The postal banks would doubtless very largely take the place of present institutions of deposit. To what extent this would be the case, it is, of course, impossible to say. For all ordinary purposes, and for the needs of the average business man, their advantages could not fail to be great. Their effect would probably be to withdraw from the market large sums now available for speculative purposes, and divert them to legitimate uses. The speculative tendency would, therefore, be likely to be discouraged by so much. Necessary limitations might make the postal banks unavailable for those whose financial transactions are conducted on a great scale, and their wants would continue to be met by private institutions, which would offer special inducements to large depositors, just as the trust companies now offer special inducements over the present national banks by paying interest on deposits.



ANOTHER VIEW OF NEWMAN.

BY WM. M. SALTER.

I suppose I should never have felt toward Cardinal John Henry Newman as I do, had I not been once in a certain state of mind. It was my lot, as a divinity student, to feel under the necessity of examining into the grounds of my religious belief. I could not accept what my teachers gave me, simply because it was taught, much as I revered some of them. I had to test, examine, and conclude for myself. I evidently felt the difficulties of belief, as most of my fellow-students did not. At New Haven the main outlines of evangelical orthodoxy, at Cambridge the fundamental ideas of theism, were accepted, as a rule, without serious question. I envied my fellows their assurance; I, too, craved assurance, but I had to get it in my own way, and I was plunged into investigations, and beset by doubts that did not seem to occupy or perplex them. The question was, where could I find a point to start from; not what was the whole truth, but what was the truth I could be immediately sure of,—what was light that I could not question (or, at least, reasonably question)? For, once in possession of that, other things might naturally and logically follow. It seemed to me, that if there was any sure ground for the Christian believer, it was to be found in Christ himself; that if ever a voice from another world had spoken to this, it had been through him. The fundamental problem was, Was his consciousness to be trusted? It was after three years of examination into the origin and trustworthiness of the gospel records, of effort to form a faithful picture of Jesus' mind, of weighing of probabilities as to whether he could have been mistaken, and a decision that he could not have been, and that he was, under God, my appointed Lord, and Saviour, and Judge, as he was that of all men,—it was at this time that I fell in with the writings of Newman, and that he began to exercise a charm over me, which, amid all my subsequent changes of thought, I have never been willing to disown.

I felt in the first place that he had a profound sense of the difficulties of faith. There was no evidence that certain questions had ever been open questions to him (such as the being of God and the reality of a revelation), but he seemed to be as keenly aware of the difficulties attending them as if they had been. He believed and yet he knew the other side. Few are the apologists who have dared to say what he has said; few are the unbelievers who could state their case more strongly than he has stated it for them. It was this width of imagination that, for one thing, separated him from the ordinary theologian. One of his precepts to a zealous follower was, "Be sure you grasp fully any view which you seek to combat." Let me illustrate. Newman admitted in so many words that it was a great question whether atheism was not as philosophically consistent with the phenomena of the physical world as the doctrine of a creative and governing power. He allowed Hume's argument against miracles to be valid from a purely scientific aspect of things, and doubted the conclusiveness of the design argument (though not the argument from order) for the being of God. He knew to the full how hard it was to hold one's faith in God in face of all that seems amiss and awry, purposeless, blind, and cruel in the world. He held this faith, he believed there were reasons for it (chiefly in man's conscience), it was the starting-point of his religious system, and yet when he looked out of himself into the world of men, the lie seemed to be given to it and the effect was as confusing, he said, as if it were denied that he was in existence himself. "If I looked into a mirror [these are his words] and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me when I look into this living, busy world and see no reflex of its Creator.... Were it not for the voice speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an Atheist, or a Pantheist, or a Polytheist.... To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship, their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths; the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity; the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary, hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the apostle's words, 'Having no hope and without God in this world'; all this is a vision to dizzy and appall, and inflicts upon the mind a sense of profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution." To have one's doubts, one's misgivings, one's own blank confusion portrayed with such appreciation and in such vivid detail by another—how could it fail to powerfully affect me? Surely, I said to myself, whether this man's faith was true or not, he did not hold it because the tremendous obstacles in the way of it had not been brought home to him. Similarly he appreciated the difficulties in connection with revelation itself, as when he said that God "has given us doctrines which are but obscurely gathered from scripture, and a scripture which is but obscurely gathered from history," as when he admitted the real obstacles in the way of the Jews admitting that Jesus was their Messiah.

But I will not linger over this point, and pass on to say that Newman impressed me as one of those few men, in any age, who have an intellectual life of their own. His was no hereditary belief; he had faced the problems of religion for himself. What looks like faith in many cases, he himself said, was a mere hereditary persuasion, not a personal principle, a habit learned in the nursery, which is scattered and disappears like a mist before the light of reason. His own admiration went out evidently to the "bold unworldliness and vigorous independence of mind" shown by one of his early teachers, Thos. Scott; to the type of mind illustrated by an Oxford associate, who had an intellect, he says, "as critical and logical as it was speculative and bold." Whately, he records, had taught him to see with his own eyes and to walk with his own feet; he thought of dedicating his first book to him, in words to the effect that he had not only taught him to think, but to think for himself. It was a first hand dealing with almost all the problems he took up, that I had the sense of in reading Newman's pages, however far ahead he was of me in the line of (what seemed then) religious advance.

And because he had thought, he had moved, he had had a history. He started with certain truths (as he supposed them to be), but instead of accepting them mechanically, he thought them out; he studied to see what they implied, what other truths were consistent with them and what were not; in other words, he gradually worked his way out to something like a system, and therein consisted his history. The ordinary idea of Newman (leaving the past tense for the moment) seems to be that he sacrificed his intellect, that out of weariness he threw himself into the Catholic fold. Such may be a true account of some conversions, but it is a pitiable travesty of the facts in the case of Newman. Newman went into the Church because it seemed rational to him to do so; and it is still the great question, whether once assuming certain fundamental ideas held by Protestant and Catholic alike, any other course is rational. The "trouble" with Newman, as with his brother Francis (in some ways also a remarkable man), was simply that, as the London Truth banteringly said, neither was able to swallow the Athanasian creed in a comfortable and prosaic way, as good Britons should; or, as the Saturday Review in all seriousness urged, that he did not hold as his supreme principle pride in the Church of England as such, determination to stand shoulder to shoulder with others "in resisting the foreigner, whether he came from Rome or from Geneva, from Tuebingen or from Saint Sulpice"; in other words, that he opened the windows of his mind, instead of keeping them shut; that he set out on living a life of reason instead of one of prejudice; that he determined to seek out and follow the truth on whatever shores that quest should land him.

"Most men in this country," Newman once wrote, "like opinions to be brought to them, rather than to be at the pains to go out and seek for them." But Newman himself was cast in another mould; rationality, consistency, were an imperative craving with him; and feeling that the popular religious creed lacked these things, he went in search of them and started, as it were, on a journey. A memorandum, written down at the age of twenty-eight, speaks of himself as "now in my room in Orell College, slowly advancing, etc., and led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me." His touching verses, beginning "Lead, kindly Light," betray the same feeling. Gloom did encircle him, but in the midst of it there was a light, which he strove and craved to follow. Though mystical, in a certain sense, by temperament, he resolved, he tells us, to be guided, not by his imagination, but by his reason. He had once a strange emotional experience, but when it was over he wished that it should not unduly influence him. "I had to determine its logical value," he says, "and its bearing on my duty." "What are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and as a duty," he wrote many years afterwards, "but unlearning the world's poetry and attaining to its prose? This is our education as boys and as men, in the action of life and in the closet or library; in our affections, in our aims, in our hopes, and in our memories. And in like manner it is the education of our intellect." This is little more than saying that the supreme rule of life is reason, that it is our life-task to bring all the varied motions of our minds into harmony with this ideal. The fact is that he became ultimately persuaded that the Catholic creed was that rational and consistent creed of which he was in search—rational and consistent that is, in the sense of being in harmony with, and an outgrowth of, those fundamental ideas of a God and of a revelation with which he started; and in addressing others after he became a Catholic, he said, "Be convinced in your reason that the Catholic Church is a teacher sent to you from God, and it is enough. I do not wish you to join her till you are."

Yet while he was in search of the truth, while he was on the journey, he excited no little suspicion and distrust. The very thing that lends him charm to those who love to see intellectual movement and development allowed apostles of prejudice and good, but narrow-minded, men to think of him as insidious, leading his disciples on to conclusions to which he designed to bring them, while his purpose was veiled. But, says Froude, who tells us this, and was himself at Oxford in those early days, he was on the contrary "the most transparent of men. He told us what he believed to be true. He did not know where it would carry him. No one who has ever risen to any great height in the world refuses to move till he knows whither he is going." Such are the words of one who, though he felt the spell of Newman, soon struck on a different intellectual path. Matthew Arnold, too, experienced the spell. "Who could resist," he says in a lecture on Emerson, "the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music—subtile, sweet, mournful." To Arnold, he was a man "never to be named by a son of Oxford without sympathy;" and this, though Arnold, too, regarded his solution for the doubts and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day as impossible. Once Charles Kingsley brought against him a charge of intellectual dishonesty and falsity; but, as Mr. Conway remarks, Kingsley's sword broke in his hands and on all sides the demolition which he received in Newman's reply (the Apologia pro Vita Sua) has been regarded as complete. Even the Saturday Review says, "His conversion was transparently honest; no one, save the most contemptible of party scribes, can ever hint a doubt of that." "He deliberately shut his eyes," an "intellectual suicide," "his sympathies and sensibilities were always his ultimate test of right thought and action." Such are the comments of a recent reviewer; but on the morning of the day in which Newman was received into the Catholic Church, he wrote to a friend, "May I have only one tenth part as much faith as I have intellectual conviction where the truth lies! I do not suppose any one can have had such combined reasons pouring in upon him that he is doing right."

But how can Newman have had reasons for his course? we may incredulously ask. And here I revert to my particular state of mind years ago. The question for me was, holding as I did that in Jesus, God had spoken to the world, and that under God he was the Lord, and Saviour, and Judge of men, could I remain standing in such a position? It was a starting-point, but did it not lead somewhere? Holding so much, despite the difficulties, was it not possible that consistently therewith, I must hold more, despite further difficulties? Looking about me among Unitarians, with whom I was then associated, I felt that even this faith had scant acceptance among them. For example, taking a country church for a year, I found that not in a decade or more had there been any additions to the church membership, or even efforts in that direction; the church was, practically, simply an assemblage of pew-holders. My own efforts to induce persons to confess Jesus as their Lord, to take his name, to become his avowed follower before the world (i. e. to join his church), were something novel; yet a church, an assembly of followers, was essential to my idea of Christianity,—Jesus having said, "Whoever will confess me before men, him will I confess before my Father who is in heaven," and a king without a kingdom (or right to a kingdom) being in itself absurd. I could not help the foreboding that Unitarianism was not a finality or more than a camp for a night; nay, the question was whether Unitarianism was not doing more to dissipate Christianity, than to build it up in any historical sense of the term.

Moreover, Protestant orthodoxy did not have any firm hold on some fundamental parts and evident implications of the faith I already held, and was struggling to keep. The idea of the Church itself was weak in most Protestant mind; they "spiritualized" it, as they said; but when Jesus spoke of confessing him before men, he evidently laid the foundations of a visible Church. Again, Jesus felt that he spoke with Divine authority, and as he was commissioned, so he commissioned others to stand for him before the world, and to speak in his name. He left them to be his witnesses, to continue his message and his work after he should be gone. He had the power to forgive sins, for example, and he conveyed it to others, solemnly saying that whatever was bound or loosed on earth, should be bound or loosed in heaven. Was it exactly natural, I asked myself, that divine light and guidance and forgiveness should be thus present, as it were, on earth for a few years, and then become entirely a matter of history and antiquarian research? If there was reason for Jesus' commissioning the apostles, was there not equal reason for the apostles commissioning others who should take their places? Protestants said the revelation was in a book; but Jesus never spoke of a book. If something else was authoritative in the apostolic days, what absurdity was there in supposing that something else might be authoritative in later days? And yet, no Protestant church or synod or council ever claimed to be such a living witness of God on the earth. The most zealous Protestants were careful to say that they gave only their human, fallible interpretations of the distant revelation; that it was even blasphemous for a man to claim to forgive sins; that the Bible, and the Bible only, was their religion. And yet, the Bible, it was severally claimed, gave the basis to the Presbyterian creed, to the Methodist creed, to, one might say, a hundred creeds, even including the slender one of Unitarians. How certain words of Newman came home to me in the midst of such reflections! "There is an overpowering antecedent improbability in Almighty God's announcing that He has revealed something, and then revealing nothing; there is no antecedent improbability in His revealing it elsewhere than in an inspired volume." I do not mean to say that I was converted by Newman; but I was open to light on that side. I did not shut my mind, as most Protestants seemed to, and I dimly felt, I had a sort of foreboding that, if what I already held was true, reason might be on his side. And it was reason—the demand for a set of views that should be harmonious and consistent—that made me dissatisfied; and so I could give credit to the idea that Newman in his changes, and in his final act, was influenced by reason.

To Newman, the main difficulty of all lay in the being of God. If there was a God, it seemed rational to him that there should be a revelation, taking into account the actual condition of men. If there was a revelation, the Catholic Church presented more signs of being its bearer and custodian than any other body or institution of men. I think if we are disposed to question the rationality of his course, we shall find, if we examine the matter carefully, that it is because we question his postulates, not his reasoning or results. Granted that there is a God, as men ordinarily understand that term, and I think that a revelation is antecedently probable; granted that a revelation has been made, as Protestants (save Unitarians) are agreed, and I think it but reasonable to suppose that some such body as the Catholic Church claims to be should be its bearer and unerring interpreter to men. We are mistaken if we think that Newman devised any short-cut to mental peace, or used any other instrument or method for arriving at his results than we ordinarily employ in sound reasonings of every day. He claimed no intuitions, no vision of theological truth, and he was less arbitrary and fanciful in defending Catholic dogma than I have known "philosophers" to be in defending the being of God and the immortality of the soul. He tells us in his Apologia that he believed in a God on a ground of probability, that he believed in Christianity on a probability, and that he believed in Catholicism on a probability, and that these three grounds of probability, distinct from each other in subject-matter, were still, all of them, one and the same in nature of proof, as being probabilities—probabilities of a special kind, a cumulative, a transcendent probability, but still probability.

But did he not by some magical metamorphosis turn these probabilities into a certainty? No; he simply claimed that they were sufficient to produce certitude, which is a different matter. Certitude, he held, was a quality or habit of mind; certainty, a quality of propositions; and probabilities that did not reach to logical certainty might suffice for a mental certitude. We are mentally sure almost every day of many things which could not be demonstratively proved; we are practically as sure of them as if they could be proved; we are ready to act on the basis of them, and that is the test of practical certitude. The word of a friend on a matter of which we are ignorant is an example; we may be as sure of what he tells us as if we had seen it ourselves; yet he may be mistaken; strictly speaking, his word is only probable evidence. But did not Newman substitute faith for reason? Yes, in a sense; but not in a sense in which it is of itself irrational to do so. How much could the reason of any of us tell us of Central Africa? We know of it by testimony, do we not? not by reason. From our own notions alone we could not tell whether it was a desert or a forest; whether it was inhabited or uninhabited; whether full-grown human beings or dwarfs lived there; but a Livingstone, a Du Chaillu, a Stanley, tell us, and we accept their word. The fact is, that trust in testimony is what we daily practise. We learn of what is going on in a neighboring town, of much in our own town, of much in our own house (unless we are there all the time, and in every part of it at the same time) not by reasoning about it, any more than by sight, but by faith in what others tell us. "Why should we be unwilling to go by faith?" asks Newman. "We do all things in this world by faith in the word of others. By faith only we know our positions in the world, our circumstances, our rights and privileges, our fortunes, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our age, our mortality; why should religion be an exception? Why should we be willing to use for heavenly objects what we daily use for earthly?" There is really nothing mystical about faith; it is not peculiarly a religious principle, nor is it the ideal way of getting knowledge. As Newman says, "The word of another is in itself a faint evidence compared with that of sight or reason. It is influential only when we cannot do without it."

Now it may be difficult to suppose that God has ever spoken in the world. But if we think He has, it cannot be irrational to take His word and believe it; it cannot be absurd to trust a Divine message, when we are every day trusting human messages. And one thing further. When we trust a friend's report, we do not make our previous ideas of what is probable, a test of how much we shall believe of what he says. If we were already competent to say what happened, we should not go to him for information. Unless it is impossible, or against all the laws of probability, we assent to what he says, however much it may surprise, or startle, or alarm us; if we cannot do this, we have not real trust. But trusting it is irrational "to pick and choose;" to say this we will accept and that we will reject, according as it seems antecedently likely or not. Surely this must be also true of divine testimony. If God, the perfect, the unerring intelligence, speaks, we are at least to give Him the same respect we should show to a fellow-man; we are not to say, "this is credible and I accept it; that is strange, mysterious, and I must reject it." If we knew beforehand what was true, to what end would God give the revelation? And if we do thus sit in judgment, we simply show (unless we are dishonest) that we do not believe that God has spoken. Hence, what is called the submission of reason, which, in the large sense of the word, it is only rational to give, if God has indeed given a message to the world. Protestants so submit to the teachings of the Bible; Catholics do to the teachings of the Church. If God really speaks in either, it is as rational to do so as it is to trust Stanley's reports of the lakes and jungles, the weird forests and strange inhabitants of Central Africa—yes, as much more so as Stanley is a man, and God is God. Most simply and frankly does Newman say, in speaking of early converts, "The Church was their teacher; they did not come to argue, to examine, to pick and choose, but to accept whatever was put before them." This attitude of arguing, examining, picking, and choosing in relation to things of which we really know nothing, and can know nothing, in our mortal state (though supposedly God knows and has given a certain amount of light) Newman calls Rationalism; and if God has spoken, surely such Rationalism is irrational. The doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, that one creed is as good as another, and that all is opinion, Newman calls Liberalism; but if God has revealed the truth such Liberalism is false.

In writing of Newman as I have, I have been moved by old attachment and personal veneration. But if I have incidentally contributed to show that a Catholic need not necessarily be either a weak man or a dishonest one, as is sometimes taken for granted among Liberals, I shall not be sorry. My opinion is that Newman differed from the stock Protestantism of his day, largely because he sought out light and sought it with a mind which for eagerness, keenness, subtlety, depth, has rarely been surpassed; that he left the Church of England because it was neither fish nor fowl—and rationality and consistency were not in it; that he went to Rome, because, taking his premises for granted, reason pointed that way. And yet the guarded way in which I have spoken has probably been noticed by my readers. I have not said that reason, abstractly speaking, was on his side, but that starting from his premises his course was reasonable—his premises being those to which most Christians hold. The difference was that he took them seriously and they became living principles, germs of ample growth in his mind, while others held them unthinkingly; that he had the rare power of realizing his ideas, while others took them as mechanically as we often take the stars at night—points of light they are to us and nothing more. But whether his premises were really sound is another question. My mature judgment is that they were not; had I been able to hold my Christian faith as I once held it, could I have resisted the solvents that science, and criticism, and philosophy were bringing to bear upon it, I should have gone I know not where; as it is, I am a Liberal (though not in Newman's sense). The ordinary idea of God I cannot hold, nor does it seem likely that I shall ever hold an idea of God with which the idea of a special revelation would be congruous; and even were the ordinary idea of God a true one, I think that the matter-of-fact evidence of a revelation through Jesus is insufficient. Reluctant as I was to admit it, struggle as I might against it, the share of Jesus in the errors and illusions of his time (the sense of which grew upon me) made it impossible for me at last to absolutely trust his consciousness; however great, however sublime a figure he was, it appeared that he belonged after all to our fallible humanity. Hence in my view we were thrown back on ourselves; we may have great and consoling beliefs about life and its purpose, about death and what lies beyond, about the fathomless Power from which we come and on whose bosom we rest; but a revelation we have not; they are beliefs which we ourselves form and do not receive from without. Rationalism, though not in the sense in which Newman used it, becomes the only method; and Liberalism, in the sense that whatever creed one may hold none can claim to be infallible, or of exclusive divine authority, and that good men of different creeds should respect and tolerate one another, becomes at once a necessity and a duty.

Newman has taken his way; other men, let us trust, with the root of piety in them as truly as it was in him, have taken theirs; the ways are far apart—which is truer, time, the future, perhaps the ages alone can tell. But we are bound not to revile him, as he in sober truth never reviled us.



INTER-MIGRATION.

BY RABBI SOLOMON SCHINDLER.

The immigration problem, which I have been discussing in previous numbers of THE ARENA, cannot be unravelled without considering one important thread which adds to the entanglement. I shall apply to it the term "Inter-migration," a word not found in the dictionary, because it is freshly coined for the purpose. Let me try to define its meaning.

A person is said to migrate when he leaves his native land, seeking a new home in some other country. Around the word emigrant or immigrant hovers always the idea of an exchange of habits, customs, and language of one country with those of another. The immigrant, when he arrives at the place which he has chosen for his new settlement, appears by his dress, his language, his manners, yea, even by his features, a stranger; one who has apparently no right to press himself upon the community; one who must not feel offended if he is mistrusted, until he has shown that his arrival will not prove dangerous to the old settlers. Around the word emigrant hovers the idea of distance; he comes from far-off countries, from a place which cannot be easily reached, or from which information concerning himself cannot be readily obtained. We call a person an immigrant who comes to us from a distance of at least a few thousand miles, and from a country that differs from ours in the forms of government as well as in customs and manners. We would surely not call a person an immigrant who comes from a village of Maine or New Hampshire to Boston, nor even if he should come from the far South or from the extreme West.

Yet, what is the difference? He is a person who has left his native home, who is as much a stranger among us as the one who comes across the ocean. His manners may be as different from ours, his features may show at a glance, whether he is a southerner, a western man, or whether he comes from down east; even his language may be strange on account of the peculiar accent which he gives his words, and the idioms which he uses. It may frequently happen that two people, who both think they speak the English language will be unable to understand each other, on account of the difference in dialect. The new-comer may prove to be as much, or even more, of an undesirable element among us, as the one who comes from Ireland or China; his presence in the labor market may tend as well to reduce the rates of wages as if he had come from Hungaria or Bulgaria. There is no denying the fact that a locomotion has taken place, that an individual has transplanted himself from one place to the other, either on account of the urging of his venturesome spirit, or for the sake of finding a better market for his abilities, or driven out by force of adverse conditions. There is little difference whether a person leaves Russia on account of his dissatisfaction with the government, or an arbitrary legislation which deprives him of his opportunities; or whether he leaves a village in Nebraska because he finds he is unable longer to withstand the grinding process of the land sharks, or the sweating system of the factory owners. His intentions are to better his condition; precisely the same as are those of him who crosses the Atlantic. The one will sell his all to pay his passage on the steamer, the other to pay for his railroad ticket, and both will arrive penniless. Yet the one is called an emigrant or immigrant, and the other is not, although the distance from which the latter comes may be the same or even greater than that from which the former hails.

In order to distinguish between these two classes of migration, I call this latter one "Inter-migration," and desire the term to stand for a change of habitation occurring within the boundaries of a land that is under the same government.

Inter-migration, although it has never before reached the development to which it has risen in the present, is not a new form of the migratory habit of peoples. Ancient records tell us that a forced inter-migration has frequently taken place. The conquerors of old, desirous of making one nation out of the many peoples they subdued by their valiant sword, would transplant large numbers of individuals from one province to another distant one, giving their land and their possessions in exchange to settlers, whom they drew from some other country. Their scheme, however, rarely succeeded, because the difficulties of a long journey made it impossible for them to transplant a sufficiently large number of people; the masses remained undisturbed, the few new-comers were soon absorbed by them, and the desired change of sentiment was not produced. The moment the government was attacked by a new conqueror, all provinces would at once rise in revolt, and thus hasten the downfall of empires, such as was, for instance, the Persian, before the onslaught of so small an army as that with which Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont.

The golden era of the Roman Empire, and the prosperity and the culture which then prevailed, were made possible solely through the facilities which were given to inter-migration. Good roads connected the ends and dissected the width and breadth of the great Roman Empire. Travel was well protected. A well-drilled army suppressed highway robbery, and an excellent navy put down piracy. A resident of Gaul could with ease settle in Syria, while the Syrian, if he so desired, could find with ease a home in Gaul. The residents of Brittania and Greece could with comparative ease inter-migrate, and had not the floods of barbarians which deluged the Roman Empire put an end to civilization, and with it the possibilities of inter-migration, we might stand to-day on a much higher round of culture, and our knowledge might have been much greater than it is.

If the inventions of the nineteenth century have made possible emigration to such an extent to-day as never before existed, it has still more facilitated inter-migration. It has almost destroyed the equilibrium between the centripetal and centrifugal forces, giving the advantages to the latter. The facilities of locomotion have made people restless; the times have passed by when grandchildren would live in the same house in which their grandparents lived or when they consider it a hardship and misfortune to move out of such a habitation, or to see it change owners; time has been, when only the adventurer left his native place, and when it was considered dangerous to go into the world, which at that time could be circumscribed by a radius of a few miles; time has been, when people lived for generations in the same house, in the same street, in the same village or town, when even the household furniture became venerable on account of its antiquity and the remembrances connected with it. What boy or girl in our day plays around the chair which their great-grandfather used to occupy? To sell one house and move into another; to leave one city and seek settlement in another, is now the rule and not the exception; and it is mainly this inter-migration, stirring up the masses, to which is due our increased prosperity and our progress in all branches of knowledge. Inter-migration keeps us from stagnation; it removes shyness and fear at the sight of a stranger, accustoms us to an intercourse with different people, removes prejudices and superstitions, and facilitates the exchange of thoughts and ideas.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that intermigration has also its drawbacks; that it will easily flood the labor market so as to screw down wages; it will foster the venturesome spirit, induce people to risk a certainty for an uncertainty, and especially has it tended to draw people from the rural districts to the large cities.

All the complaints heard against immigration, and all the pressure that is brought to bear upon the government to restrict it, do not come from the rural districts, but from the large cities; and it is generally overlooked that the competition, which presses down the compensation for labor to such a degree that the wages earned for hard work are sometimes not sufficient to support one person, and far less a family, is not brought about solely by the immigrant who comes from abroad, but is, to a very great extent, the consequence of inter-migration, of the influx of villagers into the cities. While in country places there is a scarcity of labor, thus in New England, for example, while many farms are vacant, there are people starving in the cities, unable to obtain work. The increase of large cities and of their population is beyond the proportion in which it formerly stood to that of the country. This has aroused the thoughts of many long-headed people, and investigations are being made on every hand, especially because some people are moved by fear that city life will corrupt morality. They take it for granted that country people are virtuous, and that vice finds its domicile only in the large centres of population, and having established these premises, they argue that the tendency of country people to move into cities shows a degeneracy on their part, or that the abnormal growth of cities is a sure token of the moral depravity which has taken hold of the people. This, however, is not true. There is as much iniquity in proportion in small communities as in large ones, and not unfrequently wickedness and viciousness are attributed to actions which, after all, are neither wicked nor vicious, but merely strange to one who is not accustomed to them. The tide of inter-migration, which swells the population of the cities, has its natural causes, of which moral corruption is the least.

The philosophers of the individualistic school will take exception, when I name as the first cause of the tendency to leave the village for the city, the fact that the more society becomes organized, the more each individual becomes a part of a system, the easier it is to obtain comfort, and that, having found the proper place, one can more easily excel in that sphere of life. True, a man living in a village may be able to secure for himself, without excessive labor, food that would keep him from starvation, and raiment and fuel to protect him against the inclemency of the weather; but man needs more than bread and meat, a coat and a pair of shoes. There are a thousand other things which bring cheer to him and make his life worth living, that he cannot obtain in rural solitude. He claims a right to these comforts, and tries to obtain them by seeking them where they are to be found. If simple support, which rustic life insures, was preferable to the insecurity of earning a livelihood in the city; if plenty of coarse food and the healthier habitation which the village offers, were sufficient to induce the over-worked, half-starved, and ill-tenanted city laborer to give up for them the other comforts which city life offers him, we should soon behold an exodus from the city to country places, instead of observing the growth of the centres of population. It is the tendency to work in a system and with a system which increases as the human being rises in culture and civilization. This is the magnet which draws people to large cities, and holds them there, despite the many drawbacks which naturally adhere to it.

The facility of locomotion and of transportation have made possible an interchange of commodities which has never been so before. The world has become one marketplace, upon which the commodities are thrown, and in which he who is able to sell an article of the same quality at the lowest rate will have most customers. When grain can be produced in large quantities in the West, so that it can be sold at a lower rate in the East than the cost of its production would be there, it is quite natural that the Eastern farmer must go to the wall, and it is no wonder he deserts his farm. The less the raw material can be used in its natural state, and the more our refinement demands a long process of converting it into a commodity, the more does it require systematic, organized, skilled labor to perform that conversion. With sufficient land a few people can raise such an abundance of raw material that the labor of thousands of people will be called for to change it into useful articles. It is the system, the developed social organization, which draws the villager to the city, and as an illustration I shall point to the sudden and unparelleled growth of the city of Berlin.

Twenty-five years ago Berlin was not quite as large in population as is Boston to-day, and its area was much smaller. Berlin is situated in a sandy, sterile country; so to say, in a desert. There is no navigable river to connect it with the ocean, nor are minerals or coal found in its immediate neighborhood. When Berlin was made the seat of the German government, the first result was that thousands of government officials were removed from other places to this city; then the garrison was enlarged. More commodious roads were built to connect the capital with the provinces. This attracted business men, as well as thousands whose services in all branches of life were required. The manufacturer soon followed, and Berlin became in a short time a commercial centre. Leipsic lost its prestige and Nuremberg its renown. The organized net-work of labor makes it possible now for a million and a half of people to live and prosper on that sterile ground. Let Berlin cease to be the capital of Germany, through any unforeseen event, and its population will melt away at once. Like iron filings hanging on a magnet, in which one particle attracts and holds the other, thus are people attracted to and held in places where society, and with it labor, is organized.

Another and weighty reason to account for inter-migration, and especially for the increase of population in cities, is that agriculture, too, has undergone a change. The inventive genius of our age, which keeps on creating labor-saving machinery, has not left this branch of occupation untouched. As the mechanic had to go in order to be replaced by the factory owner, thus the small farmer can no longer exist beside a syndicate which will systematically cultivate large tracts of land. The tendency of the time is to apply system also to agricultural pursuits, to take that art out of the sphere of instinct and to transplant it into the sphere of science.

In this paper I have merely sought to bring before the mind of the reader important facts which are usually overlooked in the discussion of the problem under consideration, believing it to be necessary to adduce all the important evidence which bears upon the subject in order that he may form a just and enlightened opinion on a great living question of the first magnitude, as a frank statement of a problem is of far greater value to the honest investigator than any amount of ingenious reasonings from a narrow or distorted point of view.



HE CAME AND WENT AGAIN.

BY WILL N. HARBEN.

He was the humblest man in the world. He wore ragged clothing and lived in the filthiest tenement-house in New York. He was unlettered, had never opened a book, and seemed to know little of the ways of men. His hair and beard were long, and like golden silk; his eyes held the blue of infinite space.

When wealthy people passed him they shook their heads and said, "He is demented;" but the poor, who knew him, lowered their voices when he was near and whispered that he belonged to a better world, for in his eyes they saw a strange light of eternal kindness.

"Why are you so good to me?" the poor would ask, marvelling over his tears of sympathy.

"Because I love you," he would answer, "and love is the mother of all that is good. If you will love men as I do your way of life will be strewn with roses from heaven and your vision know no end."

He had never been in a church nor heard one word in the Bible, and yet, with a far-away light in his eyes, he used to talk of immortality and infinite love. "Love is everlasting life," he would say, "love is eternal."

His poor old mother did not understand him, and she was often troubled on his behalf. She used to plead with him to stay with her more and not to give up his life so completely to others.

"Why," she would argue plaintively, "even the great clergymen who preach in the grand churches, and who are said to be the best of men, do not risk their lives and love others as you do. They seldom come here where everybody is so poor." Once he asked her to tell him what the clergymen taught, and when she tried to explain the creeds of the different denominations, he shook his head and turned pale with perplexity and pain.

"I cannot understand," he said sorrowfully. "It all makes my heart ache. It seems to me that the church-members, too, are in the dark. Love is food for the soul and they are starving. People everywhere are dying in crime and pain and no one offers to help them."

One day, after he had been laboring for a week without sufficient food and sleep among the fever-stricken poor, he fell ill, and his mother thought he was about to die. She ran, her gray locks streaming in the wind, to the parsonage of a little church near by and inquired for the minister, but was told by his wife that he had been gone for several weeks to a watering place in the mountains. The old woman ran on further, till she came to a great church whose majestic spire seemed to touch the clouds. A stately rectory was near. Soft music, mingled with merry voices, came out to her through the open doors. Awkwardly and tremblingly she went up the polished marble steps and rang. A servant in livery told her gruffly that his master was dining with his bishop and other distinguished personages, and that she would have to wait.

She replied with a groan that she feared her son was dying. The man went to his master and came back saying, "He cannot see you now."

She sat down in the great hall and tried to pray. Before her hung a costly painting representing Jesus with a child in his arms, a lamb at his side. She smelt the fragrance of flowers, and heard the clinking of wine-glasses, the tinkling of silver and rare china, short speeches and laughter.

"The dean, it seems," she heard the bishop say, "was reproving one of the young clergymen for becoming intoxicated. The young scamp's reply quite took the dean off his feet. 'If I mistake not, sir,' said the young priest, 'the liquor I drank came from your celebrated art-gallery and bar-room.'"

This story was greeted by hearty laughter, and then the old woman heard the bishop giving a description of a new yacht which he had just bought. By and by the rector came out. His cheeks were slightly flushed, his manner betrayed impatience."

"Well," said he to her, "what is it? I am very busy."

"I am afraid my son is dying," she said timidly, abashed by the splendor of his dress and abrupt manner. "I thought some minister ought to see him."

"Where do you attend church?" he asked, looking down at her tattered attire.

"I do not go to any," she faltered.

"I have as much as I can attend to in my own parish," he frowned; "besides my bishop is here as my guest; there is a young theological student with me who will go." And he went back to the dining-room and sent a young man out to her.

"Show me the way," said the student, and he shrugged his shoulders, and blushed because the footman seemed to comprehend the situation.

Without a word she led him through the squalid streets to the house, and up the narrow stairs to her miserable room. The sick man lay alone on a hard couch.

"What can I do for you?" asked the visitor.

A look of hope came into the pallid features of the one addressed. His voice was low and eager when he replied:—

"A poor woman downstairs has fallen and broken her spine. I fear she is without attention, I was trying to reach her when I fell ill. Perhaps you will go to see her; I need nothing."

"His mind is wandering," said the student, turning to the mother. "He could not comprehend anything I might read or say now. He needs medical treatment. You should apply to the public charities." And he went away, brushing the sleeve of his coat which had caught a cobweb.

At her son's request the mother went below. Presently she returned with the information that the injured woman's needs had been attended to. Then she got a Bible and began to read to him for the first time in life. When she had read a few passages he asked her what it was, and she replied:—

"They say it is the Word of God, and that it shows us how to live."

When she was reading of the life of Christ he listened with a profound look of perplexity on his pale face. But when she pronounced the words, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," he uttered an exclamation of surprise, and sat up in his bed.

"I have spoken those words before!" he cried, "but in a different language. It was in another life which seems like a dream. I lived long, long ago, in a far-away land. I had another mother there, Mary was her name, and a good father whom the people called Joseph. I lived there as I do here, but the world mocked me because I tried to teach them to love one another—they could not understand. They put me to death. They made a cross, and hung me on it, on a hill in the direction of the setting sun from Jerusalem. A multitude gathered to see me die."

Amazed at his radiant and transformed countenance, which held in it the light of eternity, she fell down before him crying:—

"My Lord! My Master!"

He lifted her up, his weakness gone.

"Rise," said he gently. "Call me not 'Master,' for I am but the son of God, as you are His daughter. The Father of us all, in His love, is not better than the humblest of His children."

She was going out to cry aloud in the streets that Jesus, the son of God, had come to earth, but he prevented her.

"Speak not of me to them," he said softly; "they could not understand; it would be even as it was before."

That very day he went about according to his humble wont, among the poor and the miserable, spreading joy and comfort everywhere. Wan-faced courtesans, with death and hate in their eyes, despairing thieves, murderers, and would-be suicides, listened to his words of hope and began life anew. He went to the houses of the wealthy and plead in the behalf of suffering men and women, misguided children, and mistreated animals, but was called a tramp and sent away.

One day his mother lead him to the corpse of a dead friend. "Make him live again," she whispered.

He looked down at the dead and smiled infinitely. He took a flower from a vase, and put it into the hand that was cold. "This is the birthday of our friend," he said. "Should I wish to alter the work of my Father, in whose eyes all things are perfect? Our friend is this day delivered from the womb of earthly travail."

One bright morning she came and laid herself at his feet.

"I have heard strange things to-day," she said, "things I have not learned before because I am so ignorant. They say that all the great and good churches in Christendom have grown up upon the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth."

"Nazareth," he repeated dreamily, "I lived in Nazareth."

"They worship him that was crucified on Calvary; ah! they would listen to you now, my Master. You have lived in their memories for centuries. Hear, the bells are ringing. It is the Sabbath, the Lord's day!"

"My Father's day has neither beginning nor end."

"Come, go with me," went on the woman eagerly, "we shall hear them praise your name."

"I will go with you," said he, a strange look in his eyes.

She ran from the room and presently came back with a suit of new clothes which she had borrowed from a dealer: Her face was aglow with pride and joy as she spread them before him.

"What are they for?" he asked in gentle surprise.

"For you," she said, "that you may go into the house of the Lord robed as—as others are."

A blended look of wonder and pain passed over his face.

"The spirit of the man is not clothed with the wool of the sheep that was slain," he said gently. "I will go as I am, and fear naught in my Father's presence."

She led him down several streets till they reached a grand thoroughfare. Along this they went side by side, jostled by the fashionable throng, till they came to a stately church. Going up the broad stone steps they entered the great Gothic doors. A group of men in the vestibule laughed at his long hair and ragged attire. Elegantly dressed ushers were seating the people as they entered. They did not speak to the woman and her son, but smiled at one another, and passed some jests in undertones. After awhile one of them drew near, and said to her:—

"Have you not made a mistake, my good woman? This is St. —— Church. St. ——'s is the next below."

Tears were in her eyes as she led her son away. By and by they came to another edifice. In a niche in the stone wall near the entrance was the figure of Jesus on a cross. He paused and looked at it for several minutes, murmuring, "Strange! Strange!"

In the vestibule she was so awed by the imposing interior of the structure and the fashionable congregation, that she drew him to one side.

"Perhaps we had better stand here," she whispered. "We seem to be unlike the rest. We shall not be in the way out here, and through the door we can see and hear the service."

He made no answer. He was looking at a grand window on which stood a representation of Jesus, in a stream of light from heaven, bearing the words, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." "Strange, very strange!" she heard him whisper, and tears were in his eyes.

No one offered to give them seats, and they remained standing in the vestibule against a wall. A grand organ began to peal out the music of Gounod's Saint Cecilia Mass. Presently it died down; there was a short pause, then, like the rising of a musical storm came the subdued voices of the choristers from the closed vestry. The door was gradually opened, and the music swelled out into the church. The crucifer, a beautiful lad, attired in a blood-red cassock and a white, lace-trimmed cotta, entered. Behind him, chanting, came a long train of choir-boys, followed by two acolytes who swung by chains of brass censers from which rose clouds of fragrant smoke. Two priests brought up the rear; one, the celebrant of the Holy Communion, was magnificently garbed. He wore a trailing black cassock of richest silk, and over it a short lawn cotta trimmed with priceless lace, an enormous cloth-of-gold cope on the back of which blazed a cross wrought in jewels. About his neck he had a white stole, over an arm a snowy maniple, upon his head a priestly beretta.

"Is it not beautiful?" asked the poor woman of her son. But he did not hear her. His eyes, blinded by tears of infinite sorrow, were resting on the white statue of the Virgin near the snowy altar of marble, on which burnt a constellation of tapers and candles around the red lamp of the "Holy Presence."

His breast heaved; a sob escaped him, and his head sank upon his chest.

"And they do this in the name of love," he said, as if in prayer. "They make an idol of my memory while my brothers and sisters are dying for the lack of love and kindness. They do all this to praise me whom they have so little understood. O God, my Father, let this trial pass, or make me as you are that I may, this time, set them right, for I suffer past endurance."

The short sermon ended. The celebration of Mass began. The wafer and the wine were consecrated. The priest raised the wafer before the eyes of the congregation and said, "This is my body," and all heads bowed low.

"At the very instant you hear the bell strike," whispered a man to a boy near the mother and son, "at that very instant the Saviour will be there—listen!"

"Father, forgive them," the woman heard her son say, and she followed him out of the church. They had reached the street when three strokes from a silver bell was heard.

A few minutes later, as they were passing through a squalid street on the way home, they came to a little church. He read her wishes in her face, and they went in. A man approached and showed them to a back seat. On a platform a preacher was striding to and fro shouting, singing snatches of hymns, and praying. In his excitement he would fall on his knees and raise his hands heavenward; again he would spring up and beat himself with his hands, and violently kick the floor, preaching, singing, and praying alternately.

"Save yourselves from the eternal wrath of an angry God!" he cried. "I tell you that hell is yawning for you; the burning breath of countless devils is about you. Christ died to save you; will you not trust in him? Now is the only time; to-morrow it may be too late!"

After awhile the congregation began to sing a hymn, and the preacher went on: "Come forward all who want the prayers of the church. Come now, and embrace salvation!" And men, women, and children trembling with fear, and weeping and groaning, went to the altar and threw themselves on their knees.

The poor woman looked at her son. His face was pale and set as with the agony of death. She glanced over the congregation. People sat there wrestling with the greatest problem of their lives, their faces white, their eyes dilated. Others were smiling as if highly amused at the preacher's actions. Members of ritualistic churches, who had come out of curiosity, were frowning contemptuously, and congratulating themselves on the dignity of their own form of worship.

"I must go," said the son to his mother. "I must be with those that need me. Here they teach that the Eternal Father hates His children. If only they knew Him they would not be afraid."

He never entered a church again. He continued his life as he had begun it, teaching human love and gentleness to all he knew. Once he was trying to save a half-demented drunkard from being beaten by an inhuman policeman, and was put into prison. While he was there his mother died, and when he was released, his health was broken.

A week passed in which he could get no food to eat. He was starving. One moonlit night he rose and staggered out to search for bread, suffering indescribable tortures. His voice had gone. He stood on the corner of a street, and mutely held out his hands to passers-by, but they paid no heed to him. Along the street he tottered till he came to a brightly lighted building. A church was holding a festival. Beautiful women in the height of fashion, children in the daintiest of dresses, were promenading about. He looked in at the door, and when he saw the long tables filled with eatables, his eyes gleamed with the desire of a famished animal. He staggered across the threshold, but was stopped by the door-keeper. "Ticket," said the man. The outcast did not understand, he could see nothing but the food within. A policeman stepped forward and laid his hand on his arm.

"This is no place for you," he said roughly. "You have no money, move on!"

"He looks hungry, wait!" said a little girl, who was pinning some flowers on the lapel of a young minister's coat, and she ran to a table and brought a piece of bread to the starving man. He hugged it in his arms, and tottered out into the night, chuckling to himself in joy. A square where trees and flowers grew was before him. He entered it, and sank on to a bench near a fountain. He looked at the bread, and a savage content captured his features. He was about to break it when a man arose from a seat across a walk, and came and sat down beside him, eyeing the food covetously. He touched the thin hand that held it, and the two men looked into each other's eyes.

"I am starving," said the breadless one. "I have no means. I belong to a family who have descended from kings; I cannot beg. I thought you looked as if you did not want it. I am dying."

The other clutched the food tightly in both his hands for an instant. A look of ferocious desire wrung his face, and he raised it to his lips. Then a divine smile dawned in his eyes, and he proffered it to the other. The man took it eagerly, and slipped into the darkness, that he might eat it unseen. As he turned away the head of the giver sank slowly to his breast.

Brightly lighted streets stretched away in several directions. A procession of men and women bearing banners and beating drums and tambourines passed along, singing hymns, and pausing now and then to kneel on the cobblestones to pray or to urge the little clusters of idlers to join them in their march to safety. Above the wondrous stars and moon were shining as they had shone at the dawn of eternal thought. They shone on the Vatican at Rome, the imperial cradle of saints; on the comfortable homes of ministers in the church; on the "palaces" of gentle-blooded bishops; on assemblages of men who were wrangling over creeds; on gatherings where earnest searchers after truth were being tried for heresy; on prisons where inmates of dark, silent cells were praying for a gleam of light, for but the voice of an insect to keep madness from their tortured brains; on millions of suffering human beings—on the cold, dead form of one who understood naught but love.



O THOU WHO SIGHEST FOR A BROADER FIELD.

JULIA ANNA WOLCOTT.

O thou who sighest for a broader field Wherein to sow the seeds of truth and right, Who fain a nobler, wider power wouldst wield O'er human souls that languish for the light;

Search well the realm that even now is thine! Canst not thou in some far-off corner find A heart, sin-bound, as tree with sapping vine, That waiteth help its burdens to unbind?

Some human plant, perchance beneath thine eyes, Pierced through by hidden thorns of idle fears; Or, drooping low for need of light from skies Obscured by doubt-clouds, raining poison tears?

Some bruised soul the balm of love would heal? Some timid spirit faith would courage give? Or maimed brother who, though brave and leal, Still needeth thee to rightly walk and live?

Oh, while one soul thou find'st that hath not known The fullest help thy soul hath power to give, Sigh not for fields still broader than thine own, But, steadfast, in thine own more broadly live!



AN EVENING AT THE CORNER GROCERY.

A WESTERN CHARACTER SKETCH.

BY HAMLIN GARLAND.

Colonel Peavy had just begun the rubber with Judge Gordon of Cerro-Gordo County. They were seated in Robie's grocery, behind the rusty old cannon stove, the checker-board spread out on their knees. The Colonel was grinning in great glee, wringing his bony yellow hands in nervous excitement, in strong contrast to the stolid calm of the fat Judge.

The Colonel had won the last game by a large margin, and was sure he had his opponent's "dodges" well in hand. It was early in the evening, and the grocery was comparatively empty. Robie was figuring at a desk, and old Judge Brown stood in legal gravity warming his legs at the red-hot stove, and swaying gently back and forth in speechless content. It was a tough night outside, one of the toughest for years. The frost had completely shut the window panes as with thick blankets of snow. The streets were silent.

"I don't know," said the Judge, reflectively, to Robie, breaking the silence in his rasping, judicial bass, "I don't know as there has been such a night as this since the night of February 2d, '59, that was the night James Kirk went under—Honorable Kirk, you remember,—knew him well. Brilliant fellow, ornament to western bar. But whiskey downed him. It'll beat the oldest man—I wonder where the boys all are to-night? Don't seem to be anyone stirring on the street. Aint frightened out by the cold?"

"Shouldn't wonder." Robie was busy at his desk, and not in humor for conversation on reminiscent lines. The two old war-dogs at the board had settled down to one of those long, silent struggles, which ensue when two "champions" meet. In the silence which followed, the Judge was looking attentively at the back of the Colonel, and thinking that the old thief was getting about down to skin and bone. He turned with a yawn to Robie, saying:—

"This cold weather must take hold of the old Colonel terribly, he's so damnably thin and bald, you know,—bald as a babe. The fact is, the old Colonel aint long for this world, anyway; think so, Hank?" Robie making no reply, the Judge relapsed into silence for a while, watching the cat (perilously walking along the edge of the upper shelf) and listening to the occasional hurrying footsteps outside. "I don't know when I've seen the windows closed up so, Hank; go down to thirty below to-night; devilish strong wind blowing, too; tough night on the prairies, Hank."

"You bet," replied Hank, briefly. The Colonel was plainly getting excited. His razor-like back curved sharper than ever as he peered into the intricacies of the board to spy the trap which the fat Judge had set for him. At this point the squeal of boots on the icy walk outside paused, and a moment later Amos Ridings entered, with whiskers covered with ice, and looking like a huge bear in his buffalo coat.

"By Josephus! it's cold," he roared, as he took off his gloves and began to warm his face and hands at the fire.

"Is it?" asked the Judge, comfortably, rising on his tiptoes, only to fall back into his usual attitude, legal legs well spread, shoulders thrown back.

"You bet it is!" replied Amos. "I'd'know when I've felt the cold more'n I have t'-day. It's jest snifty; doubles me up like a jack-knife, Judge. How d' you stand it?"

"Tollerble, tollerble, Amos. But we're agein', we aint what we were once. Cold takes hold of us."

"That's a fact," answered Amos to the retrospective musings of the Judge. "Time was you an' me would go t' singing-school or sleigh-riding with the girls on a night like this and never notice it."

"Yes, sir; yes, sir!" said the Judge with a sigh. It was a little uncertain in Robie's mind whether the Judge was regretting the lost ability to stand the cold, or the lost pleasure of riding with the girls.

"Great days, those, gentlemen! Lived in Vermont then. Hot-blooded—lungs like an ox. I remember, Sallie Dearborn and I used to go a-foot to singing school down the valley four miles. But now, wouldn't go riding to-night with the handsomest woman in America, and the best cutter in Rock River."

"Oh! you've got both feet in the grave up t' the ankles, anyway," said Robie from his desk, but the Judge immovably gazed at the upper shelf on the other side of the room where the boilers, and pans, and washboards were stored.

"The Judge is a little on the sentimental order to-night," said Amos.

"Hold on, Colonel! hold on. You've got 'o jump. He! he!" roared Gordon from the checker-board. "That's right, that's right!" he ended, as the Colonel complied reluctantly.

"Sock it to the old cuss," commented Amos. "What I was going to say," he resumed, rolling down the collar of his coat, "was, that when my wife helped me bundle up t' night, she said I was gitt'n' t' be an old granny. We are agein', Judge, the's no denyin' it. We're both gray as Norway rats now. An' speaking of us ageing reminds me,—have y' noticed how bald the old Kyernel's gitt'n'?"

"I have, Amos," answered the Judge, mournfully. "The old man's head is showing age, showing age! Getting thin up there, aint it?" The old Colonel bent to his work without reply, and even when Amos said, judicially, after long scrutiny, "Yes, he'll soon be as bald as a plate," he only lifted one yellow, freckled, bony hand, and brushed his carroty growth of hair across the spot under discussion. Gordon shook his fat paunch in silent laughter, nearly displacing the board.

"I was just telling Robie," pursued Brown, still retaining his reminiscent intonation, "that this storm takes the cake over anything—"

At this point Steve Roach and another fellow entered. Steve was Ridings' hired hand, a herculean fellow, with a drawl, and a liability for taking offence quite as remarkable.

"Say! gents, I'm no spring rooster, but this jest gits away with anything in line of cold I ever see."

While this communication was being received in ruminative silence, Steve was holding his ears in his hand and gazing at the intent champions at the board. There they sat; the old Judge panting and wheezing in his excitement, for he was planning a great "snap" on the Colonel, whose red and freckled nose almost touched the board. It was a solemn battle hour. The wind howled mournfully outside, the timbers of the stove creaked in the cold, and the huge cannon stove roared in steady bass.

"Speaking about ears," said Steve, after a silence, "dumned if I'd like t' be quite s' bare 'round the ears as Kernel there. I wonder if any o' you fellers has noticed how the ol' feller's lost hair this last summer. He's gittin' bald, they's no coverin' it up—gittin' bald as a plate."

"You're right, Stephen," said the Judge, as he gravely took his stand behind his brother advocate, and studied, with the eye of an adept, the field of battle. "We were noticing it when you came in. It's a sad thing, but it must be admitted."

"It's the Kyernel's brains wearin' up through his hair, I take it," commented Amos, as he helped himself to a handful of peanuts out of a bag behind the counter. "Say, Steve, did y' stuff up that hole in front of ol' Barney?"

A shout was heard outside, and then a rush against the door, and immediately two young fellows burst in, followed by a fierce gust of snow. One was Professor Knapp, the other Editor Foster, of the Morning Call.

"Well, gents, how's this for high?" said Foster in a peculiar tone of voice, at which all began to smile. He was a slender fellow with close-clipped, assertive red hair. "In this company we now have the majesty of the law, the power of the press, and the underpinning of the American civilization all represented. Hello! There are a couple of old roosters with their heads together. Gordon, my old enemy, how are you?"

Gordon waved him off with a smile and a wheeze. "Don't bother me now. I've got 'im. I'm laying f'r the old dog. Whist!"

"Got nothing!" snarled the Colonel. "You try that on if you want to. Just swing that man in there if you think it's healthy for him. Just as like as not, you'll slip up on that little trick."

"Ha! Say you so, old True Penny? The Kunnel has met a foeman worthy of his steel," said Foster in great glee, as he bent above the Colonel. "I know. How do I know?" quotha. "By the curve on the Kunnel's back. The size of the parabola described by that backbone accurately gauges his adversary's skill. But, by the way, gentlemen, have you—but that's a nice point, and I refer all nice points to Professor Knapp. Professor, is it in good taste to make remarks concerning the dress or features of another?"

"Certainly not," answered Knapp, a handsome young fellow with a yellow mustache.

"Not when the person is an esteemed public character, like the Colonel here? What I was about to remark, if it had been proper, was that the old fellow is getting wofully bald. He'll soon be bald as an egg."

"Say!" asked the Colonel, "I want to know how long you're going to keep this thing up. Somebody's dumned sure t' get hurt soon."

"There, there! Colonel," said Brown soothingly, "don't get excited, you'll lose the rubber. Don't mind 'em. Keep cool."

"Yes, keep cool, Kunnel, it's only our solicitude for your welfare," chipped in Foster. Then addressing the crowd in a general sort of way he speculated, "Curious how a man, a plain American citizen like Colonel Peavy, wins a place in the innermost affections of a whole people."

"That's so!" murmured the rest. "He can't grow bald without deep sympathy from his fellow-citizens." The old Colonel glared in speechless wrath.

"Say! gents," pleaded Gordon, "let up on the old man for the present. He's going to need all of himself if he gets out o' the trap he's in now." He waved his fat hand over the Colonel's head, and smiled blandly at the crowd hugging the stove.

"My head may be bald," grated the old man with a death's-head grin, indescribably ferocious, "but it's got brains enough in it to 'skunk' any man in this crowd three games out o' five."

"The ol' man rather gits the laugh on y' there, gents," called Robie from the back side of the counter. "I haint seen the old skeesix play better'n he did last night in years."

"Not since his return from Canada, after the war, I reckon," said Amos from the kerosene barrel.

"Hold on, Amos," put in the Judge warningly, "that's out-lawed. Talking about being bald and the war reminds me of the night Walters and I— By the way, where is Walters to-night?"

"Sick," put in the Colonel, straightening up exultantly. "I waxed him three straight games last night. You won't see him again till spring. Skunked him once, and beat him twice."

"Oh git out."

"Hear the old seed twitter!"

"Did you ever notice, gentlemen, how lying and baldness go together?" queried Foster reflectively.

"No! Do they?"

"Invariably. I've known many colossal liars, and they were all as bald as apples."

The Colonel was getting nervous, and was so slow that even Gordon (who could sit and stare at the board a full half hour without moving) began to be impatient.

"Come! Colonel, marshal your forces a little more promptly. If you're going at me echelon, sound y'r bugle; I'm ready."

"Don't worry," answered the Colonel, in his calmest nasal, "I'll accommodate you with all the fight you want."

"Did it ever occur to you," began the Judge again, addressing the crowd generally, as he moved back to the stove and lit another cigar, "did it ever occur to you that it is a little singular a man should get bald on the top of his head first? Curious fact. So accustomed to it we no longer wonder at it. Now see the Colonel there. Quite a growth of hair on his clap-boarding, as it were, but devilish thin on his roof."

Here the Colonel looked up and tried to say something, but the Judge went on imperturbably.

"Now I take it that it's strictly providential that a man gets bald on top of his head first, because if he must get bald it is best to get bald where it can be covered up."

"By jinks, that's a fact!" said the rest in high admiration of the Judge's ratiocination. Steve was specially pleased, and drawing a neck-yoke from a barrel standing near, pounded the floor vigorously.

"Talking about being bald," put in Foster, "reminds me of a scheme of mine, which is to send no one out to fight Indians but bald men. Think how powerless they'd—"

The talk now drifted off to Indians, politics, and religion, edged round to the war when the grave Judge was telling Ridings and Robie just how "Kilpatrick charged along the Granny White Turnpike," and on a sheet of wrapping paper was showing where Major John Dilrigg fell. "I was on his left about thirty yards, when I saw him throw up his hand—"

Foster in a low voice was telling something to the Professor, and two or three others, which made them whoop with uncontrollable merriment, when the roaring voice of big Sam Walters was heard outside, and a moment later he rolled into the room, filling it with his noise. Lottridge, the watchmaker, and Erlberg, the German baker, came in with him.

"Hello, hello, hello! All here, are yeh?"

"All here waiting for you—and the turnkey," said Foster.

"Well, here I am. Always on hand like a sore thumb in huskin' season. What's goin' on here? A game, hey? Hello, Gordon, it's you, is it? Colonel, I owe you several for last night. But what the devil yo' got your cap on fur, Colonel? Aint it warm enough here for yeh?"

The desperate Colonel who had snatched up his cap when he heard Walters coming, grinned painfully, pulling his straggly red and white beard nervously. The strain was beginning to tell on his iron nerves. He removed the cap, and with a few muttered words went back to the game, but there was a dangerous gleam in his fishy blue eyes, and the grizzled tufts of red hair above his eyes lowered threateningly. A man who is getting swamped in a game of checkers is not in a mood to bear pleasantly any remarks on his bald head.

"Oh! don't take it off, Colonel," went on his tormentor hospitably. "When a man gets as old as you are, he's privileged to wear his cap. I wonder if any of you fellers have noticed how the Colonel is shedding his hair."

The old man leaped up, scattering the men on the checker-board which flew up and struck Judge Gordon in the face, knocking him off his stool. The old Colonel was ashy pale, and his eyes glared out from under his huge brow like sapphires lit by flame. His spare form clothed in a seedy Prince Albert frock towered with a singular dignity. His features worked convulsively a moment, and then he burst forth like the explosion of a safety valve:—

"Shuttup, dumyeh!"

And then the crowd whooped, roared, and rolled on the counters and barrels, and roared and whooped again. They stamped and yelled, and ran around like fiends, kicking the boxes and banging the coal-scuttle in a perfect pandemonium of mirth, leaving the old man standing there helpless in his wrath, mad enough to shoot. Steve was just preparing to seize the old man from behind, when Judge Gordon, struggling to his feet among the spittoons, cried out, in the voice of a Colonel of Fourth of July militia:—

"H-O-L-D!"

Silence was restored, and all stood around in expectant attitudes to hear the Judge's explanation. He squared his elbows, shoved up his sleeves, puffed out his fat cheeks, moistened his lips, and began pompously:—

"Gentlemen—"

"You've hit it; that's us," said some of the crowd in applause.

"Gentlemen of Rock River, when in the course of human events, rumor had blow'd to my ears the history of the checker-playing of Rock River, and when I had waxed Cerro-Gordo, and Claiborne, and Mower, then, when I say to my ears was borne the clash of resounding arms in Rock River, the emporium of Rock County, then did I yearn for more worlds to conquer, and behold, I buckled on my armor and I am here."

"Behold, he is here," said Foster, in confirmation of the statement. "Good for you, Judge, git breath and go for us some more."

"Hurrah for the Judge," etc.

"I came seekin' whom I might devour like a raging lion. I sought foemen worthy of my steel. I leaped into the arena and blew my challenge to the four quarters of Rock—"

"Good f'r you, settemupagin! Go it, you old balloon," they all applauded.

"Knowing my prowess I sought a fair fout and no favors. I met the enemy and he was mine. Champion after champion went down before me like—went down like—Ahem! went down before me like grass before the mighty cyclone of the Andes."

"Listen to the old blow-hard," said Steve.

"Put him out," said the speaker, imperturbably. "Gentlemen, have I the floor?"

"You have," replied Brown, "but come to the point. The Colonel is anxious to begin shooting." The Colonel, who began to suspect himself victimized, stood wondering what under heaven they were going to do next!

"I'm a gitt'n' there," said the orator with a broad and sunny condescension.

"I found your champions an' laid 'em low. I waxed Walters, and then I tackled the Colonel. I tried the echelon, the 'general advanced,' then the 'give away' and 'flank' movements. But the Colonel was there. Till this last game it was a fair field and no favor. And now, gentlemen of Rock, I desire t' state to my deeply respected opponent, that he is still champion of Rock, and I'm not sure but of Northern Iowa."

"Three cheers for the Kunnel!"

And while they were being given the Colonel's brows relaxed, and the champion of Cerro-Gordo continued earnestly:—

"And now I wish to state to Colonel the solemn fact that I had nothing to do with the job put up on him to-night. I scorn to use such means in a battle. Colonel, you may be as bald as an apple, or an egg, yes, or a plate, but you can play more checkers than any man I ever met, more checkers than any other man on God's green footstool.—With one-single, lone exception—myself."

At this moment, somebody hit the dead-beat from Cerro-Gordo with a decayed apple, and as the crowd shouted and groaned Robie turned down the lights on the tumult. The old Colonel seized the opportunity for putting a handful of salt down Walters' neck, and slipped out of the door like a ghost. As the crowd swarmed out on the icy walk, Editor Foster yelled:—

"Gents! let me give you a pointer. Keep your eye peeled for the next edition of the Rock River Morning Call." And the bitter wind swept away the answering shouts of the gang.

* * * * *

[Transcriber's Notes:

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other inconsistencies. The transcriber made the following changes to the text to correct obvious errors by the publisher:

1. p. 412, "tranverse" changed to "transverse"

Also, several occurrences of mismatched quotes remain as published.

End of Transcriber's Notes]