849, while fighting against the empire. At this writing, December, 1896, we read of the unveiling, at Kormorn, of a monument to Klapka, the insurgent general of 1849.

In Berlin, Carleton saw a magnificent spectacle,—the review of the Prussian army in welcome to the Czar. He studied the battle-fields of Leipsig and Lutzen, and the ever continuing gamblers' war at Weisbaden. Then sailing down the Rhine, he revisited Paris to see the distribution of prizes at the Exposition, the array of Mohammedan and Christian princes, and the grand review of the French troops in honor of the Sultan. In England once more, he looked upon the great naval review of the British fleets of iron and wood. He studied the ritualistic movement. He attended the meeting of anti-ritualists at Salisbury, where, midway between matchless spire and preancient Cromlech, one can meditate on the evolution of religion. He was at the Methodist Conference of Great Britain in the city of Bristol, whence sailed the Cabots for the discovery of America, now four centuries ago. He read the modern lamentations of Thomas Carlyle, who, in his article, "Shooting the Niagara and After," foretold the death of good government and religion in the triumph of democracy.

At the British Scientific Association's gathering in Dundee, he heard Murchison, Baker, Lyell, Thomson, Tyndall, Lubbock, Rankine, Fairbairn, and young Professor Herschell. He was at the Social Science Congress held in Belfast, meeting Lord Dufferin, Dr. James McCosh, Goldwin Smith, and others. Two months more were given to study and observation in the countries Ireland, England and Scotland, Holland and Belgium. Of his frequent letters to the Journal a score or so were written especially to and for young people, though all of them interested every class of readers. He kept a keen watch upon movements in Italy and in Spain, where the Carlists' uprising had begun.

In this manner, nearly sixteen months slipped away in parts of Europe, and amid scenes so remote as to require hasty journeys and much travelling. Carleton received further directions to continue his journey around the world. He was to visit the Holy Land, Egypt, India, China, and Japan, to cross the Pacific, and to traverse the United States as far as possible on the Pacific railway, then in course of construction. This was indeed "A New Voyage Around the World," not exactly in the sense of Defoe; but was, as Carleton called it in the book describing it, which he afterwards wrote, "Our New Way Around the World." No one before his time, so far as known, had gone around the globe, starting eastward from America, crossing continents, and using steam as the motor of transportation on land and water all the way.

Making choice of three routes to the Orient, Carleton left Paris December 9th, 1867, for Marseilles. He found much of the country thitherward nearly as forbidding as the hardest regions of New Hampshire. The climate was indeed easier than in the Granite State, but from November to March the people suffered more from cold than the Yankees. They lived in stone houses and fuel was dear. At Marseilles the vessels were packed so closely in docks, that the masts and spars reminded him of the slopes of the White Mountains after fire had swept the foliage away. Although innumerable tons of grain were imported here, he saw no elevators or labor saving appliances like those at Buffalo, which can load or empty ships' holds in a few half hours. Many of the imports were labelled "Service Militaire," and were for the support of that army of eight hundred thousand men, which the impoverished French people, even with a decreasing population, were so heavily taxed to support. Carleton noticed that merchants of France were planning to lay their hands on the East and win its trade.



CHAPTER XVIII.

THROUGH ORIENTAL LANDS.

It was "blowing great guns," and the sea was white with foam, when on the ninety-eighth anniversary of Washington's birthday into another world, December 14th, 1867, the steamer Euphrates, of the M. I. Company, left Marseilles. The iron ship was staunch, though not overclean. On the deck were boxed up eight carriages for Turks who had been visiting Paris. The captain amused himself, in hours which ought not to have been those of leisure, with embroidery. After a run through the Sardinian straits, they had clear sea room to Sicily. Stromboli was quiet, but Vesuvius was lively. At Messina they took on coal, oranges, five Americans, and one Englishman. On learning Carleton's plan to travel eastward to San Francisco, the Queen's subject remarked, with surprise:

"There was a time when we Englishmen had the routes of travel pretty much all to ourselves, but I'll be hanged if you Americans haven't crowded us completely off the sidewalk. We can't tie your shoe-strings."

Greece was sighted at sunrise. With Carleton's mental picture of the great naval victory of Navarino, by which the murderous Turk was driven off the sea, rose boyhood's remembrances of the fashionable "Navarino bonnets," with their colossal flaring fronts, with beds of artificial flowers set between brims and cheeks, making rivalry of color amid vast ostentation of bows and ribbon. With his glass, he could discern, at one point upon the hillside, the hut of a hermit, who had discovered that man cannot live upon history alone, but that beans and potatoes are desirable. The practical hermit cultivated a garden.

Arrival at Piraeus was at 2 A. M. The party of passengers descended the ladder into a boat, and there sat shivering in their shawls, where they were likely to be left to historic meditation until the custom-house opened, except for the well-known fact that silver often conquers steel. One franc, held up before the gaze of a highly important personage possessed of a sword and much atmosphere of authority, secured smiles and welcome to the sacred soil of Greece, immunity from search, and direction to a cafe where all was warm and comfortable, and from which, in due time, hotel accommodations were secured.

In the city of Pericles, they saw the play of "Antigone" in the theatre of Herod Atticus. On visiting the Parthenon, with its marvellous sculpture, which Turkish soldiers had so often used as a target, they found that the chief inhabitants of the ruin were crows. They met the missionaries who were influential in the making of the new Grecian nation. From Athens they went to Constantinople, where Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, in Robert College, was lighting the beacon of hope for the Christians in the Turkish empire.

Leaving Europe at that end of it on which the Turks have encamped during four centuries, and where they are still blasting and devouring, Carleton visited Africa, the old house of bondage. At Alexandria his first greeting was a cry for bakshish. Within half an hour after landing, most of his childhood's illusions were dispelled. A drenching rain fell. The delta of the Nile had been turned into one vast cotton field which looked like a mass of snow. The clover was in bloom along the railway to Cairo. In this land of the donkey and of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, he received several practical lessons in the art of comparative swindling, soon learning that in roguery both Christians and the followers of the prophet are one.

In studying his Bible amid the lands which are its best commentary, Carleton concluded that the crossing of the Red Sea by the fugitive slaves from Egypt, over an "underground railway made by the order of God himself," "instead of being in the domain of the miraculous, is under natural law." At Suez, one of the half-way houses of the world, he was amused at the jollity of the Mohammedans, who had just broken their long lenten fast from tobacco and smoke, and who were very happy in their own way.

In thirty hours after leaving Alexandria, the party, now joined by Rev. E. B. Webb, had its first view of Palestine,—a sandy shore, low, level as a Western prairie, tufted with palms, green with olives, golden with orange orchards, and away in the distance an outline of gray mountains. Soon, in Jerusalem, he was among the donkeys, dogs, pilgrims, and muleteers. Out on the Mount of Olives and in starlit Bethlehem, by ancient Hebron, and then down to low-lying Jericho and at the Dead Sea, he was refreshing memory and imagination, shedding old fancies and traditions, discriminating as never before between figures of rhetoric and figures of rock and reality, while feeding his faith and cheering his spirit. Then from Jerusalem, after a twenty days' stay, the party rode northward to Shechem, the home of the Samaritan, and over the plain of Esdraelon. There Carleton's military eye revelled in the scene, and he made mind-pictures of the battles fought there during all the centuries. Then, after tarrying at Nazareth and Beyrout, we find him, April 11th, at Suez, on board a steamer for the East.

At Paris he had seen De Lesseps, amid tumultuous applause, receive from Napoleon III. a gold medal.

Now Carleton was on the steamship Baroda, moving down the Red Sea, once thought to be an arm of the Indian Ocean, but which we now know to be only a portion of "the great rift valley,"—the longest and deepest and widest trough on the earth's surface, which extends from the base of Mount Lebanon and the Sea of Galilee, through the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, the dried up wadies, the Red Sea, and the chain of lakes and Nyanzas discovered in recent years in the heart of Africa, and extending nearly to Zanzibar. Passing by Great Britain's garrisons, lighthouses, and coaling stations, which guard her pathway to India, Bombay was reached April 27th.

In the interior, in the distressing hot weather of India, Carleton found this the land of punkas, tatties, and odors both sweet and otherwise. He was impressed with the amount of jewelry seen, not in the bazaars, but on the persons of the women. "Through all ages India has swallowed up silver, and the absorption is as great as ever to-day." He was amused at the little men's big heads, covered with a hundred and fifty feet, or more, of turban material, which made so many of them look like exaggerated tulips. He noticed the phenomena of religion, the trees smeared with paint, the Buddhist caves, the Parsee Towers of Silence, the phallic emblems of nature-worship. Evidently he was not converted to cremation, for he wrote, "The earth is our mother, and it is sweeter to lie on her bosom amid blooming flowers or beneath bending elms and sighing pines in God's Acre." He noticed how rapidly the railways were breaking down caste. "The locomotive, like a ploughshare turning the sward of the prairies, is cutting up a faith whose roots run down deep into bygone ages.... The engine does not turn out for obstructions, such as in former days impeded the car of progress."

Though caste was stronger than the instincts of humanity, this relic of the brutishness of conquest was not allowed to have sway in railway carriages.

Carleton sums up his impressions of the religions of India in this sentence: "The world by wisdom knew not God." He found his preconceived ideas of central India all wrong. Instead of jungles, were plateaus, forest-covered mountains, groves, and bamboo. With the thermometer at 105 deg. in the shade, the woodwork shrunk so that the drivers of the dak or ox-cart wound the spokes of the wheels with straw and kept them wet, so that Carleton noticed them "watering their carriage as well as horses." Whether it was his head that swelled or his hat which shrunk, he found the latter two sizes too small at night. In India, between June and October, little business is done. The demand for cotton, caused by the American war, had set India farmers to growing the bolls over vast areas, but the cost of carriage to the seaboard was so great that new roads had to be built.

"Sahib Coffin" at the garrison towns was amused at both the young British officers, with their airs, and at the old veterans, who were as dignified as mastiffs. Living in the central land of the world's fairy tales, he enjoyed these legends which "give perfume to literature, science, and art." At Allahabad, in the middle of the fort, he saw a pillar forty-two feet high, erected by King Asoka, 250 B. C., bearing an inscription commanding kindness to animals. In one part of India, at the golden pagoda of Benares, he found the monkeys worshipped as gods, or at least honored as divine servants, while in the North they were pests and thieves, the enemy of the farmer.

Among other hospitalities enjoyed, was a dinner with an American, Mr. C. L. Brown, who represented the Tudor Ice Company, of Boston, and who sold solidified water from Wenham Lake. The piece that clinked in the glass of Carleton, "sparkling and bright in its liquid light," had been harvested in 1865, three years before. He described it as a "piece of imprisoned cold, fragment of a bygone winter," which called up "bright pictures of boys and girls with their rosy cheeks and flashing skates,—a breeze of old associations." At Benares, various root ideas of Hindoo holiness were illustrated, including the linga worship and the passion for motherhood in that strange phallic cult which, from India to Japan, has survived all later forms of religion. In Calcutta, Old India had already been forgotten in the newer and more Christian India. He visited especially the American Union Mission Home, where Miss Louise Hook and Miss Britton were training the girls of India to nobler ideals and possibilities of life. After seeing the school, Carleton wrote: "Theirs is a great work. Educate the women of India, and we withdraw two hundred millions from gross idolatry. This mighty moral leverage obtained, the whole substratum of society will be raised to a higher level. The mothers of America fought the late war through to its glorious end. They sustained the army by their labor, their sympathy, their heroic devotion. The mothers of India are keeping the idols on their pedestals."

Personal accidents in India were minor and amusing, mostly. Crossing the Bay of Bengal on the Clan Alpine, one of England's opium steamers bound to China, a boiler blew up. The "priming" of the iron, the life of the metal, having been burned out in passing from fresh to salt water, was the cause of the trouble. Nineteen persons, eighteen natives and a Scotsman, were killed or badly scalded. Carleton rushed out from his stateroom, amid clouds of steam that made his path nearly invisible, and was happy in finding his wife safe on deck at the stern. At sunset the Christian was given the rites of burial. The dead Hindoos, not being used to religious attentions paid to corpses, were heaved into the sea, and the voyage continued. This was not the first or the last time that Carleton experienced the sensation of being blown up while on a steamboat.



CHAPTER XIX.

IN CHINA AND JAPAN.

At Penang, in the Spice Islands, the verge of the Flowery Kingdom seemed to have been reached. "We might say that that land had bloomed over its own borders, and its blossoms had fallen here.... Nearly the entire population of this island, 125,000 in all, are Chinese." At Singapore, the town of lions, he met an American hunter named Carroll, who lived with the natives and had won fame as a dead shot. Fortunately for humanity, that contests with the aboriginal beasts a possession of this part of the earth, the leonine fathers frequently devour their cubs, else the earth would be overrun with the lions.

Seventeen days on the Clan Alpine passed by, and then, on the 10th of June, the captain pointed out the "Asses' Ears," two black specks on the distant horizon, which gave them their first glimpse of China. On Saturday afternoon, Mrs. Coffin had the pleasure of being told, by the healthy-looking captain of the sampan or boat by which they were to get ashore, that she was "a red-faced foreign devil." This was a Chinese woman, of thirty-five or forty, who commanded the craft. The next day, Sunday, they went to church in sedan-chairs, and sat under the punkas or swinging-fans, which cooled the air. On Monday, while going around with, or calling upon, the missionaries Preston, Kerr, and Parker, the Americans who had a sense of the value of minutes found that the "Chinese are an old people. Their empire is finished, their civilization complete, and time is a drug." The walls of the great Roman Catholic Cathedral, costing over four million dollars, were then but half-way up.

Being a true Christian, without cant or guile, Carleton, as a matter of course, was a warm friend of the missionaries, and always sought them out to visit and cheer them. He rarely became their guest, or accepted hospitality under the roofs either of American consuls or missionaries, lest critics might say his views were colored by the glasses of others. He would have his own mind and opinions judicial. Nevertheless, he knew that those who knew the language of the people were good guides and helpers to intelligent impressions. In Shanghai he met Messrs. Yates, Wilson, and Thomson, and, in the Sailors' Chapel, Rev. E. W. Syle, afterwards president of the Asiatic Society of Japan. Carleton noticed that when the collection was taken up among the tars present, the plate, when returned, showed several silver dollars. The travellers went up the Yangtse in a New York built Hudson River steamer, commanded by a Yankee captain from Cape Ann. At Wuchang he called on Bishop Williams, whom he had met in London at the Pan-Anglican council, and who afterwards made so noble record of work in the Mikado's empire.

So far from being appalled at what he saw of the Chinese and their civilization, Carleton noted many things to admire,—their democratic spirit, their competitive civil service examinations, and their reverence for age and parental authority. At the dinners occasionally eaten in a Chinese restaurant, he asked no questions as to whether the animal that furnished the meat barked, mewed, bellowed, or whinnied, but took the mess in all good conscience.

From the middle of the Sunrise Kingdom, the passage was made on the American Pacific mail-steamer Costa Rica, through a great storm. In those days before lighthouses, the harbor of Nagasaki was reached through a narrow inlet, which captains of ships were sometimes puzzled to find. They steamed under and within easy range of the fifty or more bronze cannon, mounted on platforms under sheds along the cliffs. Except at Shimonoseki, in 1863 and 1864, when floating and fast fortresses, steamers and land-batteries exchanged their shots, to the worsting of the Choshiu clansmen, the military powers of the Japanese had not yet been tested. Accepting the local traditions about the Papists' Hill, or Papenberg, from which, in 1637, the insurgent Christians are said to have been hurled into the sea, Carleton wrote, "The gray cliff, wearing its emerald crown, is an everlasting memorial to the martyr dead."

It was in this harbor that the American commander, James Glynn, in 1849, in the little fourteen-gun brig Preble, gave the imperious and cruel Japanese of Tycoon times a taste of the lesson they were to learn from McDougall and Pearson. Soon they reached Deshima, the little island which, in Japan's modern history, might well be called its leaven; for here, for over two centuries, the Dutch dispensed those ideas, as well as their books and merchandise, which helped to make the Japan of our day. Carleton's impressions of the Japanese were that they had a more manly physique, and were less mildly tempered, but that they were lower in morals, than the Chinese. The women were especially eager to know the mysteries of crinoline, and anxiously inspected the dress of their foreign sisters.

Japan, in 1868, was in the throes of civil war. The lamp of history at that time was set in a dark lantern, and very few of the foreigners, diplomatic, missionary, or mercantile, then in the islands, had any clear idea of what was going on, or why things were moving as they were. It may be safely said that only a handful of students, who had made themselves familiar with the ancient native records, and with that remarkable body of native literature produced in the first half of this century, could see clearly through the maze, and explain the origin and meaning of the movement of the great, southern clans and daimios against the Tycoon. It was in reality the assertion of the Mikado's imperial and historic claims to complete supremacy against the Shogun's or lieutenant's long usurpation. It was an expression of nationality against sections. The civil war meant "unite or die." Carleton naturally shared in the general wrong impressions and darkness that prevailed, and neither his letters nor his writing give much light upon the political problem, though his descriptions of the scenery and of the people and their ways make pleasing reading. In reality, even as the first gun against Sumter and the resulting civil war were the results of the clash of antagonistic principles which had been working for centuries, so the uprising and war in Japan in 1868-70, which resulted in national unity, one government, one ruler, one flag, the overthrow of feudalism, the abolition of ancient abuses, and the making of new Japan, resulted from agencies set in motion over a century before. Foreign intercourse and the presence of aliens on the soil gave the occasion, but not the cause, of the nation's re-birth.

The new government already in power at Kioto, under pressure of bigoted Shintoists, revamped the ancient cult of Shinto, making it a political engine. Persecution of the native Christians, who had lived, with their faith uneradicated, on the old soil crimsoned by the blood of their martyr ancestors, had already begun. Carleton found on the steamer going North to Nagasaki one of the French missionaries in Japan, who informed him that at least twenty thousand native Christians were in communication with their spiritual advisers. At sea they met the Japanese steamer named after Sir Harry Parkes, the able and energetic British minister, who was one of the first to understand the situation and to recognize the Mikado. This steamer had left Nagasaki three weeks previously, with four hundred native Christians. These had been tied, bundled, and numbered like so many sticks of firewood, and carried northward to the mountain-crater prisons of Kaga.

Many of these prisoners I afterwards saw. When in Boston I used to talk with Mr. Coffin about Japanese history and politics, and of the honored Guido F. Verbeck, one of the finest of scholars, noblest of missionaries, and best friends of Japan. No one was more amused than Carleton over that mistake, in his letter and book, from hearsay, about "Mr. Verbeck, a Dutchman who is trading there" (Nagasaki).

They passed safely through the straits of Shimonoseki, admiring the caves, the surf, the multitudes of sea-fowl, the silver streams falling down from the heights of Kokura, on the opposite side of Choshiu, and from mountains four thousand feet high, and made beautiful with terraces and shrubbery. Through the narrow strait where the water ran like a mill-race, the steamer ploughed her way. They passed heights not then, as a few years before, dotted numerously with the black muzzles of protruding cannon, nor fortified as they are now with steel domes, heavy masonry, and modern artillery. Here in this strait, in 1863, the gallant David McDougall, in the U. S. corvette Wyoming, performed what was perhaps the most gallant act ever wrought by a single commander in a single ship, in the annals of our navy. Here, in 1864, the United States, in alliance with three European Powers, went to war with one Parrott gun under Lieutenant Pierson on the Ta-Kiang.

Like nearly all other first gazers upon the splendid panorama of the Inland Sea, Carleton was enthralled with the ever changing beauty, while interested in the busy marine life. At one time he counted five hundred white wings of the Old Japan's bird of commerce, the junk. At the new city of Hiogo, with the pretty little settlement of Kobe yet in embryo, they spent a happy day, having Dr. W. A. P. Martin to read for them the inscriptions in the Chinese characters on the Shinto temple stones and tablets.

The ship then moved northward, through that wonder river in the ocean, the Kuro-Shiwo, or Black Current, the Gulf Stream of the Pacific, first discovered and described by the American captain, Silas Bent. The great landmarks were clearly visible,—Idzu, with its mountains and port of Shimoda, where Townsend Harris had won the diplomatic victory which opened Japan to foreign residence and commerce; white-hooded Fuji San, looking as chaste and pure as a nun, with her first dress of summer snow; Vries Island, with its column of gray smoke. Further to the east were the Bonin Islands, first visited by Captain Reuben Coffin, of Nantucket, in the ship Transit, in 1824. When past Saratoga Spit, Webster Isle, and Mississippi Bay, the party stepped ashore at Yokohama, where on the hill was a British regiment in camp. The redcoats had been ordered from India during the dangers consequent upon civil strife, and belonged to the historic Tenth Regiment, which Carleton's grandfather and his fellow patriots had met on Bunker Hill.

It was a keen disappointment to Carleton not to be able to see Tokio, then forbidden to the tourist, because of war's commotion. A heavy battle had been fought July 4, 1868, at Uyeno, of old the place of temples, and now of parks and exhibitions, in the northern part of the city. The Mikado's forces then moved on the strongholds of the rebels at Aidzu, but foreigners knew very little of what was then going on. After a visit to the mediaeval capital of the Shoguns, at Kamakura, he took the steamer southward to Nagasaki, and again set his face eastward. He was again a traveller to the Orient, that is, to America. On the homeward steamer, the Colorado, were forty-one first-class passengers, of whom sixteen were going to Europe, taking this new, as it was the nearest and cheapest, way home. Below deck were one thousand Chinese. Before the steamer got out of the harbor it stopped, at the request of Admiral Rowan, and four unhappy deserters were taken off.

The Pacific Ocean was crossed in calm. It seemed but a very few days of pleasant sailing on the great peaceful ocean,—with the days' gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, which hollowed out of the sky caverns upon caverns of light full of color more wonderful than Ali Baba's treasure-chamber, and nights spiritually lovely with the silvery light of moon and stars. On August 15th, 1868, they passed through the Golden Gate, and "Aladdin's palace of the West," the cosmopolitan city of San Francisco, was before their eyes.

Not more wonderful than the things ephemeral and the strange changes going on in the city, wherein were very few old men, but only the young and strong of many nations, were the stabilities of life. Carleton found time to examine and write about education, the libraries, churches, asylums, charities, and the beginnings of literature, science, and art. In one of the schools he found them debating "whether Congress was right in ordering Major Andre to be executed." Lest some might think Carleton lacking in love to "Our Old Home," we quote, "It is neither politic, wise, nor honest to instill into the youthful mind animosity towards England or any other nation, especially for acts committed nearly a century ago."

In his youth he had played the battles of Bunker Hill and Bennington, in which his living ancestors had fought, and of which they had told him,—using the roadside weeds as British soldiers, and sticks, stones, and a cornstalk knife for weapons. In after-life, he often expressed the emphatic opinion that our school histories were viciously planned and written, preserving a spirit that boded no good for the future of our country and the world. In the nineties, he was asked by the Harpers to write a history of the United States for young people. This he hoped to do, correcting prejudices, and emphasizing the moral union between the two nations using English speech; but all too soon the night came when he could not do the work proposed.

Remaining in California over two months, Carleton started eastward in the late autumn over the Central Pacific railway, writing from Salt Lake City what he saw and knew about Mormonism and the polygamy and concubinage there shamefully prevalent. From the town of Argenti, leaving the iron rails, they enjoyed and suffered seven days and nights of staging until smooth iron was entered upon once more. They passed several specimens of what Carleton called "pandemonium on wheels,"—those temporary settlements swarming with gamblers and the worst sort of human beings, male and female. They abode some time in the city of Latter Day Saints. They saw Chicago. "Home Again" was sung before Christmas day. Once more he breathed the salt air of Boston. Carleton wrote a series of letters on "The Science of Travel," showing where, when, and for how much, one could enjoy himself in the various countries and climates in going around the world.

Carleton summed up his impressions after completing the circuit of the globe in declaring that three aggressive nations, England, Russia, and the United States, were the chief makers of modern history,—America being the greatest teacher of them all, and "our flag the symbol of the world's best hope."



CHAPTER XX.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST.

It was one of the great disappointments of Carleton's life that, on returning from his journey around the world, he was not made, as he had with good reason fully expected to be made, chief editor of the Boston Journal. We need not go into details of the matter, but suffice it to say, that Carleton was not one to waste time in idle regrets. Indeed, his was a character that could be tested by disappointments, which, in his life, were not a few. Instead of bitterness, came the ripened fruit of patience and mellowness of character.

His renewed acquaintance with the region west of the Mississippi, which he had made during his recent trip across the continent, only whetted his appetite for more seeing and knowing of the future seat of America empire. He accepted with pleasure a commission to explore the promising regions of Minnesota and Dakota, and to give an account especially of the Red River Valley.

Already, in 1858, he had written and published, at his own expense, a pamphlet of twenty-three pages, entitled "The Great Commercial Prize," Boston, A. Williams & Co. It cost him fifty dollars, then a large sum for him, from which the advantage accrued to the nation at large. It was addressed to every American who values the prosperity of his country. It was "An inquiry into the present and prospective commercial position of the United States, and a plea for the immediate construction of a railroad from Missouri River to Puget Sound." It opens with a review of the great events in the world which have had a direct and all-important bearing upon the United States. Hitherto, since the modern mastery of the ocean through the mariner's compass and the science of navigation, the Atlantic had been the domain of sea power. The Pacific was in future to be the scene of greater opportunities and grander commercial developments. With China and Japan entering the brotherhood of nations, and Russia extending its power towards the Pacific, "five hundred millions of human beings were henceforth to be reached by the hand of civilization." The countries and continents bordering the greatest of oceans were animated with new ideas of progress. On our own western shores, California, Oregon, and Washington were awaiting the touch of industry to yield their riches.

As a reader of the signs of the times, Carleton pointed out the great changes which were to take place in the thoroughfares of trade and travel. Instead of civilization depending for its communication with India, China, and Japan, by passages around the southern capes of the two continents, the paths of water and land traffic were to be directly from China, Russia, and Japan to northern America. Noticing that England had made herself the world's banking-house, he saw that the time had come when the United States (which he believed to be potentially, at least, a larger and a nobler England) must stretch out her left hand, as well as her right, for the grasping of the world's prizes. He pointed out the wonderful openings along the shore, providing harbors at the mouths of the two great river systems on the Pacific Coast, those of the Sacramento and the Columbia.

Carleton urged that "A railroad to Puget Sound, constructed immediately, alone will take the key of the Northwest from the hands of the nations which stand with us in the front rank of power." Important as the railway to San Francisco was, it would not yield the prize. To his vision it was even then perfectly clear, as to all the world it has been since the Chino-Japanese war of 1894-95, that the chief American staple which China and Japan needs is cotton, though machinery, petroleum, and flour are in demand. After giving facts, statistics, and well-wrought arguments, he wrote: "Again we say it is easy for America to lay its hand upon the greatest prize of all times, to make herself the world's workshop,—the world's banker. Shall England or the United States control the northwestern section of the continent and the trade of the Pacific?"

Over a decade later on, in 1869, Carleton revelled in the opportunity of being once more the herald and informer concerning regions ready to welcome the plough, the machine-shop, the home, the church, the school, and the glories of civilization. He spent several months mostly in the open air and chiefly on horseback, though often on foot and in vehicles of various descriptions, camping out under the stars, or accepting such rough accommodation as was then afforded in regions where palace cars, elegant hotels, and comfortable homes are now commonplaces. His letters to the Journal were breezy and sparkling. They diffused the aroma of the Western forests and prairies, while marked with that same wealth of graphic detail, spice of anecdote, lambent humor, and garnish of a conversation which delighted the readers of his correspondence from the army and from the older seats of empire in Asia and in Europe. Carleton's literary photographs were the means of moving many a young and adventurous couple from their homes in the East to the frontier, and of firing the ambition of many a lad and lass to seek their fortune west of the Mississippi. Since California was settled and the Pacific Coast occupied even at scattered points, our frontiers, strange as it may seem, have not been at the eastern or western ends, but on the middle of the country.

After this campaign of correspondence, Carleton returned home and wrote that little book which has been so widely read, both in the East and in the West, entitled "The Seat of Empire." It was published in 1870 by Fields & Co., of Boston. It had eight pages of introduction, with a map of the territory yet to be settled. It was a volume of 232 pages, 16mo, and was illustrated. For many years afterwards, amid the hundreds of letters received from grateful readers of his books, none seemed to give Carleton more pleasure than those from readers who had become settlers. This little book had indeed come to many as a revelation of the promised land. The contagion reached even to Mrs. Coffin's brothers, one of whom, with a nephew of Carleton, became a pioneer farmer in the Red River Valley in Dakota.

Another pathfinder, a literary as well as military pioneer in opening this noble region to civilization, was the warm friend of Carleton and of the writer, General Henry B. Carrington, of the United States regular army, and author of that standard authority, "Battles of the American Revolution." During the Civil War, General Carrington had been stationed in Indiana, where he was the potent agent in spoiling the treasonable schemes of the Knights of the Golden Circle, and in nobly seconding Governor Morton in holding the State true to the Union. The war over, he served on the Western plains until 1868, and then wrote "Absaraka, the Home of the Crows," which was a score of years afterwards republished under the title of "Absaraka, the Land of Massacre." General Carrington was afterwards one of the active members of Shawmut Church. With his fine scholarly and literary tastes, he made a delightful companion.

Any well-told narrative of the exploration, conquest, and civilization of a country, with a history which has helped to make the pageant and procession of human achievement so rich, is, when fully known, of thrilling interest. How grand is the story of the Aryans in India, of the first historic invaders of Japan, of the Roman advance into northern Europe, of the making of Africa and of western America in our own times! Even the culture-epoch of the North American Indians, as written by Longfellow, in his "Song of Hiawatha," is as fascinating as a fairy tale.

Carleton, believing himself and his country to be "in the foremost files of time" and "the heirs of all the ages," came, saw, and wrote of our empire in the Northwest, with an intoxication of delight. Furthermore, he believed that those who came after him would see vastly more of this part of the earth replenished and subdued. Yet the conquest for which he longed was not to be with blood. His hope and his purpose were intensely ethical and spiritual. His vision was of the triumph of peace, law, order, religion. He urged emigrants looking beyond the Mississippi, or the Rockies, to go in groups, and take with them "the moral atmosphere of their old homes." He advocated the opening of a school the first week and a Sunday school the first Sunday following the arrival of such a colony at its destination. Even a bare, new home, cramped and poor, he suggested, might be to them the type of a better one in more prosperous years, and of the Home beyond, so that, from the beginning, "on Sabbath morning, swelling upward on the air, sweeter than the lay of the lark among the flowers, will ascend the songs of the Sunday school established in their new home. Looking forward with ardent hope of the earthly prosperous years, they would look still beyond to the heavenly, and sing:

'My heavenly home is bright and fair; Nor pain nor death can enter there.'"

In Japan's long and brilliant roll of benefactors and civilizers, no names shine more gloriously than those of the Openers of Mountain paths,—of men, priests or laymen, who, by showing the way, surmounting the dangers and difficulties, revealed and made accessible great spaces of land for home and harvest field. The Hebrew prophet speaks eloquently of those who "raise up the foundation of many generations," and of those called "the restorer of the paths to dwell in." In this glorious company of the world's benefactors, Carleton's name is written indelibly. Even "far-sighted" men deemed the project of a railway to Puget Sound "visionary," when Carleton's pamphlet was published. He lived to see it a reality.



CHAPTER XXI.

THE WRITER OF HISTORY.

Steeped in the ancestral lore of New England, a student of the origins of this country, a reader of, and thinker upon, the records of the past, having seen history in its making, and, as it were, in the very furnace and crucibles of war, having traversed the globe along the line of its highest civilizations, having watched at the cradle of our own nobler empire in the great West, Carleton determined to write for the young people of this nation the story of liberty, and of liberty's highest expression, "The American People and Their Government."

It was not a sudden impulse that came to him, it was no accident, but the result of a deliberate purpose. Opportunity and leisure now made the way perfectly clear. He had long been of the opinion that the events of history might be presented vividly to the youthful mind in a series of pictures. He would portray the experiences of individuals whom the reader has been led to regard as persons, and not merely parts of an army, a church, and a government. He believed this was a better method, with young readers at least, than that usually followed by the majority of writers of history. To form his style, he read and re-read the very best English authors. He studied Burke especially, and ascribed to him the strongest single literary influence he had known. Years afterwards, when (like the swords of the Japanese steel-smiths, Muramasa and Sanemori, which never would rest quietly in their scabbards, but always kept flying out) Carleton's books were nearly always usefully absent from the shelves, the librarian at Dover, New Hampshire, in surprise made criticism to his face of Carleton's own statement about Burke. She remarked to him that she had not thought of Burke as a model for a person intending to write fiction,—referring, doubtless, to "Winning His Way," and "Caleb Krinkle."

Carleton replied that the strong, fine style of the British author gave him the best possible lesson in presenting a subject. "Whether writing fiction or fact, if the author wished to make and retain an impression on the mind of his reader, let him study Burke." At a particular time, as the chief librarian of a large public library told him, Carleton's books were more largely read than those of any living writer in the world.

"Caleb Krinkle" is a story of American life in which the characters, the habits of thought, and the rich details of daily routine are given with minuteness, accuracy of observation, and genuine sympathy. The landscape is that of New Hampshire, but the outlook is far beyond, for the author's purpose is to sow broadcast the seeds of true dignity, manliness, and republicanism. The hero is a good one, but of no uncommon type.

The young Yankee finds the battle of life hard, but also fights it bravely, and, in good time, conquers. The secondary actor, Dan Dishaway, is a wholly original character, a tin peddler with little education and unpolished manners, but with a loyal heart, and a simple, unconscious character that impressed and influenced the whole village. The teacher of teachers, to him, was his mother. The very foundation of the story is the value of human character, apart from the accidents of birth or position. The plot develops rapidly, and is illustrated by exciting incidents of river freshets, shipwreck on one of the great lakes, and a prairie fire. Love is shown to be no respecter of persons, but is found faithful, pure, and delicate, in people who never heard of cosmic philosophy, or the term "altruism," who knew not the classics, who went sadly astray in grammar. Without direct preaching, the story shows that the way of the transgressor is hard, and that the hardness is not lessened by worldly prosperity.

The critic quickly notices, however, that Carleton is not so successful in his pictures of city life as those of the country. Nevertheless, in modern days, when the population of Boston consists not of people born there, but chiefly of newcomers from the country, from Canada, or from Europe, Carleton was all the more a helper. An American who has mastered French, even though not perfect in pronunciation, may be a better teacher of it than a native.

Bertha Wayland's success in society, and her Boston life, made a very attractive portion of the book to a large number of readers at rural firesides. For who in New England, and still young, does not hope some day to live in sight of the golden dome? In later years, "Caleb Krinkle" was republished, with some revision and in much handsomer form, as "Dan of Millbrook," by Estes and Lauriat, of Boston.

His next work, which still remains the most popular of all, the one least likely to suffer by the lapse of time, and the last probably to reach oblivion, because it appeals to young Americans in the whole nation, is his "Boys of '76." The first lore to which Carleton listened after his infant lips had learned prayer, and "line upon line, and precept upon precept," from the Bible, was from his soldier grandfathers. These around the open fireplace told the story of Revolutionary marches, and camps, and battles. Nothing could be more real to the open-eyed little boy than the narratives related by the actors themselves, especially when he could ask questions, and get full light and explanation.

For an author who would write on the beginnings of the Revolution, no part of our country is so rich in historic sites, and so superbly equipped with libraries, museums, relics, and memorials, as the valley of the Charles River, in Massachusetts. In this region lies Boston, where not the first, though nearly the first, blood of the Revolution was shed; where were hung for Paul Revere the lantern-beacons; which was first the base of operations against Bunker Hill; and which afterward suffered siege, and served as the outlet for the Tories to Canada, when Howe and his fleet sailed away. Across the river is the battle-road to Lexington, now nobly marked with monumental stones and tablets, and, further on, Lexington itself, with its blood-consecrated green and inscribed boulder, its museum, and its well-marked historic spots. Beyond is Concord, with its bridge, well-site, and bronze minuteman. From the crest of the green mound on Bunker Hill, at Charlestown, rises the granite monument seen from all the country round. Near to Boston, is Cambridge with its university, Washington's elm, and manifold Revolutionary memories; while on the southeast, on the rising ground close at hand, and now part of the municipality itself, are Dorchester Heights, once fortified and bristling with cannon. Within easy reach by rail, water, or wheel, are places already magnetic to the tourist and traveller, because their reputations have been richly enlarged by poet, artist, romancer, and historian. Along the coast, or slightly inland, stood the humble homes of the ancestors of Grant and Lincoln, and but a little further to the southeast is the "holy ground" of Plymouth.

Even more important to the historiographer are the amazing treasures of books and records gathered in the twin cities on the Charles, making a wealth of material for American history, unique in the United States. What wonder, then, that the overwhelming majority of American writers of history have wrought here? Nor need we be surprised that, both in their general tone and in the bulk of their writing, they have portrayed less the real history of the United States than the history of New England,—with a glance at parts adjacent and an occasional distant view of regions beyond.

Graphic, powerful, and popular as are Carleton's books, he does not wholly escape the limitations of his heredity and environment. Generous as he is, and means to be, to other States, nationalities, and sections in the United States, beyond those in the six Eastern States, the student more familiar with the great constructive forces of the Middle, the Southern, and the Western States, who knows the power of Princeton as well as of Harvard, of Dutch as well as of Yankee, without necessarily contesting Carleton's statements of fact, is inclined to discern larger streams of influence, and to give greater credit to sources and developments of power, and to men and institutions west and south of the Hudson River, than does Carleton in his books.

Yet to the millions of his readers, history seemed to be written in a new way. It was different from anything to which they had been accustomed. Peter Parley had, indeed, in his time, created a fresh style of historical narration, which captivated unnumbered readers by its simple and direct method of presenting subjects known in their general outline, but not made of sufficient human or present interest. These works had suited exactly the stage of culture which the majority of young people in our country had reached when the Parley books were written. It is doubtful, however, whether those same works would have achieved a like success in the last three decades of this century. Education had been so much improved, schools were so much more general, the development of the press and cheap reading matter was so great, that in the enlargement of view consequent upon the successful issue of the great civil war, a higher order of historical narration was a necessity. He who would win the new generation needed to be neither a professional scholar, a man of research, nor a genius, but he must know human nature well, and be familiar with great national movements, the causes and the channels of power. This equipment, together with a style fashioned, indeed, in the newspaper office, but deepened and enriched by the study of language, of rhetoric, and of masterly literary methods, as seen in the best English prose, made Carleton the elect historian for the new generation, and the educator of the youth of our own and the coming century.

Carleton is a maker of pictures. He turns types into prismatics, and paragraphs into paintings. He lifts the past into the present. The event is seen as though it happened yesterday, and the persons, be they kings or plough-boys, appear as if living to-day. Their hearts, affections, motives, thoughts, are just like those of men and women in our time. Their clothing and way of living may be different, but they are the sort of human beings with which we are acquainted. Better yet, it is not only the men with crowns on their heads, or the women who wear jewelled and embroidered robes, or riders locked up in steel, or men under tonsure or tiara, that did great things and made the world move. Carleton shows how the milk-maid, the wagoner, the blacksmith, the spinster with the distaff, the rower of the boat, the common soldier on foot, the student in his cell, and the peddler with his pack, all had a part in working out the wonderful story.

Had a part, did I say? No, in Carleton's story he has a part. No writer more frequently and with keener effect uses the historical present. Compare Carleton's straightforward narration and marching chapters with the average British writer of history, and at once we see the difference between chroniclers,—who give such enormous space to kings, queens and ecclesiastical and military figureheads, almost to the extent (in the eye of the philosophic student, at least) of caricature,—and this modern scribe, to whom every true man is a sovereign, while a king is no more than a man. While well able to measure personalities and forces, to divine causes, and to discern and emphasize in the foreground of his pictures, even as an artist does, the important figure, yet Carleton is never at a loss to do this because the real hero may be of humble birth or in modest apparel.

In travelling, the little child from the car window will notice many things in the landscape and about the houses passed, belonging to his lowly world of experience, no higher than the top of a yardstick, to which the average adult is blind. Carleton looked with the child's eye over history's field. He brings before the front lights of his stage what will at once catch the attention of the young people, to whom the deeper things of life may be invisible mystery. Yet, Carleton's books are always enjoyable to the mature man, for he discerns beneath the vivid picturing and simple rhetoric, so pleasing to the child, a practical knowledge and a philosophic depth which shows that the writer is a master of the art of reading men and events as well as of interpreting history.

Mr. Coffin's more serious productions are his arguments before Congressional and State legislative committees; his pamphlets on the labor question, railways, and patents; his addresses before general audiences and gatherings of scientific, commercial, and religiously interested men; his life of Garfield, as well as that of Lincoln; and those voluminous contributions made to the daily or weekly press, and to magazines, and to reviews. Editors often turned to him for that kind of light and knowledge that the public needed when grave issues were before the church, the city, the commonwealth, the nation. In speaking or writing thus, he used a less ornate style, less fervid rhetoric, and spoke or wrote with direct, business-like precision. In a word, he suited his style to the work in hand. But, because he attracted and delighted, while teaching, his young readers, that critic must be blind or unappreciative who cannot see also the purpose of a master mind. The mature intellect of Carleton which animates and informs the pretty stones, educated also up and on to the nobler heights of historical reading.

Strictly speaking, in the light of the more rigid canons of historical knowledge and the research demanded in our days, and when tested by stern criticism, Mr. Coffin was not a historical scholar of the first order. Nor did he make any such pretension. No one, certainly not himself, would dream of ranging his name in the same line with those of the great masters, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, or Parkman,—men of wealth and leisure, as well as of ability. He painted his pictures without going into the chemistry of colors, or searching into the mysteries of botany, to be absolutely sure as to the classification of the fibres which made his canvas. His first purpose was to make an impression, and his second, to fix that impression inerasably on the mind. For this, he trusted largely the work of those who had lived before him, and he made diligent and liberal use of materials already accumulated. He would paint his own picture after making the drawings and arranging his tints, perspective, lights, and shadows.

Nevertheless, Mr. Coffin was not a man accustomed to take truth at second hand. His own judgment was singularly sane, and he was not accustomed to receive statements and to devour them unflavored by the salt of criticism. Four years of the pursuit of letters amid arms, while passion was hottest, and men were too excited to care for the exact truth, had trained this cool-headed scribe to critical treatment of rumors and reports. Furthermore, he knew the value of first authorities and of contemporary writers and eye-witnesses. He discounted much of the writing done after the war in controversy, for political ends, for personal vanity, or to cover up damaged reputations. He knew both the heating and the cooling processes of time. I remember when, about 1890, after he had finished making a set of scrap-books of soldiers' letters, reminiscences and newspaper reports of the battles of the war, how heartily he laughed when, with twinkling eyes, he remarked on the tendency of some old soldiers "to remember a good deal that never happened." As his experience with the pen deepened, he became more rigid in his requirements as to the quality of the information which his books gave. Those who have read especially his four later volumes on the war, will note that at the end of each chapter he gives the sources of authority for his statements and judgments. In a word, Carleton was a man who, having mapped the irrigated country and the stream's mouth, resolutely set his face towards the fountains to find them. There is an increasing exactness and care in finish, as his works progressed.

The decade from 1870 to 1880 was a busy one for this author, not only in his home study, in the Boston libraries, but also with the pen and with voice. The formation of the Grand Army of the Republic, and the establishments of Posts all over the country, and especially in the Northern States, created a demand for lectures on the war. The soldiers themselves wished to study the great subject as a whole, while their wives and children and friends were only too glad to support the movement for the gathering of Post libraries, or the collection in the town public libraries of books relating to the war. The younger generation needed instruction as to causes, as well as to results. Carleton was everywhere a favorite, because of his personality, as well as of his wide and profound acquaintance, from actual observation, of the great movements which consolidated nations.

Years before becoming a war correspondent, Carleton had longed to be an orator who could sway thousands by the magic of his eloquence. More than once, after hearing Edward Everett, Rufus Choate, Wendell Phillips, and such masters of audiences, he would be unable to sleep, so excited was he by what he had heard, and still more by the power evinced in a single mind moving the wills of thousands. In such hours he longed to be a great orator, and thought no sacrifice too great to make in order to achieve success. As his own opportunities for public speaking multiplied, he became a fluent and convincing speaker, with clear ideas, picturesque language, and the power of dramatic antithesis. He had that gift of making pictures to the mind by which a speaker can turn the ears of his auditors into eyes. His tall form, luminous face, impressive sincerity, and contagious earnestness made delighted hearers, especially among the soldiers, who everywhere hailed him as their defender, their faithful historian, and their steadfast friend. To take the hand of Carleton, after his address or lecture, was a privilege for which men and women strove as a high honor, and which children, now grown men and women, remember for a lifetime.

Nevertheless, in the sound judgment of the critic, Carleton would not be reckoned, as he himself knew well, in the front rank of orators. Neither in overmastering grace of person, in power of unction, in magnetic conquest of the mind and will, was he preeminent. When, leaving the flowery meadows of description or rising from the table-land of noble sentiment and inspiring precepts, he attempted to rise in soaring eloquence, his oratorical abilities did not match the grandeur of his thought or the splendor of his diction.

In the course of his career as a speaker, he delivered at least two thousand lectures and addresses on formal occasions, besides unnumbered off hand speeches. Being one of those full men, it was of him that it could be said, Semper paratus. On whatever subject he spoke, he was sure to make it interesting. Besides reports of his addresses and orations in the newspapers, several of the most important have been published in pamphlet form. At the centennial celebration at Boscawen, N. H., on the 4th of July, and at the 45th anniversary of the settlement of Rev. Edward Buxton, at the 50th anniversary of the Historical-Genealogical Society of Boston, and at Nantucket, before the Bostonian Society and at the Congregational Clubs, before Press Associations, Legislative and Congressional Committees, on Social and Labor questions, and at the Congress held in Chicago for the promotion of international commerce between the countries of North and South America, Carleton reached first an audience, and then, through the types, wider circles of readers.



CHAPTER XXII.

MUSIC AND POETRY.

Besides other means of recreation, Carleton was happy in having been from childhood a lover of music. In earlier life he sang in the church choir, under the training of masters of increasing grades of skill, in his native village, at Malden, and in Boston. He early learned to play upon keyed instruments, the melodion, the piano, and the organ, the latter being his favorite. From this great encyclopaedia of tones, he loved to bring out grand harmonies. He used this instrument of many potencies, for enjoyment, as a means of culture, for the soothing of his spirits, and the resting of his brain. When wearied with the monotony of work with his pen, he would leave his study, as I remember, when living in Boston, and, having a private key to Shawmut Church, and dependent on no assistance except that of the water-motor, he would, for a half hour or more, and sometimes for hours, delight and refresh himself with this organ,—grandest of all but one, in Boston, the city of good organs and organ-makers. Many times throughout the war, in churches deserted or occupied, alone or in the public service, in the soldier's camp-church or meeting in the open air, wherever there was an instrument with keys, Carleton was a valued participant and aid in worship.

Religious music was his favorite, but he delighted in all sweet melodies. He loved the Boston Symphony concerts and the grand opera. Among his best pieces of writing were the accounts of Wagner's Parsifal at Bayreuth, and the great Peace Jubilee after our civil war. At most of the great musical events in Boston, he was present.

Shawmut Church had for many years one of the very best quartette choirs in the city, supported at the instrument by such organists as Dudley Buck, George Harris, Samuel Carr, H. E. Parkhurst, and Henry M. Dunham. In Carleton, both voice and instrument found so appreciative a hearer, and one who so often personally commended or appraised their renderings of a great composer's thought, or a heart-touching song, that "as well the singers as the players on instruments" were always glad to know how he received their art and work. In Europe, this lover of sweet sound enjoyed hearing the greatest vocalists, and those mightiest of the masses of harmony known on earth, and possible only in European capitals. Before going to some noble feast for ear and soul, as, for example, Wagner's rendition of his operas at Bayreuth, Carleton would study carefully the literary history, the ideas sought to be expressed in sound, and the score of the composer. In his grand description and interpretation of Parsifal, he likened it among operas to the Jungfrau amid the Bernese Alps. "In its sweep of vision, beauty, greatness, whiteness, glory, and grandeur, it stands alone ... to show the greatness, the ideal of Wagner, including the conflict of all time,—the upbuilding of individual character,—and reaching on to eternity."

Carleton, being a real Christian, necessarily believed in, and heartily supported, foreign missionary work. He saw in his Master, Christ, the greatest of all missionaries, and in the twelve missionaries, whom he chose to carry on his work, the true order and line of the kingdom. "Apostolical" succession is, literally, and in Christ's intent, missionary succession. He read in Paul's account of the organization of the Christian Church, that, among its orders and dignities, its officers and personnel, were "first missionaries." To him the only "orders" and "succession" were those which propagated the Gospel. He had seen the work of the modern apostles, sent forth by American Christians, west of the Alleghanies first, west of the Mississippi. He had later beheld the true apostles at work, in India, China, and Japan. It was on account of his seeing that he became a still more enthusiastic upholder of missionary, or apostolic, work. He gave many addresses and lectures in New England, in loyalty to the mind of the Master. As he had been a friend of the black man, slave or free, so also was he ever a faithful defender of the Asiatic stranger within our gates. Against the bill which practically excluded the Chinamen from the United States, in defiance of the spirit and letter of the Burlingame treaty, Carleton spoke vigorously, at the meeting held in Tremont Temple, in Boston, to protest against the infamous Exclusion bill, which committed the nation to perjury. Carleton could never see the justice of stealing black men from Africa to enslave them, of murdering red men in order to steal their hunting-grounds, or of inviting yellow men across the sea to do our work, and then kicking them out when they were no longer needed.

Carleton was instrumental in giving impetus to the movement to found that mission in Japan which has since borne fruit in the creation of the largest and most influential body of Christian churches, and the great Doshisha University, in Kioto. These churches are called Kumi-ai, or associated independent churches, and out of them have come, in remarkable numbers, preachers, pastors, editors, authors, political leaders, and influential men in every department of the new modern life in Japan. It was at the meeting of the American Board, held in Pittsburg, in the Third Presbyterian Church edifice, October 7-8, 1869, that the mission to Japan was proposed. A paper by Secretary Treat was read, and reported on favorably, and Rev. David Greene, who had volunteered to be the apostle to the Sunrise Empire, made an address. The speech of Carleton, who had just returned from Dai Nippon, capped the climax of enthusiasm, and the meeting closed by singing the hymn, "Nearer, my God, to Thee."

At one of the later meetings of the Board, at Rutland, Vermont, the Japanese student Neesima pleaded effectually that a university be founded, the history of which, under the name of the One Endeavor, or Doshisha, is well known. In the same year that Neesima was graduated from Amherst College, Carleton received from this institution the honorary degree of Master of Arts.

Carleton could turn his nimble pen to rhyme, when his friends required verses, and best when his own emotions struggled for utterance in poetry. Several very creditable hymns were composed for anniversary occasions and for the Easter Festivals of Shawmut Church.

Indeed, the first money ever paid him by a publisher was for a poem,—"The Old Man's Meditations," which was copied into "Littell's Living Age." The pre-natal life, birth, and growth of this first-born child of Carleton's brain and heart, which inherited a "double portion," in both fame and pelf, is worth noting. In 1852, an aged uncle of Mrs. Coffin, who dwelt in thoughts that had not yet become the commonplace property of our day, being at home in the immensities of geology and the infinities of astronomy, made a visit to the home in Boscawen, spending some days. Carleton was richly fed in spirit, and, conceiving the idea of the poem, on going out to plough, put paper and pencil in his pocket. As he thought out line upon line, or stanza by stanza, he penned each in open air. At the end of the furrow, or even in the middle of it, he would stop his team, lay the paper on the back of the oxen, and write down the thought or line. Finished at home in the evenings, the poem was read to a friend, who persuaded the author to test its editorial and mercantile value.

"I shall never forget," wrote Mrs. Coffin, October 13, 1896, "with what joy he came to me and showed me the poetry in the magazine, and a check for $5.00."

The last three stanzas are:

"He sails once more the sea of years So wide and vast and deep! He lives anew old hopes and fears— Sweet tales of love again he hears, While flow afresh the scalding tears, For one long since asleep.

"He sees the wrecks upon the shore, And everything is drear; The rolling waves around him roar, The angry clouds their torrents pour, His friends are gone forevermore, And he alone is here.

"Yet through the gloom of gathering night, A glory from afar Streams ever on his fading sight, With Orient beams that grow more bright, The dawn of heaven's supernal light From Bethlehem's radiant star."

During the evenings of 1892, Carleton guided a Reading Club of young ladies who met at his house. I remember, one evening, with what effect he read Lowell's "Biglow Papers," his eyes twinkling with the fun which none enjoyed more than he. On another evening, after reading from Longfellow's "The Poet's Tale," "Lady Wentworth," and other poems, Carleton, before retiring, wrote a "Sequel to Lady Wentworth." It is full of drollery, suggesting also what might possibly have ensued if "the judge" had married "Maud Mueller." Carleton's poem tells of the risks and dangers to marital happiness which the old magistrate runs who weds a gay young girl.

Carleton was ever a lover and student of poetry, and among poets, Whittier was from the first his favorite. As a boy he committed to memory many of the Quaker poet's trumpet-like calls to duty. As a man he always turned for inspiration to this sweet singer of freedom. What attracted Carleton was not only the intense moral earnestness of the Friend, his beautiful images and grand simplicity, but the seer's perfect familiarity with the New Hampshire landscape, its mountains, its watercourses, the ways and customs of the people, the local legends and poetical associations, the sympathy with the Indian, and the seraphic delight which he took in the play of light upon the New Hampshire hills. Not more did Daniel Webster study with eager eyes the glowing and the paling of the light on the hilltops, no more rapturously did Rembrandt unweave the mazes of darkness, conjure the shadows, and win by study the mysteries of light and shade, than did Whittier. To Carleton, a true son of New Hampshire, who had himself so often in boyhood watched and discriminated the mystery-play of light in its variant forms at dawn, midday, and sunset, by moon and star and zodiac, at the equinoxes and solstices, the imagery of his favorite poet was a perennial delight.

As he ripened in years, Carleton loved poetry more and more. He delighted in Lowell, and enjoyed the mysticism of Emerson. He had read Tennyson earlier in life without much pleasure, but in ripened years, and with refined tastes, his soul of music responded to the English bard's marvellous numbers. He became unspeakably happy over the tender melody of Tennyson's smaller pieces, and the grand harmony of "In Memoriam," which he thought the greatest poem ever written, and the high-water mark of intellect in the nineteenth century. Carleton was not only a lover of music, but a composer. When some especially tender sentiment in a hymn impressed him, or the re-reading of an old sacred song kindled his imagination by its thought, or moved his sensibilities by its smooth rhythm, then Carleton was not likely to rest until he had made a tune of his own with which to express his feelings. Of the scores which he composed and sang at home, or had sung in the churches, a number were printed, and have had happy use.