She said something rapidly in Italian—she is always artificial when she uses a foreign tongue—and this I caught but imperfectly, but it had a proverbial air about it of the error of too hasty assumptions.

"Well, now I'll tell you something," she said as the carriages disappeared over the top of the hill. "Fanny Meyrick is going abroad in October, and we shall not see her for ever so long."

Going abroad? Good gracious! That was the very thing I had to tell her that morning—that I too was ordered abroad. An estate to be settled—some bothering old claim that had been handed down from generation to generation, and now springing into life again by the lapsing of two lives on the other side. But how to tell her as she looked up into my face with the half-pleading, half-imperious smile that I knew so well? How to tell her now?

So I said nothing, but foolishly pushed the little pebbles aside with my stick, fatuously waiting for the subject to pass. Of course my silence brought an instant criticism: "Why, Charlie, what ails you?"

"Nothing. And really, Bessie, what is it to us whether Fanny Meyrick go or stay?"

"I shouldn't have thought it was anything. But your silence, your confusion—Charlie, you do care a little for her, after all."

Two years ago, before Bessie and I had ever met, I had fluttered around Fanny Meyrick for a season, attracted by her bright brown eyes and the gypsy flush on her cheek. But there were other moths fluttering around that adamantine candle too; and I was not long in discovering that the brown eyes were bright for each and all, and that the gypsy flush was never stirred by feeling or by thought. It was merely a fixed ensign of health and good spirits. Consequently the charm had waned, for me at least; and in my confessions to Bessie since our near intimacy it was she, not I, who had magnified it into the shadow even of a serious thought.

"Care for her? Nonsense, Bessie! Do you want me to call her a mere doll, a hard, waxen—no, for wax will melt—a Parian creature, such as you may see by the dozens in Schwartz's window any day? It doesn't gratify you, surely, to hear me say that of any woman."

And then—what possessed me?—I was so angry at myself that I took a mental resume of all the good that could be said of Fanny Meyrick—her generosity, her constant cheerfulness; and in somewhat headlong fashion I expressed myself: "I won't call her a dolt and an idiot, even to please you. I have seen her do generous things, and she is never out of temper."

"Thanks!" said Bessie, nodding her head till the blue feather trembled. "It is as well, as Aunt Sloman says, to keep my shortcomings before you."

"When did Aunt Sloman say that?" I interrupted, hoping for a diversion of the subject.

"This morning only. I was late at breakfast. You know, Charlie, I was so tired with that long horseback ride, and of course everything waited. Dear aunty never will begin until I come down, but sits beside the urn like the forlornest of martyrs, and reads last night's papers over and over again."

"Well? And was she sorry that she had not invited me to wait with her?"

"Yes," said Bessie. "She said all sorts of things, and," flushing slightly, "that it was a pity you shouldn't know beforehand what you were to expect."

"I wish devoutly that I had been there," seizing the little hand that was mournfully tapping the weatherbeaten stone, and forcing the downcast eyes to look at me. "I think, both together, we could have pacified Aunt Sloman."

It was a diversion, and after a little while Bessie professed she had had enough of the church steps.

"How those people do stare! Is it the W——s, do you think, Charlie? I heard yesterday they were coming."

From our lofty position on the hillside we commanded the road leading out of the village—the road that was all alive with carriages on this beautiful September morning. The W—— carriage had half halted to reconnoitre, and had only not hailed us because we had sedulously looked another way.

"Let's get away," I said, "for the next carnage will not only stop, but come over;" and Bessie suffered herself to be led through the little tangle of brier and fern, past the gray old gravestones with "Miss Faith" and "Miss Mehitable" carved upon them, and into the leafy shadow of the waiting woods.

Other lovers have been there before us, but the trees whisper no secrets save their own. The subject of our previous discussion was not resumed, nor was Fanny Meyrick mentioned, until on our homeward road we paused a moment on the hilltop, as we always did.

It is indeed a hill of vision, that church hill at Lenox. Sparkling far to the south, the blue Dome lay, softened and shining in the September sun. There was ineffable peace in the faint blue sky, and, stealing up from the valley, a shimmering haze that seemed to veil the bustling village and soften all the rural sounds.

Bessie drew nearer to me, shading her eyes as she looked down into the valley: "Charlie dear, let us stay here always. We shall be happier, better here than to go back to New York."

"And the law-business?" I asked like a brutal bear, bringing the realities of life into my darling's girlish dream.

"Can't you practice law in Foxcroft, and drive over there every morning? People do."

"And because they do, and there are enough of them, I must plod along in the ways that are made for me already. We can make pilgrimages here, you know."

"I suppose so," said Bessie with a sigh.

Just then Fanny Kemble's clock in the tower above us struck the hour—one, two, three.

"Bless me! so late? And there's that phaeton coming back over the hill again. Hurry, Charlie! don't let them see us. They'll think that we've been here all the time." And Bessie plunged madly down the hill, and struck off into the side-path that leads into the Lebanon road. The last vibrations of the bell were still trembling on the air as I caught up with her again.

But again the teasing mood of the morning had come over her. Quite out of breath with the run, as we sat down to rest on the little porch of Mrs. Sloman's cottage she said, very earnestly, "But you haven't once said it."

"Said what, my darling?"

"That you are glad that Fanny is going abroad."

"Nonsense! Why should I be glad?"

"Are you sorry, then?"

If I had but followed my impulse then, and said frankly that I was, and why I was! But Mrs. Sloman was coming through the little hall: I heard her step. Small time for explanation, no time for reproaches. And I could not leave Bessie, on that morning of all others, hurt or angry, or only half convinced.

"No, I am not sorry," I said, pulling down a branch of honeysuckle, and making a loop of it to draw around her neck. "It is nothing, either way."

"Then say after me if it is nothing—feel as I feel for one minute, won't you?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Say, after me, then, word for word, 'I am glad, very glad, that Fanny Meyrick is to sail in October. I would not have her stay on this side for worlds!"

And like a fool, a baby, I said it, word for word, from those sweet smiling lips: "I am glad, very glad, that Fanny Meyrick is to sail in October. I would not have her stay on this side for worlds!"



CHAPTER II.

The next day was Sunday, and I was on duty at an early hour, prepared to walk with Bessie to church. My darling was peculiar among women in this: her church-going dress was sober-suited; like a little gray nun, almost, she came down to me that morning. Her dress, of some soft gray stuff, fell around her in the simplest folds, a knot of brown ribbon at her throat, and in her hat a gray gull's wing.

I had praised the Italian women for the simplicity of their church-attire: their black dresses and lace veils make a picturesque contrast with the gorgeous ceremonials of the high altar. But there was something in this quiet toilet, so fresh and simple and girl-like, that struck me as the one touch of grace that the American woman can give to the best even of foreign taste. Not the dramatic abnegation indicated by the black dress, but the quiet harmony of a life atune.

Mrs. Sloman was ready even before Bessie came down. She was a great invalid, although her prim and rigid countenance forbore any expression save of severity. She had no pathos about her, not a touch. Whatever her bodily sufferings may have been—and Bessie dimly hinted that they were severe to agony at times—they were resolutely shut within her chamber door; and when she came out in the early morning, her cold brown hair drawn smoothly over those impassive cheeks, she looked like a lady abbess—as cold, as unyielding and as hard.

There was small sympathy between the aunt and niece, but a great deal of painstaking duty on the one side, and on the other the habit of affection which young girls have for the faces they have always known.

Mrs. Sloman had been at pains to tell me, when my frequent visits to her cottage made it necessary that I should in some fashion explain to her as to what I wanted there, that her niece, Bessie Stewart, was in nowise dependent on her, not even for a home. "This cottage we rent in common. It was her father's desire that her property should not accumulate, and that she should have nothing at my hands but companionship, and"—with a set and sickly smile—"advice when it was called for. We are partners in our expenses, and the arrangement can be broken up at any moment."

Was this all? No word of love or praise for the fair young thing that had brightened all her household in these two years that Bessie had been fatherless?

I believe there was love and appreciation, but it was not Mrs. Sloman's method to be demonstrative or expansive. She approved of the engagement, and in her grim way had opened an immediate battery of household ledgers and ways and means. Some idea, too, of making me feel easy about taking Bessie away from her, I think, inclined her to this business-like manner. I tried to show her, by my own manner, that I understood her without words, and I think she was very grateful to be spared the expression of feeling. Poor soul! repression had become such a necessity to her!

So we talked on gravely of the weather, and of the celebrated Doctor McQ——, who was expected to give us an argumentative sermon that morning, until my argument came floating in at the door like a calm little bit of thistledown, to which our previous conversation had been as the thistle's self.

The plain little church was gay that morning. Carriage after carriage drove up with much prancing and champing, and group after group of city folk came rustling along the aisles. It was a bit of Fifth Avenue let into Lenox calm. The World and the Flesh were there, at least.

In the hush of expectancy that preceded the minister's arrival there was much waving of scented fans, while the well-bred city glances took in everything without seeming to see. I felt that Bessie and I were being mentally discussed and ticketed. And as it was our first appearance at church since—well, since—perhaps there was just a little consciousness of our relations that made Bessie seem to retire absolutely within herself, and be no more a part of the silken crowd than was the grave, plain man who rose up in the pulpit.

I hope the sermon was satisfactory. I am sure it was convincing to a brown-handed farmer who sat beside us, and who could with difficulty restrain his applauding comment. But I was lost in a dream of a near heaven, and could not follow the spoken word. It was just a quiet little opportunity to contemplate my darling, to tell over her sweetness and her charm, and to say over and again, like a blundering school-boy, "It's all mine! mine!"

The congregation might have been dismissed for aught I knew, and left me sitting there with her beside me. But I was startled into the proprieties as we stood up to sing the concluding hymn. I was standing stock-still beside her, not listening to the words at all, but with a pleasant sense of everything being very comfortable, and an old-fashioned swell of harmony on the air, when suddenly the book dropped from Bessie's hand and fell heavily to the floor. I should have said she flung it down had it been on any other occasion, so rapid and vehement was the action.

I stooped to pick it up, when with a decided gesture she stopped me. I looked at her surprised. Her face was flushed, indignant, I thought, and instantly my conscience was on the rack. What had I done, for my lady was evidently angry?

Glancing down once more toward the book, I saw that she had set her foot upon it, and indeed her whole attitude was one of excitement, defiance. Why did she look so hot and scornful? I was disturbed and anxious: what was there in the book or in me to anger her?

As quickly as possible I drew her away from the bustling crowd when the service was concluded. Fortunately, there was a side-door through which we could pass out into the quiet churchyard, and we vanished through it, leaving Mrs. Sloman far behind. Over into the Lebanon road was but a step, and the little porch was waiting with its cool honeysuckle shade. But Bessie did not stop at the gate: she was in no mood for home. And yet she would not answer my outpouring questions as to whether she was ill, or what was the matter.

"I'll tell you in a minute. Come, hurry!" she said, hastening along up the hill through all the dust and heat.

At last we reached that rustic bit of ruin known popularly as the "Shed." It was a hard bit of climbing, but I rejoiced that Bessie, so flushed and excited at the start, grew calmer as we went; and when, the summit reached, she sat down to rest on a broken board, her color was natural and she seemed to breathe freely again.

"Are they all hypocrites, do you think, Charlie?" she said suddenly, looking up into my face.

"They? who? Bessie, what have I done to make you angry?"

"You? Nothing, dear goose! I am angry at myself and at everybody else. Did it flash upon you, Charlie, what we were singing?"

Then she quoted the lines, which I will not repeat here, but they expressed, as the sole aspiration of the singer, a desire to pass eternity in singing hymns of joy and praise—an impatience for the time to come, a disregard of earth, a turning away from temporal things, and again the desire for an eternity of sacred song.

"Suppose I confess to you," said I, astonished at her earnestness, "that I did not at all know what I was singing?"

"That's just it! just what makes it so dreadful! Nobody was thinking about it—nobody! Nobody there wanted to give up earth and go straight to heaven and sing. I looked round at all the people, with their new bonnets, and the diamonds, and the footmen in the pews up stairs, and I thought, What lies they are all saying! Nobody wants to go to heaven at all until they are a hundred years old, and too deaf and blind and tired out to do anything on earth. My heaven is here and now in my own happiness, and so is yours, Charlie; and I felt so convicted of being a story-teller that I couldn't hold the book in my hand."

"Well, then," said I, "shall we have one set of hymns for happy people, and another for poor, tired-out folks like that little dressmaker that leaned against the wall?" For Bessie herself had called my attention to the pale little body who had come to the church door at the same moment with us.

"No, not two sets. Do you suppose that she, either, wants to sing on for ever? And all those girls! Sorry enough they would be to have to die, and leave their dancing and flirtations and the establishments they hope to have! It wouldn't be much comfort to them to promise them they should sing. Charlie, I want a hymn that shall give thanks that I am alive, that I have you."

"Could the dressmaker sing that?"

"No;" and Bessie's eyes sought the shining blue sky with a wistful, beseeching tenderness. "Oh, it's all wrong, Charlie dear. She ought to tell us in a chant how tired and hopeless she is for this world; and we ought to sing to her something that would cheer her, help her, even in this world. Why must she wait for all her brightness till she dies? So perfectly heartless to stand up along side of her and sing that!"

"Well," I said, "you needn't wait till next Sunday to bring her your words of cheer."

In a minute my darling was crying on my shoulder. I could understand the outburst, and was glad of it.

All athrill with new emotions, new purposes, an eternity of love, she had come to church to be reminded that earth was naught, that the trials and tempests here would come to an end some day, and after, to the patiently victorious, would come the hymns of praise. Earth was very full that morning to her and me; earth was a place for worshipful harmonies; and yet the strong contrast with the poor patient sufferer who had passed into church with us was too much for Bessie: she craved an expression that should comprehend alike her sorrow and our abundant joy.

The tempest of tears passed by, and we had bright skies again. Poor Mrs. Sloman's dinner waited long that day; and it was with a guilty sense that she was waiting too that we went down the hill at a quickened pace when the church clock, sounding up the hillside, came like a chiding voice.

And a double sense of guiltiness was creeping over me. I must return to New York to-morrow, and I had not told Bessie yet of the longer journey I must make so soon. I put it by again and again in the short flying hours of that afternoon; and it was not until dusk had fallen in the little porch, as we sat there after tea, and I had watched the light from Mrs. Sloman's chamber shine down upon the honeysuckles and then go out, that I took my resolution.

"Bessie," I said, leaning over her and taking her face in both my hands, "I have something to tell you."



CHAPTER III.

"I have something to tell you;" and without an instant's pause I went on: "Mr. D—— has business in England which cannot be attended to by letter. One of us must go, and they send me. I must sail in two weeks."

It was a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, and Bessie gave a little gasp of surprise: "So soon! Oh, Charlie, take me with you!" Realizing in the next instant the purport of the suggestion, she flung away from my hands and rushed into the parlor, where a dim, soft lamp was burning on the table. She sat down on a low chair beside it and hid her face on the table in her hands.

Like a flash of lightning all the possibilities of our marriage before many days—arranging it with Mrs. Sloman, and satisfying my partners, who would expect me to travel fast and work hard in the short time they had allotted for the journey,—all came surging and throbbing through my brain, while my first answer was not given in words.

When I had persuaded Bessie to look at me and to answer me in turn, I hoped we should be able to talk about it with the calm judgment it needed.

"To leave my wife—my wife!"—how I lingered on the word!—"in some poky lodgings in London, while I am spending my day among dusty boxes and files of deeds in a dark old office, isn't just my ideal of our wedding-journey; but, Bessie, if you wish it so—"

What was there in my tone that jarred her? I had meant to be magnanimous, to think of her comfort alone, of the hurry and business of such a journey—tried to shut myself out and think only of her in the picture. But I failed, of course, and went on stupidly, answering the quick look of question in her eyes: "If you prefer it—that is, you know, I must think of you and not of myself."

Still the keen questioning glance. What new look was this in her eyes, what dawning thought?

"No," she answered after a pause, slowly withdrawing her hand from mine, "think of yourself."

I had expected that she would overwhelm me in her girlish way with saucy protestations that she would be happy even in the dull London lodgings, and that she would defy the law-files to keep me long from her. This sudden change of manner chilled me with a nameless fear.

"If I prefer it! If I wish it! I see that I should be quite in your way, an encumbrance. Don't talk about it any more."

She was very near crying, and I wish to heaven she had cried. But she conquered herself resolutely, and held herself cold and musing before me. I might take her hand, might kiss her unresisting cheek, but she seemed frozen into sudden thoughtfulness that it was impossible to meet or to dispel.

"Bessie, you know you are a little goose! What could I wish for in life but to carry you off this minute to New York? Come, get your hat and let's walk over to the parsonage now. We'll get Doctor Wilder to marry us, and astonish your aunt in the morning."

"Nonsense!" said Bessie with a slight quiver of her pretty, pouting mouth. "Do be rational, Charlie!"

I believe I was rational in my own fashion for a little while, but when I ventured to say in a very unnecessary whisper, "Then you will go abroad with me?" Bessie flushed to her temples and rose from the sofa. She had a way, when she was very much in earnest, or very much stirred with some passionate thought, of pacing the parlor with her hands clasped tightly before her, and her arms tense and straining at the clasping hands. With her head bent slightly forward, and her brown hair hanging in one long tress over her shoulder, she went swiftly up and down, while I lay back on the sofa and watched her. She would speak it out presently, the thought that was hurting her. So I felt secure and waited, following every movement with a lover's eye. But I ought not to have waited. I should have drawn her to me and shared that rapid, nervous walk—should have compelled her with sweet force to render an account of that emotion. But I was so secure, so entirely one with her in thought, that I could conceive of nothing but a passing tempest at my blundering, stupid thoughtfulness for her.

Suddenly at the door she stopped, and with her hand upon it said, "Good-night, Charlie;" and was out of the room in a twinkling.

I sprang from the sofa and to the foot of the stairs, but I saw only a glimpse of her vanishing dress; and though I called after her in low, beseeching tones, "Bessie! Bessie!" a door shut in the distant corridor for only answer.

What to do? In that decorous mansion I could not follow her; and my impulse to dash after her and knock at her door till she answered me, I was forced to put aside after a moment's consideration.

I stood there in the quiet hall, the old clock ticking away a solemn "I-told-you-so!" in the corner. I made one step toward the kitchen to send a message by one of the maids, but recoiled at the suggestion that this would publish a lovers' quarrel. So I retreated along the hall, my footsteps making no noise on the India matting, and entered the parlor again like a thief. I sat down by the table: "Bessie will certainly come back: she will get over her little petulance, and know I am here waiting."

All about the parlor were the traces of my darling. A soft little coil of rose-colored Berlin wool, with its ivory needle sheathed among the stitches, lay in a tiny basket. I lifted it up: the basket was made of scented grass, and there was a delicious sweet and pure fragrance about the knitting-work. I took possession of it and thrust it into my breast-pocket. A magazine she had been reading, with the palest slip of a paper-knife—a bit of delicate Swiss wood—in it, next came in my way. I tried to settle down and read where she had left off, but the words danced before my eyes, and a strange tune was repeating in my ears, "Good-night, Charlie—good-night and good-bye!"

One mad impulse seized me to go out under her window and call to her, asking her to come down. But Lenox nights were very still, and the near neighbors on either side doubtless wide awake to all that was going on around the Sloman cottage.

So I sat still like an idiot, and counted the clock-strokes, and nervously calculated the possibility of her reappearance, until I heard, at last, footsteps coming along the hall in rapid tread. I darted up: "Oh, Bessie, I knew you would come back!" as through the open door walked in—Mary, Mrs. Sloman's maid!

She started at seeing me: "Excuse me, sir. The parlor was so—I thought there was no one here."

"What is it, Mary?" I asked with assumed indifference. "Do you want Miss Bessie? She went up stairs a few moments ago."

"No, sir. I thought—that is—" glancing down in awkward confusion at the key she held in her hand. She was retiring again softly when I saw in the key the reason of her discomposure.

"Did you come in to lock up, Mary?" I asked with a laugh.

"Yes, sir. But it is of no consequence. I thought you had gone, sir."

"Time I was, I suppose. Well, Mary, you shall lock me out, and then carry this note to Miss Bessie. It is so late that I will not wait for her. Perhaps she is busy with Mrs. Sloman."

Something in Mary's face made me suspect that she knew Mrs. Sloman to be sound asleep at this moment; but she said nothing, and waited respectfully until I had scribbled a hasty note, rifling Bessie's writing-desk for the envelope in which to put my card. Dear child! there lay my photograph, the first thing I saw as I raised the dainty lid.

"Bessie," I wrote, "I have waited until Mary has come in with her keys, and I suppose I must go. My train starts at nine to-morrow morning, but you will be ready—will you not?—at six to take a morning walk with me. I will be here at that hour. You don't know how disturbed and anxious I shall be till then."



CHAPTER IV.

Morning came—or rather the long night came to an end at last—and at twenty minutes before six I opened the gate at the Sloman cottage. It was so late in September that the morning was a little hazy and uncertain. And yet the air was warm and soft—a perfect reflex, I thought, of Bessie last night—an electric softness under a brooding cloud.

The little house lay wrapped in slumber. I hesitated to pull the bell: no, it would startle Mrs. Sloman. Bessie was coming: she would surely not make me wait. Was not that her muslin curtain stirring? I would wait in the porch—she would certainly come down soon.

So I waited, whistling softly to myself as I pushed the withered leaves about with my stick and drew strange patterns among them. Half an hour passed.

"I will give her a gentle reminder;" so I gathered a spray from the honeysuckle, a late bloom among the fast-falling leaves, and aimed it right at the muslin curtain. The folds parted and it fell into the room, but instead of the answering face that I looked to see, all was still again.

"It's very strange," thought I. "Bessie's pique is not apt to last so long. She must indeed be angry."

And I went over each detail of our last night's talk, from her first burst of "Take me with you!" to my boggling answers, my fears, so stupidly expressed, that it would be anything but a picturesque bridal-trip, and the necessity that there was for rapid traveling and much musty, old research.

"What a fool I was not to take her then and there! She is myself: why shouldn't I, then, be selfish? When I do what of all things I want to, why can't I take it for granted that she will be happy too?" And a hot flush of shame went over me to think that I had been about to propose to her, to my own darling girl, that we should be married as soon as possible after I returned from Europe.

Her love, clearer-sighted, had striven to forestall our separation: why should we be parted all those weary weeks? why put the sea between us?

I had accepted all these obstacles as a dreary necessity, never thinking for the moment that conventional objections might be overcome, aunts and guardians talked over, and the whole matter arranged by two people determined on their own sweet will.

What a lumbering, masculine plan was mine! After I returned from Europe! I grew red and bit my lips with vexation. And now my dear girl was shy and hurt. How should I win back again that sweet impulse of confidence?

Presently the household began to stir. I heard unbarring and unbolting, and craftily retreated to the gate, that I might seem to be just coming in, to the servant who should open the door.

It was opened by a housemaid—not the Mary of the night before—who stared a moment at seeing me, but on my asking if Miss Bessie was ready yet to walk, promised smilingly to go and see. She returned in a moment, saying that Miss Bessie begged that I would wait: she was hurrying to come down.

The child! She has slept too soundly. I shall tell her how insensate she must have been, how serenely unconscious when the flower came in at the window.

The clock on the mantel struck seven and the half hour before Bessie appeared. She was very pale, and her eyes looked away at my greeting. Passively she suffered herself to be placed in a chair, and then, with something of her own manner, she said hurriedly, "Don't think I got your note, Charlie, last night, or I wouldn't, indeed I wouldn't, have kept you waiting so long this morning."

"Didn't Mary bring it to you?" I asked, surprised.

"Yes: that is, she brought it up to my room, but, Charlie dear, I wasn't there: I wasn't there all night. I did shut my door, though I heard you calling, and after a little while I crept out into the entry and looked over the stairs, hoping you were there still, and that I could come back to you. But you were not there, and everything was so still that I was sure you had gone—gone without a word. I listened and listened, but I was too proud to go down into the parlor and see. And yet I could not go back to my room, next Aunt Sloman's. I went right up stairs to the blue room, and stayed there. Mary must have put your note on my table when she came up stairs. I found it there this morning when I went down."

"Poor darling! And what did you do all night in the blue room? I am afraid," looking at her downcast eyes, "that you did not sleep—that you were angry at me."

"At you? No, at myself," she said very low.

"Bessie, you know that my first and only thought was of the hurry and worry this journey would cost you. You know that to have you with me was something that I had scarce dared to dream."

"And therefore," with a flash of blue eyes, "for me to dare to dream it was—" and again she hid her face.

"But, my precious, don't you know that it was for you to suggest what I wanted all the time, but thought it would be too much to ask?" For I had discovered, of course, in my morning's work among the dead leaves on the porch, that I had desired it from the moment I had known of my journey—desired it without acknowledging it to myself or presuming to plan upon it.

At this juncture breakfast was announced, and the folding doors thrown open that led into the breakfast-parlor, disclosing Mrs. Sloman seated by the silver urn, and a neat little table spread for three, so quick had been the housemaid's intuitions.

"Good-morning, Charles: come get some breakfast. You will hardly be in time for your train," suggested Aunt Sloman in a voice that had in it all the gloom of the morning. Indeed, the clouds had gathered heavily during the parlor scene, and some large drops were rattling against the window.

I looked at my watch. After eight! Pshaw! I will let this train go, and will telegraph to the office. I can take the night train, and thus lose only a few hours. So I stayed.

What rare power had Bessie in the very depths of her trouble, and with her face pale and eyes so heavy with her last night's vigil—what gift that helped her to be gay? Apparently not with an effort, not forced, she was as joyous and frank as her sunniest self. No exaggeration of laughter or fun, but the brightness of her every-day manner, teasing and sparkling round Aunt Sloman, coquetting very naturally with me. It was a swift change from the gloomy atmosphere we had left behind in the parlor, and I basked in it delighted, and feeling, poor fool! that the storm was cleared away, and that the time for the singing of birds was come.

I was the more deceived. I did not know all of Bessie yet. Her horror of a scene, of any suspicion that there was discord between us, and her rare self-control, that for the moment put aside all trouble, folded it out of sight and took up the serene old life again for a little space.

"Aunt Maria," said Bessie, pushing aside her chair, "won't you take care of Mr. Munro for a little while? I have a letter to write that I want him to take to New York."

Aunt Maria would be happy to entertain me, or rather to have me entertain her. If I would read to her, now, would I be so kind, while she washed up her breakfast cups?

How people can do two things at once I am sure I cannot understand; and while the maid brought in the large wooden bowl, the steam of whose household incense rose high in the air, I watched impatient for the signal to begin. When the tea-cups were all collected, and Aunt Sloman held one by the handle daintily over the "boiling flood," "Now," she said with a serene inclination of her head, "if you please."

And off I started at a foot-pace through the magazine that had been put into my hands. Whether it was anything about the "Skelligs," or "Miss Sedgwick's Letters," or "Stanley-Livingstone," I have not the remotest idea. I was fascinated by the gentle dip of each tea-cup, and watched from the corner of my eye the process of polishing each glittering spoon on a comfortable crash towel.

Then my thoughts darted off to Bessie. Was she indeed writing to her old trustee? Judge Hubbard was a friend of my father's, and would approve of me, I thought, if he did not agree at once to the hurried marriage and ocean journey.

"What an unconscionable time it takes her! Don't you think so, Mrs. Sloman?" I said at last, after I had gone through three several papers on subjects unknown.

I suppose it was scarcely a courteous speech. But Mrs. Sloman smiled a white-lipped smile of sympathy, and said, "Yes; I will go and send her to you."

"Oh, don't hurry her," I said falsely, hoping, however, that she would.

Did I say before that Bessie was tall? Though so slight that you always wanted to speak of her with some endearing diminutive, she looked taller than ever that morning; and as she stood before me, coming up to the fireplace where I was standing, her eyes looked nearly level into mine. I did not understand their veiled expression, and before I had time to study it she dropped them and said hastily, "Young man, I am pining for a walk."

"In the rain?"

"Pshaw! This is nothing, after all, but a Scotch mist. See, I am dressed for it;" and she threw a tartan cloak over her shoulder—a blue-and-green tartan that I had never seen before.

"The very thing for shipboard," I whispered as I looked at her admiringly.

Her face was flushed enough now, but she made no answer save to stoop down and pat the silly little terrier that had come trotting into the room with her.

"Fidget shall go—yes, he shall go walking;" and Fidget made a gray ball of himself in his joy at the permission.

Up the hill again we walked, with the little Skye terrier cantering in advance or madly chasing the chickens across the road.

"Did you finish your letter satisfactorily?" I asked, for I was fretting with impatience to know its contents.

"Yes. I will give it to you when you leave to-night."

"Shall we say next Saturday, Bessie?" said I, resolving to plunge at once into the sea of our late argument.

"For what? For you to come again? Don't you always come on Saturday?"

"Yes, but this time I mean to carry you away."

A dead pause, which I improved by drawing her hand under my arm and imprisoning her little gray glove with my other hand. As she did not speak, I went on fatuously: "You don't need any preparation of gowns and shawls; you can buy your trousseau in London, if need be; and we'll settle on the ship, coming over, how and where we are to live in New York."

"You think, then, that I am all ready to be married?"

"I think that my darling is superior to the nonsense of other girls—that she will be herself always, and doesn't need any masquerade of wedding finery."

"You think, then," coldly and drawing her hand away, "that I am different from other girls?" and the scarlet deepened on her cheek. "You think I say and do things other girls would not?"

"My darling, what nonsense! You say and do things that other girls cannot, nor could if they tried a thousand years."

"Thanks for the compliment! It has at least the merit of dubiousness. Now, Charlie, if you mention Europe once in this walk I shall be seriously offended. Do let us have a little peace and a quiet talk."

"Why, what on earth can we talk about until this is settled? I can't go back to New York, and engage our passage, and go to see Judge Hubbard—I suppose you were writing to him this morning?"

She did not answer, but seemed bent on making the dainty print of her foot in the moist earth of the road, taking each step carefully, as though it were the one important and engrossing thing in life.

"—Unless," I went on, "you tell me you will be ready to go back with me this day week. You see, Bessie dear, I must sail on the fixed day. And if we talk it over now and settle it all, it will save no end of writing to and fro."

"Good-morning!" said a gay voice behind us—Fanny Meyrick's voice. She was just coming out of one of the small houses on the roadside. "Don't you want some company? I've been to call on my washerwoman, and I'm so glad I've met you. Such an English morning! Shall I walk with you?"



CHAPTER V

If I could have changed places with Fidget, I could scarce have expressed my disapproval of the new-comer more vehemently than he. Miss Meyrick seemed quite annoyed at the little dog's uncalled-for snapping and barking, and shook her umbrella at him in vain. I was obliged to take him in hand myself at last, and to stand in the road and order him to "Go home!" while the two young ladies walked on, apparently the best of friends.

When I rejoined them Fanny Meyrick was talking fast and unconnectedly, as was her habit: "Yes, lodgings in London—the dearest old house in Clarges street. Such a butler! He looks like a member of Parliament. We stayed there once before for three days. I am just going to settle into an English girl. Had enough of the Continent. Never do see England now-a-days, nobody. All rush off. So papa is going to have a comfortable time. Embassy? Oh, I know the general well."

I looked beseechingly at Bessie. Why wouldn't she say that we too would be there in London lodgings? Perhaps, then, Fanny Meyrick might take the hint and leave us soon.

But Bessie gave no sign, and I relapsed into a somewhat impatient resume of my own affairs. Yes: married quietly on Saturday; leave here on Monday morning train; take, yes, Wednesday's steamer. I could arrange it with my law-partners to be absent a little longer perhaps, that there might be some little rest and romance about the wedding-journey.

Two or three times in the course of that morning—for she stayed with us all the morning—Fanny Meyrick rallied me on my preoccupation and silence: "He didn't use to be so, Bessie, years ago, I assure you. It's very disagreeable, sir—not an improvement by any means."

Then—I think without any malice prepense, simply the unreasoning rattle of a belle of two seasons—she plunged into a description of a certain fete at Blankkill on the Hudson, the occasion of our first acquaintance: "He was so young, Bessie, you can't imagine, and blushed so beautifully that all the girls were jealous as could be. We were very good friends—weren't we?—all that summer?"

"And are still, I hope," said I with my most sweeping bow. "What have I done to forfeit Miss Meyrick's esteem?"

"Nothing, except that you used to find your way oftener to Meyrick Place than you do now. Well, I won't scold you for that: I shall make up for that on the other side."

What did she mean? She had no other meaning than that she would have such compensation in English society that her American admirers would not be missed. She did not know of my going abroad.

But Bessie darted a quick glance from her to me, and back again to her, as though some dawning suspicion had come to her. "I hope," she said quietly, "that you may have a pleasant winter. It will be delightful, won't it, Charlie?"

"Oh, very!" I answered, but half noting the under-meaning of her words, my mind running on deck state-rooms and the like.

"Charlie," said Miss Meyrick suddenly, "do you remember what happened two years ago to-day?"

"No, I think not."

Taking out a little book bound in Russia leather and tipped with gold, she handed it to Bessie, who ran her eye down the page: it was open at September 28th.

"Read it," said Fanny, settling herself composedly in her shawl, and leaning back against a tree with half-shut eyes.

"'September 28th'" Bessie read, in clear tones which had a strange constraint in them, "'Charlie Munro saved my life. I shall love him for ever and ever. We were out in a boat, we two, on the Hudson—moonlight—I was rowing. Dropt my oar into the water. Leaned out after it and upset the boat. Charlie caught me and swam with me to shore.'"

A dead silence as Bessie closed the book and held it in her hand.

"Oh," said I lightly, "that isn't worth chronicling—that! It was no question of saving lives. The New York boat was coming up, if I remember."

"Yes, it was in trying to steer away from it that I dropped my oar."

"So you see it would have picked us up, any how. There was nothing but the ducking to remember."

"Such a figure, Bessie! Imagine us running along the road to the gate! I could scarcely move for my dripping skirts; and we frightened papa so when we stepped up on the piazza out of the moonlight!"

To stop this torrent of reminiscences, which, though of nothings, I could see was bringing the red spot to Bessie's cheek, I put out my hand for the book: "Let me write something down to-day;" and I hastily scribbled: "September 28. Charles Munro and Bessie Stewart, to sail for Europe in ten days, ask of their friend Fanny Meyrick her warm congratulations."

"Will that do?" I whispered as I handed the book to Bessie.

"Not at all," said Bessie scornfully and coldly, tearing out the leaf as she spoke and crumpling it in her hand.—"Sorry to spoil your book, Fanny dear, but the sentiment would have spoiled it more. Let us go home."

As we passed the hotel on that dreary walk home, Fanny would have left us, but Bessie clung to her and whispered something in a pleading voice, begging her, evidently, to come home with us.

"If Mr. Munro will take word to papa," she said, indicating that worthy, who sat on the upper piazza smoking his pipe.

"We will walk on," said Bessie coldly. "Come, Fanny dear."

Strange, thought I as I turned on my heel, this sudden fond intimacy! Bessie is angry. Why did I never tell her of the ducking? And yet when I remembered how Fanny had clung to me, how after we had reached the shore I had been forced to remind her that it was no time for sentimental gratitude when we both were shivering, I could see why I had refrained from mentioning it to Bessie until our closer confidences would allow of it.

No man, unless he be a downright coxcomb, will ever admit to one woman that another woman has loved him. To his wife—perhaps. But how much Fanny Meyrick cared for me I had never sought to know. After the dismal ending of that moonlight boat-row—I had been already disenchanted for some time before—I had scarce called at Meyrick Place more than civility required. The young lady was so inclined to exaggerate the circumstance, to hail me as her deliverer, that I felt like the hero of a melodrama whenever we met. And after I had met Bessie there were pleasanter things to think about—much pleasanter.

How exasperating girls can be when they try! I had had my conge for the walk home, I knew, and I was vexed enough to accept it and stay at the hotel to dinner.

"I will not be played upon in this way. Bessie knows that I stayed over the morning train just to be with her, and piled up for to-morrow no end of work, as well as sarcastic remarks from D. & Co. If she chooses to show off her affection for Fanny Meyrick in these few hours that we have together—Fanny Meyrick whom she hated yesterday—she may enjoy her friendship undisturbed by me."

So I loitered with my cigar after dinner, and took a nap on the sofa in my room. I was piqued, and did not care to conceal it. As the clock struck five I bethought me it was time to betake me to the Sloman cottage. A sound of wheels and a carriage turning brought me to the window. The two young ladies were driving off in Fanny Meyrick's phaeton, having evidently come to the hotel and waited while it was being made ready.

"Pique for pique! Serves me right, I suppose."

Evening found me at the Sloman cottage, waiting with Mrs. Sloman by the tea-table. Why do I always remember her, sitting monumental by the silver urn?

"The girls are very late to-night."

"Yes." I was beginning to be uneasy. It was nearing train-time again.

"Such lovely moonlight, I suppose, has tempted them, or they may be staying at Foxcroft to tea."

Indeed? I looked at my watch: I had ten minutes.

A sound of wheels: the phaeton drove up.

"Oh, Charlie," said Bessie as she sprang out, "you bad boy! you'll miss your train again. Fanny here will drive you to the hotel. Jump in, quick!"

And as the moonlight shone full on her face I looked inquiringly into her eyes.

"The letter," I said, "for Judge Hubbard?" hoping that she would go to the house for it, and then I could follow her for a word.

"Oh! I had almost forgotten. Here it is;" and she drew it from her pocket and held it out to me in her gloved hand. I pressed the hand to my lips, riding-glove and all, and sprang in beside Fanny, who was with some difficulty making her horse stand still.

"Good-bye!" from the little figure at the gate. "Don't forget, Fanny, to-morrow at ten;" and we were off.

By the wretched kerosene lamp of the car, going down, I read my letter, for it was for me: "I will not go to Europe, and I forbid you to mention it again. I shall never, never forget that I proposed it, and that you—accepted it. Come up to Lenox once more before you go."

This was written in ink, and was sealed. It was the morning's note. But across the envelope these words were written in pencil: "Go to Europe with Fanny Meyrick, and come up to Lenox, both of you, when you return."

SARAH C. HALLOWELL.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]



INSIDE JAPAN.

A double pleasure rewards the pioneer who is the first to penetrate into the midst of a new people. Besides the rare exhilaration felt in treading soil virgin to alien feet, it acts like mental oxygen to look upon and breathe in a unique civilization like that of Japan. To feel that for ages millions of one's own race have lived and loved, enjoyed and suffered and died, living the fullness of life, yet without the religion, laws, customs, food, dress and culture which seem to us to be the vitals of our social existence, is like walking through a living Pompeii.

I confess to a chronic desire to explore the Island Empire in which I dwell. Having already, in the central provinces of Japan, trodden many a path never before touched by foreign foot, I yearned to explore the twin provinces of Kadzusa and Awa, which form the peninsula lying between the Gulf of Yeddo and the Pacific Ocean. A timely holiday and a passport from the Japanese foreign office enabled me to start toward the end of March, the time when all Japan is glorious with blossoming plum trees, and the camellia trees in forests of bloom are marshaled by thousands on the mountain-slopes.

I was glad to get away from Yeddo: I had a fit of anti-Caucasianism, and wished to dwell a while amidst things purely Japanese. There were too many foreigners in Yeddo. In that city of only eight hundred thousand Japanese there are now full two hundred foreigners of all nationalities; and of these, fifty or more are Americans. It was too much like home and too little like Japan. Should I go to Yokohama, the case was worse. Nearly twelve hundred of the sons of Japheth dwelt there, and to reach that upstart European city one must travel on a railway and see telegraph-poles all along the line. What was the use of living in Japan? Every young Japanese, too, in the capital is brainful of "civilization," "progress," "reform," etc. I half suspect a few cracks in the craniums belonging to some of the youths who wish to introduce law, religion, steam, language, frock-coats and tight boots by edict and ordinance. There was too much civilization. I yearned for something more primitive, something more purely Japanese; and tramping into the country I should find it. I should eat Japanese food—profanely dubbed "chow-chow;" sleep in Japanese beds—on the floor; talk Japanese—as musical as Italian; and live so much like an old-time native that I should feel as one born on the soil. By that time, returning to Yeddo as a Japanese of the period, I should of course burn to adopt railways, telegraphs and balloons, codify the laws, improve upon United States postage, coinage and dress-coats, and finish off by annexing the English language after I had cut out all irregularities and made all the crooked spelling straight.

So, resolving to be a heathen for a week at least, I left Yeddo one afternoon, though it took several hours to do so: the big city is one of distances more magnificent than those of Washington. I started in a jin-riki-sha, which baby-carriage on adult wheels has already been described, so as to be tolerably familiar to all American readers. The "team" of this "man-power carriage" consists of two men, pulling tandem—one in the shafts, the other running ahead with a rope over his shoulder, and, until the recent passage of a law commanding decency, attired only in his cuticle and a loin-cloth two inches wide. You take three coolies when you wish to be stylish, while four are not an unknown sensation in Yeddo. With these and fresh relays you can travel sixty, or even eighty, miles a day; and I have known one man to run thirty miles on the stretch.

Of all the modes of traveling in Japan, the jin-riki-sha is the most pleasant. The kago is excruciating. It is a flat basket, swung on a pole and carried on the shoulders of two men. If your neck does not break, your feet go hopelessly to sleep. Headaches seem to lodge somewhere in the bamboos, to afflict every victim entrapped in it. To ride in a kago is as pleasant as riding in a washtub or a coffin slung on a pole. In some mountain-passes stout native porters carry you pickapack. Crossing the shallow rivers, you may sit upon a platform borne on men's shoulders as they wade. Saddle-horses are not to be publicly hired, but pack-horses are pleasant means of locomotion. These animals and their leaders deserve a whole chapter of description for themselves. Fancy a brass-bound peaked pack-saddle rising a foot above the animal's back, with a crupper-strap slanting down to clasp the tail. The oft-bandied slur, that in Japan everything goes by contraries, has a varnish of truth on it when we notice that the most gorgeous piece of Japanese saddlery is the crupper, which, even on a pack-horse, is painted crimson and gilded gloriously. The man who leads the horse is an animal that by long contact and companionship with the quadruped has grown to resemble him in disposition and ejaculation: at least, the equine and the human seem to harmonize well together. This man is called in Japanese "horse side." He is dressed in straw sandals and the universally worn kimono, or blue cotton wrapper-like dress, which is totally unfitted for work of any kind, and which makes the slovens of Japan—a rather numerous class—always look as if they had just got out of bed. At his waist is the usual girdle, from which hangs the inevitable bamboo-and-brass pipe, the bowl of which holds but a pellet of the mild fine-cut tobacco of the country. The pipe-case is connected with a tobacco-pouch, in which are also flint, steel and tinder. All these are suspended by a cord, fastened to a wooden or ivory button, which is tucked up through the belt. On his head, covering his shaven mid-scalp and right-angled top-knot, is a blue cotton rag—not handkerchief, since such an article in Japan is always made of paper. This head-gear is usually fastened over the head by twisting the ends under the nose. With a rope six feet long he leads his horse, which trusts so implicitly to its master's guidance that we suspect the prevalence of blindness among the Japanese pack-horses arises from sheer lack of the exercise of their eyesight. These unkempt brutes are strangers to curry-combs and brushes, though a semi-monthly scrubbing in hot water keeps them tolerably clean. Their shoes are a curiosity: the hoofs are not shod with iron, but with straw sandals, tied on thrice or oftener daily. Grass is scarce in Japan, and oats are unknown. The nags live on beans, barley, and the stalks, leaves and tops of succulent plants, with only an occasional wisp of hay or grass.

In certain districts horses of one or the other sex, as the law determines, are kept exclusively. Horses of the gentler sex in Japan are usually led by women. During part of my journey to the place which I am about to describe the leader of the mare I bestrode was a maiden of some forty summers—a neat, spare, vinegar-faced sylph, who had evidently long since left the matrimonial market, and had devoted herself to making one horse happy for the rest of her pilgrimage. That she was neither wife nor widow I discovered, not by asking questions, but by the manner in which her hair was dressed. Japanese virgins and wives have each distinct coiffures, by which, apart from the shaven eyebrows and the teeth dyed black of the married women, the musume or young maiden may be known. The widow who has resolved never to marry again (always too old or ugly) is distinguished by her smooth skull, every hair of which is shaved off. A lady of rank may also be known by her coiffure; and many other distinctions are thus noted.

I waited three-quarters of an hour for my horse and its leader to appear at the post-relay at which I sat down, and was stared at during that time by about three hundred pairs of eyes. The populace of each village turned out en masse to see the foreigner, and they diligently improved their time in examining him from crown to boot-sole. Like everything else in the rural districts of Japan, my guide was not in a hurry, and could not understand why a foreigner should be. But finally arriving, she bowed very low and invited me to climb up on the saddle, and off we started for a mountain ride of eight miles.

A Japanese pack-horse, at his best, seems always swaying between two opinions: his affection for the bestower of his beans and that for the repose of the stable mutually attract him. On this occasion the little woman gently led the horse over the rough places and down the steep paths with the ejaculation, Mite yo! Mite yo! but when the beast stopped too long to meditate or to chew the bit, as if vainly trying to pick its teeth, a lively jerk of the rope and a "You old beast! come on," started the animal on its travels. Finally, when the creature stopped to deliberate upon the propriety of going forward at all, the vials of the wrath of the Japanese spinster exploded, and I was tempted to believe her affections had been blighted. But when we met any of her friends on the road, or passed the wayside shops or farm-houses, the scolder of horses was the lady who wished all Ohaio ("Good-morning"), or remarked that the weather was very fine; and when joked for carrying a foreigner, replied, "Yes, it is the first time I have had the honor."

I need not trouble the reader with many details of geography. My trip lasted eight days, during which I passed over two hundred miles, two-thirds of the way on foot. I made the entire circuit of the lower half of the peninsula, but shall dwell only on my visit to Kanozan (Deer Mountain), famous for its lovely scenery, temple and Booddhist monastery. From the top of the mountain there are visible innumerable valleys, nearly the whole of the Gulf of Yeddo, and the white-throned Foosiyama, called the highest mountain in Japan and the most beautiful in the world. We spent the night previous in Kisaradzu, the capital of the now united provinces, and a neat little city, just beginning to introduce foreign civilization. Its streets were lighted with Yankee lamps and Pennsylvania petroleum. Postal boxes after the Yankee custom were erected and in use. Gingham umbrellas were replacing those made of oiled paper. Barbers' poles, painted white with the spiral red band, were set up, and within the shops Young Japan had his queue cut off and his hair dressed in foreign style. Ignorant of the significance of the symbolic relic of the old days, when the barber was doctor and dentist also, and made his pole represent a bandage wound around a broken limb, the Japanese barber has, in many cases, added a green or blue band. Not being an adept in the use of that refractory language which Young Japan would so like to flatten out and plane down for vernacular use, the Japanese barber is not always happy in executing the English legend for his sign-board. The following are specimens:

"A HAIR-DRESSING SALOON FOR JAPANES AND FOREIGNER."

"SHOP OF HAIR."

"HAIRS CUT IN THE ENGLISH AND FRENCH FASHION."

Passing out of Kisaradzu, and winding up to Kanozan over the narrow bridle-path, we pass the usual terraced rice-fields watered by descending rivulets, and the usual thatched and mud-walled cottages, which characterize every landscape in Japan, besides long rows of tall tsubaki (camellia) trees, forty feet high and laden with their crimson and white splendors. Along the road are the little wayside shrines and sacred portals of red wood which tell where the worshipers of the Shintoo faith adore their gods and offer their prayers without image, idol or picture. The far more numerous images and shrines of Booddha the sage, Amida the queen of heaven, and hundred-armed Kuannon, tell of the popular faith of the masses of Japan in the gentle doctrines of the Indian sage. The student of comparative religions is interested in noticing how a code of morals founded upon atheistic humanitarianism, in its origin utterly destitute of theology, has developed into a colossal system of demonology, dogmatics, eschatology, myths and legends, with a pantheon more populous than that of old Rome. Many of the images by the wayside are headless, cloven by frost, overturned by earthquakes, and so pitted by time as to resemble petrified smallpox patients rather than divinities. Nature neither respects dogma nor worships the gods made by men, and the moss and the lichens have muffled up the idols and eaten the substance of the sacred stone. Here Booddha wears a robe of choicest green, and there the little saxafrage waves its white blossoms from the shoulder of Amida, rending asunder her stone body. Even the little stone columns which contain a guiding hand pointing out the road to Kanozan are dedicated to Great Shaka (Booddha). Passing one of the larger temples, we meet a company of pilgrims. Actual sight and reasoning from experience in other lands agree in telling me that they are women, and most of them old women. They return my salute, politely striving to conceal their wonder at the first to-jin they have ever looked upon.

I would wager that these people, like most of the rustics in Japan, have always believed the foreigners from Europe and America to be certainly ruffians, and most probably beasts. Many of them, without having heard; of Darwin or Monboddo, believe all the "hairy foreigners" to be descendants of dogs. Their first meeting with a foreigner sweeps away the cobwebs of prejudice, and they are ashamed of their former ignorance. In extorting from Japanese friends their first ideas about foreigners, I have been forcibly reminded of some popular ideas concerning the people of China and Japan which are still entertained at home, especially by the queens of the kitchen and the lords of the hod.

After the fashion in Japan, I inquire of the pilgrims whence they came and whither they are going. Leaning upon their staves and unslinging their huge round, conical hats, they give me to know that they have come on foot from Muja, nearly one hundred and fifty miles distant, and that they will finish their pilgrimage at Kominato—where the great founder of the Nichiren sect (one of the last developments of Booddhism in Japan) was born—twenty-seven miles beyond the point at which we met. I inform them that I have come over seven thousand miles, and will also visit Nichiren's birthplace. "Sayo de gozarimos! Naru hodo?" ("Indeed, is it possible?")

I have reached their hearts through the gates of surprise. A foreigner visiting Nichiren's birthplace! And coming seven thousand miles too! The old ladies become loquacious. They pour out their questions by dozens. Do you have Booddhist temples in America? Of course the Nichiren sect flourishes there? When I politely answer No to both questions, a look of disappointed surprise and pity steals over both the ruddy and the wrinkled faces. "Then he is a heathen!" says the expression on their faces. How strange that no Booddhist temples exist in the foreigner's country! Ah, perhaps, then, the Shintoo religion is the religion of the foreigner's country? "No? Naru hodo! Then what do you believe in?"

It did not take long to answer that question. There is no country in the world in which Christianity has been more publicly and universally advertised. For three centuries, in every city, village and hamlet and on every highway, the names of Christianity and its Founder have been proclaimed on the edict-boards and in the public law-books of the empire as belonging to a corrupt and hateful doctrine; which should a man believe, he would be punished on earth by fines, imprisonment, perhaps death, and in jigoku (hell) by torments eternal. "Whosoever believeth in Christ shall be damned—whosoever believeth not shall be saved," was the formula taught by the priests for centuries. I pointed to the board on which hung the edicts prohibiting Christianity, and told them I believed in that doctrine, and that Christ was the One adored and loved by us. A volley of naru hodos, spoken with bated breath, greeted this announcement, and I could only understand the whispered "Why, that is the sect whose followers will go to hell!" The old ladies could not walk fast, and we soon parted, after many a strange question concerning morals, customs and the details of civilization in the land of the foreigner. Be it said, in passing, that the present liberal and enlightened government of Japan, in spite of priestly intolerance and the bigotry of ignorance, resisting even to blood, has decided upon the recission of the slanderous falsehoods against the faith of Christendom; and Japan, though an Asiatic nation, will soon grant toleration to all creeds.

The path wound up through higher valleys, revealing bolder scenery. Afar off, in the sheen of glorified distance, the water slanted to the sky. The white bosoms of the square-sailed junks heaved with breezy pulses, the mountains were thrones of stainless blue, the floods of sunny splendor and the intense fullness of light, for which the cloudless sky of Japan is remarkable, told the reason for the naming of Niphon, of which "Japan" is but the foreigner's corruption, "Great Land of the Fountain of Light." Anon we entered the groves of mountain-pines anchored in the rocks, and with girths upon which succeeding centuries had clasped their zones. They seemed like Nature's senators in council as they whispered together and murmured in the breeze that reached us laden with music and freighted with resinous aroma. Reaching a hamlet called Mute ("six hands"), I sit outside an inn on one of the benches which are ever ready for the traveler, and shaded overhead by a screen of boughs. A young girl brings me water, the ever-ready cup of tea, and fire for the pipe which I am supposed to smoke. A short rest, another hour's climb and walk, and we are in the village of Kanozan, which is scarcely more than a street of hotels. Situated on the ridge of the mountain, it rises like an island in a sea of pines.

In imagining a Japanese hotel, good reader, please dismiss all architectural ideas derived from the Continental or the Fifth Avenue. Our hotels in Japan, outwardly at least, are wooden structures, two stories high, often but one. Their roofs are usually thatched, though the city caravansaries are tiled. They are entirely open on the front ground floor, and about six feet from the sill or threshold rises a platform about a foot and a half high, upon which the proprietor may be seen seated on his heels behind a tiny railing ten inches high, busy with his account-books. If it is winter he is engaged in the absorbing occupation of all Japanese tradesmen at that time of year—warming his hands over a charcoal fire in a low brazier. The kitchen is usually just next to this front room, often separated from the street only by a latticed partition. In evolving a Japanese kitchen out of his or her imagination, the reader must cast away the rising conception of Bridget's realm. Blissful, indeed, is the thought as I enter the Japanese hotel that neither the typical servant-girl nor the American hotel-clerk is to be found here. The landlord comes to meet me, and, falling on his hands and knees, bows his head to the floor. One or two of the pretty girls out of the bevy usually seen in Japanese hotels comes to assist me and take my traps. Welcomes, invitations and plenty of fun greet me as I sit down to take off my shoes, as all good Japanese do, and as those filthy foreigners don't who tramp on the clean mats with muddy boots. I stand up unshod, and am led by the laughing girls along the smooth corridors, across an arched bridge which spans an open space in which is a rookery, garden, and pond stocked with goldfish, turtles and marine plants. The room which my fair guides choose for me is at the rear end of the house, overlooking the grand scenery for which Kanozan is justly famous all over the empire. Ninety-nine valleys are said to be visible from the mountain-top on which the hotel is situated, and I suspect that multiplication by ten would scarcely be an exaggeration. A world of blue water and pines, and the detailed loveliness of the rolling land, form a picture which I lack power to paint with words. The water seemed the type of repose, the earth of motion.

Enjoying to the full that rapture of first vision which one never feels twice, I turned and entered the room, which made up in neatness what it lacked in luxury. Furniture in a Japanese house there is none. Like all the others, the floor of my room was covered with soft matting two inches thick, made into sections six feet long and three feet wide, and bound with a black border. The dimensions of a room may always be expressed by the number of mats. The inside of the mats is of rice straw, the outside is of the finest and smoothest matting. There are no chairs, stools, sofas or anything to sit down upon, though, having long since forgotten the fact, we find a ready seat on the floor. On one side of the room, occupying one-half of its space, is the tokonoma, a little platform anciently used for the bed, two feet wide and five or six inches high. In one corner is a large vase containing four or five boughs broken from a plum tree crowded with blossoms, and a large bunch of white, crimson and dappled camellias, both single and double. In the centre is the sword-rack, found in every samurai's house, yet now obsolete, since Japan's chivalry have laid aside their two swords. On the other half of the room, occupying the same side as the tokonoma, is a series of peculiar shelves like those of an open Japanese cabinet, though larger; and at the top of these is a little closet closed by sliding doors. The other three sides of the room are of sliding partitions six feet high, made of fine white wood, latticed in small squares and covered with paper, through which mellow, softened light fills the room. On the plastered wall above the latticed sliding doors hangs a framed tablet on which are written Chinese characters, which, having the Japanese letters at the side, tell in terse and poetical phrase that "This room is the chamber of peaceful meditation, into which the moonlight streams." Some of the lattice and other work is handsomely carved and wrought, and a paper screen along the wall which separates this room from the next is covered with verses of Japanese poetry. Were it cold weather, a brazier, with some live coals in it, would be brought for us to toast our hands and feet and to shiver over, as stoves and hard coal are not Japanese institutions. First of all, however, at present, one of the musumes brings me a tobacco-bon or tray, in which is fire to light my pipe, the Japanese scarcely having a conception of a man who does not smoke.

My description of a Japanese room will answer, in the main, for any in Japan as it was—from the artisan's to the emperor's. Even the palaces of the mikado in Kioto never contained tables, chairs, bedsteads or any such inconvenient and space-robbing thing. The tables upon which they ate, played chess or wrote were six inches or a foot high. A Japanese of the old style thinks the cumbrous furniture in our Western dwellings impertinent and unnecessary. In the eye of aesthetic Japanese a room crowded with luxurious upholstery is a specimen of barbaric pomp, delighting the savage and unrefined eye of the hairy foreigners, but shocking to the purged vision and the refined taste of one born in great Niphon. No such tradesman as an upholsterer or furniture-dealer exists in Japan. The country is a paradise for young betrothed couples who would wed with light purses. One sees love in a cottage on a national scale here. That terrible lion of expense, the furnishing of a house, that stands ever in the way of so many loving pairs desirous of marriage and a home of their own, is a bugbear not known in Japan. A chest of drawers for clothing, a few mats, two or three quilts for a bed on the floor, some simple kitchen utensils, and the house is furnished. Why should we litter these neatly matted rooms, why cover with paint and gilding virgin wood of faultless grain, or mar the sweet simplicity and airy roominess of our (Japanese) chambers by loading them with all kinds of unnecessary luxuries?

These reflections are broken in upon by Miss Cherry-blossom, one of the maids, who glides in, kneels upon the floor, and sets down a tiny round tray with a baby tea-pot and a cup the size of an egg. Pouring out some tea, enough to half fill one of these porcelain thimbles, she sets it in the socket of another yet tinier tray, and bowing her head coquettishly, begs me to drink. Having long since learned to quaff Japan's fragrant beverage guiltless of milk or sugar, I drain the cup. Miss Cherry-blossom, sitting upright upon her heels, folds her dress neatly under her knees, gives her loose robe a twitch, revealing to advantage her white-powdered neck, the prized point of beauty in a Japanese maiden, and then asks the usual questions as to whence I came, whither I am going, and to what country I belong. These, according to the Japanese code of etiquette, are all polite questions; and in return, violating no dictum which the purists of Kioto or Yeddo have laid down, I inquire her age ("Your honorable years, how many?"). The answer, "Ju-hachi," makes known that she is eighteen years of age. Chatting further, I learn what things there are to be seen in the neighborhood, whether foreigners have been there before, the distance to the next village, the history of the old temple near by, etc. All this is told with many a laugh and a little pantomime—she naturally committing the mistake of speaking louder and faster to the foreigner who cannot fully understand her dialect or allusions—when a new character appears upon the scene.

A very jolly, matronly-looking woman, evidently the landlady, pulls aside one of the sliding paper doors, and bowing low on her hands and knees, smiles cavernously with her jet-black teeth, which, like all correct and cleanly women in Japan, she dyes on alternate days. She asks concerning dinner, and whether it is the honorable wish of the visitor to eat Japanese food. The answer being affirmative, both matron and maiden disappear to prepare the meal, evidently thinking it a fine joke. No such thing as a common dining-room exists in Japanese hotels. Caste has hitherto been too strictly observed to allow of such an idea. Every guest eats in his own room, sitting on his calves and heels. The preparations are simple, though of course I speak now of every-day life.

Miss Peach-blossom appears, bearing in her hand a table four inches high, one foot square, and handsomely lacquered red and black. Behind her comes a young girl carrying a rice-box and plate of fish. Most gracefully she sets it down with the apology, "I have kept you long waiting," and the invitation, "Please take up."

On the table are four covered bowls, two very small dishes containing pickles and soy, and a little paper bag in which is a pair of chopsticks. The place of each article is foreordained by gastronomic etiquette, and rigidly observed. In the first bowl is soup, in the second a boiled mixture consisting of leeks, mushrooms, lotus-root and a kind of sea-weed. In a third are boiled buckwheat cakes or dumplings, and tofu or bean-curd. In the porcelain cup is rice. In an oblong dish, brought in during the meal, is a broiled fish in soy. Lifting off the covers and adjusting my chopsticks deftly, I begin. The bowl of rice is first attacked, and quickly finished. The attendant damsel proffers her lacquered waiter, and uncovering the steaming tub of rice paddles out another cupful. It is etiquette to dispose of unlimited cups of rice and soup, but a deadly breach of good manners to ask to have the other two bowls replenished. Of course at the hotels whatever the larder affords can be ordered. Boiled eggs, cracked and peeled before you by the tapering fingers of the damsels, are considered choice articles of food. Raw fish, thinly sliced and eaten with radish, sauce, ginger sprouts, etc., is highly enjoyed by the Japanese, who are surprised to find the dish disliked by their foreign guests. A member of one of the embassies sent to Europe confessed that amid the luxuries of continental tables, he longed for the raw fish and grated radish of his native land. Some articles of our own diet, especially cheese and butter, are as heartily detested by the Japanese as their raw fish is by us. The popular idea at home, that the Japanese live chiefly on mice and crawfish, and that the foreigners are in chronic danger of starvation, is matched by that of some Japanese, who, finding that the "hairy foreigners" do not eat the food of human beings—i.e. Japanese—wonder what they do eat. A member of the present embassy in Europe, when first leaving his native land, was thus addressed by his anxious mother: "Now, Yazirobe, you are going to those strange countries, where I am afraid you will get very little to eat: do take some rice with you." I confess that on first landing in Japan I could not relish Japanese diet and cookery. Barring eggs and rice, everything tasted like starch or sawdust. The flavors seemed raw and earthy, or suggested dishcloths not too well scalded. I suspect that a good deal of Philadelphia and Caucasian pride lined the alimentary canal of the writer. Now, after a ten-mile tramp, a Japanese meal tastes very much as it does to one native and to the diet born.

Besides the young damsel who presides, there is another, less neatly dressed. Her apron is suggestive of the kitchen, and altogether she seems a Cinderella by the fireplace. This damsel is evidently a supe or scullion. She is not so self-possessed as her superior companion, and while observing the foreigner with a mild stare, unskillfully concealing her mirth, she finally explodes when he makes a faux pas with the chopsticks and drops a bit of fish on the clean matting. Thereupon she is dispatched to the kitchen for a floor-cloth, and severely lectured for laughing aloud, and is told to stay among the pots and pans till she learns better manners.

Dinner over, a siesta on the soft mats is next in order. These mats seem made for sleep and indolence. No booted foot ever defiles them. Every one leaves his clogs on the ground outside, and glides about in his mitten-like socks, which have each a special compartment for the great toe. My waiting damsel having gone out, and there being no such things as bells, I do as the natives and clap my hands. A far-off answer of Hei—i—i is returned, and soon the shuffling of feet is heard again. The housewife appears with the usual low bow, and, smiling so as to again display what resembles a mouthful of coal, she listens to the request for a pillow. Opening the little closet before spoken of, she produces the desired article. It is not a ticking bag of baked feathers enclosed in a dainty, spotless case of white linen, but a little upright piece of wood, six inches high and long, and one wide, rounded at the bottom like the rockers of a cradle. On the top, lying in a groove, is a tiny rounded bag of calico filled with rice-chaff, about the size of a sausage. The pillow-case is a piece of white paper wrapped around the top, and renewed in good hotels daily for each guest. One can rest about four or six inches of the side of his os occipitis on a Japanese pillow, and if he wishes may rock himself to sleep, though the words suggest more than the facts warrant. By sleeping on civilized feathers one gets out of training, and the Japanese pillows feel very hard and very much in one place. The dreams which one has on these pillows are characteristic. In my first some imps were boring gimlet-holes in the side of my skull, until they had honeycombed it and removed so much brain that I felt too light-headed to preserve my equilibrium. On the present occasion, after falling asleep, I thought that the pillow on which I lay pressed its shape into my head, and the skull, to be repaired, was being trepanned. My head actually tumbling off the pillow was the cause of the fancied operation being suddenly arrested. A short experience in traveling among the Japanese has satisfied me that they are one of the most polite, good-natured and happy nations in the world. By introducing foreign civilization into their beautiful land they may become richer: they need not expect to be happier.

W.E. GRIFFIS.



JASON'S QUEST.

I.

This is a story of love for love, and how it came to naught. In it there shall be no marrying from mercenary motives; the manoeuvering mother-in-law is suppressed; Nature takes her course; and in the climax I strive to prove how sad a thing it is that men are modest and women weak.

Still, I do not lose faith in humanity, but hope for better things in the broad, bright future. I would respectfully call attention to the moral of this tale, and, as for the heroes and heroines of the hereafter, I cheerfully leave them to regulate their affairs upon a different basis; which basis, I devoutly believe, will be one of the inevitable results of time.

But, lo! the heroine approaches and the story begins!

* * * * *

Life with some of us is but the grouping of a few brilliant or sombre tableaux, which are like the famous lines in an epic that immortalize the whole. Maud's life was such a one, and her years had been rather unpicturesque until now, when the shadows began to deepen and the lights to grow more intense. In fact, she seemed to be approaching some sort of a climax, and she began to grow nervous about it, being just woman enough to dwell somewhat anxiously upon her anticipated debut, and to hope for at least a decent appearance in her extremity.

The good-hearted, commonplace people of a pleasant country down the coast—which I will call Dreamland for convenience' sake—thought of Maud only as a gentle and humane little lady, with a comfortable income and a character above reproach. So Maud abode in peace with her maids at the seaside cottage, spending the still hours of Dreamland between her rose-garden on the sunny slope to the southward and the conservatory of lily-like nuns on the hill toward the sea.

Maud was unhappy in a world which had treated her very kindly indeed, and it was simply because she had a dove's heart, that was always fluttering in a strange place, and the face of a nun, that was for ever getting looked at by all sorts of people, much as it disliked that kind of treatment from the best of them.

The only reason why Maud preferred such a dull place as Dreamland to the splendid metropolis up the coast was that she might have a quiet time of it, and not be annoyed by the impudent metropolitans. In fact, she was tired of her lovers—all save one, a fine young fellow named Jason, but better known in Dreamland as John. I have mentioned, I believe, that Maud was in very good circumstances: I am sorry to add that Jason wasn't. He was rich only in his untried youth and the promises of a glorious manhood.

Jason loved Maud, and she knew it as well as she ever knew anything in her life—she knew it without his having told her. Had she not divined it by the infallible intuition of the heart, she might have lived believing herself unloved, for Jason hadn't the remotest idea of mentioning the fact. He could barely live comfortably by himself, frugal as he was; and he would not go to her empty-handed, though Heaven knows she had enough for two, and was dying to share it with him. He went his way, and the way was tedious enough in those days. Like a mirage, happiness glimmered before him, but his upright and patient steps brought him no nearer to its alluring vista.

Youth is impatient and sanguine, and Jason, in his impetuous and hopeful youth, besought the oracle, whose prophetic utterances seemed to imply that his future and his fortune lay in some distant land, and that it would be wise for him to seek it at once. Jason, like his illustrious predecessor, resolved to go over the sea in search of the golden fleece. It was the most adventurous thing he ever did, and Maud thought it a hopeless and a willful act; yet she could do nothing but hold her peace, while her poor heart was as near to breaking as possible—much nearer to breaking than it is usually safe for a maiden's heart to be.

So Jason gathered his mates—a reckless lot they were, too—and, having laden his barque and swung into the stream, his men said their final adieux, receiving quantities of pincushions and bookmarks, so indispensable to Argonauts, as testimonials of eternal fidelity from the maids of Dreamland.

Jason strode to the cottage and kissed the hand of Maud as if it were the hand of a princess; after which, with much embarrassment, he plucked a rose from her garden, while a pang pierced his heart till it ached again, and a thorn probed his finger till a drop of blood fell upon a myrtle leaf; which leaf Maud coveted, and keeps to this day—hugged to her in her grave-clothes.

It is of course best that this life should not be perfect, for the life to come might suffer by comparison; yet it is one of the cruelest decrees of Nature—if Nature has really decreed what seems so wholly against her—that a woman's heart must bide its time and be silent in the presence of its natural mate while every attribute of her being implores his recognition; and that the truest men are too honorable or too proud to yield themselves, having no offering but their honest love to lay at the feet of their mistresses. If it were not so, the princess would not have mourned in her garden for her flown mate, and there would have been much happiness on short notice.

Driven forth by the propitious winds, the barque fled from the shore, while Maud, seated among her roses, with weeping and wringing of hands, poured out upon the winds the burden of her love.

Why didn't Jason catch a syllable of that fervent prayer, reef, and come home to her? Then I need not have written this history, and all would have been well in Dreamland. But he didn't. He heard nothing but the sibilant waters as they rushed under his keel: he thought of nothing but the rose that was withering in the secret locker of his cabin, and of the wound in his heart that was gaping and as fresh as ever. So the night-winds hurried him onward, and the darkness absorbed the outlines of the dear Dreamland coast.

Maud watched the barque while it lessened and lessened in the distance, and the clouds blew over her, and it grew chilly and damp in the rose-garden—as chilly and damp as though it were not the abode of a princess who was beloved of the noblest of men. She watched the sail till it faded suddenly beyond the headland, and between it and her loomed the dark towers of the convent. Out on that troubled sea, seeking the golden fleece in some remote kingdom, tossed on the treacherous waves for her sake, in her white and radiant dreams she beheld Jason. Yet ever between him and her, hiding the lessening barque from the slope of the rose-garden, loomed the dark towers of the convent.



II.

Jason and his fellows coursed the seas, scanning with eager eyes the cloudy belt of the horizon, hopefully seeking some signs of the Fortunate Islands, of whose indescribable beauty and untold wealth they had heard many surmises. Day after day they pressed on between the same blank sky and the same blank sea, but there was no token to gladden the eyes of the watchers. Jason grew impatient at last: he had called upon nearly all the saints in the calendar, and was growing to be a very poor sort of a Catholic, inasmuch as he doubted the efficacy of his prayers and the ability of saints to answer them. He didn't realize that there might be good reasons for their not being answered under the existing circumstances; which is a matter worthy of the consideration of all of us.

The fact was, the Fortunate Islands were not one-half so wonderful as had been represented; and the saints knew it well enough. Had Jason invested there, as he purposed doing at the time of his embarkment, he might have sunk all that he possessed—which was little enough to float, as one would think—and then Maud might have tended her rose-garden and carried fruit-offerings to the sweet-faced nuns till she was gray and limping, for all Jason's fine notions of independence—namely, a good income from the rise of stocks in the Fortunate Islands, and two souls and two hearts doing the same sort of thing at the same time, with complete and unqualified success, in that sweet rose-garden on the sunny slope to the southward.

That was the way life went with Captain Jason of the Argonauts, called John, for short, in Dreamland, while the crew growled a good deal at their ill-luck, and began to fear that if things went on in that way much longer they would have more fasts than Fridays in the week. Those were trying times for all of them, and when land was made at last, and it proved to be a temptation and a snare, Jason ordered a special fast and a mass for the salvation of the souls in imminent peril. Out in the world at last, thousands of miles from the unsophisticated people of Dreamland, Jason beheld the dread Symplegades rocking their enormous bulks upon the waves, and liable at any moment to swing together with a terrific and deadly crash. Probably they were whales at play: it may have been two currents of the sea rushing into each other's arms: at all events, it was something deluding, though temporary, and perhaps the selfsame difficulty experienced by the original J. when he went after the original fleece.

My hero was young and unschooled in the world's wickedness, but he knew that where two opposing elements come together with much force, whatever happens to lie between them must suffer. What should be done was a question of no little importance to the Argonauts. Most of them were in favor of running the risk of a collision and letting the vessel drive straight through. Jason thought this a judgment worthy of young men whose lady-loves give expression to their most sacred sentiments by gifts of pincushions and bookmarks. But he had something to consider more than they—yea, more than any other living man—in exemplification of the pleasing fallacy that besets all lovers in all ages. Blessed be God that it is so!