"Six or seven, I suppose. Why?"

"You see dat again? Ain't but fo' par lef'! Ef I don't beat him, shoze I'm a nigger!"

"Your Mas' Jim?" I asked, smiling.

"'Tain't nobody but dat yaller varmint dat's stealin' roun' de lot.—Lor'! Lor'! ef I jes' could cotch him!"

"Anarky, while we are talking about it, I—I really wish you would manage a little better about the biscuit and—well, the eggs, and—and a good many little things of the kind. I am sure we have an abundance of everything, and it mortifies me exceedingly not to have it at table. Haven't you and Chang everything you want, and as much?"

"We gits more'n 'nuff. An' what goes outen de kitchen goes correc'. Whar dey lands 'tween dar an' de din'-room don't nobody know but dat yaller dorg. I misses things cornstant—things dat I ain't took my eyes off 'em, 'cep' ter wink; an', bless de Lord! while I wor a-winkin' de lard done took to its heels or de flour flewed away."

The next evening, when Chang brought in supper, Anarky walked by his side in solemn state, empty-handed, dignified, watchful. He appeared totally unconscious of his escort, and I made no remark; but Mr. Smith sent him into the hall on an errand, and during his absence Anarky rose to explain: "Which you see all dem biskit, Mis' Maud?"

"Yes: I am glad we are getting all right again, Anarky."

"Well, I got dat many mo' in de ub'n now—jes' like I use ter hab 'fo' dat—" Here an appalling idea seemed to strike her. "War dat Chow-chow nigger?" she exclaimed, and made a dash toward the door. As she reached it Chang-how quietly glided in and handed Mr. Smith the paper he had gone for.

The next moment a sound came from the kitchen—something between a howl and a roar—and following in its wake came Anarky. Almost inarticulate with rage, she shook her brawny fist in Chang-how's face. "You good-fur-nuthin' yaller houn'!" she exclaimed.

Mr. Smith wheeled around on his chair and looked at her in stern surprise. Chang-how stood his ground and gazed at her with the unruffled calm of a full moon beaming o'er a raging sea.

She turned to us, trembling with excitement: "Well, ef dat ain't de beatinest trick et ebber I seed! Think dat yaller houn' ain't stole de biskit outen de ub'n? An', 'fo' Gord! I didn't know he'd been out o' here long 'nuff for a dog to snap at a fly! Ef you ain't de oudaishusest—" She stopped and glared at him with the despairing, silent venom of one who felt herself a pauper in words, a verbal failure, a wretched creature who in the supreme hour of trial was proving herself the wrong person in the wrong place.

Chang-how's hands were folded, and his eyes rested dreamily on the floor. Evidently, he was contentedly rolling tea-leaves in his native land.

Suspiciously regarding the abnormal appearance of Chang-how's neat white jacket, I forbore to rebuke my sable favorite, but Mr. Smith, not having observed the little protuberances which had attracted my attention toward his more delicately-tinted protege, said with decision, "Go to the kitchen, Anarky, and send in supper or bring it yourself; and make haste about it."

Anarky turned again to Chang-how and fixed her great black eyes on him in silence. Then she sounded a note of solemn warning: "Lord! Lord! Shang-hai!" said she, "ef ebber I does cotch you out an' out, ef ebber I does git a good square holt on you, I'll t'ar you all to pieces! Yo' mammy won't want what'll be left uv you, 'cos' 'twon't be wuf berryin'!"

"Shut upee! too much jawee," said Chang-how benignly, and dreamed again of his native land. But for three days nothing was missing in Anarky's department, and so far Chang-how escaped with unbroken bones.

On the evening of the fourth day I received a letter announcing the coming of visitors, and it unfortunately occurred to me that Chang-how might assist Anarky in the laundry, thus affording her an opportunity for greater display in the culinary department; so I called him up: "You washeeman, Chang-how?"

"Oh yes, I washee all light," said Chang.

"You help Anarky iron to-day I give you more money."

"All light! How muchee?"

"One dollar."

"Two dollar."

"One dollar."

"No washee one dollar," said Chang.

"No washee at all, then."

"One dollar ap."

"Nor a dollar and a half: I get other washee."

"Melican man no washee ap."

"Oh yes. Melican woman suit me."

"All light! I washee one dollar."

"Very well. As soon, then, as you leave the dining-room go to the laundry. And, Chang, no make cook cross."

"Cook too much talkee: cookee bad egg."

"Well, you no make cookee cross perhaps I give you more money."

"All light! How muchee?"

"No matter: a quarter."

"Ap."

"A half, then."

Going to the laundry, I said to Anarky, "Chang-how will assist you in the ironing to-day, so that you can get through quickly and show my friends some of your best cooking, Anarky. I do hope—"

"What Shang-doodle know 'bout i'unin'?" asked Anarky sulkily.

"Oh, he knows ever so much," said I with cheerful faith; "and I do hope you will try to get on nicely with him this time. You know what the Bible says about brothers dwelling together in unity, and all that?"

"Chang-jaw ain't none o' my brudder, an' I ain't none o' his'n," resisted Anarky.

"Oh yes, we are all brothers; and if you will only be Chang-how's long enough to get through with the ironing, I will give you almost anything you want."

"Gimme a nigger all day long," said Anarky: "I fa'rly hates a Chinee an' a Orrisher."

"Try it to-day, though, Anarky, for my sake," said I persuasively; and she consented, though sulkily enough.

Hearing Chang-how coming, I seated myself on the stairway leading into the laundry, curious to see how they would work together.

Anarky pointed authoritatively to a heap of dried linen. "Sprinkle dem ar cloze," said she to Chang. "I'm gwine out in de yard to git what's on de line."

While she was gone, Chang-how, as is the manner of his people, filled his mouth with water, and was blowing it in a fine spray over the linen when Anarky appeared in the doorway, a basket of clothes on her head, her knuckles on her hips. As she caught sight of Chang-how moistening the linen with water from his mouth she stopped: she staggered, her basket fell to the floor, and, stooping down, she threw her hands above her head, then brought them down again with a violent slap on her knees.

"Good Lor'! come down," said she, "an' look at dat yaller houn' a-spittin' on Mis' Maud's cloze.—I got you now! Can't nobody blame me fur beatin' you 'bout dat."

Then she flew at him, and what a scene it was! She, black, brawny, of immense physical power—he, lithe, sinewy, supple as a panther. It was a spectacle! First one, then the other, seemed to have the advantage. She would catch him in her powerful grasp, and, lifting him off his feet, swing him in the air as if about to slam him to his final resting-place, when by some inexplicable manoeuvre he would writhe from between her fingers or wriggle himself to the back of her neck and mash her nose flat against her breast as if bent on suffocating her or breaking her neck. In a moment she would reach back with both hands and pull him over her head very much as men doff a shirt. Likely as not, Chang came down with his heels in the air, and at it they would go again. Presently she was tripped, and fell with a violence that should have broken every bone in her body, but before Chang-how could pursue his advantage she had wheeled on her side, wound his queue halfway up her arm and had her knee on his breast.

"Good for you, An—! I mean, aren't you ashamed of yourself? Stop! for Heaven's sake, stop! You might kill him."

As well have spoken to the winds. And as they became more terribly in earnest I began to scream for help: "Stop, Anarky! (Murder! murder!)—Here, Chang, take the poker. (Mu—u—u—r—der!) Great Heaven! don't hit her with it! Stop, Chang-how! (Mur—d—e—r! Oh, mercy! somebody come!)—Here, Anarky, take the pota- (Mur—d—e—r—rr!)—potato-masher and don't kill (M—u—r—der!)—kill him with it, unless he kills you first.—Oh, mercy! mercy! I don't know what else to give you all to keep you from killing (Murder!)—killing each other with.—Anarky, you are breaking his neck!—Here's a flatiron, Chang! (Murder! Fire! fire! fire!)"

This brought the neighbors and the neighbors' children, and their neighbors and their neighbors' children, and finally a forlorn policeman, who marched Anarky to the magistrate's office and left Chang to do up his pigtail at leisure, and reflect how often he had sinned and gone unwhipt of justice, and now, in the hour of peace and in the act of duty, retribution had deliberately sought him out, and found him and disposed of him as afore told.

It seems that Anarky went quietly enough to the magistrate, who gave her the choice between going to jail and depositing five dollars as security for her appearance next morning for examination. Not having five dollars to deposit, she was allowed an hour in which to seek some one who would go bail for her. At the end of that time she returned to the office panting, exhausted, wiping the perspiration from her face with her blue cotton apron.

"Who is going bail for you?" she was asked.

Calmly turning down the sleeves that had been rolled above her shining black elbows, she replied with contempt, "I ain't been arter no bail: I dun been home an' finish beatin' de lites outen dat yaller houn'. Dat all de bail I wants! Which ef ennybody's lookin' fur him, dey kin fin' his pigtail, an' maybe a piece uv his head a-stickin' to it, hin' de chick'n-coop at Mas' Jim's. Now kyar me to jail an' lemme res'. I boun' he don't spit on no mo' cloze I got ter han'le!"

JENNIE WOODVILLE.



THE IDYL OF THE VAUCLUSE.

A dusky opening in a range of purpling hills; a vision of a cluster of small white human homes; a shining, murmuring little river spanned by a wooden bridge; a towering background of bald, steep rock, cleft at its base into a shadowy cavern,—such is the first of my memories of the Vaucluse. At the entrance of the little town stands a low white-walled building, over the door of which is a tablet inscribed thus: "On the site of this cafe Petrarch established his study. Here he wrote the lines—

O soave contrada, O puro fiume, Che bagni 'l suo bel viso e gli occhi chiari."

On the banks of the classic Sorgue I was offered the photographs of Petrarch and Laura. I took them, and there, with the sweet May sunlight flooding all the sod, with the fresh spring grass and buds bursting into life beneath my feet, with the murmur of the glad young river in my ears, I stood and gazed upon the faces of those lovers of five hundred years ago, whose love was as a spring-time idyl. For they met in the spring, they parted in the spring, their intercourse was like the mingling of young winds with woodland violets; and, dust and ashes though they have been for centuries, they still prefigure to our hearts the eternal spring-time of the world.

And yet, could the picture that I held in my hand be a faithful reproduction of the famous portrait of Laura which was painted at the request of Petrarch by Simon Menimi and charmed him into verse with its loveliness? It represented simply the head and bust. The face was elongated, the cheeks hollow, the hair smoothed down below the ears. The long, oval, half-shut eyes wore a horrible leer, as though the owner were making a painful effort to close them. On the head was a stiff, ungainly jewelled helmet, which terminated low on the forehead in a triangular ornament. The long, slender throat was encircled by three rows of pearls. The dress was cut squarely across the neck, and was checkered off like a draught-board, while over one shoulder was thrown a small lace scarf. The whole expression of the figure was that of serious, earnest sobriety and saintliness, as understood by a mediaeval painter and treated according to his conception of his art, which recognized no difference between a man's earthly love and his spiritual patron, and made them equally crude, righteous, quaint and angular.

But I felt that these harsh distorted outlines had naught in common with Petrarch's Laura. For she had golden hair that floated loose in the breeze and was the prison of enchained and captive Love, and she had roses, red and white, upon her face, and a throat of snowy purity, and a smile of such rare gentleness that when she passed them by men said, "Sure this is an angel come from heaven!" That is the Laura who for centuries has beamed upon humanity—a sweet, benign, refreshing presence—from within her lover's sonnets. That is the Laura in whose reality I believe, but the Laura who lies imprisoned and disguised behind the grotesque mask of mediaeval art I cannot, will not, recognize. In Petrarch's utterance I find Laura, a pure spiritual shape in mind and body and soul; but in her portrait I see only Laura clogged and choked and bound about with the trammels of early art and the weight of crude, untruthful detail. Thus, I believe that art at its best is but a dull, material, mechanical means for the translation or reproduction of thought and Nature, and that for the swift, living, electric flame of truth we must refer in all ages and climes to speech pure and simple—the speech of the poet.

There are many who doubt that the words in which Petrarch clothed his love for Laura were words of sincerity and truth, and who blame his fatal tendency to utilize every incident and feeling connected with her. Unquestionably, there was a strong element of earthliness, a dilution of the pure essence of his affection, in much that Petrarch wrote. It could hardly have chanced otherwise with a man into whose life worldly intercourse entered so largely. There must have been times when the pure light of revelation was hidden from him, and he unknowingly supplied its place with fancies of a lower kind. His experiences as he met them one by one were, I doubt not, faithfully and sincerely treated, but after they had fallen into the past he was enabled to view them by the cold strong light of the intellect, and the instincts of his nature led him to incorporate them in verse. It has always been a concomitant of the poetic character, except perhaps in those lofty organizations whose utterances are revelations, to regard its own personality objectively and treat it as material for expression in speech. The very word-crystallization that a thought or sentiment, however full of inspiration, must needs undergo to make it palpable, denotes an amount of conscious effort which detracts in a measure from its apparent spontaneity. But in spite of the quaint conceits, the frequent play upon words, the unworthy tricks of speech, the painful sacrifice to rhyme which occasionally mar his verse, I believe Petrarch was sincere. If he was only a pretence and a sham, then all the amatory poetry that has been written since his time, intellectual or analytic, passionate or sensuous, is a pretence and a sham. Petrarch's utterance must needs have been founded on truth, else never could it have stood the test of five centuries, and never would it have assimilated itself, as it has done, with the poetic speech of an entire race. I know of hardly an English poet in whose rhymes in the matter of love, and particularly among those of a narrower range of thought and a lower plane of vision, one cannot trace in a greater or less degree the influence of Petrarch. Thus, to me, Petrarch remains the very king of spring-time poets. There are summer poets, autumn poets and winter poets, but Petrarch was none of these. Neither his passion nor his poetry ever ripened into summer or faded into autumn. He will always typify the early youth of love and song. I can never open his book of sonnets that I do not hear the rustle of young winds in green boughs, and do not catch the faint sweet odor of violets and primroses—the violets and primroses that grow on the banks of the Sorgue in the Vaucluse—the violets and primroses that Laura wore in her hair when Petrarch saw her kneeling in the church of Santa Chiara in Avignon, and loved her all at once.

The bright little river Sorgue is here a rushing brook, tumbling and foaming over the great stones in its bed, and imprisoned between two green sloping banks covered with low trees and bushes and tendrils of creeping ivy. It finds birth, this merry, roaring brook, in a dark, mysterious, shadowy pool, overhung by wild fantastic masses of rock, which loses itself far back in a dim cavern beneath the cliffs. Black and motionless, sullen and inscrutable, it lies, this source of the river Sorgue, a very pool of Lethe, looking as though it knew it drew its sustenance from the deepest heart of the earth, held communication with the hidden powers of Nature, and was one at the core with all the mighty waters of the creation. What a type of the poet's own genius—nourished deep down under the ground in the universal soul of humanity, fed by the elements that centuries of solution have infused into the hidden springs of the intellect, one in thought with all the great minds that have watered the arid fields of lower human intelligence, profound, unsearchable as the earth itself! And yet when it rises to the surface of the world it becomes only a sunny, murmuring river, which dances along among green banks and bushes; and, being noticed by the careless passer-by, who cannot see the deep infinity of waters of which it is the symbol, and knows not even whether they exist, is termed "a pretty stream of thought and fancy, but one that hath no profundity nor seriousness."

Across the river, on a hill just above its banks, a mass of tawny ruin fades away into the blue of the sky and the gray of the cliffs. Wild flowers grow all about it, dark brambles stretch their wanton arms over all its space, and through the clefts in its jagged surface gleam the shining walls of the village below and the hazy brightness of the wide Rhone country. The people call this bit of rare coloring the castle of "La Belle Laure," but we know that it was the home of a great cardinal, Petrarch's trusty friend and generous patron.

Down in the valley among the white village walls nestles a low brown house surrounded by a humble, sweet-smelling space of flowers. It is a dainty little spot of earth, this garden, hallowed by such rare associations. It is more precious than rubies, this small dark house, for it sheltered from the outer world the body and soul of Petrarch. The garden is enclosed by a hedge of sweet pale Provence roses and buds. I remembered, as I stood there with the breath of the beautiful blossoms creeping up about me, how Petrarch tells that walking one bright May day with Laura, a friend and confidant of both approached them and gave to each a rose, "all fresh and culled in Paradise," and said, "Such another pair of lovers the sun ne'er shone upon," and left them with a smile; and they remained all confused and trembling. Yes, I knew instinctively that it was here, on this very consecrated spot, that the sacred meeting had taken place; that he who gave the roses was no other than the good cardinal of the castle; and that those roses of five hundred years ago were the ancestors of the roses now blooming about me, and plucked from this very hedge. No wonder that the perfumes of Paradise are enchaliced in their hearts. Few flowers can boast such high and haughty lineage as these, the bright posterity of those transfigured love-tokens of centuries past. They are glorified for ever by association with the highest, purest phase of human relation. They have reached the apotheosis of flowerhood—the highest destiny vouchsafed to aught that grows. They have become one with thought in immortality.

In the heart of the little garden stands a laurel tree, a shoot from Petrarch's own sacred laurel tree. More young shoots and saplings are springing up about it, all issuing from the great root that lies deep underground—the root of five hundred years ago; and the tree overshadows all the garden and the little crystal brook that sparkles along by the side of the wall. As I gazed at the stately shape, with its shining black berries and its glossy dark leaves, I knew that I had found the keynote to much of Petrarch's music—not always that of his best and most inspired moods. The resemblance of the name of Laura to the laurel; the antique fable of the transformation of Daphne into a laurel, and its adoption by Apollo as his emblem; the old superstition that the laurel was shielded against thunderbolts; his desire to win the laurel crown as the guerdon of his pains, both amorous and poetic,—were chains of tradition and convention which Petrarch had not strength to break, pompous, meaningless hieroglyphics which he felt it his duty to interpret to men, hinderances and trammels to the development of his genius. The laurel tree of Petrarch's garden is a fair type of one phase of the poet's own speech, prone to derive its significance from extraneous sources and overloaded with borrowed metaphor. But the laurel receives a new meaning if we picture to ourselves Madonna Laura reclining in its shadow on the banks of the little river, with flowers scattered all about her garments and little Loves disporting in the air about her wreathed head. Then it becomes instinct with life and vitality, and we wonder why Petrarch deemed it needful to resort to the dead and withered husks of antique fable for what lay there at his own cottage-door, and waited but to be lifted from the sod—a wealth of poetic illustration and conceit.

Since the day when I made the memory of the Vaucluse my own, I have read how a great festival was held there in the summer-tide in honor of Petrarch. I have read how they came, those intellectual debauchees, and rioted and revelled and wrangled and jarred, and poisoned the chaste, calm waters of the sacred river with the hot fumes of literary dissension and argument. I have read how they came, with their heads full of quotations and their notebooks full of impressions and hints for effective rhapsody—how they feasted on the silver trout of the Sorgue, and gathered Laura's roses to adorn their buttonholes, and stripped the consecrated laurel of its leaves to make garlands for their own dull heads, and poured forth international compliments, and glorified one another, and hugged themselves for delight at their fine comprehension of the poet, and fell on their knees before him, and immolated their individual hearts and souls at the shrine of his genius; and, lo! there was not a true appreciater of Petrarch among them all! The right appraiser of Petrarch has been there before and since, but he was not there then. The noise and the bustle and the wisdom of the multitude held him aloof, and he waited until a more convenient season. He comes by preference in the spring-time, knowing that then Nature and Petrarch sing in unison. He is a poet, because it takes a poet to understand a poet, no less than a hero a hero. He is of such simple, foolish mould that when he thinks there is no one near to spy him out he casts himself down upon the sod and kisses it with all tenderness, and caresses the daisies with his finger-tips, greeting them as his younger brethren; for there is something stirring in him which draws him nearer to earth's heart than other men, and he loves to dwell upon his common origin with flower and leaf. He does not fall down and worship Petrarch, because he knows that Petrarch is only one expression of the great power that lives behind all thought and speech—one part of the great whole that lies spread out before him on the river and the cliff. But he takes the old poet by the hand and looks straight into his eyes, and reads there what is written in his own heart, and says, "We twain are brethren and friends, sovereign and equal, for evermore."

If Petrarch had lived earlier in the centuries of Christianity, he would have been a monk. His genius would have found expression in the cloister-life, for the first monks were poets and philosophers. But he lived at a period when that beautiful principle of asceticism was no longer at one with genius. The fine essence of spirituality was gone from it, and it had hardened into senseless form and matter; and the law of his own mind forbade his pledging himself irrevocably to what in one mood seemed highest and most precious, but what another mood might contradict and openly defy. He knew that, although that ascetic temper which took possession of his soul at times when his genius was loudest, most clamorous, most importunate, was the basis of all monastic principle, he might not imprison it, fleeting, evanescent, within the dungeons of vows and formalism. And to-day, no less than in Petrarch's time, the same spirit walks the earth, shines through the actions and speech of all high souls, and yet refuses to bind itself to dull external shows and symbols.

If Petrarch had not withdrawn himself to the solitude of the Vaucluse, I doubt if we should know more of his passion for Laura to-day than could be told in a score of sonnets. For with his mind overloaded by the sights and sounds and honors that were heaped upon him, he never could have separated her from the contingent circumstances that surrounded their intercourse in Avignon. But there, on the banks of the Sorgue, he viewed her image from afar, dismissed all the attendant episodes of palace and revel, court and council, and beheld only the ideal—or rather the real—Laura in her own worth and significance. Surely, never was there verse through which showed so plainly the Nature under whose auspices it was brought forth as those songs of Petrarch. I seem to feel that they were written in solitude, not sublime, but pleasing, and in a narrow valley shut out from contemplation of aught else. And I know, as I leave the Vaucluse behind me, how deep a hold the memory of the loved fountain must needs have taken upon the poet's mind, for I too have made me a picture of a river, and a grotto, and a shadowy pool, and a low brown house, and a stately laurel tree, which will always live in my sense. And these things resolve themselves into one with a few scattered sonnets, and a shadowy gold-haired form, and a handful of sweet small roses, and, lo! I have made incarnate and have bound fast to me for ever that beautiful old-time idyl of the Vaucluse.

CHARLOTTE ADAMS.



A "TARTAR FIGHT" AT KAZAN, AND HOW IT WAS STOPPED.

Rooshia? Why, yes, I ought to know something about Rooshia, seein' I've lived there, off and on, this fifteen year and more; and if a young man was to come to me and ax me where's the best place for a workin' man to git on, I'd say to him, jist as I says it to you now, "Go to Rooshia!" Why so? says you. Well, jist this way. You see, cotton-mills and mowin'-machines and steam-ploughs and sich are quite new ideas out there; and they haven't got the trick of workin' 'em properly, not yet; so that any man as has got it is pretty safe to git anything he likes to ax in the way o' wages. Why, I knowed a man once—common factory-hand he was when he started: couldn't read nor write, nor nothin'; but he had his wits about him, all the same,—well, he cum out here 'bout ten year ago, and went to some place on the Volga, with some crack-jaw name or other that I can't reck'lect. First year he was there he got as good pay as any overseer at home; next year he was overseer himself; two year arter that he owned his own mill, he did; and now, jist t'other day I gits a letter from him to say he's goin' home ag'in, with money in both pockets, and a-goin' to buy a big house and a bit o' ground, and I don't know what all. And if that ain't gittin' on, I should jist like to know what is!

But you mustn't think, neither, as it's all jist as easy as supping porridge: it ain't that, nohow. I can tell yer, if you was to go into one o' them hot work-rooms on a roastin' day in July, with the thermometer anywhere you like above a hundred, you'd feel more like lyin' down in the shade and havin' a drink o' beer than workin' hard for nine or ten hours on end. They say we overseers have an easy life of it. I wish them as says so had jist got to try it themselves for a day or two. Then, ag'in, most likely there's only one road from your place to the nearest town, and jist when you want to send off your stuff it'll come on pourin' rain for ever so long, and the whole road'll be nothin' but plash and mash, like a dish of cabbage-soup; and there the stuff'll have to lie idle for weeks and weeks, and you've jist got to grin and bear it. And in them parts, instead of one good pelt and have done with it, it keeps on drip, drip, drip, for days and days in a sneaking half-and-half kind o' way, as if it hadn't the pluck to come out with a good hearty pour. The very thunder don't make a good round-mouthed peal like it does at home, but a nasty jabberin' row, jist as if it was a-tryin' to talk French. And, altogether, it is a place to try a chap's temper: it is, indeed.

Are the native workmen good for much? says you. Well, that depends pretty much on how you look at it. When you've once shown 'em how to do a thing, they'll do it every bit as well as yourself; but they take a powerful deal o' showin', they do. You see, a Rooshan has his own way of doin' everything, and tryin' to teach him any other way is as bad as eating soup with a one-pronged fork. And then to see how thick some on 'em are! Why, they may well be brave in battle, for it 'ud take a precious clever bullet to git through one of their 'eads, it would. Here's one sample for yer: A friend o' mine in Mosker had got a Rooshan servant—one o' them reg'lar Derevenskis ("villagers"), and so one day he sends him to the shop with two o' them twenty-kopeck pieces,[30] tellin' him to buy bread with one and butter with t'other. Off goes the chap, and never comes back ag'in; so at last his master goes to see what's up; and there he finds Mr. Ivan at the door of the shop, holdin' out the money in one hand and scratchin' his head with t'other, as if he'd forgot his own name, and couldn't find hisself nowhow. "Oh, barin" ("master"), says he in a voice like a fit o' chollerer, "whatever am I to do now? I've been and mixed the two pieces, and now I don't know which was the one for the bread and which for the butter."

As for the Tartars, they're troublesome in another way. They make prime workmen—there's no denyin' it; and I had ought to know, seein' I was over a gang of 'em myself for more'n a year—but they're the hot-bloodedest lot as ever I saw yet, and reg'lar born imps for fightin'; and when they git up a shindy, look out! I can speak, for I saw the big fight betwixt them and the Rooshans at Kazan 'bout three year ago; and if you cares to hear the story, I'll tell yer jist how it all happened.

You tell me as you've been to Kazan, and so, o' course, you'll remember that the "Tartar Town," as they calls it, lies a mile or two east o' the reg'lar Rooshan quarter; and midway between 'em's a dry gully (leastways, it's dry in the summer-time, but you should jist see it arter the spring thaw!), with a little bridge over it. Now, the Rooshan gangs and the Tartar gangs, a-comin' from their work, used to cross each other jist at this bridge; and o' course there was a good deal o' chaffin' among 'em, and some fightin', too, now and then; for I needn't tell you that a Rooshan and a Tartar are jist about as fond of each other as a Rooshan and a Turk. Now-a-days, the masters have had the gumption to change the hours of work, and keep 'em out of each other's way; but in my time there was a scrimmage nearly every week, though nothin' like this 'un I'm tellin' of.

Well, sir, I'd knocked off early that evenin', and strolled back to my place with a young Rooshan merchant as I knowed—a right good feller, name o' Michael Feodoroff. Just at the bridge we stopped to have a look at the sunset; and a rare sight it was! There was the dark-red tower of the old Tartar gateway standin' out ag'in the bright evenin' sky, and the citadel-wall with all its turrets and battlements, and the gilt cupolers o' the churches in the town, and the great green plain of the Volga away below us, and the broad river itself a-shinin' wherever the light fell on it, and the purple hills beyond tipped with gold every here and there, jist like them Delectable Mountains as mother used to read about on Sundays when I was a boy.

While we were standin' lookin' at it up comes half a dozen Rooshan workmen, a-goin' home from their work, and four or five Tartars from t'other side, a-goin' home from theirn; and they meets jist on the bridge. As they crossed each other one o' the Rooshans pulls a bit o' sassage out of his pocket and holds it up to the foremost Tartar (a great ugly-lookin' bruiser with one eye), and says to him, chaffin' like, "Hollo, Mourad! d'ye want a bit o' grease to make yer beard grow?"

Now, I needn't tell you that offerin' pork to a Mussulman is like drinkin' Dutch William's health at an Irish fair; and the words warn't well out o' the Rooshan's mouth afore the Tartar had him by the throat and was bangin' his head ag'in' the bridge-rails as if he was drivin' a nail with it.

Then, all in one minute, a whole crowd of 'em seemed to start up out o' the werry earth, and we found ourselves right in the middle of a reg'lar tearin' fight—tossin' arms and fierce faces whirlin' all round us; men strikin' and grapplin' and clawin' like fury; the broad, bearded faces of the Rooshans and the flat sallow mugs of the Tartars all blurred up together; and sich a yellin' and cursin' and screechin' a-goin' on that I a'most thought myself one o' them old Roman hemperors a-lookin' on at a wild-beast fight in the Call-and-see-'em.

I was so took aback that I jist stood and stared like a fool; but Feodoroff had his wits about him, and dragged me into a corner where we could see it all without bein' swep' in. I saw d'reckly that it was more than a plain bout o' fisticuffs, for several of the Rooshans had got out their knives, and were slashin' about like one o'clock; and the Tartars, on their side, had begun to tear out the rails o' the palisade and to crack the skulls of the Rooshans with them. Just then Ivan Martchenkoff, one o' my best men, came tumblin' down at my feet with half a dozen Tartars atop of him; and as he fell he caught sight of me, and cried to me for help.

Well, that was more'n I could stand. I busted loose from Feodoroff (who tried to hold me), and leapt right among 'em. I cotched the uppermost Tartar by the scruff o' the neck, and chucked him away like a kitten; and the second I hit sich a dollop behind the ear as made him look five ways at once; but just then two o' the rips jumped upon me from behind, and down I went. Then Feodoroff flew in to save me, but the crowd closed upon him, and down he went too; and I thought 'twas all up with us both.

Jist then I heerd a rumble of wheels up the slope leadin' to the bridge, and then a great shout of "Soldati! soldati!" ("The soldiers! the soldiers!").

Then I lay close to the ground and made myself as small as I could, for I knowed that if they fired into sich a crowd with cannon it 'ud just mow 'em down like grass. The next minute I heerd an orficer's voice singin' out, "Halt! front! fire!" But instead of the bang of a cannon there cum a hiss like fifty tea-kettles a-bilin' over, and then a great splash, and the crowd scattered fifty ways at once; and I found myself wringin' wet all in a minute. Then somebody gripped hold o' me and pulled me up, and there was Feodoroff, and beside him Lieutenant Berezinski of the garrison laughin' fit to burst. And when I looked round the whole place was a puddle o' water, with dozens of men rollin' in it like flies in treacle; and at the end of the bridge was ten or twelve sogers, and right in front of 'em a great steam fire-engine! Then I understood it all, and began laughin' as loud as anybody.

"You've cooled their courage this time, Mr. Lieutenant," says I.

"I think I have," says the lieutenant; "and that, too, without wasting a cartridge or killing a man. When you go home to England, Yakov Ivanovitch (James son of John), you can say that if you haven't stood fire, you've stood water, and been at the battle of Voyevoda."[31]

DAVID KER.



OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE COLORED CREOLES OF BALTIMORE.

It is well known that many French families, fugitives from St. Domingo, took refuge in Baltimore during the last decade of the eighteenth century. They gracefully and gratefully accepted favors and kindness of various kinds, but they were too proud and self-reliant to resign themselves to eat the bread of charity or lead lives of indolence. Some, born to fortune and ancient titles, employed their talents and accomplishments promptly and without hesitation. Counts and marquises became gardeners (introducing a great variety of fruits and vegetables unknown before in the United States), dancing-masters, music-teachers, drawing-masters, architects, chemists, confectioners, cigar-makers and teachers of their own beautiful language. The names of many of those emigres are now borne by the most estimable citizens of the community which first sheltered their ancestors: they are ornaments of society, distinguished in the professions and skilled in the arts and sciences.

But it is not of this high and noble class that I desired to speak: it is of a more humble but not less worthy set of French people who came here at the same time. I allude to the colored creoles who were the born slaves of these ladies and gentlemen. Some shared the dangers of their flight from St. Domingo: others found a way, by tedious voyages, to join their old masters and tender their services, not as slaves, but as honest, humble, faithful servants. It was honorable both to master and slave that such cordial relations should have existed under such trying circumstances. Some of the creoles were good cooks, bakers, snuff-makers, laundry-women, etc.; and the most beautiful and touching part of this relation between the master and their former slaves was that hundreds of the latter laid the profits of their labor at the feet of their white friends with reverence and devotion. Many old ladies and gentlemen, accustomed to every attention from the best trained servants, were altogether incapable of helping themselves, and were dependent on the bounty and tender care of their former slaves. Most of the better class of French emigres retained all their former habits of domestic life, such as taking a cup of coffee before rising in the morning and an eleven-o'clock dejeuner a la fourchette, while those who could afford it had a modest petit souper at nine o'clock in the evening. At the latter were often found the elite of this French society. Music, dancing and refined conversation were indulged in for two or three hours: old memories and stirring events were recalled and the bonds of nationality and family affection were more closely knit. French only was spoken at these soirees, and the elegant manners of the old school were observed in perfection.

The most remarkable of this set was a Madame Valanbrun, the widow of a gentleman of large fortune and high position in St. Domingo. He died before the Revolution. She was only twenty-five when the massacre took place, beautiful, accomplished and fascinating. Her estates were extensive, and she lived in one of the principal cities of the island. At the time of the outbreak she escaped to a Baltimore vessel, accompanied by several of her house-servants, and saved a part of her fortune—plate, jewels and some gold coin. Arriving in Baltimore, she found several of her friends already there. With the elastic temper peculiar to the French, she determined to make the best of her changed circumstances. Having purchased a large house in a cheap part of the city, she fitted up her own suite of rooms on the second floor. Here she received company, and was attended by her servants as if she had been a queen. At that period snuff-taking was very fashionable and almost universal. Some of madame's servants were very expert in making snuff, cigars and cigarettes: these articles they sold at high prices, for they soon became well known. Others of her servants made confections, cakes, sweetmeats, which they carried around in baskets: some made dresses, and others went out as nurses. The arrangements for all these various employments were made by the servants themselves, but the profits were carefully reserved for the queen bee of the hive.

For many years Madame Valanbrun was the centre of the French society of Baltimore. She had few acquaintances outside of this circle, but the most distinguished foreigners who visited the city—French, Spanish and Italian—and several young Americans ambitious to become better acquainted with the French language, were glad to have the entree of her salon.

Time wore on. The Bourbons were restored to the throne, and many French families returned to France to seek their lost fortunes. Some were successful, but most of them were doomed to disappointment and continued poverty. Madame Valanbrun remained contented with her humble but comfortable lot. By degrees her corps of servants was reduced by death, a new race of competitors sprang up, and her income each year grew less and less.

In 1832, when the Asiatic cholera fell upon Baltimore like an Alpine avalanche upon a quiet Italian village, the colored creoles suffered more, relatively, than any other portion of the population, probably because they lived in the more confined streets in the centre of the city. The venerable physician who furnished most of the particulars for this sketch said: "I was passing through a narrow and rather dirty street one day during the height of the cholera, when I met Dr. B——, who asked me whether I did not know Madame Valanbrun: if so, would I go with him to see her in one of the houses near? He had been there a few hours before, and thought she had a severe attack of cholera. We went, and found the venerable old lady in articulo mortis. She was much changed, and the surroundings indicated an equally great change in her circumstances which it was melancholy to witness. But one feature redeemed all that was disgusting in the picture: round the squalid bed five or six old negroes, men and women, knelt in deep devotion like fixed statues, offering up their prayers to the Throne of grace for the departing soul of their beloved mistress, whose life had been so chequered by the sunshine of pleasure and the clouds of adversity. She had just received the last rites of the Church. The priest had retired to perform similar duties elsewhere, leaving the humble but devoted blacks to watch the last breath of life and to close the eyes of their lifelong friend and mistress. I never felt more veneration at the deathbed of any of my own kindred, or deeper respect for mourners than I then felt for those faithful servants of Madame Valanbrun. The old lady died that evening. She devised the small remnant of her property to be divided among her old servants in common.

"Among these colored Creoles were some remarkable women. Well do I remember Suzette, Fanny, Clementine, as faithful watchers at sick beds: many precious lives did they save by their skill, judgment and fidelity. They were not eye-servants, working for money only: they worked from the purest motives of benevolence, from the sentiment of Christian charity.

"Another instance of fidelity came under my notice when I was a student of medicine in 1819. I boarded at a good old Frenchman's, whose few domestics were French creoles. One of these was the washerwoman. When quite young she had left St. Domingo with her old mistress, who had been kind to her in the days of prosperity on the island. The old lady managed to save a small portion of her wealth, and lived quietly with her former servant, now her faithful friend. Madame Curchon, as she grew older, required more comforts than her slender means could afford, and Lizette determined to take in washing. She soon obtained as much as she could attend to, and spent her earnings in making madame comfortable in her old age.

"About this time appeared a fine-looking negro sailor from St. Domingo. He had heard that Lizette, his former sweetheart, was alone in Baltimore, and he came in search of her. He found her. She welcomed him joyously, with her affection for him unchanged. He told her he would marry her at once and take her back to the West Indies. Lizette explained to her lover that she considered herself bound in honor to her old mistress, though no longer her slave, adding that if he would give her five hundred dollars to leave with Madame Curchon her conscience would be free of all charge of ingratitude, and she would follow him to any part of the world. He said he would not pay a dollar for her, as she was a free woman and had worked for the old lady long enough.

"This little love-story came to the knowledge of the boarders through our kind-hearted landlady, and they agreed to subscribe one hundred dollars toward the payment of the amount fixed on by Lizette: the old mistress knew nothing of this romance in low life. Some weeks passed: the man remained stubborn in his idea of right, and she in her conscientious sense of what was due to her dear old mistress. Lizette positively refused to abandon madame to an old age of poverty. Her lover finally returned to the West Indies without her. Whatever disappointment the faithful creole may have suffered, she remained true to her trust, and was for many years the comfort and companion of this poor old French lady."

Another instance of creole gratitude and fidelity is worth recording. A lady who had enjoyed wealth and luxury at home escaped the massacre, but arrived in America entirely destitute. Her feeble health required constant care and delicate food. She was accompanied in her flight by her faithful servant Fanny, who devoted herself to the care and comfort of her former mistress. Fanny rented a small brick house containing five rooms—two chambers, two rooms below and a kitchen. In the upper rooms she made her dear old godmother as comfortable as any lady could be, and when her duties called her elsewhere she placed another in attendance there. The constant piety of this excellent creole was an edifying sight. Fanny still lives, but her dear friend is no more: she believes firmly that they will again be united, to part no more.

One fact connected with these colored Creoles is worthy of mention. Although they have been living in this country for more than three-quarters of a century, they have never united themselves, as social beings, with any of our American negroes. They have treated them with kindness and politeness, helped them in poverty and visited them in sickness, but have never intermarried with them, never gone to their churches, never joined any of the various African societies so conspicuous on certain days of parade. Distinguished for their honesty, they have seldom appeared in the courts either as plaintiffs or defendants. Respected by all, they have never demanded social equality.

Scarcely a dozen of the colored creoles who originally emigrated from St. Domingo are now alive, but their descendants are numerous. They form a very worthy part of the community in which they live. They retain many of the traditionary qualities of their ancestors, and among the shiftless, dependent and often destitute negroes around them they are conspicuous for their industry, integrity and morality.

E.L.D.

GLIMPSES OF BRUSSELS.

To leave Paris for Brussels is to exchange excitement for tranquillity, a crowd for a few, the oppressive newness and vivacity of to-day for a mild animation tempered with a flavor of bygone ages. Brussels has been called a miniature Paris. I should rather consider her as the younger sister of the great city—less beautiful, less decked out, less accomplished, less versed in the ways of the world, yet keeping a certain freshness and virginity of aspect that is lacking in her more brilliant elder.

There is one thing that a foreign resident of Paris is apt to find very enjoyable in Brussels, and that is the absence of the eternal crowd that mars for many people a full enjoyment of the pleasant places of Paris. Her thronging millions overwhelm you on every festive day or joyous occasion. Any little outside show or attraction calls together in some restricted space the population of a small city. Thirty thousand people rushed to hear the Spanish students play on the guitar in the garden of the Tuileries. Twenty thousand go every Sunday to the Salon during the period that it remains open. One hundred thousand go out to the races on ordinary days, and twice that number attend the Grand Prix. Hence comes a famine of conveyances and of seats, and a plethora of companions that are far from being uniformly agreeable.

In Brussels one has enough of human surroundings. There is no lack of companionship in her gardens, her galleries, her streets and her parks. She is not a solitude, as are some of the dead cities of Italy and Germany or some of the minor provincial towns in Belgium and France. The influence of her three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants is very comfortably apparent. But where Paris pours forth her tens of thousands, Brussels sends out some hundreds. Hence there is always room and to spare. And she is well-to-do in the world, is this pretty capital of Belgium. She is growing and thriving, and wears every mark of an active and contented prosperity. New and handsome streets meet the view on every side. Foremost among these is the elegant Avenue Louise, named after the late queen of the Belgians, which leads out to the spacious and lovely Bois de la Cambre, a second Bois de Boulogne, omitting the traces of the siege. The Avenue Louise reminds me very much of South Broad street in Philadelphia. It forms an almost unbroken row of elegant private residences, extending for full two miles to the very gate of the Bois. The centre of the roadway is macadamized and bordered with rows of trees, thus forming a charming road to the Bois for the private carriages of the Belgian aristocracy.

The royal family of Belgium appear but little in public. A series of family misfortunes, combined with the ill-health of the king, has induced them to live in comparative retirement. Of the children of the late king Leopold, but three survive, the present king, the Count de Flandres and the luckless empress Charlotte. The last, still sunk in a state of hopeless insanity, inhabits the Chateau de Tervueren. The king, with his wife and family, passes most of his time at the Chateau de Laeken. He is a great sufferer from a disease which has attacked one of his legs. The queen, an Austrian archduchess, was formerly one of the most beautiful princesses of Europe, but she has never regained either her health or her spirits since the death of her only son some years ago, and looks faded and careworn. On the king's death the crown will pass to his only brother, the Count de Flandres. This gentleman, whose wife, a beautiful and spirited lady, is a princess of the house of Hohenzollern, is as deaf as a post. He inhabits a very handsome palace in the heart of Brussels, and his own sleeping apartments are on the ground floor. One summer night the sentinel in charge was amazed to see a crowd gathered in front of the windows of the count's room, and evidently highly amused. On approaching it was discovered that the attendants had failed to close the outside shutters, and had drawn the lace curtains merely. The room was brilliantly lighted, and of course every part of it was distinctly visible from without. And there,

Dans le simple appareil D'une beaute qu'on vient d'arracher au sommeil,

the heir to the Belgian throne was peacefully walking to and fro in a brown study, unconscious that the eyes of some hundreds of his future subjects were fixed upon his lightly-draped form. His deafness prevented him from hearing the noise outside the window, and rendered all warnings by means of sounds ineffectual. So the prince's chamberlain was aroused, and after some delay His Royal Highness was released from his very undignified position.

Among the proprietors of the new buildings of Brussels is cited the empress Eugenie. Whole rows of newly-erected and handsome shops were pointed out to me as being her property. A very strong sympathy for the dethroned imperial family seemed to be prevalent in Brussels, as well as an equally strong dislike to the Germans. I was amused to find that two animals in the Zoological Garden, a very cross monkey and a savage-looking African boar, both bore the name of Bismarck.

This Zoological Garden, by the by, is unworthy of the beautiful city to which it belongs. It is small, shabby and ill-kept, contains very few animals, and has become a sort of beer-garden, with open-air concerts and a skating-rink for its chief attractions. A very large and beautiful aquarium, a vast grotto of artificial rock-work, is really worth seeing, but its contents are of the most commonplace kind.

The picture-gallery—or Musee Royal, as it is called—has recently been rearranged, and the modern paintings that used to be on view in the ducal palace are now installed in a series of new and beautifully-decorated rooms. Thither have also been removed a number of pictures by contemporary Belgian painters that used to adorn the public buildings of Brussels. Chief among these is Gallait's noble picture of the Abdication of Charles V. This fine work, considered by some critics as the masterpiece of the great Belgian artist, is worthy of the pencil of Delaroche. Nor is it in style unlike the best productions of that master, recalling the Death of Elizabeth by its admirable grouping and refinement of color. Verboeckhoven is seen here at his best, his Flock of Sheep in a Storm, a large and carefully-finished work, being replete with all the most striking characteristics of his genius. Madou's Interrupted Ball is a brilliant and vivacious representation of a village festival troubled by the intrusion of a group of dandies of the Directory—gay Incroyables who chuck the country damsels under the chin, rouse their swains to jealous wrath and otherwise misconduct themselves. Rohbe's pictures of still life are perfect feasts of coloring, warm, rich and glowing as the heart of a crimson rose brimming with the sunshine and sweetness of a summer's day.

The Musee itself is a noble building, and in point of arrangement and of decoration forms a contrast to the dreary halls of the Luxembourg. The gallery devoted to the old masters contains some valuable specimens of early Flemish art, and some extremely interesting historical portraits, the gem of the collection being a wonderfully fine portrait by Holbein of Sir Thomas More.

But the most interesting point in all Brussels is the Hotel de Ville. That marvellous edifice, that looks as though it ought to be preserved in a velvet-lined case, so delicate and elaborate are its multitudinous sculptures, lifts the exquisite tracery of its spire against the summer sky, as perfect in its beauty as when Alva and Egmont and Orange passed beneath its shadow ages ago. No spot in Europe, save perhaps the Tower of London, is more haunted by historic memories than is this perfect marvel of architectural beauty. The centuries roll back as we stand beneath its shadow. There is a stain of blood upon the stones, and Philip of Spain rides by, and the duke of Alva comes through yonder doorway, and the air is full of thronging phantoms and of cries—the wail of the Netherlands beneath the sword of the oppressor.

Around the Hotel de Ville are grouped a series of antique buildings, the one more exquisite than the other—the ancient halls of the corporations of Brussels, among which that of the brewers shows supreme by reason of the luxury of its carvings and the care wherewith its beauty and solidity have been maintained throughout the centuries. In one of the simplest houses of the square Victor Hugo first took refuge after the great catastrophe of the coup d'etat. It bore the number 27. A tobacco-shop occupied the ground floor. The poet's parlor was furnished in a style of bald simplicity, with chairs and a sofa covered with black haircloth. But he was wont to say, pointing to the Hotel de Ville, "I have the most wonderful piece of carving in the world for a sideboard." In this modest abode he wrote Napoleon le Petit. Then, stirred by the historic memories around him, he chose the Inquisition itself for a subject, and planned his as yet unpublished tragedy of Torquemada. The dwelling in the Grande Place became the haunt of all the proscribed republicans of France. Yet Belgium gave them but a cold welcome and grudging hospitality. They were subjected to a series of humiliating formalities, chief among which was the requirement of the authorities that each should provide himself with a permit of residence. These permits were temporary and revocable, and their holders were obliged to go weekly to ask for their renewal at the central police-office. It is not surprising, therefore, that so few of the fugitives should have remained in Belgium. Seven thousand took refuge there after the coup d'etat, but only two hundred and fifty took up their abode on Belgian soil. Yet Brussels remained, in some sense, the continental head-quarters of Victor Hugo, though never kindly or generous in her treatment of the great exile. In 1871, the rumor having gone abroad that he had offered shelter to some of the fugitive Communists, his house was attacked by an armed mob, and its inmates barely escaped with their lives.

Brussels possesses among her other sights a curiosity with which she could very well dispense—namely, the Wiertz Gallery. It is a collection of horrors depicted on a colossal scale by a man whose powers of painting were scarcely equal to those of a respectable scene-painter. A series of nightmares, expressed with a sort of epileptic violence and without any artistic value, clothe the walls of the immense studio with gigantic abominations. There is neither originality of conception nor intelligence of execution to redeem their hideousness: their horror is of the simplest bugaboo kind. A man blowing his head to pieces with a pistol-shot; a supposed corpse coming to life in its coffin; the First Napoleon in the flames of hell, with a multitude of women shaking at him the bloody severed limbs of their sons and husbands; a child burned alive in its cradle; the head of a decapitated criminal, and the visions that filled its brain,—such are some of the ghastly imaginings of this diseased and uneducated nature. Compare such works as these with Dore's crudest conceptions, and the difference between the inventions of genius and those of a morbid intellect becomes at once apparent.

L.H.H.

AN OFF YEAR.

It is a great luxury to find ourselves and the country in the midst of what Marshal MacMahon might style a quadrennate, and to be at the neutral and central point from which a much-vexed people can look both ways for a Presidential election. The contest of two years ago is over, and that of two years hence not near enough to beget mentionable worry. This equator of partisanship, lying midway between the two polls, is a happy medium of repose. The trade-winds of party passion blow from both sides fiercely toward it, but fail to break its calm. The average American—even the average professional American politician—possesses his soul in patience. He looks forward to no revolution, and, when he thinks of the matter at all, is entirely certain that the night of the first Tuesday in November, 1880, will bring nothing more tremendous than the usual hubbub among the telegraph-operators, the reporters and the haunters of the clubs and leagues. He doubts the due abnormal succession of the Presidents as little as he does that of the British kings, and a great deal less than he does that of some of the continental monarchs, to say nothing of the French ruler, whose septennate happens also to be within about two years of its close.

So pleasant it is to be at leisure to bestow attention on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without thought of the usually engrossing machinery so painfully and minutely contrived for facilitating our advance to those ends! To forget the means and for once look at the object; to ignore the strife for free government, and be placidly and contentedly free; to shut our eyes on eternal vigilance, and realize that we have paid that price and have the receipt in our pockets; to intermit our nursing of the tree and enjoy the fruit; to feel that life in a republic is not necessarily and always "the fever called living,"—such is, for the present interval, our lot. Self-government is such very hard work that those engaged in it are entitled to occasional holidays. Nature demands it. Whether their stated Sabbath come once in four years or once in seven, it must come. No wonder that it is apt to prove too welcome and seductive, and that healthy relaxation should grow into harmful lethargy, Sunday into "Blue Monday." Examples of that result are abundant enough to warn us when we need warning. They have chromoed in brilliantly illuminated text, in all the languages and alphabets, the maxim about eternal vigilance, and hung it up over our council-fires and our domestic hearths. We can only venture, perhaps, to half close our eyes and view it sleepily as through cigar-smoke, or turn our backs upon it for a little while and go out into a world of other cares which takes no note of elections, constitutions, statutes or office-holding. The shorter the interval the less should our enjoyment of it be marred. Investigations into past elections serve only to interfere with it, or to assist the newspapers in interfering with it; and newspapers are our daily food or a part of it. Three-fourths of the reading-matter in the five or six thousand of them published in the Union are filled with politics, although the conductors of them, like the rest of us, are aware that politics are temporarily in eclipse. They can teach us nothing on that subject, and we want to learn nothing. Their occupation as trade-journals devoted to the art and science of government is gone. Other periodicals devoted to a specialty, whether iron, coal, calico or the Thirty-nine Articles, show judgment and compassion on their readers when a "slack" time comes by turning miscellaneous and slipping in choice literary tidbits among their regular "shop" items. The five thousand should do likewise. If they will not wholly exclude politics, they might at least sweep political news and disquisitions into a separate corner of the sheet—say among the jokes, base-ball accidents and last year's advertisements.

Could our legislators and their chroniclers only convince themselves that they are de trop, that the best they can do just now is to assist us in cultivating a transitory oblivion of them and their deeds, and that, instead, they are depriving us of the refreshment of our forty winks, they would show a correct understanding of the situation. If they cannot be altogether silent, they might at least give their noise another pitch, and direct it into some humdrum monotone that would not jar upon our slumbers. Do their worst, however, they cannot take from us the delicious consciousness that it will be two years before another Presidential campaign. Panoplied in that reflection, we can stand a good deal.

We sometimes think it must have been a vast relief to the Poles when partition came and the three powers for good and all put an end to their perpetually recurring agony of electing a king. To the masses of the people, who were serfs, and had no more the right of suffrage or any other attribute of liberty than their cattle, we have no doubt it was so. Only by the small minority of privileged and fussy nobles, who went armed to the hall of election, ready to silence effectually any troublesome minority-man who should undertake to defeat their choice with his veto, could the loss of the wonted excitement have been seriously felt. That it was a relief to the neighboring nations, whose peace was constantly compromised by the recurrence of Poland's stormy call for a new king, is certain enough. The change threw a few very worthy men out of business—the Kosciuskos, Pulaskis, Czartoriskis, etc.—but it did away with a much larger number who were standing nuisances, and it left the surplus energy of many more to seek more legitimate and profitable paths. Of course the fate of the Poles, prosperous though their country is beyond anything dreamed of in the days of its nominal independence, is not enviable to us. It were to be wished that they had been cured of the regular—or irregular—spasms of selecting a chief without losing their national autonomy. What we remark is, that the strain of that convulsion was greater than they or their neighbors could bear, and that all concerned, with the trifling exceptions named, must have breathed freer and deeper when it was put an end to.

E.C.B.

CONJUGAL DISCORDS.

The weaknesses and follies of woman are a theme on which men, from the sage to the clown, have at all times been eloquent. Her natural coquetry in dress, her maternal vanity, her devotion to the little elegancies of the home, to clean windows and fresh curtains, are inexhaustible sources of masculine merriment or abuse. What housekeeper ever complained of an aching back or of nervous irritation without being scolded by her "lord" for some extra work she had done in beautifying the home? Men never seem to learn that women, as a rule, cannot find life endurable in the atmosphere of dust and disorder which characterizes bachelor housekeeping, and which seldom disturbs the equanimity of the masculine mind in the least. Men and women are so different in their tastes and ways that there must always be discord and unhappiness in the household until the sexes give over trying to change or remodel those tastes and ways, and learn to respect them. Men must accept as inevitable the fact that women to be happy must have artistic, or at least dainty and cozy, environments; and women must learn to preserve their souls in quiet when men spill their tobacco and ashes over the carpets and tables, for probably no man ever lived who could fill a pipe, even from a wash-tub, without scattering the tobacco over the premises.

That the sexes will give over trying to reform each other does not seem likely to happen very soon. Indeed, one might be pardoned for believing that matrimony is specially adapted to develop all the imperfections and meannesses of human character, and that even of those matches that are made in heaven the devil arranges all the subsequent conditions. There is hardly a pure and innocent delight that unmarried women enjoy which they can carry into that blissful world bounded by the marriage-ring. One of those delights is that of squandering a little money, which is merely the equivalent of man's spending it as he likes, without accounting to any one. Few wives can do this and not be subjected to the humiliation of hearing the husband say, "My dear, are you not a little extravagant? Is all that money gone that I gave you last week?"

Men and women seem incapacitated, in the very nature of things, from understanding each other. While mutually enamored they meet as upon a bridge—a Bridge of Sighs perhaps: break this, and they are for ever separated as by an impassable gulf. Leaving aside entirely the enamored state, do men as a rule seek the society of women and prefer it to that of men? The thriving clubs, the billiard- and drinking-saloons, and the other resorts of men common all over the civilized world, seem very like a negative answer to the question. In savage life we know that the sexes do not hunt or fish or do any work together. In our modern drawing-rooms most men confess themselves "bored." They long to get away to their clubs or some other resort of their fellows. When husbands spend their evenings at home, if no one happens to call it is not common for them to enter into long and exhilarating conversations with their wives. To be sure, wives are too often ignorant of the subjects that interest intelligent men; still, not more ignorant than before marriage, when the one bridge upon which they could meet was unbroken. Then conversation never flagged: it was ever new and entrancing. Both talked pure nonsense, while having the art of "kissing full sense into empty words." On the other hand, it is, I think, quite a defensible proposition, despite the inferences to the contrary drawn from the failure of the Women's Hotel, that women enjoy conversation with women more than with men when there is no possible question of gallantry or flirtation; and, finally, that the recognition of the fact that men and women are not by nature in sympathetic accord, but only attracted through the law of compensation or opposites, will do more than all other things combined to make them study each other's natures and to respect sexual biases and characteristics, the motive for that study being, of course, the consummation of the ideal marriage, where man and woman set themselves together "like perfect music unto noble words."

M.H.

A RUSSIAN GENERAL IN CENTRAL ASIA.

Afternoon in Tashkent, the burning sun of Central Asia glaring upon the dusty streets and countless mud-hovels of the great city; files of camels gliding past with their long, noiseless stride, led by gaunt brown men in blue robes and white turbans; a deep archway in a high wall of baked earth, above which appear the trees of a spacious garden, and just within the entrance two tall, wiry, black-eyed Cossacks, in flat forage-caps, soiled cotton jackets and red goatskin trousers, leaning indolently on their long Berdan rifles.

At my approach, however, the two sentinels start up briskly enough—as well they may, for they are guarding one whom every man in Bokhara would give his best horse for a fair chance of murdering. My announcement that I am expected by the governor-general is received with evident suspicion and a crossing of bayonets to bar my way; but, happily, a passing aide-de-camp recognizes me and promptly leads me in.

The clustering trees, through which the sunshine filters in a rich, subdued light suggestive of some great cathedral, are deliciously cool and shady after the blinding glare outside; but there is life enough in the scene, nevertheless. White-frocked soldiers are hurrying to and fro; laced jackets, shining epaulettes, clinking spurs and sabres meet us at every turn; and in the centre of all, under a huge spreading tree planted years before any Russian had set foot in Turkestan, sits a towering form whose vast proportions and bold swarthy face seem to dwarf every other figure in the group. Twelve years ago, General Kolpakovski was a private soldier in the Russian army: to-day he is the commander of thirty thousand men and absolute master of a territory as large as the States of New York and Pennsylvania together.

"Fine fellow, isn't he?" says my conductor, looking admiringly at the stalwart form of his chief. "Did you ever hear of his ride across the steppes from here to Kouldja? He started with twelve Tartars, and you know what horsemen they are. Well, three of them broke down the first day, five more the second, and all the rest on the third; and the general got in by himself. Ever since then the Tartars have called him 'The Chief with the Iron Skin;' and the soldiers go about singing,

Kolpakovski molodetz— Fsadnik Tatarski—glupetz!

("Kolpakovski's a fine fellow: the Tartar horseman is a fool.")

"Well done!"

"Ay, and he did a better thing still two years ago. He was crossing the mountains with a Cossack squadron in the heat of summer. Presently up comes one fellow: 'Your Excellency, my horse is lame.'—'Go back, then.'—Another man, seeing that, thought he'd get off the same way; so he calls out, 'My horse is lame, Your Excellency.'—'Get off and lead him, then,' says Kolpakovski; and the unfortunate fellow had to tramp up hill all day, and tow his horse after him into the bargain, with the thermometer ninety-five in the shade."

But just at this moment my name is called, and I go up to the general's chair, to receive a cordial handshake, a few words of frank, manly kindness, and the passport which is to carry me northward across the steppes as far as the border of Siberia.

D.K.



LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Memoir of William Francis Bartlett. By Francis Winthrop Palfrey. Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co.

The Story of my Life. By the late Colonel Meadows Taylor. Edited by his Daughter. With a Preface by Henry Reeve. London: William Blackwood & Sons.

We put these two books together, not on account of any similarity in the scenes and events, the characters and careers, depicted in them, but because each in its way brings under a strong light the qualities on which nations rely in seasons of peril and emergency, but of which in ordinary times there is only a consciousness as of a latent source of strength, the sound and enduring pith beneath many accretions of questionable fibre and tenacity. General Bartlett may very well stand for a type of the "heroes" produced by our civil war—men who, neither bred to the profession of arms nor inspired by military or political ambition, quitting their homes and chosen vocations at the call of their country or their State, devoted themselves heart and soul to the duties and demands of the hour, distinguished themselves not more by their bravery than by their strict attention to discipline, and in seasons of discouragement and defeat, of bad generalship or defective organization, gave to the respective armies that "staying power," so rare in a citizen soldiery, which prolonged the contest until it ended in the sheer exhaustion of the weaker party. Conspicuous examples of this class were sent forth, perhaps, by every State, and within its borders were often regarded with a fonder admiration than the great commanders on whom a larger responsibility and more complex duties brought a more anxious and less partial scrutiny. Massachusetts, in particular, which could boast of no eminent professional soldier and whose "political generals" carried off the palm of a disastrous incapacity, turned with especial pride to those of her sons who in the camp and in the field were recognized as models of zeal, fidelity and gallantry. Of this number—and it was not small—Bartlett, though one of the youngest, was the most distinguished. He showed from the first equal coolness and daring in battle, as well as the special faculty of a minute disciplinarian. The regiments which he trained and led were among those that headed victorious charges and stemmed the torrent of defeat, besides presenting a faultless appearance on parade and resisting temptations to plunder. He himself was repeatedly disabled by severe wounds, and, being captured before Petersburg, passed many of the last months of the war in confinement, suffering from a disease which permanently injured his system and shortened his life. Yet he survived most of the comrades whose careers had opened with a like promise, and down to his death, in 1876, was full of enterprise and activity as a private citizen, bearing a spotless reputation, and displaying qualities which, it seems to have been generally believed, would have found their fittest field in some high public position. The story of his life is well and modestly told by his friend Colonel Palfrey, and may be specially commended to readers capable of being stirred and stimulated by memories and examples which have certainly not been dimmed by the greater lustre of those of a more recent date.

It would be unfair to expect in such a narrative the rich and varied interest that belongs to the autobiography of Meadows Taylor, whose career was as eventful and exciting as that of any hero of romance, and who has told it with a vividness and graphic power which few writers of romance have equalled. "He was one of the last of those," remarks Mr. Reeve, "who went out to India as simple adventurers." His boyhood and youth were full of precocious adventure and achievement. At the age of sixteen he obtained a commission in the military contingent of the Nizam. At seventeen he was employed as interpreter on courts-martial, and at eighteen was appointed "assistant police superintendent" of a district comprising a population of a million of souls. The duties of this post "involved not only direct authority over the ordinary relations of society, but the active pursuit of bands of Dacoits, Thugs and robbers," and occasional military expeditions to reduce some lawless chief to obedience. But the most remarkable and laborious years of his life were those during which he filled the office of "political agent" at Shorapoor, administering the affairs of that principality and holding the guardianship of the young rajah during a long minority, while cut off from intercourse with Europeans and exposed to continual plottings and intrigues of native functionaries and court favorites. The skill, tact and courage with which he executed the delicate and complicated functions of this anomalous position, and encountered its difficulties and perils, make themselves felt and appreciated in all the details of the narrative, while the picture presented of Eastern character and manners is one which only the most intimate knowledge, combined with rare faculties of delineation, could furnish, and differs in many features from any other to be found in European descriptions of life in India. "Meadows Taylor was never, properly speaking, in the civil service of the East India Company or the Crown, nor did he hold any military appointment in the British Indian army. He was throughout life an officer of the Nizam. He never even visited Calcutta or Bengal." He was thus thrown out of the main line of advancement, and never attained the rank or emoluments that fell to the share of many less gifted contemporaries. Hence the peculiarly adventurous character of his career and the novelty of the scenes which he depicts. Hence, too, perhaps, the width of his attainments, the enlightened spirit he displayed in his intercourse with the natives, and his cultivation of his literary powers as the main resource of his leisure while isolated from the society of his own race. His start in life belonged to a period long antecedent to the days of competitive examinations, but his assiduity and desire for knowledge needed no stimulant and were the keys to his early success. "His perfect acquaintance with the languages of Southern India—Teloogoo and Mahratta, as well as Hindoostanee—was," we are told, "the foundation of his extraordinary influence over the natives of the country and of his insight into their motives and character." He taught himself land-surveying and engineering, and constructed roads, tanks and buildings. He studied geology, botany and antiquities, and applied the knowledge thus obtained to practical purposes. He gained an acquaintance with the principles of law, Hindoo, Mohammedan and English, that he might devise codes and rules of procedure for a country where there were no courts or legislation, and where he had to administer justice according to his own lights. In the midst of his thousand avocations he found time to write a series of novels portraying the manners and superstitions of India, and depicting the various epochs of its history, with a fidelity and liveliness that have gained for these works a wide popularity. Yet perhaps the strongest impression made by this record of his life comes from the evidence it affords of his humane and conciliatory spirit in his dealings with the native Indians of every class, his unselfish devotion to their welfare, his habit of treating them as equals and his power of inspiring them with confidence, with the result of enabling him to preserve a large and important district from participation in the Mutiny, without the aid of troops and against the constant pressure and appeals of surrounding populations all in full revolt. His autobiography has already gone through several editions in England, and we cannot but regret that it has not been republished in America, where the interest in the country and events to which it relates is of course far less general and intense, but where, we may hope, the appreciation of heroic energy and noble achievements is not less common. The book is not to be confounded with the class to which the lives of governor-generals and military commanders in India belong. Arrian complained that the expedition of the Ten Thousand was far more famous in his day than the exploits of Alexander; and this narrative of what must be considered an episode of the British rule in India is likely to hold the attention of most readers more closely than many volumes that recount the grander events of that wonderful history.

Walks in London. By Augustus J.C. Hare, author of "Walks in Rome," etc. New York: George Routledge & Sons.

Not many visitors to London would be likely to take all or half the walks described in Mr. Hare's two thick volumes, even if the word walks should be so interpreted as to include commoner modes of transit between distant points of interest and through interminable thoroughfares. In Rome or Venice the tourist may be expected to follow religiously the prescriptions of his guide-book: he is there for that purpose, he has no other means of employing his time, and he would be ashamed to report that he had omitted to see or do anything that Jones or Smith had seen and done. But a few rapid excursions in a hansom cab will enable him to visit all the "sights" that are de rigueur in London—Westminster Abbey and Hall and the Houses of Parliament; the Museum, the Zoological and the National Gallery; St. Paul's, Guildhall and the Bank and Exchange; the Monument, the Tower and the Tunnel,—after which he may devote himself without scruple to an endless round of social amusements, or to "the proper study of mankind" with all varieties and countless specimens of the genus collected for his inspection. It is only the zealous investigator, primed with the associations of English literature from Chaucer to Dickens, who will be apt to put himself under Mr. Hare's guidance, and to explore patiently the widely-separated districts in which lie scattered and almost hidden the relics that attest the identity of London through the ages of growth and change that have transformed it from the "Hill Fortress" of Lud or the Colonia Augusta of the Romans into the commercial metropolis of the world, with a population, circumference and aggregate of wealth exceeding those of most of the other European capitals combined. Yet one who undertakes this labor with the due amount of knowledge and enthusiasm may be sure of finding his reward in it. Though London is the supreme embodiment of modern life, with its ceaseless absorption and accumulation, it is none the less imbued with a conservative spirit which has saved it from the wholesale demolitions and ruthless remodellings to which Paris has been subjected. Mr. Hare speaks with just indignation of the destruction of Northumberland House at Charing Cross, but this has so far been an exceptional instance, though it is perhaps an ominous one. The traveller may still step aside from the busy Strand into the silent and beautiful Temple Church with its tombs of Crusaders, pause as he leaves his banker's in Bishopsgate to take a survey of Crosby Hall and Sir Paul Pindar's house with their reminders of the financial magnates of a bygone time beautifying their homes in the City as visible proclamations of their prosperity, and find, as he wanders through Aldgate and Bevis Marks, Wych street, Holborn and Lincoln's Inn, Southwark and Lambeth, hundreds of quaint fronts or picturesque memorials linked with names and events, epochs and usages, that have been familiar to his mind from childhood. But many such scenes and objects will escape notice or fail of due appreciation unless an informant be at hand qualified to proffer the needed suggestions without indulging in wearisome garrulity. Mr. Hare seems to us to meet very well the requirements of this office, his book being a happy medium between the concise though comprehensive, and for ordinary purposes indispensable, manual of Baedeker and the voluminous works of Timbs and Cunningham.