The immense uncut Peruvian emerald given by Rudolph II. to the elector of Saxony is still preserved in the Green Vaults at Dresden. This collection is the finest in the world, and is of the value of many millions of dollars. The treasures are arranged in eight apartments, each surpassing the previous one in the splendor and richness of its contents. This museum dates from the early period when the Freyburg silver-mines yielded vast revenues, and made the Saxon princes among the richest sovereigns in Europe. With lavish hand these potentates purchased jewels and works of art, and the treasures they have thus accumulated are of immense value, and remind the traveler of the gorgeous descriptions of Oriental magnificence.

The finest emerald in Europe is said to belong to the emperor of Russia. It weighs but thirty carats, but it is of the most perfect transparency and of the most beautiful color. There are many other fine emeralds among the imperial jewels of the czar, some of which are of great size and rare beauty. The ancient crown of Vladimir glitters with four great stones of unusual brilliancy. The grand state sceptre is surmounted by another emerald of great size. The sceptre of Poland, which is now treasured in the Kremlin, has a long green stone, fractured in the middle. It is not described, and may be one of the Siberian tourmalines, some of which closely approach the emerald in hue. The imperial orb of Russia, which is of Byzantine workmanship of the tenth century, has fifty emeralds. This fact alone would seem to prove that emeralds were known in Europe or Asia Minor long before the discovery of America; but, on the other hand, the ancient crown which was taken when Kasan was subjugated in 1553 is destitute of emeralds. And hence we are inclined to believe the imperial orb to be of modern workmanship, especially as some of the ancient state chairs do not exhibit emeralds among their decorations of gems and precious stones.

Nowhere in North America do the true emeralds occur. Professor Cleaveland, who was one of the best authorities of his day, maintained nearly half a century ago that emeralds which exhibited a lively and beautiful green hue were found in blasting a canal through a ledge of graphic granite in the town of Topsham in Maine. Several of the crystals presented so pure, uniform and rich a green that he ventured to pronounce them precious emeralds. But to-day we are unable to verify the assertion, or point to a single specimen similar in hue to the emerald from the above-mentioned locality.

The nearest approach to the emerald in color, with the exception of the incomparable green tourmalines from Maine, are the beryls of North and South Royalston in the State of Massachusetts. These beautiful stones exhibit the physical, characteristics of emeralds with the exception of the color, in which they differ very perceptibly. But to appreciate fully the difference in hue we must compare the two gems. Then the lively green of the beryl fades away before the overpowering hue of the emerald, whose rich prismatic green may be taken as the purest type of that color known to the chemist or the painter.

Two summers ago we visited the localities in Massachusetts which were famous in the days of Hitchcock and Webster. We found that the beryls occurred in a very coarse granite, where the quartz appeared in masses and the felspar in huge crystals. These also occur in finer granite, and exhibit no indications of veins or connection with each other. They are few in number, and are soon exhausted by blasting, being generally very superficial. After removing several tons of the rock at the locality at North Royalston, where the beryls appear on the summit of the loftiest hill, our labors were at length rewarded with two beautiful crystals. One of them was a fine prism an inch in diameter, of perfect transparency and of a deep sea-green color, which, however is far from being similar to the transcendent hue of the Granada emeralds, which exhibit an excess of neither blue nor yellow. The other was yellowish-green, resembling the chrysoberyls of Brazil.

Other but imperfect crystals were brought to light, some fragments of which exhibited the deepest golden tints of the topaz, and others the tints of the sherry-wine colored topazes of Siberia. Magnificent crystals have been found in these localities in times long past, and from the fragments and sections of crystals found in the debris of early explorations we observed the wide range of color and the deep longitudinal striae which characterize the renowned beryls from the Altai Mountains, in Siberia. Lively sea- and grass-green, light and deep yellow, also blue crystals of various shades, have been found here.

At the quarries on Rollestone Mountain in Fitchburg beryls of a rich golden color have been blasted out. Some of these approach the chrysoberyl and topaz in hardness and hue. Others so closely resemble the yellow diamond that they may readily be taken for that superior gem. The refractive power of these yellow stones is remarkable, and the goniometer will probably reveal a higher index than is accorded to all the varieties of beryl by the learned Abbe Hauey.

Beautiful transparent beryls have been found among the granite hills of Oxford county in Maine, and the late Governor Lincoln nearly half a century ago possessed a splendid crystal which would have rivaled the superb prism found at Mouzzinskaia, and which the Russians value so highly. The extended and unexplored ledges of granite which rise from the shores of the ocean at Harpswell in Maine, and stretch north-westward for nearly a hundred miles, quite to the base of the White Mountain group, are not only rich in beryls, but they contain many of the rarest minerals known to the mineralogist. And perhaps there is no other field of equal extent in the country which offers to the mineralogist such a harvest of the rare and curious productions of the mineral kingdom.

At Haddam in Connecticut beautiful crystals of beryl have been discovered, and one of these, of fine green color, an inch in diameter and several inches in length, was preserved in the cabinet of Colonel Gibbs. Professor Silliman possessed another fine one, seven inches in length.

The mountains in Colorado have yielded some fine specimens. But the finest of the beryl species come from Russia. In the Ural Mountains the crystals are small, but of fine color; in the Altai Mountains they are very large and of a greenish blue; but in the granitic ledges of Odon Tchelon in Daouria, on the frontier of China, they are found in the greatest perfection. They occur on the summit of the mountain in irregular veins of micaceous and white indurated clay, and are greenish-yellow, pure pale green, greenish-blue and sky-blue. The chief matrix of the beryl all over the world is graphic granite, but it may occur in other rocks. The light green stones of Limoges in France appear in a vein of quartz traversing granite. At Royalston we observed them to spring seemingly from the felspar and project into smoky quartz, becoming more transparent as they advanced into the harder stone.

The beryl possesses the same crystalline form and specific gravity as the emerald, but its hardness (especially in the yellow varieties) is sometimes greater. The only perceptible difference in the two stones is in the color. Cleaveland thought that as the emerald and beryl had the same essential characters, they might gradually pass into each other; and Klaproth, finding the oxides of both chrome and iron in one specimen, was led to take the same view. The crystals of true emerald are almost always small (with the exception of those found in the Wald district in Siberia), whilst those of the beryl vary from a few grains to more than a ton in weight. The crystals of both are almost invariably regular hexahedral prisms, sometimes slightly modified. Those of the beryl we sometimes find quite flat, as though they had been compressed by force: then again they are acicular and of extraordinary length, considering their slender diameter. Sometimes their lateral faces are longitudinally striated, and as deeply as the tourmaline, so that the edges of the prism are rendered indistinct. Other crystals are curved, and some perforated in the axis like the tourmaline, so as to contain other minerals. Sometimes they are articulated like the pillars of basalt, and separated at some distance by the intervening quartz. These modified forms give rise to curious speculations as to their formation and origin. If we admit the action of fire (which is improbable), then the separation may be easily explained; but if we insist that they were deposited in the wet way and by slow process, how can we account for the dislocation? "By electricity," whispers a friend—"by telluric magnetism, that wonderful unexplained and mysterious force which has caused the grand geological changes of the globe, and is still at work."

No other gem has been counterfeited with such perfection as the emerald; and in fact it is utterly impossible to distinguish the artificial from the real gems by the aid of the eye alone: even the little flaws which lull the suspicions of the inexperienced are easily produced by a dexterous blow from the mallet of the skilled artisan. Not only emeralds, but most of the gems and precious stones, are now imitated with such consummate skill as to deceive the eye, and none but experts are aware of the extent to which these fictitious gems are worn in fashionable society, for oftentimes the wearers themselves imagine that they possess the real stones. There is not one in a hundred jewelers who is acquainted with the physical properties of the gems, and very few can distinguish the diamond from the white zircon or the white topaz, the emerald from the tourmaline of similar hue, the sapphire from iolite, or the topaz from the Bohemian yellow quartz. Jewelers are governed generally by sight, which they believe to be infallible, whilst hardness and specific gravity are the only sure tests.

Artificial gems rivaling in beauty of color the most brilliant and delicately tinted of the productions of Nature are now made at Paris and in other European cities. The establishments at Septmoncel in the Jura alone employ a thousand persons, and fabulous quantities of the glittering pastes are made there and sent to all parts of the world.

A fine specimen of prase when cut affords a fair imitation of the emerald. The green fluor-spar which Hauey called "emeraude de Carthagene" may also be substituted, but the application of the file detects the trick with ease. Some of the green tourmalines approach the emeralds in hue very closely, and by artificial light it is impossible to distinguish them from each other. Fragments of quartz may be stained by being steeped in green-colored tinctures. The Greeks stained quartz so like the real gem that Pliny exclaimed against the fraud while declining to tell how it was done. The Ancona rubies at the present day are made by plunging quartz into a hot tincture of cochineal, which penetrates the minute fissures of the rock.

But notwithstanding the high art reached by modern glass-makers, they are yet far behind the ancients in imitating the emerald in point of hardness and lustre. Many emerald pastes of Roman times still extant are with difficulty distinguished from the real gem, so much harder and lustrous are they than modern glass. The ancient Phoenician remains found in the island of Sardinia by Cavalier Cara in 1856 show fine color in their enamels and glass-works. The green pigment brought home from the ruins of Thebes by Mr. Wilkinson was shown by Dr. Ure to consist of blue glass in powder, with yellow ochre and colorless glass. From Greek inscriptions dating from the period of the Peloponnesian war we learn that there were signets of colored glass among the gems in the treasury of the Parthenon.

Of all the emerald imitations that have descended to us from antiquity, none are more remarkable, none more interesting to the antiquary and historian, than the famous Sacro Catino of the cathedral of Genoa. This celebrated relic is a glass dish or patera fourteen inches in width, five inches in depth and of the richest transparent green color, though disfigured by several flaws. It was bestowed upon the republic of Genoa by the Crusaders after the capture of Caesarea in 1101, and was regarded as an equivalent for a large sum of money due from the Christian army. It was traditionally believed to have been presented to King Solomon by the queen of Sheba, and afterward preserved in the Temple, and some accounts relate that it was used by Christ at the institution of the Lord's Supper. The Genoese received it with so much veneration and faith that twelve nobles were appointed to guard it, and it was exhibited but once a year, when a priest held it up in his hand to the view of the passing throng. The state in 1319, in a time of pressing need, pawned the holy relic for twelve hundred marks of gold (two hundred thousand dollars), and redeemed it with a promptness which proved its belief in the reality of the material as well as in its sanctity. And it is also related that the Jews, during a period of fifty years, lent the republic four million francs, holding the sacred relic as a pledge of security. Seven hundred years passed away, when Napoleon came, and as he swept down over Italy, gathering her art-treasures, he ordered the "Holy Grail" to be conveyed to Paris. It was deposited in the Cabinet of Antiquities in the Imperial Library, and the mineralogists quickly discovered it to be glass. It is due to the memory of Condamine to state that he was the first to doubt the material of the Sacro Catino, for, when examining it by lamplight in 1757, in the presence of the princes Corsini, he observed none of the cracks, clouds and specks common to emeralds, but detected little bubbles of air. In 1815 the Allies ordered its return to the cathedral of Genoa. During this journey the beautiful relic was broken, but its fragments were restored by a skillful artisan, and it is now supported upon a tripod, the fragments being held together by a band of gold filigree. This remarkable object of antiquity, which is of extraordinary beauty of material and workmanship, furnishes a theme over which the antiquaries love to muse and wrangle.

Another of the antique monster emeralds, weighing twenty-nine pounds, was presented to the abbey of Reichenau near Constance by Charlemagne. Beckman has also detected this precious relic to be glass. And probably the great emerald of two pounds weight brought home from the Holy Land by one of the dukes of Austria, and now deposited in the collection at Vienna, is of the same material. The hardness of our glass is yet far inferior to that of the ancients, and even the ruby lustre of the potters of Umbria, which was so precious to the dilettanti of the Cinque Cento period, has not been recovered.

The emerald has been a subject of controversy among the chemists and mineralogists, and its character, especially the cause of its beautiful color, is not clearly defined even at the present day. But that distinguished chemist, Professor Lewy of Paris, seems to offer, thus far, the most correct and plausible theory. Ten years ago he boldly asserted that the hue is not due to the oxide of chromium, and with this opinion he confronted such eminent men as Vauquelin, Klaproth and others of high rank in the scientific world. Not content with his researches in his laboratory in Paris, he resolutely crossed the ocean and sought the emerald in its parent ledges in the lofty table-lands of New Granada. Here he obtained new information of a geological character which goes far to strengthen his position. The experiments of M. Lewy indicate, if they do not prove, that the coloring matter of the emerald is organic, and readily destroyed by heat, which would not be the case if it was due to the oxide of chromium. All my own fire-tests with the Granada emerald corroborate the views of M. Lewy, for in every instance the gem lost its hue when submitted to a red heat.

Nevertheless, the recent researches of Woehler and Rose give negative results. These experienced chemists kept an emerald at the temperature of melted copper for an hour, and found that, although the stone had become opaque, the color was not affected. They therefore considered the oxide of chromium to be the coloring agent, without, however, denying the presence of organic matter. The amount of the oxide of chromium found by many chemists varies from one to two per cent., while Lewy and others found it in a quantity so small as to be inappreciable, and too minute to be weighed.

Before the ordinary blowpipe the emerald passes rapidly into a whitish vesicular glass, and with borax it forms a fine green glass, while its sub-species, the beryl, changes into a colorless bead: with salt of phosphorus it slowly dissolves, leaving a silicious skeleton.[A]

M. Lewy visited the mines at Muzo in Granada, and from the results of his analyses, together with the fact of finding emeralds in conjunction with the presence of fossil shells in the limestone in which they occur, he arrived at the conclusion that they have been formed in the wet way—deposited from a chemical solution. He also found that when extracted they are so soft and fragile that the largest and finest fragments can be reduced to powder by merely rubbing them between the fingers, and the crystals often crack and fall to pieces after being removed from the mine, apparently from loss of water. Consequently, when the emeralds are first extracted they are laid aside carefully for a few days until the water is evaporated.

This statement relative to the softness of the gem and its subsequent hardening has been met with a shout of derision from some of the gem-seekers—none louder than that of Barbot, the retired jeweler. Barbot seems to forget that the rock of which his own house in Paris is constructed undergoes the same change after being removed from the deep quarries in the catacombs under the city. This phenomenon is observed with many rocks. Flints acquire additional toughness by the evaporation of water contained in them. The steatite of St. Anthony's Falls grows harder on exposure, and other minerals when quarried from considerable depths become firmer on exposure to the action of the air. Observations of this kind led Kuhlman to investigate the cause, and he believes that the hardening of rocks is not owing solely to the evaporation of quarry-water, but that it depends upon the tendency which all earthy matters possess to undergo a spontaneous crystallization by slow dessication, which commences the moment the rock is exposed to the air.

The coloring matter of the emerald seems to be derived from the decomposition of the remains of animals who have lived in a bygone age, and whose remains are now found fossilized in the rock which forms the matrix of the gem. This rock in Granada is a black limestone, with white veins containing ammonites. Specimens of these rocks exhibiting fragments of emeralds in situ, and also ammonites, are to be seen in the mineralogical gallery of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Lewy believes that the beautiful tint of these gems is produced by an organic substance, which he considers to be a carburet of hydrogen, similar to that called chlorophyll, which constitutes the coloring matter of the leaves of plants; and he has shown that the emeralds of the darkest hue, which contain the greatest amount of organic matter, lose their color completely at a low red heat, and become opaque and white; while minerals and pastes which are well known to be colored by chromium, like the green garnets (the lime-chrome garnets) of Siberia, are unchanged in hue by the action of heat.

Since the time of the Spanish Conquest, New Granada has furnished the world with the most of its emeralds. The most famous mines are at Muzo, in the valley of Tunca, between the mountains of New Granada and Popayan, about seventy-five miles from Santa Fe de Bogota, where every rock, it is said, contains an emerald. At present the supply of emeralds is very limited, owing to restrictions on trade and want of capital and energy in mining operations.

Blue as well as green emeralds are found in the Cordillera of the Cubillari. The Esmeraldas mines in Equador are said to have been worked successfully at one period by the Jesuits. The Peruvians obtained many emeralds from the barren district of Atacama, and in the times of the Conquest there were quarries on the River of Emeralds near Barbacoas.

Emeralds are found in Siberia, and some of the localities may have furnished to the ancients the Scythian gems which Pliny and others mention. In the Wald district magnificent crystals have been found embedded in mica-slate. One of these—a twin-crystal, now in the Imperial Cabinet at St. Petersburg—is seven inches long, four inches broad, and weighs four and a half pounds. There is another mass in the same collection which measures fourteen inches long by twelve broad and five thick, weighing sixteen and three-quarter pounds troy. This group shows twenty crystals from a half inch to five inches long, and from one to two inches broad. They were discovered by a peasant cutting wood near the summit of the mountain. His eye was attracted by the lustrous sparkling amongst the decomposed mica and where the ground had been exposed by the uprooting of a tree by the violence of the wind. He collected a number of the crystals, and brought them to Katharineburg and showed them to M. Kokawin, who recognized them and sent them to St. Petersburg, where they were critically examined by Van Worth and pronounced to be emeralds. One of these crystals was presented by the emperor to Humboldt when he visited St. Petersburg, and it is now deposited in the Berlin collection. Quite a number of emeralds are now brought from the Siberian localities, and it is believed that enterprise and capital would produce a large supply of the gem.[B]

The supply of emeralds from South America is very limited, and may be ascribed to want of skillful mining, as well as to climate, the political condition of the country and the indolence of its inhabitants. The localities cannot be exhausted, for they are too numerous and extensive. The elevated regions in Granada admit of scientific exploration by Europeans, and at the present day the only emerald-mining operations conducted in South America have been prosecuted near Santa Fe de Bogota by a French company, which has paid the government fourteen thousand dollars yearly for the right of mining, all the emeralds obtained being sent to Paris to be cut by the lapidaries of that city.

In the Atacama districts, and along the banks of the River of Emeralds, the physical obstructions are difficult to overcome, and pestilential diseases of malignant character forbid the long sojourn of the European. Yet the introduction of Chinese labor may prove successful and highly remunerative, since the coolie reared among the jungles and rice-swamps of Southern China is quite as exempt from malarial fevers as the negro.

The price of the emerald has no fixed and extended scale, like that of the diamond, and the fluctuations of its value during the past three centuries form an interesting chapter in the history of gems.

In the time of Dutens (1777) the price of small stones of the first quality was one louis the carat; one and a half carats, five louis; two carats, ten louis; and beyond this weight no rule of value could be established. In De Boot's day (1600) emeralds were so plenty as to be worth only a quarter as much as the diamond. The markets were glutted with the frequent importations from Peru, and thirteen years before the above-mentioned period one vessel brought from South America two hundred and three pounds of fine emeralds, worth at the present valuation more than seven millions of dollars. At the beginning of this century, according to Caire, they were worth no more than twenty-four francs (or about five dollars) the carat, and for a long time antecedent to 1850 they were valued at only fifteen dollars the carat. Since this period they have become very rare, and their valuation has advanced enormously. In fact, the value of the emerald now exceeds that of the diamond, and is rapidly approaching the ratio fixed by Benevenuto Cellini in the middle of the sixteenth century, which rated the emerald at four times, and the ruby at eight times, the value of the diamond. Perfect stones (the emerald is exceedingly liable to flaw, the beryl is more free, and the green sapphire is rarely impaired by fissures or cracks) of one carat in weight are worth at the present day two hundred dollars in gold. Perfect gems of two carats weight will command five hundred dollars in gold, while larger stones are sold at extravagant prices.

Most of our aqua-marinas come from Brazil and Siberia, and small stones are sold at trifling prices. Some of them, however, when perfect and of fine color, command fabulous sums. The superb little beryl found at Mouzzinskaia is valued by the Russians at the enormous sum of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, although the crystal weighs but little more than one ounce. Another rough prism preserved in the Museum at Paris, and weighing less than one hundred grains, has received the tempting offer of fifteen thousand francs.

A.C. HAMLIN, M.D.

[Footnote A: A curious result happened to the elder Silliman when experimenting with a Peruvian emerald before the compound blowpipe. The reducing flame instantly melted it into a transparent green globule. Perhaps the intense heat of this all-powerful flame, which reduces even the diamond, recalled the colors which disappear at a lower temperature. But this could not be done if the color was due to organic matter, which is annihilated or modified beyond recall by combustion.]

[Footnote B: Several of the natural crystals of the Siberian emeralds of large size and beautiful color are now to be seen in the valuable and choice collections of Messrs. Clay and William S. Vaux of Philadelphia.]



BERRYTOWN.

CHAPTER VIII.

It rained during the night. The wind blew feebly in the morning, and the sunlight glimmered dully from behind the flying gray clouds. Catharine looked out of her window, anxiously pushing aside the boughs full of wet white roses. The sense of desolation was not strong enough upon her to make her forget that Peter had not yet cut the clover in the lower meadow, and that such a rain was bad for the tomatoes. Doctor McCall was at the gate, propping up an old Bourbon rose, an especial favorite of her father's. Somebody tapped at her door, and Miss Muller rustled in in a flounced white muslin and rose-colored ribbons. She too hurried to the window and looked down.

"I asked him to meet me here, Kitty. I can't make you understand, probably, but the Water-cure House is so bald and bare! There is something in the shade here, and the old books, and this wilderness of roses, that forms a fitting background for a friendship like ours, aesthetically considered."

"I'm very glad. It's lucky I told Jane to have waffles—"

"I'll go down," interrupted Miss Muller, "and direct her about the table. Coarse tablecloths and oily butter would jar against the finest emotions. What very pretty shoulders you have, child! Such women as you, like potatoes, are best au naturel. Now, with those corsets, and this red shawl over the back of your chair, you would make a very good Madonna of the Rubens school. Men's ideal of womanhood then was to be plump, insipid and a mother."

"But about the oily butter?" said Kitty, glancing back over the aforesaid shoulders as she stooped to lace her shoes, while Maria hurried off to the kitchen. "Jane will jar against her finer emotions, I fancy, when she begins to order her about."

But Kitty lost all relish for fun before she sat down to the breakfast-table. Mr. Muller came in. The poor little man hurried to her side: "I passed a sleepless night, Catharine. I feared that I had been rough with you. I forget so often how gentle and tender you are, my darling."

Catharine was puzzled: "Upon my word, I've forgotten what happened. And I really never feel especially gentle or tender. You are mistaken about that."

When she took her place behind the urn, Maria motioned her brother to the foot of the table, and then nodded significantly. "Now you two can imagine a month or two has passed," she said.

Even Doctor McCall smiled meaningly. Mr. Muller blushed, and glanced shyly at Catharine. But she looked at him unmoved. "Our table will not be like this," gravely. "You forget the three hundred blue-coats between." Maria laughed, but Doctor McCall for the first time looked steadily at the girl.

First of all, perhaps, Kitty was just then a housekeeper. She waited anxiously to see if the steak was properly rare and the omelette light, nodded brightly to Jane, who stood watchful behind her, and then looked over at her betrothed, thinking how soon they would sit down tete-a-tete for the rest of their lives, perhaps for eternity, for, according to her orthodoxy, there could be no new loves in heaven. How fat he was, and bald! The mild blue eyes behind their glasses took possession of her and held her.

She listened to the talk between Doctor McCall and Miss Muller in a language she had never learned. Maria's share of it was largely made up of headlong dives into Spencer and Darwin, with reminiscences of The Dial, while Doctor McCall's was anchored fast down to facts; but it was all alive, suggestive, brilliant. They were young. They were drinking life and love with full cups. She (looking over at the bald head and spectacled eyes) had gone straight out of childhood into middle age and respectability.

The breakfast was over at last. Miss Muller followed Doctor McCall into the shop, where he fell to turning over the old books, and then to the garden. What was the use of a stage properly set if the drama would not begin?

"Pray do not worry any longer with that old bush," as he went back to Peter's rose. "It is not a trait of yours to be persistent about trifles. Or stay: give me a bud for my hair."

"Not these!" sharply, holding her hand. "I could not see one of these roses on any woman's head."

She smiled, very well pleased: "You perceive some subtle connection between me and the flower?"

"Nothing of the sort. There are some, planted, I suppose, by that little girl, which will be more becoming to your face."

"You are repelled by 'the little girl,' I see, John. I always told you your instincts were magnetic. That type of woman is antipathetic to you."

He laughed: "I have no instincts, hardly ideas, about either roses or types of women. If I avoided Miss Vogdes, it was because her name recalled one of the old hard experiences of my boyhood. The girl herself is harmless enough, no doubt."

"And the rose?"

"The rose? Why, we have no time to waste in such talk as this. You have not yet told me how you managed to get your profession. When I last saw you you had set all the old professors in the university at defiance. Did you carry lectures and cliniques by strategy or assault? You have good fighting qualities, Maria."

She would rather not have gone over her battle with the doctors just then: she would rather he had talked of her "magnetic instincts," her hair, her eyes—anything else than her fighting qualities. But she told him. There was an inexplicable delight to her in telling him anything—even the time of day. Was he not a pioneer, a captain among men, a seer in the realms of thought, keeping step with her in all her high imaginings? Ordinary people, it is true, set McCall down as an ordinary fellow, genial and hearty—not a very skillful physician, perhaps, but a shrewd farmer, and the best judge of mules or peaches in Kent county. Maria, however, saw him with the soul's eye.

Kitty meanwhile sat by the window mending the clothes that had come out of the wash. Mr. Muller was reading some letters relative to the school to her. This was the day of the week on which she always mended the clothes, and Mr. Muller had fallen into the habit of reading to her while she did so. But to-day the Reformatory rose before her a prison, the gates of which were about to close on her. The heap of stockings, the touch of the darning cotton, the sound of Mr. Muller's droning voice, were maddening to her: every moment she made a tangle in her thread, looking down at Maria under the Bourbon rose, and the attentive face bent over her. Where should she go? What should she do? Had the world nothing in it for her but this? Yesterday she had made up her mind to go to Delaware to find Hugh Guinness, alive or dead, and bring him to his father. That would be work worth doing. This morning she remembered that Delaware was a wide hunting-ground—that she had never been ten miles from home in her life. If there were anybody to give her advice! This Doctor McCall had seemed to her to-day as, in fact, he did to most people, practical, honest, full of information. He would too, she somehow felt, understand her wild fancy. But—

"Why should Doctor McCall dislike me?" she broke in at the close of one of Mr. Muller's expositions.

"What an absurd fancy, child!" looking up in amazement. "The man was civil enough to you for so slight an acquaintance."

"It was more than dislike," vehemently. "He watched me all through breakfast as though he owed me a grudge. I could see it in his eyes."

"You oughtn't to see any eyes but mine, Cathie dear," with anxious playfulness. "Why should you care for the opinion of any man?"

"Because he is different from any man I ever knew. He belongs to the world outside. I always did wonder if people would like me out there," said Kitty, too doggedly in earnest to see how her words hurt her listener. "If one could be like those two people yonder! They seem to know everything—they can do everything!"

"Maria is well enough—for a woman," dryly. "But I never heard McCall credited with exceptional ability of any sort."

Kitty glanced at him: "Of course you're right," quickly. "Men only can judge of character: we women are apt to be silly about such things." Her kind heart felt a wrench at having hurt this good soul. She put her fingers on his fat hand with a touch that was almost a caress. He turned red with surprise and pleasure. "But it is pleasant," she said, glancing down again to the Bourbon rose, "to see such love as that. They will be married soon, I suppose?"

"Very likely. I never knew of any love in the case before. But Maria is such a manager! And you think of love, then, sometimes?" timidly putting his arm about her.

"Oh to be sure! How can you doubt that? But it grows chilly. I must bring a sacque," hurrying away; and in fact she looked cold, and shivered.



CHAPTER IX.

"Doctor McCall recognizes the Book-house, just as I did, as the right background for communion like ours," Miss Muller said complacently to Kitty a week later. "He meets me here every day."

"Yes," said Catharine with a perplexed look. She had no special instincts or intuitions, but her eyes were as keen and observant as a lynx's. He came, she saw, to the Book-house every day. But had he no other purpose than to meet Maria?

"I did not know that McCall affected scholarship," said Mr. Muller tartly the next day. "He tells me that he has a peach-farm to manage. August is no time to loiter away, poring over old books. Just the peach season."

"No," Kitty replied demurely. But her face wore again the puzzled look. She began to watch Doctor McCall. He really knew but little, she saw, of rare books: his reading of them was a mere pretence. He was neither a lazy nor a morbid man: what pleasure could he have in neglecting his work day after day, sitting alone in the dusky old shop as if held there by some enchantment? Kitty knew that she herself had nothing to do with it: she appeared to be no more in his way than a tame dog would be, and, after the first annoyance which she gave him, was really little more noticed. But there is a certain sense of home-snugness and comfort in the presence of tame dogs and of women like Kitty: one cannot be long in the room with either without throwing them a kind word or petting them in some way. Doctor McCall was just the man to fall into such a habit. Down on the farm, his cattle, his hands, even the neighbors with whom he argued on politics, could all have testified to his easy, large good-humor.

"Oh, we are the best of friends," he said indifferently when Maria found Kitty chattering to him once, very much as she did to old Peter. But when Miss Muller, who had no petty jealousies, enlarged on the singular beauty of her eyes and some good points in her shape, he did not respond. "I never could talk of a woman as if she were a horse," he said. "And this little girl seems to me unusually human."

"There's really nothing in her, though. Poor William! He is marrying eyes, I tell him. It's a pitiable marriage!"

"Yes, it is," said Doctor McCall gravely.

After that he neglected the old books sometimes to talk to Kitty. He thought she was such an immature, thoughtless creature that she would not notice that the subject he chose was always the same—her daily life, with old Peter for her chum and confidant.

"Mr. Guinness, then, has had no companion but you?" he said one day, after a searching inspection of her face.

"No, nobody but me," quite forgetful, as she and Peter were too apt to be, that her mother was alive.

"And has had none for years?"

"Not since his son died. Hugh Guinness is dead, you know."

Doctor McCall was looking thoughtfully at the floor. He rose presently and took up his hat: "The old man cannot have been unhappy with such love as you could give him. No man could."

Kitty was sitting, as usual, on a low stool pasting labels on some dog-eared books: as long as McCall stood looking at her round cheeks and double chin she pasted on, apparently unconscious that he was there, but when he turned away she watched him shrewdly as he went uneasily up and down the shop, and finally, with a curt good-bye, turned out of the door. As the stout figure passed through the low branches of the walnuts her gray eyes began to shine. Her Mystery was nearly solved.

Dropping paste and books in a heap, she ran after him, taking a short cut through the currant bushes, so that when he passed on the outer side of the garden fence there she was quietly waiting, her head and face darkly framed by a thick creeper.

"Well?" smiling down, amused, as he might to a playful kitten.

"Doctor McCall," in the queer formal fashion that was Kitty's own, "I should be glad if you would come back this evening. Without Maria. I have some business—that is, a plan of mine. Well, it is a certain thing that—"

"That you wish to consult me about?" after waiting for her to finish.

"Yes, that's it," nodding energetically.

"Very well." He stood looking at her arm on the fence, and the face resting with its chin upon it. McCall, of all men, hated a scene, and he had an uneasy consciousness that he had just betrayed unexplained feeling in the house, and was therefore glad to slip back to commonplaces. Besides, Kitty was exactly the kind of woman whom all men feel an insane desire to help at first sight. "You have a plan, eh? and you want advice, not knowing much about business?"

There was not the least necessity for him to say this, having asked it before. But he did it, and waited to hear Kitty say yes again, and waited still, before he lifted his hat and said good-bye, to see the shadow of a waving branch creep over her white chin and lose itself in her neck. Most men would have done the same, just as they would stop to whistle a laugh from a fat, pretty baby on the street, and then go on, leaving it behind. The last thing in the world to consult on their business, or to ask for help or comfort when trouble met them, or death.

* * * * *

Miss Muller spent the whole day at the Book-house, but Doctor McCall did not come, as she expected. As evening approached she began to shiver, and had premonitory symptoms of clairvoyance, and went home at last, to Kitty's relief. A slow drizzling rain set in: the damp fogs that belong to that river-bottom walled in the house and hung flat over the walnuts like a roof. Catharine had made her own corner of the Book-shop snug and cheerful. The space was wide, the light soft and bright. She placed her own chair by the table, Peter's not far from it. She meant to produce a great effect on this man to-night, to change the whole current of his life, without having the help of either love or even friendship. Unconsciously she planned to bring him close to her, though very likely she had never heard of personal magnetism, or any of the curious secrets political speakers or actors or revivalists could have told her of the deadening effects of distance and empty benches.

Then Kitty, in her room overhead, looked at herself in the glass, arrayed in a soft cashmere, in color blue, still farther toned down, by certain softer fringes and loops, into the very ideal garb for a man's type of "yielding, lovely woman." It was one of the sacred wedding-dresses.

"Maria could never look like this," tying a lace handkerchief about her neck, pulling the soft rings of hair looser about her ears, setting her head on one side, and half shutting her eyes to see the thick and curly lashes.

There was no danger of interruption. Maria was safely lodged in the Water-cure House, and the very idea of Mr. Muller's glossy black shoes and dainty brown umbrella venturing out in the rain made Kitty laugh.

"The dear, good soul is finical as a cat," with the good-natured indulgence of a mother for a child. Suddenly she stopped, stared at herself in the glass. "Why, he is my husband!" she said, speaking to the blushing, blue-robed figure as to another person. Then she hastily unbuttoned, unlooped the pretty dress, threw it off, putting on her usual gray wrapper and knotting her hair more tightly back than ever in a comb. "He has been very good to me—very good to me," her chin trembling a good deal.

Then she went down to meet Doctor McCall, who that moment came into the Book-shop, stopping at the door to take off and shake his oilskin coat.

"It is a wet night," she said, just as though he were a stranger. She did not know what else to say or what he answered as she went about, trimming the lamp, dragging out a chair for him, closing the window curtains. Both McCall and Catharine were ordinary people, accustomed to keep up a good flow of talk on ordinary subjects, the weather or any joke or gossip that was nearest to them. There had been no passages of love or hate between them to account for her forced formality, her trembling and flushing, and urgent almost angry wish to remind him that she was Mr. Muller's affianced wife. She felt this with a new contempt for herself.

As for Doctor McCall, he leaned comfortably back in his arm-chair and dried his legs at the grate filled with red-hot coals, while he listened to the soft rustle of her skirts as she moved noiselessly about him. It is the peculiarity of women like Kitty, to whom Nature has denied the governing power of ideas or great personal beauty or magnetism, such as she gave to Miss Muller, that there is a certain impalpable force and attraction in their most petty actions and words, to which men yield. Miss Muller could have watched Kitty all day dragging chairs and trimming lamps, unmoved farther than to pronounce her little better than an idiot. But Peter, Muller or John McCall could not look at her for five minutes without classing her with Cordelia and Desdemona and all the other sweet fools for whom men have died, and whom the world yet keeps sacred in pathetic memory. Some day too, when Catharine should be a mother—though giving to her older children, little more than to the baby on her breast, soft touches and gentle words—she would bind them to her as no other kind, of mother could do—by such bonds that until they were gray-haired no power should be like hers. Miss Muller neither saw nor foresaw such things. But Doctor McCall did. "If I had had such a mother I should not have been what I am," he thought. It was a curious fancy to have about a young girl. But she seemed to embody all the womanliness that had been lacking in his life. Of course she was nothing to him. She was to be that prig Muller's wife, and he was quite satisfied that she should be. If he married, Maria Muller would be his wife. Yet, oddly enough, he felt to-night, for the first time, the necessity that Maria should know how marriage was barred out from him, and felt, for the first time, too, a maddening anger that it was so barred. However, Doctor McCall was never meant by Nature for a solitary man housed alone with morbid thoughts: he was the stuff out of which useful citizens are made—John Andersons of husbands, doting, gullible fathers.

Remembering the bar in his life, his skeleton, ghost or whatever it was, he was only moved to get up and stretch himself, saying, "I've stayed in Berrytown too long. When you have told me your plan, I'll say good-bye to you, Miss Vogdes, and this old house. I shall be off to-morrow."

Kitty had just caught a moth in the flame of the candle. She carried it to the window. "You will come back soon, of course?" her back still toward him.

"No, I think not. I am neglecting my business. And I, of all men in the world, have least right to loiter about this old house, to look in on its home-life or on you."

Kitty gave him a sharp glance, as though some sudden emergency was clear before her which her tact failed to meet. She was folding the bits of muslin at which she had been sewing in a basket: she finished slowly, put the basket away, and sat down at the table, with her elbow on it and her chin on her hand, her gray eyes suggesting a deeper and unspoken meaning to her words: "But for my plan?"

"Ah! to be sure! You want advice?" seating himself comfortably. Her confusion was a pretty thing to watch, the red creeping up her neck into her face, blotting out its delicate tints, the uncertain glances, the full bitten lip. Doctor McCall quite forgot his own trouble in the keen pleasure of the sight.

"Perhaps—You do not quite understand my position here? Mr. Guinness is not my own father."

"No, I knew that."

"But you cannot know what he has been to me: I never knew until the last few days."

"Why within these few days, Miss Vogdes?"

"Because I saw you and Maria: I saw what love was. I began to think about it. I never have loved anybody but him," she went on headlong, utterly blind to all inferences. "There's a thing I can do for him, Doctor McCall, before I marry Mr. Muller, and I must do it. It will make his old age happier than any other part of his life has been."

McCall nodded, leaning forward. It was nothing but an imprudent girl dragging out her secrets before a stranger; nothing but a heated face, wet eyes, a sweet milky breath; but no tragedy he had ever seen on the stage had moved him so uncontrollably—no, not any crisis in his own life—with such delicious, inexplicable emotion.

"Well, what is it you can do?" after waiting for her to go on.

There was a moment's silence.

"My father," said Kitty, "had once a great trouble. It has made an old man of him before his time. I find that I can take it from him." She looked up at him with this. Now, there was a certain shrewd penetration under the softness of Kitty's eyes. Noting it, McCall instantly lost sight of her beauty and tears. He returned her look coolly.

"What was his trouble?"

"Mr. Guinness had a son. He has believed him to be dead for years: I know that he is not dead."

Doctor McCall waited, with her eyes still upon him. "Well?" he said, attentive.

"And then," pushing back the table and rising, "when I heard that, I meant to go and find Hugh Guinness, and bring him back to his father."

Whatever this matter might be to her hearer, it was the most real thing in life to Catharine, and putting it into words gave it a sudden new force. She felt that she ought to hold her tongue, but she could not. She only knew that the lighted room, the beating of the rain without, the watchful guarded face on the other side of the table, shook and frightened and angered her unaccountably.

"You should not laugh at me," she said. "This is the first work I ever set myself to do. It is better than nursing three hundred children."

"I am not laughing at you, God knows! But this Guinness, if he be alive, remains away voluntarily. There must be a reason for that. You do not consider."

"I do not care to consider. Is the man a log or a stone? If I found him," crossing the room in her heat until she stood beside him—"if I brought him to the old house and to his father? Why, look at this!" dragging open the drawer and taking out the broken gun and rod. "See what he has kept for years—all that was left him of his boy! Look, at that single hair! If Hugh Guinness stood where you do, and touched these things as you are touching them, could he turn his back on the old man?"

Now, Doctor McCall did not touch gun nor cap nor hair, but he bent over the table, looking at them as if he were looking at the dead. He seemed to have forgotten that Kitty was there.

At last he stood upright: "Poor little chap!" with a laugh. "There seemed to be no reason, when he went gunning and fishing like other boys, why he should not stand here to-day with as fair a chance for happiness as any other man. Did there? Just a trifling block laid in his way, a push down hill, and no force could ever drag him up again."

Kitty, her eyes on his, stood silent. Do what he would, he could not shake off her eyes: they wrenched the truth from him, "I knew this man Guinness once," he said.

She nodded: "Yes, I know you did."

"Sit down beside me here, and I will tell you what kind of man he was."

But she did not sit down. An unaccountable terror or timidity seemed to have paralyzed her. She looked aside—everywhere but in his face: "I wanted you to tell me how to reach him, how to touch him: I know what manner of man he is."

"You have heard from your mother? A mixed Border Pike and Mephistopheles, eh? The devil and his victim rolled into one?" He shifted his heavy body uneasily, glancing toward the door. Chief among the graver secret emotions which she had roused in him was the momentary annoyance of not knowing how to deal with this chicken-hearted little girl before him, scared, but on fire from head to foot.

Kitty was quite confident. If it had been Maria Muller who had thus set herself to tamper with a man's life, she would have done it trembling, with fear and self-distrust. She had brains which could feel and react against the passions she evoked, and were competent to warn her of the peril of her work. But as for Kitty—

Here was Hugh Guinness before her, a Cain with the curse of God upon him. It was clearly her business to bring him back again to his father, and afterward convert him into a member of the church, if possible. She went about the work with as little doubt as if it had been the making of a pudding.

But she was shy, tender, womanly withal. Doctor McCall laughed as he looked down at her, and spoke deliberately, as though giving his opinion of a patient to another physician. "I'll tell you honestly my opinion of Hugh Guinness. He was, first of all, a thoroughly ordinary, commonplace man, with neither great virtues nor great vices, nor force of any kind. If he had had that, he could have recovered himself when he began to fall. But he did not recover himself."

"What drove him down in the first place?"

He hesitated: "I suppose that his home and religion became hateful to him. Boys have unreasonable prejudices at times."

"And then, in despair—"

"Despair? Nonsense! Now don't figure to yourself a romantic Hotspur of a fellow rushing into hell because heaven's gate was shut on him. At nineteen Hugh Guinness drank and fought and gambled, as other ill-managed boys do to work off the rank fever of blood. Unfortunately—" he stopped, and then added in a lower voice, quickly, "he made a mistake while the fever was on him which was irretrievable."

"A mistake?" Kitty was always of an inquiring turn of mind, but now she felt as if her curiosity was more than she could bear, while she stood, her eyes passing over the burly figure in summer clothes and the high-featured, pleasant face with its close-cut moustache. What dreadful secret was hid behind this good-humored, every-day propriety of linen duck, friendly eyes and reddish moustache over a mouth that often smiled? You might meet their like any day upon the streets. Was it a murder? At best some crime, perhaps, which had sent him to the penitentiary. Or—and church taught Kitty shuddered as a vague remembrance of the "unpardonable sin" rose before her like an actual horror. Whatever it was, it stood between herself and him, keeping them apart for ever.

"Irretrievable?" she said. It was only curiosity, she knew, but her voice sounded oddly far off to herself, the room was hazy, her whole body seemed to shrink together.

"What can it matter to you? You belong to another man, Miss Vogdes." She lifted herself erect. Doctor McCall was speaking more loudly than usual and looking keenly into her face.

"I know: I shall be Mr. Muller's wife. Of course, I recollect. But you—this Hugh Guinness is my father's son," stammered Kitty, her face very white. "I had some interest in him."

"Yes, that's true. He is, as you say, in some sort a brother of yours." He took her hand for the first time, looking down at her face with some meaning in his own, inexplicable, very likely, to himself, though the thoughts in Kitty's shallow brain were clear enough to him. "You are tired of standing," seating her gently in Peter's chair. A thick lock of hair had fallen over her face: he put out his hand to remove it, but drew back quickly. "We have talked too long, Miss Vogdes," in a brisk, cheerful tone. "Some other time, perhaps, we can return to this question of Hugh Guinness. That is," with a certain significance of manner, "if it be one in which Mr. Muller wishes you to take an interest." Nodding good-humoredly to her, he buttoned on his oilskin cape and went out into the rain without another word. He pulled off his cap outside to let the rain and wind reach his head, drawing a long breath as if to get rid of some foul air and heat.



CHAPTER X.

Of all that wet August the next morning was the freshest and cheerfulest. Doctor McCall had packed his valise, carried it to the station, and was now walking up the street, his hands clasped behind him and his head down, after the leisurely fashion of Delaware and Jersey farmers. People nodded an approving good-morning to him. Busy Berrytown had passed verdict on him as a man who was idle for a purpose, who permitted his brain to lie fallow, and who "loafed and invited his soul" during these two weeks for the best spiritual hygienic reasons.

"Too much brain-work, my friend Doctor Maria Muller tells me," said the lawyer, De Camp, to a group of men at the station as McCall passed them. "Is here for repose."

"Advanced?" said little Herr Bluhm, the phrenologist.

"Well, no. But Doctor Maria thinks his mind is open to conviction, and that he would prove a strong worker should he remain here. She has already begun to enlighten him on our newest theories as to a Spontaneous Creation and a Consolidated Republic."

"Should think his properer study would be potatoes. Smells of the barn-yard in his talk," rejoined one of the party.

"Doctor Maria's a fool!" snapped Bluhm. "She has read the index to Bastian's book, and denies her Creator, and gabbles of Bacteria, boiled and unboiled, ever since."

Doctor McCall meanwhile went down the cinder-path, to all passers-by a clean-shaven, healthy gentleman out in search of an appetite for breakfast. But in reality he was deciding his whole life in that brief walk. Why, he asked himself once or twice, should he be unlike the other clean-shaven, healthy men that he met? God knows he had no relish for mystery. He was, as he had told Kitty, a commonplace man, a thrifty Delaware farmer, in hearty good-fellowship with his neighbors, his cattle, the ground he tilled, and, he thought reverently, with the God who had made him and them. He had made a mistake in his early youth, but it was a mistake which every tenth man makes—which had no doubt driven half these men and women about him into their visionary creeds and hard work—that of an unhappy marriage. It was many years since he had heard of his wife: she had grown tired of warning him of the new paths of shame and crime she had found for herself. In fact, the year in which they had lived together was now so long past as to seem like a miserable half-forgotten dream.

Irretrievable? Yes, it was irretrievable. There was, first of all, the stupid, boyish error of a change of name. If he came back as this child wished, all the annoyance which that entailed would follow him, and the humiliating circumstances which had led to it would be brought to life from their unclean graves. His father believed him dead. Better the quiet, softened grief which that had left than the disgrace which would follow his return. "I should have to tell him my wife's story," muttered McCall. But he did not turn pale nor break into a cold sweat at the remembrance, as Miss Muller's hero should have done. This was an old sore—serious enough, but one which he meant to make the best of, according to his habit. He had been a fool, he thought, to come back and hang about the old place for the pleasure of hearing his father talked of, and of touching the things he had handled a day or two before. Growing into middle age, Hugh Guinness's likeness to his father had increased year by year. The two men were simple as boys in some respects, and would have been satisfied alone together. The younger man halted now on the foot-bridge which crossed the creek, looking out the different hollows where his father had taken him to fish when he was a boy, and thinking of their life then. "But his wife and mine would have to be put into the scales now," with an attempt at whistling which died out discordantly.

There was one person to whom the shameful confession of his marriage must be made—Miss Muller. That was the result, he thought, of his absurd whim of loitering about Berry town. When he had met Maria Muller before, he had no reason to think she cared a doit whether he was married or single. Now—McCall's color changed, alone as he was, with shame and annoyance. With all his experience of life and of women, he had as little self-confidence as an awkward girl. But Maria had left him no room for doubt.

"It would be the right thing to do. I ought to tell her. But it will be a slight matter to her, no doubt."

If he had been a single man, in all probability he would have asked Maria Muller to marry him that day. He was a susceptible fellow, with a man's ordinary vanity and passions; and Maria's bright sweet face, their loiterings along shady lanes and under Bourbon roses, the perpetual deference she paid to his stupendous intellect, had had due effect. He was not the man to see a strong, beautiful woman turn pale and tremble at his touch, and preserve his phlegm.

He threw away his cigar, and jumped the fence into the Water-cure grounds. "I'll tell her now, and then be off from old Berry town for ever."

Miss Muller was standing in the porch. She leaned over the railing, looking at the ragged rain-clouds driven swiftly over the blue distance, and at the wet cornfields and clumps of bay bushes gray with berries which filled the damp air with their pungent smell. Her dog, a little black-and-tan terrier, bit at her skirt. She had just been lecturing to her three students on the vertebrae, and when she took him up could not help fumbling over his bones, even while she perceived the color and scent of the morning. They gave her so keen a pleasure that the tears rushed to her eyes, and she stopped punching Hero's back.

"'The rain is over and gone,'" she recited softly to herself, "'the vines with the tender grape give a good smell, and the time of the singing of birds has come.' There is no poetry like that old Hebrew love-song. If only it had not been hackneyed by being turned into a theological allegory! Ha, doggy, doggy! There comes a friend of ours!" suddenly laughing and hugging him as she caught sight of a large man coming up the road with a swinging gait and loose white overcoat. She broke off a rose and put it in her breast, tied on her hat and hurried down to meet him, the Song of Solomon still keeping time with her thoughts in a lofty cadence: "'Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness leaning upon his beloved? Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm. For love is strong as death.'"

"What's that, Maria? I heard you intoning as I came up the hill?" Her eyes were soft and luminous and her voice unsteady. I am afraid Doctor McCall's eyes were warmer in their admiration than they should have been under the circumstances. Why should she not tell him? She repeated it. She had been chattering for two hours on cervical, dorsal and lumbar vertebrae, without stopping to take breath. But she grew red now and broke down miserably.

"'Love is strong as death,' eh?" said McCall, awkwardly holding the gate open for her. "Friendship ought to be tough enough to bear a pretty stout strain, then. Such friendship as ours, I mean. For I think a man and woman can be friends without—without—Well, what do you think, Maria?" feeling a sudden imbecility in all his big body.

The little woman beside him looked up scared and ready to cry: "I don't know, John, I'm sure. Do be quiet, Hero!" Then like a flash she saw that he meant to ask her to marry him: he meant to place love upon the higher basis of friendship. Maria was used to people who found new names for old things. Why! why! what folly was this, as she grew cold and hot by turns? So often she had pictured his coming to claim her, and how she would go out as one calm controlling soul should to meet another, to be dual yet united through all eternity; and here she was shivering and tongue-tied, like any silly school-girl! Love-making and marriage were at a discount with the Advanced Club of which she was a member, and classed with dancing, fashionable dressing and other such paltry feminine frivolities. But Maria had meant to show them that a woman could really love and marry, and preserve her own dignity. She tried to find her footing now.

"Come into the summer-house, John. I should think our friendship would bear any strain, for it does not depend on external ties."

"No, that's true. Now, as to your phalansteries and women's clubs and sitz-baths, why that's all flummery to me. But young women must have their whims until they have husbands to occupy their minds, I suppose. There's that little girl at the Book-shop: how many leagues of tatting do you suppose she makes in a year?"

"I really cannot say," sharply.

"But as to our friendship, Maria—"

"Yes. There may be a lack of external bonds" (speaking deliberately, for she wanted to remember this crisis of her life as accurate in all its minutiae); "but there is a primal unity, a mysterious sympathy, in power and emotion. At least, so it seems to me," suddenly stammering and picking up Hero to avoid looking at McCall, who stood in front of her.

"I don't know. Primal unities are rather hazy to me. I can tell by a woman's eye and hand-shake if she is pure-minded and sweet-tempered, and pretty well, too, what she thinks of me. That's about as far as I go."

"It pleases you to wear this mask of dullness, I know," with an indulgent smile, with which Titania might have fondled the ass's head.

"But as to our friendship," gravely, "I feel I've hardly been fair to you. Friendship demands candor, and there is one matter on which I have not dealt plainly with you. You have been an honest, firm friend to me, Maria. I had no right to withhold my confidence from you."

If Miss Muller had not been known as an advanced philosopher, basing her life upon the Central Truths, she would have gained some credit as a shrewd woman of business. "What do you mean, John?" she said, turning a cool I steady countenance toward him.

"Sit down and I will tell you what I mean."

* * * * *

The patients, taking soon after their two hours' exercise, made their jokes on the battle between the two systems, seeing the allopathist McCall and Doctor Maria Haynes Muller in the summer-house engaged in such long and earnest converse. Homoeopathy, they guessed, had the worst of it, for the lady was visibly agitated and McCall apparently unmoved. Indeed, when he left her and crossed the garden, nodding to such of them as he knew, he had a satisfied, relieved face.

Maria went immediately in to visit her ward as usual. The patients observed that she was milder than was her wont, and deadly pale. One of them, addressing her as "Miss Muller," however, was sharply rebuked: "I earned my right to the title of physician too hardly to give it up for that which belongs to every simpering school-girl," she said. "Besides," with a queer pitiful smile, "the sooner we doctors sink the fact that we are women the better for the cause—and for us."

She met her brother in the course of the morning, and drew him into the consulting-room.

"William," she said, fumbling with the buttons of his coat, "he is going: he is going to take the afternoon train."

"Who? That fellow McCall?"

"Why do you speak so of him, William? He has just told me his story. He is so wretched! he has been used so hardly!" She could scarcely keep back the tears. In her new weakness and weariness it was such comfort to talk to and hang upon this fat, stupid little brother, whom usually she despised.

"Wretched, eh? He don't look it, then. As stout and easy-going a fellow as I know. Come, come, Maria! The man has been imposing some story on you to work on your sensibilities. I never fancied him, as you know. He doesn't want to borrow money, eh?" with sudden alarm.

"Money? No."

"What is it, then? Don't look at me in that dazed way. You, are going to have one of your attacks. I do wish you had Kitty's constitution and some sense."

"William," rousing herself, "he is going. He will never come back to Berrytown or to me. Our whole lives depend on my seeing him once more. Ask him to wait for a day—an hour."

"If he doesn't take the noon express, he can't go in an hour. You certainly know that, Maria. Well, if I have to find him, I'd better go at once," buttoning his coat irritably. "I never did like the fellow."

"Beg him to stay. Tell him that I have thought of a way of escape," following him, catching him by his sleeve, her small face absolutely without color and her eyes glittering.

"Yes, I'm going. But I must find my overshoes first. It begins to look like rain."

Miss Muller watched him to the door, and then crossed the hall to her own room, locking the door behind her. The square table was piled with medical books. She sat down and dropped her head on her arms. Over went a bound volume of the Lancet and a folio on diseases of the kidneys to the floor. She looked down at them. "And I was willing to give him up for that—that trash!" sobbing and rubbing her arms like a beaten child. But she had so strong a habit of talking that even in this pain the words would come: "I loved him so. He would have married me! And I must be kept from him by a law of society! It is—it is," rising and wrenching her hands together, "a damnable law!"

For Miss Muller had taught herself to think and talk like a man.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]



BOWERY ENGLAND.

A party of four Americans in London—Mr. Hill Bunker of Boston, Mrs. Bunker, his wife, Miss Amy Abell of New York, and myself—we find ourselves growing weary of that noisy town. We talk of a trip to the country. It is the merry month of May.

"Just the time for 'bowery England, as Bulwer phrases it," says Amy. "Let us go to Romsey and see the Boyces."

Carried unanimously. We take the train from the Waterloo Station two hours later. When we get down at Romsey, "Fly, sir?" asks the attentive porter—carries our luggage, calls the fly and touches his hat thankfully for three-pence. The Romsey fly is a lumbering, two-seated carriage, rather more pretentious than a London cab, but far behind the glossy gorgeousness of a New York hackney-coach.

A short drive brings us to the White Horse Inn, under whose covered arch we roll, and are met at the door by a maid. She conducts us to a stuffy coffee-room up a flight of crumbling old stairs, and meekly desires to know our will.

"Send the landlord, please."

The landlord comes, bowing low, and we make inquiries concerning the distance to Paultons, the estate where the Boyces have been spending the summer, and where we venture to hope they still are. He says it is a matter of four miles, and that we can have a fly over for six shillings. We order the fly to be got ready at once, and inquire if we can have dinner now, it being late in the afternoon.

"Yes, sir," he replies. "Would you like some chicken and sparrowgrass?"

"How long will they be in cooking?"

"Matter of arf an hour, sir."

As this means a matter of an hour, I ask if he can't get us up something in a shorter time. He suggests that chops can be cooked sooner.

"Chops be it, then. In the words of the immortal Pickwick, chops and tomato sauce."

"No tomarter sauce, sir," with profound gravity.

"Sparrowgrass, then—chops and sparrowgrass."

He retires, and we all rush to the windows and look out upon the quaint old village—a curious, old-fashioned scene. We feel as if we had somehow become transmogrified, and instead of being flesh-and-blood men and women from practical New York, were playing our parts in some old English novel. Odd little tumble-down houses, with peaked roofs and mullioned windows, ranged about a triangular common, look sleepily out upon a statue of Palmerston in the middle of the open place, the gray walls of Romsey Abbey, a thousand years old, against the blue sky behind them.

About six o'clock our fly is at the door, and we are off, rattling through the ancient streets into the smooth open country. Oh the quaint, delightful old hedge-lined road, deep down below the level of the fields on either side—a green lane shut in with fragrance and delicious quiet! The hedges, perched upon the bank, tower high above our heads, and there is no break in them save at rustic gates. We meet characters on the road who have just stepped out of Trollope's novels. A young man and girl stand on a bridge across which we trundle, leaning companionably on the old stone parapet, and looking up the little river through a long avenue of trees to the pillared mansion of "Broadlands." A laborer, with a gay flower stuck in the buttonhole of his smock-frock, goes whistling along the brown road under the hedgerows. A country gentleman, driving alone in a basket phaeton, looks inquisitively at our half-closed windows as if expecting the sight of an acquaintance. Crumbling milestones stand by the wayside, with deep-cut letters so smoothed by the hand of time that we cannot read them as we pass. Flowers grow thick in the hedgerows. A boy is lolling on the green grass in front of a cottage door—an uncombed English hind, with a face of rustic simplicity and stolid ignorance.

At last we come to a gate which bars the road. The driver gets down and opens it, and when we have passed through in the fly he tells us we are now on Mr. Stanley's broad estate of Paultons. The driver wears corduroy trousers, and touches his hat every time we speak to him and every time he answers. He does not merely touch it when he is first addressed, but he touches it continually throughout the conversation. Bunker considers his conduct extremely touching.

We are presently driving through a bosky wood, and the driver touches his hat to remark that we are nearly there now, he thinks.

"But where is the bad road the landlord spoke of?"

"Bad road, sir?" touching hat.

"Yes: the landlord said we could not drive fast because the road was bad. Where is it bad?"

"All along back of 'ere, sir," touching hat. "We have pahst the worst of it naow, sir: the rest is not so 'illy, sir," touching hat.

"Hilly? We haven't passed over anything bigger than a knoll. If this is what the landlord meant by a hilly road, it is a rich joke. Why, it's as smooth as a floor, almost."

"He should go to California," says Amy, who has feeling reminiscences. "He should go to the Yosemite Valley, over the road which runs through Chinese Camp and Hodgden's. Probably the man never saw a rough road in his life. I doubt if there is such a thing in England."

After half an hour's trundling along the unfenced roads of this fine old estate, crossing ancient stone bridges, rolling through leafy groves, startling fat cattle from their browsing, getting a hat-touch from a shepherd who is leading his flocks across the fields in true pastoral style, we reach the manor-house, standing stately amid dells and dingles, pollards of fantastic growth and patches of fern and gorse. The Boyces have returned to Paris, but nurse and the children are still at the gardener's house, and thither we drive along the banks of a sylvan lake, beyond which the rooks are cawing about the chimneys.

The old gardener is nurse's father, and though he is now so old that he no longer does any work, he is maintained in comfort by the family in whose service he has spent a lifetime. Forty years of honest service in one family! No wonder he feels that his destiny is for ever linked with that of the people who have been his masters, man and boy, for forty years. He has a delightful little cottage with thatched roof and mullioned windows, and pretty vines rioting all over it, and in front of it a flower-garden full of early bloom. The lilacs which grow about so profusely are not of the color of our lilacs in America, being of a rich purple; we should not know they were lilacs but for the familiar odor.

A delicious ride back to Romsey in the twilight, carrying two of the Boyce children with us. In the evening I stroll out alone, to look at the village in the moonlight. The streets are like narrow lanes. The houses are very old, and for the most part dilapidated, but streets and houses are all as clean and neat as wax. Presently I come upon the old abbey, its rugged walls and towers looming solemnly in the moonlight, and pass the parson's house near by, all overrun with vines, thinking of Trollope again and Framley parsonage.

Before going back to the White Horse Inn I wander round the village until I find that I am lost. The discovery is not very alarming in a place so small as this, even at night. I resolve to turn every corner to the left, and see what will come of it. I presently find that getting out into the country comes of it; and having crossed a bridge and come upon a silent brickyard, and seen the long road winding away into the open country, I am reminded of Oliver Twist—or was it Pip?—running away from home and trudging off under the stars to London. Somehow, it seems this road must lead to London.

Turning about, but still walking at random and turning left-hand corners, I presently see the abbey tower again, and make for it. The street through which I pass is apparently the home of the British working man. A light burning in any house is most rare. Occasionally a man can be seen through the odd little windows, smoking a pipe by the blaze of the fire on the hearth. Here are the abbey windows, and now I know where I am. Down this narrow, winding street, across the open place where Lord Palmerston stands stonily in the moonlight, and I am at the White Horse Inn again.

At nine o'clock next morning there is a rap at the door of my room. The door being opened a man-servant is discovered, who touches his forehead (having no hat to touch) and says, "The ladies would like to 'ave you breakfast with them, sir."

He is so very respectful in his manner of saying this that he is inaudible, and being asked what he said, repeats the touching his forehead and then repeats his words.

There are no muffins at breakfast—a fact which I record merely because this is the first time since we have been in England that this peculiarly English dish has been omitted at breakfast. It appears on inquiry that muffins are a luxury of large towns. In villages they are rarely obtainable at less than about a week's notice. In fact, you can't get anything to eat, of any sort, without pretty liberal notice.

After breakfast we go to see the old abbey. It is an imposing and well-preserved pile. It was founded by Ethelwold, a thane—one of those righting, praying, thieving old rascals who lived in the tenth century, and made things lively for any one who went past their houses with money on his person. When Ethelwold had stolen an unusually large sum one day, he founded the monastery and stocked it with nuns. It was but a wooden shanty at first, but after having served till it was worm-eaten and rotting with age, it was torn down and a fine stone convent was built.

We walk about in that part of the abbey which is free from pews—by far the larger part—and stare at the monumental stones let into the floor and walls. If we did not know that Romsey had been the home of Palmerston, we should learn it now, for these stones are thickly covered with the legends of virtue in his family—wives, sisters, sons and so forth, whose remains lie "in the vault beneath." After perusing these numerous testimonials to the truly wonderful virtues of an aristocracy whom we are permitted to survive, and after dropping some shillings in the charity-box, which rather startle us by the noise they make, we pass out of the cool abbey into the hot churchyard, and read on a lonely stone which stands in a corner by the gate that here lies the dust of Mary Ann Brown, "for thirty-five years faithful servant to Mr. Appleford." Mary Ann no doubt had other virtues, but they are not recorded: this is sufficient for a servant.

An hour's ride on the velvet cushions of a railway carriage brings us, with our Paultons friends, the Boyce boys, to Southampton, which was an old town when King Canute was young. We take rooms at a pretentious marble hotel with a mansard roof, attached to the station—a railroad hotel, in fact, but strikingly unlike that institution as we know it in America. Wide halls, solid stone staircases, gorgeous coffee-room, black-coated waiters, and the inevitable buxom landlady with a regiment of blooming daughters for assistants—one presiding over the accounts, another officiating at the beer-pumps, a third to answer questions, and all very much under the influence of their back hair and other charms of person. One of them alleviates the monotony of the office duties by working at embroidery in bright worsteds.

Strolling out, Bunker and I consult certain shabby worthies who are yawning on the boxes of a long line of wretched hacks drawn up by the sidewalk across the street, and find that we can charter a vehicle for two shillings an hour. These cabbies have more nearly the air of our own noble hackmen than any we have seen in England. Americans are no novelty to them, for ship-loads of American tourists are put off here at frequent intervals, and the cabbies have a thin imitation of the voting hackman's independence. They stop short, however, of his impudence. They are lazy, but they touch their hats occasionally.

We choose two of the tumble-down vehicles and go after the ladies. My driver is an elderly man with a hat which has seen better days, and I have chosen his hack, not because it is less likely to drop off its wheels than the others, but because he himself looks like a seedy Bohemian. He proves to be a very intelligent fellow, with a ready turn for description which serves him in good stead whenever his horse gets tired of walking and stops short. At such times our Bohemian pretends that he has stopped the horse himself in order to point out and comment upon some curious thing in the immediate vicinity.

It is pleasant driving. The hack is open, and we hoist sun-umbrellas and look about comfortably. Presently the weary horse stops in the middle of the street.

"'Ere you are, sir," says Cabby briskly, turning half round on his box and pointing to an old stone structure which stretches quite across the High street. "This 'ere is the old Bar Gate, sir, one of the hancient gates of the town. Part of the horiginal town wall. Was a large ditch 'ere, sir, and another there, and a stone bridge betwixt the two, and the young bucks in them days did use to practice harchery right 'ere where you see the lamp-post. The Guild'all is hin the gate, sir, right hinside it, with a passage hup. I'll drive through the harch, sir, and you'll see the hother side. Cluck!" (to the horse).

On the other side, the horse not taking a notion to stop again, the driver is not forced to resume his remarks. Turning about as we pass on, we look up at the old Norman gate-tower, with its handsome archway and projecting buttresses, and Amy says she fancies she sees a knight in armor looking out through the narrow crevice which may have been a window in olden times. This, being an altogether proper fancy for the place, is received with applause.

The next time the horse concludes to stop we are in the midst of what is here called the Common—in fact, a magnificent old forest park, with a smooth road running through it, and numberless winding paths in among the bosky depths. I fancy Central Park might come to look like this if allowed to go untrimmed and unfussed-over for two or three hundred years.

"The Common, sir," says Cabby, turning about, "where King Chawles did use to 'unt wild boars. Fav'rite walk of Halexander Pope, sir, the poet, and Doctor Watts, which wrote the 'ymn-book. Cluck!"

From the top of a high hill a splendid wide landscape is seen, with Romsey in the distance, and (the horse having stopped again) Cabby points out Queen Elizabeth's shooting-box across the fields. In a lot close by cricketers are at play, and a little farther on, where there is a vine-covered beerhouse, a crowd of clod-hoppers are gathered in a green field, looking at two of their number engaged in a rough-and-tumble fight in their shirt-sleeves.

The road after this running down hill, the horse continues to jog along for a considerable distance, stopping at last under a towering old wall looking out on the sea.

"Wind Whistle Tower, sir," says Cabby, pointing up at a square tower projecting from the old wall overhead, and above it the remains of an old round tower thickly overrun with ivy. And, using his fingers industriously, Cabby proceeds to call off the names of various castles and towers here visible—notably, Prince Edward's Tower, bold and round, from whose summit three men were looking down.

"What are those?" asks Bunker in the carriage behind us, pointing to the old brass guns which sit on the wall like Humpty Dumpty.

"Them, sir," says Cabby, "was put there by 'Enry the Heighth, and this 'ere wall was the purtection of the town when the Frenchmen hassaulted it."

"Ho!" says Bunker, contemptuously. "Just fancy one of our ironclads paying any attention to the barking of those popguns!"

Whereupon the horse starts again, and we go lazily on, Cabby dropping in a word of enlightenment here and there to the effect that this old tumble-down part of the ancient wall is the celebrated Arcade, which formed part of the wall of the King's Palace; and this queer old lane running up through the walls like a sewer is Cuckoo lane; and that is Bugle street, where in olden times the warden blew; and here are the remains of Canute's palace, with its elliptical and circular arches and curious mouldings.

Discharging the cab in the High street, we walk about. In a shop where we pause for a moment there is a quartette of half-naked barbarians, such as, with all our boasted varieties of humanity, were never yet seen in New York. We have abundant Chinese and Japanese there, and occasionally an Arab or a Turk, and the word African means with us a man and a brother behind our chair at dinner or wielding a razor in a barber-shop. These men here are pure barbarians, just landed from a vessel direct from Africa. Hideously tattooed, and their heads shaved in regular ridges of black wool, with narrow patches of black scalp between, they are here in a small tradesman's shop in bowery England buying shirts. They know not a word of English, but chatter among themselves the most horrible lingo known to the Hamitic group of tongues. They grimace in a frightful manner, and skip and dance, and writhe their half-naked bodies into the most exaggerated contortions known to the language of signs. The dignified English salesmen are at their wits' end how to treat them. The instinct of the British shopkeeper fights desperately with his disposition to be shocked. From the Ashantee gentlemen's gestures it can only be concluded that white shirts are wanted, but when white shirts are shown the negroes make furious objection to the plaited bosoms. They want shirts such as are fashionable at home. It is easy to be seen that they are Dandy Jims in Africa. They are all young, and, in a sense, spruce. One of them carries a little switch cane, evidently just bought: while he examines the shirts, testing the strength of the stuff by pulling it with his two hands, he holds his cane between his bare legs for safe-keeping.

Sitting in the billiard-room of the hotel in the evening smoking our cigars, Bunker and I are accosted by a brisk little man, who asks us if we play billiards. Bunker doesn't. I do sometimes at home, but not the English game.