On the contrary, the duty and dignity of a mother require that she should never subordinate herself to her children. When she does so, she does it to their manifest injury and her own. Of course, if illness or accident demand unusual care, she does well to grow thin and pale in bestowing unusual care. But when a mother in the ordinary routine of life grows thin and pale, gives up riding, reading, and the amusements and occupations of life, there is a wrong somewhere, and her children shall reap the fruits of it. The father and mother are the head of the family, the most comely and the most honorable part. They cannot benefit their children by descending from their Heaven-appointed places, and becoming perpetual and exclusive feet and hands. This is the great fault of American mothers. They swamp themselves in a slough of self-sacrifice. They are smothered in their own sweetness. They dash into domesticity with an impetus and abandonment that annihilate themselves. They sink into their families like a light in a poisonous well, and are extinguished.

One hears much complaint of the direction and character of female education. It is dolefully affirmed that young ladies learn how to sing operas but not how to keep house,—that they can conjugate Greek verbs, but cannot make bread,—that they are good for pretty toying, but not for homely using. Doubtless there is foundation for this remark, or it would never have been made. But I have been in the East and the West, and the North and the South; I know that I have seen the best society, and I am sure I have seen very bad, if not the worst; and I never met a woman whose superior education, whose piano, whose pencil, whose German, or French, or any school-accomplishments, or even whose novels, clashed with her domestic duties. I have read of them in books; I did hear of one once; but I never met one,—not one. I have seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental PABLUM, leave undone things that ought to be done,—rush to the assembly, lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly alarmed in that direction.

I have seen scores and scores of women leave school, leave their piano and drawing and fancy-work, and all manner of pretty and pleasant things, and marry and bury themselves. You hear of them about six times in ten years, and there is a baby each time. They crawl out of the farther end of the ten years, sallow and wrinkled and lank,—teeth gone, hair gone, roses gone, plumpness gone,—freshness, and vivacity, and sparkle, everything that is dewy, and springing, and spontaneous, gone, gone, gone forever. This our Tract-Society book puts very prettily. "She wraps herself in the robes of infantile simplicity, and, burying her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood, patiently awaits the sure-coming resurrection in the form of a noble, high-minded, world-stirring son, or a virtuous, lovely daughter. The nursery is the mother's chrysalis. Let her abide for a little season, and she shall emerge triumphantly, with ethereal wings and a happy flight."

But the nursery ought not to be the mother's chrysalis. God never intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon. If he had, he would made her a caterpillar. She has no right to bury her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood. It will surely be required at her hands. It was given her to sun itself in the broad, bright day, to root itself fast and firm in the earth, to spread itself wide to the sky, that her children in their infancy and youth and maturity, that her husband in his strength and his weakness, that her kinsfolk and neighbors and the poor of the land, the halt and the blind and all Christ's little ones, may sit under its shadow with great delight. No woman has a right to sacrifice her own soul to problematical, high-minded, world-stirring sons, and virtuous, lovely daughters. To be the mother of such, one might perhaps pour out one's life in draughts so copious that the fountain should run dry; but world-stirring people are extremely rare. One in a century is a liberal allowance. The overwhelming probabilities are, that her sons will be lawyers and shoemakers and farmers and commission-merchants, her daughters nice, "smart," pretty girls, all good, honest, kind-hearted, commonplace people, not at all world-stirring, not at all the people one would glory to merge one's self in. If the mother is not satisfied with this, if she wants them otherwise, she must be otherwise. The surest way to have high-minded children is to be high-minded yourself. A man cannot burrow in his counting-room for ten or twenty of the best years of his life, and come out as much of a man and as little of a mole as he went in. But the twenty years should have ministered to his manhood, instead of trampling on it. Still less can a woman bury herself in her nursery, and come out without harm. But the years should have done her great good. This world is not made for a tomb, but a garden. You are to be a seed, not a death. Plant yourself, and you will sprout. Bury yourself, and you can only decay. For a dead opportunity there is no resurrection. The only enjoyment, the only use to be attained in this world, must be attained on the wing. Each day brings its own happiness, its own benefit; but it has none to spare. What escapes today is escaped forever. Tomorrow has no overflow to atone for the lost yesterdays.

Few things are more painful to look upon than the self-renunciation, the self-abnegation of mothers,—painful both for its testimony and its prophecy. Its testimony is of over-care, over-work, over-weariness, the abuse of capacities that were bestowed for most sacred uses, an utter waste of most pure and life-giving waters. Its prophecy is early decline and decadence, forfeiture of position and power, and worst, perhaps, of all, irreparable loss and grievous wrong to the children for whom all is sacrificed.

God gives to the mother supremacy in her family. It belongs to her to maintain it. This cannot not be done without exertion. The temptation to come down from her throne, and become a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water is very strong. It is so much easier to work with the hands than with the head. One can chop sticks all day serenely unperplexed. But to administer a government demands observation and knowledge and judgment and resolution and inexhaustible patience. Yet, however uneasy lies the head that wears the crown of womanhood, that crown cannot be bartered away for any baser wreath without infinite harm. In both cases there must be sacrifice; but in the one case it is unto death, in the other unto life. If the mother stands on high ground, she brings her children up to her own level; if she sinks, they sink with her.

To maintain her rank, no exertion is too great, no means too small. Dress is one of the most obvious things to a child. If the mother wears cheap or shabby or ill-assorted clothes, while the children's are fine and harmonious, it is impossible that they should not receive the impression that they are of more consequence than their mother. Therefore, for her children's sake, if not for her own, the mother should always be well-dressed. Her baby, so far as it is concerned in the matter, instead of being an excuse for a faded bonnet, should be an inducement for a fresh one. It is not a question of riches or poverty; it is a thing of relations. It is simply that the mother's dress—her morning and evening and street and church dress—should be quite as good as, and if there is any difference, better than her child's. It is of manner of consequence how a child is clad, provided only its health be not injured, its taste corrupted, or its self-respect wounded. Children look prettier in the cheapest and simplest materials than in the richest and most elaborate. But how common is it to see the children gaily caparisoned in silk and feathers and flounces, while the mother is enveloped in an atmosphere of cottony fadiness! One would take the child to be mistress, and the mother a servant. "But," the mother says, "I do not care for dress, and Caroline does. She, poor child, would be mortified not to be dressed like the other children." Then do you teach her better. Plant in her mind a higher standard of self-respect. Don't tell her you cannot afford to do for her thus and thus; that will scatter premature thorns along her path; but say that you do not approve of it; it is proper for her to dress in such and such a way. And be so nobly and grandly a woman that she shall have faith in you.

It is essential also that the mother have sense, intelligence, comprehension. As much as she can add of education and accomplishments will increase her stock in trade. Her reading and riding and music, instead of being neglected for her children's sake, should for their sake be scrupulously cultivated. Of the two things, it is a thousand times better that they should be attended by a nursery-maid in their infancy than by a feeble, timid, inefficient matron in their youth. The mother can oversee half a dozen children with a nurse; but she needs all her strength, all her mind, her own eyes, and ears, and quick perceptions, and delicate intuition, and calm self-possession, when her sturdy boys and wild young girls are leaping and bounding and careering into their lusty life. All manner of novel temptations beset them,—perils by night and perils by day,—perils in the house and by the way. Their fierce and hungry young souls, rioting in awakening consciousness, ravening for pleasure, strong and tumultuous, snatch eagerly at every bait. They want then a mother able to curb, and guide, and rule them; and only a mother who commands their respect can do this. Let them see her sought for her social worth,—let them see that she is familiar with all the conditions of their life,—that her vision is at once broader and keener than theirs,—that her feet have travelled along the paths they are just beginning to explore,—that she knows all the phases alike of their strength and their weakness,—and her influence over them is unbounded. Let them see her uncertain, uncomfortable, hesitating, fearful without discrimination, leaning where she ought to support, interfering without power of suggesting, counseling, but not controlling, with no presence, no hearing, no experience, no prestige, and they will carry matters with a high hand. They will overrule her decisions, and their love will not be unmingled with contempt. It will be strong enough to prick them when they have done wrong, but not strong enough to keep them from doing wrong.

Nothing gives a young girl such vantage-ground in society and in life as a mother,—a sensible, amiable, brilliant, and commanding woman. Under the shelter of such a mother's wing, the neophyte is safe. This mother will attract to herself the wittiest and the wisest. The young girl can see society in its best phases, without being herself drawn out into its glare. She forms her own style on the purest models. She gains confidence, without losing modesty. Familiar with wisdom, she will not be dazed by folly. Having the opportunity to make observations before she begins to be observed, she does not become the prey of the weak and the wicked. Her taste is strengthened and refined, her standard elevates itself; her judgment acquires a firm basis. But cast upon own resources, her own blank inexperience, at her first entrance into the world, with nothing to stand between her and what is openly vapid and covertly vicious, with no clear eye to detect for her the false and distinguish the true, no firm, judicious hand to guide tenderly and undeviatingly, to repress without irritating and encourage without emboldening, what wonder that the peach-bloom loses its delicacy, deepening into rouge or hardening into brass, and the happy young life is stranded on a cruel shore?

Hence it follows that our social gatherings consist, to so lamentable an extent, of pert youngsters, or faded oldsters. Thence come those abominable "young people's parties," where a score or two or three of boys and girls meet and manage after their own hearts. Thence it happens that conversation seems to be taking its place among the Lost Arts, and the smallest of small talk reigns in its stead. Society, instead of giving its tone to the children, takes it from them, and since it cannot be juvenile, becomes insipid, and because it is too old to prattle, jabbers. Talkers are everywhere, but where are the men that say things? Where are the people that can be listened to and quoted? Where are the flinty people whose contact strikes fire? Where are the electric people who thrill a whole circle with sudden vitality? Where are the strong people who hedge themselves around with their individuality, and will be roused by no prince's kiss, but taken only by storm, yet once captured, are sweeter than the dews of Hymettus? Where are the seers, the prophets, the Magi, who shall unfold for us the secrets of the sky and the seas, and the mystery of human hearts?

Yet fathers and mothers not only acquiesce in this state of things, they approve of it. They foster it. They are forward to annihilate themselves. They are careful to let their darlings go out alone, lest they be a restraint upon them,—as if that were not what parents were made for. If they were what they ought to be, the restraint would be not only wholesome, but impalpable. The relation between parents and children should be such that pleasure shall not be quite perfect, unless shared by both. Parents ought to take such a tender, proud, intellectual interest in the pursuits and amusements of their children that the children shall feel the glory of the victory dimmed, unless their parents are there to witness it. If the presence of a sensible mother is felt as a restraint, it shows conclusively that restraint is needed.

A woman also needs self-cultivation, both physical and mental, in order to self-respect. Undoubtedly Diogenes glorified himself in his tub. But people in general, and women in universal,—except the geniuses,—need the pomp of circumstance. A slouchy garb is both effect and cause of a slouchy mind. A woman who lets go her hold upon dress, literature, music, amusement, will almost inevitably slide down into a bog of muggy moral indolence. She will lose her spirit, and when the spirit is gone out of a woman, there not much left of her. When she cheapens herself, she diminishes her value. Especially when the evanescent charms of mere youth are gone, when the responsibilities of life have left their mark upon her, is it indispensable that she attend to all the fitnesses of externals, and strengthen and polish all her mental and social qualities. By this I do not mean that women should allow themselves to lose their beauty as they increase in years. Men grow handsomer as they grow older. There is no reason, there ought to be no reason, why women should not. They will have a different kind of beauty, but it will be just as truly beauty and more impressive and attractive than the beauty of sixteen. It is absurd to suppose that God has made women so that their glory passes away in half a dozen years. It is absurd to suppose that thought and feeling and passion and purpose, all holy instincts and impulses, can chisel away on a woman's face for thirty, forty, fifty years, and leave that face at the end worse than they found it. They found it a negative,—mere skin and bone, blood and muscle and fat. They can but leave their mark upon it, and the mark of good is good. Pity does not have the same finger-touch as revenge. Love does not hold the same brush as hatred. Sympathy and gratitude and benevolence have a different sign-manual from cruelty and carelessness and deceit. All these busy little sprites draw their fine lines, lay on their fine colors; the face lights up under their tiny hands; the prisoned soul shines clearer and clearer through, and there is the consecration and the poet's dream.

But such beauty is made, not born. Care and despondency come of themselves, and groove their own furrows. Hope and intelligence and interest and buoyancy must be wooed for their gentle and genial touch. A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward. She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She must sedulously cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil case. The first, the most important trust which God has given to any one is himself. To secure this trust, He has made us so that in no possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making the most of ourselves. Indulging our whims, or, inordinately, our just tastes, is not developing ourselves; but neither is leaving our own fields to grow thorns and thistles, that we may plant somebody else's garden-plot, keeping our charge. Even were it possible for a mother to work well to her children in thus working ill to herself, I do not think she would be justified in doing it. Her account is not complete when she says, "Here are they whom thou hast given me." She must first say, "Here am I." But when it is seen that suicide is also child-murder, it must appear that she is under doubly heavy bonds for herself.

Husbands, moreover, have claims, though wives often ignore them. It is the commonest thing in the world to see parents tender of their children's feelings, alive to their wants, indulgent to their tastes, kind, considerate, and forbearing; but to each other hasty, careless, and cold. Conjugal love often seems to die out before parental love. It ought not so to be. Husband and wife should each stand first in the other's estimation. They have no right to forget each other's comfort, convenience, sensitiveness, tastes, or happiness, in those of their children. Nothing can discharge them from the obligations which they are under to each other. But if a woman lets herself become shabby, drudgy, and commonplace as a wife, in her efforts to be perfect as a mother, can she expect to retain the consideration that is due to the wife? Not a man in the world but would rather see his wife tidy, neat, and elegant in her attire, easy and assured in her bearing, intelligent and vivacious in her talk, than the contrary; and if she neglect these things, ought she to be surprised if he turns to fresh woods and pastures new for the diversion and entertainment which he seeks in vain at home? This is quaky ground, but I know where I am, and I am not afraid. I don't expect men or women to say that they agree with me, but I am right for all that. Let us bring our common sense to bear on this point, and not be fooled by reiteration. Cause and effect obtain here as elsewhere. If you add two and two, the result is four, however much you may try to blink it. People do not always tell lies, when they are telling what is not the truth; but falsehood is still disastrous. Men and women think they believe a thousand which they do not believe; but as long as they think so, it is just as bad as if it were so. Men talk—and women listen and echo—about the overpowering loveliness and charm of a young mother surrounded by her blooming family, ministering to their wants and absorbed in their welfare, self-denying and self-forgetful; and she is lovely and charming; but if this is all, it is little more than the charm and loveliness of a picture. It is not magnetic and irresistible. It has the semblance, but not the smell of life. It is pretty to look at, but it is not vigorous for command. Her husband will have a certain kind of admiration and love. Her wish will be law within a certain very limited sphere; but beyond that he will not take her into his counsels and confidence. A woman must make herself obvious to her husband, or he will drift out beyond her horizon. She will be to him very nearly what she wills and works to be. If she adapts herself to her children, and does not adapt herself to her husband, he will fall into the arrangement, and the two will fall apart. I do not mean that they quarrel, but they will lead separate lives. They will be no longer husband and wife. There will be a domestic alliance, but no marriage. A predominant interest in the same objects binds them together after a fashion; but marriage is something beyond that. If a woman wishes and purposes to be the friend of her husband,—if she would be valuable to him, not simply as the nurse of his children and the directress of his household, but as a woman fresh and fair and fascinating,—to him intrinsically lovely and attractive,—she should make an effort for it. It is not by any means a thing that comes of itself, or that can be left to itself. She must read, and observe, and think, and rest up to it. Men, as a general thing, will not tell you so. They talk about having the slippers ready, and enjoin women to be domestic. But men are blockheads,—dear, and affectionate, and generous blockheads,—benevolent, large-hearted, and chivalrous,—kind, and patient, and hard-working,—but stupid where women are concerned. Indispensable and delightful as they are in real life,—pleasant and comfortable as women actually find them,—not one in ten thousand but makes a dunce of himself the moment he opens his mouth to theorize about women. Besides, they have "an axe to grind." The pretty things they inculcate—slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—ought indeed to be done, but the others ought not to be left undone. And to the former women seldom need to be exhorted. They take to them naturally. A great many more women fret boorish husbands with fond little attentions than wound appreciative ones by neglect. Women domesticate themselves to death already. What they want is cultivation. They need to be stimulated to develop a large, comprehensive, catholic life, in which their domestic duties shall have an appropriate niche, and not dwindle down to a narrow and servile one, over which those duties shall spread and occupy the whole space.

This mistake is the foundation of a world of wretchedness and ruin. I can see Satan standing at the mother's elbow. He follows her around into the nursery and the kitchen. He tosses up the babies and the omelets, delivers dutiful harangues about the inappropriateness of the piano and the library, and grins fiendishly in his sleeve at the wreck he is making,—a wreck not necessarily of character, but of happiness; for I suppose Satan has so bad a disposition, that, if he cannot do all the harm he would wish, he will still do all he can. It is true that there are thousands of good men married to fond and foolish women, and they are happy. Well, the fond and foolish women are very fortunate. They have fallen into hands that will entreat them tenderly, and they will not perceive any lack. Nor are the noble men wholly unfortunate, in that they have not taken to their hearts shrews. But this is not marriage.

There are women less foolish. They see their husbands attracted in other directions more often and more easily than in theirs. They have too much sterling worth and profound faith to be vulgarly jealous. They fear nothing like shame or crime; but they feel the fact that their own preoccupation with homely household duties precludes real companionship, the interchange of emotions, thoughts, sentiments,—a living, and palpable, and vivid contact of mind with mind, of heart with heart. They see others whose leisure ministers to grace, accomplishments, piquancy, and attractiveness, and the moth flies towards the light by his own nature. Because he is a wise, and virtuous, and honorable moth, he does not dart into the flame. He does not even scorch his wings. He never thinks of such a thing. He merely circles around the pleasant light, sunning himself in it without much thought one way or another, only feeling that it is pleasant; but meanwhile Mrs. Moth sits at home in darkness, mending the children's clothes, which is not exhilarating. Many a woman who feels that she possesses her husband's affection misses something. She does not secure his fervor, his admiration. His love is honest and solid, but a little dormant, and therefore dull. It does not brace, and tone, and stimulate. She wants not the love only, but the keenness, and edge, and flavor of the love; and she suffers untold pangs. I know it, for I have seen it. It is not a thing to be uttered. Most women do not admit it even to themselves; but it is revealed by a lift of the eyelash, by a quiver of the eye, by a tone of the voice, by a trick of the finger.

But what is the good of saying all this, if a woman cannot help herself? The children must be seen to, and the work must be done, and after that she has no time left. The "mother of a young and increasing family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her "multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many children." She has neither time nor for self-culture, beyond what she may obtain in the nursery. What satisfaction is there in proving that she is far below where she ought to be, if inexorable circumstance prevent her from climbing higher? What use is there in telling her that she will alienate her husband and injure her children by her course, when there is no other course for her to pursue? What can she do about it?

There is one thing that she need not do. She need not sit down and write a book, affirming that the most glorious and desirable condition imaginable. She need not lift up her voice and declare that "she lives above the ills and disquietudes of her condition, in an atmosphere of love and peace and pleasure far beyond the storms and conflicts of this material life." Who ever heard of the mother of a young and increasing family living in an atmosphere of peace, not to say pleasure, above conflicts and storms? Who does not know that the private history of families with the ordinary allowance of brains is a record of recurring internecine warfare? If she said less, we might believe her. When she says so much, we cannot help suspecting. To make the best of any thing, it is not necessary to declare that it is the best thing. Children must be taken care of; but it is altogether probable that there are too many of them. Some people think that opinion several times more atrocious than murder in the first degree; but I see no atrocity in it. I think there is an immense quantity of nonsense about, regarding this thing. I believe in Malthus,—a great deal more than Malthus did himself. The prosperity of a country is often measured by its population; but quite likely it should be taken in inverse ratio. I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of the species is so indicative of prosperity. Mobs are not so altogether lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase. A village is honorable, not according to the number, but the character of its residents. The drunkards and the paupers and the thieves and the idiots rather diminish than increase its respectability. It seems to me that the world would be greatly benefited by thinning out. Most of the places that I have seen would be much unproved by being decimated, not to say quinqueted or bisected. If people are stubborn and rebellious, stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, the fewer of them the better. A small population, trained to honor and virtue, to liberality of culture and breadth of view, to self-reliance and self-respect, is a thousand times better than an over-crowded one with everything at loose ends. As with the village, so with the family. There ought to be no more children than can be healthily and thoroughly reared, as regards the moral, physical, and intellectual nature both of themselves and their parents. All beyond this is wrong and disastrous. I know of no greater crime than to give life to souls, and then degrade them, or suffer them to be degraded. Children are the poor man's blessing and Cornelia's jewels, just so long as Cornelia and the poor man can make adequate provision for them. But the ragged, filthy, squalid, unearthly little wretches that wallow before the poor man's shanty-door are the poor man's shame and curse. The sickly, sallow, sorrowful little ones, shadowed too early by life's cares, are something other than a blessing. When Cornelia finds children too many for her, when her step trembles and her cheek fades, when the sparkle dies on her chalice-brim and her salt has lost its savor, her jewels are Tarpeian jewels. One child educated by healthy and happy parents is better than seven dragging their mother into the grave, notwithstanding the unmeasured reprobation of our little book. Of course, if they can stand seven, very well. Seven and seventy times seven, if you like, only let them be buds, not blights. If we obeyed the laws of God, children would be like spring blossoms. They would impart as much freshness and strength as they abstract. They are a natural institution, and Nature is eminently healthy. But when they "come crowding into the home-nest," as our book daintily says, they are unnatural. God never meant the home-nest to be crowded. There is room enough and elbow-room enough in the world for everything that ought to be in it. The moment there is crowding, you may be sure something wrong is going on. Either a bad thing is happening, or too much of a good thing, which counts up just the same. The parents begin to repair the evil by a greater one. They attempt to patch their own rents by dilapidating their children. They recruit their own exhausted energies by laying hold of the young energies around them, and older children are wearied, and fretted, and deformed in figure and temper by the care of younger children. This is horrible. Some care and task and responsibility are good for a child's own development; but care and toil and labor laid upon children beyond what is best for their own character is intolerable and inexcusable oppression. Parents have no right to lighten their own burdens by imposing them upon the children. The poor things had nothing to do with being born. They came into the world without any volition of their own. Their existence began only to serve the pleasure or the pride of others. It was a culpable cruelty, in the first place, to introduce them into a sphere where no adequate provision could be made for their comfort and culture; but to shoulder them, after they get here, with the load which belongs to their parents is outrageous. Earth is not a paradise at best, and at worst it is very near the other place. The least we can do is to make the way as smooth as possible for the new-comers. There is not the least danger that it will be too smooth. If you stagger under the weight which you have imprudently assumed, stagger. But don't be such an unutterable coward as to illumine your own life by darkening the young lives which sprang from yours. I wonder that children do not open their mouths and curse the father that begat and the mother that bore them. I often wonder that parents do not tremble lest the cry of the children whom they oppress go up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and bring down wrath upon their guilty heads. It was well that God planted filial affection and reverence as an instinct in the human breast. If it depended upon reason it would have but a precarious existence.

I wish women would have the sense and courage,—I will not say, to say what they think, for that is not always desirable,—but to think according to the facts. They have a strong desire to please men, which is quite right and natural; but in their eagerness to do this, they sometimes forget what is due to themselves. To think namby-pambyism for the sake of pleasing men is running benevolence into the ground. Not that women consciously do this, but they do it. They don't mean to pander to false masculine notions, but they do. They don't know that they are pandering to them, but they are. Men say silly things, partly because they don't know any better, and partly because they don't want any better. They are strong, and can generally make shift to bear their end of the pole without being crushed. So they are tolerably content. They are not very much to blame. People cannot be expected to start on a crusade against ills of which they have but a vague and cloudy conception. The edge does not cut them, and so they think it is not much of a sword after all. But women have, or ought to have, a more subtle and intimate acquaintance with realities. They ought to know what is fact and what is fol-de-rol. They ought to distinguish between the really noble and the simply physical, not to say faulty. If men do not, it is women's duty to help them. I think, if women would only not be quite so afraid of being thought unwomanly, they would be a great deal more womanly than they are. To be brave, and single-minded, and discriminating, and judicious, and clear-sighted, and self-reliant, and decisive, that is pure womanly. To be womanish is not to be womanly. To be flabby, and plastic, and weak, and acquiescent, and insipid, is not womanly. And I could wish sometimes that women would not be quite so patient. They often exhibit a degree of long-suffering entirely unwarrantable. There is no use in suffering, unless you cannot help it; and a good, stout, resolute protest would often be a great deal more wise, and Christian, and beneficial on all sides, than so much patient endurance. A little spirit and "spunk" would go a great way towards setting the world right. It is not necessary to be a termagant. The firmest will and the stoutest heart may be combined with the gentlest delicacy. Tameness is not the stuff that the finest women are made of. Nobody can be more kind, considerate, or sympathizing towards weakness or weariness than men, if they only know it exists; and it is a wrong to them to go on bolstering them up in their bungling opinions, when a few sensible ideas, wisely administered, would do so much to enlighten them, and reveal the path which needs only to be revealed to secure their unhesitating entrance upon it. It is absurd to suppose that unvarying acquiescence is necessary to secure and retain their esteem, and that a frank avowal of differing opinions, even if they were wrong, would work its forfeiture. A respect held on so frail a tenure were little worth. But it is not so. I believe that manhood and womanhood are too truly harmonious to need iron bands, too truly noble to require the props of falsehood. Truth, simple and sincere, without partiality and without hypocrisy, is the best food for both. If any are to be found on either side too weak to administer or digest it, the remedy is not to mix it with folly or falsehood, for they are poisons, but to strengthen the organisms with wholesome tonics,—not undiluted, perhaps, but certainly unadulterated.

O Edmund Sparkler, you builded better than you knew, when you reared eulogiums upon the woman with no nonsense about her.



CAMILLA'S CONCERT

I, who labor under the suspicion of not knowing the difference between "Old Hundred" and "Old Dan Tucker,"—I, whose every attempt at music, though only the humming of a simple household melody, has, from my earliest childhood, been regarded as premonitory symptom of epilepsy, or, at the very least, hysterics, to be treated with cold water, the bellows, and an unmerciful beating between my shoulders,—I, who can but with much difficulty and many a retrogression make my way among the olden mazes of tenor, alto, treble, bass, and who stand "clean daft" in the resounding confusion of andante, soprano, falsetto, palmetto, pianissimo, akimbo, l'allegro, and il penseroso,—I was bidden to Camilla's concert, and, like a sheep to slaughter, I went.

He bears a great loss and sorrow who has "no ear for music." Into one great garden of delights he may not go. There needs no flaming sword to bar the way, since for him there is no gate called Beautiful which he should seek to enter. Blunted and stolid he stumbles through life for whom its harp-strings vainly quiver. Yet, on the other hand, what does he not gain? He loses the concord of sweet sounds, but he is spared the discord of harsh noises. For the surges of bewildering harmony and the depths of dissonant disgust, he stands on the levels of perpetual peace. You are distressed, because in yonder well-trained orchestra a single voice is pitched one sixteenth of a note too high. For me, I lean out of my window on summer nights enraptured over the organ-man who turns poor lost Lilian Dale round and round with his inexorable crank. It does not disturb me that his organ wheezes and sputters and grunts. Indeed, there is for me absolutely no wheeze, no sputter, no grunt. I only see dark eyes of Italy, her olive face, and her gemmed and lustrous hair. You mutter maledictions on the infernal noise and caterwauliug. I hear no caterwauliug, but the river-god of Arno ripples soft songs in the summertide to the lilies that bend above him. It is the guitar of the cantatrice that murmurs through the scented, dewy air,—the cantatrice with the laurel yet green on her brow, gliding over the molten moonlit water-ways of Venice, and dreamily chiming her well-pleased lute with the plash of the oars of the gondolier. It is the chant of the flower-girl with large eyes shining under the palm-branches in the market-place of Milan; and with the distant echoing notes come the sweet breath of her violets and the unquenchable odors of her crushed geraniums borne on many a white sail from the glorified Adriatic. Bronzed cheek and swart brow under my window, I shall by and by throw you a paltry nickel cent for your tropical dreams; meanwhile tell me, did the sun of Dante's Florence give your blood its fierce flow and the tawny hue to your bared and brawny breast? Is it the rage of Tasso's madness that burns in your uplifted eyes? Do you take shelter from the fervid noon under the cypresses of Monte Mario? Will you meet queenly Marguerite with myrtle wreath and myrtle fragrance, as she wanders through the chestnut vales? Will you sleep tonight between the colonnades under the golden moon of Napoli? Go back, O child of the Midland Sea! Go out from this cold shore, that yields crabbed harvests for your threefold vintages of Italy. Go, suck the sunshine from Seville oranges under the elms of Posilippo. Go, watch the shadows of the vines swaying in the mulberry-trees from Epomeo's gales. Bind the ivy in a triple crown above Bianca's comely hair, and pipe not so wailingly to the Vikings of this frigid Norseland.

But Italy, remember, my frigid Norseland has a heart of fire in her bosom beneath its overlying snows, before which yours dies like the white sick hearth-flame before the noonday sun. Passion, but not compassion, is here "cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." We lure our choristers with honeyed words and gentle ways: you lay your sweetest songsters on the gridiron. Our orchards ring with the full-throated happiness of a thousand birds: your pomegranate groves are silent, and your miserable cannibal kitchens would tell the reason why, if outraged spits could speak. Go away, therefore, from my window, Giuseppo; the air is growing damp and chilly, and I do not sleep in the shadows of broken temples.

Yet I love music; not as you love it, my friend, with intelligence, discrimination, and delicacy, but in a dull, woodeny way, as the "gouty oaks" loved it, when they felt in their fibrous frames the stir of Amphion's lyre, and "floundered into hornpipes"; as the gray, stupid rocks loved it, when they came rolling heavily to his feet to listen; in a great, coarse, clumsy, ichthyosaurian way, as the rivers loved sad Orpheus's wailing tones, stopping in their mighty courses, and the thick-hided hippopotamus dragged himself up from the unheeded pause of the waves, dimly thrilled with a vague ecstasy. The confession is sad, yet only in such beastly fashion come sweetest voices to me,—not in the fulness of all their vibrations, but sounding dimly through many an earthly layer. Music I do not so much hear as feel. All the exquisite nerves that bear to your soul these tidings of heaven in me lie torpid or dead. No beatitude travels to my heart over that road. But as sometimes an invalid, unable through mortal sickness to swallow his needed nutriment, is yet kept alive many days by immersed in a bath of wine and milk, which somehow, through unwonted courses, penetrates to the sources of vitality,—so I, though the natural avenues of sweet sounds have been hermetically sealed, do yet receive the fine flow of the musical ether. I feel the flood of harmony pouring around me. An inward, palpable, measured tremulousness of the subtile secret essence of life attests the presence of some sweet disturbing cause, and, borne on unseen wings, I mount to loftier heights and diviner airs.

So I was comforted for my waxed ears and Camilla's concert.

There is one other advantage in being possessed with a deaf-and-dumb devil, which, now that I am on the subject of compensation, I may as well mention. You are left out of the arena of fierce discussion and debate. You do not enter upon the lists wherefrom you would be sure to come off discomfited. Of all reputations, a musical reputation seems the most shifting and uncertain; and of all rivalries, musical rivalries are the most prolific of heart-burnings and discomfort. Now, if I should sing or play, I should wish to sing and play well. But what is well? Nancie in the village "singing-seats" stands head and shoulders above the rest, and wears her honors tranquilly, an authority at all rehearsals and serenades. But Anabella comes up from the town to spend Thanksgiving, and, without the least mitigation or remorse of voice, absolutely drowns out poor Nancie, who goes under, giving many signs. Yet she dies not unavenged, for Harriette sweeps down from the city, and immediately suspends the victorious Anabella from her aduncate nose, and carries all before her. Mysterious is the arrangement of the world. The last round of the ladder is not yet reached. To Madame Morlot, Harriette is a savage, une bete, without cultivation. "Oh, the dismal little fright! a thousand years of study would be useless; go, scour the floors; she has positively no voice." No voice, Madame Morlot? Harriette, no voice,—who burst every ear-drum in the room last night with her howling and hooting, and made the stoutest heart tremble with fearful forebodings of what might come next? But Madame Morlot is not infallible, for Herr Driesbach sits shivering at the dreadful noises which Madame Morlot extorts from his sensitive and suffering piano, and at the necessity which lies upon him to go and congratulate her upon her performance. Ah! if his tortured conscience might but congratulate her and himself upon its close! And so the scale ascends. Hills on hills and Alps on Alps arise, and who shall mount the ultimate peak till all the world shall say, "Here reigns the Excellence"? I listen with pleasure to untutored Nancie till Anabella takes all the wind from her sails. I think the force of music can no further go than Madame Morlot, and, behold, Herr Driesbach has knocked out that underpinning. I am bewildered, and I say, helplessly, "What shall I admire and be a la mode?" But if it is so disheartening to me, who am only a passive listener, what must be the agonies of the dramatis personae? "Hang it!" says Charles Lamb, "how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!" And do Nancie, Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them for their spretae injuria formae? What can repay the hapless performer, who has performed her very best, for learning by terrible, indisputable indirections that her cherished and boasted Cremona is but a very second fiddle?

So, standing on the high ground of certain immunity from criticism and hostile judgment, I do not so much console myself as I do not stand in need of consolation. I rather give thanks for my mute and necessarily unoffending lips, and I shall go in great good-humor to Camilla's concert.

There are many different ways of going to a concert. You can be one of a party of fashionable people to whom music is a diversion, a pastime, an agreeable change from the assembly or the theatre. They applaud, they condemn, they criticise. They know all about it. Into such company as this, even I, whose poor old head is always getting itself wedged in where it has no business to be, have chanced to be thrown. This is torture. My cue is to turn into the Irishman's echo, which always returned for his "How d'ye do?" a "Pretty well, thank you." I cling to the skirts of that member of the party who is agreed to have the best taste and echo his responses an octave higher. If he sighs at the end of a song, I bring out my pocket-handkerchief. If he says "charming," I murmur "delicious." If he thinks it "exquisite," I pronounce it "enchanting." Where he is rapt in admiration, I go into a trance, and so shamble through the performances, miserable impostor that I am, and ten to one nobody finds out that I am a dunce, fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils. It is a great strain upon the mental powers, but it is wonderful to see how much may be accomplished, and what skill may be attained, by long practice.

Also one may go to a concert as a conductor with a single musical friend. By conductor I do not mean escort, but a magnetic conductor, rapture conductor, a fit medium through which to convey away his delight, so that he shall not become surcharged and explode. He does not take you for your pleasure, nor for his own, but for use. He desires some one to whom he can from time to time express his opinions and his enthusiasm, sure of an attentive listener,—since nothing is so pleasant as to see one's views welcomed. Now you cannot pretend that in such a case your listening is thoroughly honest. You are receptive of theories, criticisms, and reminiscences; but you would not like to be obliged to pass an examination on them afterwards. You do, it must be confessed, sometimes, in the midst of eloquent dissertations, strike out into little flowery by-paths of your own, quite foreign to the grand paved-ways along which your friend supposes he is so kind as to be leading you. But however digressive your mind may be, do not suffer your eyes to digress. Whatever may be the intensity of your ennui, endeavor to preserve an animated expression, and your success is complete. This is all that is necessary. You will never be called upon for notes or comments. Your little escapades will never be detected. It is not your opinions that were sought, nor your education that was to be furthered. You were only an escape-pipe, and your mission ceased when the soul of song fled and the gas was turned off. This, too, is all that can justly be demanded. Minister, lecturer, singer, no one has any right to ask of his audience anything more than opportunity,—the externals of attention. All the rest is his own look-out. If you prepossess your mind with a theme, you do not give him an even chance. You must offer him in the beginning a tabula rasa,—a fair field, and then it is his business to go in and win your attention; and if he cannot, let him pay the costs, for the fault is his own.

This also is torture, but its name is Zoar, a little one.

There is yet another way. You may go with one or many who believe in individuality. They go to the concert for love of music,—negatively for its rest and refreshment, positively for its embodied delights. They take you for your enjoyment, which they permit you to compass after your own fashion. They force from you no comment. They demand no criticism. They do not require censure as your certificate of taste. They do not trouble themselves with your demeanor. If you choose to talk in the pauses, they are receptive and cordial. If you choose to be silent, it is just as well. If you go to sleep, they will not mind,—unless, under the spell of the genius of the place, your sleep becomes vocal, and you involuntarily join the concert in the undesirable role of De Trop. If you go into raptures, it is all the same; you are not watched and made a note of. They leave you at the top of your bent. Whether you shall be amused, delighted, or disgusted, they respect your decisions and allow you to remain free.

How did I go to my concert? Can I tell for the eyes that made "a sunshine in the shady place"? Was I not veiled with the beautiful hair, and blinded with the lily's white splendor? So went I with the Fairy Queen in her golden coach drawn by six white mice, and, behold, I was in Camilla's concert-room.

It is to be a fiddle affair. Now I am free to say, if there is anything I hate, it is a fiddle. Hide it away under as many Italian coatings as you choose, viol, violin, viola, violone, violoncello, violoncellettissimo, at bottom it is all one, a fiddle; in its best estate, a whirligig, without dignity, sentiment, or power; and at worst a rubbing, rasping, squeaking, woollen, noisy nuisance that it sets teeth on edge to think of. I shudder at the mere memory of the reluctant bow dragging its slow length across the whining strings. And here I am, in my sober senses, come to hear a fiddle!

But it is Camilla's. Do you remember a little girl who, a few years ago, became famous for her wonderful performance on the violin? At six years of age she went to a great concert, and of all the fine instruments there, the unseen spirit within her made choice, "Papa, I should like to learn the violin." So she learned it and loved it, and when ten years old delighted foreign and American audiences with her marvelous genius. It was the little Camilla who now, after ten years of silence, tuned her beloved instrument once more.

As she walks softly and quietly in, I am conscious of a disappointment. I had unwittingly framed for her an aesthetic violin, with the essential strings and bridge and bow indeed, but submerged and forgot in such Orient splendors as befit her glorious genius. Barbaric pearl and gold, finest carved work, flashing gems from Indian watercourses, the delicatest pink sea-shell, a bubble-prism caught and crystallized,—of all rare and curious substances wrought with dainty device, fantastic as a dream, and resplendent as the light, should her instrument be fashioned. Only in "something rich and strange" should the mystic soul lie sleeping for whom her lips shall break the spell of slumber, and her young fingers unbar the sacred gates. And, oh me! it is, after all, the very same old red fiddle! Dee, dee!

But she neither glides nor trips nor treads, as heroines invariably do, but walks in like a Christian woman. She steps upon the stage and faces the audience that gives her hearty greeting and waits the prelude. There is time for cool survey. I am angry still about the red fiddle, and I look scrutinizingly at her dress, and think how ugly is the mode. The skirt is white silk,—a brocade, I believe,—at any rate, stiff, and, though probably full to overflowing in the hands of the seamstress, who must compress it within prescribed limits about the waist, looks scanty and straight. Why should she not, she who comes before us tonight, not as a fashion, but an inspiration,—why should she not assume that immortal classic drapery whose graceful falls and folds the sculptor vainly tries to imitate, the painter vainly seeks to limn? When Corinne tuned her lyre at the Capitol, when she knelt to be crowned with her laurel crown at the hands of a Roman senator, is it possible to conceive her swollen out with crinoline? And yet I remember, that, though sa roe etait blanche, et son costume etait tres pittoresque, it was sans s'e carter cependant assez des usages recus pour que l'on put y trouver de l'affectation; and I suppose, if one should now suddenly collapse from conventional rotundity to antique statuesqueness, the great "on" would very readily "y trouver de l'affectation." Nevertheless, though one must dress in Rome as Romans do, and though the Roman way of dressing is, taking all things into the account, as good as any, and if not more graceful, a thousand times more convenient, wholesome, comfortable, and manageable that Helen's, still it does seem that, when one steps out of the ordinary area of Roman life and assumes an abnormal position, one might, without violence, assume temporarily an abnormal dress, and refresh our dilated eyes once more with flowing, wavy outlines. Music is one of the eternities: why should not its accessories be? Why should a discord disturb the eye, when only concords delight the ear?

But I lift my eyes from Camilla's unpliant drapery to the red red rose in her hair, and thence, naturally, to her silent face, and in that instant ugly dress and red red rose fade out of my sight. What is it that I see, with tearful tenderness and a nameless pain at the heart? A young face deepened and drawn with suffering; dark, large eyes, whose natural laughing light has been quenched in tears, yet shining still with a distant gleam caught from the eternal fires. O still, pathetic face! A sterner form than Time has passed and left his vestige there. Happy little girl, playing among the flickering shadows of the Rhine-land, who could not foresee the darker shadows that should settle and never lift nor flicker from her heavy heart? Large, lambent eyes, that might have been sweet, but now are only steadfast,—that may yet be sweet, when they look tonight into a baby's cradle, but gazing now upon a waiting audience, are only steadfast. Ah! so it is. Life has such hard conditions, that every dear and precious gift, every rare virtue, every pleasant facility, every genial endowment, love, hope, joy, wit, sprightliness, benevolence, must sometimes be cast into the crucible to distil the one elixir, patience. Large, lambent eyes, in which days and nights of tears are petrified, steadfast eyes that are neither mournful nor hopeful nor anxious, but with such unvoiced sadness in their depths that the hot tears well up in my heart, what do you see in the waiting audience? Not censure, nor pity, nor forgiveness for you do not need them,—but surely a warm human sympathy, since heart can speak to heart, though the thin, fixed lips have sealed their secret well. Sad mother, whose rose of life was crushed before it had budded, tender young lips that had drunk the cup of sorrow to the dregs, while their cup of bliss should hardly yet be brimmed for life's sweet springtime, your crumbling fanes and broken arches and prostrate columns lie not among the ruins of Time. Be comforted of that. They witness of a more pitiless Destroyer, and by this token I know there shall dawn a brighter day. The God of the fatherless and the widow, of the worse than widowed and fatherless, the Avenger of the Slaughter of the Innocents, be with you, and shield and shelter and bless!

But the overture wavers to its close, and her soul hears far off the voice of the coming Spirit. A deeper light shines in the strangely introverted eyes,—the look as of one listening intently to a distant melody which no one else can hear,—the look of one to whom the room and the people and the presence are but a dream, and past and future centre on the far-off song. Slowly she raises her instrument. I almost shudder to see the tawny wood touching her white shoulder; yet that cannot be common or unclean which she so loves and carries with almost a caress. Still intent, she raises the bow with a slow sweep, as were a wand of divination. Nearer and nearer comes the heavenly voice, pouring around her a flood of mystic melody. And now at last it breaks upon our ears,—softly at first, only a sweet faint echo from that other sphere, but deepening, strengthening, conquering,—now rising on the swells of a controlling passion, now sinking into the depths with its low wail of pain; exultant, scornful, furious, in the glad outburst of opening joy and the fierce onslaught of strength; crowned, sceptred, glorious in garland and singing-robes, throned in the high realms of its inheritance, a kingdom of boundless scope and ever new delights: then sweeping down through the lower world with diminishing rapture, rapture lessening into astonishment, astonishment dying into despair, it gathers up the passion and the pain, the blight and woe and agony; all garnered joys are scattered. Evil supplants the good. Hope dies, love pales, and faith is faint and wan. But every death has its moaning ghost, pale spectre of vanished loves. Oh, fearful revenge of the outraged soul! The mysterious, uncomprehended, incomprehensible soul! The irrepressible, unquenchable, immortal soul, whose every mark is everlasting! Every secret sin committed against it cries out from the house-tops. Cunning may strive to conceal, will may determine to smother, love may fondly whisper, "It does not hurt"; but the soul will not BE outraged. Somewhere, somehow, when and where you least expect, unconscious, perhaps, to its owner, unrecognized by the many, visible only to the clear vision, somewhere, somehow, the soul bursts asunder its bonds. It is but a little song, a tripping of the fingers over the keys, a drawing of the bow across the strings,—only that! Only that? It is the protest of the wronged and ignored soul. It is the outburst of the pent and prisoned soul. All the ache and agony, all the secret wrong and silent endurance, all the rejected love and wounded trust and slighted truth, all the riches wasted, all the youth poisoned, all the hope trampled, all the light darkened,—all meet and mingle in a mad whirl of waters. They surge and lash and rage, a wild storm of harmony. Barriers are broken. Circumstance is not. The soul! the soul! the soul! the wronged and fettered soul! the freed and royal soul! It alone is king. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in! Tremble, O Tyrant, in your mountain-fastness! Tremble, Deceiver, in your cavern under the sea! Your victim is your accuser. Your sin has found you out. Your crime cries to Heaven. You have condemned and killed the just. You have murdered the innocent in secret places, and in the noonday sun the voice of their blood crieth unto God from the ground. There is no speech nor language. There is no will nor design. The seal of silence is unbroken. But unconscious, entranced, inspired, the god has lashed his Sybil on. The vital instinct of the soul, its heaven-born, up-springing life, flings back the silver veil, and reveals the hidden things to him who hath eyes to see.

The storm sobs and soothes itself to silence. There is a hush, and then an enthusiasm of delight. The small head slightly bows, the still face scarcely smiles, the slight form disappears,—and after all, it was only a fiddle.

"When Music, heavenly maid, was young," begins the ode; but Music, heavenly maid, seems to me still so young, so very young, as scarcely to have made her power felt. Her language is yet unlearned. When a baby of a month is hungry or in pain, he contrives to make the fact understood. If he is at peace with himself and his surroundings, he leaves no doubt on the subject. To precisely this degree of intelligibility has the Heavenly Maid attained among us. When Beethoven sat down to the composition of one of his grand harmonies, there was undoubtedly in his mind as distinct a conception of that which he wished to express, of that within him which clamored for expression, as ever rises before a painter's eye, or sings in a poet's brain. Thought, emotion, passion, hope, fear, joy, sorrow, each had its life and law. The painter paints you this. This the poet sings you. You stand before a picture, and to your loving, searching gaze its truths unfold. You read the poem with the understanding, and catch its concealed meanings. But what do you know of what was in Beethoven's soul? Who grasps his conception? Who faithfully renders, who even thoroughly knows his idea? Here and there to some patient night-watcher the lofty gates are unbarred, "on golden hinges turning." But, for the greater part, the musician who would tell so much speaks to unheeding ears. We comprehend him but infinitesimally. It is the Battle of Prague. Adrianus sits down to the piano, and Dion stands by his side, music-sheet in hand, acting as showman. "The cannon," says Dion, at the proper place, and you imagine you recognize reverberation. "Charge," continues Dion, and with a violent effort you fancy the ground trembles. "Groans of the wounded," and you are partly horror-struck and partly incredulous. But what lame representation is this! As if one should tie a paper around the ankle of the Belvedere Apollo, with the inscription, "This is the ankle." A collar declares, "This is the neck." A bandeau locates his "forehead." A bracelet indicates the "arm." Is the sculpture thus significant? Hardly more does our music yet signify to us. You hear an unfamiliar air. You like it or dislike it, or are indifferent. You can tell that it is slow and plaintive, or brisk and lively, or perhaps even that it is defiant or stirring; but how insensible you are to the delicate shades of its meaning! How hidden is the song in the heart of the composer till he gives you the key! You hear as though you heard not. You hear the thunder, and the cataract, and the crash of the avalanche; but the song of the nightingale, the chirp of the katydid, the murmur of the waterfall never reach you. This cannot be the ultimatum. Music must hold in its own bosom its own interpretation, and man must have in his its corresponding susceptibilities. Music is language, and language implies a people who employ and understand it. But music, even by its professor, is as yet faintly understood. Its meanings go on crutches. They must be helped out by words. What does this piece say to you? Interpret it. You cannot. You must be taught much before you can know all. It must be translated from music into speech before you can entirely assimilate it. Musicians do not trust alone to notes for moods. Their light shines only through a glass darkly. But in some other sphere, in some happier time, in a world where gross wants shall have disappeared, and therefore the grossness of words shall be no longer necessary, where hunger and thirst and cold and care and passion have no more admittance, and only love and faith and hope and admiration and aspiration, shall crave utterance, in that blessed unseen world shall not music be the everyday speech, conveying meaning not only with a sweetness, but with an accuracy, delicacy, and distinctness, of which we have now but a faint conception? Here words are not only rough, but ambiguous. There harmonies shall be minutely intelligible. Speak with what directness we can, be as explanatory, emphatic, illustrative as we may, there are mistakes, misunderstandings, many and grievous, and consequent missteps and catastrophes. But in that other world language shall be exactly coexistent with life; music shall be precisely adequate to meaning. There shall be no hidden corners, no bungling incompatibilities, but the searching sound penetrates into the secret sources of the soul, all-pervading. Not a nook, not a crevice, no maze so intricate, but the sound floats in to gather up fragrant aroma, to bear it yonder to another waiting soul, and deposit it as deftly by unerring magnetisms in the corresponding clefts.

Toot away, then, fifer-fellow! Turn your slow crank, inexorable Italian! Thrum your thrums, Miss Laura, for Signor Bernadotti! You are a way off, but your footprints point the right way. With many a yawn and sigh subjective, I greatly fear me, many a malediction objective, you are "learning the language of another world." To us, huddled together in our little ant-hill, one is "une bete," and one is "mon ange"; but from that fixed star we are all so far to have no parallax.

But I come down from the golden stars, for the white-robed one has raised her wand again, and we float away through the glowing gates of the sunrise, over the purple waves, over the vine-lands of sunny France, in among the shadows of the storied Pyrenees. Sorrow and sighing have fled away. Tragedy no longer "in sceptred pall comes sweeping by"; but young lambs leap in wild frolic, silken-fleeced sheep lie on the slopes of the hills, and shepherd calls to shepherd from his mountain-peak. Peaceful hamlets lie far down the valley, and every gentle height blooms with a happy home. Dark-eyed Basque girls dance through the fruitful orchards. I see the gleam of their scarlet scarfs wound in with their bold black hair. I hear their rich voices trilling the lays of their land, and ringing with happy laughter. But I mount higher and yet higher, till gleam and voice are lost. Here the freshening air sweeps down, and the low gurgle of living water purling out from cool, dark chasms, mingles with the shepherd's flute. Here the young shepherd himself climbs, leaping from rock to rock, supple, strong, brave, and free as the soul of his race,—the same iron in his sinews, and the same fire in his blood that dealt the "dolorous rout" to Charlemagne a thousand years ago. Sweetly across the path of Roncesvalles blow the evening gales, wafting tender messages to the listening girls below. Green grows the grass and gay the flowers that spring from the blood of princely paladins, the flower of chivalry. No bugle-blast can bring old Roland back, though it wind long and loud through the echoing woods. Lads and lasses, worthy scions of valiant stems, may sit on happy evenings in the shadow of the vines, or group themselves on the greensward in the pauses of the dance, and sing their songs of battle and victory,—the olden legends of their heroic sires; but the strain that floats down from e darkening slopes into their heart of hearts, the song that reddens in their glowing cheeks, and throbs in their throbbing breasts, and shines in their dewy eyes, is not the shock of deadly onset, glorious though it be. It is the sweet old song,—old, yet ever new,—whose burden is,

Come live with me and be my love,"—

old, yet always new,—sweet and tender, and not to be gainsaid, whether it be piped to a shepherdess in Arcadia, or whether a princess hears it from princely lips in her palace on the sea.

But the mountain shadows stretch down the valleys and wrap the meadows in twilight. Farther and farther the notes recede as the flutesman gathers his quiet flock along the winding paths. Smooth and far in the tranquil evening-air fall the receding notes, a clear, silvery sweetness; farther and farther in the hushed evening air, lessening and lowering, as you bend to listen, till the vanishing strain just cleaves, a single thread of pearl-pure melody, finer, finer, finer, through the dewy twilight, and—you hear only your own heart-beats. It is not dead, but risen. It never ceased. It knew no pause. It has gone up the heights to mingle with the songs of the angels. You rouse yourself with a start, and gaze at your neighbor half bewildered. What is it? Where are we? Oh, my remorseful heart! There is no shepherd, no mountain, no girl with scarlet ribbon and black braids bound on her beautiful temples. It was only a fiddle on a platform!

Now you need not tell me that. I know better. I have lived among fiddles all my life,—embryotic, Silurian fiddles, splintered from cornstalks, that blessed me in the golden afternoons of green summers waving in the sunshine of long ago,—sympathetic fiddles that did me yeomen's service once, when I fell off a bag of corn up garret and broke my head, and the frightened fiddles, not knowing what else to do, came and fiddled to me lying on the settee, with such boundless, extravagant flourish that nobody heard the doctor's gig rolling by, and so sinciput and occiput were left overnight to compose their own quarrels, whereby I was naturally all right before the doctor had a chance at me, suffering only the slight disadvantage of going broken-headed through life. What I might have been with a whole skull, I don't know; but I will say, that, good or bad, and even in fragments, my head is the best part of me.

Yes, I think I may dare affirm that whatever there is to know about a fiddle I know, and I can give my affidavit that it is no fiddle that takes you up on its broad wings, outstripping the "wondrous horse of brass," which required

"the space of a day natural, This is to sayn, four and twenty houres, Wher so you list, in drought or elles showres, To beren your body into every place To which your herte willeth for to pace, Withouten wemme of you, thurgh foule or faire,"

since it bears you, "withouten" even so much as your "herte's" will, in a moment's time, over the and above the stars.

A fiddle, is it? Do not for one moment believe it.—A poet walked through Southern woods, and the Dryads opened their hearts to him. They unfolded the secrets that dwell in the depths of forests. They sang to him under the starlight the songs of their green, rustling land. They whispered the loves of the trees sentient to poets:—

"The sayling pine; the cedar, proud and tall; The vine-propt elme; the poplar, never dry; The builder oake, sole king of forrests all; The aspine, good for staves; the cypresse funerall; The lawrell, meed of mightie conquerours And poets sage; the firre, that weepeth stille; The willow, worne of forlorne paramours; The eugh, obedient to the benders will The birch, for shaftes; the sallow, for the mill; The mirrhe, sweete-bleeding in the bitter wounde; The warlike beech; the ash, for nothing ill; The fruitful olive; and the platane round; The carver holme; the maple, seldom inward sound."

They sang to him with their lutes. They danced before him with sunny, subtile grace, wreathing with strange loveliness. They brought him honey and wine in the white cups of lilies, till his brain was drunk with delight; and they kept watch by his moss pillow, while he slept.

In the dew of the morning, he arose and felled the kindly tree that had sheltered him, not knowing it was the home of Arborine, fairest of the wood-nymphs. But he did it not for cruelty, but tenderness, to carve a memorial of his most memorable night, and so pulled down no thunders on his head. For Arborine loved him, and, like her, sister Undine in the North, found her soul in loving him. Unseen, the beautiful nymph guided his hand as he fashioned the sounding viol, not knowing he was fashioning a palace for a soul new-born. He wrought skilfully strung the intense chords, and smote them with the sympathetic bow. What burst of music flooded the still air! What new song trembled among the mermaiden tresses of the oaks! What new presence quivered in every listening harebell and every fearful windflower? The forest felt a change, for tricksy nymph had proved a mortal love, and put off her fairy phantasms for the deep consciousness of humanity. The wood heard, bewildered. A shudder as of sorrow thrilled through it. A breeze that was almost sad swept down the shady aisles as the Poet passed out into the sunshine and the world.

But Nature knows no pain, though Arborines appear never more. A balm springs up in every wound. Over the hills, and far away beyond their utmost purple rim, and deep into the dying days the happy love-born one followed her love, happy to exchange her sylvan immortality for the spasm of mortal life,—happy, in her human self-abnegation, to lie close on his heart and whisper close in his ear, though he knew only the loving voice and never the loving lips. Through the world they passed, the Poet and his mystic viol. It gathered to itself the melodies that fluttered over sea and land,—songs of the mountains, and songs of the valleys,—murmurs of love, and the trumpet-tones of war,—bugle-blast of huntsman on the track of the chamois, and mother's lullaby to the baby at her breast. All that earth had of sweetness the nymph drew into her viol-home, and poured it forth anew in strains of more than mortal harmony. The fire and fervor of human hearts, the quiet ripple of inland waters, the anthem of the stormy sea, the voices of the flowers and the birds, their melody to the song of her who knew them all.

The Poet died. Died, too, sweet Arborine, swooning away in the fierce grasp of this stranger Sorrow, to enter by the black gate of death into the full presence and recognition of him by loving whom she had learned to be.

The viol passed into strange hands, and wandered down the centuries, but its olden echoes linger still. Fragrance of Southern woods, coolness of shaded waters, inspiration of mountain-breezes, all the secret forces of Nature that the wood-nymph knew, and the joy, the passion, and the pain that throb only in a woman's heart, lie still, silent under the silent strings, but wakening into life at the touch of a royal hand.

Do you not believe my story? But I have seen the viol and the royal hand!



CHERI

Cheri is the Canary-bird,—a yellow bird with a white tail, when the cat leaves him any tail at all. He came as a gift, and I welcomed him, but without gratitude. For a gift is nothing. Always behind the gift stands the giver, and under the gift lies the motive. The gift itself has no character. It may be a blunder, a bribe, an offering, according to the nature and design of the giver; and you are outraged, or magnanimous, or grateful. Cheri came to me with no love-token under his soft wings,—only the "good riddance" of his heartless master. Those little black eyes had twinkled, those shining silken feathers had gleamed, that round throat had waved with melody in vain. He had worn his welcome out. Even the virtues which should have throbbed, tender and all-embracing, under priestly vestments, had no tenderness, no embrace for him,—only a mockery and a prophecy, a cold and cynical prediction that I should soon tire of his shrill voice. Yes, Cheri, your sweet silver trills, your rippling June-brook warbles, were to him only a shrew's scolding. I took the bird wrathfully, his name had been Cherry, and rechristened him on the spot Cheri, in anticipation of the new life that was to dawn upon him, no longer despised Cherry, but Cheri, my cherished one.

He has been with me now nearly a year, and every trick of his voice and head and tail is just as fresh, graceful, and charming as on the first day of his arrival. He is a constant recreation and delight. I put him in my own room, and went up to look at him two or three times the first evening. Every time I looked he would be quite still, but his little black beads of eyes shone wide open in the candle-light, and I recalled how Chaucer's

"Smale foules maken melodie That slepen alle night with open eye,"

and reflected that Cheri certainly made melodie enough in the daytime to be ranked with the poetic tribe; but one night, after he had been here long enough to have worn away his nervous excitement, I happened to go into the room very softly, and the black beads had disappeared. The tiny head had disappeared, too, and only a little round ball of feathers was balanced on his perch. Then I remembered that chickens have a way of putting their heads in their pockets when they go to sleep, and poetry yielded to poultry, Cheri stepped out of Chaucer, and took his place in the hencoop.

He has had an eventful life since he came to me. In the summer I hung him on a hook under piazza for the merry company of robins and bluebirds, which he enjoyed excessively. One day, in the midst of a most successful concert, an envious gust swept down the cage, up went the door, and out flew the frightened bird. I could have borne to lose him, but I was sure he would lose himself,—a tender little dilettante, served a prince all the days of his life, never having to lift a finger to help himself, or knowing a want unsatisfied. Now, thrown suddenly upon his own resources, homeless, friendless, forlorn, how could ever make his fortune in this bleak New England, for all he has, according to Cuvier, more brains in his head in proportion to his size than any other created being? I saw him already in midsummer, drenched with cold rains, chilled and perishing; but sharper eyes than mine had marked his flight, and a pair of swift hands plunged after him into the long grass that tangled his wings and kept him back from headlong destruction. Amicable relations between Cheri and the cat are on a most precarious footing. The cat was established in the house before Cheri came,—a lovely, frolicsome kitten, that sat in my lap, purred in my face, rubbed her nose against my book, and grew up, to my horror, out of all possibility of caresses, into a great, ugly, fierce, fighting animal, that comes into the house drenched and dripping from the mud-puddle in which she has been rolling in a deadly struggle with every Tom Hyer and Bill Sayers of the cat kind that make night hideous through the village. This cat seems to be possessed with a devil every time she looks at Cheri. Her green eyes bulge out of her head, her whole feline soul rushes into them, and glares with a hot, greeny-yellow fire and fury of unquenchable desire. One evening I had put the cage on a chair, and was quietly reading in the room below, when a great slam and bang startled the house. "The bird!" shrieked a voice, mine or another's. I rushed upstairs. The moonlight shone in, revealing the cage upturned on the floor, the water running, the seeds scattered about, and a feather here and there. The cat had managed to elude observation and glide in, and she now managed to elude observation and glide out. Cheri was alive, but his enemy had attacked him in the flank, and turned his left wing, which was pretty much gone, according to all appearances. He could not mount his perch, and for three days, crouching on the floor of his cage, life seemed to have lost its charm. His spirits drooped, his appetite failed, and his song was hushed. Then his feathers grew out again, his spirit returned to him with his appetite, and he hopped about as good as new. To think that cat should have been able to thrust her villanous claw in far enough to clutch a handful of feathers of him before she upset the cage! I have heard that canaries sometimes die of fright. If so, I think Cheri would have been justified in doing it. To have a great overgrown monster, with burning globes of eyes as big as your head and claws as sharp as daggers, come glaring on you in the darkness, overturn your house, and grab half your side with one huge paw, is a thing well calculated to alarm a person of delicate organization.

Then I said to myself, this cat thinks she has struck a placer, and a hundred to one she will be driving her pick in here again directly. So I removed the cage immediately, and set it on a high bureau, with a "whisking-stick" close by it. Sure enough I was awakened the next morning before day by a prolonged and mournful "maeouw" of disappointment from the old dragon at not finding the prey where she had expected. Before she had time to push her researches to success, she and I and the stick were not letting the grass grow under our feet on the stairs. Long after, when the fright and flurry had been forgotten, the cage was again left in a rocking-chair in the upper front entry, where I had been sitting in sunshine all the afternoon with Cheri, who thinks me, though far inferior to a robin or a finch, still better than no company at all. In the course of the evening I happened to open the lower entry door, when the cat suddenly appeared on the lower stair. I should have supposed she had come from the sitting-room with me, but for a certain elaborate and enforced nonchalance in her demeanor, a jaunty air of insouciance, as far removed, on the one hand, from the calm equilibrium of dignity which almost imperceptibly soothes and reassures you, as from the guileless gayety of infantile ignorance, which perforce "medicines your weariness," on the other,—a demeanor which at once disgusts and alarms you. I felt confident that some underhand work was going on. I went upstairs. There was Cheri again, this time with his right wing gone, and a modicum of his tail. The cage had retained its position, but the Evil One had made her grip at him; and the same routine of weariness, silence, loss of appetite and spirits was to be gone through with again, followed by re-pluming and recuperating. But every time I think of it, I am lost in wonder at the skill and sagacity of that cat. It was something to carry on the campaign in a rocking-chair, without disturbing the base of operations so as to make a noise and create a diversion in favor of the bird; but the cunning and self-control which, as soon as I opened the door, made her leave the bird, and come purring about my feet, and tossing her innocent head to disarm suspicion, was wonderful. I look at her sometimes, when we have been sitting together a while, and say, with steadfast gaze, "Cat-soul, what are you? Where are you? Whence come you? Whither go you?" But she only her whiskers, and gives me no satisfaction.

But I saw at once that I must make a different disposition of Cheri. It would never do to have him thus mauled. To be sure, I suppose the cat might be educationally mauled into letting him alone; but why should I beat the beast for simply acting after her kind? Has not the Manciple, with as much philosophy as poetry, bidden,—

"Let take a cat, and foster hire with milke And tendre flesh, and make hire couche of silke, And let hire see a mous go by the wall, Anon she weiveth milke and flesh, and all, And every deintee that is in that hous, Swich appetit hath she to ete the mous Lo, here hath kind hire domination, And appetit flemeth discretion"?

Accordingly I respected the "domination" of "kind," took the cage into the parlor and hung it up in the folds of the window-curtain, where there is always sunshine, wrapping a strip of brown paper around the lower part of the cage, so that he should not scatter his seeds over the carpet. What is the result? Perversely he forsakes his cup of seed, nicely mixed to suit his royal taste; forsakes his conch-shell, nicely fastened within easy reach; forsakes the bright sand that lies whitely strewn beneath his feet, and pecks, pecks, pecks away at that stiff, raw, coarse brown paper, jagging great gaps in it from hour to hour. I do not mind the waste of paper, even at its present high prices; but suppose there should be an ornithological dyspepsia, or a congestion of the gizzard, or some internal derangement? The possibility of such a thing gave me infinite uneasiness at first; but he has now been at it so long without suffering perceptible harm, that I begin to think Nature knows what she is about, and brown paper agrees with birds. I am confident, however, that he would devout it all the same, whether it were salutary or otherwise, for he is a mule-headed fellow. I let him loose on the flower-stand yesterday, hoping he might deal death to a horde of insects who had suddenly squatted on the soil of the money-plant. He scarcely so much as looked at the insects, but hopped up to the adjoining rose-bush, and proceeded to gorge himself with tender young leaves. I tilted him away from that, and he fluttered across the money-plant over to the geranium opposite. Disturbed there, he flashed to the other side of the stand, and, quick as thought, gave one mighty dab at a delicate little fuchsia that is just "picking up" from the effects of transplanting and a long winter journey. Seeing he was bent on making himself disagreeable, I put him into his cage again, first having to chase him all about the room to catch him, and prying him up at last from between a picture and the wall, where he had flown and settled down in his struggle to get out. For my Cheri is not in the least tame. He is an entirely uneducated bird. I have seen canaries sit on people's fingers and eat from their tongues, but Cheri flies around like a madman at the first approach of fingers. Indeed, he quite provokes me by his want of trust. He ought to know by this time that I am his friend, yet he goes off into violent hysterics the moment I touch him. He does not even show fight. There is no outcry of anger or alarm, but one "Yang!" of utter despair. He gives up at once. Life is a burden, his "Yang!" says. "Everything is going to ruin. There is no use in trying. I wish I never was born. Yang!" Little old croaker, what are you Yang-ing for? Nobody wishes to harm you. It is your little cowardly heart that sees lions and hyenas in a well-meaning forefinger and thumb. Be sensible.

Another opportunity for the exhibition of his perversity is furnished by his bathing. His personal habits are exquisite. He has a gentleman's liking for cold water and the appliances of cleanliness; but if I spread a newspaper on the floor, and prepare everything for a comfortable and convenient bath, the little imp clings to his perch immovable. It is not only a bath that he wishes, but fun. Mischief is his sine qua non of enjoyment. "What is the good of bathing, if you cannot spoil anything?" says he. "If you will put the bathtub in the window, where I can splash and spatter the glass and the curtains and the furniture, very well, but if not, why—" he sits incorrigible, with eyes half closed, pretending to be sleepy, and not see water anywhere, the rogue!

One day I heard a great "to-do" in the cage, and found that half the blind was shut, and helped Cheri to a reflection of himself, which he evidently thought was another bird, and he was in high feather. He hopped about from perch to perch, sidled from one side of the cage to the other, bowed and bobbed and courtesied to himself, sung and swelled and smirked, and became thoroughly frantic with delight. "Poor thing!" I said, "you are lonely, no wonder." I had given him a new and shining cage, a green curtain, a sunny window; but of what avail are these to a desolate heart? Who does not know that the soul may starve in splendor? "Solitude," says Balzac, I think, "is a fine thing; but it is also a fine thing to have some one to whom you can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing." I know that I am but a poor substitute for a canary-bird,—a gross and sorry companion for one of ethereal mould. I can supply seed and water and conch-shells, but what do I know of finchy loves and hopes? What sympathy have I to offer in his joyous or sorrowful moods? How can I respond to his enthusiasms? How can I compare notes with him as to the sunshine and the trees and the curtain and views of life? It is not sunshine, but sympathy, that lights up houses into homes. Companionship is what he needs, for his higher aspirations and his everyday experiences,—somebody to whom he can observe "The sand is rather gritty today, isn't it?"

"Very much as usual, my dear."

"Here is a remarkably plump seed, my dear, won't you have it?"

"No, thank you, dear, nothing more. Trol-la-la-r-r-r!"

"Do let me help you to a bit of this hemp. It is quite a marvel of ripeness."

"Thank you. Just a snip. Plenty."

"My dear, I think you are stopping in the bathtub too long this morning. I fancied you a trifle hoarse yesterday."

"It was the company, pet. I strained my voice slightly in that last duet."

"We shall have to be furnished with a new shell before long. This old one is getting to be rather the last peas of the picking."

"Yes, I nearly broke my beak over it yesterday. I was quite ashamed of it when the ladies were staring at you so admiringly."

"Little one, I have a great mind to try that swing. It has tempted me this long while."

"My love, I beg you will do no such thing. You will inevitably break your neck."

Instead of this pleasant conjugal chit-chat, what has he? Nothing. He stands looking out at the window till his eyes ache, and then he turns around and looks at me. If any one comes in and begins to talk, and he delightedly joins, he gets a handkerchief thrown over his cage. Sometimes the cat creeps in,—very seldom, for I do not trust her, even with the height of the room between them, and punish her whenever I find her on forbidden ground, by taking her upstairs and putting her out on the porch-roof, where she has her choice to stay and starve or jump off. This satisfies my conscience while giving a good lesson to the cat, who is not fond of saltatory feats, now that she is getting into years. If it is after her kind to prey upon birds, and she must therefore not be beaten, it is also after her kind to leap from anywhere and come down on her feet, and therefore the thing does not harm her. Whenever she does stealthily worm herself in, Cheri gives the pitch the moment he sets eyes on her. Cat looks up steadily at him for five minutes. Cheri, confident, strikes out in a very tempting way. Cat describes a semicircle around the window, back and forth, back and forth, keeping ever her back to the room and her front to the foe, glaring and mewing and licking her chaps. O, what a delicious tit-bit, if one could but get at it! Cheri sings relentlessly. Like Shirley with Louis Moore in her clutches, he will not subdue one of his charms in compassion.

"Certes it is NOT of herte, all that he sings."

She leaps into a chair. Not a quarter high enough. She jumps to the window-seat, and walks to and fro, managing the turning-points with much difficulty. Impossible. She goes over to the other window. Still worse. She takes up position on the sofa, and her whole soul exhales into one want.

She mews and licks her chaps alternately. Cheri "pitilessly sweet" sings with unsparing insolence at the top of his voice, and looks indifferently over her head.

That is the extent of his society. "It is too bad," I said one day, and scoured the country for a canary-bird. Everybody had had one, but it was sold. Then I remembered Barnum's Happy Family, and went out to the hen-pen, and brought in a little auburn chicken, with white breast, and wings just budding; a size and a half larger than Cheri, it is true, but the smallest of the lot, and very soft and small for a chicken, the prettiest wee, waddling tot you ever saw, a Minnie Warren of a little duck, and put him in the cage. A tempest in a teapot! Cheri went immediately into fits and furies. He hopped about convulsively. You might have supposed him attacked simultaneously with St. Anthony's fire, St. Vitus's dance, and delirium tremens. He shrieked, he writhed, he yelled, he raved. The chicken was stupid. If he had exerted himself a little to be agreeable, if he had only shown the smallest symptom of interest or curiosity or desire to cultivate an acquaintance, I have no doubt something might have been accomplished; but he just huddled down in one corner of the cage, half frightened to death, like a logy, lumpy, country bumpkin as he was, and I swept him back to his native coop in disgust. Relieved from the lout's presence, Cheri gradually laid aside his tantrums, smoothed down his ruffled plumes, and resumed the manners of a gentleman.

My attempt at happy families was nipped in the bud, decidedly.

By and by I went to the market-town, and, having sold my butter and eggs, hunted up a bird-fancier. He had plenty of heliotropes, verbenas, and japonicas, and HAD had plenty of birds, but of course they were every one gone. Nobody wanted them. He had just about given them away, for a quarter of a dollar or so, and since then ever so many had been to buy them. Could he tell me where I might find one? Yes, he sold one to the barber last week, down near the depot. Didn't believe but what he would sell it. Was it a female bird? For my ambition had grown by what it fed on, and, instead of contenting myself simply with a companion for Cheri, I was now planning for a whole brood of canaries, with all the interests of housekeeping, baby-tending, and the manifold small cares incident upon domestic life. In short, I was launching out upon an entirely new career, setting a new world a-spinning in that small wire cage. Yes, it was a female bird. A good bird? For I could not understand the marvelously low price. Yes 'm, prime. Had eight young ones last year. Eight young ones! I rather caught my breath. I wanted a brood, but I thought three was the regular number, and I must confess I could hardly look with fortitude on such a sudden and enormous accession of responsibility. Besides, the cage was not half large enough. And how could they all bathe? And how could I take proper care of so many? And, dear me, eight young ones! And eight more next year is sixteen. And the grandchildren! And the great-grandchildren! Hills on hills and Alps on Alps! I shall be pecked out of house and home. I walked up the street musingly, and finally concluded not to call on the barber just yet.

It was very well I did so, for just afterwards Cheri's matins and vespers waxed fainter and fainter, and finally ceased altogether. In great anxiety I called in the highest medical science, which announced that he was only shedding his feathers. This opinion was corroborated by numerous little angelic soft fine feathers scattered about in localities that precluded the cat. Cheri is a proud youngster, and I suppose he thought if he must lose his good looks, there was no use in keeping up his voice; therefore he moped and pouted for several months, and would have appeared to very great disadvantage in case I had introduced a stranger to his good graces.

So Cheri is still alone in the world, but when my ship comes home from sea and brings an additional hour to my day, and a few golden eagles to my purse, he is going to have his mate, eight young ones and all, and I shall buy him a new cage, a trifle smaller than Noah's ark, and a cask of canary-seed and a South Sea turtle-shell, and just put them in the cage and let them colonize. If they increase and multiply beyond all possibility of provision, why, I shall by that time, perhaps have become world-encrusted and hard-hearted, and shall turn the cat in upon them for an hour or two, which will no doubt have the effect of at once thinning them down to wieldy proportions.

Sweet little Cheri. My heart smites me to see you chirping there so innocent and affectionate while I sit here plotting treason against you. Bright as is the day and dazzling as the sunlit snow, you turn away from it all, so strong is your craving for sympathy, and bend your tiny head towards me to pour out the fulness of your song.

And what a song it is! All the bloom of his beautiful islands sheds its fragrance there. The hum of his honey-bees roving through beds of spices, the loveliness of dark-eyed maidens treading the wine-press with ruddy feet, the laughter of young boys swinging in the vines and stained with the scented grapes,—all the music that rings through his orange-groves, all the sunshine of the tropics caught in the glow of fruit and flower, in the blue of sky and sea, in the blinding whiteness of the shore and the amethystine evening,—all come quivering over the western wave in the falls of his tuneful voice. You shall hear it while the day is yet dark in the folds of the morning twilight,—a weak, faint, preliminary "whoo! whoo!" uncertain and tentative, then a trill or two of awakened assurance, and then, with a confident, courageous gush and glory of soul, he flings aside all minor considerations, and dashes con amore into the very middle of things. I am not musical, and cannot give you his notes in technical hieroglyphs, but in exact and intelligible lines such as all may understand, whether musical or not, his song is like this,—and you may rely upon its accuracy, for I wrote it down from his own lips this morning:—

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SIDE-GLANCES AT HARVARD CLASS-DAY

It happened to me once to "assist" at the celebration of Class-Day at Harvard University. Class-Day is the peculiar institution of the Senior Class, and marks its completion of College study and lease from College rules.

Harvard has set up her Lares and Penates in a fine old grove, or a fine old grove and green have sprouted up around her, as the case may be,—most probably the latter, if one may judge from the appearance of the buildings which constitute the homes of the students, and which seem to have been built, and to be now sustained, without the remotest reference to taste or influence, but solely to furnish shelter,—angular, formal, stiff, windowy, bricky, and worse within than without. Why, I pray to know, as the first inquiry suggested by Class-Day, why is it that a boys' school should be placed beyond the pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of life, that they can safely dispense with the conditions of amenity? Have boys so strong a predisposition to grace, that society can afford to take them away from home and its influences, and turn them loose with dozens of other boys into a bare and battered boarding-house, with its woodwork dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched; windows dingy and dim; walls dingy and gray and smoked; everything narrow and rickety, unhomelike and unattractive?