Mechanically Reuben moved. Stung by her words, irritated by a sense of failure, filled with the sharpest jealousy against his rival, he saw no other course open to him than to let her go her way and to go his. "Good-bye, then, Eve," he said, in a dry, cold voice.

"Good-bye," she answered.

"I don't think, after what's passed, you need expect to see me again," he ventured, with the secret hope that she would pause and say something that might lead to a fresh discussion.

"I had no notion that you'd still have a thought of coming. I should look upon a visit from you as very out of place."

"Oh, well, be sure I sha'n't force myself where I'm not wanted."

"Then you'll be wise to stay away, for you'll never be wanted where I am."

And without another glance in his direction she walked away, while Reuben stood and watched her out of sight. "That's ended," he said, setting his lips firmly together and hardening the expression of his naturally grave face. "That mad game's finished, and finished so that I think I've done with sweet-hearting for as long as I live. Well, thank God! a man may get on very fairly though the woman that he made a fool of himself for flings back his love and turns him over for somebody else." Then, as if some unseen hand had dealt him a sudden thrust, he cried out, "Why did I ever see her? Why was I made to care for her? Haven't I known the folly of it all along, and fought and strove from the first to get the better of myself? and here she comes down and sees a fellow whose eye is tickled by her looks, and he gets in a week what I've been begging and praying for years for; and they tell you that God's ways are just and that He rewards the good and punishes the evil!" and Reuben's face worked with suppressed emotion, for in spirit he stood before his Creator and upbraided Him with "Lo! these many years have I served Thee, neither transgressed I at any time Thy commandments; and yet this drunkard, this evil-liver, this law-breaker, is given that for which in my soul I have thirsted!" and the devils of envy and revenge ran by his side rejoicing, while Fate flew before and lured him on to where Opportunity stood and welcomed his approach.

The Author of "Dorothy Fox."

[TO BE CONTINUED.]



POSSESSION.

She is thine own at last, O faithful soul! The love that changed not with the changing years Hath its reward: Desire's strong prayers and tears Fall useless since thy hand hath touched the goal. See how she yieldeth up to thy control Each mystery of her beauty: enter, thou, A vanquished victor. None can disavow Thy royal, love-bought right unto the whole Of love's rich feast. Oh outspread golden hair, White brow, red lips whereon thy lips are set With rapturous thrills undreamed of, past compare! Oh ecstasy of bliss! And yet—and yet— What doth it profit thee that every part Is thine except the little wayward heart?

ELIZA CALVERT HALL.



AN OLD ENGLISH HOME: BRAMSHILL HOUSE.

A peculiar charm hangs about an Elizabethan country-house.

The castles belong to an utterly different state of things and people—to a rougher, coarser time. Their towers and walls, where the jackdaws build in the ivy; their moats, where the hoary carp bask and fatten; their drawbridges and heavy doors and loopholed windows,—these all tell of the unrest, the semi-war-like state of feudal days, when each great seigneur was a petty king in his own county, with his private as well as public feuds, and his little army of men-at-arms ready to do his bidding, to sally forth and fight for the king or to defend his own walls against some more powerful neighbor.

The great houses of the eighteenth century have a different character again, with their Italian facades and trim terraced gardens, where the wits and beauties of dull Queen Anne's time amused themselves after their somewhat rude fashion. They speak of a solid luxury in keeping with the heavy features and ponderous minds of the worthies of those days.

But the Elizabethan, or even early Jacobean, house tells us of England in her golden age. The walls of red brick, gray with lichens; the rows of wide stone-mullioned windows and hanging oriels; the delicate, fanciful chimneys rising in great clusters above the pointed gables; the broad stone steps leading up to the hospitable door; the smooth green terraces and bowling-lawns, walled in, it is true, but closed with gates of curiously-wrought ironwork meant more for ornament than for defence,—all these serve to recall the days when learning and wealth joined hands with the Maiden Queen to raise England from the depths into which she had sunk—the days of "the worthies whom Elizabeth, without distinction of rank or age, gathered round her in the ever-glorious wars of her great reign."

It was then that Burleigh and Walsingham talked statecraft; that Raleigh and Drake, Frobisher and Grenville, sailed the seas and beat the Spanish Armada; that the "sea-dogs" brought the treasures of the New World to the feet of the queen, and filled men's minds with dreams of El Dorados where gold and jewels were as common as the sand on the seashore. It was then that English literature, all but dead during the storm of the Reformation, began to revive. And then it was that a galaxy of poets arose such as the world had never seen before; that Sidney wrote his Arcadia, Spenser his Faerie Queene; that Christopher Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher and merrie Ben Jonson founded the English drama; and that Shakespeare, poet of poets, overshadowed them all with that stupendous genius which has filled succeeding generations with wonder and love.

Then it was that men began to think of their home as a casket in which to enshrine the gentler tastes and luxuries which peace at home and continental influences from without were fostering in England. The casket must be fitted for its treasure; and so it came to pass that throughout the length and breadth of the land those fair Elizabethan mansions sprang up.

I see one such now in my mind's eye—one that I love well, for since my earliest childhood it has filled me with awe and admiration and delight. It was built by James I. as a hunting-box for his son, Prince Henry, but ere the house was finished the young prince was dead, and all the promise of his short life gone with him. Had he lived, our English history for the next hundred years might have been a different story. Bramshill then passed into other hands—first to Lord Zouch, then to the Copes, who still own it—but in the finely-carved stone balustrade above the great western door the three plumes of the prince of Wales's feathers may still be seen, the sole memento of its royal origin. Only half the original house remains: the rest was destroyed by fire a couple of hundred years ago. Yet what still stands is verily a palace.

You enter through the heavily-nailed and barred doors, and find yourself in a vast hall panelled up to the ceiling with old oak. The immense fireplace with its brass dogs and andirons tells of the yule log that still at Christmas burns upon the hearth, and trophies of arms of all ages—from the Toledo blade that can be bent by the point into a semicircle, so perfect is the temper of its steel, to the Sikh sword that was brought home after the Indian mutiny—form fitting ornaments for the walls.

Then come many rooms, with deep-embrasured windows looking out on the terrace, each beautiful or curious in its own way—a noble dining-room hung with old grisaille tapestry, from which you may learn the life of Decius Mus if you have patience to disentangle the strange medley of impossible figures in gardens with impossible flowers, where impossible beasts roam in herds and impossible birds sing among the branches.

But the glory of the house is its first floor. The wide oak staircase leads you up first to the chapel-room, with its oriel windows overhanging the western door, its Italian cabinets, its rare china, its chairs and couches covered with crewel-work more than two hundred years old, yet with colors as fresh as on the day that Lady Zouch and her maidens set in the stitches. Then there is the great drawing-room, with its precious Italian marble chimney-piece, more brass dogs, more tapestry, more recessed windows. Then the library, full of priceless books, to which the present learned owner is constantly adding new volumes. The mere ceilings are a study in themselves, for they are covered with mouldings and traceries and hanging bosses of marvellous workmanship of the time of Inigo Jones—designed, some say, by him, for he used to stay at Eversley, hard by, with a friend and fellow-pupil of Sir Christopher Wren. Then comes the long gallery, running the whole width of the building, stored with curiosities, where we used to run races and play hide-and-seek with the children of the house in bygone days, and tremble when evening came on lest some bogie from his lurking-place should spring out upon us. The bedrooms are panelled with oak painted white, with splendid fireplaces and carved mantelpieces that reach the ceiling.

And besides all these there are enchanting little rooms reached by unexpected staircases, by secret doors in the wall, by dark passages where one hears the rustle of ghostly brocade dresses. Those are the most lovable rooms, for, once safely in them, one is at home and warm, while in the state rooms one feels, as the dear old squire who died here thirty years ago said, "like a pea in a drum."

Down from the house slopes the park, with its green glades, its heather-covered knolls, its huge oaks, its delicate silver birches—above all, its matchless Scotch firs, which James I. planted here, as he did in many places in England, to remind himself of the land of his birth. The hardy northern trees took kindly to their new home, and they have seeded themselves and spread far and wide over vast tracts of country. But nowhere south of Tweed are finer specimens to be found than in this old Hampshire park. Three great avenues of them run round a triangle half a mile across, and outside the shade of their black branches the purple heather and waving bracken form a carpet fit for elves and fairies.

From the western front of the house a double avenue of gigantic elms leads down to the river that gleams in silver lines beneath the bridge, and ends where the moors begin on the opposite hill a mile away. Up this avenue in olden days the deer were driven toward the house, to be killed at the feet of the ladies, who stepped down in hoops and furbelows and dainty shoes to the iron gates between two pepper-box towers where gorgeous peacocks now strut and sun themselves.

Those were the days when, sorely against his own wish, Archbishop Abbot, my worthy ancestor, went a-hunting in the park on Sunday at the command of the king his master, who with the archbishop was a guest of Lord Zouch. Well for him had it been if he had resisted the royal will, for, as it befell, the arrow from his crossbow, glancing from a tree, struck one of the keepers and killed him then and there. The poor archbishop, it is said, never smiled again, and his sad, tender face in Vandyke's noble picture looks down on me from the wall as I write and bears out the truth of the story. Often and often when we children were playing in the park did we wander about, trying to settle from which tree the arrow glanced, conjuring up before our eyes the whole scene—the king's anger and the archbishop's despair at the catastrophe—and feeling the while a proud personal interest in it all. Ah, what good days those were, roaming about knee-deep in heather, catching the rare moths, chasing the squirrels that whisked up the fir stems and mocked us from their high perch, searching the hollow trees for woodpeckers' nests, eating the beech-nuts or pricking our fingers as we tried to open the husks of the Spanish chestnuts that grew by the lake! From among the bulrushes the coots sailed out at our approach, and the tiny dabchick dived so deep that we thought, "This time she must be drowned," when, lo and behold! she would appear twenty yards off, a little black ball with a yellow bill, only to take breath and plunge again. Sometimes in a hard winter we would hear high in the sky the cry of a weird pack of hounds. Nearer and nearer drew that unearthly music, till we held our breath in a kind of delightful terror, and then above our heads appeared a flock of wild swans on the search for water; and down they dropped, like white cannon-balls, into the lake, sending a mass of spray into the air and shivering the smooth black surface of the water into a thousand ripples that circled away and lapped against the banks in mimic waves.

But I think my most exquisite moment of happiness was one spring day when I saw close by me a little fox-cub—a furry darling, about as big as a four-months'-old kitten, with black stripes across his fat back. He had ventured out of the fox-earths on the other side of the park palings, and did not know how to get back to his anxious mother. I tried to catch him, but that was not to be, and young Reineke soon found a way home. Nevertheless, the joy was mine, never to be forgotten, of having seen a real wild beast so near.

Even on dark and stormy days the park has its own strange charm as one walks up the gloomy avenue on the soft fir-needles glistening with rain. A murmur fills the air as of sea-waves beating on the shore: it is the wet south-west wind soughing overhead and lashing the writhing branches. One thinks of the German fairy-tales, and half expects to meet the old woman who led Hansel and Grethel captive, or to come suddenly upon her house with its ginger-bread roof and barley-sugar windows.

I remember once taking a well-known musician through those fir woods one dark afternoon as the wind was making soft music above us. He was silent, and I was disappointed, for I had fancied that the new country would delight him and excite his imagination. But when we reached home he sat down to the piano in the dark, and played on and on as if he were pouring out his whole soul in the flood of sweet melody; and when, after an hour of marvellous improvisation, he stopped and said to us, "I couldn't help it: I had to reel off all that I have been seeing and hearing this afternoon," then I was content, for I knew nothing had been thrown away on our friend, and that if he could not talk about it all he could do even better.

But if you would see Bramshill in all its pride come on some November morning to the first meet of the season.

Well do I recollect the excitement of those happy days. How long the night seemed before morning broke and I was sure it was not pouring with rain! How pleasant to run down to breakfast all neat and trim in one's habit! And then when flask and sandwiches were safely bestowed, white gloves buttoned and hat firmly secured, how eagerly I watched for half-past ten to walk out to the stables, where the horses were stamping and snorting impatiently, knowing full well by their marvellous instinct what enjoyment was before them! Then my little bay Sintram came dancing out, followed by Puff, the dear old brown mare. I was tossed into the saddle, and away we went at that peculiarly unpleasant and tiring pace, a "cover trot," which for some inscrutable reason is the right thing if you are going to a meet. Less than a trot, more than a walk, you can neither sit still nor rise in your stirrup, but must just jog along till you fairly ache. The horses pull and fight with their bits as we keep them in the soft sandy ditch up the lane to spare their precious feet. At the few cottages we pass women and children are all standing at their garden-gates to watch the "quality" go by. The ploughmen in the fields discover that the furrows nearest the road need a great deal of attention; the shepherds fold their sheep to-day close to the hedge, so as to secure front places for the show; and if we chance to run this way every man will leave his work and follow us as long as his breath lasts, and his master, who is riding, will not grumble, for if hounds are running every man, be he rich or poor, has a right to run too.

Up the sandy hill we go, and out on the wide moors, covered with soft brown heather, which stretch away with hardly a break twenty miles south and east to Aldershot Camp or Windsor Forest. On the brow of the hill grows a mighty bush of furze which always goes by the name of "Miss Bremer's furze-bush." When the dainty Swedish novelist once came to gladden Eversley Rectory with her presence she told how she longed to see the plant before which Linnaeus had fallen on his knees; and she walked up this selfsame hill and with eyes full of tears gazed on the prickly shrub with its mist of golden-colored, apricot-scented flowers. The old Hampshire proverb says, "When furze is out of flower kissing is out of fashion;" and, sure enough, there is not a month in the year in which you may not find a blossom or two among the green spines.

Now we cross a green road, the Welsh Ride, which in the autumn is covered with thousands of cattle making their way in great herds from the Welsh mountains and Devonshire pastures to the winter fairs round London. The drovers used to boast that they could bring their beasts all the way from Wales without once going off turf or through a turnpike. Now, alas! crowded cattle-trucks on the railway are fast superseding the old-fashioned, wholesome way of travelling, and we seldom have the autumnal air filled with the lowing of the herds, the barking of the attendant dogs and the shouts of the drovers on their sturdy Welsh ponies. But to-day the Welsh Ride looks gay enough, for it is dotted with little knots of horsemen in black or red coats using it as a short cut from Aldershot and Sandhurst. We turn off the moor into the shadow of the fir avenue that leads half a mile up to the park-gates. The ground, covered with a soft carpet of pine-needles and burrowed everywhere by the roots of the trees, gives off a hollow echo to the horses' clattering hoofs. The sombre avenue is alive in unwonted fashion to-day. Now we pass a group of pedestrians from the village; now a young farmer comes by on a half-broken colt which is to make its first acquaintance with the hounds; then a break with a big party from a country-house in Miss Mitford's village passes us with a gay greeting as it rattles on. A tiny nutshell of a pony-carriage full of babies comes trotting along, and its driver, poor Sheldon Williams, will make notes of the scene and put them into one of his clever hunting-pictures, little dreaming of the day when his early death will leave those babies penniless. Now a group of the redcoats we saw on the Welsh Ride overtakes us, and Sintram plunges and dances as a wild little thorough-bred comes up to our side. His master, who has already gained his Victoria Cross twice—first as a little lad in the trenches at Sevastopol, and again for desperate deeds of valor in the Indian mutiny—is to win yet further glory in 1879 at the head of the "flying column" in Zululand—Evelyn Wood, the most gallant and humane of all that gallant band.

The white park-gate is held wide open by a poor ne'er-do-weel in a shabby old red coat—John Ellis by name. How he gets his living no one knows, but if there is a meet of fox-hounds anywhere within ten miles, there he is sure to be, holding people's horses or ready at a gate for stray pennies and sixpences. There is usually such a hanger-on to every pack of hounds in England—one who travels immense distances on foot to turn up in unexpected places and get a few hard-earned shillings as his reward. We jog along under the magnificent silver firs, only to be equalled by those in the duke of Wellington's park at Strathfieldsaye, hard by; then up the lime avenue which borders the cricket-ground, where thirty years ago the most famous matches in Hampshire were played; and as we reach the iron gates leading up to the house our little knot of riders has swelled into a veritable cavalcade.

Down the drive we trot, past the stables, where the watch-dogs strain angrily at their chains and a little green monkey jibbers with rage and excitement, and in another moment we turn under the shadow of the great house up to the western door. Here all is life and bustle. Twenty or thirty carriages are drawn up by the widespreading lawn: grooms are holding horses ready for their masters, who are refreshing the inner man with cherry brandy and cold breakfast indoors. A tinkle of bells is heard as the duchess of Wellington drives herself up with her three ponies abreast, Russian fashion. Then a perfectly-appointed brougham, with a pair of magnificent cobs, stops in a corner, and a soldier-like foreigner in a red coat helps out a quiet-looking English lady wrapped up in furs. She slips them off as her groom leads up a priceless horse for her to mount, and in a moment is in the saddle, and will ride as straight as any man in the field to-day. Her husband, Count Morella, better known as the famous Carlist general Cabrera, whose strange and terrible history many years ago fascinated the gentle English heiress, now satisfies his war-like spirit by fox-hunting on the best horses that money can buy, and has settled down into a quiet English country gentleman.

The hounds have arrived before us. There they are—the beauties!—on the green grass, and we ride in among them to have a word with Tom Swetman the huntsman and good George Austin the whip, the latter of whom has given me a lead over many a fence. Gallant Tom! the bravest and gentlest of men, how little we thought that in a year or two we should never see your honest face again on earth! But you will be long remembered, though you are with us no more, and the story will be told for years to come of a day when the hounds ran into their fox on the South-western Railway. It was in a cutting fifty feet deep, with a tremendous fence at the top. Tom arrived just in time to see his hounds on the rails, with poor Reynard dead in their midst and the express train from Southampton speeding up the hill at fifty miles an hour. He crammed his horse over the great post and rails, down the almost perpendicular side of the cutting, whipped the hounds off, and, as the train rushed screaming by, rode out from under the very wheels of the engine and up the farther bank with his rescued pack.

But now our master, Mr. Garth, comes down the steps—a signal that we must no longer waste time talking with our neighbors, and like a good old friend he gives us a private programme of the way we shall draw. Stirrups are lengthened or shortened, girths tightened, restive horses led away to unobserved corners where their owners can try to mount without being seen by the assembled multitude. Sintram executes a war-dance on his hind legs, to the delight of some schoolboys in a wagonette, the terror of their fair companions and the extreme disgust of his mistress at having to practice the haute ecole before so large an audience. Ah, my poor Sintram! He danced once too often, and one fine day came to a sad end by falling backward and breaking his neck.

Tom now comes up to the master: "Shall we go, sir?"

"Yes—now, I think."

A crack of the whips and away trots Tom, followed by his splendid pack and his two whippers-in. Then comes the master, and we all crowd after them pell-mell with horses plunging and kicking, and as soon as we are fairly out in the open a kind of stampede takes place among the unruly young ones, and we see many an involuntary steeple-chase over the smooth green cricket-ground. Through the dark avenues of fir trees we canter to the temple, a little summerhouse on a promontory in the sea of wood that lies below, and we stand admiring the far blue distant view away to the Hogsback and the South Downs beyond Basingstoke as the hounds begin their work. There they are: you can see their twinkling tails as they draw the heather-covered slopes beneath us and disappear among the golden-brown bracken, while one of the whips plunges down after them and shakes a shower of amber leaves from the silver birches as he brushes past them.

Something streaks away down a green drive. A young hound gives tongue, but his note of triumph quickly changes to a yelp as the vigilant whip catches him with the tip of his long lash and roars, "War'[1] hare!" Poor little man! He has tried to run what is called a "short-tailed fox," and returns to the pack a sadder and a wiser dog. But now the tails twinkle faster than ever. A low whimper from some of the old hounds, then a burst of joyous music from the pack.

"Gone away!" yells Tom, standing up in his stirrups and tooting his horn.

Then that unmistakable screech which is supposed to mean "Tally-ho!" from a group of beaters and keepers in the distance, and there, against the park-palings, a beautiful red thing scudding along the soft ride, flat to the ground, his bushy tail flying straight behind him. Reynard himself! Now let all look out for themselves. Adieu, carriages! adieu, poor pedestrians! We are off, and shall not see you again till dinner-time. Through the park-gate we stream away, down the fir avenue, along the Welsh Ride. We have got a splendid start, and our horses fly on beside Countess Morella, who looks the perfection of a hunting lady in her plain neat habit just down to her feet.

Reynard is making for Coombes's Wood, but the earths were all stopped this morning at four o'clock; so away he speeds again, leaving the rectory and its lovely meadows and the dear old church below us—away past the bogs where the cotton-grass and the flycatcher, the blue gentian and the yellow asphodel, grow among the treacherous tussocks—away to Eversley Wood. Here the same fate—a fagot or three or four sods in the mouth of each hole—awaits him; so, changing his tactics, he strikes boldly across Hartfordbridge Flats for Lord Calthorpe's woods at Elvetham.

And now woe to the unwary or to the newcomer who thinks our heather-covered moors are all plain sailing! for along them run long lines of ruts, the remains of the old pack-road of the Middle Ages, worn by the traffic of centuries and now covered deep in purple heath. The only way to get over them, unless you stop and walk, is to jump boldly into the middle like the man in the nursery rhyme, and then jump out again: horses that have been in the country for a while soon learn to do this. But some luckless ensign who has lately joined his regiment at Aldershot comes down bodily, and horse and man roll and struggle in the deep ruts which William the Conqueror's pack-horses helped to tread out as they came from London to Winchester.

Now the woods are drawing near, and we cross the old London road, the high-road between the metropolis and Southampton, along which ninety stagecoaches ran every day in the good old times. A mile off to our right, down Star Hill, lies the famous White Lion Inn, now a miserable pot-house, where George IV. used to stay, and where, on the day that the London and South-western Railway was opened, the old ostler cut his throat in sheer despair, for Othello's occupation was gone. Ten miles up the road lies Bagshot Heath, the terror of travellers in those coaching days. There stood, and stands still, a little wayside inn called the Golden Farmer, where many of the coaches stopped to water the horses. The wearied travellers of the end of last century, touched by the tender solicitude of the charming landlord, confided to his sympathetic ear their fears of the highwaymen who were said to infest the heath. Cheered and encouraged with assurances from their host of the perfect safety of the particular road they intended taking, the travellers set out. But usually, when they had gone about a mile, the coach would stop with a sudden jerk, and a masked man on a magnificent horse would ride up, pistol in hand, and demand their money or their life. Sometimes serious encounters took place with this leader and his band, and then the wounded and terrified victims would drag themselves back to the Golden Farmer, where the host, full of commiseration for their misfortunes, would lavish care and kindness upon them. This went on for years, and it was not until hundreds of robberies had been committed that the discovery was made of the identity of the fascinating landlord and the desperate captain of the highwaymen.

Many are the tales the old people at Eversley used to tell of the "gentlemen of the road" in their fathers' and grandfathers' time. Even in quiet Eversley itself a curate lived some hundred years ago whose strange career ended on the gallows. He owned a splendid black horse which no one ever saw him mount. But it was whispered that if any one peeped into its stable in the morning the beautiful creature was seen covered with foam, bathed in perspiration, trembling as if it had just come in from a long gallop; and at last it was found out that Parson Darby belonged to the gang of highwaymen on Bagshot Heath. He was caught red-handed, and hanged close to the Golden Farmer in chains on a gibbet of which the posts were still standing forty years ago. But what became of his black horse no one ever could tell me. Now the London road is as safe and quiet as any other well-kept highway, and the wildest passengers upon it are a few wandering gypsies, who travel up and down it from fair to race and from race to fair.

But Reynard is speeding away through the pleasant fir woods, and we are following him as fast as we can lay legs to ground—scrambling over the rotten banks, scurrying along the soft rides, lying low on our saddles to avoid the sweeping boughs, and watching with all our eyes for the slippery roots that crawl along the surface of the sandy soil. Down through the bogs, across the bridge by the home farm, past the park, into the fallow fields, with half a dozen tremendous fences which send my heart up into my throat till Sintram lands me safe over each, into the fir woods again, up to the foot of the Queen's Mounts; and there, where good Queen Bess sat and watched the deer being driven up to her feet, do we run into our gallant fox, and a "Whoo-hoop!" from Tom proclaims that Reynard is no more.

But our run has led us far from home, and while the hounds trot on to Dogmersfield Park to draw the coverts of the descendants of the old regicide Mildmay, let us wend our way once more to Bramshill and linger a while longer about the terraces and gardens of the dear old house.

Come back with me, gentle reader, through the iron gates under the crumbling archways of the pleasaunce, where the Virginia creeper twines its delicate wreaths and glorifies the old stones in autumn with a flush of flame. The troco-ground, with its green turf as smooth as a billiard-table, is just as it was in the days of King James. There in the centre is the iron ring through which the lords and dames drove the heavy wooden troco-balls; and if you go into the garden-hall through that arched corridor you will see the actual balls that they used, and the long poles, with a kind of iron cup at their ends, with which the players pushed them—forerunners of the modern croquet-box that lies beside them.

Under the sunny walls run straight wide borders, where the bees make merry among pinks and lilies, mignonette and gilliflowers, and the walls themselves are tangled with old-fashioned roses and honeysuckles. One double yellow rose tree of prodigious age is kept as the apple of the gardener's eye. Tradition tells that it was brought a hundred years ago from Damascus—a fact which I am quite willing to believe, for the knotted stem tells its own story, and certainly there never was a sweeter rose or one more worthy of coming from the far-famed gardens of the East. Many a thousand blossoms have I picked from its descendants, for it is the ancestor of a hardy race: every sucker of the family grows and thrives in the poorest soil, and covers itself each June with a thick mass of canary-colored blossoms. During the three weeks that the yellow briers were in flower every room in Eversley Rectory was decked out with flat bowls of them on a ground of green ferns, and purple-black pansies mingled with their golden blooms.

Round about the house masses of another yellow flower are planted with no sparing hand—the great St. John's wort. It is pleasant to look upon, but it has another value. Dare I tell it in the nineteenth century, this age of railroads and telegraphs and iron-clads, when space and time are in a fair way to be annihilated, and nothing is so sacred that it may not be questioned, no problem so hard that men may not try to solve it? In the days when Bramshill House was built our forefathers believed firmly in a whole unseen or rarely-seen world around them of fairies, ghosts, spirits and witches. In some out-of-the-way corners in England—even in these days of board schools and competitive examinations, when we are told that King Arthur never existed and that William Tell is a "sun-myth"—some remnants of this belief still linger. In Devonshire folks speak shyly and with bated breath of the "good people;" and even in the year of grace 1879 a Warwickshire laborer was had up before the magistrates for having with a pitchfork half killed a poor old woman whom he declared to be a witch. But be that as it may, in the reign of James I. no one doubted the existence of the spirit-world about us, and on St. John's Eve all its denizens, good and bad, were supposed to wander freely where they would. One only thing they feared, and that was the great St. John's wort. Therefore, all who wished to guard house and home from the unwelcome visitors, who pinched the maids, turned the milk sour and plagued their victims with a thousand impish tricks, planted it freely about their gardens; and thus it is that you see its golden flowers amid their shining rich green leaves and crimson shoots round nearly all old English homes.

Do not laugh at these old fables, gentle reader. When we wander over the green turf and through the wide halls we seem to have opened a door that leads us back into the past out of the turmoil of the nineteenth century. And surely for a moment it can do us no harm to leave our striving, hurrying, anxious modern life, and picture to ourselves the days when our forefathers maybe were ignorant and superstitious, but when they knew how to build and how to fight and how to write—the days when England became "a nest of singing birds."

ROSE G. KINGSLEY.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In hunting dialect the warning "'ware" or "beware" is shortened to "war'," as in the old advice, "War' horse, war' hound, war' heel!"



CANOEING ON THE HIGH MISSISSIPPI.

TWO PAPERS.—I.



The Kleiner Fritz and Hattie of Louisville and the Betsy D. of Cincinnati made the canoe-fleet which the Northern Pacific Railway shunted out upon its station-platform at Detroit City, Minnesota, in the early gray of last July's first Thursday. We had bargained by post with Beaulieu, a shrewd, wiry, reckless French half-breed, for transportation of ourselves, canoes, equipment and provisions to Itasca Lake, or to a point upon the Mississippi five miles below the lake, as we might elect. His assurance was that four days and forty-one dollars would carry us to our first objective point. His helpers were a lively young half-breed, son-in-law of the murdered chief Hole-in-the-Day, another big mongrel, fat, plodding and reticent, and a young Indian who could speak a few English words, but was destitute of ideas in either English or Chippewa. Their motive-power was grazing on the open prairie back of the ragged village. The Reservation Indian, denied liquor at home, reckons upon a trip out of bounds as fair opportunity for a spree, so that catching and harnessing the ponies and cattle was a tedious task that covered the hours from breakfast well on toward noon; but at last the Hattie was firmly imbedded in prairie-grass and soft luggage upon one wagon, the Fritz and the Betsy were bound together upon a second, and the men of the fleet, with the stores, filled the third.

From Detroit City to Itasca Lake is about forty miles in a straight line, but no practicable way thither approximates to a direct line, and he who would see the beautiful lake and the head of the great river must travel for seven or eight days and endure many hardships. Sixty miles were to be done on wheels. The first day's travel was to White Earth Agency, twenty-two miles across a rolling prairie which steadily rises toward its climax in the Hauteur des Terres. The soil is of rare fertility, and the unbounded fields were clothed in the greenest of green, flecked with wild flowers of every hue in luxuriant profusion. Clumps of trees gave variety to the broad and beautiful view, while scores of clear little lakes gemmed the prairie as with great drops of molten silver. The eye swept an horizon of twenty miles, and once twenty leagues were within our visual grasp. The plodding fat man went his way in a dignified walk, but the passenger vehicle and that which bore the other boats, travelling by order of Beaulieu, who had in him more Detroit whiskey than ordinary discretion, came more than half the way at a terrible gait, spite of our remonstrances and greatly to our trepidation. Examination showed that the Betsy was racked and pounded beyond all excuse, while the poor Fritz revealed a hole in its graceful side like that made by a six-pound cannon-shot—a sad beginning for so long a cruise. Thence we went on slowly to the agency, where our first task was to find a clever Vermont Yankee reputed as the man to repair the unwelcome and inexcusable damage. The ingenious and genial fellow worked through the hot Fourth of July, while we mingled with the Indians and took part in their celebration, the first ever conducted entirely by themselves.

White Earth Agency is the seat of government of three reservations which embrace the homes of all the Chippewas. White Earth Reservation is thirty-six miles square, and is peopled by nearly seventeen hundred Indians and half-breeds. These were formerly gathered upon Crow Wing River, near Brainerd, where they existed in drunkenness, barbarism and destitution. In 1868 they were removed here, and the institutions of Christian civilization were introduced. They live in comfortable cabins and bark lodges. The agent, Major C.A. Ruffee, is a gentleman of capacity and integrity. Using his authority well and wisely, he is a king throughout his dominion of thirteen hundred square miles. His happy blending of civil and military government gives satisfaction to all who are well disposed. The Chippewas deal kindly among themselves, and have no quarrels with the whites. They have a well-arranged police system, with a chief, lieutenants and sergeants, embracing sixteen men in all, and directly responsible to the agent. No liquor is allowed on the reservation. They have no pilfering, and the few locks and bolts are rarely needed. In case of trespass or disagreement the parties come or are summoned before the agent, who examines the case on its merits, weighs the facts and the equities, decides; and there the quarrel ends.

The seat of the agency is an orderless village gathered about a green-shored little lake, and includes the office of the agent, the post-office, a warehouse for supplies, a meat-shop, two trading-stores and an untidy and comfortless hotel. Near by is the neat cottage of the agent, a large and comely boarding-school, an industrial school, and the residences of the chief clerk and of the head-farmer, who teaches and aids the Indians in practical farming. Not far away to the south is the Roman Catholic church; a mile to the north is the hospital, a large and cheerful building; and near the hospital are the tasteful Protestant Episcopal chapel and the rectory of the Rev. Mr. Gilfillan, who for fourteen years has worthily occupied a parish coextensive with the Chippewa Nation. The true solution of the Indian question is being worked out at White Earth in results that augur well for the future. Each child may secure education, and the minds and morals of all ages are cared for. Their churches are well attended and their schools have outgrown present accommodations. Their religious services and schools are conducted in their own language. They have an educated Indian clergyman who can scarcely speak English, while Mr. Gilfillan speaks the Chippewa as fluently as his mother-tongue. They have few quarrels, no thieving, no drunkenness, no abject poverty. They are not more perfect than others of human kind, but according to their light and sphere they are as good as a similar average of whites anywhere. The wise purpose is to make them kind, moral, educated and industrious Indians, not make-believe white men, and the work is doing and promising well in sincere and capable hands.

The Indian Fourth-of-July celebration took place in an open, treeless prairie. The festivities centred in a series of races run in pairs by the small and wiry Indian ponies over a curved, mowed and rolled half-mile course. Nearly all the young men were betters, in stakes of from twenty-five cents to ten dollars. There were no pools, but hard running, straight betting and square paying. The chief of police was the president of the course. All were in good-humor. There was no liquor, neither was there a harsh word or a blow among the five hundred. After the races eatables, tea, coffee and ice-water were enjoyed with laughter and chat. In the evening we cruisers gave a show of rockets and Roman candles, to the great delight of the Indians, and the day closed with a dance in the large dining-hall of the boarding-school.



Our damaged boats repaired and preparations completed for three weeks' absence from civilization, we set out near mid-day of Saturday for the march to Wild Rice River, eighteen miles. Our way lay among the cabins, lodges and farms of the Chippewas, over a billowy, green immensity bordered on the east by the lines of the Hauteur des Terres, which shut us from the Mississippi Valley, and horizoned on the west by the slopes beyond the famed Red River of the North. Our day's journey terminated, in a driving rainstorm, on the banks of Wild Rice River, where are a trading-store, the cabin of the trader and a neat chapel of the Protestant Episcopal mission. Our habitation for the night was a dark, muddy, odorous storehouse, in whose nether apartment we munched a frugal supper, then climbed a ladder to beds upon the bare floor between stacks of snake-root, which had accumulated from barterings with the Indians. During the night the rainstorm grew to a gale which rocked our night's home like a ship at sea to the music of heaven's grand diapasons. Sunday morning, impelled by the expense of our large retinue and the cheerlessness of our refuge, we pushed on for the foot of Wild Rice Lake, twenty miles distant over prairies and through forests. Two miles out we were overtaken by another fierce storm, which drove us to the shelter of the last human habitation, save two others near by, that we should see for three weeks. The broad, sweeping bow of the black cloud, the peculiar detonations of thunder in that clear atmosphere, the rush of wind, rain and hail, unhindered by the treeless and trackless moor, were lessons of God's majesty and power more impressive than cathedral mass or prayer and song and psalm of men. Out of the storm's first onset we rushed unasked into the hut of an Indian family, and surprised a pair of squaws and a six-months' pappoose squatting on a dirty and rain-pooled floor in almost total darkness. In an hour the storm had gone its eastward way, the sun shone out, and we resumed our trail among spruces, pines, oaks and elms to the foot of the lake, where we were to dismiss our prairie-schooners. Monday, with the early sun, we left teams and drivers, to push on by lakes, up rivers and through the pathless wilderness beyond all roads and habitations. Our party was reduced to the barest needs for the severe work before us. Besides our three selves we had a corps of five Indians as guides and packers, each of whom was a character, and all bore themselves through four days of severe work honestly, cheerfully and helpfully. They were Henry St. Clair, a half-breed, our interpreter, to whom we could only address measured monosyllables with any hope of imparting ideas, but always faithful, frank and wise; Kewashawkonce, the guide, a man of push and a genuine wag; Kawaybawgo, a huge hunter, whose old long shot-gun has banged over almost every acre of these wilds; Metagooe, a sleepy, thick-headed fellow; and Waisonbekton, young and active, always ready for work or burden and constantly alert for new and interesting things in Nature.

At the foot of Wild Rice Lake we prepared our canoes for voyaging, and began our long paddle toward the source of the Mississippi, whence we were to descend to civilization. A brief description of our little ships and equipment will help to a better understanding of our cruise. Each voyager had a Rob Roy canoe, slightly improved as to model and built upon the incomparable plan of Mr. Rushton of Canton, New York. The canoes are fourteen feet long, ten and a half inches deep and twenty-seven inches wide, decked over except a man-hole sixteen by about thirty-six inches, and weighing, with the mast and lug sail, from fifty to fifty-six pounds. The paddle is eight feet long, bladed at each end, grasped in the middle, and drives the canoe by strokes alternating on each side. The traveller sits flat upon the boat's floor, facing the bow. The canoe is not only a vehicle, but furnishes a dry and secure bed for sleeping at night, and, with its rubber apron, is a refuge from rain and storm. Each boat was equipped with an air-pillow, rubber blanket, rubber poncho, woollen blankets, rubber navy-bag and haversack. The general outfit represented a fine double shot-gun, a small and effective rifle, a revolver, fishing-tackle for each man, compass, aneroid barometer, thermometer, folding stove, stew-pans in nests, frying-pan, broiler, table-ware, and provisions for three weeks based upon the army ration, with dried fruits, condensed milk, brandy, medicines, etc., purchased at St. Paul.

Our stores and equipment suitably divided between the canoes, we paddled up through the outlet and into the lake, followed by Metagooe and Waisonbekton in a large birch-bark canoe bearing the provisions and camp-supplies of the Indians, while their companions walked across the country.

Wild Rice Lake is about one mile by five miles in extent. It is named from the wild rice which grows up from its shallow depths over almost its whole extent. Each autumn hundreds of Indians gather upon its shores in tents and lodges to secure the crop. Two squaws pass slowly through the thick rice in a birch canoe, one paddling at the stern and the other at the bow, drawing the ripe rice over the gunwale and with a club flailing the grain out of the straw into the boat. There and thus every family upon the reservation may secure an important part of the winter's provisions.

Through and over this green and productive sea we paddled about four miles to the mouth of Wild Rice River, which flows out of Upper Wild Rice Lake, then up the narrow, deep and crooked river. At our noon rendezvous Kawaybawgo and his foot-companions came in with a fine deer, the victim of his old but effective gun. In the early afternoon our progress became slow and excessively wearying from the shallowing of the river and its wonderful crookedness. The current ran like a mill-race around hundreds of short turns, and had its own exasperating way upon our keels. Finally, we were obliged to wade and drag the canoes after us in water varying between ankle-and waist-deep. A few hours of this wore us all out, and we called a halt and camp, utterly exhausted, with not more than twelve miles to the credit of the hard day's work. The Betsy D.'s skipper rolled over dead-beaten and sick; the Hattie's captain floundered up into the deep grass, incapable of further effort; while he of the Kleiner Fritz, scarcely better off, prescribed camphor and black coffee for the one and cherry brandy for the other, discreetly mixing the prescription for himself. Medication, an hour's rest and juicy rashers of broiled venison from the Indians' generous store soon brought the expedition to its wonted cheer and vigor.



Supper over, we filled the pipes of the Indians with fine tobacco and asked for a council. We all sat around a bright fire, and soon effected a bargain with the Indians to drag our canoes on up the little river, leaving us to walk across the country with the guide. Early the following morning we started, four of our party with the canoes, and we on foot with Kewashawkonce. The guide was pantomimed by our fat man for a conservative pace becoming the hot morning and the difficult route. Ke, as we abbreviated him, strode into an unbroken forest, grown with dense underbrush, strewn with fallen trees at almost every step, diversified by swamps and thickets through which he beat his way by main strength, and now and then traversed by rivers—all streams are rivers there—into which he plunged with never an interrogation-mark, and so on briskly, up hill and down, till, with three miles of walking, wading, climbing and struggling, we were brought to bay, tired out. Half an hour's rest and some refreshing wild strawberries prepared us for such another stage. Then an hour more of this terrible strain made us drop again for rest. Another hour, and before noon, hot and jaded, we came out upon a low bluff overhanging the river, and stopped for lunch. The guide, apparently fresh and unwearied, cut a sheet of birch bark for tinder, lit a fire as defence against mosquitos, and in sixty seconds was snoring. We were not slow in following his example, and the sun was dropping over into the west when we awoke. The guide examined the river, and informed us that our wading section was yet below. Standing in mid-stream drinking from his hands, he saw a fine pickerel's graceful movements a rod away, reached out for a half-sunken bit of a tree's branch, plunged it dexterously at the fish, struck it fairly in the back, and brought it up to us with a satisfied grunt. We lounged the afternoon away, and at six o'clock Metagooe came wearily to our camp with the Fritz at his heels. Half an hour later his comrades came with the other Rob Roys, their camp-traps loaded upon the decks and upon the interpreter's back. Our inquiry as to what had become of their birch canoe brought from Henry, as he dropped his pack, the sententious answer, "Busted." Over the evening's pipes and camp-fire, less than eight miles of actual distance accomplished, we resolved to abandon the shallow river and to portage directly to Upper Wild Rice Lake. The skipper of the Betsy proposed for the three of us a joint bed: Cincinnati feet have a troublesome time under a Rob Roy's low deck. We assented, stretched our rubber blankets, spread our woollens, adjusted the Betsy's long mosquito-bar and crawled carefully under it in expectation of a glorious sleep under the stars and the pines; but the dreams of the Hattie's captain, the trombonings of the Betsy's nose, the tossings of the Fritz and the savage industry of the mosquitos drove anything but troubled sleep from our eyelids, and we welcomed the early "Ho! ho! ho!" and improvised gong of the irrepressible Kawaybawgo.



Before we had done with our coffee, venison and slap-jacks the Indians had made yokes for carrying the canoes on their heads and shoulders, and had reduced the camp to packs. Soon we were off upon the first pose of a regular Indian portage. Each of three Indians had upon his shoulders one of the canoes, his head within its hot and darkening sides, its bow pointing forward high in the air and its stern hanging low behind his heels. The other two squatted upon heel and toe, drew the broad strap of their carrying-thongs over their foreheads, and with a plunge and a grunt sprang to their feet, each with a great hump of six score pounds. Then we plunged, in Indian file, into a trackless forest, and jogtrotted our way for three miles, when in a clump of pines, without a word or a signal, down came the boats and the packs. Three of the splendid fellows loosed their pack-thongs and took their rest in tramping back unloaded to camp for what had been left. The others, with us, rested a few moments: then we pushed on till two miles brought us out upon the low, jungled shore of a beautiful lake about one mile by two in extent. The guide, without a word, laid down his load, but not his clothes, and with a swift rush sprang far out into the lake, swam up and down, splashing, shouting and laughing, came dripping to shore, lit his smudge-fire, lay down in a sunny place, snored an hour, awoke dry and vigorous, and with a whoop he and Waisonbekton dashed into the woods to go back for their share of the luggage left behind. While they were gone we enjoyed our lunch and gave a name to the lovely lake which had rippled so long, far away from the haunts of men, without identity. We christened it Rob Roy Lake, in honor of our fleet. It lies half a mile to the south-west of Upper Wild Rice Lake, into which its waters flow, and is set down on Colton's sectional map in the township range numbered thirty-seven. Our entire party reunited, we canoeists paddled across to the lake's outlet, a narrow, miry stream which loses itself in a swamp, and that in turn merges into the Upper Wild Rice Lake. We paddled and poled down to the end of the little river, and came to a dead stand in the matted roots of the swamp-grass: then waded waist-deep in the mire and slime, each dragging his canoe with the aid of an Indian, until we came out upon the open water. Thence a paddle of two miles along the coast brought us to another little stream flowing into the lake. As we came to its mouth Kawaybawgo was feasting upon a duck he had killed and broiled, of which he offered me a portion with a smile and interrogative grunt which seemed to compassionate my wet, weary and forlorn appearance. A splendid pike, two feet long, came gracefully out of the stream and hung motionless in the clear water. I pointed him out to the Indian and the Hattie's captain, both of whom were standing near him. At the instant their eyes fell upon him he moved: then, as they started for him, he darted like a flash for deep water, pursued by the two men at the top of their speed through a sheet of water six inches deep for nearly a hundred feet out. It was a fair race, and the six-feet-three Indian made a splendid spurt, but the pike won.



The stream bore us upward to the floating bog out of which it flowed. We drew the canoes out upon a meadow which undulated in graceful billows at our every movement. A step would shake all the surface for a rod about us, while our combined tread sent waves of grassy earth in every direction. A sudden leap so shook the cup of cold coffee sitting by one of the Indians, six or seven yards away, that the liquid spilled over the cup's edge. The whole meadow, solid to the eye, is but one of those monster sponges that hold in abeyance waters which otherwise would sweep like a flood down the great rivers. Beyond this billowy field we came to the open water of another unnamed lake, about one mile long, fringed about with green pines, to which we gave the name of Longworth, in honor of Cincinnati's distinguished judge, and to a lovely little green island thickly grown with trees we gave the name of another canoeist left behind, Mr. Empson of Louisville. At the head of Longworth Lake, and in plain view of Empson Island, within a space cleared out of a dense jungle, we made our last camp before reaching the coveted Mississippi. Our stay here was marked in red by the most vindictive attack from mosquitos in all the cruise. No one unacquainted with the Northern Minnesota wilderness in midsummer, or with a region having a similar insect population, can at all imagine the number and fierceness of the ravenous aerial hosts that had beset us all the way from White Earth. In mid-day they keep one constantly alert, while at night they are beyond credible report. They are small, shrewd and persistent. As I lay awake their myriad voices about and above me made a great chorus, really grand and impressive, out of which for a few seconds at a time there came bursts of harmony which I could hardly separate from the idea of a vast, distant chorus of human voices. Against their voracity no ordinary bar is a bar at all. We had gone to their haunts provided with netting which at home gave immunity, but through its meshes these mosquitos inserted their bills, then their heads, then struggled through bodily, and came down upon us like demons. We were dressed in woollens, our hands were in dogskin gloves and our heads and necks in thick calico hoods and capes, but all such protections were naught when those screaming villains had a mind for blood. At one onslaught they would go into the shrinking flesh through two thicknesses of wool and two of cotton, or through a heavy dogskin glove, or through the thick and hardened skin of the hand's palm or the foot's ball, or through a buckskin moccasin and cotton hose—through any protection at our command except a cotton canopy hung wide of our heads and bodies.

Sung and stung out of all endurance by the very centre of that army of the wilderness, we were astir in the grayest of our second Thursday's dawn, and were soon in readiness for our final portage over the crests of the Heights of Land to the river, which out of our long and severe march had become to us a veritable Mecca. Our way was up a gentle range of hills, whose tops, but a few yards wide, divide the waters which flow southward to the great Gulf from those which seek their far northward trend through the Red River of the North. The first division of our party reached the Mississippi before noon with a joy born out of a week's toil and hardship, and in a trice I was drinking of and laving in its swift, bright water. We could hardly realize that in this deep, rushing brook, not more than four or five paces wide, we saw the beginnings of that majestic current which drains half a continent. Soon our second division came up, we ate our last lunch in company, and the Indians, each shaking us by the hand with a grunt and a smile, then going off into the forest with a cheer, left us alone in that vast and uninhabited wilderness. Late in the afternoon we launched our canoes into the little river, and loaded them for our journey to its head, camping about three miles above our point of embarkation.



The next morning we started with light hearts upon what we supposed would be but a short journey to the river's source, to meet an exasperating disappointment. We had made a bargain for transportation from the railway to Itasca Lake or to a point five miles below, all fully diagrammed and understood by correspondence, but found ourselves set down by the employes of the rascally half-breed—who had been careful to leave us at Wild Rice Lake—in an unknown land, six days from civilization, at a point nearly or quite thirty miles below the lake, below a region of rapids and obstructions against which we had especially stipulated, and up which no craft had ever travelled. A mile's work brought us to the beginning of this second series of troubles. Lying across the river at all heights, depths and angles were the tough pine logs we had dreaded, and at every mile or two were tumbling rapids. All that long Friday we took our turns with the axe, lopping off branches that we might squeeze under or shunt over logs; climbing with our stores and boats over great log-drifts held by the grip of the rocky defiles; wading through shoals and dragging our canoes through mud and sand; plunging suddenly into holes that engulfed us to our armpits; paddling astride our decks over pools too deep for wading; chopping and wrenching logs that forbade other means of passage; fighting inch by inch up plunging gorges, down which and over whose rugged boulders the narrowed waters foamed in almost resistless fury and milky foam—on and up, rod by rod, half a mile in the hour, till we came to a weary and desolate camp not two leagues from our breakfasts. There we cooked our suppers and ate in hoods and gloves, fighting mosquitos and black flies for every morsel, speculating as to the morrow's probabilities and discussing the question of victory or defeat. We rose from the night's sleep resolved upon seeing Itasca, and until mid-afternoon fought over again the battles of yesterday, and at last came out upon a smooth, placid stream, up which we paddled with easy swing some nine miles. Then the river narrowed and shallowed, and we again took to our feet upon a beautiful gravelly bottom. At times the way was closed to sight by rushes and wild rice, and we could only beat our way through. At last the water, thickly grown with reeds, broadened and deepened, and a score of paddle-strokes carried us through the green curtain out upon Itasca's beautiful surface, over which we glided, under the shadows of the setting sun, up to Schoolcraft's Island for a Sunday's quiet.

Our heavy and restful sleep was not broken till long after the sun was glinting upon us through the trees. Our first work was given to building a lodge of underbrush and making preparations for two days' stay on the lonely island, completed by unfurling the signal of the New York Canoe Club from a high stump hard by the camp-fire. Barring the mosquitos, Sunday's rest was a pleasant and refreshing sequence to ten days of toil and struggle, and Monday found us in hearty readiness for a thorough exploration of Itasca Lake and its feeders. We took a lunch, our guns and scientific instruments, and paddled up the south-west arm of the lake to find and explore the leading tributary. We found the outlets of five small streams, two having well-defined mouths and three filtering into the lake through bogs. Selecting the larger of the two open streams, we paddled into its sluggish waters, ten feet wide and one foot deep where they enter the lake. Slow and sinuous progress of two hundred yards brought us to a blockade of logs and to shallow water. We landed, fastened the canoes, took our bearings by compass and started for a tramp through thicket and forest to Elk Lake, which we reached after a rapid walk of thirty-five minutes. This lake is an oval of about one mile in its longest diameter. It lies about half a mile in a straight line south from Itasca. Its shores are marshy, bordered by hills densely timbered. Its sources are boggy streams having little or no clearly-defined course. To all appearance, these bogs and this small lake are the uttermost tributaries to Itasca Lake, and the latter, concentrating these minor streams and sending them out as one, is the true head of the Father of Waters.

Elk Lake was a place of misadventure to us. Our struggle through the thicket and dense forest was hot and exhausting. Our scientist left there a fine aneroid barometer, which a second hot walk failed to recover. Our photographer, arrived at the lake with a grievous burden of camera, plates, tripod, etc., found that he had forgotten his lens tubes, and was compelled to double his tracks back to the canoes, then wade out into the swampy borders of the lake, waist-deep in slime, to secure a view of this highest Mississippi water, only to have his plate light-struck and ruined by an accident on the homeward journey.

While the artist was gone for his forgotten lenses our Nimrod missed a fine eagle which swept over our heads at long range. So we returned to our island camp in no very good mood, but a successful troll for lake-trout, and a good supper off two fine fellows baked under the coals in birch jackets, sent us to bed in good spirits and with no regrets save for the lost barometer.

A.H. SIEGFRIED.



NATIONAL MUSIC AN INTERPRETER OF NATIONAL CHARACTER.

The popular music of any people is, in a great measure, the thermometer of its physical sensitiveness and its moral sentiments; and the reason of this is evident. The shepherd tending his flock, the fisherman mending his nets, the soldier on the march, the peasant at the plough, has no inducement to sing unless his heart's emotion incite him to it. A true national music is, then, what the Germans call Volksmusik, and, springing from the hearts of the people, it is psychologically one of their best interpreters. For this reason the composers of national melodies are seldom known to fame. A national song composes itself: the musician's lyre is the musician's heart, and from the sorrow, triumph and travail of life comes the child of song.

The assertion, then, that music is a universal language is only half true: it has a great variety of dialects; and it is this very sensitiveness to human influence which makes it so universally eloquent. Let us turn first to the East, for it still retains its primitive music, and at this very hour some muezzin is calling from his minaret or some Jew intoning his Talmud in the same musical cadence with which Syrian maidens sang the hymns to Cybele.

All Oriental music is distinguished by a pathetic, long—drawn, wailing monotony quite in keeping with the stationary and contemplative character of the people. We are struck at once with its frequent repetitions of one note and its short and cautious transitions, the intervals rarely being greater than a half, or at most a full, note. The conclusion of a measure is generally a descent, and the commencement of a new one seems to be a feeble effort to rise from the dreamy apathy in which Eastern imagination delights; but it is immediately followed by the fall of the rhythmus, re-establishing its languid repose. The frequent use of half notes induces a predominance of the minor key, and this, with the constant recurrence of the rhythmical fall, imparts to Semitic and Hindoo music that melancholy, lethargic uniformity which expresses in a striking manner the benumbed energies and undeveloped spirit of the people among whom it is found. When a race has substituted habit and custom for national feeling, its music is necessarily monotonous and characterless, for the stronger the national feeling of any people, the more intense, vivid and pronounced will be its music.

Hindoo music is almost untranslatable to Western ears, but Sir W. Jones, in an essay on the musical modes of the Hindoos—to be found in the third volume of the Asiatic Researches—makes an attempt to render one of their most popular songs. The original, of which he also gives a copy, looks like a mixture of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese characters, and how far our notation represents it it is impossible to say; for, though Sir W. Jones was an erudite Oriental scholar, that of itself would not render him a good translator of Hindoo music. The air is a song of love and spring, and the measure is indicated, "rapid and gay:"



Kindred to Semitic and Hindoo music, though venturing on bolder intervals, is Chinese, Persian and Arabian. The almost untranslatable airs of India assume in China something like an artless melody. Their smallest intervals are semitones, which have been in use, like everything else in China, from time immemorial. Nevertheless, in the diatonic series of seven intervals the Chinese usually avoid the two semitones by omitting the fourth and the seventh, so that their scale consists really of only five intervals, and as they regard F as their principal key (just as we regard C as ours), the Chinese scale stands thus:



This scale is, however, by no means confined to China, but is met with in several Asiatic countries—Japan, Siam, Java, etc. In order to judge how it affects the character of music, I have copied the following Chinese air and Japanese song from Carl Engel's Researches into Popular Songs and Customs:



Arabic music, which is Asiatic in its foundation, shows decided traces of the wider civilization and greater independence of character to which this race attained. The delicate gradations of sounds are still adhered to in the form of multitudes of grace-notes, but the intervals are longer and the melodies more decided. The overloading of the melody by an excessive use of trills and grace-notes by Persians, Arabians, and even Spaniards, in their popular music, indicates some common sentiment; and it is remarkable that the European Jews preserve this same Oriental ornamentation in the vocal performances of their synagogues. Numerous examples of Arabic music may be found in Lane's Modern Egypt. This writer professes great admiration for it, and says he "never heard the song of the Mekka water-carriers without emotion," though it consists of only three notes:



The translation of the line is, "Paradise and forgiveness be the lot of him who gave you this water!" It is said that the Arabic music is a powerful exponent of the wild, fierce and yet romantic nature of that people, though it did not commend itself to Engel and other musicians at the Paris Exposition. But, however void of beauty and expression any national music is to us, it is certainly felt to possess these qualities by the people to whom it belongs; and it is very likely that our music would seem to them just as unintelligible and discordant. When the French missionary Amiot played some of Boildieu's and Rossini's melodies to a Chinese mandarin he said, with a polite shake of the head, "They are sadly devoid of meaning and expression, while the Chinese music penetrates the soul."

Both Venice and Spain show traces of Arabic influence in their national music. In Venetian airs it is only a dim memory, manifesting itself by the frequent repetition of single notes, whereas the Spanish melodies are often so Moorish in construction and sentiment that it is easy to fancy in them tones like the call of the muezzin. Thus, too, the following Spanish song, judged by its repetitions and short intervals, might easily be taken for an Arabic air:



It is to be noted that instruments of percussion are the natural exponents of such primitive music, and that, therefore, the East has its drum, gong and cymbals, Arabia its tambourine, Spain its castanets.

The Sclavs, being a pure race, have also a very decided national music. Its peculiarity is smooth, lisping, sibillating sounds, analogous to the rustling of leaves in a forest. Having no native accent in their own language, they easily imitate that of others; and this imparts to the Sclavonic races that admirable facility for speaking foreign languages which distinguishes them. This characteristic of their speech is faithfully reproduced in their music, especially in that of the southern Sclavs. It is indicated by continuous notes of the same value, and by a compass scarcely ever exceeding a fifth. Its negative peculiarities harmonize exactly with the history of the Russians. The sad, doleful monotony of their existence in the past is pathetically interpreted by their narrow, sombre, subdued melodies. They are the voice of a people whose ideas revolved in a narrow circle—of people who dwelt on vast gray plains dotted with sad brown huts, and who heard no sounds but the sighing of the wind through the dark pine forests. The "Vesper Hymn," known to every ordinary player, is a very good example of the general character of Russian melodies. The songs of the peasants are further distinguished by their frequent modulation from the major to the minor key, as if not long could they be joyful, and also by the peculiar way in which they are rendered. The tonic and the dominant are the prevalent intervals, and the intermediate notes are slurred or slightly sounded. Rochlitz found it impossible to convey this peculiarity by notation, but gives the following melody as a favorite accompaniment to the serf-songs of Northern Russia:



The Poles, members of this family, have had a great national existence, and their national music echoes its history and its character. The heartstirring strains of their mazurkas make many a bosom beat and ache as they remind the listeners of past times. Polish music is the voice of a light-minded, brave-hearted people who lived in a gay turmoil and drained with eager lips and reckless spirits the cup of glory and of joy. The Polish polkas and mazurkas, with their changing and fugitive rhythmus and their lively, uneven time, admirably embody the light and graceful spirit of this people.

In striking contrast to the character and music of the Slavic peoples are the character and music of the Hungarians. Living on the confines of the East and West, this people belong to the former by descent and to the latter by civilization. Between two elements, they have been exposed to the attacks of both, and their history records only a continual struggle for existence as a nation. This prolonged warfare has made nationality the uppermost thought in the life of the Hungarian: it is the influence controlling all his ideas, his feelings, his poetry and his art. His music embalms a thousand years of struggle for it, and every note of its wild, melancholy strains breathes tales of war and sorrow, of hope and triumph. The music interpreting such an intense nationality ought to be a peculiar one; and it is. A foreigner, having once heard it, can never mistake its sounds for those of any other national music.

But to understand the Magyar music you must apprehend the Magyar's character. He is a singular mixture of East and West, habitually passive and melancholy, yet easily roused to the wildest excitement. His step is slow, his face pensive, his manners imposing and dignified; yet when once roused he rushes forward with a furious impetuosity which his enemies have learned to estimate and dread. His eloquence is wonderful, and after success he throws aside his solemnity and gives himself up with wild abandon to the feast, the dance and the song. All this various character he has imparted to his national music: it is full of pathos and earnestness, yet often impetuous and even hilarious. The "Rakotzy" is so perfectly national that it thrills like a shout from the Hungarian heart, and it is no wonder that the Austrian government found it necessary to forbid it to be played on public occasions, and even to confiscate all printed copies of it. "When I hear the 'Rakotzy,'" said a famous Hungarian, "I feel as if I must arise and conquer the world." As my readers can easily procure a copy of it, it would be a kind of sacrilege to give so grand a march shorn of any of its noble proportions; and I can with far more justice give an example which embraces two of the most predominant traits of Hungarian songs—the Scotch catch introduced in the middle or end of the bar, instead of at the beginning as in Scotch music, and the beautiful modulations from the major to the minor key of the minor third—a change very unusual in any national music but the Hungarian:



We cannot leave Hungarian music without noticing the fact that it has been greatly influenced by the gypsies of that country, by whom it is mainly cultivated as an art. In Hungary, indeed, there is no stately festival, no public rejoicing, no private merrymaking, without some gypsy band; and it would be impossible to find more sympathetic interpreters of its intense and passionate spirit. But if professional musicians, they are nomadic ones: they wander through all the towns and villages of Transylvania and Wallachia, and are everywhere welcome. In dance-music the life and impetuosity of their musical movements, their varying rhythms and the strange thrill of their wild dissonances are absolutely enthralling. Charles Boner, in his work on Transylvania, says that even the aged find it impossible to resist the dance when a gypsy band invites them to it. Their prelude is slow and sonorous, the music quickens, there is a rush of tones, the fantastic melody hastens on at a head-long pace—every one, old and young, is under its spell.

Many of the Hungarian gypsies are composers as well as performers. Pougratz and Patikarus are names beloved wherever the "Czardas" is listened to; and where, in Hungary, is not the "Czardas" listened to? No one can play a "Czardas" like a gypsy, and he is often rewarded for it in the most exaggerated manner; for he soon has his audience so excited that they call for it again and again, and heap recompense on recompense, until, in their passionate delight, the last ducat, the last watch, ring, and even horse, has been bestowed. The gypsies of Hungary conclude all pieces ending in the minor key by substituting the major chord for the minor chord; for instance, a passage written thus,



they finish thus:



following instinctively a rule which we find frequently observed in the most classical compositions. The following is a martial dance of the gypsies, but the most elaborate notation would only be the skeleton of any example: the best parts of all their performances are those they improvise while playing:



It may be said that the gypsy has no nationality, and can therefore have no national music. This is hardly true. The gypsy has no country, but his sentiment of nationality is strong and persistent, and his music is as peculiar as his language and customs. It is true that he steals the music of the country in which he sojourns just as readily as he steals the poultry from the roost or the linen from the line, but he always imparts to it some echo of his far Eastern home and some flavor of the tent and the hedgerow. Twice in my life this fact has struck me in a remarkable manner. Once, on the skirts of a pine forest in the wilds of Argyleshire, I came suddenly on a gypsy-camp celebrating a wedding. The women were dancing the "Romalis" to a violin and tambourine. The music, the dance, the conical tents, the flashing swarthy faces, the careless piquant dresses, were all so Oriental in character that in spite of the mountains, the moors and the heather I found it hard to realize that I was in the heart of Scotland. Even when the most distinctive Scotch pibrochs were played I was quite conscious of an Eastern clash in them which no Scot could or would have given. Again: eighteen months ago I found a camp of English gypsies in the Rocky Mountains a little beyond Golden. One man was leaning against a tree fiddling negro melodies to the birds, but negro melodies with the flavor of the tent instead of the cabin. At my request he played "Yankee Doodle," and imparted to it a revolutionary dash, a piquant mocking defiance, which convinced me that he knew its history and was interpreting it from his own heart—a fact which a subsequent conversation confirmed. I often wonder that no musical speculator has ever organized a band of Russian, Hungarian and English gypsies. Certainly, it would give us a far more characteristic entertainment than bands of blackened "minstrels."

The Swiss love their national music as they love their mountains and their freedom; and at first sight it seems singular that a people so blended with the progress of liberty should possess a music singularly simple and pastoral. But in this fact we perceive how truly music explains character, for as early as the fourteenth century their political faith, like their mode of life, was simple and averse to display. In a few ordinary words the deputies of Appenzell said all that has since been said with infinite bombast: "We are convinced that mankind are born for order, but not for servitude—that they must have magistrates whom they themselves elect, but not masters to grovel under." The essentials of true freedom having thus early become an every-day enjoyment, a people so plain and simple sang naturally melodies suggestive of the calm pastoral life so dear to them.



We must notice that the favorite instrument of the Swiss, the Alp-horn, has caused a predilection for a certain progression of intervals. The Alp-horn is a long tube of fir-wood having the same compass as the trumpet. But on both these instruments the upper F is not an exact F, neither is it an exact F sharp, and thus in most Alpine tunes there are passages like the following, where the notes marked x ought to be F natural, but are nearly F sharp. However, this irregular tone charms the Swiss, and is one of the peculiarities of their "Ranz des Vaches:"



But it is in the national music of the Celtic race that we find the most familiar examples of melody symbolizing character. The purest form of it is undoubtedly the Irish; and who will not bear witness that in its half-laughing and half-sobbing notes we hear the voice of the race? Its musical distinction is the emphatic and striking introduction of the sixth major, but this peculiarity is also prominent in Scotch and Welsh airs, and is a favorite termination in all mountainous countries. To a fine sensibility there is, I think, a much more peculiar trait in Irish music, whether gay or sad—a strain of longing which imparts a charm like songs of memory—a strain so subtle that my explanation can only be intelligible to those who have already apprehended it.

Kindred to the Irish is the Welsh and the Scotch music. The Welsh has a more hopeless sob, the Scotch a wilder mirth. We feel in the old Welsh tunes that terrible struggle they had, first with the Romans, and then with the Anglo-Normans; and whoever has heard the "March of the Men of Haerlech" will understand why King Edward slew the Welsh Bards.

The most striking examples of Scotch music are the pibrochs and strathspeys. These compositions generally ring with a wild laughter that is almost harassing, especially when it is enhanced by the abrupt close with the fifth instead of the keynote. The ear, which has been longing for the rest, has a sense of being teased and deluded with the rollicking strain. As exponents of the cautious, cannie Scot we should think them a satire did we not know what a wild vein of Celtic wit runs through the granite foundation of his character. If it be true that national musics embalm peculiar humanities, of no country is this so true as of Scotland, for no people and no history is so highly picturesque and so full of the broadest lights and shadows. In their earliest history we find this antithesis. They lived rudely as peasants: they fought as if possessed by the very spirit of chivalry. When they abolished the magnificence of the papacy they inaugurated the barest of churches. They were the first to betray Charles Stuart, and the last to lay down arms for the rights of his descendants. They are worldly-wise to a proverb, and yet wildly susceptible to poetry and romance.

The songs of such a people have necessarily a great variety: the color and the perfume of life are in them. Listen to the mocking, railing drollery of "There cam' a young man," the sly humor of the "Laird o' Cockpen," or "Hey, Johnnie Cope!" and you may understand one side of Scottish character. The Border ballads, that go lilting along to the galloping of horses and jingling of spurs, are the interpretation of another side. The same active influence accompanies the Jacobite songs—"Up wi' the bonnets for bonnie Dundee!" filled many a legion for Prince Charles—and the blood kindles yet to their fife-like and drum-like movements. Again, the stately rhythm and march of some of the oldest airs make them peculiarly suitable for patriotic songs; and Burns took advantage of this when he adapted "Scots wha hae" to the air of "Hey, Tuttie Taittie!" for to this spirit-stirring strain Bruce and his heroes marched to the field of Bannock-burn.

Scotch music is a good example of the fact that the favorite musical instruments of the different nations have undoubtedly caused some favorite group of notes, constituting motives of a peculiar rhythm, which are employed with evident preference. Thus, the use of the minor seventh instead of the major seventh (as in "Wha'll be King but Charlie?"), and the sudden modulation from the minor key to the major key, a whole tone below, are in exact accord with the bagpipe, and are more certain in the strathspeys, reels and dances which are universally played on that instrument; the intervals of which are



with the bass of the drone emitting A, so that A minor must be regarded as the principal key of this instrument. Indeed, Macdonald, in his Complete Tutor for the Great Highland Bagpipe, gives the odd rule that the "piper is to pay no attention to the flats and sharps marked on the clef, as they are not used in pipe-music."

In Scotch music are also continually found motives of a rhythm in which the first note has only one-fourth the duration of the second. This is known as the Scotch catch or snap, and evidently originated in the strathspeys, though it is now a distinction of many fine songs, notably so of "Roy's Wife of Aldavalloch."

That these old melodies are the voice of ancient Scotland is proved by the fact that no modern musician has been able to imitate them. Haydn tried to rearrange some of them, and failed, and Geminiani blotted quires of paper in attempting to write a second part to the "Broom o' the Cowdenknowes." No: ere we can add anything to the national music of Scotland we must restore the precise national conditions of which it was the articulate idea.

English music, until the days of the Tudors, was really French: England sang, as all Europe did, the songs of the Troubadours. But the "Chanson de Roland" and the "Complaint of the Chatelain de Courcy" were not English strains, for a national song is a winged fact. France was the legitimate successor of the Troubadours, and many of their oldest songs would serve to-day as airs de vaudeville. The French national music has mostly grown out of civil dissensions and party conflicts. What scenes do the "Carillon," the atrocious "Carmagnole" and the "Marseillaise" bring up! The "Carillon" had been Marie Antoinette's favorite tune: it pursued her from her palace to her prison, startled her on her way to her trial, and was probably the last sound she heard as she lay bound under the guillotine.

When not breathing blood and anarchy French popular music has a wonderful range: it is gallant, mocking, elegant, or full of absolute nonsense and frivolity. In fact, French music has always been so intensely national that it would have been impossible for England to have long borrowed it; and in the days of the Tudors we find English character beginning to explain itself in those admirable tunes and ballads which form a regular and successive declaration of English principles, with their sound piety, broad fun, perfect liberty of speech and capital eating and drinking. They have neither the wailing grief nor the boisterous merriment of Celtic music, and they lack entirely the monotonous tenderness of the Troubadours; but they are full of buoyant, daring independence, and have a certain homeliness which strikes in a very powerful manner some chord in the Anglo-Saxon heart.

The cosmopolitan nature of the German speaks to all the world in his music. Of all national musics it is the grandest and the most developed: we see this in the position it gives to rhythms. National musics with undeveloped rhythms are the speech of people just awakening, while music that has them strongly marked and regularly introduced belongs to people of fully-matured energies. Only in the Jodlers and Landlers of the Tyrolese, Austrian and Swiss mountains is the original Teutonic iambic preserved in its purity. In all other German music every kind of rhythm is met with, no kind being predominant. For the musical language of Germany embraces not only the few octaves of passion, but the whole keyboard of existence. It has preludes, symphonies and sonatas for every phase of life. Nothing smaller than this range would suffice to express the multiform ideas of a people so thoughtful and cosmopolitan. And though by this universal sympathy German music may have lost a purely national life, it is a most sufficing compensation to have gained the power of expressing the ideas of a whole epoch.

Musical taste in America is in progress of formation. We have no national music: we have not even a decided preference for any style. We like Beethoven and Chopin, but we also like Rossini and Donizetti and delight in Lecocq and Sullivan. In no respect is the national pride so utterly forgotten as in music. We give to all schools a fair hearing. The great German masters are household words: the national music of every land is welcome. We have been learning to like Italian opera at an insane cost; we have kindly winked at the follies of opera-bouffe; probably nowhere in the world are the intellectual depths of a German symphony and the passionate declamation of an Italian recitative more thoroughly appreciated. This is the natural musical exposition of our complex and various life. This wondrous variety, which indicates possibilities not yet revealed, pleases us without being always clear to our feelings and intellect. Still, we shall not ask, with the Frenchman, "Sonate, que veux-tu?" We are satisfied with what the present affords, and what new masters shall appear or what new instruments be invented we know not. Always the epochs will have their own interpreter. One hundred years ago who had imagined a Weber or Steinway piano, that piece of furniture with a soul in it?

It has been suggested to me while writing this paper that national melodies are in a great measure influenced by the physical features of the country in which they rise. I think very little so. It is true that the music of all mountainous countries has many points of resemblance, but it is because the people of such countries have strong mental and moral similitudes. Savages are not inspired by the most lovely scenery, and a collection of national airs from different parts of the world would not reveal to us whether they were written in valleys or on mountains or by the sounding seashore.

There are distinct ensigns by which national music may be as promptly detected as a ship by its colors. Spanish airs have in them the rapid twinkling, so to speak, of the guitar; the mountain-melodies of Switzerland recall the open notes of the Alp-horn; the Irish and Scotch musics have their marks as plainly impressed upon them as the physiognomy of the peoples is distinct, and it is nothing to the purpose to say that they have been cleverly imitated: the mark still remains a fact, and is the mysterious specialty that thrills the rich, the poor, the soldier and the churchman, the peasant and the exile. Whatever analogy exists between a country and its music is mainly with the inward character of the people themselves, and is generally too profound to be theorized upon. We only know that at every step we advance in the science of music we are deciphering what is written within us, not transcribing anything from without.

Nor as Americans are we insensible to the value of a national music. The few airs which have any claim to represent us in this capacity have done service that no money can estimate. During the late war wherever the rebel flag was raised it was necessary to silence "Yankee Doodle." Like the "Marseillaise," it was an institution before which its enemies trembled; and when we have produced or annexed something infinitely grander we shall not forget the saucy, free-and-easy, mind-your-own-business melody that carried the nation cheerfully through two great crises.

AMELIA E. BARR.



MALLSTON'S YOUNGEST.

The railroad-village of Fairfield woke up one spring morning and found a clumsy blue car, with a skylight in its roof, standing on the common near the blacksmith-shop. Horses and tongue were already removed, the former being turned into the tavern pasture and the latter stowed in the tavern barn. A small sky-colored ladder led up to the door of this artistic heaven, which remained closed long after a crowd of loungers had gathered around it.

The Fairfield loungers were famously lazy savages, though to the last degree good-natured and obliging. They wore butternut overalls and colored shirts, a few adding the picturesque touch of bright handkerchiefs and broad straw hats: there were a few coats in various stages of rags and grease, and one or two pairs of boots, but the wearers of these put on no airs over the long ankles and sprawling toes which blossomed around them. The whole smoking, stoop-shouldered, ill-scented throng were descendants of that Tennessee and Carolina element which more enterprising Hoosiers deplore, because in every generation it repeats the ignorance and unthrift branded so many years ago into the "poor white" of the South.

Those who could read traced the legend "Photographic Car" on the sides of the vehicle, and with many a rude joke each bantered the other to have his picter took for such purposes as skeerin' stock off the railroad-track or knockin' the crows stiff. Their scuffling and haw-haws waked the occupant of the car, who rose in his bunk and drew the curtain from a window. The boys saw his face and hushed. Raising the window, he scattered a bunch of handbills among them, which set them all to scrambling, and, when they had caught the bills, to struggling with large and small type which announced that an unrivalled photographer would be in that vicinity in a very few days with his beautiful travelling-car, giving everybody an opportunity of securing such tin-types and photographs as only the large cities turned out, and at the lowest possible prices.

Presently the photographer appeared at his own door and looked abroad. The tender spring morning, though it glorified surrounding woods and rich farming-lands, could do little for this dilapidated village, which consisted of one lane of rickety dwellings crossed at right angles by the Peru Railroad, a stern brick building, a wooden elevator and a mill. It was a squalid sight, though the festive season of the year and that glamourous air peculiar to Indiana brooded it. The photographer surveyed his new field with an amused sneer, and descended the steps to go to his breakfast at the tavern, a peak-roofed white frame set among locust trees—the best house on the street. Before it stood that lozenge-shaped sign on a fat post which stands before all country taverns, making a vague, lonesome appeal to the traveller.