For the rest, this savage was crooked, ill-shapen and hideous. His skin was as black as night; his head small, the face immensely disproportionate to the cranium; his jaws massive and armed with glittering white teeth filed to points; his cheeks full, his nose flat, his eyes little, deep-set, restless, wicked. The usage he received from his new master was so different from his former experience with white men, and so in accord with his own undisciplined nature, that it called forth all the sympathies of his character. He soon loved the Frenchman with an intensity of affection almost incomprehensible. It is no exaggeration to say that he would have willingly laid down his life to gratify his master's slightest wish. The latter's knowledge was to him so comprehensive, his power so boundless and his will so imperious and inflexible, that he feared and worshiped him as a god.

Fournier looked upon his monster with satisfaction, and longed for a battle. His wish was at last gratified. On the Fourth of July, 1864, an engagement took place three miles north-west of Legareville, near the North Edisto River. A force of Union soldiery had been assembled from the Sea Islands and from Florida, massed on Seabrook Island, and pushed thence up into South Carolina. The object of this expedition was unknown; indeed, as nothing whatever was accomplished, the strategy of it remains to this day unexplained. However, forewarned is forearmed. Every movement was watched and reported by the rebel scouts; all the troops that could be spared from Charleston were sent out to oppose the invaders; roads were obstructed; bridges were destroyed, batteries erected in strong positions, everything prepared to impede their progress. Our story needs not that we should dwell upon the sufferings of the Union soldiers on that futile expedition, from the narrow, dusty roads, the frequent scarcity of water, the intense heat. With infinite fatigue and peril they advanced only five or six miles in a day's march. Many died of sunstroke, and many fell by the way utterly exhausted. There was occasional skirmishing; but one actual battle. To that the troops gave the name of "the battle of Bloody Bridge." Picture a slightly undulating country covered with thick low forest; a narrow road that by an open plank bridge crosses a wide, sluggish stream with marshy banks, and curves beyond abruptly to the right to avoid a low, steep hill facing the bridge; crowning this hill an earth-work, rude to be sure, but steep, sodded, almost impregnable to men without artillery to play upon it; within, two cannon, for which there is plenty of ammunition, and six hundred Confederate soldiers, fresh, eager, determined; on the road in front of the battery, but just out of range of its guns, the Union forces halting under arms, the leaders anxious and discouraged, the men exhausted, careworn, wondering what is to be done next, heartily sick of it all, yet willing to do their best; in the thicket on both sides the road, not sheltered, only covered, within pistol-shot of the enemy, six hundred United States soldiers, a Massachusetts colored regiment, one of the first recruited, without cannon, over-marched, overheated, a forlorn hope, sent forward to take the battery! These men, stealthily assembling there among the trees and bushes, are ready. Not one of them carries a pound of superfluous weight. Their rifles with fixed bayonets, a handful of cartridges, a canteen of water, are enough. They wear flannel shirts and blue trowsers; numbers are bareheaded, some have cut off the sleeves of their shirts: they know there is work before them. Many kneel in prayer; comrades exchange messages to loved ones at home, and give each other little keepsakes—the rings they wore or brier pipes carved over with the names of coast battles; others—perhaps they have no loved ones—look to the locks of their pieces and await impatiently the signal to advance. The officers—white men, most of them Boston society fellows, old Harvard boys who once thought a six-mile pull or a long innings at cricket on a hot day hard work, and knew no more of military tactics than the Lancers—move about among them, speaking to this one and to that one, calling each by name, jesting quietly with one, encouraging another, praising a third, endeavoring to inspire in all a hope which they dare not feel themselves.

But hark! The signal to move. Quickly they form in the road, and with a shout advance at a run, their dusky faces glistening in that summer sun and their manly hearts beating bravely in the very jaws of death. Now the bridge trembles beneath their steady tread: the foremost are at the hill, yet no sign of life in the battery. Only the smooth green bank, the wretched flag in the distance, and those guns charged with death looking grimly down upon them and waiting. On they come, nearer and nearer, and now some are on the hill and begin to climb the steep that forms the defence, slowly and with difficulty, using at times their rifles as aids like alpenstocks. Not a word is spoken. It is hard to understand how so many men can move with so little noise. The silence is that which precedes all dreadful noises. It is ominous, terrible. Scarcely twenty feet more, and the foremost will reach the rampart. Haste! haste! The day is won!

Suddenly a figure in gray leaps upon the breastwork: he waves his sword, utters a short quick word of command, and disappears. It is enough. The sleeping battery awakes. The silence becomes hideous uproar. The smooth green line of the sod against the sky is lined with marksmen, and in an instant fringed with fire. Then the cannon bellow and the breezeless air is dense with smoke. The attacking column hesitates, trembles, makes a useless effort to advance, and then falls back beyond the bridge. The officers endeavor to rally their men and renew the attack at once, but in vain: flesh and blood cannot stand in such a storm. Nevertheless, the brave fellows—God bless their memory!—halt at length, and form and charge once more. And so again and again and again; every time in vain and with new losses, until at last they cannot rally, but retreat, broken and bleeding, to the main body of the expedition, carrying with them such of the wounded and dead as they can snatch from under the fire of the rebel riflemen. Such was the battle of Bloody Bridge, and well was it named. Five times that gallant regiment charged the battery, and when the smoke of battle cleared away the sun shone down upon a piteous sight—blood dyeing the green of that sodded escarp—blood in great clots upon the rocks and stumps of the rugged hill below—blood poured plenteously upon the dusty road, making it horrible with purple mire—blood staining the bridge and gathering in little pools upon the planks, and dripping slowly down through the cracks between them into the sluggish stream, where it floated with the water in great red clouds, toward which creatures dwelling in slimy depths below came up lazily, but when they tasted it became furious and fought among themselves like demons—blood drying in hideous networks and arabesques upon the railing of the bridge—blood upon the fences, blood upon the trembling leaves of the bushes by the wayside—blood everywhere! And everywhere the upturned faces and torn bodies of men who had dared to do their duty and to die: side by side the white, who led and the black who followed—all set and motionless, but all wearing the same expression of brave but hopeless determination. That was a brave charge at Balaklava, but, trust me, there have been Balaklavas that are yet unsung.

So the expedition went back, and its brigades were redistributed to the Sea Islands and to Florida; but why it was ever sent out, and why that regiment was sent forward to take the battery without artillery and without reinforcements, God, who knoweth all things, only knows. And God alone knows why there must be wars and rumors of wars, and why men made in his image must tear each other like maddened beasts.

In this battle, heavy as the losses were, the Confederates took but one prisoner. At the third charge a tall, broad-shouldered captain, who seemed, like another son of Thetis, almost invulnerable, darted impetuously ahead of his men and reached the summit of the defence. Useless bravery! In an instant a volley point blank swept away the charging men behind him, and a gunner's sabrethrust bore him to the ground within the works, where he lay stunned and bleeding beside the gun he had striven so hard to take. The man who had captured him, wild with excitement and maddened with the powder that blackened him and the hot blood which jetted upon him, sprang down, spat upon him, spurned him with his foot, and would have dashed out his brains with the heavy hilt of his clubbed sword had not a strong hand grasped his uplifted wrist.

It was Fournier, who had watched the battle with an interest as intense as that of the most ardent Southerner in the battery, though widely different in character. His interest was that of the naturalist who stands by eager and curious to see a rustic entrap some rara avis that he desires to study, to use for his experiment. Better for the bird: it can suffer and die. Afterward what matter whether it stand neatly stuffed and mounted, a voiceless worshiper, in some glass mausoleum, or slowly moulder in a fence corner until its feathers are wafted far and wide, and only a little tuft of greener grass remains to its memory? As our naturalist's game was nobler and destined for more important study, so it was capable of lifelong suffering more subtle and intense. Perhaps Fournier had not fully considered, in his eagerness to prove his hypothesis, the dangers to the subjects of his experiment. Perhaps his mind was so intent upon the physical aspect of the questions that he had overlooked some of the intellectual and moral elements involved in the problem, and did not realize the enormities that would result should he succeed. On the other hand, perhaps he saw them, realized them fully, and was the more deeply fascinated with the research because of its leading into such gloomy and mysterious regions of speculation. Let us do him justice. Science was his god, and this idolater was willing to endure any labor and privation and to assume any responsibility in her service. Would that more who worship a greater God were as devoted!

He was a physiologist, and was simply engaged in an experimental investigation, yet in its progress he had already uncivilized a man whose eyes were beginning dimly to see the truth, had poisoned his mind with lies, and had hurled him into depths of Plutonian ignorance inconceivably more profound than his original estate; and now he was about to debase another fellow-creature of his own race, to tamper with his manhood, to confuse his identity, to render him among his own kindred and people perhaps tabooed, ostracised, despised—perhaps an object of pity. If he should succeed? Surely he had not come thus near success to suffer his splendid Yankee captain to be brained there before his eyes. Like a hawk he had watched every incident of the fight, and was on the alert to act the part of surgeon toward any who might be either wounded in the battery or taken prisoner. He had even resolved, in case of the capture of the place, to represent his peculiar position to the United States officer in command, and to beg of him permission to make his experiment upon a wounded rebel.

The gunner turned fiercely upon him, but dropped his arm and sheathed his sabre at his question, and then walked back to his gun abashed, for he was, after all, a brave and chivalrous man.

Fournier simply asked: "Do Confederate soldiers murder prisoners of war?" And added, "He is a wounded man—leave him to me."

Then he knelt down beside him and examined his wound, and though he strove to be calm he trembled with excitement as he tore open the blue blouse and felt the warm blood welling over his fingers. It was a simple wound through the fleshy part of the shoulder: a strand of saddler's silk and a few strips of sticking-plaster would have sufficed to dress it, but the Frenchman smiled when he wiped away the clots and saw the blood spurting from two or three small divided arteries.

Then he called his African, and they carried the wounded man back to a tent, and laid him on a bed of moss and cypress boughs, and left him there to bleed, while he went out into the air, and walked about, and tossed his hat and shouted with excitement like a madman. But the battle raged, and the gunners charged their guns and fired, and charged and fired again, and the men along the breastwork grew furious with the slaughter and the fiery draughts they took from their canteens through lips blackened with powder and defiled with grease and shreds of cartridge-paper; and no one noticed the doctor's mad conduct nor the savage standing guard before the tent; nor did any other save those two in the whole battery—no, not even the gunner who had captured him—give a thought to the prisoner who lay bleeding there, until the battle was over.

And this prisoner, what of him? Any one, looking upon him as he lay upon the cypress boughs, would have known him to be thoroughbred. Everything about him proclaimed it. His face, manly but gentle, his figure, great in stature and strength, yet graceful in outline like a Grecian god, the very dress and accoutrements he wore, which were neat, strong, expensive, but without ornament, showed him to be a gentleman. And Robert Shirley was a gentleman. Probably no man in all the States could have been found who would have presented a greater contrast to the man standing guard outside the tent than this man who lay within it; and for that reason none who would have been so welcome to Fournier. As the one was a pure savage, the other was the realization of the most illustrious enlightenment; the one fierce, cunning, undisciplined, the other gentle, frank, considerate; as the one was hideous, ill-formed and black as night, so the other was radiant with manly beauty and fair as the morning. Each among his own people sprang from noble stock; the one a prince, the other the descendant of the purest Puritan race, which knew among its own divines and judges brave captains, and farther back a governor of the colony. But the guard and his people were at the foot of the scale, the guarded at the top. The blood flowing out upon the cypress bed was the best blood of America. It was blue blood and brave blood. Generation after generation it had flowed in the veins of fair women and noble men, and had never known dishonor. Yet Fournier let it flow. More, he was delighted that it continued to flow.

Presently, however, he sobered down, and began to prepare for his work. He placed a large caldron of water over a fire; he brought basins, towels and his case of surgical instruments, and placed them in the, tent, and with them the case which he had taught the African to believe contained his god. While thus busied he did not neglect the subject of his experiment. His watchful eye noted everything—the mass, of clots growing like a great crimson fungus under the wounded shoulder, the deadly pallor, the dark circles forming around the sunken eyes, the blanched lips, the transparent nostrils, the slow, deep respiration. From time to time he felt the wounded man's pulse and counted it carefully. Ninety—he went out again into the open air; one hundred—"The loss of blood tells," he muttered, and began to rearrange his appliances and busy himself uneasily with them; one hundred and thirty beats to the minute —"He is failing too fast: I must stop this bleeding" said the experimenter. Then he cleansed the wound, and tied the arteries, and bound it up. But the loss of blood had been so great that the heart fluttered wildly and feebly in its efforts to contract upon its diminished contents, and Fournier, anxious, and pale himself almost as his victim, trembled when his finger felt in vain for the bleeding artery and caught only a faint tremulous thrill, so feeble that he scarcely knew whether the heart was beating at all or not. In terror he threw the ends of the little tent and fanned him, and moistened his lips, and gave him brandy, and hastened to begin the experiment for which he had waited so long and for which both subjects were at last ready.

He told his savage that the Yankee was dying, but that he had communed with his god, who would let him live if blood was given in return. Then he reminded him of the time when he lost blood, and that it had done him no harm. The African, trained for this duty with so much care, did not fail him, but bared his arm and gave the blood. The god was brought forth and caught it, and the sacrifice began. As the silver, bowl floated in a basin of water so warm that the thermometer in its side marked ninety-eight degrees of Fahrenheit, Fournier stirred the blood flowing into it quickly with the bundle of wires, to collect the fibrine and prevent the formation of clots; he then drew it into the syringe through the strainer, and forced it through the perforated needle, which he had previously thrust into a large vein in Shirley's arm, carefully avoiding the introduction of the slightest bubble of air. Time after time he filled his syringe and emptied it into the veins of the wounded man, until at length he saw signs of reaction. The color came, the breathing became more natural, the pulse became slower, fuller, regular. By and by he moved, sighed, opened his eyes and spoke.

He asked a question: "What has happened?"

While he had been lying there much had happened. Life and death had battled over him, and life had triumphed. When he recovered from the effects of his fall and found himself bleeding, he tried to rise and stanch the flow, but, already exhausted, he fell back almost fainting from the effort. He called repeatedly for help, but his only reply was the hideous face of his guard, silently leering at him for a moment, then disappearing without a word, At last it occurred to him that he had been left there to die, and he roused all his energies to his aid. How we strive for our lives! But Shirley accomplished nothing, he could not even raise his hand to the bleeding shoulder, with every effort the blood flowed more copiously. His mind was rapidly becoming benumbed like his body, which shivered as though it were mid winter. Darkness came over his eyes, and as he listened to the din of the battle he fell into a dreamy state that soon passed into seeming unconsciousness again. Nevertheless, while the doctor came and went and did his work, and the savage scowled at him, yet gave his life's blood to save him, though he lay like a dead man and saw them not, nor heard them, nor even felt the needle in his flesh, his mind was not idle. Strange doubts and fears, wild longings and regrets, sweet thoughts of long-forgotten happiness, and fair visions of the future, busied his brain. Memory unrolled her scroll and breathed upon the letters of his story that lapse of time and press of circumstance had made dim, till they grew clear, and with himself he lived his life again, and nothing was lost out of it or forgotten. There was his mother's face again, with the old, old loving smile upon her lips and the tender mother-love in the depths of her beautiful blue eyes—lips that had so oven kissed away his childish tears, and had taught him to say at evening, "Our Father" and "Now I lay me down to sleep," eyes that had never looked upon him without something of the heavenly light of which they were now so full. There before him, bright and clear as ever, were the scenes of his boyhood—the school-forms defaced with many a rude cutting of names and dates, the master knitting his shaggy brows and tapping meaningly with his ruler upon the awful desk while some white haired urchin floundered through an ill-learned task and his classmates tittered at his blunders. Dear old classmates! How their faces shone and gladdened as they chased the bounding football! How merrily they flushed and glowed when the clear frosty air of the Northern winter quivered with the ring of their skates upon the hard ice! How soberly side by side they solved problems and looked up sesquipedalia verba in big lexicons! And how happily the late evening hours wore away as they read Ivanhoe and the Leather Stocking Tales by the fireside with shellbarks and pippins!

Then the college days flew by with all their romance and delight. Again there were bells ringing to morning prayers, recitations and lectures, examinations and prizes, speeches and medals, and the glorious friendships, pure, earnest, almost holy. Would there were more such friendships in the outer, wider world! Commencement with its "pomp and circumstance," its tedious ceremony and scholarly display, its friends from home—mothers, sisters, sweethearts, all bright eyes and fond hearts, its music and flowers, its caps, gowns, dress-coats and "spreads," and, last and worst of all, its sorrowful "good-byes," some of them, alas! for ever! Once more he trembled as he rose to make his commencement speech, but slowly, as he went on, his voice grew steady and his manner calmer, for, lad as he was, and tyro at "orations," he was in earnest. "May my light hand forget its cunning, O my brother! may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, O ye oppressed! if ever there comes to me an opportunity to help you win your way to freedom and I fail you!" He, the aristocrat of his class, had chosen to speak "Against Caste," and though he spoke with the enthusiasm of an untried man, it was with devoted honesty of purpose, of which his earnestness was witness, and of which his future was to give ample proof. Again in vision he stood before that assembly and spoke for the lowly and oppressed. "Let every man have place and honor as he proves himself worthy. Make the way clear for all."

Through the bewilderment of applause that greeted him as he finished he saw only the glad, smiling face of Alice Wentworth nodding approval of the rest, hundreds though they were, he saw nothing. Her congratulation was enough.

Then came tenderer scenes, and Alice Wentworth was to be his wife. Another change, and he is in the midst of ruder scenes. There is war, civil war, and he is a soldier, once more he seems to be in Virginia, and there are marches and counter-marches, camps and barracks, battles and retreats, and all the great and little miseries of long campaigns. The silver leaflets of a major are exchanged for the golden eagles of a colonel, and all the time, amid sterner duties, he finds time to write to Alice Wentworth, and never a mail comes into camp but he is sure of letters dated 'Home' and full of words that make him hopeful and brave, "'Home!' Yes hers and mine too, if home's where the heart is!'" he thinks, and he loves her more dearly every day.

Negro troops are raised, and, true to his principles and to himself, he resigns his commission to take a lower rank in a colored regiment. Now the scenes grow dim, confused sounds far off disturb him, low music, familiar yet strange, now distant, now at his very ear, attracts him, a weird, shadowy mist encloses him, concealing even the things which were visible to the mind's eye, and memory and thought have almost ceased. Yet while all else fades away, clear and beautiful before him are two faces that cannot be forgotten—his mother's face, and that other, which he loves, if that can be, even more. Thus, with the 'Our Father' not on his lips, but fixed in his mind, he feels himself drifting away—drifting away like a boat that has broken its moorings and drifts out with the ebbing tide—whither?

But the rich, warm, lusty blood of the African quickly does its work. The heart, which had almost ceased to beat, because there was not blood enough for it to contract upon, reacted to the stimulus, and as it revived and sent the new life pulsating through all the body the whole man revived, and again:

The fever called living burned in his brain.

Fournier, under one pretext or another, but really by the force of his relentless will, kept his victim by him for years after their escape from the South. He noted from time to time certain curious changes that took place in his physical nature, and recorded his observations with scientific precision in a book kept for the purpose, for the renewal of life had entailed results of an extraordinary character, as the reader may have already anticipated. At length he wrote 'My hypothesis is verified, it has become a theory. My theory is proved, it is a physiological law. Climatic influences, acting upon man, bring about physical changes exceedingly slowly, because they are resisted by an inveterate habit of assimilation which pertains to the blood.'

That day Shirley was free. His rescuer had finished his experiment.

Alice Wentworth had never believed that her lover was dead. She had heard all with a troubled heart, but while his distant kinsmen, who were heirs-at-law, put on the deepest mourning and grew impatient of the law's delay, she simply said, "I will wait until there is some proof before I give him up! Proof! proof! Shall I be quicker than the law to give up every hope?" And in her heart she said, "He is not dead." Even when years had passed and the war was over, and her agent had searched everywhere and found no trace of him, she did not cease to hope that he would yet appear. So, when at length a letter came, it was welcome and expected. Not surprise but joy made her start and tremble as the old familiar superscription met her eyes.

Such a letter!—filled with the spirit of his love, breathing in every word the tender, passionate devotion of an earlier day, and yet so sad. Tears dropped down through her smiles of joy and blurred the lines she read at first, but smiles and tears alike ceased as she read on. He had written many, many times, but he knew she had not got his letters. He had been a prisoner—not only prisoner of war, but afterward prisoner to a man whose will was iron. It could hardly be explained. This man had not only saved his life, but he had also rescued him from the horrors of a Southern prison—would God he had let him die!—and they had been living together in a ranch in a far off Mexican valley.

Then the letter went on:

"In my heart I am unchanged; my love for you is ever the same; yet I am no longer the Robert Shirley whom you knew. That has come upon me which will separate me from you for ever: I cannot ask you now to be my wife. You are free. It is through no fault of mine. It is my burden, the price of life, and I must bear it. God bless you and give you all happiness!

"ROBERT SHIRLEY:"

When she had read it all she bowed her head and wept again, and the face that had grown more and more beautiful with the years of waiting was radiant. Who can fathom the depths of a woman's love? Who can follow the subtle workings of a woman's thought? Who can comprehend a woman's boundless faith? Her course was clear. If misfortune had befallen him, if he were maimed, disfigured, crazed, even if he were loathsome to her eyes, she loved him, and she must see him: she would see him and speak to him, and love him still, even if she could not be his wife. What would she have done if she could have guessed the truth? As it was, she wrote upon her card, "If you love me, come to me," and sent it to him. And in answer to the summons he stood before her—not disfigured, not maimed, not crazed, not loathsome in any way, yet irrevocably separated from her for Dr. Fournier's experiment had succeeded, and Robert Shirley was a mulatto!

CORNELIUS DEWEES.



A VISIT TO THE KING OF AURORA.

(FROM THE GERMAN OF THEODORE KIRSCHOFF.)

On the Oregon and California Railroad, twenty-eight miles south of the city of Portland in Oregon, lies the German colony of Aurora, a communist settlement under the direction of Doctor William Keil. In September, 1871, I made a second journey from San Francisco to Oregon, on which occasion I found both time and opportunity to carry out a long-cherished desire to visit this colony, already famous throughout all Oregon, and to make the acquaintance of the still more famous doctor, the so-called "king of Aurora." During the years in which I had formerly resided in Oregon, and especially on this last journey thither, I had frequently heard this settlement and its autocrat spoken of, and had been told the strangest stories as to the government of its self-made potentate. All reports agreed in stating that "Dutchtown," the generic appellation of German colonies among Americans, was an example to all settlements, and was distinguished above any other place in Oregon for order and prosperity. The hotel of "Dutchtown," which stands on the old Overland stage-route, and is now a station on the Oregon and California Railroad, has attained an enviable reputation, and is regarded by all travelers as the best in the State; and as to the colony itself, I heard nothing but praise. On the other hand, with regard to Doctor Keil the strangest reports were in circulation. He had been described to me in Portland as a most inaccessible person, showing himself extremely reserved toward strangers, and declining to give them the slightest satisfaction as to the interior management of the prosperous community over which he reigned a sovereign prince. The initiated maintained that this important personage had formerly been a tailor in Germany. He was at once the spiritual and secular head of the community: he solemnized marriages (much against his will, for, according to the rules of the society, he was obliged to provide a house for every newly-married couple); he was physician and preacher, judge, law-giver, secretary of state, administrator, and unlimited and irresponsible minister of finance to the colony; and held all the very valuable landed property of the settlement, with the consent of the colonists, in his own name; and while he certainly provided for his voluntarily obedient subjects an excellent maintenance for life, he reserved to himself the entire profits of the labor of all and the value of the joint property, notwithstanding that the colony was established on the broadest principles as a communist association.

I had a great desire to see this original man—a kindred spirit of the renowned Mormon leader, Brigham Young—with my own eyes, and, so to speak, to visit the lion in his den. From Portland, where I was staying, the colony was easily accessible by rail, and before leaving I made the acquaintance of a. German life-insurance agent of a Chicago company—Koerner by name—who, like myself, wished to visit Aurora, and in whom I found a very agreeable traveling companion. He had procured in Portland letters of introduction to Doctor Keil, and had conceived the bold plan of doing a stroke of business in life insurance with him; indeed, his main object in going to Aurora was to induce the doctor to insure the lives of the entire colony—that is to say, of all his voluntary subjects—in the Chicago company, pay, as irresponsible treasurer of the association, the legal premiums, and upon the occurrence of a death pocket the amount of the policy.

My fellow-traveler had great hopes of making the doctor see this project in the light of an advantageous speculation, and accordingly provided himself amply with the necessary tables of mortality and other statistics. It had been carefully impressed upon us in Portland always to address the ci-devant tailor, now "king of Aurora," as "Doctor," of which title he was extremely vain, and to treat him with all the reverence which as sovereign republicans we could muster; otherwise he would probably turn his back on us without ceremony.

On a pleasant September morning the steam ferry-boat conveyed us from Portland across the Willamette River to the depot of the Oregon and California Railroad, and soon afterward we were rushing southward in the train along the right shore of that stream—here as broad as the Rhine—the rival of the mighty Columbia. After a pleasant and interesting journey through giant forests and over fertile prairies, some large, some small, embellished here and there with farms, villages and orchards, we reached Oregon City, which lies in a romantic region close to the Willamette: then leaving the river, we thundered on some miles farther through the majestic primitive forest, and soon entered upon a broad, wood-skirted prairie, over which here and there pretty farm-houses and groves are scattered; and presently beheld, peeping out from swelling hills and standing in the middle of a prosperous settlement embowered in verdure, the slender white church-tower of Aurora, and were at the end of our journey.

Our first course after we left the cars was to the tavern, standing close to the railroad on a little hill, whither the passengers hurried for lunch. This so-called "hotel," the best known and most famous, as has already been said, in all Oregon, I might compare to an old-fashioned inn. The long table with its spotless table-cloth was lavishly spread with genuine German dishes, excellently cooked, and we were waited on by comely and neatly-dressed German girls; and though the dinner would not perhaps compare with the same meal at the club-house of the "San Francisco" I must confess that it was incomparably the best I ever tasted in Oregon, in which region neither the cooks nor the bills of fare are usually of the highest order.

Dinner being over, we made inquiry for Doctor Keil, to whom we were now ready to pay our respects. Our host pointed out to us the doctor's dwelling-house, which looked, in the distance, like the premises of a well-to-do Low-Dutch farmer; and after passing over a long stretch of plank-road, we turned in the direction of the royal residence. On the way we met several laborers just coming from the field, who looked as if life went well with them—girls in short frocks with rake in hand, and boys comfortably smoking their clay pipes—and received from all an honest German greeting. Everything here had a German aspect—the houses pleasantly shaded by foliage, the barns, stables and well-cultivated fields, the flower and kitchen-gardens, the white church-steeple rising from a green hill: nothing but the fences which enclose the fields reminded us that we were in America.

The doctor's residence was surrounded by a high white picket-fence: stately, widespreading live-oaks shaded it, and the spacious courtyard had a neat and carefully-kept aspect. Crowing cocks, and hens each with her brood, were scratching and picking about, the geese cackled, and several well-trained dogs gave us a noisy welcome. Upon our asking for the doctor, a friendly German matron directed us to the orchard, whither we immediately turned our steps. A really magnificent sight met our eyes—thousands of trees, whose branches, covered with the finest fruit, were so loaded that it had been necessary to place props under many of them, lest they should break beneath the weight of their luscious burden.

Here we soon discovered the renowned doctor, in a toilette the very opposite of regal, zealously engaged in gathering his apples. He was standing on a high ladder, in his shirt sleeves, a cotton apron, a straw hat, picking the rosy-cheeked fruit in a hand-basket. Several laborers were busy under the trees assorting the gathered apples, and carefully packing in boxes the choicest of them—really splendid specimens of this fruit, which attains its utmost perfection in Oregon. As soon as the doctor perceived us he came down from the ladder, and asked somewhat sharply what our business there might be. My companion handed him the letters of introduction he had brought with him, which the doctor read attentively through: he then introduced my humble self as a literary man and assistant editor of a well-known magazine, who had come to Oregon for the special purpose of visiting Dr. Keil, and of inspecting his colony, of which such favorable reports had reached us. Without waiting for the doctor's reply, I asked him whether he were not a relative of K——, the principal editor of the magazine to which I was attached. I could scarcely, as it appeared, have hit upon a more opportune question, for the doctor was evidently flattered, and became at once extremely affable toward us. The relationship to which I had alluded he was obliged unwillingly to disclaim. I learned from him that his name was William Keil, and that he was born at Bleicherode in Prussian Saxony. He now left the apple-gathering to his men, and offered to show us whatever was interesting about the colony: as to the life-insurance project, he said he would take some more convenient opportunity to speak with Mr. Koerner about it.

The doctor, who after this showed himself somewhat loquacious, was a man of agreeable appearance, perhaps of about sixty years of age, with white hair, a broad high forehead and an intelligent countenance. Sound as a nut, powerfully built, of vigorous constitution and with an air of authority, he gave the idea of a man born to rule. He seemed to wish to make a good impression on us, and I remarked several times in him a searching side-glance, as though he were trying to read our thoughts. He sustained the entire conversation himself, and it was somewhat difficult to follow his meaning: he spoke in an unctuous, oratorical tone, with extreme suavity, in very general terms, and evaded all direct questions. When I had listened to him for ten minutes I was not one whit wiser than before. His language was not remarkably choice, and he used liberally a mixture of words half English, half German, as uneducated German-Americans are apt to do.

While we wandered through the orchard, the beauty and practical utility of which astonished me, the doctor, gave us a lecture on colonization, agriculture, gardening, horticulture, etc., which he flavored here and there with pious reflections. He pointed out with pride that all this was his own work, and described how he had transformed the wilderness into a garden. In the year 1856 he came with forty followers to Oregon, as a delegate from the parent association of Bethel in Missouri, in order to found in the far West, then so little known, a branch colony. At present the doctor is president both of Aurora and of the original settlement at Bethel: the latter consists of about four hundred members, the former of four hundred and ten.

When he first came into this region he found the whole district now owned by his flourishing colony covered with marsh and forest. Instead, however, of establishing himself on the prairies lying farther south, in the midst of foreign settlers, he preferred a home shared only with his German brethren in the primitive woods; and here, having at that time very small means, he obtained from the government, gratis, land enough to provide homes for his colonists, and found in the timber a source of capital, which he at once made productive. He next proceeded to build a block-house as a defence against the Indians, who at that time were hostile in Oregon: then he erected a saw-mill and cleared off the timber, part of which he used to build houses for his colonists, and with part opened an advantageous trade with his American neighbors, who, living on the prairie, were soon entirely dependent on him for all their timber. The land, once cleared, was soon cultivated and planted, with orchards: the finer varieties of fruit he shipped for sale to Portland and San Francisco, and from the sour apples he either made vinegar or sold them to the older settlers, who very soon made themselves sick on them. He then attended them in the character of physician, and cured them of their ailments at a good round charge. This joke the good doctor related with especial satisfaction.

By degrees, the doctor continued to say, the number of colonists increased; and his means and strength being thus enlarged, he established a tannery, a factory, looms, flouring-mills, built more houses for his colonists, cleared more land and drained the marshes, increased his orchards, laid out new farms, gave some attention to adornment, erected a church and school-houses, and purchased from the American settlers in the neighborhood their best lands for a song. He did everything systematically. He always assigned his colonists the sort of labor that they appeared to him best fitted for, and each one found the place best suited to his capabilities. If any one objected to doing his will and obeying his orders, he was driven out of the colony, for he would endure no opposition. He made the best leather, the best hams and gathered the best crops in all Oregon. The possessions of the colony, which he added to as he was able, extended already over twenty sections (a section contains six hundred and forty acres, or an English square mile), and the most perfect order and industry existed everywhere.

Thus the doctor; and amid this and the like conversation we walked over an orchard covering forty acres. The eight thousand trees it contained yielded annually five thousand bushels of choice apples and eight thousand of the finest pears, and the crop increased yearly. The doctor pointed out repeatedly the excellence of his culture in contrast with the American mode, which leaves the weeds to grow undisturbed among the trees, and disregards entirely all regularity and beauty. He, on the contrary, insisted no less on embellishment than on neatness and order; and this was no vain boast. Carefully-kept walks led through the grounds; verdant turf, flowerbeds and charming shady arbors met us at every turn; there were long beds planted with flourishing currant, raspberry and blackberry bushes, and large tracts set with rows of bearing vines, on which luscious grapes hung invitingly. Order also reigned among the fruit trees: here were several acres of nothing but apples, again a plantation of pears or apricots, beneath which not a weed was to be seen: the hoe and the rake had done their work thoroughly. Everything was in the most perfect order: the courtgardener of a German prince might have been proud of it.

We seated ourselves in a shady arbor, where the doctor entertained us further with an account of his religious belief. He had, he said, no fixed creed and no established religion: there were in the colony Protestants, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, indeed Christians of every name, and even Jews. Every one was at liberty to hold what faith he pleased: he preached only natural religion, and whoever shaped his life according to that would be happy. After this he enlarged on the prosperity of the colony, which was founded on the principles of natural religion, and prosed about humility, love to our neighbor, kindness and carrying religion into everything; and then back he came to Nature and himself, until my head was perfectly bewildered. I had given up long before this, in despair, any questions as to the interior organization of the colony, for the doctor either gave me evasive answers or none at all. His colonists, he asserted, loved him as a father, and he cared for them accordingly: both these assertions were undoubtedly true. The deep respect with which those whom we occasionally met lifted their hats to "the doctor"—a form of greeting by no means universal in America—bore witness to their unbounded esteem for him. Toward us also they demeaned themselves with great respect, as to noble strangers whom the doctor deigned to honor with his society. As to his care for them, no one who witnessed it could deny the exceedingly flourishing condition of the settlement. Whether, however, in all this the doctor had not a keen eye to his own interest was an afterthought which involuntarily presented itself.

As we left the orchard, the doctor pointed out to us several wheat-fields in the neighborhood, cultivated with true German love for neatness, which formed, with the pleasant dwellings adjoining, separate farms. The average yield per acre, he observed, was from twenty-five to forty bushels of wheat, and from forty to fifty of oats. He then took us into a neighboring grove, to a place where the pic-nics and holiday feasts of the colony are held: here we paused near a grassy knoll shaded by a sort of awning and surrounded by a moat. This, which bears the name of "The Temple Hill," forms the centre of a number of straight roads, which branch out from it into the woods in the shape of a fan. Not far from it I noticed a dancing ground covered by a circular open roof, and a pavilion for the music.

"At our public feasts," said the doctor, "I have all these branching roads lighted with colored lanterns, and illuminate the temple, which, with its brilliant lamps, makes quite an imposing spectacle. When we celebrate our May-day festival it looks, after dark, like a scene out of the Arabian Nights; and when, added to this, we have beautiful music and fine singing, and the young folks are enjoying the dance, it is really very pleasant. But none are permitted to set foot on the Temple Hill, nor can they do it very easily if they would. Do you know the reason, gentlemen?" Koerner opined that it might be on account of the ditch, which would be difficult to pass, in which view I agreed. "Exactly so," remarked the doctor. "This Temple Hill has an especial significance: it represents the sovereign ruler of the people, on whose head no one may tread: on that account the ditch is there."

After a walk of several hours we returned to the doctor's house, where he invited us to take a glass of homemade wine. As we had been informed that the sale and use of wine and spirits were strictly forbidden in the colony, this invitation was certainly an unprecedented exception. The wine, of which two kinds were placed before us—one made of wild grapes, and the other of currants—was very good, and was partaken of in the doctor's office. Here Mr. Koerner again brought forward his life-insurance project: the doctor gave him hopes that he would go into it, but he wished to give the matter due consideration, and to subject the advantages and disadvantages of the speculation to a strict investigation, before giving a definite answer; and with this ended our visit to the "king of Aurora."

Before leaving the colony we obtained considerable information from the members as to their interior organization and government, the results of which, as well as what I further learned respecting Doctor Keil, I will state briefly.

Should any one wish to become a member of the colony, he must, in the first place, put all his ready money into the hands of Doctor Keil: he will then be taken on trial. If the candidate satisfies the doctor, he can remain and become one of the community: should this, however, not be the case, he receives again the capital he paid in, but without interest. How long he must remain "on probation" in the colony, and work there, depends entirely on the doctor's pleasure. If a member leaves the community voluntarily—a thing almost unheard of—he receives back his capital without interest, together with a pro rata share of the earnings of the community during his membership, as appraised by the doctor.

All the ordinary necessaries of life are supplied gratuitously to the members of the community. The doctor holds the common purse, out of which all purchases are paid for, and into which go the profits from the agricultural and industrial products of the colony. If any member needs a coat or other article of clothing, flour, sugar or tobacco, he can get whatever he wants, without paying for it, at the "store:" in the same way he procures meat from the butcher and bread from the baker: spirits are forbidden except in case of sickness. The doctor also appoints the occupation of each member, so as to contribute to the best welfare of the colony—whether he shall be a farmer, a mechanic, a common laborer, or whatever he can be most usefully employed in; and the time and talents of each are regarded as belonging to the whole community, subject only to the doctor's judgment. If a member marries, a separate dwelling-house and a certain amount of land are assigned him, so that the families of the settlement are scattered about on farms. The elders of the colony support the doctor in the duties of his office by counsel and assistance.

The lands of the colony are collectively recorded in Doctor Keil's name, in order, as he says, to avoid intricate and complicated law-papers. It would, however, be for the interest of the colonists to make, a speedy change in this respect, so that the members of the community, in case of the doctor's death, might obtain each his share of the lands without litigation. Should the doctor's decease occur soon, before this alteration is made, his natural heirs could claim the whole property of the colony, and the members would be left in the lurch. He does not appear, however, to be in great haste to effect this change, though it ought to have been done long ago. It is always said among the colonists, naturally enough, that all the ground is the common property of the community. Whether the doctor fully subscribes to this opinion in his secret heart might be a question.

Doctor Keil is at the same time the religious head and the unlimited secular ruler of the colony of Aurora, and can ordain, with the consent of the elders (who very naturally uphold his authority), what he pleases. A life free from care and responsibility, such as the members of the community (who, for the most part, belong to the lower and uncultivated class) lead—a life in regard to which no one but the doctor has the trouble of thinking—is the main ground of the undisturbed continuance of the colony. The pre-eminent talent for organization, combined with the unlimited powers of command, which the doctor—justly named "king of Aurora"—possesses, together with the inborn industry peculiar to Germans, is the cause of the prosperity of the settlement, which calls itself communistic, but is certainly nothing more than a vast farm belonging to its talented founder. It has its schools, its churches, newspapers and books—the selection and tendency of which the doctor sees to—and no lack of social pleasures, music and singing. Taken together with an easily-procured livelihood, all this satisfies the desires of the colonists entirely, and the good doctor takes care of everything else.

ELIZABETH SILL.



GRAY EYES.

I have always counted it among the larger blessings of Providence that a woman can bear up year after year under a weight of dullness which would drive a man of the same mental calibre to desperation in a month.

I had no idea what a heavy burden mine had been until one day my brother asked me to go to sea with him on his next voyage. He and his wife were at the farm on their wedding-tour, and only the happiness of a bridegroom could have led him to hold out to me this way of escape. Christian's heart when he dropped his pack was not lighter than mine. Butter and cheese are good things in their way—the world would miss them if all the farmers' daughters went suddenly down to the sea in ships—but it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and such had been my feeling for some years.

So suddenly and completely did my threadbare endurance give way that if Frank had revoked his words the next minute, I must have gone away at once to some crowded place and drawn a few deep breaths of excitement before I could have joined again the broken ends of my patience.

No bride-elect poor in this world's goods ever went about the preparations for her wedding with more delicious awe than I felt in turning one old gown upside down, and another inside out, for seafaring use. There was excitement enough in the departure, the inevitable sea-changes, and finally the memory of it all, to keep my mind busy for a few weeks, but when we settled into the grooves of a tropical voyage, wafted along as easily by the trade winds as if some gigantic hand, unseen and steady, had us in its grasp, my life was wholly changed, and yet it bore an odd family resemblance to the days at the farm. It was a pleasant dullness, because, in the nature of things, it must soon have an end.

I went on deck to look at a passing ship about as often as I used to run to the window at the sound of carriagewheels. One can't take a very intimate interest in whales and the other seamonsters unless one is scientific. Time died with me a slow but by no means a painful death. I used to fold my hands and look at them by the hour, internally rollicking over the idea that there was no milk to skim or dishes to wash, or any earthly wheel in motion that required my shoulder to turn it. I spent much time in a half-awake state in the long warm days, out of sheer delight in wasting time after saving it all my life.

So it came about that I slept lightly o' nights. Every morning the steward came into the cabin with the first dawn of day to scour his floors before the captain should appear. He had a habit of talking to himself over this early labor, and one morning, more awake than usual, I found that he was praying. "O Lord, be good to me! I wasn't to blame. I would have helped her if I could. O Lord, be good to me!" and other homely entreaties were repeated again and again.

He was a meek, bowed old negro, with snowy hair, and so many wrinkles that all expression was shrunk out of his face. He was an excellent cook, but he waited on table with a manner so utterly despairing that it took away one's appetite to look at him.

For many mornings after this I listened to his prayers, which grew more and more earnest and importunate. I could not think he had done any harm with his own will. He must have been more sinned against than sinning.

He brought me a shawl one cool evening as if it were my death-warrant, and I said, in the sepulchral tone that wins confidence, "Pedro, do you always say your prayers when you are alone?"

"Yes, miss, 'board this ship."

"What's the matter with, this ship?"

"I s'pose you don't have no faith in ghosts?"

"Not much."

"White folks mostly don't," said Pedro with aggravating meekness, and turned into his pantry.

I followed him to the door, and stood in it so that he had no escape: "What has that to do with your prayers?"

"This cabin has got a ghost in it."

I looked over my shoulder into the dusk, and shivered a little, which was not lost on Pedro. He grew more solemn if possible than before: "I see her 'most every morning, and if my back is to the door, I see her all the same. She don't never touch me, but I keep at the prayers for fear she will."

"Do you never see her except in the morning?"

"Once or twice she has just put her head out of the door of the middle state-room when I was waitin' on table."

"In broad daylight?"

"Sartin. Them as sees ghosts sees 'em any time. Every morning, just at peep o' day, she comes out of that door and makes a dive for the stairs. She just gives me one look, and holds up her hand, and I don't see no more of her till next time."

"How does she look?" I almost hoped he would not tell, but he did.

"She's got hair as black as a coal, kind o' pushed back, as if she'd been runnin' her hands through it; she has big shiny eyes, swelled up as she'd been cryin' a great while; and she's always got on a gray dress, silvery-like, with a tear in one sleeve. There ain't nothin' more, only a handkerchief tied round her wrist, as if it had been hurt."

"Is she handsome?"

"Mebbe white folks'd think so."

"Why does she show herself to you and no one else, do you suppose?"

"Didn't I tell you the reason before?"

"Of course you didn't."

"Well, you see, she looked just so the last time I seen her alive. I must go and put in the biscuit now, miss."

I submitted, knowing that white folks may be hurried, but black ones never; and I could not but admire the natural talent which Pedro shared with the authors of continued stories, of always dropping the thread at the most thrilling moment.

"Who was she?" said I, lying in wait for him on his return.

"She was cap'n's wife, miss—a young woman, and the cap'n was old, with a blazing kind of temper. He was dreffle sweet on her for about a month, and mebbe she was happy, mebbe she wa'n't: how should I know about white folks' feelin's? All of a suddent he said she was sick and couldn't go out of the middle state-room. The old man took in plenty of stuff to eat, but he never let me go near her. We was on just such a v'y'ge as this, only hotter. The cap'n would come out of that room lookin' black as thunder, and everybody scudded out of his sight when he put his head out of the gangway.

"He was always bad enough, but he got wuss and wuss, and nothin' couldn't please him. Sometimes I'd hear the poor thing a-moaning to herself like a baby that's beat out with loud cryin' and hain't got no noise left. She was always cryin' in them days. Once the supercargo (he was a cool hand, any way) give me a bit of paper very private to give to her, and I slipped it under the door, but the old man had nailed somethin' down inside, an' he found it afore she did. Then there was a regular knockdown fight, and the supercargo was put in irons. The old man was in the middle room a long time that day, talkin' in a hissin' kind of a way, and the missus got a blow. Just after that a sort of a white squall struck the ship, and the old man give just the wrong orders. You see, he was clean out of his head. He got so worked up at last that he fell down in a fit, and they bundled him into his state-room and left him, 'cause nobody cared whether he was dead or alive. The mate took the irons off the supercargo first thing, and broke open the middle room. The supercargo went in there and stayed a long time, whispering to the missus, and she cried more'n ever, only it sounded different.

"Toward night the old man come to, and begun to ask questions—as ugly as ever, only as weak as a baby. 'Bout midnight I was comin' out of his room, and I seen the missus in a gray dress, with her eyes shinin' like coals of fire, dive out of her room and up the stairs, and nobody never seen her afterward. The next morning the supercargo was gone too, and I think they just drownded themselves, 'cause they couldn't bear to live any more without each other. Mebbe the mate knew somethin' about it, but he never let on, and I dunno no more about it; only the old man had another fit when he heard it, and died without no mourners."

"It might be she was saved, after all," I said, with true Yankee skepticism.

"Then why should I see her ghost, if she ain't dead-drownded?"

"Did you never find anything in the state-room that would explain?"

"Well, I did find some bits of paper, but I couldn't read writin'."

"Oh, what did you do with them?" I insisted, quivering with excitement.

"You won't tell the cap'n?"

"No, never."

"You'll give 'em back to me?"

"Yes, yes—of course."

"Here they be," he said, opening his shirt, and showing a little bag hung round his neck like an amulet. He took out a little wad of brown paper, and gave it jealously into my hand.

"I will give it back to you to-night," I said with the solemnity of an oath, and carried it to my room.

It proved to be a short and fragmentary account of the sufferings which the "missus" had endured in the middle room, written in pencil on coarse wrapping-paper, and bearing marks of trembling hands and frequent tears. I thought I might copy the papers without breaking faith with Pedro. The outside paper bore these words:

"Whoever finds this is besought for pity's sake, by its most unhappy writer, to send it as soon as possible to Mrs. Jane Atwood of Davidsville, Connecticut, United States of America."

Then followed a letter to her mother:

Dearest Mother: If I never see your blessed face again, I know you will not believe me guilty of what my husband accuses me of. I married Captain Eliot for your sake, believing, since Herbert had proved faithless, that no comfort was left to me except in pleasing others. I meant to be a good wife to Captain Eliot, and I believe I should have kept my vow all my days if the most unfortunate thing had not wakened his jealousy. Since then he has been almost or quite crazed.

I knew we had a supercargo of whom Captain Eliot spoke highly. He kept his room for a month from sea-sickness, and when he came out it was Herbert. Of course I knew him, every line of his face had been so long written on my heart. I strove to treat him as if I had never seen him before, but the old familiar looks and tones were very hard to bear. If Herbert could only have submitted patiently to our fate! But it was not in him to be patient under anything, and one evening, when I was sitting alone on deck, he must needs pour out his soul in one great burst, trying to prove that he had never deserted me, but only circumstances had been cruel. I longed to believe him, but I could only keep repeating that it was too late.

When I went down, Captain Eliot dragged me into the middle state-room, and gave vent to his jealous feelings. He must have listened to all that Herbert had said. His last words were that I should never leave that room alive. I had a wretched night, and the first time I fell into an uneasy sleep I started suddenly up to find my husband flashing the light of a lantern across my eyes. "Handsome and wicked," he muttered—"they always go together."

I begged him to listen to the story of my engagement to Herbert, and he did listen, but it did not soften his heart. If he ever loved me, his jealousy has swallowed it up.

I have been in this room just a week. My husband does not starve or beat me, but his taunts and threats are fearful, and his eyes when he looks at me grow wild, as if he had the longing of a beast to tear me in pieces.

* * * * *

May 10. I placed a copy of the paper that is pinned to this letter in a little bottle that had escaped my husband's search, and threw it out of my window.

I am Waitstill Atwood Eliot, wife of Captain Eliot of the ship Sapphire. I have been kept in solitary confinement and threatened with death for four weeks, for no just cause. I believe him to be insane, as he constantly threatens to burn or sink the ship. I pray that this paper may be picked up by some one who will board this ship and bring me help.

Of course it is a most forlorn hope, but it keeps me from utter despair.

20. Herbert tried to communicate with me by slipping a paper under the door, but I did not get it, and he has been put in irons. Captain Eliot boasts of it. I wish he would bind us together and let us drown in one another's arms, as they did in the Huguenot persecution.

28. A little paper tied to a string hung in front of my bull's-eye window to-day: I took it in. The first officer had lowered it down: "Captain Eliot says you are ill, but I don't believe it. If he tries violence, scream, and I will break open the door. I am always on the watch. Keep your heart up."

This is a drop of comfort in my black cup, but my little window was screwed down within an hour after I had read the paper.

June 10. My spirit is worn out: I can endure no more. I have begged my husband to kill me and end my misery. I don't know why he hesitated. He means to do it some time, but perhaps he cannot think of torture exquisite enough for his purpose.

11. My husband came in about four in the afternoon, looking so vindictive that my heart stood still. He gradually worked himself into a frenzy, and aimed a blow at my head: instinct, rather than the love of life, made me parry it, and I got the stroke on my wrist.

I screamed, and at the same moment there was a tumult on deck, and the ship quivered as if she too had been violently struck. Captain Eliot rushed on deck, and began to give hurried orders. I could hear the first officer contradict them, and then there was a heavy fall, and two or three men stumbled down the cabin stairs, carrying some weight between them.

Later. My husband is helpless, and Herbert has been with me, urging me passionately to trust myself to him in a little boat at midnight. He says there are several ships in sight, and one of them will be almost sure to pick us up. He swears that he will leave me, and never see me again (if I say so), so soon as he has placed me in safety, but he will save me, by force if need be, from the brute into whose hands I fell so innocently. If the ship does not see us, it is but dying, after all.

Good-bye, mother! I pray that this paper will reach you before Captain Eliot can send you his own account, but if it does not, you will believe me innocent all the same.

This was the last, and I folded up the papers as they had come to me. That night I read them all to Pedro.

"They was drownded—I knew it," said Pedro; and nothing could remove that opinion. A ghost is more convincing than logic.

Our voyage wore on, with one day just like another: my brother looked at the sun every day, and put down a few cabalistic figures on a slate, but his steady business was reading novels to his wife and drinking weak claret and water.

The sea was always the same, smiling and smooth, and the "man at the wheel" seemed to be always holding us back by main strength from the place where we wanted to go. I had a growing belief that we should sail for ever on this rippling mirror and never touch the frame of it. It struck me with a sense of intense surprise when a dark line loomed far ahead, and they told me quietly that that line meant Bombay.

It seemed a matter of course to my brother that the desired port should heave in sight just when he expected it, but to me the efforts that he had made to accomplish this tremendous result were ridiculously small.

"I have done more work in a week, and had nothing to show for it at last," said I, "than you have seemed to do in all this voyage."

"Poor sister! don't you wish you were a man?"

"Certainly, all women do who have any sense. I hold with that ancient Father of the Church who maintained that all women are changed into men on the judgment-day. The council said it was heresy, but that don't alter my faith."

"I shouldn't like you half as well if you had been born a boy," said Frank.

"But I should like myself vastly better," said I, clinging to the last word.

Bombay is a city by itself: there is none like it on earth, whatever there may be in the heaven above or in the waters under it. From Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy's hospital for sick animals to the Olympian conceit of the English residents, there are infinite variations of people and things that I am persuaded can be matched nowhere else. I felt myself living in a series of pictures, a sort of supernumerary in a theatre, where they changed the play every night.

One of the first who boarded our ship was Mr. Rayne, an old friend of Frank's. He insisted on our going to his house for a few days in a warm-hearted way that was irresistible.

"Are you quite sure you want me?" I said dubiously. "Young married people make a kind of heaven for themselves, and do not want old maids looking over the wall."

"But you must go with us," said Frank, man-like, never seeing anything but the uppermost surface of a question.

"Not at all. I'm quite strong-minded enough to stay on board ship; or, if that would not do in this heathen place, the missionaries are always ready to entertain strangers. A week in the missionhouse would make me for ever a shining light in the sewing circle at home.

"A woman of so many resources would be welcome anywhere. For my part, an old maid is a perfect Godsend. The genus is unknown here, and the loss to society immense," said Mr. Rayne.

"But what shall I do when Mrs. Rayne and my sister-in-law are comparing notes about the perfections of their husbands?"

"Walk on the verandah with me and convert me to woman suffrage."

Mr. Rayne had his barouche waiting on shore, and drove us first to the bandstand, where, in the coolness of sunset, all the Bombay world meet to see and to be seen. When the band paused, people drove slowly round the circle, seeking acquaintance. Among them one equipage was perfect—a small basket-phaeton, and two black ponies groomed within an inch of their lives. My eyes fell on the ponies first, but I saw them no more when the lady who drove them turned her face toward me.

She wore a close-fitting black velvet habit and a little round hat with long black feather. Her hair might have been black velvet, too, as it fell low on her forehead, and was fastened somehow behind in a heavy coil. Black brows and lashes shaded clear gray eyes—the softest gray, without the least tint of green in them—such eyes as Quaker maidens ought to have under their gray bonnets. Little rose colored flushes kept coming and going in her cheeks as she talked.

All at once I thought of Queen Guinevere,

As she fled fast thro' sun and shade, With jingling bridle-reins.

"Mr. Rayne, do you see that lady in black, with the ponies?"

"Plainly."

"If I were a man, that woman would be my Fate."

"I thought women never admired each other's beauty."

"You are mistaken. Heretofore I have met beautiful women only in poetry. Do you remember four lines about Queen Guinevere?—no, six lines, I mean:

"She looked so lovely as she swayed The rein with dainty finger-tips, A man had given all other bliss, And all his worldly worth for this, To waste his whole heart in one kiss Upon her perfect lips.

"I always thought them overstrained till now."

"I perfectly agree with you," said Mr. Rayne: "I knew we were congenial spirits." Then he said a word or two in a diabolical language to his groom, who ran to the carriage which I had been watching and repeated it to the lady: she bowed and smiled to Mr. Rayne, and soon drew up her ponies beside us.

"My wife," said Mr. Rayne with laughter in his eyes.

Mrs. Rayne talked much like other people, and her beauty ceased to dazzle me after a few minutes; not that it grew less on near view, but, being a woman, I could not fall in love with her in the nature of things.

When the music stopped we drove to Mr. Rayne's house, his wife keeping easily beside us. When she was occupied with the others Mr. Rayne whispered, "Her praises were so sweet in my ears that I would not own myself Sir Lancelot at once."

"If you are Sir Lancelot," I said, "where is King Arthur?"

"Forty fathoms deep, I hope," said Mr. Rayne with a sudden change in his voice and a darkening face. I had raised a ghost for him without knowing it, and he spoke no more till we reached the house.

It was a long, low, spreading structure with a thatched roof, and a verandah round it. A wilderness of tropical plants hemmed it in. But all appearance of simplicity vanished on our entrance. In the matted hall stood a tree to receive the light coverings we had worn; not a "hat tree," as we say at home by poetic license, but the counterfeit presentment of a real tree, carved in branches and delicate foliage out of black wood. The drawing-room was eight-sided, and would have held, with some margin, the gambrel-roofed house, chimneys and all, in which I had spent my life. Two sides were open into other rooms, with Corinthian pillars reaching to the roof. Carved screens a little higher than our heads filled the space between the pillars, and separated the drawing-room from Mrs. Rayne's boudoir on the side and the dining-room on the other.

The furniture of these rooms was like so many verses of a poem. Every chair and table had been designed by Mrs. Rayne, and then realized in black wood by the patient hands of natives.

Another side opened by three glass doors on a verandah, and only a few rods below the house the sea dashed against a beach.

After dinner I sat on the verandah drinking coffee and the sea-breeze by turns. The gentlemen walked up and down smoking the pipe of peace, while Mrs. Rayne sat within, talking with Rhoda in the candlelight. Opposite me, as I looked in at the open door, hung two Madonnas, the Sistine and the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. In front of each stood a tall flower-stand carved to imitate the leaves and blossoms of the calla lily. These black flowers held great bunches of the Annunciation lily, sacred to the Virgin through all the ages. Mrs. Rayne had taken off the close-buttoned jacket, and her dress was now open at the throat, with some rich old lace clinging about it and fastened with a pearl daisy.

"Have you forgiven me the minute's deception I put upon you?" said Mr. Rayne, pausing beside me. "If I had not read admiration in your face, I would have told you the truth at once."

"How could one help admiring her?"

"I don't know, I'm sure: I never could."

"She has the serenest face, like still, shaded water. I wonder how she would look in trouble?"

"It is not becoming to her."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite."

"Your way of life here seems so perfect! No hurry nor worry—nothing to make wrinkles."

"You like this smooth Indian living, then?"

"Like it! I hope you won't think me wholly given over to love of things that perish in the using, but if I could live this sort of life with the one I liked best, heaven would be a superfluity."

"It is heaven indeed when I think of the purgatory from which we came into it," said Mr. Rayne, throwing away his cigar and carrying off my coffee-cup.

"Do you know anything of Mrs. Rayne's history before her marriage?" I said to Frank as I joined him in his walk.

"Nothing to speak of—only she was a widow."

"Oh!" said I, feeling that a spot or two had suddenly appeared on the face of the sun.

"That's nothing against her, is it?"

"No, but I have no patience with second marriages."

"Nor first ones, either," said Frank wickedly.

"But seriously, Frank—would you like to have a wife so beautiful as Mrs. Rayne?"

"Yes, if she had Rhoda's soul inside of her," said Frank stoutly.

"I shouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Because all sorts of eyes gloat on her beauty and drink it in, and in one way appropriate it to themselves. Mr. Rayne is as proud of the admiration given to his wife as if it were a personal tribute to his own taste in selecting her. A beautiful woman never really and truly belongs to her husband unless he can keep a veil over her face, as the Turks do."

"I knew you had 'views,'" said Mr. Rayne behind me, "but I had no idea they were so heathenish. What is New England coming to under the new rule? Are the plain women going to shut up all the handsome ones?"

"I was only supposing a case."

"Suppositions are dangerous. You first endure, then dally with them, and finally embrace them as established facts."

"I was only saying that if I am a man when I come into the world next time (as the Hindoos say), I shall marry a plain woman with a charming disposition, and so, as it were, have my diamond all to myself by reason of its dull cover."

"Jealousy, thy name is woman!" said Mr. Rayne. "When the Woman's Republic is set up, how I shall pity the handsome ones!"

"They will all be banished to some desert island," said Frank.

"And draw all men after them, as the 'Pied Piper of Hamelin' did the rats," said Mr. Rayne.

"What are you talking about?" said Mrs. Rayne, joining us at this point.

"The pity of it," said her husband, "that beauty is only skin deep."

"That is deep enough," said Mrs. Rayne.

"Yes, if age and sickness and trouble did not make one shed it so soon," said I ungratefully.

"Don't mention it," said Mrs. Rayne—"'tis bad enough when it comes. Do you remember that Greek woman in Lothair, whose father was so fearfully rich that she seemed to be all crusted with precious stones?"

"Perfectly."

"To dance and sing was all she lived for, and Lothair must needs bring in the skeleton, as you did, by reminding her of the dolorous time when she would neither dance nor sing. You think she is crushed, to be sure, only Disraeli's characters never are crushed, any more than himself. 'Oh then,' she says, 'we will be part of the audience, and other people will dance and sing for us.' So beauty is always with us, though one person loses it."

She gave a little shrug of her shoulders, which made her pearls and velvet shimmer in the moonlight. She looked so white and cool and perfect, so apart from common clay, that all at once Queen Guinevere ceased to be my type of her, and I thought of "Lilith, first wife of Adam," as we see her in Rossetti's fanciful poem:

Not a drop of her blood was human, But she was made like a soft, sweet woman.

We all went to our rooms after this, and in each of ours hung a full-length swinging mirror; I had never seen one before, except in a picture-shop or in a hotel.

"Truly this is 'richness'!" I said, walking up and down and sideways from one to the other.

"I had no idea you had so much vanity," said Frank, laughing at me, as he has done ever since he was born.

"Vanity! not a spark. I am only seeing myself as others see me, for the first time."

"I always had a glass like that in my room at home," said my sister-in-law, with the least morsel of disdain in her tone.

"Had you? Then you have lost a great deal by growing up to such things. A first sensation at my age is delightful."

Next day Rhoda and I were sitting with Mrs. Rayne in her dressing-room, with a great fan swinging overhead. We all had books in our hands, but I found more charming reading in my hostess, whose fascinations hourly grew upon me.

She wore a long loose wrapper, clear blue in color, with little silver stars on it. I don't know how much of my admiration sprang from her perfect taste in dress. Raiment has an extraordinary effect on the whole machinery of life. Most people think too lightly of it. Somebody says if Cleopatra's nose had been a quarter of an inch shorter, the history of the world would have been utterly changed; but Antony might equally have been proof against a robe with high neck and tight sleeves. Mrs. Rayne's face always seemed to crown her costume like a rose out of green leaves, yet I cannot but think that if I had seen her first in a calico gown and sitting on a three-legged stool milking a cow, I should still have thought her a queen among women.

While I sat like a lotos-eater, forgetful of home and butter-making, a servant brought in a parcel and a note. Mrs. Rayne tossed the note to me while she unfolded a roll of gray silk.

Dear Guinevere: I send with this a bit of silk that old Fut'ali insisted on giving to me this morning. It is that horrid gray color which we both detest. I know you will never wear it, and you had better give it to Miss Blake to make a toga for her first appearance in the women's Senate. LANCELOT.

"With all my heart!" said Mrs. Rayne as I gave back the note. "You will please us both far more than you can please yourself by wearing the dress with a thought of us. I wonder why Mr. Rayne calls me 'Guinevere'? But he has a new name for me every day, because he does not like my own."

"What is it?"

"Waitstill. Did you ever hear it?"

"Never but once," I said with a sudden tightness in my throat. I could scarcely speak my thanks for the dress.

"I should never wear it," said Mrs. Rayne: "the color is associated with a very painful part of my life."

"Do you suppose water would spot it?" asked Rhoda, who is of a practical turn of mind.

"Take a bit and try it."

"Water spots some grays" said Mrs. Rayne with a strange sort of smile as Rhoda went out, "especially salt water. I spent one night at sea in an open boat, with a gray dress clinging wet and salt to my limbs. When I tore it off in rags I seemed to shed all the misery I had ever known. All my life since then has been bright as you see it now. It would be a bad omen to put on a gray gown again."

"Then you have made a sea-voyage, Mrs. Rayne?"

"Yes, such a long voyage!—worse than the 'Ancient Mariner's.' No words can tell how I hate the sea." She sighed deeply, with a sudden darkening of her gray eyes till they were almost black, and grasped one wrist hard with the other hand.

A sudden trembling seized me. I was almost as much agitated as Mrs. Rayne. I felt that I must clinch the matter somehow, but I took refuge in a platitude to gain time: "There is such a difference in ships, almost as much as in houses, and the comfort of the voyage depends greatly on that."

"It may be so," she said wearily.

"My brother's ship is old, but it has been refitted lately to something like comfort. It's old name was the Sapphire."

This was my shot, and it hit hard.

"The Sapphire! the Sapphire!" she whispered with dilated eyes. "Did you ever hear—did you ever find—But what nonsense! You must think me the absurdest of women."

The color came back to her face, and she laughed quite naturally.

"The fact is, Miss Blake, I was very ill and miserable when I was on shipboard, and to this day any sudden reminder of it gives me a shock.—Did water spot it?" she said to Rhoda, who came in at this point.

I thought over all the threads of the circumstance that had come into my hand, and like Mr. Browning's lover I found "a thing to do."

The next morning I made an excuse to go down to the ship with my brother, and there, by dint of pressure, I got those stained and dingy papers into my possession again. I had only that day before me, for we were going to a hotel the same evening, and the Raynes were to set out next day for their summer place among the hills, a long way back of Bombay. Our stay had already delayed their departure.

This was my plot: Mrs. Rayne had been reading a book that I had bought for the home-voyage, and was to finish it before evening. I selected the duplicate of the paper which "Waitstill Atwood Eliot" had put in a bottle and cast adrift when her case had been desperate, and laid it in the book a page or two beyond Mrs. Rayne's mark. It seemed impossible that she could miss it: I watched her as a chemist watches his first experiment.

Twice she took up the book, and was interrupted before she could open it: the third time she sat down so close to me that the folds of her dress touched mine. One page, two pages: in another instant she would have turned the leaf, and I held my breath, when a servant brought in a note. Her most intimate friend had been thrown from her carriage, and had sent for her. It was a matter of life and death, and brooked no delay. In ten minutes she had bidden us a cordial good-bye, and dropped out of my life for all time.

She never finished my book, nor I hers. I had had it in my heart, in return for her warm hospitality, to cast a great stone out of her past life into the still waters of her present, and her good angel had turned it aside just before it reached her. I might have asked Mr. Rayne in so many words if his wife's name had been Waitstill Atwood Eliot when he married her, but that would have savored of treachery to her, and I refrained.

Often in the long calm days of the home-voyage, and oftener still in the night-watches, I pondered in my heart the items of Mrs. Rayne's history, and pieced them together like bits of mosaic—the gray eyes and the gray dress, the identity of name, the indefinite terrors of her sea-voyage, the little touch concerning Lancelot and Guinevere, her emotion when I mentioned the Sapphire. If circumstantial evidence can be trusted, I feel certain that Pedro's ghost appeared to me in the flesh.

ELLA WILLIAMS THOMPSON.



REMINISCENCES OF FLORENCE.

I had six months more to stay on the Continent, and I began for the first time to be discontented in Paris. There was no soul in that great city whom I had ever seen before, but this alone would hot have been sufficient to make me long for a change, except for an accident which unluckily surrounded me with my own countrymen. These I did not go abroad to see; and having lived almost entirely in the society of the French for over two years, it was with dismay that I saw my sanctum invaded daily by twos and threes of the aimless American nonentities who presume that their presence must be agreeable to any of their countrymen, and especially to any countrywoman, after a chance introduction on the boulevard or an hour spent together in a cafe.

"Seeing these things," I determined to leave Paris, and the third day after found me traveling through picturesque Savoy toward Mont Cenis. All the afternoon the rugged hills had been growing higher and whiter with snow, and now, just before sunset, we reached the railway terminus, St. Michel, and were under the shadow of the Alps themselves.

The previous night in the cars I had found myself the only woman among some half dozen French military officers, who paid me the most polite attention. They were charmed that I made no objection to their cigarettes, talked with me on various topics, criticised McClellan as a general, and were enthusiastic on the subject of our country generally. About midnight they prepared a grand repast from their traveling-bags, to which they gave me a cordial invitation. I begged to contribute my mesquin supply of grapes and brioches, and the supper was a considerable event. Their canteens were filled with red wines, and one cup served the whole company. They drank my health and that of the President of the United States. Afterward we had vocal music, two of the officers being good singers. They sang Beranger's songs and the charming serenade from Lalla Rookh. I finally expressed a desire to hear the Marseillaise. This seemed to take them by surprise, but one of the singers, declaring that he had "rien a refuser a madame" boldly struck up,

Allons, enfants de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrive;

but his companions checked him before he had finished the first stanza. The law forbade, they said, the production of the Marseillaise in society. We were a society: the guard would hear us and might report it.

"Vous voyez, madame," said the singer, "n'il n'est pas defendu d'etre voleur, mais c'est defendu d'etre attrape" (It is not against the law to be a thief, but to be caught.)

My traveling—companions reached their destination early in the morning, and, very gallantly expressing regrets that they were not going over the Alps, so as to bear mer company, bade me farewell.

From the rear of the St. Michel hotel, called the Lion d'Or, I watched the preparations for crossing Mont Cenis. Three diligences were being crazily loaded with our baggage. The men who loaded them seemed imitating the Alpine structure. They piled trunk on trunk to the height of thirty feet, I verily believe; and if some one should nudge my elbow and say "fifty," I should write it down so without manifesting the least surprise.

When the preparations were finished the setting sun was shining clearly on the white summits above, and we commenced slowly winding up the noble zigzag road. Rude mountain children kept up with our diligences, asked for sous and wished us bon voyage in the name of the Virgin.

The grandeur, but especially the extent and number, of the Alpine peaks impressed me with a vague, undefinable sense, which was not, I think, the anticipated sensation; and indeed if I had been in a poetic mood, it would have been quickly dissipated by the mock raptures of a young Englishman with a poodly moustache and an eye-glass. He called our attention to every chasm, gorge and waterfall, as if we had been wholly incapable of seeing or appreciating anything without his aid. As for me, I did not feel like disputing his susceptibility. I was suffering an uneasy apprehension of an avalanche—not of snow, but of trunks and boxes from the topheavy diligences ahead of us. However, we reached the top of Mont Cenis safely by means of thirteen mules to each coach, attached tandem, and we stopped at the queer relay-house there some thirty minutes. Here some women in the garb of nuns served me some soup with grated cheese, a compound which suggested a dishcloth in flavor, yet it was very good. I will not attempt to reconcile the two statements. After the soup I went out to see the Alps. The ecstatic Briton was still eating and drinking, and I could enjoy the scene unmolested. I crossed a little bridge near the inn. The night was cold and bright. Hundreds of snowy peaks above, below and in every direction, some of their hoary heads lost in the clouds, were glistening in the light of a clear September moon, and the stillness was only broken by a wild stream tumbling down the precipices which I looked up to as I crossed the bridge. It was indeed an impressive scene—cold, desolate, awful. I walked so near the freezing cataract that the icicles touched my face, and thinking that Dante, when he wrote his description of hell, might have been inspired by this very scene, I wrapped my cloak closer about me and went back to the inn.

The diligences were ready, and we commenced a descent which I cannot even now think of without a shudder. To each of those heavily-laden stages were attached two horses only, and we bounded down the mountain-side like a huge loosened boulder. Imagine the sensation as you looked out of the windows and saw yourself whirling over yawning chasms and along the brinks of dizzy precipices, fully convinced that the driver was drunk and the horses goaded to madness by Alpine demons! I have been on the ocean in a storm sufficiently severe to make Jew and Christian pray amicably together; I have been set on fire by a fluid lamp, and have been dragged under the water by a drowning friend, but I think I never had such an alarming sense of coming destruction as in that diligence. I think of those sure-footed horses even now with gratitude.

We arrived at Susa a long time before daylight. At first, I decided to stay and see this town, which was founded by a Roman colony in the time of Augustus. The arch built in his honor about eight years before Christ seemed a thing worth going to see; but a remark from my companion with the eye-glass made me determine to go on. He said he was going to "do" the arch, and I knew I should not be equal to witnessing any more of his ecstasies.

My first astonishment in Italy was that hardly any of the railroad officials spoke French. I had always been told that with that language at your command you could travel all over the Continent. This is a grave error: even in Florence, although "Ici on parle francais" is conspicuous in many shop-windows, I found I had to speak Italian or go unserved. I had a mortal dread of murdering the beautiful Italian language; so I wanted to speak it well before I commenced, like the Irishman who never could get his boots on until he had worn them a week.

I stopped at Turin, then the capital of Italy, only a short time, and hurried on to Florence, for that was to be my home for the winter. It was delightful to come down from the Alpine snows and find myself face to face with roses and orange trees bearing fruit and blossom. Here I wandered through the olive-gardens alone, and gave way to the rapturous sense of simply being in the land of art and romance, the land of love and song; for there was no ecstatic person with me armed with Murray and prepared to admire anything recommended therein. Besides, I could enjoy Italy for days and months, and therefore was not obliged to "do" (detestable tourist slang!) anything in a given time. I was free as a bird. I knew no Americans in Florence, and determined to studiously avoid making acquaintances except among Italians, for I wished to learn the language as I had learned French, by constantly speaking it and no other.

The day following my arrival in Florence I went out to look for lodgings, which I had the good fortune to find immediately. I secured the first I looked at. They were in the Borgo SS. Apostoli, in close proximity to the Piazza del Granduca, now Delia Signoria. I was passing this square, thinking of my good luck in finding my niche for the winter, when, much to my surprise, some one accosted me in English. Think of my dismay at seeing one of the irrepressible Paris bores I had fled from! He was in Florence before me, having come by a different route; and neither of us had known anything about the other's intention to quit Paris. He asked me at once where I was stopping, and I told him at the Hotel a la Fontana, not deeming it necessary to add that I was then on my way there to pack up my traveling-bag and pay my bill. As he was "doing" Florence in about three days, he never found me out. The next I heard of him he was "doing" Rome. This American prided himself on his knowledge of Italian; and one day in a restaurant, wishing for cauliflower (cavolo fiore), he astonished the waiter by calling for horse. "Cavallo"! he roared—"Portez me cavallo!" "Cavallo!" repeated the waiter, with the characteristic Italian shrug. "Non simangia in Italia, signore" (It is not eaten in Italy, signore). Then followed more execrable Italian, and the waiter brought him something which elicited "Non volo! non volo!" (I don't fly! I don't fly!) from the American, and "Lo credo, signore" from the baffled waiter, much to the amusement of people at the adjacent tables.

I liked my new quarters very much. They consisted of two goodly-sized rooms, carpeted with thick braided rag carpets, and decently furnished, olive oil provided for the quaint old classic-shaped lamp, and the rooms kept in order, for the astounding price of thirty francs a month. Wood I had to pay extra for when I needed a fire, and that indeed was expensive; for a bundle only sufficient to make a fire cost a franc. There were few days, however, even in that exceptional winter, which rendered a fire necessary. The scaldino for the feet was generally sufficient, and this, replenished three times a day, was included in the rent.

One of my windows looked out on olive-gardens and on the old church San Miniato, on the hill of the same name. Mr. Hart, the sculptor, told me that those rooms were very familiar to him. Buchanan Read, I think he said, had occupied them, and the walls in many places bore traces of artist vagaries. There were several nice caricatures penciled among the cheap frescoes of the walls. All the walls are frescoed in Florence. Think of having your ceiling and walls painted in a manner that constantly suggests Michael Angelo!

After some weeks spent in looking at the art-wonders in Florence, I visited many of the studios of our artists. That of Mr. Hart, on the Piazza Independenza, was one of the most interesting. He had two very admirable busts of Henry Clay, and all his visitors, encouraged by his frank manner, criticised his works freely. Most people boldly pass judgment on any work of art, and "understand" Mrs. Browning when she says the Venus de' Medici "thunders white silence." I do not. I am sure I never can understand what a thundering silence means, whatever may be its color. These appreciators talked of the "word-painting" of Mrs. Browning.

They sit on their thrones in a purple sublimity, And grind down men's bones to a pale unanimity.

I suppose this is "word-painting." I can see the picture also—some kings, and possibly queens, seated on gorgeous thrones, engaged in the festive occupation of grinding bones! Oh, I degrade the subject, do I? Nonsense! The term is a stilted affectation, perhaps never better applied than to Mrs. Browning's descriptive spasms. Still, she was undoubtedly a poet. She wrote many beautiful subjective poems, but she wrote much that was not poetry, and which suggests only a deranged nervous system. I have a friend who maintains from her writings that she never loved, that she did not know what passion meant. However this may be, the author of the sonnet commencing—