Monsignor Catinari was indeed much provoked when the signora told him the true story of the little novice.

"Just see what creatures girls are!" he exclaimed. "How are we to know if they have a vocation or not? That girl professed herself both willing and desirous to be a nun."

He did not scold Silvia, however. When he saw her pretty frightened face his heart relented. "You have told me a good many lies, my child," he said, "but I forgive you, since they were not intended in malice. We will say no more about it. I learn from the signora that this Claudio is a good young man, so the sooner you are married the better. Cheer up: we will have you a bride by the first week of November; and if Claudio has such a wonderful voice, he can make his way in Rome."

The reassurances of a man were more effectual than those of a woman.

"At last I believe! at last I fear no more!" Silvia cried, throwing herself into the arms of the Signora Fantini when the Monsignor was gone. "Oh how beautiful the earth is! how beautiful life is!"

"We will then begin immediately to enjoy life," the signora replied. "Collation is ready, and Nanna has bought us some of the most delicious grapes. See how large and rich they are! One could almost slice them. There! these black figs are like honey. Try one now, before your soup. The macaroni that will be brought in presently was made in the house—none of your Naples stuff, made nobody knows how or by whom. What else Nanna has for us I cannot say. She was very secret this morning, and I suspect that means riceballs seasoned with mushrooms and hashed giblets of turkey. She always becomes mysterious when those are in preparation. Eat well, child, and get a little flesh and color before Claudio comes."

They made a merry breakfast, with the noon sun sending its golden arrows through every tiniest chink of the closed shutters and an almost summer heat reigning without. Then there was an hour of sleep, then a drive to the Pincio to see all the notable people who came up there to look at or speak to each other while the sun sank behind St. Peter's. And in the evening after dinner they went to the housetop to see the fireworks which were being displayed for some festa or other; and later there was music, and then to bed.

Life became an enchantment to the little bride-elect, as life in Italy will become to any one who has not too heavy a cross to bear. For peace in this beautiful land means delight, not merely the absence of pain. How the sun shone! and how the fountains danced! What roses bloomed everywhere! what fruits of Eden were everywhere piled! How soft the speech was! and how sweet the smiles! And when it was discovered that Silvia had a beautiful voice, so that she and Claudio would be like a pair of birds together, then it seemed to her that a nest of twigs on a tree-branch would be all that she could desire.

They took her to see the pope on one of those days. It was as if they had taken her to heaven. To her he was the soul of Rome, the reason why Rome was; and when she saw his white figure against the scarlet background of cardinals she remembered how Rome looked against the rosy Campagna at sunset from her far-away window in Monte Compatri.

"A little sposa, is she?" the pope said when Monsignor Catinari presented her.—"I bless you, my child: wear this in memory of me." He gave her a little gold medal from a tiny pocket at his side, laid his hand on her head and passed on. It was too much: she had to weep for joy.

Then, when the audience was over, they took her through the museum and library, and some one gave her a bunch of roses out of the pope's private garden, and she was put into a carriage and driven home, her heart beating somewhere in her head, her feet winged and her eyes dazzled.

There was a rapturous letter from Claudio awaiting her, and by that she knew that it was not all a dream. She rattled the paper in her hands as she sat with her eyes shut, half dreaming, to make sure and keep sure that she was not to wake up presently to bitterness. Claudio would come to Rome in a week, and perhaps they would be married before he should go back. There was no letter from Matteo. So much the better.

One golden day succeeded another, and Silvia changed from a lily to a rose with marvellous rapidity. She was not a ruddy, full-leaved rose, though, but like one of those delicate ones with clouds of red on them and petals that only touch the calyx, as if they were wings and must be free to move. She was slim and frail, and her color wavered, and her head had a little droop, and her voice was low. She had always been the stillest creature alive; and now, full of happiness as she was, her feelings showed themselves in an uneasy stirring, like that of a flower in which a bee has hidden itself. After the first outburst she did not so much say that she was happy as breathe and look it.

One noonday, when life seemed too beautiful to last, and they all sat together after breakfast, the signora, her daughter and Silvia, too contented to say a word, the door opened, and Matteo Guai came in with a black, smileless face, and not the slightest salutation for his sister. He had come to take Silvia home, he replied briefly to the signora's compliments. She must be ready in an hour. The vintage was suffering by his absence, and it was necessary that he should return at once.

Signora Fantini poured out the most voluble exclamations, prayers and protests. She had forty engagements for Silvia. They had had only a few days' visit from her, and she was to have stayed a month. They would themselves accompany her to Monte Compatri later if it was necessary that she should go. But, in fine, Monsignor Catinari did not expect her to return.

"I am the head of the family, and my sister has to obey me till she is married," Matteo replied doggedly. "I suppose that Monsignor Catinari will not deny that. The Church always supports the authority of the master of the family."

"Why, of course," the signora replied, rather confused by this irresistible argument, "you have the right, and no one will resist you. But as a favor now—" and the signora assumed her most coaxing smile, and even advanced a plump white hand to touch Matteo's sleeve.

She might as well have tried to bewitch and persuade the bronze Augustus on the Capitoline Hill.

"Things are changed since it was promised that Silvia should stay a month with you," Matteo replied. "There is work at home for her to do. Since she is not to be a nun, she must work. Let her be ready to start in an hour: my carriage is waiting at the door. I am going out into the piazza for a little while. I will send a man up for her trunk when I am ready to start."

Silvia uttered not a word. At sight of her brother she had sunk back in her chair white and speechless. On hearing his voice she had closed her eyes.

He half turned to her before going out, looking at her out of the corners of his evil eyes, a cold, strange smile wreathing his lips. "So you are not going to be a nun?" he said.

She did not respond. Only the quiver of her lowered eyelids and a slight shiver told that she knew he was addressing her.

Matteo went out, and the signora, at her wits' end, undertook to encourage Silvia. There was no time to see Monsignor Catinari or to appeal to any authority; and if there were, it would have availed nothing perhaps. Almost any one would have said that the girl's terrors were fanciful, and that it was quite natural her brother, who would lose five hundred scudi by her change of purpose, should require her to work as other girls of her condition worked.

"Cheer up and go with him, figlia mia," she said, "and leave all to me. I will see Monsignor Catinari this very evening, and post a letter to you before I go to bed. If Matteo is unkind to you, we will have you taken away from him at once. And, in any case, you shall be married in a few weeks at the most, as Monsignor promised. Don't cry so: don't say that you cannot go. I am sorry and vexed, my dear, but I see no way but for you to go. Depend upon me. No harm shall come to you. I will myself come to Monte Compatri within the week, and arrange all for you. Besides, recollect that you will see Claudio: he is there waiting for you. Perhaps you may see him this very evening."

The Signora Fantini's efforts to cheer and reassure the sister were as ineffectual as her efforts to persuade the brother had been. Silvia submitted because she had no strength to resist.

"O Madonna mia!" she kept murmuring, "he will kill me! he will kill me! O Madonna mia! pray for me."

When an Italian says that he will come back in an hour, you may look for him after two hours. Matteo was no exception to the rule. It was already mid-afternoon when the porter came up and said that Silvia's brother was waiting for her below.

The signora gave her a tumbler half full of vin santo, which she kept for special occasions—a strong, delicious wine with the perfume of a whole garden in it. "Drink every drop," she commanded: "it will give you courage. You had better be a little tipsy than fainting away. And put this bottle into your pocket to drink when you have need on the way."

More dead than alive, Silvia was placed in the little old-fashioned carriage that Matteo had hired to come to Rome in, and her brother took his seat beside her. The Signora Fantini and her daughter leaned from the window, kissing their hands to her and shaking their handkerchiefs as long as she was in sight. And as long as she was in sight they saw her pale face turned backward, looking at them. Then the tawny stone of a church-corner hid her from their eyes for ever.

Who knows or can guess what that drive was? The two passed through Frascati, and Matteo stopped to speak to an acquaintance there. They drove around Monte Porzio, and Matteo stopped again, to buy a glass of wine and some figs. He offered some to his sister, but she shook her head.

"She is sleepy," her brother said to the man of whom he had bought. "Give me another tumbler of wine: it isn't bad."

"It is the last barrel I have of the vintage of two years ago," the man replied. "It was a good vintage. If the signorina would take a drop she would sleep the better. Besides, the night is coming on and there is a chill in the air."

Silvia opened her eyes and made the little horizontal motion with her fore finger which in Italy means no.

"She will sleep well enough," Matteo said, and drove on.

Night was coming on, and they had no more towns to pass—only a bit more of lonely level road and the lonely road that wound to and fro up the mountain-side. At the best, they could not reach home before ten o'clock. The road went to and fro—sometimes open, to give a view of the Campagna and the Sabine Mountains, and Soracte swimming in a lustrous dimness on the horizon; sometimes shut in closely by trees, that made it almost black in spite of the moon. For the moon was low and gave but little light, being but a crescent as yet. There was a shooting star now and then, breaking out like a rocket with a trail of sparks or slipping small and pallid across the sky.

One of these latter might have been poor Silvia's soul slipping away from the earth. It went out there somewhere on the mountain-side. Matteo said the carriage tilted, and she, being asleep, fell out before he could prevent. Her temple struck a sharp rock, and Claudio missed his bride.

He had to keep quiet about it, though. What could he prove? what could any one prove? Where knives are sharp and people mind their own business, or express their opinions only by a shrug of the shoulders and a grimace, how is a poor boy, how is even a rich man or a rich woman, to come at the truth in such a case? Besides, the truth would not have brought her back, poor little Silvia!

MARY AGNES TINCKER.



A SPANISH STORY-TELLER

In these days of pessimism in literature, when Tourgueneff and Sacher-Masoch represent man as the victim of blind Chance and annihilation his greatest happiness, it is pleasant to turn to a writer who still believes in God, his country and the family, and recognizes an overruling Providence that directs the world. It is not strange that these old-fashioned ideas should be found in Spain, where, in spite of much ignorance and superstition, the lower classes are deeply religious in the best sense of the word, and distinguished for their patriotism and intense love for their homes.

Antonio de Trueba, the subject of this sketch, was born in 1821 at Montellano, a little village in Biscay. He thus describes the home of his childhood in the preface to his collected poems: "On the brow of one of the mountains that surround a valley of Biscay there are four little houses, white as four doves, hidden in a grove of chestnut and walnut trees—four houses that can only be seen at a distance when the autumn has removed the leaves from the trees. There I spent the first fifteen years of my life. In the bottom of the valley there is a church whose belfry pierces the arch of foliage and rises majestic above the ash and walnut trees, as if to signify that the voice of God rises above Nature; and in that church two masses were said on Sunday—one at sunrise and the other two hours later. We children rose with the song of the birds and went down to the first mass, singing and leaping through the shady oak-groves, while our elders came down later to high mass. While our parents and grand-parents were attending it I sat down beneath some cherry trees that were opposite my father's house—for from that spot could be seen the whole valley that ended in the sea—and shortly after four or five young girls came to seek me, red as the cherries that hung over my head or as the graceful knots of ribbon that tied the long braids of their hair, and made me compose couplets for them to sing to their sweethearts in the afternoon, to the sound of the tambourine, under the walnut trees where the young people danced and the elders chatted and enjoyed our pleasure."

The young poet's parents were simple tillers of the soil, who gave their son a meagre education. In one of his letters he says that his father's library consisted of the Fueros de Viscaya (the old laws of Biscay), the Fables of Samaniego, Don Quixote, some ballads brought from Valmaseda or Bilbao, and two or three lives of the saints. Antonio seems to have had from his earliest childhood an ardent love of poetry, and in the passage quoted above he mentions his own compositions. He continues by saying, "I remember one day one of those girls was very sad because her sweetheart was going away for a long time. She wanted a song to express her grief, and I composed one at her request. A few days later she did not need my aid to sing her sorrow: in proportion as it had increased her ability to sing it herself had also increased, for poetry is the child of feeling. Her songs, as well as those I composed, soon became popular in the valley."

When the poet was fifteen years old the civil war waged by Don Carlos was desolating Spain. The inhabitants of Biscay espoused his cause, but Antonio's parents were unwilling to expose their son to the dangers he must run if he remained at home, and therefore decided to send him to a distant relative in Madrid who kept a hardware-shop. "One night in November," says Trueba, "I departed from my village, perhaps—my God!—never to return. I descended the valley with my eyes bathed in tears. The cocks began to crow, the dogs barked, the owls hooted in the mountains, the wind moaned in the tops of the walnut trees, and the river roared furiously rushing down the valley; but the inhabitants of the village slept peaceably, except my parents and brothers, who from the window followed weeping the sound of my footsteps, about to be lost in the noise of the valley. I was just leaving the last house of the village when one of those girls who had so often sought me under the cherry trees approached the window and took leave of me sobbing. On crossing a hill, about to lose the valley from my sight, I heard a distant song, and stopped. That same girl was sending me her last farewell in a song as beautiful as the sentiment that inspired it."

Antonio devoted himself to his duties during the day and pursued his studies with eagerness during the night. What he suffered from home-sickness the reader can easily imagine. All through his later works are scattered reminiscences of those unhappy years in Madrid, when his memory fondly turned to the mountains and cherry-groves of his beloved Encartaciones.[1] Often dreaming of the country, which, he says, is his perpetual dream, he imagined the moment in which God would permit him to return to the valley in which he was born. "When this happens, I say to myself, my brow will be wrinkled and my hair gray. The day on which I return to my native valley will be a festal day, and on crossing the hill from which I can behold the whole valley, I shall hear the bells ringing for high mass. How sweetly will resound in my ears those bells that so often rilled my childhood with delight! I shall enter the valley, my heart beating, my breathing difficult and my eyes bathed with tears of joy. There will be, with its white and sonorous belfry, the church where the holy water of baptism was poured upon the brows of my parents and my own; there will be the walnut and chestnut trees beneath whose shade we danced on Sunday afternoons; there will be the wood where my brothers and I looked for birds' nests and made whistles out of the chestnut and walnut bark; there, along the road, will be the apple trees whose fruit my companions and I knocked off with stones when we went to school; there will be the little white house where my grand-parents, my father, my brothers and I were born; there will be all that does not feel or breathe. But where will be, my God, all those who with tears in their eyes bade me farewell so many years ago? I shall follow the valley down: I shall recognize the valley, but not its inhabitants. Judge whether there will be among sorrows a greater sorrow than mine! The people gathered in the portico of the church waiting for mass to begin will look over the wall along the road, and others will look out of the windows, all to see the stranger pass. And they will not know me, and I shall not know them, for those children and those youths and those old men will not be the old men nor the youths nor the children whom I left in my native valley. I shall follow sadly the valley down. 'All that has felt,' I shall exclaim, 'has changed or died. What is it that preserves here pure and immaculate the sentiments which I inspired?' And then some village-woman will sing one of those songs in which I enclosed the deepest feelings of my soul, and on hearing her my heart will want to leap from my breast, and I shall fall on my knees, and, if emotion and sobs do not stifle my voice, I shall exclaim, 'Holy and thrice holy, blessed and thrice blessed, poetry which immortalizes human sentiment!'"

Antonio after a time left his relative's shop to enter another in the same business, from which he was relieved by the owner's financial difficulties. He then determined to devote himself to literature, and became a writer for the papers. In 1852 he published Libro de Cantares (Book of Songs), which at once made his name a household word throughout Spain. He tells us that most of the poems in it were composed mentally while dreaming of his native country and wandering about the environs of Madrid, "wherever the birds sing and the people display their virtues and their vices, for the noble Spanish people have a little of everything." He warns his readers not to expect from him what he cannot give them: "Do not seek in this book erudition or culture or art. Seek recollections and feeling, and nothing more. Fifteen years ago I left my solitary village: these fifteen years, instead of singing under the cherry trees of my native country, I sing in the midst of the Babylon which rises on the banks of the Manzanares; and, notwithstanding, I still amuse myself with counting from here the trees that shade the little white house where I was born, and where, God willing, I shall die: my songs still resemble those of fifteen years ago. What do I understand of Greek or Latin, of the precepts of Horace or of Aristotle? Speak to me of the blue skies and seas, of birds and boughs, of harvests and trees laden with golden fruit, of the loves and joys and griefs of the upright and simple villagers, and then I shall understand you, because I understand nothing more than this."

These poems are what the author calls them, nothing more—pure and simple records of the life of the people around him, their loves and griefs, their hopes and disappointments. The most usual metre is the simple Spanish asonante, or eight-syllable trochaic verse, with the vowel rhyme called asonante.[2] They are pervaded by a tender spirit of melancholy, very different from the Weltschmerz of Heine, with some of whose lyrics the Spanish poet's cantares may be compared without losing anything by the comparison. In one poem he says: "In the depths of my heart are great sorrows: some of them are known to men, others to God alone. But I shall rarely mention my griefs in my songs, for I have no hope that they can be alleviated; and where is the mortal who, in passing through this valley, has not encountered among the flowers some sharp thorn?" In the same poem he says: "All ask me, Who taught you to sing? No one: I sing because God wills it—I sing like the birds;" and he explains his method by a touching incident. One evening he was singing on the bank of the Manzanares when he saw a child smiling on the breast of its mother. The poet went and caressed it, and the child threw its arms about Antonio's neck and turning to its mother cried, "Mother, Antonio, he of the songs, is a blind man who sees."[3] The poet continues: "I am a blind man who sees: that angel told the truth. With my guitar resting on my loving heart, you may see me wandering from the city to the valley, from the cabin of the poor to the palace of the great, weeping with those who weep, singing with those who sing, for my rude guitar is the lasting echo of all joys and all sorrows. I shall sing my songs in the simple language of the laborer and the soldier, of the children and the mothers, of those who have not frequented learned schools.... In this language I shall extol the faith and the holy combats of the soldiers of Christ with the sacrilegious Saracen; I shall sing the heroic efforts of our fathers to conquer the proud legions of Bonaparte; and the beauty of the skies, and the flowers of the valley, and love and innocence—all that is beautiful and great—will find a lasting echo in my rude guitar."

Many of these songs are ingenious variations on a theme supplied by some old and well-known poem, a few lines of which are woven into each division of the new song.

The success of the Libro de los Cantares was immediate and great; the first three editions were exhausted in a few months; the duc de Montpensier wished to defray the expenses of the fourth, and Queen Isabella of the fifth; since then others have followed. Some years later the poet married, and since then has written chiefly in prose.

In 1859 appeared a volume of short tales entitled Rose-colored Stories (Cuentos de Color de Rosa): these were followed by Tales of the Country (Cuentos campesinos), Popular Tales (Cuentos popolares), Popular Narrations (Narraciones popolares), Tales of Various Colors, Tales of the Dead and Living, etc.[4]

Before examining in detail any of these collections it may be well to learn the author's views of his task and definition of his subject. In the introduction to the Popular Tales he says, addressing his friend Don Jose de Castro y Serrano: "The object of this preface is simply to tell you why I have given the name of Popular Tales to those contained in this volume, what I understand by popular literature, and why I write tales instead of writing novels or comedies or cookbooks. There are two reasons why I have called these tales popular. First, because many of them are told by the people; and, secondly, because in retelling them I have used the simple and plain style of the people.... In my conception, popular literature can be defined in this manner: That literature which by its simplicity and clearness is within the reach of the intelligence of the people.... However, in popular literature the simplicity of form is not enough: it is necessary to reproduce Nature, because if not reproduced there will be no truth in it; and if there is no truth in it the people will not believe it; and if they do not believe it they will not feel it. For my part, I take such pains in studying Nature, in order that my pictures may be true, that I fear you will accuse me of extravagance, and will laugh at me when you read the two examples I am going to cite. On a very severe night in January I was writing in the fourth story of the street Lope de Vega, No. 32, the tale which I named De Patas en el Infierno ('The Feet in Hell'), and when a detail occurred which consisted in explaining the changes in the sound made by water in filling a jar at a fountain, I found that I had never studied these changes, and I did not have in the house at that moment water enough to study them. The printers were going to send for the story early in the morning, and it must be finished that night. Do you know what I did to get out of my difficulty? At three o'clock in the morning, facing the darkness, rain and wind, I went to the little fountain near by with a jar under my cloak, and spent a quarter of an hour there listening to the sound of the water as it fell into the jar. A short time after I was preparing to write the rural tale called Las Siembras y las Cosechas ('Seed-time and Harvest'), and the description of a sunrise in the country entered into my plan. I had often seen the sun rise in the country, but it was necessary to contemplate and study anew that beautiful spectacle in order to describe it exactly; and early one morning, long before the dawn, accompanied by two friends, I went to the hills of Vicalvaro, where we made some good studies, but were very much frightened by some thieves who attacked us knife in hand, believing we were people who carried watches."

These words of the author reveal better than we could explain his aim and method. He is a follower of Fernan Caballero, in so far as he has devoted himself to illustrate the every-day life of the Spanish people. The former writer has filled her pages with brilliant pictures of the life of Andalusia. Her canvas is, however, larger than Trueba's: she depicts the society of the South in all its grades; Trueba has chosen a more limited circle on which he has lavished all his care.

The volume of Rose-colored Tales is in many respects the best that Trueba has produced. The dedication to his wife explains the title and reveals the author's optimistic views. He says: "I call them Rose-colored Tales because they are the reverse of that pessimistic literature which delights in representing the world as a boundless desert in which no flower blooms, and life as a perpetual night in which no star shines. I, poor son of Adam, in whom the curse of the Lord on our first parents has not ceased to be accomplished a single day since the time when, still a child, I left my beloved valley of the Encartaciones,—I shall love this life, and shall not believe myself exiled in the world while God, friendship, love and the family exist in it, while the sun shines on me every morning, while the moon lights me every night and the flowers and birds visit me every day."

The scene of all the stories of this collection is in the Encartaciones, and an examination of a few of them will make us acquainted with the usual range of characters and the author's mode of treatment. The first is entitled "The Resurrection of the Soul" (La Resurreccion del Alma), and opens with an account of the village of C——, one of the fifteen composing the Encartaciones. Here lived Santiago and Catalina, the latter a foundling whom Santiago's parents had found at their door one winter morning. The good people, who had always desired a daughter, cared tenderly for the little stranger, and she grew up with their son, who was a few years older. It had been decided that when Santiago was fifteen he should go to his uncle in Mexico; which country, for the simple inhabitants of Biscay, is still "India," and the retired merchants who return to spend their last days in their native towns are "Indians"—a class that often play an important part in the denouement of Trueba's simple plots. At the beginning of the story the two children (Santiago was nearly fifteen) had gone off to play and allowed the goats to get into the fields. The angry father is about to punish Catalina, who has assumed all the blame, but his wife mollifies him by reminding him that they have received a piece of good news. Ramon good-humoredly says, "You women always have your own way," and proceeds to tell a story to illustrate it. We give it as an example of the popular tales that Trueba often weaves into his stories:

"Once upon a time, when Christ went through the world healing the sick and raising the dead, a woman came out to meet him and said to him, seizing hold of his cloak and weeping like a Magdalen, 'Lord, do me the favor to come and raise my husband, who died this morning.'

"'I cannot stop,' answered the Lord. 'I am going to perform a great miracle—that is, find a good mother among the women who are fond of bull-fights; but everything will turn out well if the ass doesn't stop. All I can do for you is that if you take it into your head to raise your husband, your husband will be raised.'

"And indeed the wife took it into her head that her husband must be raised, and her husband was raised, for even the dead can't resist the whims of women."

The good news that Ramon had received was a letter from his brother, who wished Santiago to be sent to him by the first steamer leaving Bilbao. It was the 15th of August, the Feast of the Assumption, when Santiago, accompanied by his father, prepared to start for Bilbao.

"Quica, who until the moment of departure had not shed a tear, because she had only seen her son on the way to happiness, as you saw yours, disconsolate mother, who now see only a sepulchre in the Americas,—Quica now wept without restraint. Poor Catalina had wept so much for a month and a half that there were no tears left in her eyes: she did not weep, but she felt the faintness and sorrow which the dying must experience. Santiago's eyes were moist at times, but soon shone with joy.

"'Come, come! You are like a lot of crying children,' exclaimed Ramon, tearing his son from the arms of Quica and Catalina. 'One would say that it is a matter to cry over. Don't you see me? I too have a soul in my soul-case....'

"And indeed he had, for tears as large as nuts rolled from his eyes. Santiago and Ramon departed. Quica and Catalina sorrowfully followed them with their eyes until they crossed a neighboring hill. Then the young girl made an almost supernatural effort to calm herself, and said, 'Mother, I am going to take the sheep to the mountain.'

"'Do what you wish, my daughter,' answered Quica mechanically.

"It was Catalina's custom to open, the gate every morning to a flock of sheep and lead them a stone's throw from the farmhouse, where she left them alone; but this day she went with them as far as the hill that Ramon and Santiago had just crossed, and from that hill she went on to the next and the next, with her eyes always fixed on the road to Bilbao, until, overcome by fatigue and dying with grief, she bowed her beautiful head, and instead of retracing her steps to the farmhouse of Ipenza, she went to the church in the valley and fell on her knees before the altar of the Virgin of Solitude."

Santiago reaches Mexico in safety, and is kindly received by his uncle, who dies ten years later and leaves him an immense fortune. Santiago at once plunges into every species of dissipation, and soon destroys his health. His physician recommends him as a last resort to return to his native country and try the effect of the mountain-air. Meanwhile, Catalina had grown up one of the prettiest girls of the village, and Santiago's parents had died, leaving her a handsome dowry and the use of the farm until it should be claimed by Santiago.

"One dark and rainy night Santiago returned to his home, broken down in health and profoundly weary of life. Catalina receives him, and is amazed at his changed appearance.

"'Are you ill, Santiago?' asked Catalina with infinite tenderness.

"'Yes—ill in body and mind.'

"'How do you feel, brother of my heart?'

"'I do not feel anything: that is my greatest misfortune.'"

In truth, the unfortunate Santiago had lost all the better feelings of his heart. His return to the home of his innocent boyhood failed to evoke any pure and noble sentiments: his heart continued paralyzed, cold, indifferent to everything. But it was impossible for him to remain in this condition under the influence of Catalina. He gradually began to take an interest in the life around him and employ his wealth for the benefit of his neighbors. Gradually, he awoke from his lethargy and became well in body and mind. As the reader can imagine, the story closes with his marriage to Catalina, who had such a great share in his recovery.

In the story called "From One's Country to Heaven" (Desde la Patria al Cielo) the author's endeavors show that the surest happiness is to be found in one's native village. He begins with an ironical description of the village of S—— in the Encartaciones, in which he depicts the simplicity of the inhabitants and their backwardness, in regard to the spirit of the age. In this village lived, among others, Teresa, a poor widow, and her only child, Pedro. One day, while passing the palace of a wealthy "Indian," he called her and said he was obliged to return to America, and wished her to take care of his house during his absence. The poor woman now saw herself relieved from want and able to educate her son. The latter found in the rich library of the "Indian" food for many years of study, and soon became dissatisfied with his quiet life in the village, and eager to travel and see the countries about which he had read such charming tales. He soon grew to despise everything around him, and treated with scorn his neighbor Rose, who had long loved him tenderly.

One day news arrived from Mexico that the "Indian" had died, leaving to Teresa his palace at S—— and a large sum of money besides. Pedro was now able to fulfil his dreams of travel, and started on his journey. He first visits the Pass of Roncesvalles, and is nearly killed by the indignant Frenchmen whom he asks about the defeat of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers. Pedro then proceeds to Bayonne, where he is so shocked by the sight of young girls selling their hair to the highest bidder that he determines to leave France, and we next find him in a Swiss chalet, where he is disgusted by the lack of cleanliness. His feelings can be imagined when he finds that the peasants have no popular traditions and are not acquainted even with the name of William Tell. In despair, Pedro directs his course to Germany, but finds no sylphs or sirens on the banks of the Rhine, while maidens with blue eyes and golden hair are no more abundant there than elsewhere. Greece next receives the wanderer, who hears in Athens of railroads and consolidated funds: on Olympus he finds a guano manufactory, and on Pindus a poet writing fourteen-syllable endecasyllabics. He visits with a similar disenchantment Constantinople, and then makes his way to England. There poor Pedro is disgusted by the sordid, selfish spirit of the people. An absurd scene at a village church fills him with horror. The bare walls of the temple chill his heart, and after the service a domestic quarrel between the curate and his jealous wife caps the climax and Pedro flees to America. On landing in New York he is robbed of his watch: the thief is arrested, but gives the watch to the magistrate, keeping the chain for himself, and Pedro is condemned to pay the costs and the damages suffered by the thief's character. On returning that evening from the theatre he is garroted and robbed of all he has with him. The landlord tells him that no one thinks of going out at night without a pair of six-shooters, and adds that what happens in New York is nothing to what goes on at Boston, Baltimore and New Orleans. The next day he reads an editorial in the New York Herald advising American merchants to repudiate their foreign debts. He then determines to visit the different States, and on passing through the South thanks God that slavery is unknown in Europe. Railroad accidents, murders and political and social corruption cause him to regard with profound horror the young republic, which seems to him old in vice, and he starts for South America, the Spanish part of which reminds him of a virgin overwhelmed with misfortunes, but still full of youth and faith. In Vera Cruz, Pedro visits the sepulchre of the "Indian" to whom he owes his fortune. A letter from his mother is awaiting him there, and he bursts into tears, and sails at once for his beloved home, which he reaches one beautiful Sunday morning in May. His meeting with his mother takes place in the church, and there also he sees Rose, whose constancy is now rewarded. The story closes with the lines from Lista: "Happy he who has never seen any other stream than that of his native place, and, an old man, sleeps in the shade where he played a boy!"

Another story of the same collection, and one of the author's best, is entitled Juan Paloma. The principal characters are Don Juan de Urrutia, nicknamed Juan Paloma ("dovelike"), a wealthy and crusty old bachelor, and Antonio de Molinar, a poor peasant, and his wife. The moral of the story is in Don Juan's last words: "Blessed be the family!" and in Juana's remark: "Alas for him who lives alone in the world, for only his dogs will weep for him when he dies!"

The other stories of this volume, "The Mother-in-Law," "The Judas of the Household" and "I Believe in God," all contain many charming scenes. In the last a young girl is educated by an infidel father, and after his death marries Diego, a village lad. She becomes a mother, but still retains in her heart the seeds of atheism sown there by her father. Her child, a girl, becomes ill, and a doctor is sent for from Bilbao.

"The doctor was long in coming, and Ascensita was devoured by impatience and uncertainty. He arrived at last, and examined the child attentively, observing a deep silence, which caused the poor mother the most sorrowful anxiety.

"'Will the daughter of my heart recover?' Ascensita asked him in tears. 'For God's sake, speak to me frankly, for this uncertainty is more cruel than the death of my daughter.'

"'Senora,' answered the doctor, 'God alone can save the child.'

"Ascensita fell senseless by the side of the cradle containing her dying child. When she returned to herself Diego alone was at her side. The unhappy mother placed her ear to the child's lips, and perceived that it still breathed.

"'Diego,' she exclaimed, 'take care of the child of my soul!' and flying down the stairs hastened to a hermitage near by, and falling on her knees before the Virgin of Consolation exclaimed in grief, 'Holy Virgin! pity me! Save the child of my heart! And if she has flown to heaven since I left her side to fall at thy feet, beg thy holy Son to restore her to life, as He did the maid of Galilee!'

"A woman who was praying in a corner of the temple arose weeping with joy and grief, and hastened to clasp the unhappy mother in her arms and call her daughter. It was her husband's mother, Agustina, who had also gone to the temple to pray for the restoration of the child.

"'Mother,' exclaimed Ascensita, 'I believe in God! I believe in God and hope in His mercy!'

"'My daughter, no one believes in it in vain,' answered Agustina, bursting into tears. And both again knelt and prayed."

The mother's prayer was heard and the child recovered.

In the Popular Narrations, Trueba works up themes already popular among the people, but clothes them in his own words and varies them to suit his own taste. He says in the preface: "The task which I undertook some time ago, and still continue, consists in collecting the narrations, tales or anecdotes that circulate among the people and are the work of the popular invention, which sometimes creates and at others imitates, if it does not plagiarize, trying when it imitates to give to the imitation the form of the original. Some of the writers or collectors abroad, and especially in Germany, who have devoted themselves to a similar task, have followed a method different from mine; since, like the Brothers Grimm, they reproduce the popular tales almost as they have collected them from the lips of the people. This system is not to my taste, because almost all popular tales, although they have a precious base, have an absurd form, and in order to enter worthily into the products of the literary art they need to be perfected by art, and have a moral or philosophical end, which nothing in the sphere of art should be without."

The subjects of some of these stories are well known out of Spain. "St. Peter's Doubts" (Las Dudas de San Pedro) is as old as the Gesta Romanorum (cap. 80), and is familiar to English readers from Parnell's Hermit. Another, "A Century in a Moment" (Un Siglo en un Momento), is the story of the woman allowed after death to come back to the earth and see her lover, whom she finds faithless. Still another, Tragaldabas, is familiar to the readers of Grimm's Household Tales, where it figures as "Godfather Death."

The volume of Popular Tales contains nineteen stories of the most varying description. Some are popular in the broadest sense, as "The Three Counsels" (Los Consejos), in which a soldier whose time of service has expired buys from his captain with his pay three pieces of advice: Always take the short cut on a road, Do not inquire into what does not concern you, and Do nothing without reflection. The soldier on his way home has occasion to put in practice all three counsels, and thereby saves his life and property. Others, are legendary, as Ofero, the legend of St. Christopher, and Casilda, the story of the Moorish king's daughter converted to the Christian religion by a physician from Judea, who proves to be Our Lord. One, "The Wife of the Architect" (La Mujer del Arquitecto), is a local tradition of Toledo, and another, "The Prince without a Memory" (El Principe Desmemoriado), is taken from Gracian Dantisco's Galateo Espanol.

We may say of this collection, as of the last, that, although the stories show much humor and skill, they are not among the author's best. He is most at home in the simple pictures of life in the Encartaciones or in the country near Madrid. The latter is the scene of the stories in the volume entitled Rural Tales (Cuentos campesinos), which contains some of the author's most charming productions. They are generally longer than the others—one, "Domestic Happiness" (La Felicidad domestica), filling over ninety-two octavo pages. "Seed-time and Harvest" (Las Siembras y las Cosechas) is a charming story of Pepe and his wife Pepa, the former of whom sows wheat in his fields, and the latter economy, love and virtue by the fireside. The best story of the collection, however—and, to our mind, one of the best that Trueba has written—is the one called "The Style is the Man" (El Estilo es el Hombre), which is so well worth a translation that we will not spoil it by an analysis.

We have said that Trueba's works have been great popular successes. He has endeared himself to all who love poetry and the simple, honest life of the Spanish people. His beloved province has not forgotten him, and in 1862 unanimously elected him archivist and chronicler of Biscay, with a salary of nine hundred dollars a year. The poet henceforth turned his attention to a history of Biscay, which has not yet appeared, though some preliminary studies have been published in a work entitled Chapters of a Book (Capitulos de un Libro). Trueba resided at this period of his life at Bilbao, which he was obliged to leave in haste during the last Carlist war, and he has since lived in Madrid. He has published there several volumes of romances and historical novels, some of which have been very successful; but Trueba's real strength is in his poetry and short stories, which may be favorably compared with the best of this class of literature—with Auerbach's Tales of the Black Forest, for example. The reader is at once attracted to the author, whose personality shines through most of his stories and is always apparent in his poetry. Simple, honest, patriotic, religious, he is a type of the best class of Spaniards—a class that will some day win for their country the respect of other nations and bring back a better glory than that founded on conquest.

T. F. CRANE.



THROUGH WINDING WAYS.

CHAPTER XVII.

My first meeting with Georgy Lenox on the seashore was not my last. The habits of the family made it easy for us to have our interviews uninterrupted, and probably unperceived, for although we were all early risers we rarely met each other till breakfast-time. Helen went to her father's room at half-past seven, and they read and talked together until my mother called them at nine o'clock. As for my mother, purest of all women as she was, she felt she was not pure enough to meet the new day until she had spent an hour at her Bible and on her knees in prayer. There is a light that comes out of the west sometimes toward evening after a stormy day which seems to be sent straight from the fount of light itself. Such light was always in my mother's eyes when I kissed her good-morning, and I knew it had come to her as she knelt on bended knees. She was tranquil in these days with a Heaven-born tranquillity, but I know now that she had a pang of dread for every throb of love.

She spoke to me once of my increasing intimacy with Georgina. "There is nothing you are concealing from me, Floyd?" she said, her brown eyes reading my face.

She had come to my bedside after I had gone to rest for the night, impelled by a restlessness to be certain that all was well with her dear ones before she could close her eyes.

"I cannot think what you mean, mother," I answered. "I have nothing to conceal."

She sighed. "Georgy is a beautiful girl," she said quietly, "but she baits too many lures for men, Floyd. It seems to me she is trying to win you, my dear boy. She is born to make men unhappy. Do not trust her. Oh, why is she here?"

"Because Helen has asked her to remain, mother."

"Helen pities her and tries to please her. She is one too many in the house, Floyd: she will do some harm to some of us. She is cold and treacherous at heart, and she never sees us happy, contented together but that she hates us every one."

I thought my mother fanciful, and told her that she was prejudiced against the girl, who had grown up from infancy under her eyes.

"I know her better than you do, mother," I affirmed stubbornly.

She smiled a patient, melancholy smile. "If I am prejudiced," said she gently, "it is because of what her misconduct cost my son years ago. Do you think I can ever forget that but for her caprice and self-will you would never have had those years of suffering, Floyd? But we women know each other. It is at times a sad knowledge, and for our prescience the men whom we would serve misjudge us and tell us we hate each other. Georgina is in love this summer. You do not guess what man she has set her wishes upon?"

I stirred restlessly on my pillow, but I looked at her with something like anger against her growing in my heart.

"Good-night, mother," I returned. "It is none of my business to read any girl's heart through a sister-woman's cold trained eyes. If Miss Lenox is in love, God bless her! I say. I suppose I am not the lucky fellow."

My mother kissed me softly on my forehead and went out; and, alas! it was many a day afterward before there was perfect peace and confidence between us again. Not that we were cold or constrained—indeed, we were more than ever gentle and tender in our ways ... but there was a subject which was heavy on our hearts of which we were not again to speak, and there may have been a meaning in my face which she did not venture to read, for I resented it if her look fastened upon me too closely.

But the pleasant country-house life went on quite unchecked by events of any sort. Few visitors were admitted, and it was understood at the Point that rigid seclusion from all society was the will of Miss Floyd. The young girl was much talked about: she held every advantage of youth, beauty, enormous wealth, and, almost more than all these, she possessed that prestige which inheres in families that maintain quietly and proudly their reserve, dignity and indifference to the transitory fashions of society. Georgy Lenox became more and more involved in the watering-place dissipations as the season advanced and the hotels filled. She came and went in shimmering toilettes of all hues with an air of radiant enjoyment, but her outgoings and incomings disturbed no one but myself. Helen would kiss her and tell her there was no one half so beautiful; Mr. Floyd would lean back in his chair and smile at her with the admiration in his eyes that all men who are not churls feel it a discourtesy to withhold from a pretty woman; and even my mother, with a conscientious wish to do her duty by the young girl, would inquire carefully about every chaperone, every invitation, and would herself direct what time the carriage should be sent to bring her home.

I have already spoken of our pleasant labors together in the study over poor Mr. Raymond's papers. Many a treasure did Mr. Floyd and Helen find there. After the death of his daughter Mr. Raymond had jealously taken possession of every scrap of paper which belonged to her, and now her husband was at last to see a hundred testimonials of her love for him of which he had never dreamed. There was the young girl's journal before she was married, bound in blue velvet and clasped with gold: there were the letters the poor little woman had written, shuddering before her great trial, to the husband and the child who should survive her. I believe all young mothers on the threshold of outward and visible maternity believe they are to die in their agony, but these tokens of his young wife's unspoken dread touched Mr. Floyd so closely we almost had cause to regret that he had seen them.

"She never told me of her premonition of death," he said to my mother over and over again. "She seemed very glad and proud that she was going to bring me a little child."

Helen had run off with her blue velvet-covered book.

"Some time," said Mr. Floyd, "I want to read every word she wrote, but these letters are enough now: I can bear nothing more." And even these he could not well endure until my mother had talked them over with him again and again.

The quiet, happy life which we led in these days suited Mr. Floyd's health, and there was no recurrence of the alarming symptoms which had filled me with dread a few months before. "I begin to think," he remarked often, "that by continuing this life, as simple as that which a bird leads flying from bough to bough, I am to grow stout and elderly, and go on getting gray, rubicund, with an amplitude of white waistcoat, until I am seventy years of age or so. My father and mother each died young, but both by accident as it were: the habit of both families was of long life and great strength. I confess I should like to live for a good many years yet. I suppose Helen will marry by and by. I should like to be a witness of her happiness, rounded, full, complete, sanctified by motherhood. Think, Mary, of my holding Helen's children on my knee!"

"I think often of grandmotherhood myself," my mother replied. "It is a symptom of advancing age, James."

I heard the talk, but Helen was far enough from guessing what plans her father was forming for his ultimate satisfaction, and I could fancy her superb disdain at such mention. It was easy for me to see that her love for her father was quite enough for her: she invested it with all the charming prettinesses that a dainty coquette uses with her lover. She was arch, gay, imperious, tender, all in a breath: I confess that I often felt that, let her once put forth her might, not Georgy Lenox could be more winning, sweet and seductive. But all her tenderness was for her father: with me she was sometimes proud and shy, sometimes wearing the manner of a loving little child. I often called her "little sister" in those days, and so, and in no other wise, I held her. When she was kind, we had pleasant talks together: when she treated me with coolness and reserve, I laughed and let her go. Her father needed her, and I did not; and I paid scant attention to her little caprices, although I scolded her for them now and then.

"Do you wish to treat me as you treat Thorpe?" I would ask. "I am not a tame cat yet."

"How do I treat Mr. Thorpe?" she inquired. "I intend to treat him as I do the man who places my chair."

"You don't always manage that, my dear child. For instance, last night, when you were going to sing, you showed plainly that you were vexed at his officiousness in opening the piano and placing your stool for you, and declined singing at once. Now, had Mills performed those slight services you would have said coolly, 'Thank you, Mills,' and not have wasted a thought on the matter more than if some interior mechanism had raised the cover of the instrument."

"But Mr. Thorpe looks at me as Mills would never dare to look. He thrusts his personality upon me," exclaimed Helen in a small fury. "Let him pay his compliments to Georgy: I do not want them. Think of it! he called me Miss Helen this morning!"

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him nothing: I looked——"

"I pity him then: I know how you can look."

"Am I so dreadful?" she asked coaxingly. "Tell me how to behave to young gentlemen, Floyd. Really, I don't know."

"To me you should behave in the most affectionate manner, mademoiselle. Granted that, the more disdainful you are to other fellows the more I shall admire you."

"Really, now?"

"Well, since you are in earnest, dear child, if I were you I would show nothing but kindness to my friends.

Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike; But, like the sun, they shine on all alike,

is a very pretty description of the manner of a successful woman."

"But I cannot be like that," she cried plaintively. "Would you like me to treat you and Mr. Thorpe in precisely the same way, Floyd?"

"Not at all. Don't count me in with the rest of your admirers: I must have the first, best, dearest place."

"I am sure you always do," she remonstrated in a tone of injury. "You come next after papa. If I behave badly to you sometimes, it is because I like to see if you mind my putting on little airs." That was candor.

"Well, Miss Kitten," said I, "you seem to know how to behave to young men. I shall waste no more advice upon you."

And indeed she did not require it. She possessed in an exquisite degree that gift of a delightful manner which generally comes through inheritance, and cannot be perfectly gained by education. But my suggestion regarding Thorpe bore fruit, and henceforward she was a little more queenly and indifferent to him than ever, but never displayed pique or asperity. Yet, however badly she treated him, he quite deserved my title of a "tame cat:" he bore every reverse patiently, and indeed at times displayed an absolute heroism in the face of her indifference, going on in fluent recital of something he believed would interest her while she utterly ignored him and his subject. However, Thorpe was a good actor, and could play his part, and do it well, in spite of his audience. I sometimes fancied that he was less cheerful in those times than he seemed. In fact, I was ready to believe that he was in reality, as he was in pretence, seeking to win Helen's attention. Mr. Floyd looked at the matter in the same light.

"When he gets his conge he cannot complain of having received encouragement," he said once or twice. "But he's no fool: can it be that he is in love with Miss Lenox all the time, and that he tries to pique her with a show of devotion to Helen?"

"Tony Thorpe will never be in love with a poor girl," I replied: "there is nothing of that sort."

"I don't like Helen's having lovers," said Mr. Floyd. "When I married my wife it was the pleasantest thing in the world to know that no other man had ever breathed a word of love in her ears. 'The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.' The first sound of a lover's voice brings a thrill to a girl's heart which she never knows but once. Miss Lenox's perceptions in that way must be considerably toughened: sole-leather is nothing in thickness compared to the epidermis of a coquette's heart. Now, a man can love with delicacy, fervor, passion a score of times. Women are frail creatures, are they not? I would like to have my little girl give her heart once, receive unbounded love in return, and never think of another man all her life. But Fate will manage her affairs for her, as for us all."

I have said that my morning interviews with Miss Lenox on the beach continued for a time. Suddenly they ceased: she came to the rendezvous no more, and it was impossible for me to get near enough to her to seek an explanation. I had felt quite dissipated and like a man of the world when I jumped out of my bed half awake each morning with an appointment on my hands. I had not told myself that it was bliss to meet her, and in fact had smiled a little at the recollection that it had been she who had asked me to join her ramble. Once or twice I had designated the whole thing a bore, and had wished it might rain and let me have a comfortable morning's nap instead of an hour or two with the most beautiful of girls at a romantic trysting-place. But most men deceive themselves about their feelings concerning women. When the first time I did not find Georgina awaiting me (for my orders were to join her walk, not to have her join mine) I lay on the rocks and took a nap until Thorpe came along the beach as usual and awoke me. But when I had failed to find her the second morning I was restless and disturbed. After two more fruitless quests I grew by turns insanely jealous and wretchedly self-distrustful.

Had I vexed her? What had I said? what had I done? I went over and over again every word of our talks: every mood of hers, every blush and glance and smile, lived again for me. We had spoken of many things those mornings we had met, yet there had been small reference to our mutual relations; and certainly if there were love-making on my part, it had colored none of our moods to any passion. I had travelled and seen many people: I had been introduced in courts, and had, by Mr. Floyd's influence, penetrated into an exclusive and brilliant continental society, where I had found much to observe. These reminiscences of mine had delighted Georgina: she had the irresistible feminine instinct for details, the analysis of which made a mastery of brilliant results easily attainable to her who possessed, to begin with, remarkable beauty, and, if not tact, so bewildering a way of doing what she chose that in the eyes of men at least she lacked nothing which grace and good taste could teach her. She was always anxious, too, to hear everything concerning Mr. Floyd—his friends abroad, his habits, his vie intime at certain houses which had been his favorite lounge for years while he was minister at ——. Garrulity was by no means my habit in those days, but I had talked to her very freely: indeed, she could do with me what she wished.

But why had she suddenly given me up? Had she tired of me, exhausted me, wrung my mind dry of interest; and flung me by like a squeezed orange? I lay in wait for her in the passages that I might speak to her, but she seemed never to be alone any more. I would lurk in her path for hours, only to be rewarded by the sight of her dress vanishing in another direction. I wrote her notes, to none of which would she reply. "If a woman flies, she flies to be pursued," I had heard all my life. Elusive, mocking goddess that she was, I felt every day more and more ardent in my pursuit, yet I rarely saw her now except at breakfast, when she was demure, a little weary, and altogether indifferent to me. I determined to follow her into society.

It was early in July now, and the watering-place life was at its gayest. I had hitherto accepted no invitations, from respect for the habits of the house where I was staying, but now I examined with interest every card and note brought to me. Accordingly, I set out on a round of pleasure-seeking, which soon transformed me from a boy whose foolish aim in life was to be as clever as other men into an impassioned lover. Other men may look back upon their first love with a certain pleasing sentimentality: in spite of all the years that now lie between me and the fever of those few months at The Headlands, I still suffer bitterly from the recollection of that time.



CHAPTER XVIII.

I had gone with Georgina to a picnic one day at her request, meeting her at the house of Mrs. Woodruff, with whom she was staying for a fortnight, at the Point. The picnic meant merely a drive for miles back into the country and a lunch in the woods prepared by a French cook, but it was a delightful road through shadows of tall forest trees, the glare of sunlight alternating with green copsewood coolness. They were cutting the grass and clover in the fields, and the air was fresh with the scent of new-mown hay: half the land on either side of us was covered with ripening grain, and the light breeze that played perpetually over it gave us endless shimmerings and glimmerings of wonderful light almost as beautiful as the tints that play over the sea.

I had every need to find the beauty of the summer gracious to me that day. It was but another of many days when every throb of my feeling for Georgy Lenox became an anguish hard to bear. She was opposite me as we rode through the fair country, but she neither looked at nor spoke to me. I was much lionized, however, by Mrs. Woodruff, a pretty, faded, coquettish woman, who had been balancing herself on the very edge of proprieties for years, but who still, thanks to a certain weariness she compelled in men, was yet safe enough in her position as a matron. Georgy's companion was a titled foreigner just then a favorite at the Point, but of whom I need not speak.

"Did you ask me to come that I might hear you talk with the count?" I asked her when once that day I had a chance to address her.

"But the count would talk to me," she returned, laughing. "Do you suppose I care for him? I think him the most odious man I know, with his waxed moustache, his small green eyes, his wicked mouth and teeth. But Mrs. Woodruff is dying for him, and half the women here hate me in their hearts because he pays me attention. I like you infinitely better, Floyd."

"Then come away and sit upon the rocks with me."

"Oh, I cannot afford to do those romantic, compromising things. You see that, as we are both staying at The Headlands, where everybody's curiosity is centred this summer, we are much observed, much commented upon."

"It seems to me you are not at all afraid of compromising yourself with other men."

"Now you are cross and jealous. Perhaps if you betrayed a little less interest in me you might make me less afraid of concession. And you must not watch me so: the count himself spoke about your eyes ready to burn me with their melancholy fire."

"Hang the count!"

"With all my heart! I am tired of his hanging about me, however. Now go away: at the dance to-night I will talk to you all you wish."

There were plenty of beautiful girls at the picnic, and not a few of them sat outside the circle quite neglected or wandered away like school-girls in couples, picking ferns and gathering pale wood-blossoms; but since I could not speak to Georgina at my ease, there seemed to me neither meaning nor occupation for the slowly-passing hours. I have sometimes wondered how those women feel to whom society brings no homage, no real social intercourse, who sit outside the groups formed around their more brilliant sisters and behold their easy triumphs. They seem patient and good-natured, but must they not wonder in their hearts why one woman's face and figure are a magnet compelling every man to come within the circle of her attraction, while others, not less fair and sweet, seem depolarized?

Georgy had many successful days, and this was but one of them. She understood allurement now not as an accident, but as a science, and she practised it cleverly. She had already heard bold language from the count, so held him in check as he sat beside her, giving him at times, however, "a side glance and look down," and to his trained habits of observation showed constantly that she was perfectly aware of his presence even if she seemed to ignore him. She was openly flirting with Frank Woolsey (a cousin of mine), but since she knew him for a veteran whose admiration only counted to lookers-on, she consoled herself by other little diversions, and scarcely a man there but felt his pulses tingle as she sent him a bright word or a careless smile.

Thorpe was there, but dull, moody, distrait, and he joined me and poured into my ears his disgust at this form of entertainment. He had eaten ants in his salad, he affirmed, his wine was corked, his pate spoiled.

"What are we here for?" he asked. "I see no reason in it. I suppose Miss Lenox is enjoying herself, and she thinks the men about her are in a seventh heaven. What do even the cleverest women know about the men they meet? Woolsey hates her like poison; the count is on the lookout for a belle heritiere and is yawning over his loss of time; and I doubt if one of that group except Talbot would marry her. I don't think many of us are pleased with that sort of thing. We don't want too fierce a light to beat about the woman we are dreaming of. She has no love or respect for sweetness and womanly virtue for their own sake—no faith in their value to her, further than that the semblance of them may attract admirers."

"You're out of humor, Thorpe," said I: "don't vent it on her."

"I am out of humor," he exclaimed, "devilishly out of humor! For God's sake, Randolph, tell me if you think I have any chance with Miss Floyd."

"Look here, Thorpe," I returned under my breath: "I have no business to make any suppositions concerning that young lady, but I will say just this much. Do you see that bird in the air hovering above that oak tree?"

He followed my look upward toward the unfathomable blue. "I do," he returned.

"I think there is just as much chance of that bird's coming down at your call and nestling in your bosom as there is of your winning the young lady you allude to."

He looked crestfallen for a moment: then his thorough coxcombry resumed its sway. "You see," said he, with a consummate air of reserve, "you know nothing about the affair at all, Randolph."

"You'd much better drop the subject, Thorpe," I remarked: "I assure you it's much safer let alone."

I contrived to live through the long hours of the day. At sunset we drove back to the Point, I giving up my seat in Mrs. Woodruff's barouche to a lady and joining Frank Woolsey and Thorpe in a dog-cart. We none of us spoke, but smoked incessantly, our eyes upturned to the sky, which was lovely, mystical, wonderful, with the pale after-glow thrilling it with the most beautiful hues. Before we had reached the town a strange yellow moonlight had crept over the landscape, making the trees gloom together in solemn masses, while the sea glimmered in a thousand lines of trembling light away, away into remote horizons. We all enjoyed the drive, although none of us spoke until we got down from the cart at the steps of the hotel.

"That was the best part of the day," observed my cousin Frank. "What good times we fellows might have if there were no women to disturb us!"

Thorpe growled some inarticulate assent or dissent, as the case might be, and went up to his room, while Frank and I had our cigars out on the piazza.

A dance at Mrs. Woodruff's was to follow the picnic, and thither we resorted about ten o'clock and found the chairs placed for a German. Georgy Lenox was there, radiant in a ravishing toilette, waiting for Frank to lead the cotillon with her. She nodded to me pleasantly as she took her seat. I was angry with myself for my disappointment, doubly angry with her for causing it. It cost me my self-respect to be so utterly at her mercy. What did I gain by following her into this gay coterie but pang upon pang of humiliation and pain? Why did I come, indeed? It was not the first time she had broken her promises to me. Yet what could I expect of her? Bright, gay, dazzling creature that she was, warm and eager in her love of vigorous life, could she sit down with me in a corner and talk while the rest of the world palpitated and glowed and whirled around her to the music of the waltz, which stirred even my crippled limbs with a wild wish for voluptuous swaying motion in rhythm with the melodious melancholy strain? No, I could not blame her: I was merely out of my place. Let me go home and remember what a gulf of disparity separated me from my fellows.

So I walked out of the house through the grounds into the street, and along the road home to The Headlands. It was a long walk for me, yet I overcame the distance quickly, and long before eleven o'clock gained the house, entered quietly and sat down beside my mother on her sofa, unseen by Mr. Floyd and Helen, who were in the next room.

I was half mad with baffled desire, blind anger and fatigue that night, and the sound of Helen's voice as she sang some song like a lullaby was like a blessing. My mother did not speak to me; only smiled gently in my face and kissed me on my forehead. Her tenderness touched my heart, and my head drooped to her shoulder, then to her lap, and I lay there like a boy comforted by his mother's touch, just as I was. A kind of peaceful stupor came over me. Helen went on singing some quiet German piece of which her father was fond, with many verses and a sweet, moving story. Her voice was delicious in its way, with a noble and simple style, and a pathetic charm in some of its cadences I never heard surpassed. Mr. Floyd never tired of hearing her. After a time the ballad came to an end.

"Floyd has come, papa," I heard her say.

"Why, no! Has he? so early?"

"Go on singing, Helen," whispered my mother. "Floyd has gone to sleep."

She sang something soft, cooing, monotonous, a strain a mother might sing as she hushed her baby at her breast: then she came out, followed by her father, and both sat down beside us. I, half shyly, half through dread of talking, went on counterfeiting sleep.

"Poor boy!" exclaimed Mr. Floyd. "He has evidently walked back from the Point. He was tired out with his dissipations, or Miss Georgina was coquetting with other men or ate too much to suit him. If I were in love to extremity of passion with Miss Lenox, or rather with her brilliant flesh-tints and her hands and feet, I should recover the moment I saw her at table. She is the frankest gourmande I ever saw, and will be stout in five years."

"Now, papa, Georgy's hands and feet are nothing so particular."

"Helen's are smaller and much better shaped," said my mother jealously.

"Now, Mary, how little you understand the points of a woman! Helen has hands that I kiss"—and he kissed them—"the most beautiful hands in the world; and she has feet whose very shoe-tie I adore; but, nevertheless, there is nothing aggressive about her insteps and ankles. She considers her feet made to walk with, not to captivate men with."

"I should hope not," said Lady Disdain, with plenty of her chief attribute in her voice. "I prefer that nobody should know I have any feet."

"That is just it. Now, Miss Lenox never comes in or goes out of a room but every man there knows the color of her stockings."

"I am ashamed of you, papa!—Scold him, Mrs. Randolph. I think him quite horrid."

"Since, my mouse, you don't want to be admired for your feet and hands, what points of your beauty may we venture to obtrude our notice upon?"

"Oh, you may love me for whatever you like. But I don't want other people ever to think of me in that way at all."

"Your intellect is a safe point, perhaps."

"I do not want anybody to love me at all, papa, except yourself."

"Not even Floyd?"

"Floyd would never be silly," Helen said indignantly. "Floyd likes me because we are old friends: he knew grandpa and you, papa, and all that."

"You are easily satisfied if you are contented with affection on the score of your aged relatives."

"How soundly he sleeps!" murmured Helen; and I knew that she bent close to me as she spoke, for I could feel the warmth of her young cheeks. Half to frighten her, half because I wanted to see how she looked as she regarded me, I suddenly opened my eyes.

"You weren't asleep at all!" she exclaimed, laughing and quite unembarrassed. "But I think you were wicked to hoax us so. Did you hear everything we said?"

"Indeed, Helen," I said, "I was fast asleep, I do believe, until you confessed your affection for me. You did not expect me to sleep through that?"

She stared at me blankly, then looked at the others with dilating eyes. "Did I say anything about that?" she asked, growing pale even to her lips and tears gathering in her eyes.

"Why, no, you foolish child!" said her father, drawing her upon his knee: "he is only teasing you. As if anybody had any affection for one of the Seven Sleepers!—Well, Floyd, how happened you to come back so soon? The carriage was going for you at midnight.—Here, Mills, Mr. Randolph has already returned, and the coachman may go to bed."

"The day was pretty long," I returned. "I had had enough of it, and so set out and walked back. I was well tired out when I came in, and that put me to sleep."

"It was a shame for you to walk so far," exclaimed Helen imperiously: "you are not strong enough for such an effort. There are eight horses in the stables, every one of them pawing in his stall, longing for a gallop, and for you to be obliged to walk four miles! Don't do such a dreadful thing again, Floyd."

I sprang up and limped about, feeling impatient and cross. "In spite of my poor leg," I returned, "I am a fair walker. Don't set me down as a helpless cripple, Helen."

I was bitter and wrathful still, or I trust I was too magnanimous to have wounded her so.

"Floyd!" exclaimed my mother in a tone of reproof; but I did not turn, and went down the long suite of parlors and stood at the great window which overlooked the sea. It was all open to the summer night, and the lace curtains waved to and fro in the breeze. Solemnly came up the rhythmic flow of the waves as they beat against the rocks. I pushed aside the draperies and looked out at the wide expanse of waters lying, it seemed, almost at my feet, for everything else but the great silver plain of sea was in shadow. Above, the moon had it all her own way to-night: the constellations shone pale, and seemed weary of the firmament which at other times they span and compass with their myriad splendors. Mars moved in a stately way straight along above the southern horizon to his couch in the west: even his red light was dim.

But what stillness and peace seemed possible beneath this throbbing sea? I sighed as I listened to the sound of the waves and gazed at the great golden pathway of the moon across the silver waters. I knew that some one had followed me and stood timidly behind me: I guessed it was Helen, but did not know until a slim satin hand stole into mine, for surely it was not my mother's hand. Hers was warm and firm in its pressure: the touch of this was soft and cool like a rose-leaf. I held the hand close, but did not turn.

"Floyd!" she whispered timidly, "dear Floyd!"

"I hear you, Helen," I returned wearily.

"Are you angry with me? Do not be angry."

"I am only angry with myself: I am not behaving well to-night."

She came in front of me and looked up in my face. "I don't want you to think," she said in a little faint trembling voice, "that—that I—that I—" She quite broke down.

"I really don't know what you mean, Helen."

"Floyd," she cried passionately, "I think I would die before I would wilfully hurt your feelings!"

"Why, my poor little girl," said I, quite touched at the sight of her quivering face and the sound of her impassioned voice, "you did not hurt my feelings for an instant. What I said was in answer to my own thoughts. I like to say such things to myself at times, and remember that I do not possess the advantages of other men. Besides, facts are facts: I am lame. I cannot dance, and although I can walk, it is with a limping gait: I should be a poor fellow in a foot-race. I don't suppose that my being a cripple will forfeit me anything in the kingdom of heaven, but, nevertheless, it obliges me to forego a good many pleasures here on earth."

"You are not a cripple!" she burst out impetuously. "You have every advantage! What is it that you cannot dance? I despise men who whirl about like puppets: I have never seen them waltzing but they must make themselves ridiculous. I am glad you cannot dance: you are on the level of too much dignity and noble behavior to condescend to such petty things. And surely you do not want to run a foot-race!" she added with an intensity of disdain which made me laugh, high-wrought and painful although my mood was. Then her lip trembled, and I saw tears in her eyes as she went on. "If you were a cripple," she pursued in a low, eager voice, "really a helpless cripple, everybody would love you just the same. Why, Floyd, what do you think it is to me that, as you say, you do not possess the advantages of other men? Have you forgotten how it all came about? I was a little girl then, but there is nothing that happened yesterday clearer to my memory than that terrible morning when I cost you so dear. I know how I felt—as if forsaken by the world. I wondered if God looked down and saw me, alone, in danger, blind and dizzy and trembling, so that again and again I seemed to be slipping away from everything that held me. I could not have stayed one minute more had I not heard your voice. You were so strong, so kind, Floyd! When you reached me your hands were bleeding, your face scratched and torn, your breath came in great pants, but you looked at me and smiled. And then you carried me to the top and put me in safety, and I let you go down, down, down!" She was quite speechless, and leaned her cheek against my hand, which she still held, and wet it freely with her tears.

"If you mind your lameness," she said brokenly, with intervals of sobs—"if you feel that Fate is cruel to you—that there is any reason why you cannot be perfectly happy—then I wish," she exclaimed with energy, "that I had never been born to do you this great injury. I love my life, I love papa, I love your mother and you, and it seems to me as if I were going to be a very happy woman; but still, if you carry any regret for that day in your heart, I wish I had died when I was so sick before you came: I wish I lay up there on the hill with the grass growing over me."

What was anybody to do with this overwrought, fanciful child? She was so wonderfully pretty too, with her great dark, melancholy eyes, her flushed, tear-stained cheeks, her rich rare lips! "Oh, Helen," I murmured, holding her close to me, "I don't want you to go under the green grass: I'm very glad you are alive. I would have broken all my bones in your service that day and welcome, so that you might be well and unhurt. Come, now, cheer up: I am going to be a pleasanter fellow than I have been of late. Dry your eyes, dear. Your father will be laughing at you. Come, let us go and take a stroll in the moonlight: it is quite wicked not to indulge in a little romance on a sweet midsummer night like this."

When I had gone to my room that night, and sat, still bitter, still discontented, looking off through my open window toward the Point, and wondering who was looking in Georgy Lenox's starry eyes just then—thinking, with a feeling about my forehead like a band of burning iron, that some man's arm was sure to be about her waist, her face upturned to his, her floating golden hair across his shoulder as they danced,—while, I say, such fancies held a firm clutch over my brain and senses, devouring me with the throes of an insane jealousy, my mother came in and sat down beside me.

"My dear boy," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, "I am going to give you a caution. You must remember that Helen, with all her frankness and impetuosity, is still no child. Don't win her heart unthinkingly."

I felt the blood rush to my face, and I think I had never in all my life experienced such embarrassment.

"I'm not such a coxcomb, mother, as to believe any girl could fall in love with me—Helen above all others."

She smiled, with a little inward amusement in her smile. "You must remember," she said again softly, "that Helen is not a child, and you surely would not make her suffer."

"Why, mother," I gasped, "we are just like brother and sister: our intimacy is the habit of years."

"Good-night, my son," my mother said, and went away still smiling: "I have perfect faith in your magnanimity."

I remembered with a flash of guilty self-consciousness one or two little circumstances about our talk by the window two hours before which I have not set down here. It had seemed an easy task to soothe the child. If there had been any absurdity like that my mother hinted at, would she—could I— No, never! She was a careless child, with fits of coldness, imperious tenderness and generosity. Not a woman at all. The idea was quite distasteful to me that Helen was a grown-up woman with whom I must be on my guard.

However, Helen's manner to me next day and at all times was calculated to assure any man that she was a wilful, self-sustained young creature of extraordinary beauty and grace, who was devoted to her father, and to him alone. I saw Thorpe one evening pick up, by stealth, the petals of a crimson rose which had dropped from the stalk that still nestled in the black ribbon at her throat, and I laughed at him for his pains as he laid them carefully away in his pocket-book.

"Miss Floyd," said I, "here is another rose. Don't honor that poor skeleton of a vanished flower."

She saw the accident which had befallen her rose, and took mine from me and replaced her ornament with a fresh blossom. "Give me the poor stem," said I as she was about to throw it away.

"What is that for?" she asked, staring at me as I placed it in my buttonhole. "What do you want of the poor old thing?"

And, mistrusting some mischief beneath my sentimental behavior, she was quite tart with me the entire evening, and would not speak to Thorpe at all, but sat demurely between my mother and Mr. Floyd, her eyes nailed on some embroidery, and behaving altogether like a spoiled child of twelve years old.

Georgy Lenox had returned from her visit at Mrs. Woodruff's, and seemed a little quiet and weary of late. I was not so much at her service as before, but had begun to console myself by teaching in song what, like other young poets, I had experienced in suffering. I thank Heaven that no eyes but my own ever beheld the tragedy I wrote that summer: still, I am a little tender-hearted over it yet, and believe that it was, after all, not so bad as it might have been. At any rate, it enabled me to find some relief from my passionate unrest in occupation, and even my own high-sounding phrases may have taught me some scanty heroism. After all, if one fights one's own battle bravely, does it make so much matter about other things? Our battles to-day, like the rest of those fought since creation, show poor cause if regarded from any other standpoint save the necessity of fighting them. Most of our fiercest struggles for life have no adequate reason: it is not so necessary for us to live as we think it is. That we do not get what we want, or that we sink beneath our load of trouble, signifies little in the aggregate of the world's history. But, all the same, our cries of despair go up to Heaven, and there seems no need in the universe so absolute, so final, as that we ourselves should live and be happy.

It is hard for a man of middle age, with a cool brain and tranquillized passions, to retrace the history of his youth. There is much that he must smile over—much, too, which is irksome for him to dwell upon. Many experiences which in their freshness seemed holy and sacred, in after years, stripped of their disguise of false sentiment and the aureole with which they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely loathsome—just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high romanticism—silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders, balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. This skeleton framework of the illusion, these well-worn contrivances, tarnished gold lace and mock splendors, disenchant us sadly, and what we took for

Horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle: answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying,

is now discovered to be a cheap-trumpet imitation of the enchanted notes we dreamed of hearing.

After Miss Lenox returned from the Point she was, as I have said, a little pensive: this little shadow upon the splendor of her beauty lent a subtlety and charm to her manner. If there had been a fault in her loveliness before, it was that it remained always equal: the same light seemed always to play over face and hair, the liquid clearness of her eyes was always undimmed, and there was a trifle of over-robustness about the rounded contours of her figure. In spite of all her beauty, it had at times been hard for me to realize that she was a woman to give herself thoroughly to love. I had already had many dreams of her, yet never one where I thought she could have given me the infinite softness of a caressing touch or feel the motherly quality which lies at the bottom of every true woman's love for man. Now the splendor of her eyes was veiled, her smile was half melancholy, her voice less clear and ringing.

When a man loves a woman, and her mood changes and softens, he reads but one meaning in her tenderness; and it was not long before I had begun fully to believe that there was hope for me. There seemed to be no one to meddle in my wooing. True, Judge Talbot came constantly to the house to see Miss Lenox, and lacked none of the signs by which we read a man's errand in his demeanor; but I did not fear any rivalry from him. Youth, at any rate, is something in itself, independent of other advantages: no wonder it vaunts itself and believes in its own power. That Georgy would think for an instant of giving herself to this man did not seriously occur to me. His face was like the face of thousands of successful men whom we see daily in the great marts of the world. His forehead was broad but low, his eyes inclined to smallness and set closely together, his brows shaggy and overhanging: his cheeks were heavy, and the fleshy formation of his mouth and chin denoted both cruelty and sensuality. He was a wealthy man: such men are always rich. He had the reputation of holding an iron grip over everything he claimed, and never letting it go. He had been married in early life, and now had sons and daughters past the age of the girl upon whom he was eagerly pressing his suit.

He came to dinner now and then, and over his wine he was noisy, boisterous and bragging. He had been in Congress with Mr. Floyd years before, and, though of different parties, they had innumerable recollections in common, and, much as I disliked Mr. Talbot, I recognized his cleverness in anecdote and the clearness and conciseness of his narratives. I could endure him among men, but with women he was odious, and, for some reasons occult and inexplicable to any man, plumed himself upon his success with them. He understood himself too well, and relied too entirely upon his natural abilities, to make any effort to hide his gross ignorance upon all subjects requiring either literary or mental culture. He had been eminently successful without any such acquirements in every field he entered, and consequently considered them non-essentials in a man's career—very good to have, like the cream and confectionery at dessert, tickling the palates of women and children, but eschewed by sensible men. He had travelled twice over Europe, seeing everything with the voracious curiosity of a strong man eager to get his money's worth: after his experience of cities rich in high historic charm, works of art where the rapture and exaltation of long-vanished lives have been exultingly fixed in wonderful colors or imperishable marbles, he had carried away merely a hubbub of recollections of places where the best wines were found and his miseries at being reduced in certain cases to the position of a deaf-mute through his inability to grapple with the difficulties of foreign tongues.