The wretched condition of the dwellings of the agricultural laborers in many parts of the country has attracted much attention, and plans for bettering their condition have frequently been urged. Lately the interest in the subject has increased, prominent statesmen on both sides having espoused the cause. In view of the political power which the recent extension of the suffrage has given to the agricultural laborers, there is a general expectation that a measure will shortly be enacted requiring the owner or occupier of the farm to give each laborer a plot of ground "of a size that he and his family can cultivate without impairing his efficiency as a wage-earner," at a rent fixed by arbitration, and providing for a loan of money by the state for the erection of a proper dwelling. The provisions of the Irish Land Act and its amendment relating to laborers' cottages and allotments suggest the lines along which legislation for the improvement of laborers' dwellings in England and Scotland is likely to proceed.

Then there is the scheme for nationalizing the land, the state paying the present owners no compensation, or a very small amount, and assuming the chief functions now exercised by the landlords. No statesman has yet ventured to advocate this scheme, but it has called forth a great deal of discussion on the platform and in the newspapers and reviews, and has captivated most of those who are inclined to adopt socialistic theories of property. Mr. George himself has preached his favorite doctrine to the crofters, whose views of their own rights in the land have led them to look upon the plan with more favor than the English tenants. Others, too, who have plans to advocate for giving tenants and laborers greater rights have taken special pains to have their views presented to the crofters, since the claims of the latter against the landlords seem to rest upon so much stronger grounds than those of the English tenant.

The agitations for the reform of the land laws in Ireland and England, and the utterances of the advocates of the various plans for increasing the rights and privileges of the tenant, have led the crofters to dwell upon their grievances until they have become thoroughly aroused. They have in many cases refused to pay rent, have resisted eviction and driven away officers who attempted to serve writs, have offered violence to the persons or property of some of those who have ventured to take the crofts of evicted tenants, and in some instances have taken forcible possession of lands which they thought ought to be added to their crofts. The government found it necessary a short time ago to send gunboats with marines and extra police to some of the islands and districts to restore the authority of the law. The crofters and their friends are thoroughly organized, and seem likely to insist upon their claims with the persistency that is characteristic of their race. It is now generally conceded that some remedy must be provided for their grievances and hardships.

The remedy that has been most frequently suggested, the only one recommended by the Emigration Commissioners in 1841 and by Sir John McNeil in 1852, is emigration. The crofting system, it has often been urged, belongs to a bygone age; it survives only because of its remoteness from the centres of civilization and the ruggedness of the country; the implements used by the crofters are of the most primitive sort, while their agricultural methods are "slovenly and unskilful to the last degree." It is impossible for these small farmers, with their crude implements and methods, to compete with the large farmers, who have better land and use the most improved implements and methods. Besides, many of the crofters are, and their ancestors for many generations have been, "truly laborers, living chiefly by the wages of labor, and holding crofts and lots for which they pay rents, not from the produce of the land, but from wages." If they cannot find employment within convenient distance of their present homes, the best and kindest thing for them is to help them to go where there is a good demand for labor and better opportunities for earning a decent livelihood. To encourage them to stay on their little crofts, where they are frequently on the verge of want, is unkind and very bad policy. One who has seen the wretched hovels in which some of these crofter families live, the small patches of unproductive land on which they try to subsist, the hardships which they sometimes suffer, and the lack of opportunities for bettering their condition in their native Highlands or islands, and who knows how much has been accomplished by the enterprise and energy of Highlanders in other parts of the world, can hardly help wishing that they might all be helped to emigrate to countries where their industry and economy would more certainly be rewarded, and where they would have a fairer prospect for success in the struggle for life and advancement. Many of them would undoubtedly be far better off if they could emigrate under favorable conditions. The descendants of many of those who were forced to leave their homes by "cruel and heartless Highland lairds," and who suffered terrible hardships in getting to this country and founding new homes, have now attained such wealth and influence as they could not possibly have acquired among their ancestral hills. The Royal Commissioners recommended that the state should aid those who may be willing to emigrate from certain islands and districts where the population is apparently too great for the means of subsistence.

The crofters are, however, strongly attached to their native hills and glens, and they claim that such laws can and ought to be enacted as will enable them to live in comfort where they are. The present, it is urged, is a particularly favorable time to establish prosperous small farmers in many parts of the Highlands where sheep-farming has proved a failure. The inhabitants of the coasts and islands are largely a seafaring people. There is quite as much Norse as Celtic blood in the veins of many of them, and the Norseman's love of the sea leads them naturally to fishing or navigation. The herring-fisheries, with liberal encouragement on the part of the government, might be made far more profitable to the fishermen and to the nation. Besides, the seafaring people of the Highlands and islands "constitute a natural basis for the naval defence of the country, a sort of defence which cannot be extemporized, and which in possible emergencies can hardly be overrated." At the present time they "contribute four thousand four hundred and thirty-one men to the Royal Naval Reserve,—a number equivalent to the crews of seven armored war-steamers of the first class." It is surely desirable to foster a population which has been a "nursery of good citizens and good workers for the whole empire," and of the best sailors and soldiers for the British navy and army. Public policy demands that every legitimate means be used to better the condition of the crofters and cottars, and to encourage them to remain in and develop the industries of their own country, instead of abandoning it to sheep and deer. Private interests must be made subordinate to the public good. Parliament may therefore interfere with the rights of landed property when the interests of the people and of the nation demand it, as they do in this case.

It was on some such grounds that the Royal Commissioners recommended that restrictions be placed upon the further extension of deer-forests, that the fishing interests should be aided by the government, that the proprietors should be required to restore to the crofters lands formerly used as common pastures, and to give them, under certain restrictions, the use of more land, enlarging their holdings, and that in certain cases they should be compelled to grant leases at rents fixed by arbitration, and to give compensation for improvements. The government is already helping the fishermen by constructing a new harbor and by improving means of communication and transportation, and proposes to greatly lighten taxation in the near future.

The bill which the late government introduced into Parliament does not undertake to provide for aid to those who may wish to emigrate, or for the compulsory restoration of common pasture, or for the enlargement of the holdings. It does, however, propose to lend money on favorable terms for stocking and improving enlarged or new holdings. As a convention of landlords which was held at Aberdeen last January, and which represented a large amount of land, resolved to increase the size of crofters' holdings as suitable opportunities offered and when the tenants could profitably occupy and stock the same, the demand for more land seems likely to be conceded in many cases without compulsory legislation. The bill defines a crofter to be a tenant from year to year of a holding of which the rent is less than fifty pounds a year, and which is situated in a crofting-parish. Every such crofter is to have security of tenure so long as he pays his rent and complies with certain other conditions; his rent is to be fixed by an official valuer or by arbitration, if he and his landlord cannot agree in regard to it; he is to have compensation, on quitting his holding, for all his improvements which are suitable for the holding; and his heirs may inherit his interests, although he may not sell or assign them. Such propositions seem radical and calculated to interfere greatly with proprietary rights and the freedom of contract. They are, however, but little more than statements of the customs that already exist on some of the best estates. Just as the government by the Irish Land Law Act (1881) took up the Ulster tenant-right customs, gave them the force of law, and extended them to all Ireland, it is proposed by this bill to give the sanction of law to those customary rights which the crofters claim to have inherited from former generations, and which have long been conceded by some of the landlords.

Such a measure of relief will not make all the crofters contented and prosperous. It will, however, give them security against being turned out of their homes and against excessively high rents, and will encourage them to spend their labor and money in improving their holdings. If some assistance could be given to those who may wish to emigrate from overcrowded districts, and if the government would make liberal advances of money to promote the fishing industry, the prospect that the discontent and destitution would disappear would be much better. The relief proposed will, however, be thankfully received by many of the crofters and their friends.

DAVID BENNETT KING.



MY FRIEND GEORGE RANDALL.

Since his own days at the university George Randall had always had a friend or two among the students who came after him. I remember how in my Freshman year I used to see Tom Wayward going up the stairs in the Academy of Music building to his office, and how I used to envy Billy Wylde when I met him arm in arm with George on one of the campus malls. It was occasionally whispered about that Randall's influence on these young men was not of the very best, and that he used to have a never-empty bottle of remarkably smooth whiskey in his closet, along with old letter-files and brief-books; and it is undoubtedly true that Perry Tomson and I used to consider George's friends as models in the manner of smoking a pipe, or ordering whiskey-and-soda at Bertrand's to give us an appetite for our mutton-chops or our bifteck aux pommes, and in the delightful self-sufficiency with which in the pleasant spring days they would cut recitations and loll on the grass smoking cigarettes right under the nose, almost, of the professor. But they are both married now, and settled down to respectable conventional success; and Billy Wylde, as I happen to know, has repaid the money which George lent him wherewith to finish his education in Germany. The estimable matrons of Lincoln who made so much ado over George's ruining these young men,—who had such bright intellects and might have been expected to do something but for that dreadfully well read lawyer's awful influence,—these women do not consider it worth their while now, in the face of the facts as they have turned out, to remember their predictions, but confine themselves to making their dismal prophecies anew in regard to the three young fellows whom George has of late taken up. But then I remember how they went on about Perry Tomson and me in the early part of our Junior year, when we began to enjoy the favor of George's friendship; and if their miserable croaking never does any good, I fancy it will never work any very great harm: so one might as well let them croak in peace. In fact, one would more easily dam the waters of Niagara than stop them, and George, I know, doesn't care the cork of an empty beer-bottle what they say of him.

I have never tried to analyze the influence for good George had over us, or account for it in any way, nor do I care to. I have always considered his friendship for me as one of the pleasantest and most profitable experiences of my life in Lincoln. Perry and I were always more close and loving friends, and cared for George with a silent but abiding sense of gratitude in addition to the other sources of our affection for him, after he showed us the boyish foolishness of our quarrel about Lucretia Knowles. Of course I ought not to have grown angry at Perry's good-natured cynicism; for how could he have imagined that I cared for her? Though I sometimes think, even now, that Perry was indeed anxious lest I should fall in love with her, and wanted to ridicule me out of the notion, and I fear, in spite of his acquaintance, that he disapproves of our engagement. I wonder if he will ever get over his prejudice against women. The dear old fellow! if he would only consent to know Lucretia better I am sure he would.

One night in the winter before we graduated, Perry and I went with George to the Third House, which is a mock session of the legislature that the political wags of the State take advantage of to display their wit and quickness at repartee and ability to make artistic fools of themselves. If it happens to be a year for the election of a senator, as it was in this case, the different candidates are in turn made fun of and held up to ridicule or approval; and the chief issues of the time are handled without gloves in a way that is always amusing and often worth while in showing the ridiculous nature of some of them. The Third House is usually held on some evening during the first or second week of the session, and is opened by the Speaker calling the house to order with a thundering racket of the gavel—"made from the wood of trees grown on the prairies of the State"—and announcing the squatter governor. Since the State was a territory, this announcement, after due formalities, has been followed by the statement that, as the squatter governor is somewhat illiterate, his message will be read by his private secretary. After this personage has read his score or more pages of jokes, sarcastic allusions, and ridiculous recommendations, the discussion of the message takes place, during which any one who thinks of a bright remark may get up and fire it at the gallery; and many very lame attempts pass for good wit, and much private spite goes for harmless fooling.

George got us seats in the gallery next to old Billy Gait, the bald-headed bachelor, who owns half a dozen houses which he rents for fifty dollars a month each, and who lives on six hundred a year, investing the surplus of his income every now and then in another house. William, as usual, had a pretty girl at his elbow, and we heard him telling her how he could never get interested in George Eliot's novels, and how it beat him to know why he ever wrote such tedious books. The young lady smiled over her fan at Randall, and said that she supposed Mr. Eliot had a great deal of spare time on his hands, but of course he had no business to employ it in writing tiresome novels.

George, who knew everybody, had a kindly greeting for all who were within its reach, even for the tired-looking little school-teacher, who had come out with her landlady's fifteen-year-old son as an escort and in a little while had settled down to quiet enjoyment of the squatter governor's message, approving with a quiet smile the grin that occasionally spread over Perry's good-humored face. As for me, I was made miserable from the start by seeing Lucretia Knowles in one of the best seats on the floor, with a conceited fool of a newspaper-correspondent at her side, whispering nonsense in her ear at such a rate that she did nothing but laugh and turn her pretty head back to speak with Mamie Jennings, her fidus Achates, and never once cast her eyes toward the gallery. She has said since that she knew I was there all the time, and that she didn't dare look at me, because I was such a frightful picture of jealousy, with my fingers in my hair and my elbow on the gallery railing, staring down on the floor as if I should like to drop a bomb and annihilate the entire lot. It is all very well to look back now and laugh and feel sorry for the curly-locked journalist, who is writing letters from Mexico and trying to get over the disappointment which the knowledge of our engagement gave him, but it was very little fun for me at the time.

I turned away a dozen times, and swore inwardly that I wouldn't look that way again, and after each resolve I would find my eyes glancing from one person to another in Lu's vicinity, until finally they would rest again on her. When I had declared for the thirteenth time that I wouldn't contemplate her heartless flirting, I noticed George bow to some one who had just come in at the gallery door. A young man from one of the western counties was making a satirical speech in favor of the woman's suffrage amendment, misquoting Tennyson's "Princess" and making the gallery shake with laughter, at the time; but I noticed George's face light up and his eyes sparkle with pleasure at the sight of the new-comer. She was a beautiful lady, over thirty, I should say, with the sweetest face, for a sad one, I had ever seen. Of course, in a certain way I like Lucretia's style of beauty better; but Mrs. Herbert was beautiful in a way, so far as the women I have ever seen are concerned, peculiar to herself. She was rather slender, and had a calm, graceful bearing that I somehow at once associated with purity and nobleness. She was quite simply dressed, and had on a small widow's bonnet, with the ribbons tied under her chin, while a charming little girl, whose hair curled obstinately over her forehead, had hold of her hand.

I was somewhat surprised—I will not say disappointed exactly—to see her lips break into a glad smile, though it made her face look all the lovelier and sweeter, in reply to George's greeting; and when she came toward us, as he beckoned her to do, every one immediately and gladly made room for her to pass. Perry and I gave our seats to Mrs. Herbert and her little girl; and I found myself speculating, as I leaned against one of the pillars, on the difference of expression in the eyes of the two, which were otherwise so much alike,—the same deep shade of brown, the same soft look, the same lashes, and yet what a vast difference when one thought of the combined effect of all these similar details. I spoke to Perry of it, and he good-naturedly poked fun at me, saying I was forever trying to see a romance or a history in people's eyes.

"Well, I suppose you will say she isn't even lovely," I exclaimed, with impatience.

"I'm no judge," he replied, with exasperating carelessness; "but a little too pale, I should say. I wish George hadn't introduced her to me."

"Why?"

"Oh, it made me feel cheap to have to back into old Billy Gait's bony legs and try to bow and shake hands before everybody,—in the eyes of the assembled community, as Charley McWenn would say."

McWenn was the stupid block of a journalist,—for I do think him a stupid block, in spite of his cleverness,—and I realized then that I had forgotten for a moment all about Lucretia. I could not see her from my new position, so I amused myself by imagining how she was carrying on.

At last George and Mrs. Herbert rose up to go, and the former, as he asked our forgiveness for leaving us, told us to come to his office when we had enough of the Third House, and, if he wasn't there, to wait for him. "We'll go over to Bertrand's and have some oysters," he said, with his confidence-inspiring smile. I have always thought that if George had not had so pleasant a smile and such a soulful laugh we should never have been such friends.

We found him waiting for us at the foot of the Academy of Music stairs, with a cigar in his mouth and one for each of us in his hand, and we knew from experience that his case was filled with a reserve.

"It's a pleasant night, boys, isn't it?" he said, looking up at the stars (wonderfully bright they were in the clear, cold atmosphere) as we went, crunching the snow under our feet, along the deserted streets to the little back-entrance we knew of to Bertrand's.

"Yes," said Perry; "but you missed the best thing of the whole circus by leaving before Colonel Bouteille made his speech in favor of the prohibition amendment." And he gave a resume of the colonel's laughable sophistry for George's benefit,—and for mine as well, for I had paid no attention to the old toper's remarks.

We could see the glimmer of lights behind the shutters of the faro-room over Sudden's saloon and hear the rattle of the ivory counters as we passed.

"Do you ever go up there?" asked George, interrupting Perry.

"Why, yes; sometimes," we answered.

"Play a little now and then? I suppose?"

"We don't like to loaf around such a place," said Perry rather grandly, considering our circumstances, "without putting down a few dollars."

"That's all right," said George; "but once or twice is enough, boys. After you have seen what the thing is like, keep away from the tiger. She is a greedy beast, and always hungry; and of course you can't think of sitting down at a poker-table with the professional players."

Direct advice was rather a new strain for Randall, and we were not surprised when he dropped it abruptly as we filed into a little private room at the restaurant.

"Yes, I fancy old Bouteille might have made a humorous speech," he said, after ordering the oysters. "Three?" he added, looking at me, "or four?"

"Quarts?" I asked in reply.

George nodded.

"Two, I should say."

"Oh, bother!" exclaimed Perry. "We should only have to trouble the waiter again."

So George ordered four bottles of beer.

"It's after ten o'clock, sir," said the waiter doubtfully. It is needless to say that he was a new one.

"That's the reason we came here," answered George, with a calm manner of assumption that dissipated the waiter's doubts while it evidently filled him with remorse. "Where's Auguste?"

"He's gone to bed, sir; but I guess 'twill be all right." And the waiter started to fetch the beer.

"I should think so," growled Perry.

"I suppose it is not good form to drink beer with oysters," I suggested mildly.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said George.

"I suppose not," said Perry; "they go so well together. I hope it isn't, at any rate: I like to do things that are bad form."

So I relapsed into silence, and my speculations about George's outbreak against gambling, and Mrs. Herbert's beautiful face and sad eyes, and Lucretia Knowles's wicked light-heartedness.

When we had finished eating and had opened the last bottle of beer, I asked George, as he stopped his talk with Perry for a moment to relight his cigar, who Mrs. Herbert was.

"She is the noblest and most unfortunate woman in the world," he replied, "I will tell you her story some time, perhaps."

"Let us hear it now," I cried, looking at Perry with triumph.

"Yes, let us," said Perry, nothing to my surprise, for I knew his heart was in the right place, if his ways were a little rough and unimpressionable-like. "We have no recitations, no lectures, no anything, to-morrow, and there is no one else in the restaurant but the waiter, and he is asleep."

And, in fact, we could hear him snoring.

"No, I would rather not tell it here," George said simply; "but if you will come with me to the office you shall hear it." And when we had heard it we respected the feeling that had prompted him to consider even the walls of such a place as unfit listeners. To be sure, it was a very comfortable restaurant, where the waiters were always attentive and skilful and the mutton-chops irreproachable, and many a pleasant evening had we three had there over our cigars and Milwaukee, and sometimes a bottle or two of claret. But so had Tom Hagard, the faro-dealer, and Frank Sauter, who played poker over Sudden's, and Dick Bander, who got his money from Madame Blank because he happened to be a swashing slugger, and many another Tom, Dick, and Harry whose reputations were, to say the least, questionable. Of course we never associated with such characters, and plenty of estimable people besides ourselves frequented Bertrand's. The place was not in bad odor at all, but merely a little miscellaneous, and suited our plebeian fancies all the more on that account. If young fellows want to be really comfortable in life, we thought, and see a little at first hand just what sort of people make up the world, they must not be too particular. So we used to sit down at the next table to one where a gambler or a horse-jockey would perhaps be seated, or a man of worse fame, and order our humble repast with a quiet conscience and a strengthened determination never to become one among such people. We would even see the gay flutter of skirts sometimes, as the waiter entered one of the private rooms with an armful of dishes, and hear the chatter and laughter of the wearers.

We did not wonder, therefore, at George's preference for his own office, whose four walls had never looked down upon anything but innocent young fellows smoking and talking whatever harmless nonsense came into their heads, or playing chess or penny-ante, or upon his own generous thoughts and solitary contemplations, or hard work on some intricate lawsuit. So we aroused the sleeping waiter, and walked back to the Academy of Music building in silence.

"It is rather a long story," said George, when we had at last made ourselves comfortable, "and I have never told it before. I don't know why I should tell it now, but somehow I want to. I felt this evening after I left the Capitol that I would, and I asked leave of Mrs. Herbert while we were walking to her home together. I knew she would let me: I am the only friend, I suppose,—the only real friend, I mean, whom she trusts and treats as an intimate friend,—that she has in the world. I know I am the only person who knows the whole story of her sad life.

"When I was in the university," he slowly continued, holding his cigar in the gas-jet and turning it over and over between his fingers, with an evident air of collating his reminiscences, "Phil Kendall and I were great friends. I don't know how we ever came to be so: it was natural, I suppose, for us to like each other. I used to notice that he did not associate much with the other fellows; and yet he was the best runner and boxer in the class. He was the only fellow in the university who could do the giant swing on the bar, and, though he had never taken lessons, it was next to impossible for any one but Wayland, the sub-professor in chemistry, to touch him with the foils. Somehow we were drawn together, and before long were hardly ever apart. We used to get out our Horace together, he with the pony and text and I with the lexicon, for he was too impatient to hunt up the words. I believe you study differently now."

"We still have the pony," said Perry.

"And we used to puzzle our heads together over Mechanics, for we didn't have election as you do, and take long walks, and play chess, and get up spreads in our room for nobody but us two. Not such elaborate affairs as are called spreads now, but I warrant you they were fully as much enjoyed. I fancy we were rather sentimental. We used to hold imaginary conversations in the person of some favorite characters in fiction; but we were very young and boyish."

Perry glanced at me sheepishly, but George went on without noticing:

"Phil's father lived here, and was proprietor of the only wholesale grocery-store the town then boasted of. He had been captain of a volunteer company in the war, and, I fancy, had a romance too. At any rate, his wife had been dead since Phil was a little fellow in knickerbockers; and not very long after her death a certain Mrs. Preston had sent a little girl, about a year older than Phil, with a dying charge to the captain to care for the friendless orphan for the sake of their early love. No one but Grace could ever get anything out of the old gentleman about her mother, and she never learned much. Mrs. Preston had been unhappy at least, and perhaps miserable, in her marriage. We always thought she had forsaken Mr. Kendall in their youth and made a hasty marriage; but never a word was uttered by him about Grace's father.

"I used to imagine Mr. Kendall cared more for his adopted daughter than for his son, from what I saw of them, and I was at the house a good deal with Phil. I am sure they were very affectionate; and it was only natural that the melancholy old man—that is the way he always struck me—should have loved the daughter of the woman who had deserted him and then turned toward him in her hour of supreme need. It showed that her trust and belief in him and his goodness had never really left her. And, besides, Grace was always so airy and light-hearted,—nothing could put her out of humor,—so kind and gentle, and as lovely as a flower. She is a splendid-looking woman yet, but one can have no idea of what she was in those days, from the sad-eyed Mrs. Herbert who smiles so rarely on any one but her little girl. Nannie is going to make much such a young lady as her mother was, but I don't believe she will ever be quite so beautiful.

"Well, I was not long in discovering that Phil was in love with his father's adopted daughter. I was never quite sure whether he knew it himself at the time or not, but I could see easily enough that she didn't dream of such a thing, nor the old captain either. They were so much like brother and sister it used to make me feel wofully sorry for Phil to see her throw her arms around his neck and kiss him for some little kindness or other that he was always doing her: the difference of mood in which the caress would be given from that in which Phil would receive it was somehow always painful to me. Phil would never offer to kiss her on his own account; and it is still a mystery to me why she never discovered how he felt toward her until he became jealous. The tenderness and gentle considerateness of his bearing were always so marked that to a less innocent and pure nature, I fancy, it would have been noticeable at once.

"When we were Juniors, Phil took her to a party one night, just after Easter. The captain was a scrupulous Churchman, and Grace was always by him in the pew. She had not been confirmed, however, and never said a word to Phil and me about our persistency in staying away from church, though the captain used to lecture Phil quite soberly about it. This party was given at the house of one of the vestrymen, and they had refreshments, and, after the rector had gone home, dancing. They called it a sociable, and took up a collection for the ladies' aid society just after the cake and coffee and whipped cream had been served. There was where Grace first met George Herbert. He was a handsome young fellow, well educated, a graduate of some Eastern college, clever and talented, and his family in Rochester, New York, were considered very good people. He had come to Lincoln to take a place on the 'Gazette,' and every one thought him a young man of good parts and fair prospects.

"He made up to Grace from the start. They were laughing and talking together all the evening on a little sofa, just large enough for two, that stood in the bow-window. There was a little crowd of young people around the two most of the time, and she was saying bright things to them all, but never, I noticed, at the expense of young Herbert, who made most of his remarks so low that no one but Grace could hear them. She always smiled and often broke out into her musical laugh at what he said; and when Phil, who had been trapped into a game of whist with some old fogies, finally came back into the parlor and made his way to where Grace was having such a happy time, she even launched a shaft or two of her wit at him.

"I saw that the poor fellow was hurt: he turned away without answering, though, and, coming over to where I was, sat down and began looking at an album, trying hard all the time to hide his feelings. But in a moment Grace was hanging over his shoulder, oblivious of her surroundings, and lovingly begging his pardon if she had hurt him. I have sometimes thought that Phil then fully realized for the first time how he cared for her. The way in which her affection disregarded the presence of the crowd smote him, I imagine, with something like despair. I saw him turn pale and catch his breath, and I knew his laugh too well to be deceived, as Grace was, when he made light of her self-accusations and declared that than taking offence at her words nothing had been further from his thoughts. This was in a sense true, of course, for ordinarily he would have answered as light-heartedly almost as Grace herself; and it was only the feeling of jealousy, unconscious perhaps, at any rate irresistible, that gave her words undue—no, not that exactly, but unusual influence over his feelings.

"For a while Phil acted as considerately as ever, and made himself thoroughly agreeable to several young ladies, whereat Grace was highly pleased and soon took up again her mood of gayety. But when Phil brought her a plate and napkin and some things to eat, and found her and Herbert already served and with mock gravity breaking a piece of cake together on the stairs,—'they were only doing it,' Phil declared to me afterward, 'that they might touch each other's hands,'—he lost his head. He must have spoken very bitterly, else he would never have aroused Grace's anger. I don't know what he said, except that he complained about having come to such a thing as a church sociable, which he despised, and, inasmuch as he had done it for the sake of her enjoyment and pleasure, she might at least have shown him the same politeness she would have accorded to any of the insufferable prigs whom she seemed delighted to honor.

"Herbert started to reply, but Grace silenced him by a look, and said, 'We have been as brother and sister since childhood.' It was probably well for Herbert's handsome face that he did not enter into a discussion with Phil. They were both hot-tempered, and Phil had no scruples against asking him out of doors, and would have been as cool in his manner and as terrible in his strength as an iceberg.

"Grace led Phil away, and tried to tell him how she had not supposed he would care; that she had imagined he would prefer to serve the young lady with whom he had been talking; how she had never known him to put such store by trivialities before; how 'at least we,' Phil told me, bitterly quoting her words, 'at least we ought to be sure of each other's hearts,' and did everything to pacify him. But he would listen to nothing, and, coming to me, asked me to walk home with Grace, as he was going away immediately. I imagined the trouble, and got him to admit that he and Grace had said unkind words to each other. But he would say nothing more about the matter till I found him in my room after it was all over, when he raved about Grace until near morning, and cursed the fate that had turned the bread of her kind affection for him into a stone. 'How can I ever hope to win her love when she thinks that way of me?' he would ask sorrowfully, after telling of some pure and loving freedom she had taken. I was full of pity for the miserable fellow, but I felt as if I ought to do all I could to discourage him. I was sure he was right; he never could hope to, and I thought the sooner he learned this, and to submit to it, the better it would be for him.

"I persuaded him not to leave the party in the height of his resentment, though, and he was so quiet before the dancing that I began to hope he would beg Grace's pardon and take her home repentantly and in peace. But he insisted on my going and offering to dance with her the first set in his place. She had already promised, she said, to dance it with Mr. Herbert, and it was in vain that I told her she must look upon me as acting for Phil, and advised her for his sake to excuse herself to Herbert and dance with either Phil or myself. 'If Phil should come and ask me himself on his knees I would not do it,' she declared, with superb grandeur, 'He has acted wrong, and imputed to me the worst motives for trivial things which I did unthinkingly even, and, heaven knows, without deliberate calculation.'

"I saw it was no use to talk with her, and that in her present mood even entreaty, to which she was usually so yielding, would be of no avail. I felt very helpless and miserable about it, but I could do nothing. I saw that Phil had made a grave mistake by accusing her of partiality for Herbert, and that her acquaintance with him might possibly be forced into a closer relation by Phil's jealousy. I kept away from him for a while, and almost made Miss Scrawney think I had fallen in love with her, in order to keep Phil from getting a word with me. At last, however, just as the music began, he pulled my sleeve and asked in a whisper if I wasn't going to take Grace out and dance with her.

"'She was already engaged,' I answered.

"'To whom?' said Phil. 'But there is no need to ask.' And at the moment, indeed, almost as if in answer to his question, Grace entered the room from the hall on Herbert's arm. I was afraid for an instant that Phil would make a scene. The veins on his forehead swelled, and he started forward as they passed within a few feet of where we were standing, Grace smiling and talking to Herbert, apparently as oblivious of us as if we had not been within a thousand miles of her; but he mastered the impulse, whatever it was, and I have often speculated as to whether it was to upbraid Grace or to strike Herbert.

"'Look at her, George,' he said, with a calmness that was belied by the look in his eyes. 'You wouldn't think that three hours ago she had never known him, would you? nor that we had lived in the same house since we were no higher than that. Her mother, I know, did her best to break my old man's heart, and I warrant you it was for some such worthless fool as that, who wasn't fit to black the dear old fellow's boots. Poor old dad! we shall be together in the boat: when I begin to handle hams and barrelled sugar we will write ourselves 'Kendall & Son' with a flourish.' And as we went up the stairs to get his coat and hat he told me to stay and offer to go home with Grace. 'It wouldn't do for me to leave her unless you do, George,' he said; 'but if she wants to go with Herbert, let her; but she shall not say I went away and left her without an escort.'

"I promised readily enough, and even hurried him away. There was no good in his staying; in fact, I thought it better that he should leave; and after he had gone I went to Grace. I managed the matter rather badly, but I suppose the most consummate tact on my part would not have changed things. I should have waited until I saw her alone, or until the party was breaking up; but I went directly I saw they had stopped dancing. She was leaning on the piano and letting Herbert fan her, and looking almost too beautiful for real life as she turned her face toward him, flushed with her exercise and beaming with excitement. There was something grand to me in the expression of individuality and proud insistence that had come to her so suddenly. It was no factitious strife of her nature against the dependence of her position as an adopted daughter, I knew, for she had never felt in the least but that she was perfectly free; it was no caprice or stubbornness; it was merely her womanly assertion of self and her unconscious protest against what she thought injustice. She would not have believed from any one but Phil himself that he was in love with her and jealous.

"'Phil has gone away,' I said bluntly, interrupting their talk. She looked at me for a moment and raised her eyebrows slightly.

"'Has he?' was all she asked.

"'Yes: he was feeling badly,' I went on. 'He asked me to walk home with you when you were ready to go. I thought I would tell you now, so you would not be at a loss in case you should want to leave before the party breaks up.'

"'You are very kind, I am sure, Mr. Kendall' (she usually called me George), 'but I shall not want to go for ever so long yet. It was needless for Phil to trouble you; he knew I should get home all right,—but it was like him. I am awfully sorry to keep you waiting: I know you are anxious to get back to your pipe and books.'

"Here Herbert said something with the appearance of speaking to us both; but she only could hear what it was. I, however, imagined readily enough.

"'Will you?' she answered him, in a pleased tone, and I fancied her smile was grateful. 'Mr. Herbert is going to stay and dance a while longer,' she went on, turning to me, 'and if he takes me home it will not seem as if I were troubling any one too much, and—'

"'Very well, Miss Preston,' I interrupted, making my best bow; 'as you like.' And when I saw the smile on Herbert's face I didn't wonder much at the way Phil had felt. 'Let me bid you good-night,' I said, bowing again, and started off.

"Grace followed me rapidly into the hall. 'Now, please don't you be angry too, George,' she said, laying her hand on my arm.

"'I am not angry,' I said.

"'Do you think it right, George,' she asked earnestly,—and there was a pleading look in her eyes,—'or manly to desert one's friends in trouble?'

"'I am doing the best I know how,' said I, 'to be true to my friend.'

"'Oh, George, I am so sorry!' Her voice trembled, and all her queenliness had gone. 'You must not go off this way. You don't blame me as Phil does, do you? Wait, I will get my things, and you shall walk home with me now. I will see Phil and tell him—'

"'He has gone to my room,' I said.

"'Well, I will wait till you bring him home. You must tell him I forgive him,—or no, tell him I am sorry and ask his forgiveness. Oh, George, we cannot be this way. Only think how sad it would make his father—and—' There were tears on her lashes, and her lips were trembling piteously. She put her hand to her throat and could not go on. God forgive me if I was wrong,—and I know I was,—but I couldn't help it then,—I asked, almost with a sneer, if she didn't dislike to slight her estimable friend Mr. Herbert's kindness; and she turned away without a word, as if regretting, from my unworthiness, the emotion she had shown.

"I was in very nearly as bad a state as Phil for a while. I told him just how I had acted, and he was rather pleased than otherwise at my cruelty. We tried hard to make ourselves believe that Grace had deserved it, and to a certain extent succeeded.

"'She probably thought it was too high a price,' said Phil, 'when she saw both of us going off offended, and she concluded not to give it. But, then, it was just like her,' he added, in a kindlier spirit than the natural interpretation of his words seemed to indicate.

"It was a month before either of us went to the house. The old captain thought at first that we were going to the dogs, and, I think, kept up a kind of watch over our movements. He came in one morning, after he had concluded his suspicions were wrong, and made a sort of expiatory call. He tried to tell us how he had judged us too harshly, but couldn't quite bring himself to it, and, after a good many half-uttered remarks that did honor to the old gentleman's heart, if they didn't prove him a cool hand in such matters, he left us with an unspoken blessing and some homely, sound advice to do as we liked, so long as we were manly and honest.

"Within a week he was stricken with apoplexy on receiving news of some serious losses, and was taken home without speaking. He died the next morning just at sunrise, and Grace and Phil mingled their tears at his bedside. He tried in vain to speak to them, and the pleased light in his eyes as they took each other's hands and laid them, joined together, in his, was the only sign he gave of having known there had been a difference between them.

"Poor Grace! she was very miserable and lonely after that. Phil could never bear to be with her after he had spoken. Her true kindness and gentle, loving pity were misery to him. He made a noble effort to stay by and watch over her, but he was hardly fit to take care of himself. She never knew how small a share of what little was left of his father's money he took with him to the mountains, but she realized why he went without waiting for his degree, and sadly approved his resolution. She always kept the growing attachment between her and Herbert from grating on Phil as much as was in her power, but he could not help seeing it. Though he never said anything even to me, it was plain that he had a poor opinion of the young journalist; and Grace was very thankful to him for all he did and suffered.

"She must have felt very much alone in the world after Phil left, and the house certainly seemed empty and sad when I used to go there to see her. There was no one but Grace and the housekeeper and an old gentleman, a clerk in one of the State departments, to whom she had rented rooms, partly for the money and partly to have a man in the house. Herbert was with her whenever his work would permit, and there was some talk about their intimacy among people who, even if they had known her, were too base to have appreciated the fineness and truth and purity of Grace's nature.

"I couldn't blame her for marrying Herbert,—which she did the fall after I graduated. They certainly were very much in love, and Herbert had borne himself creditably in every way. No one could have foreseen that he would turn out so badly; and for a year or more after their marriage they were as happy as birds in May. Grace was never light-hearted, as when I first knew her,—no woman of worth and tenderness would have been,—but still she was happily and sweetly contented, completely bound up in her husband, thinking almost of nothing but him, and caring for nothing but his love.

"When I came back from the law-school, I went to see them as soon as I was settled. They had sold the house, and were living in a rented cottage out in East Lincoln. Nannie, their baby, was quite if not more than a year old then; and, though I had known that Grace would be a fond mother, I was unprepared to see the way in which she seemed absolutely to worship the child. I immediately asked myself if it meant that she was not so happy with Herbert as she had been. I met him at tea, to which Grace insisted on my staying. His dress was as neat and as carefully arranged as ever, and he was cordial enough toward me; but he did not kiss Grace when he came in, and hardly looked at the baby. He laughed a good deal, and told several amusing incidents of his newspaper experience. I noticed that his old habit of looking at one's chin or cravat instead of at one's eyes when he spoke to one had grown upon him. He excused himself soon after tea on the ground of having to be at the office, and went away smoking a cigarette.

"Grace complained of the way in which his work kept him up nights. He was never home until after midnight, she said, and sometimes not before morning. She was afraid it was telling upon his health. 'You must come and see me often. George.' she said, as she gave me her hand at parting. 'I see very little of my husband now, and, if it were not for Nannie, I feel as if I should be almost unhappy. Then he would have to do some other work, though he likes journalism so well.' That was the nearest she ever came to complaining to me, though I soon knew that she had plenty of cause. She was not entirely deceived by Herbert's assertions and excuses. I learned before long, for I made a point of finding out, that he was never obliged to be at the office after nine o'clock, that he gambled and drank, and was looked on with unpleasant suspicions by his employers, so that he might at any time find himself without a position. He owned no property, and Grace's little patrimony had disappeared, even to the money they had received for the house, without leaving the slightest trace. Herbert's ill reputation was common property in the town, and he and Grace went nowhere together. She had even given up going to church, that she might be with him for a few hours on Sundays; and now and then if he took her for a walk and pushed the baby-carriage through the Capitol-grounds for an hour, she cared more for it than for a whole stack of Mr. Gittner's sermons. She had no friends at all, and but few acquaintances, and altogether had much to bear up under. Right nobly she did it, too; never a word of complaint to any one: I believe not even to herself would she admit that she was treated basely.

"They kept on in this way for a year after I opened my office. I heard from Phil now and then,—brief notes that he was alive and well,—and on the 11th of June, the date of the old captain's death, Grace always received a long letter from him, full of references to their childhood, but telling little of himself. Herbert's reputation became worse and worse, and he deserved all the evil that was said of him. The tradesmen refused him credit, and the carpets and furniture of their little cottage grew old and thread-bare and were not replaced. I have seen him play pool at Sudden's for half a day at a dollar a game, and perhaps lose his week's wages. He was hand in glove with the set that lurked about the 'club-room' over the saloon, and almost any night could be seen at the faro-table fingering his chips and checking off the cards on his tally-sheet. Nobody but strangers would sit down to a game of poker or casino with him: he had grown much too skilful. He was what they called a 'very smooth player:' though I never heard of his being openly accused of cheating.

"One of my first cases of consequence was to recover some money which had been paid to some sharpers by an innocent young fellow from the East for a worthless mine in Colorado. In connection with it I went to Denver. Charlie Wayland, a brother of the chemistry professor, happened to be on the same train. He owns the planing-mill down on Sixth Street now, you know; but he was a wild young fellow then, and knew everything that was going on. He intended to have a time, he said, while he was in Denver; that was what he was going for. He went with me to the St. James, where I had written Phil to meet me, if he could come down from Boulder.

"Young Wayland had his time in the city, and I had finished my business and was going to start back and leave him to enjoy by himself his trip to Pike's Peak and the other sights of the State, considerably disappointed at not having seen Phil, when he came in on us as I was packing my grip-sack. He was rough and hardy as a bear, and had grown a tremendous black beard: his heavy hand closed over mine till my knuckles cracked. We were glad enough to see each other, and had plenty to talk about. Of course I stayed over another day, and Wayland put off his trip to Pike's Peak to keep us company, though we didn't care so much for his presence as he seemed to think we did. But he gave us a little dinner at Charpiot's, and I forgave his talkativeness for the sake of the champagne, until he became excited by drinking too much of it and began to talk about George Herbert. He was stating his system of morality, which was, in effect,—and Charlie had acted up to it pretty well,—that a fellow should go it when he was young, but when he was married he ought to settle down.

"'Now, I can't stand a fellow like that Herbert,' he said; and for all my kicks under the table he went on, 'It may be well enough for the French, but I say in this country it's a devilish shame. He is a young fellow in Lincoln, Mr. Kendall,—got a splendid wife, and a little baby, one of the nicest women in the world, and thinks the world of him, and he goes it with the boys as if he was one of 'em. He never goes home, though, unless he is sober enough to keep himself straight; but I've seen him bowling full many a time. Wine, women, and song, you know, and all that; it may be well enough for us young bloods, but in a fellow of his circumstances I say it's wrong, damn it! and he oughtn't to do it.'

"Now, I had told Phil that Grace was well and fairly happy. I had thought it but just to sink my opinion and give Grace's own account of herself and deliver her simple message without comment. 'Give Phil my love,' she had said as I left her the night before I came away.

"'And how does this Herbert's wife take all this?' asked Phil of Wayland.

"'Oh, she doesn't know all, I suppose. If she did, it would probably kill her. My brother's wife says that if it were not for her child she doesn't believe Mrs. Herbert would live very long, as it is.'

"'Her trouble is common talk, then?' observed Phil, sipping his wine and avoiding my eyes.

"'Why, yes, to a certain extent; though she doesn't parade it, by any means. In fact, she lives very much alone; no one ever sees her, hardly, but George here, who is an old friend, you know. Maybe you used to know her,' he added suddenly, coming to himself a little. 'Well, if you did,' he went on, as Phil did not answer, 'you wouldn't know her now, they say, for the lively, careless girl she was five or six years ago.' And then he began to talk about the condition of the Chinese in Denver, and how he had that morning seen one of them kicked off the sidewalk without having given the least provocation.

"Phil said nothing further about the Herberts all evening, but just before we separated for the night he asked me if I could let him have some money. I unsuspectingly thanked my stars that I could, and told him so.

"'Well, then,' he declared, 'I am going back to Lincoln with you to-morrow.' And, in spite of all I could say, he did. He had his beard shaved off, bought himself some civilized clothes, and made his appearance with me on the streets of Lincoln as naturally as if he had gone away but the day before. His life in the mountains had given him an air of decision, a certain quiet energy and determination which impressed one immediately with the sense of his being a man of strong character, with a powerful will under perfect control. I grew to have so much confidence in him that I thought his coming would somehow be a benefit to Grace, though I could not see how; in fact, when I tried to reason about it, I told myself exactly the contrary. But Phil seemed to have such implicit confidence in himself, to be so self-sufficient and so ready for any emergency, and altogether such a perfect man of action, that he inspired belief and confidence in others.

"We met Herbert on our way up from the station: he was standing in front of the 'Gazette' office, laughing and talking with Sudden's barkeeper. He greeted Phil with cordiality, in spite of the latter's distant bearing, and told him Grace would be greatly pleased at his arrival.

"'I suppose she will be glad to see me,' said Phil, as we passed on. And she was glad, very glad, to see him, but she was far from being made happy by his coming. I sent a note out to her, and Phil and I followed shortly after. I did not watch their meeting,—I thought, somehow, that no one ought to see it,—but I knew he took her in his arms; and when she came out on the porch to bring me in there were tears in her eyes.

"We all sat and talked for a long while, Grace with her hand in Phil's and her eyes on his face, when she was not looking anxiously after my awkward attempts at caring for her baby; for of course Nannie had been brought out almost the first thing. I think, from the way in which she carefully avoided asking him his reasons for coming back, that she divined what they were. I imagined that she blamed me as being the prime cause; but there was nothing I could say to undeceive her. In fact, I thought it better for her to believe so than to know the truth.

"'She is miserably unhappy, George,' said Phil gloomily, as we walked away. 'But you were right not to tell me. I can do nothing to help her: I cannot even openly sympathize with her. It would have been better to have kept on thinking she was happy: there was a bitter kind of satisfaction to me in that, but still it was a satisfaction.'

"Nevertheless Phil did not go back to the mountains. He stayed on here for a month or more, dividing his time pretty equally between my office and Grace's little parlor. He very seldom met Herbert. Now and then they would be together at the cottage for half an hour, if Herbert happened to come home while he was there, and when they met on the street they would merely pass the time of day.

"One evening before going to supper I waited until after seven o'clock for Phil to come in, and just as I had given him up, and was starting away alone, he entered the office, looking pale as a ghost, and evidently in great distress of spirit.

"'For God's sake, Phil, what is the matter?' I exclaimed, as he sank upon the sofa and covered his face with his hands.

"'Go away, George: go away and leave me,' was all he said; then he got up and began walking violently up and down the room. At last he came near me and put his hand on my shoulder. 'I've killed her, George, I am afraid; At least I have killed him right before her eyes, and she may never get over it. I didn't mean to, George, you know that; but he came home drunk, and I had gone to bid Grace good-by,—for I had made up my mind, George, to leave to-morrow,—and he came in. We had been talking of father, and Grace was very sad and wretched, and there were tears in her eyes when she kissed me, just as he came in and saw us. She was frightened at his brutality, and clung to me in terror, when he began swearing in a torrent of passion and calling her the vilest of names. He struck at us with his cane. If he had struck me he might yet have been alive; but when I saw the great red welt on Grace's neck and heard her cry out, I was wild, George. For an instant, I believe, I could have stamped him into bits, and if it had been my last act on earth I could not have helped striking him.'

"While he spoke, Phil stood with his hand on my shoulder, looking into my eyes, as if he wanted me to judge him, as if he would read in my very look whether I blamed him or not. I took his hand.

"'I thought you would understand,' he went on. 'I did not know I was going to kill him, but I think I tried to: I struck him with all my might, Grace threw herself between us and begged me not to hurt him after he had fallen down, and took hold of my arm as if to hold me. But when she saw the blood running from his temple, where he had struck it on the window-sill, and how still and motionless he lay, she tried to go to him, but could not for weakness and fainting. I carried her into Mrs. Stanley's, and have not seen her since, but the doctor says she is very ill. Herbert was dead when they went into the room after I told them what had happened; and I suppose I had better give myself up to the law.'

"You can have no idea how I felt to see my dearest friend in such a position. And poor Grace!—it was much worse for her. I thought with Phil that she might never survive the shock and misery of it all. But she did, and came out, weak and broken down as she was, to give her testimony at Phil's trial. We had no trouble in getting a jury to acquit him, and he went back to Colorado without bidding Grace good-by, although she would have seen him and was even anxious to do so. Some persons here, mostly women, pretended to think that there had been more cause for Herbert's jealousy than was generally supposed; but they belonged to the sanctimonious, hypocritical custom-worshippers. All really good people remembered what Herbert had been, and refused to see in him a martyr or even a wronged man.

"After that Grace supported herself by dress-making and teaching music; and some two years ago, when we heard that Phil had been killed by a mine's caving in, and that he had left a little fortune to her and Nannie, I, as his executor and her friend, induced her to take and use it,—which she did, with simplicity and thankfulness and with her heart full of pity and love for poor Phil. Yes, poor Phil! those five or six years must have been full of misery to him, and he was probably thankful when the end came. We never heard from him until after his death. There was a letter that came to me with the will, that had been written long before. None but they two know what was in it; and I, for one, do not want to inquire."

George sat for a long while in silence, looking at the glowing coals in the huge reservoir stove. Neither Perry nor I cared to interrupt his revery. At last he roused himself.

"Well, boys," he said, "it is late: I think we had better go. It is all over now, and life has gone on calmly for years. Other people have forgotten that there ever were such persons as Phil or Herbert."

When Perry and I reached our room we found it was almost three o'clock. George had walked with us to the door, and very little had been said between us. I took a cigarette and lay down on the bed. "Perry," I said, as he was lighting the gas.

"Sur to you," he answered, in a way he had of imitating a certain barkeeper of our acquaintance.

"What do you think of George?"

"You know what I think of him as well as I do."

"Yes; but I mean in connection with this that he has told us."

"I think he acted just like himself all the way through."

"Don't you think he has been in love with Mrs. Herbert from the first?"

"Am I in the habit of imagining such nonsense?"

"You may think it nonsense," I answered, with the quiet fervor of conviction, "but I am sure it is nothing but the real state of the case."

"Bosh!" exclaimed Perry, throwing his boots into a corner; and therewith the discussion closed.

About a week ago I had a letter from him, though, in which he recalled this circumstance and acknowledged that I had been in the right. "They are going to be married in the fall," he wrote. "I hope they may be happy, and I suppose they will be; but I don't think Mrs. Herbert ought to marry him unless she loves him; and I am fearful that she only thinks to reward long years of faithful affection. George deserves more than that." This was a good deal for Perry to manage to say. He usually keeps as far away from such subjects as he well can,—which is partly the reason, I think, that his opinion thereon is not greatly to be trusted. As for me, I am sure George's wife will love him as much as he deserves,—though this is almost an infinite amount,—and that she has not been far from loving him from the beginning. I have bought a pair of vases to send them; and I expect that Miss Lucretia Knowles will say, when she learns how much they cost, that I was very extravagant. Not that Lu is close or stingy at all; but she has promised to wait until I have made a start in life, and is naturally impatient for me to get on as rapidly as possible.

FRANK PARKE.



THE WOOD-THRUSH AT SUNSET.

Lover of solitude, Poet and priest of nature's mysteries, If but a step intrude, Thy oracle is mute, thy music dies.

Oft have I lightly wooed Sweet Poesy to give me pause of pain, Oft in her singing mood Sought to surprise her haunt, and sought in vain.

And thou art shy as she, But mortal, or I had not found thy shrine, To listen breathlessly If I may make thy hoarded secret mine.

Thy tender mottled breast, Dappled the color of our primal sod, Now quick and song-possessed, Doth seem to hold the very joy of God,—

Joy hid from mortal quest Of bosky loves on silver-mooned eves, And the high-hearted best That swells thy throat with joy among the leaves.

Like the Muezzin's call From some high minaret when day is done, Among the beeches tall Thy voice proclaims, "There is no God but one."

And but one Beauty, too, Of whose sweet synthesis we ever fail: She flies if we pursue, Like thy swift wing down some dim intervale.

For thou art lightly gone; Gone is the flute-like note, the yearning strain, And all the air forlorn Is breathless till it hear thy voice again.

But thou wilt not return; Thou hast the secret of thy joy to keep, And other hearts must learn Thy tuneful message, ere the world may sleep,—

Sleep lulled by many a dream Of sylvan sounds that woo the ear in vain, While still thy numbers seem To voice the pain of bliss, the bliss of pain.

MARY C. PECKHAM.



A FOREST BEAUTY.

Last spring, or possibly it was early in June, I was walking, in company with an intelligent farmer, through a bit of heavy forest that bordered some fields of corn and wheat, when a golden, flame-like gleam from the midst of the last year's leaves and twigs on the ground at my feet attracted my sight. I stooped and picked up a large fragment of a flower of the Liriodendron Tulipifera which had been let fall by some foraging squirrel from the dark-green and fragrant top of the giant tree nearest us. Strange to say, my farmer friend, who owned the rich Indiana soil in which the tree grew, did not know, until I told him, that the "poplar," as he called the tulip-tree, bears flowers. For twenty years he had owned this farm, during which time he had cut down acres of forest for rails and lumber, without ever having discovered the gorgeous blossom which to me is the finest mass of form and color to be seen in our American woods. As I had a commission from an artist to procure a spray of these blooms for her, I at once began to search the tree-top with my eyes. The bole, or stem, rose sixty feet, tapering but slightly, to where some heavy and gnarled limbs put forth, their extremities lost in masses of peculiarly dark, rich foliage. At first I could distinguish no flowers, but at length here and there a suppressed glow of orange shot with a redder tinge showed through the dusky gloom of the leaves. Lo! there they were, hundreds of them, over three inches in diameter, bold, gaudy, rich, the best possible examples of nature's pristine exuberance of force and color. Two gray squirrels were frisking about among the highest sprays, and it was my good fortune that my friend carried on his shoulder a forty-four-calibre rifle; for, though it was death to the nimble little animals, it proved to be the instrument with which I procured my coveted flowers. It suggested the probability that, if bullets could fetch down squirrels from that tree-top, they might also serve to clip off and let fall some of the finest clusters or sprays of tulip. The experiment was tried, with excellent result. I made the little artist glad with some of the grandest specimens I have ever seen.

The tulip-tree is of such colossal size and it branches so high above ground that it is little wonder few persons, even of those most used to the woods, ever see its bloom, which is commonly enveloped in a mass of large, dark leaves. These leaves are peculiarly outlined, having short lobes at the sides and a truncated end, while the stem is slender, long, and wire-like. The flower has six petals and three transparent sepals. In its centre rises a pale-green cone surrounded by from eighteen to thirty stamens. Sap-green, yellow of various shades, orange-vermilion, and vague traces of some inimitable scarlet, are the colors curiously blended together within and without the grand cup-shaped corolla. It is Edgar Fawcett who draws an exquisite poetic parallel between the oriole and the tulip,—albeit he evidently did not mean the flower of our Liriodendron, which is nearer the oriole colors. The association of the bird with the flower goes further than color, too; for the tulip-tree is a favorite haunt of the orioles. Audubon, in the plates of his great ornithological work, recognizes this by sketching the bird and some rather flat and weak tulip-sprays together on the same sheet. I have fancied that nature in some way favors this massing of colors by placing the food of certain birds where their plumage will show to best advantage on the one hand, or serve to render them invisible, on the other, while they are feeding. The golden-winged woodpecker, the downy woodpecker, the red-bellied woodpecker, and that grand bird the pileated woodpecker, all seem to prefer the tulip-tree for their nesting-place, pecking their holes into the rotten boughs, sometimes even piercing an outer rim of the fragrant green wood in order to reach a hollow place. I remember, when I was a boy, lying in a dark old wood in Kentucky and watching a pileated woodpecker at work on a dead tulip-bough that seemed to afford a great number of dainty morsels of food. There were streaks of hard wood through the rotten, and whenever his great horny beak struck one of these it would sound as loud and clear as the blow of a carpenter's hammer. This fine bird is almost extinct now, having totally disappeared from nine-tenths of the area of its former habitat. I never see a tulip-tree without recollecting the wild, strangely-hilarious cry of the Hylotomus pileatus; and I cannot help associating the giant bloom, its strength of form and vigor of color, with the scarlet crest and king-like bearing of the bird. The big trees of California excepted, our tulip-bearing Liriodendron is the largest growth of the North-American forests; for, while the plane-tree and the liquidambar-(sweet-gum) tree sometimes measure more in diameter near the ground, they are usually hollow, and consequently bulged there, while the tulip springs boldly out of the ground a solid shaft of clear, clean, and sweetly-fragrant wood, sixty or seventy feet of the bole being often entirely without limbs, with an average diameter of from three to five feet. I found a stump in Indiana nearly eight feet in diameter (measured three feet above the ground), and a tree in Clarke County, Kentucky, of about the same girth, tapering slowly to the first branch, fifty-eight feet from the root.

In nearly all the Western and Southern States the tulip is generally called poplar, and the lumber manufactured from it goes by the same name, while in the East it is known as white-wood. The bark is very thick and cork-like, exhaling an odor peculiarly pungent and agreeable; the buds and tender twigs in the spring have a taste entirely individual and unique, very pleasant to some persons, but quite repellent to others. Gray squirrels and the young of the fox-squirrel eat the buds and flowers as well as the cone-shaped fruit. Humming-birds and bumble-bees in the blossoming-time make a dreamy booming among the shadowy sprays. A saccharine, sticky substance, not unlike honey-dew, may often be found in the hollows of the immense petals, in search of which large black ants make pilgrimages from the root to the top of the largest tulip-trees, patiently toiling for two or three hours over the rough bark, among the bewildering wrinkles of which it is, a wonder how the way is kept with such unerring certainty. I have calculated that in making such a journey the ant does what is equivalent to a man's pedestrian tour from New York City to the Adirondacks by the roughest route, and all for a smack of wild honey! But the ant makes his long excursion with neither alpenstock nor luncheon, and without sleeping or even resting on the way.

The tulip-tree grows best in warm loam in which there is a mixture of sand and vegetable mould superposed on clay and gravel. About its roots you may find the lady-slipper and the dog-tooth violet, each in its season. Its bark often bears the rarest lichens, and, near the ground, short green moss as soft and thick as velvet. The poison-ivy and the beautiful Virginia creeper like to clamber up the rough trunk, sometimes clothing the huge tree from foot to top in a mantle of brown feelers and glossy leaves. Seen at a distance, the tulip-tree and the black-walnut-tree look very much alike; but upon approaching them the superior symmetry and beauty of the former are at once discovered. The leaves of the walnut are gracefully arranged, but they admit too much light; while the tulip presents grand masses of dense foliage upheld by knotty, big-veined branches, the perfect embodiment of vigor.

In the days of bee-hunting in the West, I may safely say that a majority of bee-trees were tulips. I have found two of these wild Hyblas since I began my studies for this paper; but the trees have become so valuable that the bees are left unmolested with their humming and their honey. It seems that no more appropriate place for a nest of these wild nectar-brewers could be chosen than the hollow bough of a giant tulip,—a den whose door is curtained with leaves and washed round with odorous airs, where the superb flowers, with their wealth of golden pollen and racy sweets, blaze out from the cool shadows above and beneath. But the sly old 'coon, that miniature Bruin of our Western woods, is a great lover of honey, and not at all a respecter of the rights of wild bees. He is tireless in his efforts to reach every deposit of waxy comb and amber distillation within the range of his keen power of scent. The only honey that escapes him is that in a hollow too small for him to enter and too deep for his fore-paws to reach the bottom.

Poe, in his story of the Gold-Bug, falls into one of his characteristic errors of conscience. The purposes of his plot required that a very large and tall tree should be climbed, and, to be picturesque, a tulip was chosen. But, in order to give a truthful air to the story, the following minutely incorrect description is given: "In youth the tulip-tree, or Liriodendron Tulipiferum, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but in its riper age the bark becomes gnarled and uneven, while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem" The italics are mine, and the sentence italicized contains an unblushing libel upon the most beautiful of all trees. Short branches never "appear on the stems" of old tulip-trees. The bark, however, does grow rough and deeply seamed with age. I have seen pieces of it six inches thick, which, when cut, showed a fine grain with cloudy waves of rich brown color, not unlike the darkest mahogany. But Poe, no matter how unconscionable his methods of art, had the true artistic judgment, and he made the tulip-tree serve a picturesque turn in the building of his fascinating story; though one would have had more confidence in his descriptions of foliage if it had been May instead of November.

The growth of the tulip-tree, under favorable circumstances, is strong and rapid, and, when not crowded or shaded by older trees, it begins flowering when from eighteen to twenty-five years old. The blooming-season, according to the exigences of weather, begins from May 20 to June 10 in Indiana, and lasts about a week. The fruit following the flower is a cone an inch and a half long and nearly an inch in diameter at the base, of a greenish—yellow color, very pungent and odorous, and full of germs like those of a pine-cone. The tree is easily grown from the seed. Its roots are long, flexible, and tough, and when young are pale yellow and of bitterish taste, but slightly flavored with the stronger tulip individuality which characterizes the juice and sap of the buds and the bark of the twigs. The leaves, as I have said, are dark and rich, but their shape and color are not the half of their beauty. There is a charm in their motion, be the wind ever so light, that is indescribable. The rustle they make is not "sad" or "uncertain," but cheerful and forceful. The garments of some young giantess, such as Baudelaire sings of, might make that rustling as she would run past one in a land of colossal persons and things.

I have been surprised to find so little about the tulip-tree in our literature. Our writers of prose and verse have not spared the magnolia of the South, which is far inferior, both tree and flower, to our gaudy, flaunting giantess of the West. Indeed, if I were an aesthete, and were looking about me for a flower typical of a robust and perfect sentiment of art, I should greedily seize upon the bloom of the tulip-tree. What a "craze" for tulip borders and screens, tulip wallpapers and tulip panel-carvings, I would set going in America! The colors, old gold, orange, vermilion, and green,—the forms, gentle curves and classical truncations, and all new and American, with a woodsy freshness and fragrance in them. The leaves and flowers of the tulip-tree are so simple and strong of outline that they need not be conventionalized for decorative purposes. During the process of growth the leaves often take on accidental shapes well suited to the variations required by the designer. A wise artist, going into the woods to educate himself up to the level of the tulip, could not fail to fill his sketch-books with studies of the birds that haunt the tree, and especially such brilliant ones as the red tanager, the five or six species of woodpecker, the orioles, and the yellow-throated warbler. The Japanese artists give us wonderful instances of the harmony between birds, flowers, and foliage; not direct instances, it is true, but rather suggested ones, from which large lessons might be learned by him who would carry the thought into our woods with him in the light of a pure and safely-educated taste. Take, for instance, the yellow-bellied woodpecker, with its red fore-top and throat, its black and white lines, and its bright eyes, together with its pale yellow shading of back and belly, and how well it would "work in" with the tulip-leaves and flowers! Even its bill and feet harmonize perfectly with the bark of the older twigs. So the golden-wing, the tanager, and the orioles would bear their colors harmoniously into any successful tulip design.

South of the Alleghany Mountains I have not found as fine specimens of this tree as I have in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Everywhere the saw-mills are fast making sad havoc. The walnut and the tulip are soon to be no more as "trees with the trees in the forest." Those growing in the almost inaccessible "pockets" of the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains may linger for a half-century yet, but eventually all will be gone from wherever a man and a saw can reach them.

The oak of England and the pine of Norway are not more typical than the tulip-tree. The symmetry, vigor, and rich colors of our tree might represent the force, freedom, and beauty of our government and our social influences. If the American eagle is the bird of freedom, the tulip is the tree of liberty,—strong, fragrant, giant-flowered, flaunting, defiant, yet dignified and steadfast.

A very intelligent old man, who in his youth was a great bear- and panther-hunter, has often told me how the black bear and the tawny catamount used to choose the ample "forks" of the tulip-tree for their retreats when pursued by his dogs. The raccoon has superseded the larger game, and it was but a few weeks ago that I found one lying, like a striped, fluffy ball of fur, in a crotch ninety feet above ground. "Our white-wood" lumber has grown so valuable that no land-owner will allow the trees to be cut by the hunter, and hence the old-fashioned 'coon-hunt has fallen among the things of the past, for it seems that the 'coon is quite wise enough to choose for the place of his indwelling the costliest tulip of the woods. I have already casually mentioned the fact that the tulip-tree's bloom is scarcely known to exist by even intelligent and well-informed Americans. Every one has heard of the mimosa, the dogwood, the red-bud, and the magnolia, but not of the tulip-bearing tree, with its incomparably bold, dashing, giantesque flower, once so common in the great woods of our Western and Middle States. I have not been able to formulate a good reason for this. Every one whose attention is called to the flower at once goes into raptures over its wild beauty and force of coloring, and wonders why poems have not been written about it and legends built upon it. It is a grander bloom than that which once, under the same name, nearly bankrupted kingdoms, though it cannot be kept in pots and greenhouses. Its colors are, like the idiosyncrasies of genius, as inimitable as they are fascinating and elusive. Audubon was something of an artist, but his tulip-blooms are utter failures. He could color an oriole, but not the corolla of this queen of the woods. The most sympathetic and experienced water-colorist will find himself at fault with those amber-rose, orange-vermilion blushes, and those tender cloudings of yellow and green. The stiff yet sensitive and fragile petals, the transparent sepals, with their watery shades and delicate washing of olive-green, the strong stamens and peculiarly marked central cone, are scarcely less difficult. All the colors elude and mock the eager artist. While the gamut of promising tints is being run, he looks, and, lo! the grand tulip has shrivelled and faded. Again and again a fresh spray is fetched in, but when the blooming-season is over he is still balked and dissatisfied. The wild, Diana-like purity and the half-savage, half-aesthetic grace have not wholly escaped him, but the color,—ah I there is the disappointment.

I have always nursed a fancy that there is something essential to perfect health in the bitters and sweets of buds and roots and gums and resins of the primeval woods. Why does the bird keep, even in old age, the same brilliancy of plumage and the same clearness of eye? Is it because it gets the elixir vitae from the hidden reservoir of nature? Be this as it may, there are times when I sincerely long for a ball of liquidambar or a mouthful of pungent spring buds. The inner bark of the tulip-tree has the wildest of all wild tastes, a peculiarly grateful flavor when taken infinitesimally, something more savage than sassafras or spice-wood, and full of all manner of bitter hints and astringent threatenings: it has long been used as the very best appetizer for horses in the early spring, and it is equally good for man. The yellow-bellied woodpecker knows its value, taking it with head jauntily awry and quiet wing-tremblings of delight. The squirrels get the essence of it as they munch the pale leaf-buds, or later when they bite the cones out of the flowers. The humming-birds and wild bees are the favored ones, however, for they get the ultimate distillation of all the racy and fragrant elements from root to bloom.

The Indians knew the value of the tulip-tree as well as its beauty. Their most graceful pirogues were dug from its bole, and its odorous bark served to roof their rude houses. No boat I have ever tried runs so lightly as a well-made tulip pirogue, or dug-out, and nothing under heaven is so utterly crank and treacherous. Many an unpremeditated plunge into cold water has one caused me while out fishing or duck-shooting on the mountain-streams of North Georgia. If you dare stand up in one, the least waver from a perfect balance will send the sensitive, skittish thing a rod from under your feet, which of course leaves you standing on the water without the faith to keep you from going under; and usually it is your head that you are standing on. But, to return to our tree, I would like to see its merits as an ornamental and shade tree duly recognized. If grown in the free air and sunlight, it forms a heavy and beautifully-shaped top, on a smooth, bright bole, and I think it might be forced to bloom about the fifteenth year. The flowers of young, thrifty trees that have been left standing in open fields are much larger, brighter, and more graceful than those of old gnarled forest-trees, but the finest blooms I ever saw were on a giant tulip in a thin wood of Indiana. A storm blew the tree down in the midst of its flowering, and I chanced to see it an hour later. The whole great top was yellow with the gaudy cups, each gleaming "like a flake of fire," as Dr. Holmes says of the oriole. Some of them were nearly four inches across. Last year a small tree, growing in a garden near where I write, bloomed for the first time. It was about twenty years old. Its flowers were paler and shallower than those gathered at the same time in the woods. It may be that transplanting, or any sort of forcing or cultivation, may cause the blooms to deteriorate in both shape and color, but I am sure that plenty of light and air is necessary to their best development.

In one way the tulip-tree is closely connected with the most picturesque and interesting period of American development. I mean the period of "hewed-log" houses. Here and there among the hills of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, there remains one of those low, heavy, lime-chinked structures, the best index of the first change from frontier-life, with all its dangers and hardships, to the peace and contentment of a broader liberty and an assured future. In fact, to my mind, a house of hewed tulip-logs, with liberal stone chimneys and heavy oaken doors, embowered in an old gnarled apple-and cherry-orchard, always suggests a sort of simple honesty and hospitality long since fallen into desuetude, but once the most marked characteristic of the American people. It is hard to imagine any meanness or illiberality being generated in such a house. Patriotism, domestic fidelity, and spotless honesty used to sit before those broad fireplaces wherein the hickory logs melted to snowy ashes. The men who hewed those logs "hewed to the line" in more ways than one. Their words, like the bullets from their flint-locked rifles, went straight to the point. The women, too, they of the "big wheel" and the "little wheel," who carded and spun and wove, though they may have been a trifle harsh and angular, were diamond-pure and the mothers of vigorous offspring.

I often wonder if there may not be a perfectly explainable connection between the decay or disappearance of the forests and the evaporation, so to speak, of man's rugged sincerity and earnestness. Why should not the simple ingredients that make up the worldly part of our souls and bodies be found in all their purity where nature's reservoir has never been disturbed or its contents tainted? Why may not the subtile force that develops the immense tulip-tree and clothes it with such a starry mantle have power also to invigorate and intensify the life of man? "I was rocked in a poplar trough," was the politician's boast a generation ago. Such a declaration might mean a great deal if the sturdy, towering strength of the tree out of which the trough was dug could have been absorbed by the embryo Congressman. The "oldest inhabitant" of every Western neighborhood recollects the "sugar-trough" used in the maple-sap-gathering season, ere the genuine "sugar-camp" had been abandoned. Young tulip-trees about fifteen inches in diameter were cut down and their boles sawed into lengths of three feet. These were split in two, and made into troughs by hollowing the faces and charring them over a fire. During the bright spring days of sugar-making the young Western mother would wrap her sturdy babe in its blanket and put it in a dry sugar-trough to sleep while she tended the boiling syrup. A man born sixty years ago in the region of tulip-trees and sugar-camps was probably cradled in a "poplar" trough; and there were those born who would now be sixty years old if they had not in unwary infancy tumbled into the enormous rainwater-troughs with which every well-regulated house was furnished. I have seen one or two of these having a capacity of fifty barrels dug from a single tulip bole. In such a pitfall some budding Washington or Lincoln may have been whelmed without causing so much as a ripple on the surface of history.

But, turning to take leave of my stately and blooming Western beauty, I see that she is both a blonde and a brunette. She has all the dreamy, languid grace of the South combined with the verve and force of the North. She is dark and she is fair, with blushing cheeks and dewy lips, sound-hearted, strong, lofty, self-reliant, a true queen of the woods, more stately than Diana, and more vigorous than Maid Marian.

MAURICE THOMPSON.



OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

Daniel Webster's "Moods."

A late magazine-article treating of one of America's illustrious dead—Daniel Webster—alluded to his well-known sombre moods, and the gentle suasion by which his accomplished wife was enabled to shorten their duration or dispel them entirely.

On an occasion well remembered, though the "chiel takin' notes" was but a simple child, I myself was present when the grim, moody reticence of the great orator converted fully twoscore ardent admirers into personal foes.

During the summer of 1837, Mr. Webster, in pursuit of a Presidential nomination, executed his famous tour through the Great West, at that time embracing only the States of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The first infant railway of the continent being yet in swaddling-clothes, the journey was accomplished by private conveyance, and the bumps and bruises stoically endured in probing bottomless pits of prairie-mud, diversified by joltings over rude log-ways and intrusive stumps, were but a part of the cruel price paid for a glittering prize which in the end vanished before the aspirant like fairy gold. At stations within reach of their personal influence, local politicians flew to the side of the brilliant statesman with the beautiful fidelity of steel to magnet: hence he was environed by a self-appointed escort of obsequious men, constantly changing as he progressed.