"I will not. You are a bad girl," said Mrs. Kavanagh severely. "Here has Mr. Ingram been teaching you and making you better for ever so long back, and you pretend to accept his counsel and reform yourself; and then all at once you break out, and throw down the tablets of the law, and conduct yourself like a heathen."

"Because I want him to explain, mamma. I suppose he considers it wicked of us to start for Switzerland to-morrow. The money we shall spend in traveling might have despatched a cargo of muskets to some missionary station, so that—"

"Ceilia!"

"Oh no," Ingram said carelessly, and nursing his knee with both his hands as usual, "traveling is not wicked: it is only unreasonable. A traveler, you know, is a person who has a house in one town, and who goes to live in a house in another town, in order to have the pleasure of paying for both."

"Mr. Ingram," said Mrs. Kavanagh, "will you talk seriously for one minute, and tell me whether we are to expect to see you in the Tyrol?"

But Ingram was not in a mood for talking seriously, and he waited to hear Mrs. Lorraine strike in with some calmly audacious invitation. She did not, however, and he turned round from her mother to question her. He was surprised to find that her eyes were fixed on the ground and that something like a tinge of color was in her face. He turned rapidly away again. "Well, Mrs. Kavanagh," he said with a fine air of indifference, "the last time we spoke about that I was not in the difficulty I am in at present. How could I go traveling just now, without knowing how to regulate my daily expenses? Am I to travel with six white horses and silver bells, or trudge on foot with a wallet?"

"But you know quite well," said Mrs. Lorraine warmly—"you know you will not touch that money that Mrs. Lavender has left you."

"Oh, pardon me," he said: "I should rejoice to have it if it did not properly belong to some one else. And the difficulty is, that Mr. Mackenzie is obviously very anxious that neither Mr. Lavender nor Sheila should have it. If Sheila gets it, of course she will give it to her husband. Now, if it is not to be given to her, do you think I should regard the money with any particular horror and refuse to touch it? That would be very romantic, perhaps, but I should be sorry, you know, to give my friends the most disquieting doubts about my sanity. Romance goes out of a man's head when the hair gets gray."

"Until a man has gray hair," Mrs. Lorraine said, still with some unnecessary fervor, "he does not know that there are things much more valuable than money. You wouldn't touch that money just now, and all the thinking and reasoning in the world will never get you to touch it."

"What am I to do with it?" he said meekly.

"Give it to Mr. Mackenzie, in trust for his daughter," Mrs. Lorraine said promptly; and then, seeing that her mother had gone to the end of the drawing-room to fetch something or other, she added quickly, "I should be more sorry than I can tell you to find you accepting this money. You do not wish to have it. You do not need it. And if you did take it, it would prove a source of continual embarrassment and regret to you, and no assurances on the part of Mr. Mackenzie would be able to convince you that you had acted rightly by his daughter. Now, if you simply hand over your responsibilities to him, he cannot refuse them, for the sake of his own child, and you are left with the sense of having acted nobly and generously. I hope there are many men who would do what I ask you to do, but I have not met many to whom I could make such an appeal with any hope. But, after all, that is only advice. I have no right to ask you to do anything like that. You asked me for my opinion about it. Well, that is it. But I should not have asked you to act on it."

"But I will," he said in a low voice; and then he went to the other end of the room, for Mrs. Kavanagh was calling him to help her in finding something she had lost.

Before he left that evening Mrs. Lorraine said to him, "We go by the night-mail to Paris to-morrow night, and we shall dine here at five. Would you have the courage to come up and join us in that melancholy ceremony?"

"Oh yes," he said, "if I may go down to the station to see you away afterward."

"I think if we got you so far we should persuade you to go with us," Mrs. Kavanagh said with a smile.

He sat silent for a minute. Of course she could not seriously mean such a thing. But at all events she would not be displeased if he crossed their path while they were actually abroad.

"It is getting too late in the year to go to Scotland now," he said with some hesitation.

"Oh most certainly," Mrs. Lorraine said.

"I don't know where the man in whose yacht I was to have gone may be now. I might spend half my holiday in trying to catch him."

"And during that time you would be alone," Mrs. Lorraine said.

"I suppose the Tyrol is a very nice place," he suggested.

"Oh most delightful," she exclaimed. "You know, we should go round by Switzerland, and go up by Luzerne and Zurich to the end of the Lake of Constance. Bregenz, mamma, isn't that the place where we hired that good-natured man the year before last?"

"Yes, child."

"Now, you see, Mr. Ingram, if you had less time than we—if you could not start with us to-morrow—you might come straight down by Schaffhausen and the steamer, and catch us up there, and then mamma would become your guide. I am sure we should have some pleasant days together till you got tired of us, and then you could go off on a walking-tour if you pleased. And then, you know, there would be no difficulty about our meeting at Bregenz, for mamma and I have plenty of time, and we should wait there for a few days, so as to make sure."

"Cecilia," said Mrs. Kavanagh, "you must not persuade Mr. Ingram against his will. He may have other duties—other friends to see, perhaps."

"Who proposed it, mamma?" said the daughter calmly.

"I did, as a mere joke. But of course, if Mr. Ingram thinks of going to the Tyrol, we should be most pleased to see him there."

"Oh, I have no other friends whom I am bound to see," Ingram said with some hesitation, "and I should like to go to the Tyrol. But—the fact is—I am afraid—"

"May I interrupt you?" said Mrs. Lorraine. "You do not like to leave London so long as your friend Sheila is in trouble. Is not that the case? And yet she has her father to look after her. And it is clear you cannot do much for her when you do not even know where Mr. Lavender is. On the whole, I think you should consider yourself a little bit now, and not get cheated out of your holidays for the year."

"Very well," Ingram said, "I shall be able to tell you to-morrow."

To be so phlegmatic and matter-of-fact a person, Mr. Ingram was sorely disturbed on going home that evening, nor did he sleep much during the night. For the more that he speculated on all the possibilities that might arise from his meeting those people in the Tyrol, the more pertinaciously did this refrain follow these excursive fancies: "If I go to the Tyrol I shall fall in love with that girl, and ask her to marry me. And if I do so, what position should I hold, with regard to her, as a penniless man with a rich wife?"

He did not look at the question in such light as the opinion of the world might throw on it. The difficulty was what she herself might afterward come to think of their mutual relations. True it was, that no one could be more gentle and submissive to him than she appeared to be. In matters of opinion and discussion he already ruled with an autocratic authority which he fully perceived himself, and exercised, too, with some sort of notion that it was good for this clear-headed young woman to have to submit to control. But of what avail would this moral authority be as against the consciousness she would have that it was her fortune that was supplying both with the means of living?

He went down to his office in the morning with no plans formed. The forenoon passed, and he had decided on nothing. At mid-day he suddenly be-thought him that it would be very pleasant if Sheila would go and see Mrs. Lorraine; and forthwith he did that which would have driven Frank Lavender out of his senses—he telegraphed to Mrs. Lorraine for permission to bring Sheila and her father to dinner at five. He certainly knew that such a request was a trifle cool, but he had discovered that Mrs. Lorraine was not easily shocked by such audacious experiments on her good nature. When he received the telegram in reply he knew it granted what he had asked. The words were merely, "Certainly, by all means, but not later than five."

Then he hastened down to the house in which Sheila lived, and found that she and her father had just returned from visiting some exhibition. Mr. Mackenzie was not in the room.

"Sheila," Ingram said, "what would you think of my getting married?"

Sheila looked up with a bright smile and said, "It would please me very much—it would be a great pleasure to me; and I have expected it for some time."

"You have expected it?" he repeated with a stare.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"Then you fancy you know—" he said, or rather stammered, in great embarrassment, when she interrupted him by saying,

"Oh yes, I think I know. When you came down every evening to tell me all the praises of Mrs. Lorraine, and how clever she was, and kind, I expected you would come some day with another message; and now I am very glad to hear it. You have changed all my opinions about her, and—"

Then she rose and took both his hands, and looked frankly into his face.

"—And I do hope most sincerely you will be happy, my dear friend."

Ingram was fairly taken aback at the consequences of his own imprudence. He had never dreamed for a moment that any one would have suspected such a thing; and he had thrown out the suggestion to Sheila almost as a jest, believing, of course, that it compromised no one. And here, before he had spoken a word to Mrs. Lorraine on the subject, he was being congratulated on his approaching marriage.

"Oh, Sheila," he said, "this is all a mistake. It was a joke of mine. If I had known you would think of Mrs. Lorraine, I should not have said a word about it."

"But it is Mrs. Lorraine?" Sheila said.

"Well, but I have never mentioned such a thing to her—never hinted it in the remotest manner. I dare say if I had she might laugh the matter aside as too absurd."

"She will not do that," Sheila said. "If you ask her to marry you, she will marry you: I am sure of that from what I have heard, and she would be very foolish if she was not proud and glad to do that. And you—what doubt can you have, after all that you have been saying of late?"

"But you don't marry a woman merely because you admire her cleverness and kindness," he said; and then he added suddenly, "Sheila, would you do me a great favor? Mrs. Lorraine and her mother are leaving for the Continent to-night. They dine at five, and I am commissioned to ask you and your papa if you would go up with me and have some dinner with them, you know, before they start. Won't you do that, Sheila?"

The girl shook her head, without answering. She had not gone to any friend's house since her husband had left London, and that house, above all others, was calculated to awaken in her bitter recollections.

"Won't you, Sheila?" he said. "You used to go there. I know they like you very much. I have seen you very well pleased and comfortable there, and I thought you were enjoying yourself."

"Yes, that is true," she said; and then she looked up, with a strange sort of smile on her lips, "But 'what made the assembly shine?'"

That forced smile did not last long: the girl suddenly burst into tears, and rose and went away to the window. Mackenzie came into the room: he did not see his daughter was crying: "Well, Mr. Ingram, and are you coming with us to the Lewis? We cannot always be staying in London, for there will be many things wanting the looking after in Borva, as you will know ferry well. And yet Sheila she will not go back; and Mairi too, she will be forgetting the ferry sight of her own people; but if you wass coming with us, Mr. Ingram, Sheila she would come too, and it would be ferry good for her whatever."

"I have brought you another proposal. Will you take Sheila to see the Tyrol, and I will go with you?"

"The Tyrol?" said Mr. Mackenzie. "Ay, it is a ferry long way away, but if Sheila will care to go to the Tyrol—oh yes, I will go to the Tyrol or anywhere if she will go out of London, for it is not good for a young girl to be always in the one house, and no company and no variety; and I was saying to Sheila what good will she do sitting by the window and thinking over things, and crying sometimes? By Kott, it is a foolish thing for a young girl, and I will hef no more of it!"

In other circumstances Ingram would have laughed at this dreadful threat. Despite the frown on the old man's face, the sudden stamp of his foot and the vehemence of his words, Ingram knew that if Sheila had turned round and said that she wished to be shut up in a dark room for the rest of her life, the old King of Borva would have said, "Ferry well, Sheila," in the meekest way, and would have been satisfied if only he could share her imprisonment with her.

"But first of all, Mr. Mackenzie, I have another proposal to make to you," Ingram said; and then he urged upon Sheila's father to accept Mrs. Lorraine's invitation.

Mr. Mackenzie was nothing loath: Sheila was living by far too monotonous a life. He went over to the window to her and said, "Sheila, my lass, you was going nowhere else this evening; and it would be ferry convenient to go with Mr. Ingram, and he would see his friends away, and we could go to a theatre then. And it is no new thing for you to go to fine houses and see other people; but it is new to me, and you wass saying what a beautiful house it wass many a time, and I hef wished to see it. And the people they are ferry kind, Sheila, to send me an invitation; and if they wass to come to the Lewis, what would you think if you asked them to come to your house and they paid no heed to it? Now, it is after four, Sheila, and if you wass to get ready now—"

"Yes, I will go and get ready, papa," she said.

Ingram had a vague consciousness that he was taking Sheila up to introduce to her Mrs. Lorraine in a new character. Would Sheila look at the woman she used to fear and dislike in a wholly different fashion, and be prepared to adorn her with all the graces which he had so often described to her? Ingram hoped that Sheila would get to like Mrs. Lorraine, and that by and by a better acquaintance between them might lead to a warm and friendly intimacy. Somehow, he felt that if Sheila would betray such a liking—if she would come to him and say honestly that she was rejoiced he meant to marry—all his doubts would be cleared away. Sheila had already said pretty nearly as much as that, but then it followed what she understood to be an announcement of his approaching marriage, and of course the girl's kindly nature at once suggested a few pretty speeches. Sheila now knew that nothing was settled: after looking at Mrs. Lorraine in the light of these new possibilities, would she come to him and counsel him to go on and challenge a decision?

Mr. Mackenzie received with a grave dignity and politeness the more than friendly welcome given him both by Mrs. Kavanagh and her daughter, and in view of their approaching tour he gave them to understand that he had himself established somewhat familiar relations with foreign countries by reason of his meeting with the ships and sailors hailing from those distant shores. He displayed a profound knowledge of the habits and customs and of the natural products of many remote lands which were much farther afield than a little bit of inland Germany. He represented the island of Borva, indeed, as a sort of lighthouse from which you could survey pretty nearly all the countries of the world, and broadly hinted that so far from insular prejudice being the fruit of living in such a place, a general intercourse with diverse peoples tended to widen the understanding and throw light on the various social experiments that had been made by the lawgivers, the philanthropists, the philosophers of the world.

It seemed to Sheila, as she sat and listened, that the pale, calm and clear-eyed young lady opposite her was not quite so self-possessed as usual. She seemed shy and a little self-conscious. Did she suspect that she was being observed, Sheila wondered? and the reason? When dinner was announced she took Sheila's arm, and allowed Mr. Ingram to follow them, protesting, into the other room, but there was much more of embarrassment and timidity than of an audacious mischief in her look. She was very kind indeed to Sheila, but she had wholly abandoned that air of maternal patronage which she used to assume toward the girl. She seemed to wish to be more friendly and confidential with her, and indeed scarcely spoke a word to Ingram during dinner, so persistently did she talk to Sheila, who sat next her.

Ingram got vexed. "Mrs. Lorraine," he said, "you seem to forget that this is a solemn occasion. You ask us to a farewell banquet, but instead of observing the proper ceremonies you pass the time in talking about fancy-work and music, and other ordinary, every—day trifles."

"What are the ceremonies?" she said.

"Well," he answered, "you need not occupy the time with crochet—"

"Mrs. Lavender and I are very well pleased to talk about trifles."

"But I am not," he said bluntly, "and I am not going to be shut out by a conspiracy. Come, let us talk about your journey."

"Will my lord give his commands as to the point at which we shall start the conversation?"

"You may skip the Channel."

"I wish I could," she remarked with a sigh.

"We shall land you in Paris. How are we to know that you have arrived safely?"

She looked embarrassed for a moment, and then said, "If it is of any consequence for you to know, I shall be writing in any case to Mrs. Lavender about some little private matter."

Ingram did not receive this promise with any great show of delight. "You see," he said, somewhat glumly, "if I am to meet you anywhere, I should like to know the various stages of your route, so that I could guard against our missing each other."

"You have decided to go, then?"

Ingram, not looking at her, but looking at Sheila, said, "Yes;" and Sheila, despite all her efforts, could not help glancing up with a brief smile and blush of pleasure that were quite visible to everybody.

Mrs. Lorraine struck in with a sort of nervous haste: "Oh, that will be very pleasant for mamma, for she gets rather tired of me at times when we are traveling. Two women who always read the same sort of books, and have the same opinions about the people they meet, and have precisely the same tastes in everything, are not very amusing companions for each other. You want a little discussion thrown in."

"And if we meet Mr. Ingram we are sure to have that," Mrs. Kavanagh said benignly.

"And you want somebody to give you new opinions and put things differently, you know. I am sure mamma will be most kind to you if you can make it convenient to spend a few days with us, Mr. Ingram."

"And I have been trying to persuade Mr. Mackenzie and this young lady to come also," said Ingram.

"Oh, that would be delightful!" Mrs. Lorraine cried, suddenly taking Sheila's hand. "You will come, won't you? We should have such a pleasant party. I am sure your papa would be most interested; and we are not tied to any route: we should go wherever you pleased."

She would have gone on beseeching and advising, but she saw something in Sheila's face which told her that all her efforts would be unavailing.

"It is very kind of you," Sheila said, "but I do not think I can go to the Tyrol."

"Then you shall go back to the Lewis, Sheila," her father said.

"I cannot go back to the Lewis, papa," she said simply; and at this point Ingram, perceiving how painful the discussion was for the girl, suddenly called attention to the hour, and asked Mrs. Kavanagh if all her portmanteaus were strapped up.

They drove in a body down to the station, and Mr. Ingram was most assiduous in supplying the two travelers with an abundance of everything they could not possibly want. He got them a reading-lamp, though both of them declared they never read in a train. He got them some eau-de-cologne, though they had plenty in their traveling-case. He purchased for them an amount of miscellaneous literature that would have been of benefit to a hospital, provided the patients were strong enough to bear it. And then he bade them good-bye at least half a dozen times as the train was slowly moving out of the station, and made the most solemn vows about meeting them at Bregenz.

"Now, Sheila," he said, "shall we go to the theatre?"

"I do not care to go unless you wish," was the answer.

"She does not care to go anywhere now," her father said; and then the girl, seeing that he was rather distressed about her apparent want of interest, pulled herself together and said cheerfully, "Is it not too late to go to a theatre? And I am sure we could be very comfortable at home. Mairi, she will think it unkind if we go to the theatre by ourselves."

"Mairi!" said her father impatiently, for he never lost an opportunity of indirectly justifying Lavender. Mairi has more sense than you, Sheila, and she knows that a servant-lass has to stay at home, and she knows that she is ferry different from you; and she is a ferry good girl whatever, and hass no pride, and she does not expect nonsense in going about and such things."

"I am quite sure, papa, you would rather go home and sit down and have a talk with Mr. Ingram, and a pipe and a little whisky, than go to any theatre."

"What I would do! And what I would like!" said her father in a vexed way. "Sheila, you have no more sense as a lass that wass still at the school. I want you to go to the theatre and amuse yourself, instead of sitting in the house and thinking, thinking, thinking. And all for what?"

"But if one has something to be sorry for, is it not better to think of it?"

"And what hef you to be sorry for?" said her father in amazement, and forgetting that, in his diplomatic fashion, he had been accustoming Sheila to the notion that she too might have erred grievously and been in part responsible for all that had occurred.

"I have a great deal to be sorry for, papa," she said; and then she renewed her entreaties that her two companions should abandon their notion of going to a theatre, and resolve to spend the rest of the evening in what she consented to call her home.

After all, they found a comfortable little company when they sat round the fire, which had been lit for cheerfulness rather than for warmth, and Ingram at least was in a particularly pleasant mood. For Sheila had seized the opportunity, when her father had gone out of the room for a few minutes, to say suddenly, "Oh, my dear friend, if you care for her, you have a great happiness before you."

"Why, Sheila!" he said, staring.

"She cares for you more than you can think: I saw it to-night in everything she said and did."

"I thought she was just a trifle saucy, do you know. She shunted me out of the conversation altogether."

Sheila shook her head and smiled: "She was embarrassed. She suspects that you like her, and that I know it, and that I came to see her. If you ask her to marry you, she will do it gladly."

"Sheila," Ingram said with a severity that was not in his heart, "you must not say such things. You might make fearful mischief by putting these wild notions into people's heads."

"They are not wild notions," she said quietly. "A woman can tell what another woman is thinking about better than a man."

"And am I to go to the Tyrol and ask her to marry me?" he said with the air of a meek scholar.

"I should like to see you married—very, very much indeed," Sheila said.

"And to her?"

"Yes to her," the girl said frankly. "For I am sure she has great regard for you, and she is clever enough to put value on—on—But I cannot flatter you, Mr. Ingram."

"Shall I send you word about what happens in the Tyrol?" he said, still with the humble air of one receiving instructions.

"Yes."

"And if she rejects me, what shall I do?"

"She will not reject you."

"Shall I come to you for consolation, and ask you what you meant by driving me on such a blunder?"

"If she rejects you," Sheila said with a smile, "it will be your own fault, and you will deserve it. For you are a little too harsh with her, and you have too much authority, and I am surprised that she will be so amiable under it. Because, you know, a woman expects to be treated with much gentleness and deference before she has said she will marry. She likes to be entreated, and coaxed, and made much of, but instead of that you are very overbearing with Mrs. Lorraine."

"I did not mean to be, Sheila," he said, honestly enough. "If anything of the kind happened it must have been in a joke."

"Oh no, not a joke," Sheila said; "and I have noticed it before—the very first evening you came to their house. And perhaps you did not know of it yourself; and then Mrs. Lorraine, she is clever enough to see that you did not mean to be disrespectful. But she will expect you to alter that a great deal if you ask her to marry you; that is, until you are married."

"Have I ever been overbearing to you, Sheila?" he asked.

"To me? Oh no. You have always been very gentle to me; but I know how that is. When you first knew me I was almost a child, and you treated me like a child; and ever since then it has always been the same. But to others—yes, you are too unceremonious; and Mrs. Lorraine will expect you to be much more mild and amiable, and you must let her have opinions of her own."

"Sheila, you give me to understand that I am a bear," he said in tones of injured protest.

Sheila laughed: "Have I told you the truth at last? It was no matter so long as you had ordinary acquaintances to deal with. But now, if you wish to marry that pretty lady, you must be much more gentle if you are discussing anything with her; and if she says anything that is not very wise, you must not say bluntly that it is foolish, but you must smooth it away, and put her right gently, and then she will be grateful to you. But if you say to her, 'Oh, that is nonsense!' as you might say to a man, you will hurt her very much. The man would not care—he would think you were stupid to have a different opinion from him; but a woman fears she is not as clever as the man she is talking to, and likes his good opinion; and if he says something careless like that, she is sensitive to it, and it wounds her. To-night you contradicted Mrs. Lorraine about the h in those Italian words, and I am quite sure you were wrong. She knows Italian much better than you do, and yet she yielded to you very prettily."

"Go on, Sheila, go on," he said with a resigned air. "What else did I do?"

"Oh, a great many rude things. You should not have contradicted Mrs. Kavanagh about the color of an amethyst."

"But why? You know she was wrong; and she said herself a minute afterward that she was thinking of a sapphire."

"But you ought not to contradict a person older than yourself," said Sheila sententiously.

"Goodness gracious me! Because one person is born in one year, and one in another, is that any reason why you should say that an amethyst is blue? Mr. Mackenzie, come and talk to this girl. She is trying to pervert my principles. She says that in talking to a woman you have to abandon all hope of being accurate, and that respect for the truth is not to be thought of. Because a woman has a pretty face she is to be allowed to say that black is white, and white pea-green. And if you say anything to the contrary, you are a brute, and had better go and bellow by yourself in a wilderness."

"Sheila is quite right," said old Mackenzie at a venture.

"Oh, do you think so?" Ingram asked coolly. "Then I can understand how her moral sentiment has been destroyed, and it is easy to see where she has got a set of opinions that strike at the very roots of a respectable and decent society."

"Do you know," said Sheila seriously, "that it is very rude of you to say so, even in jest? If you treat Mrs. Lorraine in this way—"

She suddenly stopped. Her father had not heard, being busy among his pipes. So the subject was discreetly dropped, Ingram reluctantly promising to pay some attention to Sheila's precepts of politeness.

Altogether, it was a pleasant evening they had, but when Ingram had left, Mr. Mackenzie said to his daughter, "Now, look at this, Sheila. When Mr. Ingram goes away from London, you hef no friend at all then in the place, and you are quite alone. Why will you not come to the Lewis, Sheila? It is no one there will know anything of what has happened here; and Mairi she is a good girl, and she will hold her tongue."

"They will ask me why I come back without my husband," Sheila said, looking down.

"Oh, you will leave that all to me," said her father, who knew he had surely sufficient skill to thwart the curiosity of a few simple creatures in Borva. "There is many a girl hass to go home for a time while her husband he is away on his business; and there will no one hef the right to ask you any more than I will tell them; and I will tell them what they should know—oh yes, I will tell them ferry well—and you will hef no trouble about it. And, Sheila, you are a good lass, and you know that I hef many things to attend to that is not easy to write about—"

"I do know that, papa," the girl said, "and many a time have I wished you would go back to the Lewis."

"And leave you here by yourself? Why, you are talking foolishly, Sheila. But now, Sheila, you will see how you could go back with me; and it would be a ferry different thing for you running about in the fresh air than shut up in a room in the middle of a town. And you are not looking ferry well, my lass, and Scarlett she will hef to take the charge of you."

"I will go to the Lewis with you, papa, when you please," she said, and he was glad and proud to hear her decision; but there was no happy light of anticipation in her eyes, such as ought to have been awakened by this projected journey to the far island which she had known as her home.

And so it was that one rough and blustering afternoon the Clansman steamed into Stornoway harbor, and Sheila, casting timid and furtive glances toward the quay, saw Duncan standing there, with the wagonette some little distance back under charge of a boy. Duncan was a proud man that day. He was the first to shove the gangway on to the vessel, and he was the first to get on board; and in another minute Sheila found the tall, keen-eyed, brown-faced keeper before her, and he was talking in a rapid and eager fashion, throwing in an occasional scrap of Gaelic in the mere hurry of his words.

"Oh yes, Miss Sheila, Scarlett she is ferry well whatever, but there is nothing will make her so well as your coming back to sa Lewis; and we wass saying yesterday that it looked as if it wass more as three or four years, or six years, since you went away from sa Lewis, but now it iss no time at all, for you are just the same Miss Sheila as we knew before; and there is not one in all Borva but will think it iss a good day this day that you will come back."

"Duncan," said Mackenzie with an impatient stamp of his foot, "why will you talk like a foolish man? Get the luggage to the shore, instead of keeping us all the day in the boat."

"Oh, ferry well, Mr. Mackenzie," said Duncan, departing with an injured air, and grumbling as he went, "it iss no new thing to you to see Miss Sheila, and you will have no thocht for any one but yourself. But I will get out the luggage—oh yes, I will get out the luggage."

Sheila, in truth, had but little luggage with her, but she remained on board the boat until Duncan was quite ready to start, for she did not wish just then to meet any of her friends in Stornoway. Then she stepped ashore and crossed the quay, and got into the wagonette; and the two horses, whom she had caressed for a moment, seemed to know that they were carrying Sheila back to her own country, from the speed with which they rattled out of the town and away into the lonely moorland.

Mackenzie let them have their way. Past the solitary lakes they went, past the long stretches of undulating morass, past the lonely sheilings perched far up on the hills; and the rough and blustering wind blew about them, and the gray clouds hurried by, and the old, strong-bearded man who shook the reins and gave the horses their heads could have laughed aloud in his joy that he was driving his daughter home. But Sheila—she sat there as one dead; and Mairi, timidly regarding her, wondered what the impassable face and the bewildered, sad eyes meant. Did she not smell the sweet strong smell of the heather? Had she no interest in the great birds that were circling in the air over by the Barbhas mountains? Where was the pleasure she used to exhibit in remembering the curious names of the small lakes they passed?

And lo! the rough gray day broke asunder, and a great blaze of fire appeared in the west, shining across the moors and touching the blue slopes of the distant hills. Sheila was getting near to the region of beautiful sunsets and lambent twilights and the constant movement and mystery of the sea. Overhead the heavy clouds were still hurried on by the wind; and in the south the eastern slopes of the hills and the moors were getting to be of a soft purple; but all along the west, where her home was, lay a great flush of gold, and she knew that Loch Roag was shining there, and the gable of the house at Borvabost getting warm in the beautiful light.

"It is a good afternoon you will be getting to see Borva again," her father said to her; but all the answer she made was to ask her father not to stop at Garrana-hina, but to drive straight on to Callernish. She would visit the people at Garra-na-hina some other day.

The boat was waiting for them at Callernish, and the boat was the Maighdean-mhara.

"How pretty she is! How have you kept her so well, Duncan?" said Sheila, her face lighting up for the first time as she went down the path to the bright-painted little vessel that scarcely rocked in the water below.

"Bekaas we neffer knew but that it was this week, or the week before, or the next week you would come back, Miss Sheila, and you would want your boat; but it wass Mr. Mackenzie himself, it wass he that did all the pentin of the boat; and it iss as well done as Mr. McNicol could have done it, and a great deal better than that mirover."

"Won't you steer her yourself, Sheila?" her father suggested, glad to see that she was at last being interested and pleased.

"Oh yes, I will steer her, if I have not forgotten all the points that Duncan taught me."

"And I am sure you hef not done that, Miss Sheila," Duncan said, "for there wass no one knew Loch Roag better as you, not one, and you hef not been so long away; and when you tek the tiller in your hand it will all come back to you, just as if you wass going away from Borva the day before yesterday."

She certainly had not forgotten, and she was proud and pleased to see how well the shapely little craft performed its duties. They had a favorable wind, and ran rapidly along the opening channels, until in due course they glided into the well-known bay over which, and shining in the yellow light from the sunset, they saw Sheila's home.

Sheila had escaped so far the trouble of meeting friends, but she could not escape her friends in Borvabost. They had waited for her for hours, not knowing when the Clansman might arrive at Stornoway; and now they crowded down to the shore, and there was a great shaking of hands, and an occasional sob from some old crone, and a thousand repetitions of the familiar "And are you ferry well, Miss Sheila?" from small children who had come across from the village in defiance of mothers and fathers. And Sheila's face brightened into a wonderful gladness, and she had a hundred questions to ask for one answer she got, and she did not know what to do with the number of small brown fists that wanted to shake hands with her.

"Will you let Miss Sheila alone?" Duncan called out, adding something in Gaelic which came strangely from a man who sometimes reproved his own master for swearing. "Get away with you, you brats: it wass better you would be in your beds than bothering people that wass come all the way from Styornoway."

Then they all went up in a body to the house, and Scarlett, who had neither eyes, ears nor hands but for the young girl who had been the very pride of her heart, was nigh driven to distraction by Mackenzie's stormy demands for oatcake and glasses and whisky. Scarlett angrily remonstrated with her husband for allowing this rabble of people to interfere with the comfort of Miss Sheila; and Duncan, taking her reproaches with great good-humor, contented himself with doing her work, and went and got the cheese and the plates and the whisky, while Scarlett, with a hundred endearing phrases, was helping Sheila to take off her traveling things. And Sheila, it turned out, had brought with her in her portmanteau certain huge and wonderful cakes, not of oatmeal, from Glasgow; and these were soon on the great table in the kitchen, and Sheila herself distributing pieces to those small folks who were so awestricken by the sight of this strange dainty that they forgot her injunctions and thanked her timidly in Gaelic.

"Well, Sheila my lass," said her father to her as they stood at the door of the house and watched the troop of their friends, children and all, go over the hill to Borvabost in the red light of the sunset, "and are you glad to be home again?"

"Oh yes," she said heartily enough; and Mackenzie thought that things were going on favorably.

"You hef no such sunsets in the South, Sheila," he observed, loftily casting his eye around, although he did not usually pay much attention to the picturesqueness of his native island. "Now look at the light on Suainabhal. Do you see the red on the water down there, Sheila? Oh yes, I thought you would say it wass ferry beautiful—it is a ferry good color on the water. The water looks ferry well when it is red. You hef no such things in London—not any, Sheila. Now we must go in-doors, for these things you can see any day here, and we must not keep our friends waiting."

An ordinary, dull-witted or careless man might have been glad to have a little quiet after so long and tedious a journey, but Mr. Mackenzie was no such person. He had resolved to guard against Sheila's first evening at home being in any way languid or monotonous, and so he had asked one or two of his especial friends to remain and have supper with them. Moreover, he did not wish the girl to spend the rest of the evening out of doors when the melancholy time of the twilight drew over the hills and the sea began to sound remote and sad. Sheila should have a comfortable evening in-doors; and he would himself, after supper, when the small parlor was well lit up, sing for her one or two songs, just to keep the thing going, as it were. He would let nobody else sing. These Gaelic songs were not the sort of music to make people cheerful. And if Sheila herself would sing for them?

And Sheila did. And her father chose the songs for her, and they were the blithest he could find, and the girl seemed really in excellent spirits. They had their pipes and their hot whisky and water in this little parlor; Mr. Mackenzie explaining that although his daughter was accustomed to spacious and gilded drawing-rooms where such a thing was impossible, she would do anything to make her friends welcome and comfortable, and they might fill their glasses and their pipes with impunity. And Sheila sang again and again, all cheerful and sensible English songs, and she listened to the odd jokes and stories her friends had to tell her; and Mackenzie was delighted with the success of his plans and precautions. Was not her very appearance now a triumph? She was laughing, smiling, talking to every one: he had not seen her so happy for many a day.

In the midst of it all, when the night had come apace, what was this wild skirl outside that made everybody start? Mackenzie jumped to his feet, with an angry vow in his heart that if this "teffle of a piper John" should come down the hill playing "Lochaber no more" or "Cha till mi tualadh" or any other mournful tune, he would have his chanter broken in a thousand splinters over his head. But what was the wild air that came nearer and nearer, until John marched into the house, and came, with ribbons and pipes, to the very door of the room, which was flung open to him? Not a very appropriate air, perhaps, for it was

The Campbells are coming, oho! oho! The Campbells are coming, oho! oho! The Campbells are coming to bonny Lochleven! The Campbells are coming, oho! oho!

But it was, to Mr. Mackenzie's rare delight, a right good joyous tune, and it was meant as a welcome to Sheila; and forthwith he caught the white-haired piper by the shoulder and dragged him in, and said, "Put down your pipes and come into the house, John—put down your pipes and tek off your bonnet, and we shall hef a good dram together this night, by Kott! And it is Sheila herself will pour out the whisky for you, John; and she is a good Highland girl, and she knows the piper was never born that could be hurt by whisky, and the whisky was never yet made that could hurt a piper. What do you say to that, John?"

John did not answer: he was standing before Sheila with his bonnet in his hand, but with his pipes still proudly over his shoulder. And he took the glass from her and called out "Shlainte!" and drained every drop of it out to welcome Mackenzie's daughter home.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]



OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP

MR. E. LYTTON BULWER.

In looking over, not very long since, a long—neglected, thin portfolio of my twin-brother, the late Willis Gaylord Clark of Philadelphia, I came across a sealed parcel endorsed "London Correspondence." It contained letters to him from many literary persons of more or less eminence at that time in the British metropolis; among others, two from Miss Landon ("L.E.L."); two from Mrs. S. C. Hall, the versatile and clever author of Tales and Sketches of the Irish Peasantry, cordial, closely—written and recrossed to the remotest margin; one from her husband, Mr. S.C. Hall; three or four from Mr. Chorley; and lastly, five or six elaborate letters from Mr. E. Lytton Bulwer, sent through his American publishers, the Brothers Harper, by Washington Irving, then secretary of legation to the American embassy "near the court of St. James." Enclosed with these last-mentioned letters was a communication from Miss Fanny Kemble, to whom they had been sent for perusal, and who, in returning them, did not hesitate to say that she did Not share his young American correspondent's admiration for the author of Pelham. She had met him frequently in London society, and regarded his manners as affected and himself as a reflex of his own conceited model of a gentleman—a style which Thackeray perhaps did not too grossly caricature when he made Chawls Yellowplush announce, from his own lips, his sounding name and title to a distinguished London drawing-room as "Sa-wa-Edou-wah'd-a-Lyttod-a-Bulwig!"

The poems which my brother had written for two London journals at the time of their first appearance and sudden popularity, the London Literary Gazette and, I believe, the Athenaeum, led to the correspondence I have mentioned; and from the letters of Mr. Bulwer I have extracted a few passages, as somewhat personal in their nature, besides being characteristic of his tone of thought and manner of expression at that period of his career:

"An author who has a just confidence in his attainments and powers, who knows that his mind is imperishable and capable of making daily additions to its own strength, is always more desirous of seeing the censures (if not mere abuse) than the praises of those who aspire to judge him; and any suggestions or admonitions thus bestowed are seldom disregarded. But if he is to profit by criticism, the motive must be known to him. It is by no means natural to take the advice of an enemy. When the critic enters his department of literature in the false guise of urbanity and candor merely to conceal an incapable and huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object of his fear or envy."

"Seldom indeed is it that injustice fails to be seen through, or that the policy of interested condemnation escapes undetected. They first produce the excitements, then furnish the triumphs, of genius."

"There is a charm in writing for the pure and intelligent young worth all the plaudits of sinister or hypocritical wisdom. At a certain age, and while the writings that please have a gloss of novelty about them, hiding the blemishes that may afterward be discovered as their characteristics,—then it is that the young convert their approbation into enthusiasm. An author benefits in a wide and most pleasing range of public opinion by this natural and common disposition in the young; and the only cloud thrown athwart the rays of pleasure thus saluting his spirit is flung from the thought that they who are thus moved by the movings of his own mind may come in a few years to look upon his pages with hearts less ardent in their sympathies, and with altered eyes, which have acquired additional keenness by looking longer upon the world."

"The competent American litterateur has a glorious career before him. So much is there in your magnificent country, hitherto undescribed and unexpressed, in scenery, manners, morals, that all may be wells from which he may be the first to drink. Yet it cannot be expected—for it has passed to a proverb that escape from persecution and detraction can never and nowhere be the lot of literature—that there will not be many instances, even in America, where every attempt on the part of gifted writers (and young writers especially, who are commonly regarded with eyes of invidious jaundice by the elders, whose waning reputations they may through industry either supplant or explode) will be rendered an uneasy struggle, and sometimes almost a curse, by the envy of those who deny approval while blind to success, and the affected disdain of those who exaggerate demerit. Yet these obstacles warm the spirit of honest ambition, and enhance its inevitable conquests."

"It is a sight of gratification and pride to behold a laborer in the vineyard of letters escaping from the envy, the jealousy, the rivalry, the leaven of all uncharitableness, with which literary intercourse is so often polluted. The writers of England have been tardy in their justice, not only to the progress, circumstances and customs of America, but to her intellectual offspring; and the time is not remote—nay, has already dawned—when, in this regard, the spirit of Change wields his wand and finds obedience to his prerogatives."

"'No hostility between nations affects the arts:' so said the old maxim, but it has rarely been found a truism. They who feel it, feel also the virtue which dictated the aphorism. Men whose object is to enlighten the nations or exalt the judgment or (the least ambition) to refine the tastes of others—men who feel that this object is dearer to them than a petty and vain ambition—feel also that all who labor in the same cause are united with them in a friendship which exists in one climate as in another—in a I republic or in a despotism: these are the best cosmopolites, the truest citizens of the world."

The foregoing extracts will make it obvious that Mr. Bulwer was at that time sore at the treatment he had received at the hands of certain of his critics, who were by no means unanimous in their estimation of his genius. He was very sensitive at all times of adverse comment upon his writings. Thackeray wounded him woefully when he made "Chawls Yellowplush" review him characteristically in Punch. These most amusing papers ought to have been included in Thackeray's published miscellaneous writings, but they were not, although Bulwer is humorously travestied in Punch's "Prize Novelists," together with Lover, Ainsworth, and Disraeli. The subjoined will show the style of the "littery" footman, who, as a critic, "sumtimes gave kissis, sumtimes kix":

"One may objeck to an immence deal of your writings, witch, betwigst you and me, contain more sham sentiment, sham morallaty and sham potry than you'd like to own; but in spite of this, there's the stuf you; you've a kind and loyal heart in your buzm, bar'net—a trifle deboshed, praps: a keen i, igspecially for what is comick (as for your tragady, it's mighty flatchulent), and a ready pleasn't pen. The man who says you're an As, is an As himself. Dont b'lieve him, bar'net: not that I suppose you will; for, if I've formed a correck opinion of you from your wuck, you think your small beear as good as most men's. Every man does—and wy not? We brew, and we love our own tap—amen; but the pint betwigst us is this steupid, absudd way of crying out because the public don't like it too. Wy should they, my dear bar'net? You may vow that they are fools, or that the critix are your enemies, or that the world should judge your poams by your critikle rules, and not by their own. You may beat your brest, and vow that you are a martyr, but you won't mend the matter."

After these general remarks, the critic-footman takes up the subject of style, and argues with a good deal of ingenuity and force in favor of simplicity and terseness, especially in his performance of The Sea-Captain:

"Sea-captings should not be eternly spowting, and invoking gods, hevn, starz, and angels, and other silestial influences. We can all do it, bar'net: no-think in life is easier. I can compare my livery buttons to the stars, or the clouds of my backr pipe to the dark vollums that ishew from Mount Hetna; or I can say that angles are looking down from them, and the tobacco-silf, like a happy soil released, is circling round and upwards, and shaking sweetness down. All this is as easy as to drink; but it's not potry, bar'net, nor natral. Pipple, when their mothers reckonise them, don't howl about the suckumambient air, and paws to think of the happy leaves a-rustling—leastways, one mistrusts them if they do...Look at the neat grammaticle twist of Lady Arundel's spitch too, who in the cors of three lines has made her son a prince, a lion with a sword and coronal, and a star. Wy gauble, and sheak up metafers in this way, bar'net? One simile is quite enuff in the best of sentences; and I preshume I need not tell you that it's as well to have it like while you are about it. Take my advice, honrabble sir: listen to an umble footman: it's genrally best in potry to understand perffickly what you mean yourself, and to igspress your meaning clearly affterward: the simpler the words the better, praps. You may, for instans, call a coronet an 'ancestral coronal,' if you like, as you might call a hat a 'swart sombrero,' a glossy four-and-nine, a 'silken helm, to storm impermeable,' and 'lightsome as a breezy gossamer;' but in the long run it's as well to call it a hat. It is a hat, and that name is quite as poeticle as another."

The remarks of Mr. Yellowplush upon some of the segregated passages are amusing enough. Take the following, for example:

Girl, beware! The love that trifles round the charm it gilds, Oft ruins while it shines.

Igsplane this, men and angles! I've tried every way; backards, forards, and all sorts of trancepositions:

The love that ruins round the charm it shines Gilds while it trifles oft,

or—

The charm that gilds around the love it ruins, Oft trifles while it shines,

or—

The ruins that love gilds and shines around Oft trifles while it charms,

or—

Love while it charms shines round and ruins oft The trifles that it gilds,

or—

The love that trifles, gilds and ruins oft While round the charm it shines.

All witch are as sen sable as the ferst passadge. Sir Mr. Bullwig, ain't I right? Such, barring the style, was the tenor of many of the critiques upon Bulwer's writings which appeared about that period, and which, as is now well known, "wrought him much annoy," versatile and powerful as his genius has since proved itself.

L. GAYLORD CLARK.



SALVINI'S OTHELLO.

It might have been supposed that whatever the fate of the stage among other races, it would always maintain its position as one of the great instruments of popular culture with the English-speaking nations, linked as it is inseparably with the immortal name of Shakespeare in his double capacity of author and actor, and possessing as it does in his works a body of dramatic literature supreme alike in all intellectual qualities and in fitness for scenic representation. Yet it is but the other day that we were reminded by the announcement of Macready's death of the long interval that had elapsed since the last of the English tragedians had dropped a sceptre which there was no one to take up; and now it is an actor of another race, speaking a different language, who presents himself to fill the vacant place, and to interpret for us anew creations which we study indeed more closely than ever in the printed page, but of which we had ceased to ask for any adequate palpable embodiment. Our impression, however, of a drama is and must be incomplete until we have seen it on the stage: it must be put in action before our eyes ere we can hope fully to understand it. The amount of thoughtful and learned criticism to which Shakespeare's plays have been subjected makes us forget at times that the ultimate test of their excellence is to be found on the boards, and that they were meant, above all things, to be acted.

Taking Othello as Salvini presents him to us, and merely in the light of a dramatic performance, having cast from out our minds the recollection of all that we have ever heard, read or thought about the character—more than this, forgetting our native English and knowing Shakespeare only through the libretto in our hands (of which, however, we must forbear to speak slightingly, for from it, we are told, Salvini himself has gained his knowledge of the part),—putting ourselves in this mental attitude, the performance may safely be said to defy criticism, or rather to be above it, except such criticism as accords with enthusiastic admiration. It is absolutely without a shortcoming, seen from this standpoint. His majestic bearing, his beautiful elocution, his pure voice, his graceful, expressive gestures, and above all his perfect freedom from affectation or self-consciousness, delight us throughout; and when to these qualities are added the marvelous vigor of expression and force of passion with which he shakes his audience from the middle of the play on, one feels as if there were nothing more to ask of acting. No description, in fact, can do justice to the perfect consistency and harmony of his conception, or to the marvelous delicacy of his points, which are yet as penetrating as they are subtle, and which never fail of their effect, whether rendered by a gesture whose power of expression seems to make words superfluous, as when in reply to Iago's hypocritically sympathetic "I see this has a little dashed your spirits," which is answered in the play by "Not a jot, not a jot," Salvini tries to speak, but chokes with the words, and lifting his hand with a motion of denial and deprecation, tells us what he would fain say, but cannot; or by an intonation of voice, as when in answer to Iago's "You would be satisfied?" he replies, marking the difference between conditional and imperative with a tone that would of itself betray him born to command—

Vorrei, che dico—io voglio (Would?—Nay, I will).

And when in his desperate pain and fury, maddened by the poison working within, he drags Iago to the front of the stage, and holding him by the throat speaks Shakespeare's meaning, if not Shakespeare's words, thick and fast, as if he were not an actor, but Othello himself, and while his audience listen with bated breath and quick-beating hearts, he hurls him to the ground, and in the uncurbed fury of his mood raises his foot to spurn him like a dog,—then he rises far above ordinary dramatic effect: his art does "hold the mirror up to Nature." We feel that we have seen Othello.

Again, in the fourth act, when Iago brings home to him the realization of his wife's infidelity, what can be finer than the sharpening of his voice from stress of pain, changing from the full roundness of its usual masculine robustness to a high womanish key, as he asks the fatal questions, "Che disse? Che? Che fece?" What words could have said so much as the dumb show with which he signifies that terrible fact of which he can neither ask nor hear in words? And who can doubt when he hears that cry of agony that bursts from his lips at Iago's gross confirmation of his suggestion that it is the cry of a man stabbed to the heart? His suffering is as real to us as the agony of a lion would be if we stood by and saw some one drive a knife into the beast up to the hilt. It equals in reality any exhibition of simple unfeigned bodily pain, with all its intensity of violence. The word "rant" never once comes into our minds.

Salvini expresses everything. He demands nothing from his audience but eyes and ears; he acts the part in every detail; he does just what he aims to do. His motion is as unconscious and unfettered as that of a deer or a tiger: whether he paces with a stealthy, restless tread up and down the back of the stage, reminding us irresistibly of a caged wild beast, or whether he half crouches, then drags himself along, and then darts upon Iago in the last scene, it is always plain that his body is the servant of his mind: he moves in harmony with his mood.

Despite, therefore, the natural tendency to scrutinize closely the claims of a foreigner seeking to rule over our hearts as the vicegerent of Shakespeare's sovreignty, there has been, and happily can be, no question in regard to one essential point. That Salvini is a born actor, a great tragedian, none will be bold enough to dispute. In that rare combination of intellectual and physical qualities without which no particular gift would justify his pretensions—intensity of emotion, subtlety of perception, a power of impersonation implying of itself the union of all the natural requirements with a mastery in their display attainable only by consummate art—it is hard to believe that he can ever have been excelled; though doubtless the mingled fire and pathos of Kean transcended in their effect any like exhibition ever witnessed on the stage. Except for the few—if any still survive—who can remember the Othello of Kean, living recollection affords no opportunity for a judgment founded on comparison.

The only question therefore which it is possible to raise relates to Salvini's conception of the character—a question such as must always exist in the case of any representation of Shakespeare, with whose creations no actor can ever hope to identify himself, however he may modify our former impressions. Let it be remembered, too, that an actor's conception of a character must never be vague, undefined or shadowy, as that of a mere reader may well be, and probably will be in the exact degree in which he is a keen and appreciative student. The actor must not strive to suggest all possible solutions, but must hold firmly to one, and that the most dramatic; he must seize upon the salient points; his subtleties must not be too subtle for gesture, glance and tone to express; he must choose which meaning out of many meanings he shall enforce, which mood out of many moods he shall make predominate.

The exceptions which have been taken to Salvini's performance all rest upon the notion that he has misconceived the character. It is superb, we are told, but it is not Shakespeare. It is a representation not of Othello the Moor, but of a Moor named Othello. The idea that dominates throughout is that of race: the character loses its individuality and becomes a mere type, an embodiment of the tropical nature, an illustration of Byron's lines:

Africa is all the sun's, And as her earth her human clay is kindled.

The unbridled passion, the revengeful fury, is that of a savage. The anguish and indignation of a noble spirit believing itself outraged and wronged are transformed into the blind rage and capricious fury of a wild beast.

This objection seems to us to spring from the state of mind often induced by long familiarity with a subject, in which the gain of minute knowledge is accompanied by a loss of the force and vividness of the first impression. People study Shakespeare as they study the Bible, softening whatever they find revolting until they have convinced themselves that it does not exist. Actors in general share in this sentiment or strive to gratify it. Othello's complexion is forgotten in the reading, and becomes in the representation such that the spectator feels no repugnance to his marriage with the fair Desdemona. Betrayed through the mere openness and generosity of his nature, he acts only as a sensitive and vehement nature would be compelled to act in so terrible a complication, and the emotions kindled by his demeanor and conduct are never those of horror and repulsion, but only of pity and admiration.

But, however noble and pathetic such a rendering may be, it consorts better with the ideas and demands of the present time than with those of the Elizabethan age. The dramatist who began by writing Titus Andronicus had at least no instinctive distaste to repulsive subjects, no fear of shocking his audience by an exhibition of untamed barbarity. Othello is "of a free and open nature," he is "great of heart," he is above doing wrong without provocation, real or supposed. But his nature admits no possibility of self-control, of reason in the midst of doubts, of patience under injury. His temperament betrays itself in physical exhibitions wild and portentous. "You are fatal then when your eyes roll so," is the suggestive cry of Desdemona. In his perplexity and fury he swoons and foams. He overhears an insult to Venice and slays the traducer. His language to the wife whom he still loves while believing himself dishonored by her is such that "a beggar, in his drink, could not have laid such terms upon his callet." He outrages her kinsman and a throng of attendants by striking her in their presence. Her protestations of innocence serve only to inflame him, and he cuts short her last pleadings with his murderous hand in a way which would have forced M. Dumas fils himself to cry out, "Ne tue la pas!"

How are this fury and this credulity, both equally insensate, to be explained, how are they to be reconciled with traits that compel sympathy and admiration, except as the workings of a nature essentially uncivilized? The object of a great drama is to exhibit men not as they appear in the ordinary affairs of life, but while subject to those fiery tests under which all that is foreign or acquired melts away, and the primal components of the character are revealed in their bareness and in their depths. Othello's race is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. It throws a fatality on that marriage which seems unnatural even to those who yet do not suspect that the discordancy lies deeper than in the complexion. It makes him the easy victim of a plot which would otherwise only have ensnared its concoctor. It sweeps away all impediments to the catastrophe, making it swift, inevitable and dire. And it is by seizing upon this central fact that Salvini has been enabled to render his performance artistically perfect. Were the conception radically false, there could not be the same unity in the execution, the same harmony in the details. We shall not assert that his is the ideal Othello, or that such an Othello is possible. Shakespeare's creations cannot be bounded by the limit of another idiosyncrasy. But we hold that, if he does not put into the character all that belongs to it, he puts nothing into it that does not belong to it. We may miss in the accents of his despair a pathos capable of assuaging our horror; but this latter emotion, equally legitimate, is commonly stifled altogether, leaving us more disposed to linger lovingly beside the dead than to shudder and exclaim with Ludovico, "The object poisons sight;—let it be hid."

A.F.



A LETTER FROM NEW YORK.

I have come from the country. I have seen Salvini. All emotion has to be expressed now in the above form, for Salvini rules. He is simply the greatest actor since Rachel, and his troupe the most perfect ever seen in this country. The whole plane of their acting is forty steps higher than we are accustomed to; therefore it has been slow of gaining appreciation, and the panic having burst over the devoted city just as Salvini opened, the houses have been poor. He should play, too (all actors should), in a smaller house than the Academy of Music. His first great success may therefore date from a matinee at Wallack's, where he had the most distinguished audience I have ever seen in New York, on Saturday, October 11th. Salvini lunched while here with Madame Botta, and expressed himself surprised that any one should care to go to hear him who could not understand the language. "I am sure I should not go," said the great actor. He thinks he has not had a success, but he will not think so after he becomes accustomed to his audiences. He is in private one of the most cultivated and intelligent of men, and has brought to the practice of his art a scholar's study, a soldier's experience and a gentleman's taste. I say a soldier's experience, for Salvini has been a soldier, and fought for united Italy in 1857 and earlier.

Nilsson is much improved by marriage. Her beauty is softer, she has gained flesh—not to the detriment of that girlish outline, but to the improvement of those somewhat aggressive cheek-bones. She sings better than ever, with rounded voice. Never since the days of Salvi and Steffanoni have we had such opera in New York. The orchestra is better, Maurel is superb, Capoul is still better, and Campanini is very admirable. We miss Jamet very much in Mephisto, but every one else is better than before. The house is not gay—it misses many of its old habitues. Five empty boxes in a row tell of the financial troubles. It was the fashion to laugh at the Wall street men, but they gave gayety and life and movement up town as well as down town. Many of those whose names are recorded on the wrong side of the list were our most generous givers and most amiable hosts. Their misfortunes cause nothing but regrets.

The races at first felt the effects of the panic, but the crowd on Saturday, the 11th of October, was immense. Somebody must get the money that everybody loses; therefore somebody can still afford to go to the races, and the last day was also very full. Two drags set the English example of having the horses taken off and dining on the top of the coach. The notes of a key-bugle from one of them seemed to suggest Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Ben Allen; but whether those young gentlemen were of the party or not I did not hear. With our delicious sky, and particularly this golden autumn, there seems to be no reason why we should not adopt the fashions of Chantilly and Ascot. We are, however, a gregarious people, and the tendency is to gather together under the protection of the grand stand.

Poor Maretzek is always the first to go, and it is understood that his opera is among the great unpaid. Every one is sorry for the poor singers, always excepting Lucca, whose jealousy of Nilsson is so aggressive that she has declared that she would sing her off the boards of the Academy of Music. She is driven like a bad angel out of Paradise, while the starry Nilsson in magnificent triumph sings on superbly to constantly increasing houses at the Academy, and is lunched and feted to her heart's content.

The Evangelical Alliance has gone, and left behind it nothing but animosities. It was really a vast movement of the Presbyterian Church: Geneva and Calvin were the exclusive proprietors. Episcopalians, Unitarians and Baptists, Methodists and Universalists, were requested to stand aside. The communions were always at some Presbyterian church. Perhaps they thought the Episcopal Church exclusive, as some one said an Englishman carried his pride into his prayers, and said, "O Lord, I do most haughtily beseech thee," and that the Unitarians felt "that any man who had been born in Boston did not see the necessity of being born again."

Every one is extremely well dressed, in spite of the panic. The hair is worn plain and off the brow, let us thank the genius of Fashion, so that every woman has a purer, better look. Nothing destroys the expression of a good woman like breaking over that line which Nature has made about the forehead. Our women have made themselves into wicked Faustinas and vulgar Anonymas long enough with their frizzes and short curls and "banging," as the square-cut straight lock on the forehead is called. Let us see the Madonna brow once more. The high ruff, the sleeve to the elbow, the dress cut to show the figure, all bring-back the days of our great-grandmothers: the opera is filled with Copley's portraits. The bonnets, too, are delightfully large, with long feathers. Every new fashion brings out a new crop of beauties, but I could not see what beauties were brought out by those bold bonnets of last year, which were hung on at the back of the head.

We expect great fun from Dundreary rehearsing Hamlet for private theatricals. Mr. Sothern has been asked to write down Dundreary, that so great an eccentric conception may not be lost to the world. He answers that he has twelve volumes of Dundreary literature! That shows how much industry goes to even an "inconsiderate trifle." This fine actor and most accomplished and agreeable man has been playing in two of the poorest plays ever presented to a New York audience. Nothing but a capital "make up," resembling one of the most fashionable men in town, who is Sothern's particular friend, has given them point—even then only to New Yorkers. Sothern's fondness for practical joking has brought about so many false charges that he is getting very tired of being fathered with every stupid trick which any one chooses to play, and will probably drop that form of wit, so really unworthy of his great genius and true refinement, for the man who could invent Dundreary and who can play Garrick is a genius.

I assisted with four thousand others at the first representation of the Magic Flute at the Grand Opera House, where the late James Fisk's monogram is decently covered up by Gothic shields, hastily improvised after that distinguished actor met the reward of his crimes. I heard lima di Murska for the first time. She is an unpleasant miracle, compelling your reluctant astonishment. Such vocal gymnastics I never heard. The flute and the musical-box are left in the background, but her voice is nasal and disagreeable at first. Lucca's splendid, rich, full organ rang out gloriously by contrast, although her constitutional jealousy showed itself unpleasantly in some parts of the opera where Murska was so deliriously applauded. Lucca, little woman, conquered herself at last, and handed the flowers up to her rival with a pretty grace which was loudly applauded. It is strange that the tact of woman, usually so apprehensive, does not more often see the good effect of generosity.

One effect of the panic, it is to be hoped, will be to make the dinners less magnificently heavy. I am sure every lady in New York who was last winter constrained to sit from seven o'clock until eleven at those monstrously elaborate and expensive dinners which have become so much the fashion, will be glad to dine in a more simple manner, in a shorter time, with less display, and with fewer courses, and fewer excitements. One entertainer last winter introduced live swans and small canaries to enliven his dinner. The swans splashed rather disagreeably.

"Do you know why he had the swans?" said a lady to a gentleman.

"I suppose, he wanted the Ledas of society," said the gentleman.

"Well, yes," said the lady, "but I did not know, although he is as rich as a Jew, that he was a Jupiter."

The faces of the "panicstricken" seem to look brighter, although everybody talks of "shrinkage" and ruin. Meanwhile the beautiful weather keeps the carriages going and Fifth Avenue looking gay. "I shall fail, but my wife need not give up her horses," said a young broker the other day. The old days of commercial morality, when people reduced their style of living because they had failed, seem to have gone out of fashion.

A letter from New York, this Queen of Commerce, is almost necessarily mercantile, as is our conversation.

"How you all talk stocks and money!" said a gentleman just arrived from a ten years' sojourn in Europe. "When I went away you were talking of books, of art, of social ethics, of fine women, of good dinners, of whist and bezique: now you are all talking of longs and shorts, bulls and bears, a fraction of per cent., etc. etc.—all of you, men, women and children."

We have a beautiful collection at the Art Museum in Fourteenth street of jewelry, objets d'art, and a good ceramic display, all clustered round the Di Cesnola sculptures and pottery. This collection, founded on the idea of the South Kensington Museum, makes a most agreeable lounging-place in the Kruger mansion, and is, in the absence of most of the opulent owners of private picture-galleries and the closing of the National Academy, almost our only artistic amusement at present. But the first of December will throw open many hospitable doors, and the new pictures and statues which have been accumulated during the past summer will become in one sense the property of the gazing public.

MARGARET CLAYSON.



NOTES.

Amongst the traditional scenes of the drama probably none plays a part more useful than the village festival. This merrymaking appears twice or thrice in an ordinary pantomime, regularly adorns the melodrama, is almost an essential of the opera, could not be dispensed with in the plays of the Fanchon type, and may even relieve the sombre tints of dire tragedy. We all know the charming spectacle: peasant youths and maidens, clad in all the wealth of the dramatic wardrobe, are skipping around a Maypole; presently Baptiste and Lisette are discovered kissing behind a pasteboard hedge, and are drawn out with universal laughing, in the midst of which enters the recruiting-sergeant with his squad and whisks off poor Baptiste to the wars. It is a pleasing scene—a trifle monotonous now with repetition; and for this latter reason it might be well to vary it by substituting the rural Feast of the Onion, which a 'correspondent of the Cambrai Gazette witnessed in the suburbs of Gouzeaucourt. Every year, between June 24th and July 2d, the inhabitants of the two neighboring villages of Gouzeaucourt and Gonnelieu perform the ceremony of "turning the onion"—that is to say, they dance in a circle, joining hands, on the village green of one or the other hamlet. Thanks to this ancient custom, the two French communes raise the finest onions in the department, this vegetable never failing, as carrots are apt to do in that locality: on the contrary, the onions are well-grown, finely rounded, and in short, magnificently "turned." On this festive occasion three or four hundred persons of every age and condition dance around a well in Sunday best, rigged out in ribbons and with smiling faces. The more they hop the bigger the crop of onions; and naturally they skip and sing till out of breath, always repeating the popular song, "Ah! qu'il est malaise d'etre amoureux et sage." Surely, all this would form a pleasant variety on the ordinary festal scene of the stage; and we hasten to remind the fastidious that though this ceremony is the Feast of Onions, yet it does not appear that that odorous esculent need actually be present; besides, even if it were, surely a garland of "well-turned" onions would add strength to the picturesque ropes of theatrical paper roses. The well, too, would replace with a certain grace the too familiar pole. And again, since all ages and conditions assist at this feast, it would utilize that extraordinary company of figurantes, varying from the longest and slimmest to the shortest and plumpest, which every manager thinks it incumbent to put upon the stage for the rural fete. Finally, to complete the tableau satisfactorily, it appears that this year at Gonnelieu, at the height of the dancing, half a dozen gendarmes rushed upon the scene, causing a general stampede among the disciples of the onion and a hasty adjournment of the festival. What law against irregular assemblages was infringed by these onion-worshipers is not clear, for one can hardly detect sedition lurking under the rustic ditty, and it is equally difficult to suspect an Orsini bomb conspiracy of being typified by the conjuring of prodigious prize onions.

It is a vast pity that so many excellent stories are "almost too good to be true." Such a tale seems to be the one which explains the origin of that prodigious collection of monkeys that forms so large a part of the population of the Jardin d'Acclimation in Paris; and yet, as this curious account has not been questioned, so far as we are aware, by those who ought to know the facts, it is hardly gracious in us to begin the relation of it by gratuitous skepticism. A Bordeaux ship-owner, who is noted for insisting on a strict obedience to instructions on the part of his captains, some time ago gave written orders to one of the latter to bring back from Brazil, whither he was going, one or two monkeys—"Rapportez-moi 1 ou 2 singes." The ou was so badly written that the captain read "1002 singes;" and the result was that the owner, three months after, found his ship returning, to his utter stupefaction, overrun with monkeys from keel to mast-head. However, inflexibly just even in his surprise, he recognized the fault to be that of his own hasty handwriting, and praised the scrupulous captain who had executed his apparent order even to the odd pair of monkeys over the thousand. For a week apes were a drug in the Bordeaux market, and, adds the story, the Jardin, hearing the news, took care not to lose so good an opportunity of laying in a large stock.

The traditional union of fidelity, obedience to orders, strict discipline and stupidity in the old-fashioned military servant is wittily illustrated in a story told by the Gazette de Paris at the expense of a captain of the Melun garrison. This officer, who had been invited to dine at a neighboring castle, sent his valet with a note of "regrets," adding, as the boy started, "Be sure and bring me my dinner, Auguste, when you have left the letter." The soldier took the letter to the castle and was told, of course, "It's all right." "Yes, but I want the dinner," said the lad: "the captain ordered me to bring it back, and I always obey orders." The baroness, being informed of the good fellow's blunder, carried out the joke by despatching a splendid repast. The officer, too amused to make any explanation to his servant, merely sent him back at once to buy a bouquet to carry with his compliments to the baroness. Successfully accomplishing this feat, the brilliant Auguste was handed a five-franc piece from the lady. "That won't do," says the honest fellow: "I paid thirty francs for the flowers." The difference was made up to him, and he returned to the fort, quite proud at having so ably discharged his duty. We think this incident will fairly match some of the experiences which our own officers are fond of narrating, regarding the way in which their servants have interpreted and executed their orders.



LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Sub-Tropical Rambles in the Land of the Aphanapteryx. By Nicholas Pike. New York: Harper & Brothers.

The story of a bright and educated traveler is always a capital one, and Mr. Pike has done wonders for Mauritius, which would seem in itself to be one of the most deplorably dull and fatiguing prominences on the face of the sea. An enthusiastic botanist and naturalist, as well as an interested ethnologist, this lively observer relieves the monotony of a seemingly easy consulate and repulsive population by watching all the secrets of animated nature around him. It is a very bloodthirsty island that his fates have guided him to: everything bites or stings or poisons. When wading out into the sea for shells, Mr. Pike is attacked by "a tazarre, a fish something like a fresh-water pike," which comes right at him repeatedly, "like a bulldog," and is only subdued by being speared in the head with a harpoon. Creatures elsewhere the most evasive and timid are here found fighting like gladiators: the eels bite everybody within their reach—one of these combative eels caught by our author measured twelve feet three inches; the fresh-water prawns "strike so sharply with their tails as to draw blood if not carefully handled." The exquisite polyps and anemones, whose painted beauty our author is never weary of relating, have mostly poisoned weapons concealed under their flounces, and treat the naturalist who would coquet with them to a swelled arm or a lamed hand. Centipedes, scorpions and virulently poisonous snakes animate the land, while the shoals, where the natives declare there are "more fish than water," teem with every sort of man-eating shark, and with the cuttle-fish watching for his prey from each interstice of the coral-reef. The latter, often of immense size, are caught and eaten, both fresh and salt, some fishermen collecting nothing else: they dexterously turn the ugly stomach inside out and thread it on a string slung round the neck. The horror of the lobster for these cuttle-fish is something curious; and it affords a gauge for the sensitiveness of crustaceae (and incidentally an argument against those who maintain the greater reasonableness of fishing than of hunting on account of the lower organization of the prey) to learn that the lobster must not be taken to market in company with the cuttle-fish, "or the flesh will be spoilt before he gets there, the creature being literally sick from fright." Meantime, in the ooze which forms a connecting link between sea and shore lurks the mud-laff, indescribably hideous in shape, leprous-looking, slimy, and darting a greenish poison through the spines on its back. Treading on one of these, the poor naked fisherman is apt to die of lockjaw; and Mr. Pike's kitten, having its paw touched with a single spine, perished of convulsions in an hour. Some of the sea-carnivora, however, are so beautiful that one is ready to forgive their more or less Clytemnestra-like tempers. Of some gymnobranchiata the writer observes: "I never saw any living animals with such gorgeous colors—the most vivid carmine and pure white, mixed with golden yellow in the bodies and mantles, and the gills of pale lemon-color and lilac. No painting could give an idea of the harmony of the shades as they blended into each other, or the undulating grace of the movements of the mantles. I have sat for an hour at a time watching them, lost in admiration, and frequently turning them over to see the expert way they would contract the elegant gill-branches, and reopen them as soon as they had righted themselves." Such are some of the animated charms of Paul and Virginia's island. Of Bernardin Saint Pierre's romance as an illustration of the spot, Mr. Pike dryly observes that writers when about to draw largely on their imaginations should be careful to conceal the actual whereabouts of their stories: we live in an age of exploration that is sure to "display their ridiculous side when reduced to fact." There was, however, a foundation in fact, quite enough for the purpose of a prose poem, in the loves and deaths of Paul and Virginia: it is doubtless the island scenes alone that Mr. Pike would satirize. The great shipwreck was in 1744, a year of famine, which the wise and prudent French governor, the most able man who ever adorned the colony, M. Mahe de Labourdonnais, was unable to avert. The ship St. Geran, sent with provisions from France, was ignorantly driven on the reef shortly before dawn, and all perished save nine souls. There were on board two lovers, a Mademoiselle Mallet and Monsieur de Peramon, who were to be united in marriage on arriving at the island, then called Isle de France. The young man made a raft, and implored his mistress to remove the heavier part of her garments and essay the passage. This the pure young creature refused to do, with that exaggerated modesty which has been called mawkishness in the story, but which in a real occurrence looks very like heroism. Their bodies were soon washed ashore together in the harbor, since called the Bay of Tombs. Two structures of whitewashed brick under some beautiful palms and feathery bamboos, in an inland garden called "Pamplemousses" (the Shaddocks), now cover the remains of the ill-starred lovers. Mr. Pike appears to have visited the site but once, when, as there had been heavy rains, he could not reach the tombs. He is evidently more in his element when wading after sea-urchins. His observations on such races as coolies, Chinese and Malabar-men are all, however, to the purpose. The island is peopled with these varieties, in addition to a mixed white population, the Indians having been brought from Hindostan for the cane-fields since the English occupation in 1810, and serving a good purpose. Their manners illustrate the lower horrors of the Hindoo mythology, they appearing to worship pretty exclusively a race of gods and goddesses invented for robber tribes, who are appeased only by blood-curdling rites: our author saw their young men running, with yells and contortions, over a bed of live coals twenty-five feet across to earn the favor of one such cruel goddess. The Chinese, though in worship they exhibit the milder sacrificial spirit of offering sheets of paper, yet in a more stolid way show an equal talent for self-sacrifice. A neighbor of Mr. Pike's, an excellent quiet fellow, having gambled with his own servant for his shop, stock and person, was seen one morning sweeping and serving customers, whilst the youngster sat leisurely smoking, the game having gone contrarily. "There was no appearance of triumph on the boy's face: master and servant reversed their places with the most perfect sang-froid." Of the Creoles, we learn that they believe the presence of pieces of coral in the house induces headache; of the women from Malabar, that they can only wear toe-rings after marriage; of the handsomest Indian tribe in the island, the Reddies, we are told that the boys marry at five or six, their bride living with the father-in-law or other husband's relative and rearing children to him: when the boy grows up, his wife being then aged, he "takes up with some boy's wife in a manner precisely similar to his own, and procreates children for the boy-husband." The remaining wonder of Mauritius appears to be the great Peter Both Mountain, so nearly inaccessible that a rage for climbing it has been developed. The first successful attempt was made by Claude Penthe, who planted the French flag on it in 1790, and English ascents were made in 1832, 1848, 1858, 1864 and 1869. We must not omit, however, the Aphanapteryx, though Mr. Pike does: it is a red bird which in Mauritius has survived its whilom companion the dodo, and which is to be described in a future volume. Mr. Pike has obliged us with a book of admirable temper, inexhaustible research and fine manly spirit: we could wish for our own sakes nothing better than that all our sub-tropical and tropical consulships were filled by his brothers, and that they would all make volumes out of their experiences.

Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. By William Ellery Ghanning. Boston: Roberts Bros.

Mr. Charming is a boon, and we would not have missed his lucubration on any account. Now we know how Margaret Fuller talked and in what dialect they wrote The Dial. It was with this sententiousness, this solemn attitude over the infinitely little, this care to compose paragraphs out of short sentences completely disconnected, that the old Concord philosophy was enunciated. Nobody outside the circle ever caught the exact accent except one of Dickens's characters—Mr. F.'s aunt—who would interrupt a dinner conversation to observe, "There's milestones on the Dover road." "Above our heads," says Mr. Channing, "the nighthawk rips;" "see the frog bellying the world in the warm pool;" "the rats scrabbling." This sententiousness is consistent, on Mr. Channing's part, with the most stupefying ignorance of words and things, as in the sentence, "forced to conceal the raveled sleeve of care by buttoning up his outer garments." It is particularly imposing in the judgments, nearly always severe, of individuals, and the reader lays down the present book sure that here, at last, he has found a truly superior person. Schoolcraft is simply "poor Schoolcraft," and of course subsides; Miss Martineau is "that Minerva mediocre;" Carlyle is "Thomas Carlyle with his bilious howls and bankrupt draughts on hope." Hawthorne, he learns, though we cannot tell from whence, "thought it inexpressibly ridiculous that any one should notice man's miseries, these being his staple product," and was "swallowed up in the wretchedness of life;" also, "the Concord novelist was a handsome, bulky character, with a soft rolling gait; a wit said he seemed like a boned pirate." From these more or less contemptuous views of mankind at large Mr. Channing turns with a kind of somersault to an intense admiration for Thoreau. Could he but write of him in his own style—supposing him to have a style—he would have been in danger of producing a sensible book, and nous autres would have lost one delight; but it is the perfection of comedy to see the apocalyptic trio—Emerson stepping off grandly and gladly into the clouds—Thoreau, his principal disciple, following with a good imitation of the gait, but with evident self-consciousness—and finally Mr. Channing—