How long did they mean to wait? He went to the window and looked out. Just then a horse neighed, and the sound oddly recalled the country-town where they had lived after they came into this State. On market-days it was one perpetual whinny along the streets from the colts trotting along-side of the wagons. He and Jane used to keep open table for their country-friends then, and on court- or fair-days. What a hard-fisted, shrewd people they were! talking bad English (like Jane herself); but there was more refinement and softness of feeling among them than among city-bred men. He should relish that life again; it suited him. To die like a grub? But he had done his work. Thank God!

He opened the window to catch the damp air, as Dr. Bowdler came in and touched him on the arm.

"Shall we stay here? Mr. Aikens has come, and they have been testing the machine for some time, I find. Go? Certainly, but—You're a little nervous, Mr. Starke, and—Wouldn't it be better if you were not present? They would be freer in deciding, and—suppose you and I stay here?"

"Eh? How? At it for some time?" hurrying out. "At it?" as the Doctor tried to keep pace with him. "Why, God bless my soul, Sir, what can they do? Nobody understands the valves but myself. A set of ignoramuses, Sir. I saw that at a glance. But it's my last chance,"—panting and wheezing before he reached the back lobby, and holding his hand to his side.

Dr. Bowdler stopped outside.

"What are you waiting here for, Mary?"

"I want to hear. What chance has it? I think I'd give something off my own life, if that man had succeeded in doing a great thing."

"Not much of a chance, Aikens says. The theory is good, but they are afraid the expense will make it of no practical use. However, they have not decided. It is well it is his last chance, though, as he says. I never saw a man who had dragged himself so near to insanity in pursuit of a hobby. Nothing but a great reaction can save him."

"Success, you mean? I think that man's life is worth a thousand aimless ones, Sir. If it fails, where's your 'justice on earth'? I"—

She pushed her curls back hotly. The Doctor did not answer.

The trial lasted until late in the afternoon. One or two of the gentlemen came out at odd times to luncheon, which was spread in the adjoining room. They looked grave, and talked earnestly in low tones: the man had infected them with his own feeling in a measure.

"I don't know when I was more concerned for the success of anything not my own," said Mr. Aikens to Miss Defourchet, as he rose to go back to the lobby, putting down his glass. "It is such a daring innovation; it would be worth thousands per annum to me, if I could make it practicable. And then that poor devil himself,—I feel as if we were trying him for his life to-day. It's pitiful."

She went in herself once, when the door was open, and saw Starke: he was in his shirt-sleeves, driving in a wedge that had come out; his face was parched, looked contracted, his eyes glazed. She spoke to him, but he made no answer, went from side to side of the engine, working with it, glancing furtively at the men, who stood gravely talking. The girl was nervous, and felt she should cry, if she stayed there. She called the dog, but he would not come; he was crouched with his head on his fore-paws, watching Starke.

"It is curious how the dog follows him," she said, after she had gone out, to Andy, who was in the back porch, watching the rain come up.

"I've noticed animals did it to him. My Jerry knows him as well as me. What chances has he, Miss?"

"I cannot tell."

There was a pause.

"You heard Dr. Bowdler say he was married. Do you know his wife?" she asked.

Some strange doubts had been in Andy's brain for the last hour, but he never told a secret.

"It was in the market I come, to know Mr. Starke," he said, confusedly. "At the eatin'-stalls. He never said to me as he hed a wife."

The rain was heavy and constant when it came, a muddy murkiness in the air that bade fair to last for a day or more. Evening closed in rapidly. Andy sat still on the porch; he could shuffle his heels as he pleased there, and take a sly bit of tobacco, watching, through a crack between the houses, the drip, drip, of rain on the umbrellas going by, the lamps beginning to glow here and there in the darkness, listening to the soggy footfalls and the rumble of the streetcars.

"This is tiresome,"—putting one finger carefully under the rungs of his chair, where he had the lantern. "I wonder ef Jane is waiting for me,—an' for any one else."

He trotted one foot, and chewed more vehemently. On the verge of some mystery, it seemed to him.

"Ef it is—What ef he misses, an' won't go back with me? God help the woman! What kin I do?"

After a while, taking out the lantern, and rubbing it where the damp had dimmed it,—

"I'll need it to-night, that's sure!"

Now and then he bent his head, trying to catch a sound from the lobby, but to no purpose. About five o'clock, however, there was a sudden sound, shoving of chairs, treading, half-laughs, as of people departing. The door opened, and the gentlemen came out into the lighted hall, in groups of two or three,—some who were to dine with the Doctor passing up the staircase, the others chatting by the door. The Doctor was not with them, nor Starke. Andy stood up, trying to hear, holding his felt hat over his mouth. "If he's hed a chance!" But he could catch only broken sentences.

"A long session."

"I knew it from the first."

"I asked Starke to call on me to-morrow," etc.

And so they put on their hats, and went out, leaving the hall vacant.

"I can't stand this," said Andy, after a pause.

He wiped his wet feet, and went into the hall. The door out of which the men came opened into a reception-room; beyond that was the lobby. It was dimly lighted as yet, when he entered it; the engine-model, a mass of miniature wheels and cylinders, was in the middle of the bare floor; the Doctor and Starke at the other end of the apartment. The Doctor was talking,—a few words now and then, earnestly spoken. Andy could not hear them; but Starke sat, saying nothing. Miss Defourchet took a pair of India-rubber boots from the servant in the hall, and went to him.

"You must wear them, and take an umbrella, if you will not stay," she said, stooping down, as if she would like to have put them on his feet, her voice a little unsteady. "It rains very heavily, and your shoes are not strong. Indeed, you must."

"Shoes, eh?" said the old machinist, lifting one foot end then the other on his knee, and looking vacantly at the holes through which the bare skin showed. "Oh, yes, yes,"—rising and going past her, as if he did not see her.

"But you'll take them?"

"Hush, Mary! Mr. Starke, I may come and see you to-morrow, you said? We'll arrange matters,"—with a hearty tone.

Starke touched his hat with the air of an old-school gentleman.

"I shall be happy to see you, Sir,—very happy. You will allow me to wish you good evening?"—smiling. "I am not well,"—with the same meaningless look.

"Certainly,"—shaking hands earnestly. "I wish I could induce you to stay and have a talk over your future prospects, eh? But to-morrow—I will be down early to-morrow. Your young friend gave me the address. The model—we'll have that sent down to-morrow, too."

Starke stopped.

"The model," without, however, looking at it. "Yes. It can go to-night. I should prefer that. Andrew will bring an express-wagon for it,"—fumbling in his pocket.

"I have the exact change," said Miss Defourchet, eagerly; "let me pay the express."

Starke's face colored and grew pale again.

"You mistake me," he said, smiling.

"He's no beggar. You hurt him," Andy had whispered, pushing back her hand. Some women had no sense, if they were ladies. Ann Mipps would never have done that!

Starke drew out a tattered leather purse: there was a dime in it, which Andy took. He lighted his lantern, and followed Starke out of the house, noticing how the Doctor hesitated before he closed the door after them. They stood a moment on the pavement; the rain was dark and drenching, with sudden gusts of wind coming down the street. The machinist stood, his old cap stuck on the back of his head, his arms fallen nerveless at his sides, hair and coat and trousers flapping and wet: the very picture of a man whom the world had tried, and in whom it had found no possible savor of use but to be trodden under foot of men.

"God help him!" thought Andy, "he's far gone! He don't even button an' unbutton his coat as allus."

But he asked no questions, excepting where should he take it. Some young men came up, three abreast; Starke drew humbly out of their way before he replied.

"I—I do not know, Andrew. But I'd rather not see it again. You"—

His voice went down into a low mumbling, and he turned and went slowly off up the street. Andy stood puzzled a moment, then hurried after him.

"Let me go home with you."

"What use, boy?"

"To-morrow, then?"

Starke said nothing, thrust his hands into his pockets, his head falling on his breast with an unchanged vacancy of expression. Andy looked after him, coughing, gazing about him uncertainly.

"He's clean given up! What kin I do?"

Then overtook him again, forcing the lantern into his hand,—not without a gulp for breath.

"Here! take this! I like to. It's yours now, Mr. Starke, d' y' understand? Yours. But you'll take care of it, won't you?"

"I do not need anything, my good boy. Let me go."

But Andy held on desperately to his coat.

"Come home. She's there. Maybe I ought not to say it. It's Jane. For God's sake, come to Jane!"

It was so dark that Andy could not see the expression of the man's face when he heard this. Starke did not speak for some minutes; when he did, his voice was firm and conscious, as it had not been before to-night.

"Let go my coat, Andrew; I feel choking. You know my wife, then?"

"Yes, this many a year. She's waited for you. Come home. Come!"

But Starke drew his arm away.

"Tell her I would have gone, if I had succeeded. But not now. I'm tired, I'm going to rest."

With both hands he pushed the lank, wet hair off his face. Somehow, all his tired life showed itself in the gesture.

"I don't think I ever did care as much for her as I do to-night. Is she always well, Andrew?"

"Yes, well. Come!"

"No; good night. Bid her good night."

As he turned away, he stopped and looked back.

"Ask her if she ever thinks of our Rob. I do." And so was gone.

As he went down the street, turning into an alley, something black jumped over the low gate beside Andy and followed him.

"It's the dog! Well, dumb creatures are curious, beyond me. Now for Jane"; and with his head muddled and aching, he went to find an express-stand.

The examination of the model took place on Tuesday. On the Saturday following, Dr. Bowdler was summoned to his back parlor to see a man and woman who had called. Going in, he found Andy, clad as before in his dress-suit of blue coat and marvellously plaid trousers, balancing himself uneasily on the edge of his chair, and a woman in Quaker dress beside him. Her face and presence attracted the Doctor at once, strongly, though they were evidently those of an uneducated working-woman. The quietude in her motions and expression, the repressed power, the delicacy, had worked out, from within, to carve her sad face into those fine lines he saw. No outside culture could do that. She spoke, too, with that simple directness that belongs to people who are sure of what they have to do in the world.

"I came to see if thee knew anything of my husband: thee was so kind to him some days ago. I am Jane Starke."

The Doctor comprehended in a moment. He watched the deserted wife curiously, as he answered her.

"No, my dear Madam. Is it possible he is not with you? I went to his lodging twice with my niece, and, finding it vacant, concluded that he had returned to you, or gone with our young friend Andrew here."

"He is not with me."

She rose, her fingers twitching nervously at her bonnet-strings.

"She was so dead sure you would know," said Andy, rising also. "We've been on the search for four days. We thought you would know. Where will you go now, Jane?"

The woman lost every trace of color when Dr. Bowdler answered her, but she showed no other sign of her disappointment.

"We will find him somewhere, Andrew."

"Stop, stop," interrupted the Doctor. "Tell me what you have done. You must not go in this way."

The woman began to answer, but Andy took the word from her.

"You keep yerself quiet, Jane. She's dreadful worn out, Sir. There's not much to tell. Jane had come into town that night to meet him,—gone to his lodgins—she was so sure he'd come home. She's been waitin' these ten years,"—in a whisper. "But he didn't come. Nor the next day, nor any day since. An' the last I saw of him was goin' down the street in the rain, with the dog followin'. We've been lookin' every way we could, but I don't know the town much, out of my streets for milk, an' Jane knows nothin' of it at all, so"—

"It is as I told you!" broke in Miss Defourchet, who had entered, unperceived, with a blaze of enthusiasm that made Jane start, bewildered. "He is at work,—some new effort. Madam, you have reason to thank God for making you the wife of such a man. It makes my blood glow," turning to her uncle, "to find this dauntless heroism in the rank and file of the people."

She was sincere in her own heroic sympathy for the rank and file: her slender form dilated, her eyes flashed, and there was a rich color mounting to her fine aquiline features.

"I like a man to fight fate to the death as this one,—never to give up,—to sacrifice life to his idea."

"If thee means the engine by the idea," said Jane, dully, "we've given up a good deal to it. He has. It don't matter for me."

Miss Defourchet glanced indignantly at the lumbering figure, the big slow eyes, following her with a puzzled pain in them. For all mischances or sinister fates in the world she had compassion, except for one,—stupidity.

"I knew," to Dr. Bowdler, "he would not be content with the decision the other day. It is his destiny to help the world. And if this woman will come between him and his work, I hope she may never find him."

Jane put a coarse hand up to her breast as if something hurt her; after a moment, she said, with her heavy, sad face looking full down on the young girl,—

"Thee is young yet. It may be God meant my old man to do this work: it may be not. He knows. Myself, I do not think He keeps the world waitin' for this air-engine. Others'll be found to do it when it's needed; what matter if he fails? An' when a man gives up all little works for himself, an' his child, or—his wife," with a gasp, "for some great work"—

She stopped.

"It's more likely that the Devil is driving him than God leading," said the Doctor, hastily.

"Come, Andrew," said Jane, gravely. "We have no time to lose."

She moved to the door,—unsteadily, however.

"She's fagged out," said Andy, lingering behind her. "Since Tuesday night I've followed her through streets an' alleys, night an' day. Jest as prim an' sober as you see. Cryin' softly to herself at times. It's a sore heart-break, Sir. Waitin' these ten years"—

Dr. Bowdler offered his help, earnestly, as did his niece, with a certain reserve. The dog Thor had disappeared with Starke, and they hoped that would afford some clue.

"But the woman is a mere clog," said Miss Defourchet, impatiently, after they were gone. "Her eyes are as sad, unreasonable as Thor's. Nothing in them but instinct. But it is so with most women,"—with a sigh.

"But somehow, Mary, those women never mistake their errand in the world any more than Thor, and do it as unconsciously and completely as he," said the Doctor, with a quizzical smile. "If Starke had followed, his 'instincts,' he would have been a snug farmer to-day in the Jerseys."

Miss Defourchet vouchsafed no answer.

Dr. Bowdler gave his help, as he had promised, but to no purpose. A week passed in the search without success, until at last Thor brought it. The dog was discovered one night in the kitchen, waiting for his supper, as he had been used to do: his affection for his new master, I suppose, not having overcome his recollection of the flesh-pots of Egypt. They followed him (Jane, the Doctor, and Andy) out to that maze of narrow streets, near Fairmount, called, I think, Francisville. He stopped at a low house, used in front as a cake-shop, the usual young girl with high cheek-bones and oily curls waiting within.

"The dog's owner?" the trading look going out of her eyes suddenly, "Oh, are you his friends? He's low to-night: mother's up with him since supper; mother's kept him since last Tuesday,"—fussing out from behind the counter. "Take chairs, Ma'am. I'll call her. Go out, you Stevy,"—driving out two or three urchins in their bed-gowns who were jamming up the door-way.

Miserably poor the whole place was; the woman, when she came down, a hard skinflint—in Andy's phrase—in the face: just home from her day's washing, her gown pinned up, her arms flabby and red.

"Good evenin', Sir! evenin', Ma'am! See the man? Of course, Ma'am; but you'd best be keerful,"—standing between Jane and the door. "He's very poorly."

"What ails him?"

"Well, I'll say it out,—if you're his friends, as you say," stammering. "I'd not like to accuse any one rashly, but—I think he'd a notion of starvin' to death, an' got himself so low. Come to me las' week, an' pawned his coat for my back room to sleep in. He eat nothin' then: I seen that. An' he used to go out an' look at the dam for hours: but he never throwed himself in. Since he took to bed, we keep him up with broth and sech as we have,—Sally an' me. Sir? Afford it? Hum! We're not as well off as we have been," dryly; "but I'm not a beast to see a man starvin' under my roof. Oh, certingly, Ma'am; go up."

And while Jane mounted the rickety back-stairs, she turned to the door to meet two or three women with shawls pinned about their heads.

"He's very poorly, Mis' Crawford, thank ye, Mem. No, you can't do nothing'," in a sepulchral whisper, which continued in a lower tone, with a nod back to the Doctor and Andy.

Starke's affair was a godsend to the neighborhood, Dr. Bowdler saw. Untrained people enjoy a sickness with more keenness and hearty good-feeling than you do the opera. The Doctor had providently brought a flask of brandy in his pocket. He went on tiptoe up the creaking stairs and gave it to Jane. She was standing, holding the handle of the door, not turning it.

"What is it, Jane?" cheerfully. "What do you tremble for, eh?"

"Nothin'",—chewing her lips and opening the door. "It's ten years since,"—to herself, as she went in.

Not when she was a shy girl had he been to her what these ten years of desertion had made him.

It was half an hour before the Doctor and Andy went up softly into the upper room and sat quietly down out of sight in the corner. Jane was sitting on the low cot-bed, holding Starke's head on her breast. They could not see her face in the feeble light. She had some brandy and water in a glass, and gave him a spoonful of it now and then; and when she had done that, smoothed the yellow face incessantly with her hard fingers. The Doctor fancied that such dumb pain and affection as there was in even that little action ought to bring him to life, if he were dead. There was some color on his cheeks, and occasionally he opened his eyes and tried to speak, but closed them wearily. They watched by him until midnight; his pulse grew stronger by that time, and he lay wistfully looking at his wife like one who had wakened out of a long death, and tried to collect his thought. She did not speak nor stir, knowing on how slight a thread his sense hung.

"Jane!" he said, at last.

They bent forward eagerly.

"Jane, I wish thee'd take me home."'

"To be sure, Joseph," cheerfully. "In the morning. It is too chilly to-night. Is thee comfortable?" drawing his head closer to her breast. "O God! He'll live!" silently clutching at the bed-rail until her hand ached. "Go to sleep, dear."

Whatever sobs or tears choked her voice just then, she forced them back: they might disturb him. He closed his eyes a moment.

"I have something to say to thee, Jane."

"No. Thee must rest."

"I'd sleep better, if I tell thee first."

There was a moment's silence. The woman's face was pale, her eyes burning, but she only smiled softly, holding him steadily.

"It has been so long!"—passing his hand over his forehead vaguely.

"Yes."

She could not command a smile now.

"It was all wasted. I've been worth nothing."

How close she held him then to her breast! How tender the touches grew on his face!

"I was not strong enough to kill myself even, the other day, when I was so tired. So cowardly! Not worth much, Jane!"

She bent forward over him, to keep the others from hearing this.

"Thee's tired too, Jane?" looking up dully.

"A little, Joseph."

Another silence.

"To-morrow, did thee say, we would go home?"

"Yes, to-morrow."

He shut his eyes to sleep.

"Kiss him," said the Doctor to her. "It will make him more certain."

Her face grew crimson.

"He has not asked me yet," she said.

Sometime early in the summer, nearly four years after, Miss Defourchet came down to make her uncle another visit,—a little thinned and jaded with her winter's work, and glad of the daily ride into the fresh country-air. One morning, the Doctor, jumping into the barouche beside her, said,—

"We'll make a day of it, Mary,—spend it with some old friends of ours. They are such wholesome, natural people, it refreshes me to be with them when I am tired."

"Starke and his wife?" she asked, arranging her scarf. "I never desire to be with him, or with any man recreant to his work."

"Recreant, eh? Starke? Well, no; he works hard, digs and ditches, and is happy. I think he takes his work more humbly and healthily than any man I know."

Miss Defourchet looked absently out at the gleaming river. Her interest had always been languid in the man since he had declined either to fight fate or drown himself. The Doctor jerked his hat down into the bottom of the carriage and pulled open his cravat.

"Hah! do you catch that river-breeze? Don't that expand your lungs? And the whiff of the fresh clover-blossoms? I come out here to study my sermons, did you know? Nature is so simple and grand here, a man could not well say a mean or unbrotherly thing while he stays. It forces you to be 'a faithful witness' to the eternal truth. There is good fishing hereabouts, eh, Jim?"—calling to the driver. "Do you see that black pool under the sycamore?"

"I could not call it 'faithful witnessing' to delight in taking even a fish's life," dryly said his niece.

The Doctor winced.

"It's the old Adam in me, I suppose. You'll have to be charitable to the different making-up of people, Mary."

However, he was silent for a while after that, with rather an extinguished feeling, bursting out again when they reached the gate of a little snug place by the road-side.

"Here is where my little friend Ann lives. There's a wife for you! 'And though she rules him, never shows she rules.' They've a dairy-farm, you know, back of the hills; but they live here because it was her father's toll-house then, and they won't give up the old place. I like such notions. Andy's full of them. There he is! Hillo, Fawcett!"

Andy came out from the kitchen-garden, his freckled face redder than his hair, his eyes showing his welcome. Dr. Bowdler was an old tried friend now of his and Ann's. "He took a heap of nonsense out of me," he used to say.

"No, no, we'll not stop now," said the Doctor; "we are going on to Starke's, and Ann is not in, I see. I will stop in the evening for my glass of buttermilk, though, and a bunch of country-grown flowers."

But they waited long enough to discuss the price of poultry, etc., in market, before they drove on. Miss Defourchet looked wearied.

"Such things seem so paltry while the country is in the state it is," she said.

"Well, my dear, so it is. But it's 'the work by which Andy thrives,' you know. And I like it, somehow."

The lady had worked nobly in the hospitals last winter, and naturally she wanted to see every head and hand at work on some noble scheme or task for the world's good. The hearty, comfortable quiet of the Starkes' little farm-house tired her. It was such a sluggish life of nothings, she thought,—even when Jane had brought her chair close to the window where the sunshine came in broadest and clearest through the buttonwood-leaves. Jane saw the look, and it troubled her. She was not much of a talker, only when with her husband, so there was no use of trying that. She put a little table beside the window and a white cloth on it, and then brought a saucer of crimson strawberries and yellow cream; but the lady was no eater, she was sorry to see. She stood a moment timidly, but Miss Defourchet did not put her at her ease. It was the hungry poor she cared for, with stifled brains and souring feeling. This woman was at ease, stupidly at peace with God and herself.

"Perhaps thee'd be amused to look over Joseph's case of books?" handing her the key, and then sitting down with her knitting, contented in having finished her duty. "After a while thee'll have a pleasant time,"—smiling consciously. "Richard'll be awake. Richard's our boy, thee knows? I wish he was awake, but it is his mornin' nap, an' I never disturb him in his mornin' nap."

"You lead a very quiet life, apparently," said Miss Defourchet; for she meant to see what was in all these dull trifles.

"Yes, thee might call it so. My old man farms; he has more skill that way than me. He bought land in Iowa, an' has been out seein' it, an' that freshened him up this spring. But we'll never leave the old place."

"So he farms, and you"—

"Well, I oversee the house," glancing at the word into the kitchen to see how Bessy was getting on with the state dinner in progress. "It keeps me busy, an' Bessy, (she's an orphan we've taken to raise,) an' the dairy, an' Richard most of all. I let nobody touch Richard but myself. That's my work."

"You have little time for reading?"

Jane colored.

"I'm not fond of it. A book always put me to sleep quicker than a hop pillow. But lately I read some things," hesitating,—"the first books Richard'll have to know. I want to keep him with ourselves as long as I can. I'd like,"—her eyes with a new outlook in them, as she raised them, something beyond Miss Defourchet's experience,—"I'd like to make my boy a good, healthy, honest boy before I'm done with him. I wish I could teach him his Latin an' th' others. But there's no use to try for that."

"How goes it, Mary?" said the Doctor heartily, coming in, all in a heat, and sun-burnt, with Starke.

Both men were past the prime of life, thin, and stooped, but Starke's frame was tough and weather-cured. He was good for ten years longer in the world than Dr. Bowdler.

"I've just been looking at the stock. Full and plenty, in every corner, as I say to Joseph. It warms me up to come here, Starke. I don't know a healthier, more cheerful farm on these hills than just this one."

Starke's face brightened.

"The ground's not overly rich, Sir. Tough work, tough work; but I like it. I'm saving off it, too. We put by a hundred or two last year; same next, God willing. For Richard, Dr. Bowdler. We want enough to give him a thorough education, and then let him rough it with the others. That will be the best way to bring out the stuff that's in him. It's good stuff," in an under-tone.

"How old is he?" said Miss Defourchet.

"Two years last February," said Jane, eagerly.

"Two years; yes. He's my namesake, Mary, did you know? Where is the young lion?"

"Why, yes, mother. Why isn't Richard down? Morning nap? Hoot, toot! bring the boy down!"

Miss Defourchet, while Jane went for the boy, noticed how heavy the scent of the syringas grew, how the bees droned down into a luxurious delight in the hot noon. One might dream out life very pleasantly there, she thought. The two men talked politics, but glanced constantly at the stairs. She did not wonder that Starke's worn, yellow face should grow so curiously bright at the sight of his boy; but her uncle did not care for children,—unless, indeed, there was something in them. Jane came down and put the boy on the floor.

"He has pulled all my hair down," she said, trying to look grave, to hide the proud smile in her face.

Miss Defourchet had taken Richard up with an involuntary kiss, which he resisted, looking her full in the face. There was something in this child.

"He won't kiss you, unless he likes you," said Starke, chafing his hands delightedly.

"What do you think of that fellow, Mary?" said the Doctor, coming over. "He's my young lion, Richard is. Look at this square forehead. You don't believe in Phrenology, eh? Well, I do. Feel his jaws. Look at that lady, Sir! Do you see the big, brave eyes of him?"

"His mouth is like his mother's," said Starke, jealously.

"Oh, yes, yes! So. You think that is the best part of his face, I know. It is; as tender as a woman's."

"It is a real hero-face," said the young lady, frankly; "not a mean line in it."

Starke had drawn the boy between his knees, and was playing roughly with him.

"There never shall be one, with God's help," he thought, but said nothing.

Richard was "a hobby" of Dr. Bowdler's, his niece perceived.

"His very hair is like a mane," he said; "he's as uncouth as a young giant that don't feel his strength. I say this, Mary: that the boy will never be goodish and weak: he'll be greatly good or greatly bad."

The young lady noticed how intently Starke listened; she wondered if he had forgotten entirely his own God-sent mission, and turned baby-tender altogether.

"What has become of your model, Mr. Starke?" she asked.

Dr. Bowdler looked up uneasily; it was a subject he never had dared to touch.

"Andrew keeps it," said Starke, with a smile, "for the sake of old times, side by side with his lantern, I believe."

"You never work with it?"

"No; why should I? The principle has since been made practical, as you know, better than I could have done it. My idea was too crude, I can see now. So I just grazed success, as one may say."

"Have you given up all hope of serving your fellows?" persisted the lady. "You seemed to me to be the very man to lead a forlorn hope against ignorance: are you quite content to settle down here and do nothing?"

His color changed, but he said quietly,—

"I've learned to be humbler, maybe. It was hard learning. But," trying to speak lightly, "when I found I was not fit to be an officer, I tried to be as good a private as I could. Your uncle will tell you the cause is the same."

There was a painful silence.

"I think sometimes, though," said Starke, "that God meant Jane and I should not be useless in the world."

He put his hand almost reverently on the boy's head.

"Richard is ours, you know, to make what we will of. He will do a different work in life from any engine. I try to think we have strength enough saved out of our life to make him what we ought."

"You're right, Starke," said the Doctor, emphatically. "Some day, when you and I have done with this long fight, we shall find that as many privates as captains will have earned the cross of the Legion of Honor."

Miss Defourchet said nothing; the day did not please her. Jane, she noticed, when evening came on, slipped up-stairs to brush her hair, and put on a soft white shawl.

"Joseph likes to see me dress a little for the evenings," she said, with quite a flush in her cheek.

And the young lady noticed that Starke smiled tenderly as his wife passed him. It was so weak! in ugly, large-boned people, too.

"It does one good to go there," said the Doctor, drawing a long breath as they drove off in the cool evening, the shadowed red of the sun lighting up the little porch where the machinist stood with his wife and child. "The unity among them is so healthy and beautiful."

"I did not feel it as you do," said Miss Defourchet, drawing her shawl closer, and shivering.

Starke came down on the grass to play with the boy, throwing him down on the heaps of hay there to see him jump and rush back undaunted. Yet in all his rude romps the solemn quiet of the hour was creeping over him. He sat down by Jane on the wooden steps at last, while, the boy, after an impetuous kiss or two, curled up at their feet and went to sleep The question about the model had stirred an old doubt in Jane's heart. She watched her husband keenly. Was he thinking of that old dream? Would he go back to it? the long dull pain of those dead years creeping through her brain. He looked up from the boy, stroking his gray beard,—his eyes, she saw, full of tears.

"I was thinking, Jane, how much of our lives was lost before we found our true work."

"Yes, Joseph."

He gathered up the boy, holding him close to his bony chest.

"I'd like to think," he said. "I could atone for that waste, Jane. It was my fault. I'd like to think I'd earn up yonder that cross of the Legion of Honor—through him."

"God knows," she said.

After that they were silent a long while, They were thinking of Him who had brought the little child to them.

* * * * *

A LOYAL WOMAN'S NO.

No! is my answer from this cold, bleak ridge Down to your valley: you may rest you there: The gulf is wide, and none can build a bridge That your gross weight would safely hither bear.

Pity me, if you will. I look at you With something that is kinder far than scorn, And think, "Ah, well! I might have grovelled, too; I might have walked there, fettered and forsworn."

I am of nature weak as others are; I might have chosen comfortable ways; Once from these heights I shrank, beheld afar, In the soft lap of quiet, easy days.

I might—(I will not hide it)—once I might Have lost, in the warm whirlpools of your voice, The sense of Evil, the stern cry of Right; But Truth has steered me free, and I rejoice:

Not with the triumph that looks back to jeer At the poor herd that call their misery bliss; But as a mortal speaks when God is near, I drop you down my answer; it is this:—

I am not yours, because you seek in me What is the lowest in my own esteem: Only my flowery levels can you see, Nor of my heaven-smit summits do you dream.

I am not yours, because you love yourself: Your heart has scarcely room for me beside. I could not be shut in with name and pelf; I spurn the shelter of your narrow pride!

Not yours,—because you are not man enough To grasp your country's measure of a man! If such as you, when Freedom's ways are rough, Cannot walk in them, learn that women can!

Not yours, because, in this the nation's need, You stoop to bend her losses to your gain, And do not feel the meanness of your deed: I touch no palm defiled with such a stain!

Whether man's thought can find too lofty steeps For woman's scaling, care not I to know; But when he falters by her side, or creeps, She must not clog her soul with him to go.

Who weds me must at least with equal pace Sometimes move with me at my being's height: To follow him to his more glorious place, His purer atmosphere, were keen delight.

You lure me to the valley: men should call Up to the mountains, where the air is clear. Win me and help me climbing, if at all! Beyond these peaks rich harmonies I hear,—

The morning chant of Liberty and Law! The dawn pours in, to wash out Slavery's blot: Fairer than aught the bright sun ever saw Rises a nation without stain or spot.

The men and women mated for that time Tread not the soothing mosses of the plain; Their hands are joined in sacrifice sublime; Their feet firm set in upward paths of pain.

Sleep your thick sleep, and go your drowsy way! You cannot hear the voices in the air! Ignoble souls will shrivel in that day: The brightness of its coming can you bear?

For me, I do not walk these hills alone: Heroes who poured their blood out for the Truth, Women whose hearts bled, martyrs all unknown, Here catch the sunrise of immortal youth

On their pale cheeks and consecrated brows! It charms me not,—your call to rest below: I press their hands, my lips pronounce their vows Take my life's silence for your answer: No!

* * * * *

EUGENE DELACROIX.

The death of Eugene Delacroix cuts the last bond between the great artistic epoch which commenced with the Bellini and that which had its beginning with the nineteenth century, epochs as diverse in character as the Venice of 1400 and the Paris of 1800. In him died the last great painter whose art was moulded by the instincts and traditions that made Titian and Veronese, and the greatest artist whose eyes have opened on the, to him, uncongenial and freezing life of the nineteenth century. In our time we have a new ideal, a new and maybe a higher development of intellectual art, and as great a soul as Titian's might to-day reach farther towards the reconciled perfections of graphic art: but what he did no one can now do; the glory of that time has passed away,—its unreasoning faith, its wanton instinct, revelling in Art like children in the sunshine, and rejoicing in childlike perception of the pomp and glory which overlay creation, unconscious of effort, indifferent to science,—all gone with the fairies, the saints, the ecstatic visions which framed their poor lives in gold. Only, still reflecting the glory, as eastern mountains the sunken sun, came a few sympathetic souls kindling into like glow, with faint perception of what had passed from the whole world beside. Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and Delacroix, kept the line of color, now at last utterly extinguished. Now we reason, now we see facts; sentiment is out of joint, and appearances are known to be liars; we have found the greater substance; we kindle with the utilities, and worship with the aspiring spirit of a common humanity; we banish the saints from our souls and the gewgaws from our garments, and walk clothed and in our right minds in what we believe to be the noonday light of reason and science. We are humanitarian, enlightened. We begin to comprehend the great problems of human existence and development; our science touches the infinitely removed, and apprehends the mysteries of macrocosmic organism: but we have lost the art of painting; for, when Eugene Delacroix died, the last painter (visible above the man) who understood Art as Titian understood it, and painted with such eyes as Veronese's, passed away, leaving no pupil or successor. It is as when the last scion of a kingly race dies in some alien land. Greater artists than he we may have in scores; but he was of the Venetians, and, with his nearly rival, Turner, lived to testify that it was not from a degeneracy of the kind that we have no more Tintorets and Veroneses; for both these, if they had lived in the days of those, had been their peers.

Painting, as the Venetians understood it, is a lost art, because the mental conditions which made it possible exist no longer. The race is getting to that mannish stature in which every childlike quality is a shame to it; and the Venetian feeling for and cultivation of color are essentially childlike traits. No shadows of optics, no spectra of the prism clouded their passionate enjoyment of color as it was or as it might be, no uplifted finger of cold decorum frightened them into gray or sable gloom; they garbed themselves in rainbows, and painted with the sunset. Color was to them a rapture and one of the great pursuits of their lives; it was music visible, and they cultivated it as such,—not by rule and measure, by scales and opposites, through theories and canons, with petrific chill of intellect or entangling subtilty of analysis. Their lives developed their instincts, and their instincts their art. They loved color more than everything else; and therefore color made herself known to them in her rarest and noblest beauty. They went to Nature as children, and Nature met them as a loving mother meets her child, with her happiest smile and the richest of her gifts. I do not believe that to any Venetian painter the thought of whether a given tint was true ever came; if only his fine instinct told him it was lovely, he asked no question further,—and if he took a tint from Nature, it was because it was lovely, and not because he found it in Nature. Our painter must see,—their painter could feel; and in this antithesis is told the whole difference between the times, so far as color is concerned.

But while Delacroix worked in the same spirit and must be ranked in the same school, there were differences produced by the action of the so different social and intellectual influences under which he grew up. His nature was intensely imaginative, and so was preserved from the dwarfing effect of French rationalism and materialism: their clay could not hide his light or close his eyes, for imagination sees at all points and through all disguises, and so his spiritual and intellectual nature was kept alive when all Art around him was sinking into mere shapely clay. Classic taste and rationalistic pride had left in his contemporaries little else than cold propriety of form and color, studied negations of spontaneity and imaginative abandon; yet such was the force of his imagination, that these qualities, almost more than any other, characterize his conceptions: but the perpetual contact and presence of elements so uncongenial to his good genius produced their effects in a morbid sadness, in his feeling for subject, and in a gloomy tone of coloring, sometimes only plaintive, but at other times as melancholy as the voice of a lost soul. When healthiest, as in his Harem picture in the Luxembourg Gallery, it is still in the minor key of that lovely Eastern color-work, such as we see in the Persian carpets, and to me always something weird and mysterious and touching, like the tones of an Aeolian harp, or the greetings of certain sad-voiced children touched by the shadow of death before their babyhood is gone. No color has ever affected me like that of Delacroix,—his Dante pictures are the "Commedia" set in color, and palpitating with the woe of the damned.

His intellect was of that nobler kind which cannot leave the questions of the Realities; and conscious kindred with great souls passed away must have given a terrible reality to the great question of the future, the terror of which French philosophy was poorly able to dispel or lead to anything else than this hopeless gloom. His great picture of the plafond of the Salon d'Apollon, in the Louvre, seems like a great ode to light, in the singing of which he felt the gloom break and saw the tones of healthy life lighten in his day for a prophetic moment; but dispelled the gloom never was. What he might have been, bred in the cheerful, unquestioning, and healthy, if unprogressive faith of Venice, we can only conjecture, seeing how great he grew in the cold of Gallic life.

His health was, through his later life, bad; and for my own part, I believe that the same morbid feeling manifested in his art affected injuriously his physical life, aided doubtless by the excessive work which occupied all his available hours. For many years previous to his death he alternated between periods of almost unbroken labor, taking time only to eat and sleep, and intervals of absolute rest for days together. In his working fits, so deranged had his digestion become, he could take only one meal, a late dinner, each day, and saw no visitors except in the hour preceding his dinner.

Having gone to Paris to spend a winter in professional studies, I made an earnest application by letter to Delacroix to be admitted as a pupil to his atelier. In reply, he invited me to visit him at his rooms the next day at four, to talk with him about my studies, proffering any counsel in his gift, but assuring me that it was impossible for him to receive me into his studio, as he could not work in the room with another, and his strength and occupations did not permit him to have a school apart, as he once had.

At the appointed time I presented myself, and was received very pleasantly in a little drawing-room at his house in the Latin Quarter. His appearance, to me, was prepossessing; and though I had heard French artists speak of him as morose and bearish, I must say that his whole manner was most kindly and sympathetic, though not demonstrative. He was small, spare, and nervous-looking, with evident ill-health in his face and bearing, and under slight provocation, I should think, might have been disagreeable, but had nothing egoistic in his manner, and, unlike most celebrated artists, didn't seem to care to talk about his own pictures. After personal inquiries of my studies and the masters whom I knew and had studied, and most kindly, but appreciative criticism on all whom we spoke of, "Ah," said he, "I could not have an atelier (i.e. school-atelier) now, the spirit in which the young artists approach their work now is so different from that of the time when I was in the school. Then they were earnest, resolute men: there were Delaroche and Vernet," and others he mentioned, whose names I cannot remember, "men who went into their painting with their whole souls and in seriousness; but now the students come into the atelier to laugh and joke and frolic, as if Art were a game; there is an utter want of seriousness in the young men now which would make it impossible for me to teach them. I should be glad to direct your studies, but the work on which I am engaged leaves me no time to dispose of." I asked if I could not sometime see him working; but he replied that it was quite impossible for him to work with any one looking on.

I asked him where, to his mind, was the principal want of the modern schools. He replied, "In execution; there is intellect enough, intention enough, and sometimes great conception, but everywhere a want of executive ability, which enfeebles all they do. They work too much with the crayon, instead of studying with the brush. If they want to be engravers, it is all well enough to work in charcoal; but the execution of an engraver is not that of a painter. I remember an English artist, who was in Paris when I was a young man, who had a wonderful power in using masses of black and white, but he was never able to do anything in painting, much to my surprise at that time; but later I came to know, that, if a man wants to be a painter, he must learn to draw with the brush."

I asked him for advice in my own studies; to which he replied, "You ought to copy a great deal,—copy passages of all the great painters. I have copied a great deal, and of the works of almost everybody"; and as he spoke, he pointed to a line of studies of heads and parts of pictures from various old masters which hung around the room.

I am inclined to think that he carried copying too far; for the principal defect of his later pictures is a kind of hardness and want of thought in the touch, a verging on the mechanical, as if his hand and feeling did not keep perfectly together.

I regret much that I did not immediately after my interview take notes of the conversation, as he said many things which I cannot now recall, and which, as mainly critical of the works of other artists, would have been of interest to the world. I only remember that he spoke in great praise of Turner and Sir Joshua Reynolds. As his dinner-hour drew near, I took my leave, asking for some directions to see pictures of his which I had not seen; in reply to which, he offered to send me notes securing me admission to all the places where were pictures of his not easily accessible,—a promise he fulfilled a day or two after. I left him with as pleasant a personal impression as I have ever received from any great artist, and I have met many.

The works of Delacroix, like those of all geniuses, are very unequal; but those who, not having studied them, attempt to estimate them by any ordinary standard will be far from the truth in their estimate, and will most certainly fail to be impressed by their true excellence. The public has a mistaken habit of measuring greatness by the capacity to give it pleasure; but the public has no more ignorant habit than this. That is no great work which the popular taste can fully appreciate, and no thoroughly educated man can at once grasp the full calibre of a work of great power differing from his own standard. It took Penelope's nights to unweave the web of her days' weaving, and no sudden shears of untaught comprehension will serve to analyze those finer fabrics of a genius like Delacroix. Perhaps, owing to many peculiarities of his nature, showing themselves in unsympathetic forms in his pictures, he may always fall short of complete appreciation by the educated taste even,—and, indeed, to me he seems, of all the great colorists, the one least likely ever to win general favor, but not from want of greatness.

I have often heard his drawing spoken of as bad. It was not the drawing of a dessinateur, but there was method in its badness. I remember hearing a friend say, that, going into his studio one day, he found him just in the act of finishing a hand. He said, "It looks very badly drawn, but I have painted it three times before I could get it right Once I had it well drawn, and then it looked very badly; and now it suits me better than when it was well drawn." A neatly drawn figure would have made as bad an appearance in one of his pictures as a dandy in the heat and turmoil of a battle-field; yet, as they came, all the parts were consistent with the whole, reminding one of what Ruskin says of Turner's figures.

For vigor and dash in execution, and the trooping energy of some of his competitions, he reminds me more of Rubens than of any other; but his composition has a more purely imaginative cast than that of Rubens, a purer melody, a far more refined spiritualism. Nothing was coarse or gross, much less sensual. His was the true imaginative fusion from which pictures spring complete, subject to no revision. Between him and Turner there were many points of resemblance, of which the greatest was in a common defect,—an impulsive, unschooled, unsubstantial method of execution, contrasting strongly with the exact, deliberate, and yet, beyond description, masterly touch of Titian and most of his school. Tintoret alone shows something of the same tendency,—attributable, no doubt, to the late time at which he came into the method of his master. If Delacroix has none of the great serenity and cheerfulness of Titian, or the large and manly way of seeing of Veronese, he has an imaginative fervor and intensity we do not see in them, and of which Tintoret and Tiepolo only among the Venetians show any trace. Generations hence, Eugene Delacroix will loom larger above his contemporaries, now hiding him by proximity.

* * * * *

SYMPATHETIC LYING.

If "all men are liars," and everybody deceives us a little sometimes, so that David's dictum hardly needs his apology of haste, it is a comfort to remember that many lies are not downright, but sympathetic; and an understanding of their nature, if it does not palliate them, may put us on our guard. Sympathetic we think a better name than the unfortunate title of white, which was given them by Mrs. Opie, because that designation carries a meaning of innocence, if not even of virtue; and instead of protecting our virtue, may even expose us to practise them without remorse. Of laughing over them and making light of them, and calling them by various ludicrous synonymes, as fibs, and telling the thing that is not, there has been enough. We have a purpose in our essay, than which no preaching could be more sober. Our aim is to give for them no opiate, but to quicken the sense of their guilt, and their exceeding mischief, too; for, if Francis Bacon be right in declaring the lie we swallow down more dangerous than that which only passes through our mind, how seriously the wine-bibbing of this sweet poison of kindly misrepresentation must have weakened the constitution of mankind! Lying for selfish gain or glory, for sensual pleasure, or for exculpation from a criminal charge, is more gross, but it involves at once such condemnation in society, and such inward reproach, as to be far less insidious than lying out of amiable consideration for others, to shield or further kinsfolk or friends, which may pass unrebuked, or stand for an actual merit. Yet, be the motive what it may, there is a certain invariable quantity of essential baseness in all violation of the truth; and it may be feared our affectionate falsehoods often work more evil than our malignant ones, by having free course and meeting with little objection. "Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for Him?" severely asks the old prophet of those who thought to cheat for their own set, as though it were in the cause of religion; and no godly soul can accept as a grateful tribute the least prevarication, however disinterested or devoted in its behalf. Indeed, no smart antithesis has been so hurtful as the overstated distinction between black lies and white. They are of different species, but have no generic difference. Charles Reade's novel, of "White Lies," in which the deceptions of love are so glorified, charming story as it is, will sap the character of whoever does not, with a mental protest, countermine its main idea. The very theory of our integrity is gone, if we do not insist on this. God has not so made the world that any perjury or cover of the facts is necessary to serve the cause of goodness. Commend it though English or German critics do, can we not conceive of a speech grander than the untruth which Shakspeare has put into the dying Desdemona's mouth?

Let us, then, examine some of the forms of sympathetic lying.

One of them is that of over-liberal praise. That a person is always ready to extol others, and was never heard to speak ill of anybody under the sun, appears to some the very crown of excellence. But what is the panegyric worth that has no discrimination, that finds any mortal faultless, or bestows on the varying and contradictory behaviors of men an equal meed? To what does universal commendation amount more than universal indifference? What value do we put on the lavish regard which is not individual, or founded on any intelligent appreciation of its object, but scattered blindly abroad on all flesh, as once thousands were vaguely baptized in the open air by a general sprinkling, and which any one can appropriate only as he may own a certain indeterminate section of an undivided township or unfenced common? To have a good word for everybody, and take exception to nothing, is to incapacitate one's self for the exquisite delight of real fellowship. We all know persons who seem a sort of social favorites on account of this gracious manner which they afford with such mechanical plenty. But what a dilution and deterioration their external quality of half-artificial courtesy becomes! It is handing round sweetened water, instead of tasting the juice of the grape. It is pouring from a pail, instead of opening a vial of sweet odors. This broadcast and easy approval lacks that very honesty which, in the absence of fineness, is the single grace by which it could be sanctified.

The same vice affects more public concerns. Of what sheer hypocrisy eulogistic resolutions upon officers leaving their posts in Church or State are too frequently composed! The men who are tired and want to get rid of their Representative or minister are so overjoyed at losing sight of him, that they can set no bounds to their thankful exaltation of his name! Truly they speed the parting guest, wish well to the traveller from their latitude, and launch with shouts the ship of his fortunes from their ways! They recommend him as a paragon of genius and learning to all communities or societies who want a service in his kind. How happy both sides to this transaction are expected to feel, and how willing people are sometimes to add to the soft words a solid testimonial of gold, if only thus a dismissal can be effected! But are not the reports of the committees and the votes of the meetings false coin, nowhere current in the kingdom of God, circulate as they may in this realm of earth? Nay, does not everybody, save the one that receives the somewhat insincere and left-handed blessing, read the formal and solemn record with a disposition to ridicule or a pitying smile?

How well it is understood that we are not to speak the truth, but only good, of the dead! How melancholy it is, that lying has come to be so common an epithet for the gravestones we set over their dust! How few obituaries characterize those for whom they are written, or are distinguishable from each other in the terms of their funeral celebrations of departed virtue! How refreshing, as rare, is any of the veritable description which implies real lamentation! But what a suspicion falls on the mourning in whose loquacity we cannot detect one natural tone! As if that last messenger, who strips off all delusions and appearances, should be pursued and affronted with the mockery of our pretence, and we could circumvent the angel of judgment with the sentence of our fond wishes and the affectation of our groundless claims! As if the disembodied, in the light of truth, by which they are surrounded and pierced, could be pleased with our make-believe, or tolerate the folly of our factitious phrase! With what sadness their purged eyes must follow the pens inditing their epitaphs, and the sculptors' chisels making the commonplaces of fulsome commendation permanent on their tombs! What vanity to their nicer ears must be the sonorous and declamatory orator's breath! Let us not offend them so. They will take it for the insult of perfunctory honor, not for the sympathy it assumes to be. Nothing but good of the dead, do you say? Nothing but truth of the dead, we answer. Do not disturb their bones; let them rest easy at last, is the commentary on all keen criticism of those who have played important parts in life, and whose influence has perhaps been a curse. No, we reply, their bones will rest easier, and their benedictions come to us surer, for our unaffected plain-dealing. The trick of flattery may succeed with the living. Those still in this world of shadows, cross-lights, and glaring reflections may be caught by the images we flash upon them from the mirrors of admiration we swing in our hands. But they who have laid down all the shows of things with their own superficial countenances and mortal frames cannot be imposed upon by the faces of adulation we make up. They who listen to that other speech, whose tones are the literally translated truth, cannot be patient with the gloss and varnish of our, at best, imperfect language. Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be only the conviction of our heart we venture to offer to spirits before whom the meaning of all things is unveiled!

But private conversation is the great sphere of sympathetic lying. Our antipathies doubtless often tempt to falsify. We stretch the truth, trying, in private quarrels, to make out our case, or holding up our end in party-controversies. Anger, malice, envy, and revenge make us often break the ninth commandment. But concession, compromise, yielding to others' influence, and indisposition to contradict those whom we love or the world respects, generate more deceit than comes from all the evil passions, which, as Sterne said of lust, are too serious to be successful in cunning play. How it would mortify most persons to have brought back to them at night exact accounts of the divers opinions they have expressed to different persons, with facile conformity to the mood of each one during the course of a single day! How the members of any pleasant evening-company might astonish or amuse each other by narrating together the contradictory views the same voluble discourser has unfolded to them successively during the passage of one hour! so easily we bend and conform, and deny God and ourselves, to gratify the guest we converse with. On account of a few variations, scholars have composed what they call Harmonies of the Gospels; but how much harder it would be for any one of us to harmonize his talk on any subject moving the minds of men! Where strong self-interest acts, we can explain changes and inconsistencies in the great organs set up to operate on public sentiment. Such a paper as the London "Times," having nothing higher than avaricious commerce and national pride to consult, in a conspicuous centre of affairs has thus become the great weathercock of the world, splendidly gilded, lifted very high in the air, but, like some other stupid chanticleers, crowing at false signals of the dawn, and well called the "Times," as in its columns nothing eternal was ever evinced. Everywhere exist these agents of custom and convention, wielded by a power behind them, and holding long no one direction, but varying in every wind. Some breeze of general policy, however, prescribes the law of these alterations, while only a weak and brainless sensibility, blowing from every source, commonly occasions the continual veering of our private word. Through what manifold phases a good conversationist has dexterity to pass! Quarterings of the uncertain moon, the lights that glance blue, silver, yellow, and green from the shifting angles of the gems that move with their wearers, or the confused motions of some of our inferior fellow-creatures that flutter from side to side of the road as intimidating objects fail on the eyes planted on opposite sides of their heads, feebly symbolize these human displays of unstable equilibrium. We must adapt our method to circumstances; but the apostolic rule, of "All things to all men," should not touch, as in Paul it never did, the fundamental consistency of principle which is the chief sign of spiritual life. The degree of elevation in the scale of being is marked by the approximation of the sight to a focus of unity. But, judging from the pictures they give us of their interior states, we might think many of our rational companions as myriad-eyed as naturalists tell us are some insects. Behold the wondrous transformation undergone by those very looks and features that give the natural language, as sentiments contrary to each other are successively presented, and Republican or Democrat, Pro-Slavery man or Abolitionist, walks up! In truth, a man at once kindly and ingenuous can hardly help in most assemblies coming continually to grief. He knows not what to do, to be at once frank and polite. The transverse beams of the cross on which he is crucified are made of the sincerity and amiability which in no company can he quite reconcile. Happy is he who has discovered beneath all pleasant humors the unity at bottom of candor with goodness, in an Apostle's clause, "speaking the truth in love"! No rare and beautiful monster could stir more surprise and curiosity. It is but shifting the scene from a domestic dwelling to a concert-hall to notice how much sympathetic lying is in all applause. We saw a young man vigorously clap the performance to which he had not listened, and, when the encore took effect, return immediately to his noisy and disturbing engrossment in the young ladies' society from whose impertinent whispering he had only rested for the moment, troubling all who sat near him both with his talk and his sympathetic lie. A true man will not move a finger or lisp a syllable to echo what he does not apprehend and approve. A true man never assents anywise to what is error to him. In the delicious letters of Mendelssohn we read of an application by a distinguished lady made to him to write a piece of music to accompany the somewhat famous lines known as "Napoleon's Midnight Review." The great artist, feeling the untruth to his genius of any such attempt at description in sound, with gentle energy declines the request. He affirms that music is a most sober thing in his thoughts, that notes have their veracity as well as words, and even a deeper relation to reality than any other tongue or dialect of province or people, and that acquiescence in her wishes would be for him an unrighteous abuse of his function. We know a conscientious artist on the organ who would no more perjure his instrument than his lips, but go to the stake sooner than turn his keys into tongues to captivate a meretricious taste or transform one breath of the air under his fingers into sympathetic lying, though thousands should be ready to resound their delight. So was it with the noble Christian Jew, an Israelite of harmony indeed. The most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is direct to the feelings, could not induce him to tell a sympathetic lie. Would that the writers and speakers of plain English, and of their mother-tongue in every vernacular, might take example from the conscientious creator, who would not put a particle of cant into the crooked marks and ruled bars which are such a mystery to the uninitiated, blot with one demi-semi-quaver of falsehood his papers, or leave aught but truth of the heavenly sphere at a single point on any line! Then our sternest utterance with each other would be concord, our common questions and answers more melodiously responsive than chants in great cathedrals, and our lowest whispers like tones caught from angelic harps. For truth and tenderness are not, after all, incompatible; but whoever is falsely fond alone proves himself in the end harsh and rough. The sympathetic lie is of all things most unsympathetic, smoothing and stroking the surface to haunt and kill at the very centre and core. The proclamation from the house-top of what is told in the ear in closets will give more pain than if it were fairly published at first. There is a distinction here to be noted. All truth, or rather all matter of fact, does not, of course, belong to everybody. There are private and domestic secrets, whose promulgation, by no law of duty required, would make the streets of every city and village run with blood. There is a style of speaking, miscalled sincerity, which in mere tattling and tale-bearing, minding others' business, interfering with their relations, impertinently meddling with cases we can neither settle nor understand, and eating over again the forbidden fruit of that tree of knowledge of good and evil planted in the Garden of Eden, whose seed has been scattered through the earth, though having less to do with truth than with the falsehood, to promulgate which artful and malicious combination of facts is one of the Devil's most skilful means, while truth is always no mere fact or circumstance, but a spirit. Sincerity consists in dealing openly with every one in things that concern himself, reserving concerns useless to him, and purely our neighbors' or our own. Husbands and wives, parents and children, fellow-citizens and friends, or strangers, owning but the bond of humanity, let such discrete sentences—if we may use rhetorically a musical word—from your lips afford a sweeter consonance than can vibrate and flow from all the pipes and strings of orchestra or organ. So sympathy and verity shall be at one: mercy and truth shall meet together, righteousness and peace shall kiss each other.

Another form of sympathetic lying appears in a part of the social machinery whose morality has somehow been more strangely and unhappily overlooked,—we mean in letters of introduction. But the falsehood is only by perversion. The letter of introduction is an affair of noble design, to bring together parties really related, to give room for the elective affinities of friendship, to furnish occasion for the comparison of notes to the votaries of science, to extend the privilege of all liberal arts, and promote the offices of a common brotherhood. How much we owe to these little paper messengers for the new treasures of love and learning they have brought! It is hard to tell whose debt to them is greatest, that of the giver, the bearer, or the receiver, or whether, beyond all private benefit and pleasure, their chief result has not been the improvement and refinement of the human race. But, it must be confessed, the letter of introduction is too much fallen and degenerate. Convenience, depredation, the compassing of by-ends, rather than any loving communion, is too often its intent. It savors less of the paradise of affection than of the vulgar wilderness of the world. We are a little afraid of it, when it comes. A worthy man told me he knew not whether to be sorry or glad, when he found a letter addressed to him at the post-office. How does the balance incline, when a man or woman stands before us with a letter of introduction in hand? We eye it with a mistrust that it may turn out to be a tool of torture, serving us only for a sort of mental surgery. Frequently, it has been simply procured, and is but an impudent falsehood on its very face. The writer of it professes an admiration he does not feel for the person introduced, to whose own reading he leaves it magnificently open before its terms of exaggerated compliment can reach him to whom it is sent. What is the reason of this deceit? there is a ground for it, no doubt. "This effect defective comes by cause." The inditer has certainly some sympathy with the bearer he so amply commissions and wordily exalts. This bearer has some distress to be relieved, some faculty to exercise, some institution to recommend, or some ware to dispose of. He that forwards him to us very likely has first had him introduced to himself, has bestowed attention and hospitable fellowship upon him, and now, growing weary of the care and trouble and expense, is very happy to be rid of him at so small a cost as that of passing him on to a distant acquaintance by a letter of introduction, which the holder's business in life is to carry round from place to place through the world! Sometimes dear companions call on us to pay this tax; sometimes those who themselves have no claim on us. But, be it one class or the other, how little they may consider what they demand! Upon what a neglect or misappreciation of values the proceed! Verily we need a new Political Economy written, deeper than that of Malthus or Smith, to inform them. Our precious time, our cordial regards, the diversion of our mind from our regular duties, the neglect of already engrossing relations in our business or profession, the surrender of body and soul, they require for the prey of idlers and strangers! Had our correspondents drawn upon us for a sum of money, had a highwayman bid us stand and deliver our purse, we should not have been so much out of pocket. But we cannot help yielding; there is no excuse or escape. We are under the operation of that most delicate and resistless of powers no successor of Euclid ever explained the principle of, which may be called the social screw. We submit patiently, because we cannot endure to deny to the new-comer the assumed right of him who cruelly turns it, out of reach and out of sight. We know some men, of extraordinary strength of countenance themselves, who have been able to defend their door-stone against an impostor's brazen face. A good householder, when a stage-full of country-cousins came to his door, bade the driver take them to the hotel, and he would willingly pay the bills. But few have the courage thus to board out those who have a staff in their hands to knock at the very gate of their hearts. There would be satisfaction in the utmost amount of this labor and sacrifice, could we have any truth for its condition. But the falsehood has been written down by one whom we can nowise accuse. Alas! there is often as little truth in the entertainer. All together in the matter are walking in a vain show. We are at the mercy of a diviner's wand and a conjurer's spell. We have put on a foolish look of consent and compromise. We join with our new mate in extolling the wrong-doer who has inflicted him upon us. We dare not analyze the base alloy of the composition he conveys, which pretends to be pure gold. We must either act falsely ourselves, or charge falsehood upon others. We prefer the guilt to seeming unkindness; when, if we were perfectly good and wise, we should shake off the coil of deception, refuse insincere favors, and, however infinite and overflowing our benevolence, insist on doing, in any case, only willing and authentic good,—for affection is too noble to be feigned. "If," said Ole Bull, "I kiss my enemy, what have I left for my friend?" We must forgive and love our enemies and all men, and show our love by treating them without dissimulation, but a sublime openness, according to their needs and deserts.

The male or female adventurers, launching with their bag of letters for all their merchandise on the social sea, understand well the potent value, beyond bills of exchange, of the sheets they bear. They may have taken them as an equivalent for some service they have rendered, in discharge of some actual or apparent obligation in the great market limited to no quarter of our towns and no description of articles, but running through every section of human life. Our acceptance of these notes is a commercial transaction, not of the fairest sort. It belongs to a species of trade in which we are made to pay other people's debts, and our dear friends and intimate relations sell us for some song or other which has been melodiously chanted into their own ears. "A new way to pay old debts," indeed! Every part of the bargain or trick of the game is by the main operators well known and availed of for their own behoof. By letter, persons have been introduced into circles where they had no footing, posts for whose responsibilities they were utterly unfit, and trusts whose funds they showed more faculty to embezzle than apply. Such licentious proceedings have good-natured concessions to wrong requests multiplied to the hurt of the commonweal. Let us beware of this kind of sympathetic lie, which ends in robbery, and swindles thousands out of what is more important than material property, for the support of pretenders that are worse than thieves, who are bold enough, like drones, to break into the hive of the busy and eat the honey they never gathered, absorbing to themselves, as far as they can, the courtesy of the useful members of the community by the worst monopoly in the world.

Our treatment of the subject would be partial, if we did not emphasize the advantage of a right use, of this introductory prerogative. What more delightful to remember than that we brought together those who were each other's counterparts? What more beautiful than to have put the deserving in the way of the philanthropic, and illustrated the old law, that, grateful as it is to have our wants supplied, a lofty soul always finds it more blessed to give than to receive, and a boon infinitely greater to exercise beneficent affection than even to be its object? It ill becomes us who write on this theme to put down one unfair or churlish period. We too well remember our own experience in circumstances wherein our only merit was to be innocent recipients of abundant tokens of good-will; and perhaps the familiar instance may have pardon for its recital, in illustration of the mercy which the letter-bearer may not seldom find. An epistle from a mutual acquaintance was our opportunity of intercourse with a venerable bachelor residing in the city of Antwerp. It was so urged upon us, that the least we could do was to present it, expecting only a few minutes' agreeable conversation. Shall we ever forget the instant welcome that beamed from his benignant face, or how he honored the draft upon him by immediately calling upon all the members of our travelling-party? how literally, against all our expostulations, he gave himself up to us, attending us to picture-galleries and zoological gardens, insisting on disbursing the entrance-fee for us all, with our unavoidable allowance at the moment, and, on our exaction of a just reckoning with him at last, declining to name the sum, on the unanswerable plea of an old man's poor and failing memory! "Does the old man still live?" Surely he does the better life in heaven, if his gray locks on earth are under the sod, and it is too late for these poor lines to reach his eyes, for our sole repayment. Without note, but only chance introduction, a similar case of disinterested bounty in Liverpool from one of goodness undiscriminating as the Divine, which gives the sun and rain to all, stood in strange contrast with the reception of a Manchester manufacturer, almost whose only manifestation in reply to the document we tendered was a sort of growl that we could see mills in Lowell like those under his own control. Perhaps, from his shrewd old head, as he kept his seat at his desk, like a sharp-shooter on the watch and wary for the foe, he only covered us with the surly weapon of his tongue in the equitable way for which we have here been contending ourselves! Certainly we were quite satisfied, if the Englishman was.

But printed lies, as well as written, are largely sympathetic. We are bitter against the press; and surely it needs a greater Luther for its reformer. But its follies are ours; its corruptions belong to its patrons. The editor of a paper edits the mind of those that take it. He cannot help being in a sort of close communion. Perhaps he mainly borrows the very indignation, not so very pure and independent, with which he reproves some ingenuous satirist of what may appear indecent in our fashions of amusement, or unbecoming in the relations of the sexes or the habits of the young. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau." He is two and more, as we all are, while he is one, and must not be blamed on his own score alone. The London "Times," already mentioned, is called the Thunderer; but, like the man behind the scenes at the theatre with his machinery, it thunders as it is told. How sympathetic are the countless brood of falsehoods respecting our country in foreign publications is evident from the cases, too few, of periodicals which, with the same means of information, rise to a noble accuracy and justice. While the more virulent, like the "Saturday Review," servile to its peculiar customers, make a show of holding out against the ever more manifest truth, others, among which is even the "Times" itself, learn the prudence of an altered style. When the wind is about to change, an uncertain fluttering and swinging to and fro may be observed in the vanes. So do many organs prove what pure indicators they are, as they shake in the breeze of public opinion. "Stop my paper" is a cry whose real meaning is for the constituency which the paper represents.

It is a more shameful illustration of the same weakness, when the pens of literary men, not dependent on local support, are subsidized by the prejudice or sold to the pride and wealth of the society in which they live. "I believe in testifying," once said a great man; and we have, among the philosophic and learned, noble witnesses for the equity of our national case. But what a spectacle of degraded functions, when poets, historians, and religious thinkers bow the knee to an aristocracy so vilely proud to stretch forth its hand of fellowship to a slaveholding brotherhood beyond the sea! We need not denounce them. The ideas they pretend to stand for hold them in scorn. The imagination whose pictures they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there was a grand old republican in the realm of letters, John Milton by name, whose shade must be terrible to their thoughts. Let them beware of making of themselves a public shame. The great revenge of years will turn into a mere trick of literature the prose and verse of all not inspired by devotion to humanity, zeal for the cause of the oppressed, and a hearty love of truth, while every covering of lies shall be torn away. They who have despised our free institutions, and prophesied our downfall, and gloated by anticipation over the destruction of our country, to get the lease of a hundred years more to their own lordship of Church and State, and have put their faith in the oppressive Rebels trying to build an empire on the ruins of the Ten Commandments, are as blind to discern the laws of human nature as they are awkward to raise the horoscope of events. This Western Continent, under God, may it please the despots, is not going to barbarism and desolation. That good missionary of freedom as well as religion, whom New England sent to California in the person of Thomas Starr King, writes us that Mount Shasta is ascertained to be higher than Mont Blanc. Some other elevations than of the surface of the globe, in this hemisphere, the Transatlantics may yet behold.

The pulpit is but a sympathetic deceiver, when it violates the truth it is set to defend. All its lies are echoes of the avarice and inhumanity sitting in the pews; and when, in the rough old figure, it is a dumb dog that will not bark at the robber or warn us of danger, the real mutes, whom its silence but copies, are those demure men below who seem to listen to its instructions.

We are astonished to find a liar in the lightning of heaven over the telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military movements and fortified posts and the numbers of dead and wounded on either side. Kinglake calls the telegraph a device by which a clerk dictates to a nation. Who but the nation, or some part of it, dictates to the clerk? He does not control, but records, the sentiment of the community in all his invented facts; and when we hear the click or read the strange dots, we want some trustworthy voucher or responsible human auditor even of these electric accounts.

But, creatures of sympathy, needy dependants on approbation, as we are, shall we surrender to all or any of these lies? No,—there is a sympathy of truth, to whose higher court and supreme verdict we must appeal. Before it let us stand ourselves, perpetual witnesses of the very truth of God in our breast. Said the lion-hearted Andrew Jackson, "When I decide on my course, I do not ask what people will think, but look into my own heart for guidance, believing that all brave men will agree with me."

"As the minister began on the subject of Slavery, I left the church," said a respectable citizen to a modest woman, of whose consent with him he felt sure.

"And did the minister go on?" she gently inquired.

"Yes, he went on," the mistaken citizen replied.

So, in this land, let us go on in the way of justice and truth we have at last begun. Let us have no more sympathetic, however once legal, lies for oppression and wrong. We shall be as good as a thousand years old, when we are through our struggle. For the respect of Europe let us have no anxiety. It will come cordially or by constraint, upon the victory of the right and the reinstating of our manhood by the divine law, to the discouragement of all iniquity at home or abroad. Our success will be a signal for all the tyrannies, in which the proud and strong have been falsely banded together to crush the ignorant and lowly, to come down. The domineering political and ecclesiastical usurpers of exclusive privilege will no longer give and take reciprocal support against the rising of mankind than the Roman augurs could at last keep one another in countenance. Let us go on, through dark omens as well as bright, and suffer ourselves to have no doubting day. Let us show that something besides a monarchy in this world can stand. On disbelievers and obstructers let us have companion. They cannot live contented, and it is not quite safe for them to die. The path of our progress opens clear. Let us not admit the idea of failure. To think of failing is to fail. As it was with the sick before their Saviour of old, only our faith can make us whole.

* * * * *

SOMETHING ABOUT BRIDGES.

Instinctively, Treason, in this vast land, aimed its first blow at the Genius of Communication,—the benign and potent means and method of American civilization and nationality. The great problem Watt and Fulton, Clinton and Morse so gloriously solved, a barbaric necessity thus reduces back to chaos; and not the least sad and significant of the bulletins whereby the most base of civic mutinies finds current record is that entitled, "Destruction of the Bridges"; and (melancholy contrast!) simultaneously we hear of constructive energy in the same direction, on the Italian peninsula,—an engineer having submitted to Victor Emmanuel proposals for throwing a bridge across the Straits of Messina, "binding Scylla to Charybdis, and thus clinching Italian unity with bonds of iron." Bonds of nationality, in more than a physical sense, indeed, are bridges: even cynical Heine found an endeared outlook to his native Rhine on the bastion of a familiar bridge; Tennyson makes one an essential feature of his English summer picture, wherein forever glows the sweet image of the "Gardener's Daughter"; and Bunyan found no better similitude for Christian's passage from Time to Eternity than the "river where there is no bridge."

The primitive need, the possible genius, the science, and the sentiment of a bridge endear its aspect and associations beyond those of any other economical structure. There is, indeed, something genially picturesque about a mill, as Constable's pencil and Tennyson's muse have aptly demonstrated; there is an artistic miracle possible in a sculptured gate, as those of Ghiberti so elaborately evidence; science, poetry, and human enterprise consecrate a light-house; sacred feelings hallow a spire; and mediaeval towers stand forth in noble relief against the sunset sky: but around none of these familiar objects cluster the same thoroughly human associations which make a bridge attractive to the sight and memory. In its most remote suggestion it typifies man's primal relation to Nature, his first instinctive effort to circumvent or avail himself of her resources; indeed, he might take his hint of a bridge from Nature herself,—her fallen monarchs of the forest athwart a stream, "the testimony of the rocks," the curving shores, cavern roofs, and pendent branches, and the prismatic bow in the heavens, which a poet well calls "a bridge to tempt the angels down."

A bridge of the simplest kind is often charmingly effective as a landscape-accessory: there is a short plank one in a glen of the White Mountains, which, seen through a vista of woodland, makes out the picture so aptly that it is sketched by every artist who haunts the region. What lines of grace are added to the night view of a great city by the lights on the bridges! what subtile principles enter into the building of such a bridge as the Britannia, where even the metallic contraction of the enormous tubes is provided for by supporting them on cannon-balls! how venerable seems the most graceful of Tuscan bridges, when we remember it was erected in the fifteenth century,—and the Rialto, when we think that it was designed by Michel Angelo! and how signal an instance is it of the progressive application of a true principle in science, that the contrivance whereby the South-Americans bridge the gorges of their mountains, by a pendulous causeway of twisted osiers and bamboo,—one of which, crossed by Humboldt, was a hundred and twenty feet long,—is identical with that which sustains the magnificent structure over the Niagara River! In a bridge the arch is triumphal, both for practical and commemorative ends: unknown to the Greeks and Egyptians, even the ancient Romans, it is said by modern architects, did not appreciate its true mechanical principle, but ascribed the marvellous strength thereof to the cement which kept intact their semicircle. In Caesar's "Commentaries," the bridge transit and vigilance form no small part of military tactics,—boats and baskets serving the same purpose in ancient and modern warfare. The Church of old originated and consecrated bridges; religion, royalty, and art celebrate their advent; the opening of Waterloo Bridge is the subject of one of the best pictures of a modern English painter; and Cockney visitors to the peerless Bridge of Telford still ask the guide where the Queen stood at its inauguration. But it is when we turn from the historical and scientific to the familiar and personal that we realize the spontaneous interest attached to a bridge. It is as a feature of our native landscape, the goal of habitual excursions, the rendezvous, the observatory, the favorite haunt or transit, that it wins the gaze and the heart. There the musing angler sits content; there the echoes of the horse's hoofs rouse to expectancy the dozing traveller; there the glad lover dreams, and the despairing wretch seeks a watery grave, and the song of the poet finds a response in the universal heart,—

"How often, oh, how often, In the days that have gone by, Have I stood on that bridge at midnight, And gazed on the wave and sky!"

One of the most primitive tokens of civilization is a bridge; and yet no artificial object is more picturesquely associated with its ultimate symbols: the fallen tree whereon the pioneer crosses a stream in the wilderness is not more significant of human isolation than the fragmentary arch in an ancient city of the vanished homo of thousands. Thus, by its necessity and its survival, a bridge suggests the first exigency and the last relic of civilized life. The old explorers of our Western Continent record the savage expedients whereby water-courses were passed,—coils of grape-vine carried between the teeth of an aboriginal swimmer and attached to the opposite bank, a floating log, or, in shallow streams, a series of stepping-stones; and the most popular historian of England, when delineating to the eye of fancy the hour of her capital's venerable decay, can find no more impressive illustration than to make a broken arch of London Bridge the observatory of the speculative reminiscent.

The bridge is, accordingly, of all economical inventions, that which is most inevitable to humanity, signalizing the first steps of man amid the solitude of Nature, and accompanying his progress through every stage of civic life: its crude form makes the wanderer's heart beat in the lonely forest, as a sign of the vicinity or the track of his kind; and its massive remains excite the reverent curiosity of the archaeologist, who seeks among the ruins of Art for trophies of a by-gone race. Few indications of Roman supremacy are more striking than the unexpected sight of one of those bridges of solid and symmetrical masonry which the traveller in Italy encounters, when emerging from a mountain-pass or a squalid town upon the ancient highway. The permanent method herein apparent suggests an energetic and pervasive race whose constructive instinct was imperial; such an evidence of their pathway over water is as suggestive of national power as the evanescent trail of the savage is of his casual domain. In the bridge, as in no other structure, use combines with beauty by an instinctive law; and the stone arch, more or less elaborate in detail, is as essential now to the function and the grace of a bridge as when it was first thrown, invincible and harmonious, athwart the rivers Caesar's legions crossed.

As I stood on the scattered planks which afford a precarious foothold amid the rapids of St. Anthony, methought these frail bridges of hewn timber accorded with the reminiscence of the missionary pioneer who discovered and named the picturesque waters more than an elaborate and ancient causeway. Even those long, inelegant structures which lead the pedestrian over our own Charles River, or the broad inlets of the adjacent bay, have their peculiar charm as the scene of many a gorgeous autumnal sunset and many a patient "constitutional" walk. It is a homely, but significant proverb, "Never find fault with the bridge that carries you safe over." What beautiful shadows graceful bridges cast, when the twilight deepens and the waves are calm! how mysteriously sleep the moonbeams there! what a suggestive vocation is a toll-keeper's' patriarchs in this calling will tell of methodical and eccentric characters known for years.

Bridges have their legends. There is one in Lombardy whence a jilted lover sprang with his faithless bride as she passed to church with her new lover; it is yet called the "Bridge of the Betrothed." An old traveller, describing New-York amusements, tells us of a favorite ride from the city to the suburban country, and says,—"In the way there is a bridge about three miles distant, which you always pass as you return, called the 'Kissing Bridge,' where it is part of the etiquette to salute the lady who has put herself under your protection."[F] A curious lawsuit was lately instituted by the proprietor of a menagerie who lost an elephant by a bridge giving way beneath his unaccustomed weight; the authorities protested against damages, as they never undertook to give safe passage to so large an animal.

The office of a bridge is prolific of metaphor, whereof an amusing instance is Boswell's comparison of himself, when translating Paoli's talk to Dr. Johnson, to a "narrow isthmus connecting two continents." It has been aptly said of Dante's great poem, that, in the world of letters, it is a mediaeval bridge over that vast chasm which divides classical from modern times. All concliating authors bridge select severed intelligences, and even national feeling: as Irving's writings brought more near to each other the alienated sympathies of England and America, and Carlyle made a trysting-place for British and German thought; as Sydney Smith's talk threw a suspension-bridge from Conservative to Reformer, and Lord Bacon's (in the hour of bitter alienation between Crown and Commons) "reconciling genius spanned the dividing stream of party."

How isolated and bewildered are villagers, when, after a tempest, the news spreads that a freshet has carried away the bridge! Every time we shake hands, we make a human bridge of courtesy or love; and that was a graceful fancy of one of our ingenious writers to give expression to his thoughts in "Letters from under a Bridge." With an eye and an ear for Nature's poetry, the gleam of lamps from a bridge, the figures that pass and repass thereon, the rush and the lull of waters beneath, the perspective of the arch, the weather-stains on the parapet, the sunshine and the cloud-shadows around, are phases and sounds fraught with meaning and mystery.