The last great improvement in connection with the screw remains to be noticed, namely, lining the "bushings" and "bearings" with lignum-vitae,—the invention of Mr. Penn, of Greenwich, near London.

The lignum-vitae is introduced in the manner shown in the drawing. In connection therewith, it must be said, that the length and diameter of bearings has been increased far beyond the proportions of former years. The "brasses" are bored out about three-sixteenths of an inch larger than the shaft; then the recesses are slotted out for the reception of the wooden strips. If care be taken with this part of the operation, any number of strips can be supplied ready fitted, and to put in a set of spare strips becomes a short and simple operation.



Strange as it appears, these wooden bearings are far more durable than those of metal, and in some ships they have endured for years without any perceptible wear in those parts which, previously to this invention, had occasioned so much trouble and expense. But for this important discovery, it is thought by some of the most competent engineers that they would have been compelled to abandon the use of the screw in heavy ships.

The Napolon, the type of the new steam-ships of the line in the French navy, is a good illustration of a first-class, full-powered steamer.

Her dimensions are as follows:—

FT. IN. Length extreme. 262 6.40 Length at load-line. 234 0.94 Beam. 53 8.38 Height between decks. 6 8.72 Height of lower port sill. 7 2.63 Depth of hold. 26 9.34 Deep-load draft. 25 3 Immersed cross section, sq. ft. 1063.48 Displacement. tons. 6050 Diameter of cylinders. 8 2.45 Length of stroke. 5 3.06 Diameter of propeller. (4 bladed) 19 0.70 Pitch " " mean) 37 11

She has eight boilers, each having five furnaces, consuming, at full speed, (12.14 knots,) 143 tons of coal per day, for which she stows five days' supply. The boilers and engines occupy eighty-two feet in the length of the ship.

The trial of this ship has established the practicability of adapting a propeller to a ship of the largest class, so as to insure great speed, and constitute a most effective man-of-war for certain purposes and in certain situations; but when the great weight of the engines is considered, and the large space they occupy in the vessel,—thereby diminishing the stowage of supplies,—and further, that, after the coal is exhausted, the ninety-gun ship has but the sail of a sixty-gun ship to rely upon, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion, that, however useful such a vessel may be for short passages,[1] and in those seas in which her supplies of coal and provisions may be constantly replenished, her sphere of action must be very limited, and she could not be relied upon for the long cruises and various services on which an ordinary line-of-battle ship is employed.

[Footnote 1: For debarking a regiment or two of Zouaves on the shores of the Adriatic or upon the coast of Ireland.]

A ship constructed on the plan of the Napolon, for the sake of gaining a speed of twelve knots per hour for the distance of about two thousand two hundred miles, is compelled to sacrifice a great part of her efficiency in several most important particulars.

In time of war, at short distances from port, for the defence of bays or harbors or the Florida channel, for the speedy transport of troops to an adjacent coast, or to force a blockade, such a vessel would undoubtedly be a most valuable addition to our navy: but her employment must necessarily be confined to such circumstances and such situations; for should she unluckily fall in with an enemy's squadron, with her coal expended, or her machinery rendered useless by any of the numerous accidents to which steam-machinery is so constantly exposed, with her comparatively light rig, and want of stability in consequence of losing so great a weight of coals, she would hardly prove a very formidable opponent.

Therefore, while admitting the importance and necessity of providing for special service a small class of fast, full-power steamers, it is submitted that the auxiliary screw-steamer is the description of ship to which the largest and best consideration should be devoted; for to the nation possessing the most efficient fleet of such vessels must belong the dominion of the sea. And while their cost is counted, let it at the same time be remembered that their value can be estimated only by the character of the service they may render, and that their capacity for aggression abroad makes them the best defence at home.

Having briefly referred to the various views entertained in regard to the steam-power with which the navy should be furnished, it will be seen that a difference of opinion on this important subject may most reasonably be entertained.

None can doubt the advantages of celerity to a man-of-war, yet many believe it would be too dearly purchased by the sacrifice of space to such an extent as would require supplies to be often replenished; as this necessity would in war confine the operations of the navy to our own shores.

On the other hand, it is admitted, that, without high speed, a ship of war cannot exercise many of her most important functions,—that she can neither choose an engagement, protect a convoy, nor enforce a blockade.

The best experience affirms the policy of giving to our cruisers as large steampower as is consistent with a due development of all other warlike qualities; for what would avail the superior armament of a ship, if the option of fighting or flying remain with her adversary, which must be the case when the latter commands higher speed? The introduction of improved ordnance, throwing heavy shells with great precision at long ranges, gives increased importance to celerity; for in any future fleet-fight, victory should belong to that flag having at command a steam-squadron of superior speed, which may thereby be concentrated upon any point without having been long under fire.

May not the command of a maximum speed of thirteen knots be obtained from the machinery now employed for a maximum speed of ten knots? It evidently may, and with great economy, too, by the simple introduction of artificial draft, and the use of steam of higher pressure, when requiring the highest speed. At present, in our men-of-war, the boilers are proportioned for natural draft, burning about twelve pounds of coal per square foot of grate per hour, and for a steam-pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch. If, then, the boilers be proportioned to burn at the maximum, with blowers, say twenty-two pounds of coal to the square foot of grate, and to generate steam of forty pounds to the square inch, we shall double the power developed by the machinery, and consequently derive from it the same speed that could be attained without blowers from double the machinery; while the natural draft and the usual pressure of fifteen pounds would give sufficient speed for ordinary service. The inconvenience of the higher pressure with blowers could well be endured for the short and occasional periods during which they would be required.

To create a perfect screw-frigate, a ship with sail-power complete, and efficient for any service that may be required, the endeavor should be made—by getting rid of every dispensable article of weight or bulk, and without reducing supplies below three months' provisions and six weeks' water—to find space and displacement for an engine of sufficient force to drive her thirteen knots an hour, together with at least ten days' full consumption of fuel; and this, it is believed, might be successfully accomplished in ships of the dimensions of the Wabash, beginning with a judicious reduction of spare spars, spare sails, and spare gear, and by the addition of blowers to their present machinery: a subject which should immediately receive the earnest consideration of a commission of the most intelligent officers.

Having fixed upon the proportions of hull and spars, the form of propeller, and the plan of engine, a cautious discrimination should be exercised in multiplying the types of either. Besides economy, many other advantages would flow from a judicious regard to similarity in build; as it would permit us to relieve our ships of many of the spare spars with which they are incumbered, and we should probably not again hear of suspending the operations of a frigate thousands of miles away, until a crank or rod could be sent to her; because, when ships of the same class are cruising together, by a careful distribution of spare spars and machinery among them, it is hardly probable that damage would be sustained, or loss of spars or "break down" occur, which might not be remedied by the resources of the squadron.

On the other hand, this system not be carried to a Chinese extreme, lest we follow too long a false direction,—thus losing the advantage of improvements constantly being made. For such is the change in all things pertaining to maritime war, that neither model of hull, plan of engine, nor mould of ordnance is best, unless of the latest creation. True progress will be most judiciously sought in not departing too suddenly and widely from the established order.



WHITE MICE.

A great many circumstances led me to decide on leaving the convenient boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail: a house correctly described as containing several "modern improvements": improperly, as being "in the immediate vicinity of all the places of public amusement." For, as the Central Park of New York is a place of public amusement, so likewise is Barnum's Museum; and these two places being at a distance of about five miles from each other, how could any one house be in the immediate vicinity of both? But it was not upon this incompatibility that any of my objections were founded.

If I have a prejudice, it is against being talked at instead of to. Now Mrs. Silvernail, who, like the katydid of the poplar-tree, if small, was shrill, had a way of conveying instructions to her boarders by means of parables ostensibly directed at Catharine, the tall Irish serving-maid, but in reality meant for the ear of the obnoxious boarder who had lately transgressed some important statute of the house, made and provided to meet a case or cases.

A landing-place on the stairs was usually the platform selected for the delivery of a monologue, in which Catharine was always assumed to be the person addressed; although I have known instances in which that "excellent wench" was, at the time of being so conferred with, in the grocery at the corner, about half a block distant, as I could see from the window where I sat and viewed her protracting her doorway dalliance with Jeremiah Tomaters, the grocer's efficient young man.

"Catharine," my landlady would say in a loudish whisper, close by a malefactor's chamber-door, and probably when Catharine was yet far down the street,—"Catharine, who let the water in the bathroom run over just now? If the slippers he left behind him a'n't Mr. Jennings's, I declare! Boarders must be warned an' watched, elseways we shall hev all in the house afloat, 'cepting the stoves an' flat-irons, by-'n'-by. Somebody at Mrs. Moyler's acted so, and the house was like a roarin' sea, with the baby adrift in his little cradle, and the roaches a-swimmin' round. Oh, dear!"

Now Mr. Jennings was the serious boarder, who lodged in the room just over mine: a man who, from general indications, had never had a bath in his life; certainly he had never troubled the waters in that house. I was the supposed delinquent, and at me the parable was levelled.

"Catharine, whose pass-key was that you found in the door? It's a mussy we wasn't all a-murdered and a-plundered in cold blood, by the light o' the moon! Mr. Jennings's night-key it must have been, to be sure! Boarders must be warned and watched. When Mrs. Toyler's nephew's night-key was found in the door of Number Forty-Seven, the boarders all went off at daylight in an omnibus, takin' away custom and character from the house forever."

Now Mr. Jennings, the serious boarder, was always in bed and asleep long before latch-key time came round; and even supposing he ever had let himself in by means of that mischievous little convenience, he would as soon have thought of taking the door up to bed with him as of leaving the key in it. The parable was intended for the hearing of a young man who occupied the room opposite mine, and who, being connected with clubs, came home nobody ever knew when or in what condition, but had red eyes o' mornings and a general odor of the convivial kind.

Then, again, Mrs. Silvernail had a way of being always about the doors of the rooms, and a faculty, as I thought, of hovering near several of them at one and the same moment. There are men who will turn the least promising circumstance to advantage,—even that of being listened at through a keyhole, while they discourse to themselves about affairs connected with their most cherished and secret designs. One Captain Dunnitt, who lived in the house before I came, adroitly made his account of this eavesdropping propensity of the landlady, by settling his weekly bill with a silver-mounted pistol, instead of the dollars justly due. He had been a tragedian as well as a captain, and was saturated with Shakspeare and other bards to a far greater amount than with money; and when his week came round, he used to stride up and down his room with much gnashing of teeth and other stage indications of distress, finally settling down into a chair before the table, on which he would place and replace a packet of letters and a wisp of unromantic-looking hair. Then he would take the little silver pistol from his breast, and, after the usual soliloquy of "To be or not to be," or something equally to the purpose, would point it at his temples just as the landlady came bursting into the room, begging him for all sakes not to "ruin the character of her second-best room, and the walls newly painted at that!" Remorse would then double up the manly form of Captain Dunnitt, who would fall on his knees before the landlady,—"his benefactress! his better angel!"—and then arrangements would be entered into by which he was not to commit suicide for the present, but could avail himself of the landlady's indulgence and wait for "that remittance," which was always coming, but which never came.

But there were more serious objections, even than a landlady of shrill parables and an inquiring turn of mind, to my prolonging the delights of a residence at the first-class boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail. Not the least of these was the fact of its being a boarding-house,—a community. In such communities, from the inevitable intercourse over the social board, your circle of acquaintance is always liable to be extended rather than improved. In them there is no escape from the disinterested offers of those who would be your perpetual friends. I am still under lasting obligations to a man who, at a boarding-house in which I sojourned for but three days, forced on me a pipeful of an extremely choice and luxurious kind of tobacco, to dilate on the properties of which he came and smoked about a quarter of a pound of it in my room that very evening, and far on into the morning light. His goodness is the more impressed upon my memory, because, on the same occasion, he drank the greater part of the contents of a large willow-bound bottle of old St. Croix rum, which I had just received from a friend who had imported it direct. Then, in boarding-house communities, one's magnetism is as much at fault as that of a ship sailing up a river whose rock-bound shores are impregnated with iron elements. I knew a man who was over-magnetized to the extent of matrimony by the lady of the house,—a widow, and a shrew. He hated, or at least professed to hate her, and had ridiculous stories about her to no end; but she married him, and he still lives. Another, of a rather unsociable turn, rejected the proffered civilities of all his fellow-boarders who ever came to offer him rations of curious tobacco or to assist him in performing a libation of old and valuable Hollands. The only one of the party to whom he ever "cottoned" was the latest comer, a smoothed-out, blandulose kind of man, who smoked up all his cunning cigars, made sad havoc among his Hollanders of gin, departed from that house in an unexpected manner and his friend's best trousers, in the pockets of which he had bestowed that friend's rarest gems and gold, and is now serving out a term allotted to him in the State Prison, in recognition of the remarkable abilities displayed by him in the character of what the police call a "confidence man."

And yet there are more objectionable boarding-house acquaintances than people who insist upon sharing with you their friendship, be they "confidence men" or not. I suppose we may allow, in these advanced times, that it is something like magnetism which decides the question of affinity and its reverse. But, in granting this, I will take the liberty of observing that external and palpable facts have a considerable effect in directing the currents of magnetism. For example, and to adopt the language of scientific men, the insignificant circumstance of a person habituating himself to the partial deglutition of his knife, while partaking of food, may produce antipathetic emotions on the part of others, whom prejudice or superstition has led to regard the knife as an article designed for cutting only. This kind of outrage I allude to merely for the purpose of illustrating a case. In first-class boarding-houses, like that of Mrs. Silvernail, such rusticities have long since become traditional, and of the things that have passed away; and, indeed, so particular was that lady with regard to her knives, that, had a boarder swallowed even a part of one, he would undoubtedly have heard the deed alluded to through the keyhole of his chamber-door on the following day, in the form of a parable having for its hero the justified Mr. Jennings, our serious young man.

If external and palpable circumstances, then, are admitted to have a decided effect upon streams of magnetism, I suppose we may assume that they have also a certain power of determining impressions by themselves, without the intervention of any of the more subtile agencies whatever. The granting of this postulate will put me on quite easy terms with regard to the very positive objection entertained by me towards a certain Mr. Dsol Arcubus, who, by provision of an immutable Medo-Persic edict promulgated by Mrs. Silvernail, occupied the chair next mine at the first-rate table of that rigid expounder of boarding-house law.

Mr. Dsol Arcubus, a young man of some three or four and twenty, had no special nationality about him from which one could guess how he came by his rather uncommon names. He was reputed to be learned, particularly in the modern languages; had a profusion of long, wild hair of a greenish-drab hue, which matched his complexion exactly,—this prevalent tint being infused also into the cornea or "white" of his eye,—and, in physical proportions, was of weedy and unwholesome growth. He was not a young man of cheerful disposition. On the contrary, his deportment at table, where alone his fellow-boarders had any opportunity of observing him, was such as to induce a very general belief that his mind must have been affected by some terrible calamity; and his presence, indeed, was looked upon as undesirable by many of the guests, whose health had begun to suffer seriously from the manner in which Arcubus used to groan between his instalments of food. Sometimes, in the interval between the soup and the solids, he would lean his elbows upon the table, and, burying his face in his hands, so that his long, sad hair swept the board, would abandon himself for a brief space to private despondency, until the boiled leg of mutton brought with it a necessity for renewed action.

Nor was the social feeling of distrust of this unhappy young man allayed when the party learned, through a boarder of detective instincts, that Mr. Dsol Arcubus was an enthusiast in scientific pursuits, and that the "romance of a poor young man," as shadowed out by him, was no romance at all, but an unpleasant reality. Toxicology was the branch of science to which Mr. Arcubus had for some time past been devoting his mind. For fourteen hours a day he worked assiduously in the laboratory of an eminent analytical chemist, whose practice in connection with the coroner was of a flourishing and increasing kind, owing to the growing taste for suicide, and the preference given to poisons over any other means for accomplishing that irrevocable wrong. In this chamber of horrors,—a court of which the tests were the stern, incorruptible ordinances of Nature,—he had already gone steadily through a course which gave him a mastery over the secrets of the relative poisons, with which he laughed secretly now, and played as securely as a child might with a dog-rose of whose thorns he had been made aware. But of late, his haggard features, and the start with which he would wake into life when a guest haply plucked a flower from the bouquets on the table, or when the handmaiden came round to him with a dish of leguminous vegetables, could readily have been traced by a clairvoyant to associations connected with the ghastly belladonna and with the deadly bean of St. Ignatius the Martyr. For Mr. Arcubus had now arrived at the investigation of the positive poisons,—a fact which might have revealed itself to the man of science by the general narcotico-acrid expression into which he had settled down bodily; while the most casual observer might have gathered from his incoherent contributions to the table-talk that some noxious drug was envenoming the cup of his life.

He had a way of thinking aloud, and, as his thoughts always ran on the subject of his studies, the expression of them sometimes dovetailed curiously with the general conversation.

"Miss Rocket will not come down to dinner, poor thing!" said Mrs. Silvernail, in her choicest table-manner. "She has lost her beautiful Angola kitten. It slipped into the glass globe, this morning, among the gold-fishes, and was drowned."

"Digested in water, several of its constituents are dissolved," said Mr. Arcubus, in a husky voice, looking wildly at the picture on his plate.

"You have a spcialit for puddings, I perceive, Madam," remarked a smiling old gentleman, a new-comer, addressing himself to the hostess; "may I ask now of what this very excellent one is composed?"

"Sulphate of lime, potash, oil, resin, extractive matter, gluten, et cetera, et cetera," put in Mr. Arcubus, still following out his train of thought.

"During the process of evaporation, a black substance is precipitated," continued he; and at that very moment, the small colored boy, running to pour out some water for the wild boarder, who had just arrived in an excited condition from a rowing match, caught his foot in the carpet, and came to the floor with a crash.

"Black oxide of Mercury, called Ethiops per se," pursued Mr. Arcubus, grappling with his tangled hair.

"Do just try a drop or two of this Hollands of mine in that iced water; it is positively dangerous to drink it so," said an attentive boarder to Mrs. Silvernail, who certainly did look warm.

"Absorbs oxygen readily, when brought to a red heat," said Mr. Arcubus, abstractedly, as he pulled at his long fingers and made their joints crack.

"Who is the tall lady who dined here yesterday with Miss Rocket, and talked so enthusiastically about woman's rights?" inquired the serious boarder of Mrs. Silvernail.

"Prepared by deflagration in a crucible, one part of nitre with two of powdered tartar," proceeded Mr. Arcubus.

"What do you think of that sample of mixed tobacco I gave you to try?" asked the wild boarder of another, whom Mrs. Silvernail used to speak of with fear and doubt. "When heated, it readily sublimes in the form of a dense white vapor," said Mr. Arcubus, confidently, "disagreeably affecting the nose and eyes."

"I hope you are not going to bring another dog into the house, Mr. Puglock," remonstrated Mrs. Silvernail, addressing the wild boarder, to whose conversation she had been lending a sharp ear. "Re'lly now, I must restrict the number of dogs; we have three here already, I believe."

"There is a strong analogy between the virus injected into wounds made by the teeth of a rabid dog and that found in the poison-apparatus of venomous snakes," brought in Mr. Arcubus, diving his fork truculently into a ripe tomato.

This last observation of Mr. Arcubus, together with the fact that the blade of his knife had manifestly turned black, while all the other blades at table were as bright as silver, decided me. I packed up my portmanteau and writing-case that evening, and, having settled with my wondering landlady, to whom I accounted for my sudden departure by pleading expediency as to important affairs, took leave of that estimable widow, and drove away to a distant hotel, from which I sallied forth early next morning to look for lodgings,—furnished lodgings for single gentlemen, without board,—for against boarding-houses I had set my face forever.

A peculiar feature of life in lodgings in New York, as in other large cities, is the incomparable solitude attainable in that blessed state of deliverance from promiscuous "board." One may dwell for a twelvemonth in lodgings for single gentlemen, without incurring the obligation of knowing by sight, or even by name, the lodger who occupies the very room opposite to his, on the same landing. Fifty lodgers may have successively lived in those "apartments" during the twelve months, on the same terms of perfect isolation from one who would rather mind his own business than make any inquiries regarding theirs. And so it is, that, of all the stage-pieces which have achieved popularity in our day, none is more faithful to the facts than the often-repeated one of "Box and Cox"; yet, but for the exigencies of the drama, which, of course, has for its principal object the development of a plot, there would have been no necessity whatever for bringing Box on a footing of acquaintance with Cox,—still less for attributing to either of them an idea of his landlady's name.

For several months I lived contentedly in the house selected by me, up one pair of stairs, in a room looking out into a busy street,—a street so narrow, that the trees at one side of it, whenever a reviving breeze brought with it a subject for greeting and congratulation, shook hands in quite a friendly manner with those at the other. To illustrate the isolation of a residence in these lodgings, I may as well state, that, during all the time of my sojourn there, I never arrived at the knowledge of my landlady's name. It was not graven upon the house-door, and, as a knowledge of it was of no immediate consequence to any of my occupations, nor likely to be, I never asked about it from the old woman who kept the rooms in order, and to whom I seldom spoke, except upon the weekly occasion of handing to her the amount due to the landlady, with whom I never had any interview after the day I agreed with her for the lodgings. I believe there was a landlord,—if that be the proper term to apply to a man who is the husband of a landlady, and nothing else. From my window I once observed a man who might have been the landlord, a man of subdued appearance, accompanying the lady of the house to church. Subsequently, as I came in one evening rather earlier than usual, the same person was leaning against the railings by the hall-door, smoking a cigar. He greeted me as I passed in, addressing me in an interrogative manner with one word, the only one I ever heard him utter,—

"Owasyerelthbin?"

To which, as I supposed him to be a foreigner, unacquainted with the English tongue, I replied at random in the only word of German of which I happen to be master,—

"Yaw!"

And this was the only communication I ever had with people of the house, excepting occasional conversations with the dust-colored old woman who cleaned the windows and swept the floors; while, with regard to a dozen or two of lodgers who succeeded each other from time to time in the other disposable rooms of the house, I never saw one of them, nor was acquainted with them otherwise than by footstep,—and that rather infelicitously at one time, in the case of something which went either upon crutches or wooden legs, and which occupied the room immediately over mine. This was in charming contrast with life at Mrs. Silvernail's, in its freedom from parables, and from the uncared-for society of Miss Rocket's guests; likewise from that of the serious and vicious boarders, and above all of the poisonous young man.

A day came for cleaning my windows, and, as it rained heavily, I could not give the old woman a clear stage by going out for a couple of hours, but told her to clean away and be as lively as she could, while I sat there and wrote. Lodgers, she told me, as she polished up the brightening panes, came and went week after week, so fast that she forgot one when another came, and never knew any of their names. She had an eye for character, though, and told me the peculiarities of some of them in a quaint way, nailing her sentences, now and then, with odd, hard words, put in independently of the general text.

"And who lives in the room just under mine? Somebody who raises plants, I see,—unless the green things on the balcony belong to the house."

"A gentleman as keeps emself quite to emself. Lonesome and friendless, I reckon, for he looks but poorly. Plants out queer sasses in boxes all the time, and some of 'em on the balcoany itself. Guess he makes kinder tea of 'em, or root-drink. Decoctifies."

"And who in the room opposite, on this floor?"

"Empty now. Two dark-featured little gentlemen had it for a fortnight,— Jews, I reckon,—and as like one another as two spots of dirt on this 'ere pane of glass. Spoke a hard-biled kind of tongue, and was furriners, I guess. Polyanders."

The vacant room would just suit De Vonville, who had arrived a few days before from abroad. I told him of it, and he came in the next day, bag and baggage, a portion of which latter was curious and uncommon.

De Vonville, with whom I had lived in lodgings two or three years previously, was a Belgian and a savant, and a man of rare companionable qualities besides. Professionally, I believe, he called himself a naturalist. He had already roamed over the greater part of America, North and South, investigating the mysteries of Nature, especially of the animal kingdom, and contributing, as he went, many specimens of rare animals to the principal collections of Europe. His latest adventures took him through Africa and the East, whence he brought to New York a number of living creatures of many species, all of which, however, he had shipped for Havre before I met him, with the exception of two or three of the least disreputable kinds, which he meant to keep about him as pets. The most valued of these treasures were a small animal called a Mangouste, and a cage containing a family of white mice.

These white mice were greatly prized by De Vonville, on account of the rare manner in which they were marked, their paws and muzzles being of a perfect jet black. They were quite tame and familiar; but, on the approach of a cat, or any other cause for alarm, the whole family would concentrate their energies in a very remarkable way into one piercing squeak.

The Mangouste, an animal somewhat resembling a ferret, but more nearly allied to the Nilotic ichneumon of Egypt, was a marvellously lithe and active little creature, perfectly tame, and coming as readily as a dog to his name, "Mungo," except when overfed, when he would sleep sometimes for hours, rolled up at the bottom of his cage, or in some dark corner of the room. There were personal reminiscences connected with Mungo which rendered him particularly valuable to De Vonville, whom he had often saved from the stings of the noxious vermin to be encountered by those who dwell in tents. His instinct was for creeping things, though he looked as if he could have dined contentedly on a brace of white mice. One piece of mischief he committed, during the few days he was allowed to run about the rooms: he gnawed holes at the bottom of all the doors, through which he could let himself in and out. He used to lie in the sun, on my table, as I sat reading; and was generally companionable and trustworthy, notwithstanding his insidious look.

Seeing the interest I took in his small menagerie, De Vonville begged me to undertake the superintendence of it, on his being called away for a brief tour to Baltimore and elsewhere, in pursuance of an engagement to deliver a course of traveller's tales. Numerous were the directions I had from him as to the diet and general treatment most congenial to the constitutions of white mice; and there was implicit confidence expressed, that, for safety, the Mangouste should be kept strictly confined to his cage. There were parrots to be looked after, also, including an extremely vituperative old macaw, any verbal communication with whom laid the advancing party open to all manner of insult and objurgation.

The very first day of my menagerial experience, the Mangouste got out of his cage while I was feeding him, and glided away into dark nooks and garrets unknown. I failed of recovering him by a stalking process among the giddy passes of the upper stairs; nor did he return that day to my often-repeated call; for I vociferated at intervals throughout the day the word "Mungo!" in a manner that must have led the mysterious inhabitants of that silent house to the conclusion that I was a spiritual medium, inviting revelations from the shade of the mighty Park.

A hot, clammy night. No balmy essences arise from the kennels of this hollow street in which I live; whatever comes from that quarter must be malarious, if anything. The windows are thrown open as far as they were made to be thrown, and I get as far out of one of them as I safely can, by tilting my chair back, and extending my legs out into that undefined everywhere called the wide, wide world. The only newspaper within reach of my hand is one I have already looked over, but I glance at it again, reading backwards from the end an account of a terrible poisoning case lately brought to light in England, which I had already read forwards from the beginning. Throwing it away from me in disgust, I reach out my other hand for a book. The one I lay hold of is "Laurel-Water," the melancholy drama of Sir Theodosius Boughton by insidious poisoner killed. I dashed it away, backwards, over my head, and, turning off the gas, abandoned myself to the strange influences that breathed hotly upon me from the clammy vegetation festering in the ropy night-air.

Why do civic wood-rangers choose the ailantus-tree for a bouquet-holder to the close-pent inhabitants of towns? Nothing can be more graceful, certainly, than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem. Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long, feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls away thence along the parapets and in at the windows of the sleepers. Dead-horse chestnut it might reasonably be called, because of its heavy, carrion smell, which, under the influences of a July night, is but too perceptible to the dwellers of streets where it abides. The tree at my window was an ailantus, of stately dimensions, and bounteous in a proportionate enormity of smell; yet it had never before affected me so much as on this night, when I lay dozing in the ghastly gloom. Sleep must have overcome me, for I had a troublous dream or vision of which Poison was the predominant nightmare,—a dream and slumber broken by the convulsive sensation which roused me up as I endeavored in imagination to swallow at one draught the contents of a metal tankard of half-and-half—half laurel-water, and half decoction of henbane—handed to me on a leaden salver by a demon-waiter, with a sprig of hemlock in the third buttonhole of his coat. This Lethean influence could hardly be that of the ailantus-tree alone. What of the plants on the balcony beneath,—the strange, rooty coilers which the mysterious planter sedulously fosters at the glooming of dusk, with a weird watering-pot held forth in a fawn-colored hand?

In a particular condition of the nerves,—say, when a man feels "shaky,"—it takes but little to convince him that anything which may possibly not be all right is to a moral certainty all wrong. To sleep another night in that room, with the windows open,—and who would shut his windows in July?—directly exposed to the exhalations of a rising forest of upas-antiars of Macassar, nurtured by the unwholesome hand of a mysterious vegetarian for purposes unavowed, was no longer to be thought of. De Vonville's room, which was at the back of the house, and had no fuming ailantus by its windows on which to browse nightmares of skunkish flavor, afforded a better climate for a night's rest, notwithstanding the singular ideas which these travelled men, especially naturalists, have of comfort, in a civilized sense. He invariably slept on the floor, converting his room, indeed, into the general semblance of a tent, by divesting it of all the appliances dear to a Christian gentleman, and one who loves to repose as such. Yet there was comparative freshness in that tent-like apartment, as I entered it that night, shutting the door of mine after me, to prevent ailantus and upas-antiar from following in my wake. The little beasts were all sleeping tranquilly in their cages, and the birds on their perches rested quietly, too,—excepting the old macaw, who cursed me in his sleep, as I lit up the gas. But the Mangouste had not returned, nor did I quite regret his absence for the present; because, although highly approving of the culture of four-footed beasts, be they large or small, I have a prejudice against having my jugular vein breathed, at midnight, by small animals of the weasel tribe,—an act of which Mungo, probably, would have been incapable. His relations will do such things, however, and newspapers recording appalling instances of it may be found.

Shutting the door, I turned the gas down to a mere spark, and stretched my weary limbs on the mat which served the travelled man for a bed, drawing over me a gauze-like fabric, which, I suppose, answers in tropical countries all the purposes of the more voluminous "bed-clothes" of ours. Sleep soon came upon me,—a heavy, but unquiet sleep, in which the same influences haunted me as those I felt when slumbering at the window. The malaria from the trees was there, and the planter of the balcony watering henbane and hellebore with boiling aquafortis; likewise the demon-waiter, with his leaden salver and poisoned tankard, wearing an ophidian smile on his features and a fresh sprig of hemlock in his third buttonhole.

How long I slept thus I know not. Once I had a vague sense of the Mangouste gliding across me, but it was only part of a dream; and it was still night, black and awful, when I started up in good earnest, at a piercing shriek from the united family of white mice, whose cage stood upon a low stand, about two yards to the right of where I lay.

The sound which followed this was one which the man is not likely to forget who has once heard it,—whether beneath his foot, as he steps upon the moss-grown log in the rank cedar-swamp, or under his hand, when about to grasp with it a ledge of the rocks among which he is clambering, unknowing of the serpent's dens. With clenched teeth, and hair that rustled like the sedge-grass, I rose and woke up the obedient gas, which flashed tremulously on the scales of an enormous rattlesnake coiled round the mice's cage, tightening his folds as he whizzed his infernal warning, and darting out his lightning tongue with baffled fury at the trembling group in the middle of the cage. This I saw by the first flash. Grasping a sword from among the weapons with which the walls were studded, I made a pass to sever the monster; but the Mangouste was quicker than I, as he darted upon the coils of the serpent, which, in a moment, fell heavily to the floor, a writhing, headless mass.

In the heavy dreams which haunted me during the sleep from which I had just been roused, I had a vision of the planter of the balcony with a snake coiled round his naked arm. Who so dull as to require an interpreter for such plain speakings? Rushing down-stairs, I burst open the door of that person's room with one kick, and there, in the middle of the floor, half-dressed and bending over a censer of red-hot charcoal, knelt Mr. Dsol Arcubus, the poison-man of Mrs. Silvernails boarding-house. His features were collapsed and livid, and he held his left arm, which was much swollen and discolored, close over the red-hot coals, basting it wildly, the while, with ladlefuls of some hot liquid, while he crammed into his mouth, at intervals, a handful of herb-fodder of some kind from a salad-bowl on the floor beside him. He was rapidly growing faint and sinking, but indicated his wishes by signs, and one of several strangers who now entered the room continued the fomenting treatment, while another ran for medical assistance.

There was an open letter on the table, which I had no hesitation in reading, when I saw at a glance that it threw light on the matter. The following is an exact copy of it:—

"Hollow Rock——County. N. Y. 17 Jewly. 18—

MR. HARKABUS dear Sir.

a cording to promis i send the sneak by Xpress. He is the Largest and wust Sneak we have ketched In these parts. Bit a cow wich died in 2.40 likeways her calf of fright. Hope the sneak weed growed up strong and harty. By eting and drinking of that wede the greatest sneak has no power. Smeling of it a loan will cure a small sneak ader or the like. I go in upon the dens tomorough and if we find any Pufing Aders will Xpres them to you per Xpress.

Yr. oblgd. servt. SILENUS CLUCK."

Here was the whole story in a nutshell. For his experiments in septic poisons, Mr. Arcubus had hired this apartment, with its convenient balcony for the cultivation of his antidotes. Having prepared his decoctions, he had this night caused himself to be bitten by the snake, which, disgusted probably at its services being then rudely dispensed with, had followed its guiding instinct up to the room where the animals were, making its way through the holes nibbled by the Mangouste underneath the doors. A cold shudder seized me when I guessed the reality of the sense of something gliding over me in the night. The hunger of the reptile had steered him straight to the cage of the mice, whose cry of agony at the presence of the great enemy of mouse-kind had fortunately roused me from my lethargy,—for the rattle of the snake is but a drowsy sound, and will not awaken the sleeper. How the Mangouste came to appear on the scene at the nick of time, I know not. He might have come in at the open window, or possibly had been sleeping, since I missed him, among the trappings and traveller's gear with which the room was lumbered.

And these were the delights of lodgings,—of lodgings without board! And who could see the end of it all?—for, if snake-poison lurked on the stairs, probably hydrophobia was tied up in the cupboard. Brief time I expended in making my arrangements to quit, having first seen Mr. Arcubus carted away to a hospital, where by skilful treatment he slowly recovered. For the Mangouste and the mice, the parrots and the blasphemous macaw, I engaged temporary board and lodging with a bird-and-rabbit man in the neighborhood, telegraphing De Vonville that I had departed from lodgings forever,—lodgings for single gentlemen, without board.

But, on leaving the house, I did not forget the dust-colored old woman, whose last words to me, as I tipped her with a gratuity, were oracular:—"Forty long years and more have I lived in lodgin'-houses and never before seen a sarpint. It behooves all on us, now, to be watchful for what may be coming next, and wakeful. Circumspectangular."

I live in a hotel now, a very noisy life, and fearfully expensive. "But what do you wish, my friend?" as the French say, in their peculiar idiom. Believing in the ancient Egyptians, who worshipped the Nilotic ichneumon, I have privately canonized his cousin, the Mangouste, by the style and title of St. Mungo; and if ever surplus funds are discovered to my credit in any solvent bank, at present unknown to me, I will certainly devote a moiety of them to the foundation of a neat row of alms-cages, for the reception of decayed members of the family of White Mice.



FOR CHRISTIE'S SAKE.

Upon us falls the shadow of night, And darkened is our day: My love will greet the morning light Four hundred miles away. God love her, torn so swift and far From hearts so like to break! And God love all who are good to her, For Christie's sake!

I know, whatever spot of ground In any land we tread, I know the Eternal Arms are round, That heaven is overhead; And faith the mourning heart will heal, But many fears will make Our spirits faint, our fond hearts kneel, For Christie's sake.

Good bye, dear! be they kind to you, As though you were their ain! My daisy opens to the dew, But shuts against the rain. Never will new moon glad our eyes But offerings we shall make To old God Wish, and prayers will rise For Christie's sake.

Four years ago we struck our tent; O'er homeless babes we yearned; Our all—three darlings—with us went, But only two returned! While life yet bleeds into her grave, Love ventures one more stake; Hush, hush, poor hearts! if big, be brave, For Christie's sake!

Like crown to most ambitious brows Was Christie to us given, To make our home a holy house And nursery of heaven. Oh, softer was her bed of rest Than lily's on the lake! Peace filled so deep each billowy breast, For Christie's sake!

To music played by harps and hands Invisible were we drawn O'er charmd seas, through fary lands, Under a clearer dawn: We entered our new world of love With blessings in our wake, While prospering heavens smiled above, For Christie's sake.

We gazed with proud eyes luminous On such a gift of grace,— All heaven narrowed down to us In one dear little face! And many a pang we felt, dear wife, With hurt of heart and ache All shut within like clasping knife, For Christie's sake.

I would no tears might e'er run down Her patient face, beside Such happy pearls of heart as crown Young mother, new-made bride! For 'tis a face that, looking up To passing heaven, might make An angel stop, a blessing drop, For Christie's sake.

If Love in that child's heart of hers Should breathe and break its calm, With trouble sweet as that which stirs The brooding buds of balm,— Listening at ear of peeping pearl, Glistening in eyes that shake Their sweet dew down,—God bless our girl, For Christie's sake!

But, Father, if our babe must mourn, Be merciful and kind! And if our gentle lamb be shorn, Attemper thou the wind! Across the Deluge guide our Dove, And to thy bosom take With arm of love, and shield above, For Christie's sake!

We have had sorrows many and strange: Poor Christie I when I'm gone, Some of my words will weirdly change, If she read sadly on! Lightnings, from what was dark of old, With meanings strange will break Of sorrows hid or dimly told, For Christie's sake.

Wife, we should still try hard to win The best for our dear child, And keep a resting-place within, When all without grows wild: As on the winter graves the snow Falls softly, flake by flake, Our love should whitely clothe our woe, For Christie's sake.

For one will wake at midnight drear From out a dream of death, And find no dear head pillowed near, No sound of peaceful breath! May no weak wailing words arise, No bitter thoughts awake To see the tears in Memory's eyes: For Christie's sake!

And There, where many crownless kings Of earth a crown shall wear, The martyrs who have borne the pangs Their palm at last shall bear,— When with our lily pure of sin Our heavenward way we take, There may we walk with welcome in, For Christie's sake!



THE NURSERY BLARNEY-STONE.

Where is it kept? We have often longed for a sight of that precious bit of arolite, that talismanic moon-stone and bewildering boulder, to which the lips of all devoted to infantile education must be religiously pressed.

In vain have we searched in the closet, where the headless dolls and tailless horses, the collapsed drum and the torn primer, are put away. We have privately climbed to the summit of the clothes-press, we have surreptitiously invaded the nurse's own private work-basket, lured by disappointing lumps of wax and fragments of rhubarb-root; but we did not find it. We believe in its existence none the less. Real as the coronation-stone of the Scottish kings now in Westminster Abbey, as the Caaba at Mecca, as the loadstone mountain against which dear old Sinbad was wrecked, as the meteor which fell into the State of Connecticut and the volcanic island which rose out of the Straits of Messina, as the rock of Plymouth, or the philosopher's stone,—yet we have sought in vain for it, and only know of it as of the Great Carbuncle, by the light it sheds.

"Pray, my good Sir," ask legions of fond parents, "what do you mean? Is it Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir, Brown's Syrup of Squills, or White's Magnetic Mixture? Is it of the soothing or the coercing system? a substitute for lollipops or for birch? rock candy or rock the cradle?"

"Look" not "into your heart," responds our Muse, but into your nursery, and write!

We invite a general review of all infantry divisions. We may be, for aught you know, Mrs. Ellis incog., warning the mothers of America, as of yore the Cornelias of England. What is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? You have none in your own airy and southern-exposed first-pair-back, (Nov-Anglic>, "the keeping-room chamber,") where you daily water and rake your young olive-sprouts? upon your word of honor, Madam, you have not? You never tell nursery-tales of ghosts or fairies; you have conscientiously stripped from the dark closet every vestige of a legend; you have permitted juvenile inspection of the chimney, to prove that Santa Claus could not descend its sooty flue without grievous nigritude of the anticipated doll's frock, and have logically appealed to Miss Bran Beeswax's satin silveriness in proof of the non-existence of the saint beloved of Christmas-tide. Nay, more, you tell us you have actually invited inspection of the overnight process of filling the stockings, (you brute!) and you appropriately label each gift, "From Papa," "From Uncle Edward," "From Sister Kate," "From dear Mamma," lest a figment of the supernatural untruth should linger in the infantile brain. The "Arabian Nights'" (and "Arabian Days'") "Entertainments" are on your Index Expurgatorius. You have banned Bluebeard, and treated Red Ridinghood as no better than the Bonnet Rouge of domestic Jacobinism.

You are a model mother, with whom even the late Mr. Gradgrind might be satisfied. "Truth, crushed to earth" by the whole race of nurses of the good old time, rises again triumphant at your hearth-stone. Then answer us,—Why did you tell your little ones to-night, as the sparrows were making an unusually loquacious preparation for their dormitories, that the little birds were singing their evening hymns, and exhort, thereupon, your unwilling nestlings to a rival performance of the verses of Dr. Watts? You ought to be prepared to explain, also, for the benefit of any sucking Socrates, why it is that these feathered choristers have their "revival seasons," and are terrible backsliders during the moulting period. When you looked out of the nursery-window, into the poultry-yard, and heard the noisy confabulation of the motherly hens and pert pullets, you should be prepared to state upon what theological principles it is that psalmody is not the wont of the Gallinacae. Are the Biddies given over to a reprobate mind, because you don't happen to like their vocalization? Is it only the Piccolomini and Linds of the feathered kingdom who have a right to practise sacred music?

And how about that other stupendous fiction of the harvest-moon? Tell us, since you are voluntarily in the confessional, tell us why you kept back that explanation of its dependence on the Precession of the Equinoxes, which, at Professor Cram's finishing examination, in your school-girl days, you so glibly recited before your admiring papa and mamma? Do you really believe that the solar and stellar system was arranged to accommodate "the reapers reaping early" of the little island of Great Britain?

We think you said angels! When little Isabel Montgomery, with her long, sunny curls, and sweet, blue eyes, was taken away, you made a very touching application of her decease, to illustrate what all good people were to become in the unknown world. How did you get out of the scrape which followed the remark of your downright eldest, remembering also the departure of a good-natured, obese, elderly neighbor,—"Then I thpothe Mithter Thimmonth ith a big angel"? So he probably is; but Simmons's two hundred pounds of earthliness did not suit your sentimentality quite as readily as the little fairy who always wore such clean pantalets and never tore her pretty white frocks in a game of romps. Is beatification dependent upon the platform-balance? and what amount of flesh will turn the scale in favor of the Avvocato del Diavolo?

Once upon a time, a little boy was allowed to ramble in the woods. Being an adventurous little boy, he saw and coveted, and also conquered, (in the good old English sense of the word,) a pretty bird's-nest and its contents, to wit, several shiny, speckled eggs. He brought them home for triumphant display. He set them out upon the drawing-room table, and called a family conclave to admire and exult. What was the surprise and grief of the infant Catiline, to find himself received, not with applause, but horror! He was accused of robbery, was threatened with Solomonic penalties, was finally condemned to penance at a side-table upon dry bread and water, while his innocent brothers and sisters were regaling upon chickens and custards. He was edified over his scanty meal by melting descriptions of the mother-bird returning to the desolated home, of her positive sorrow and her probable pining to death. And the same little boy, looking out through the prison-bars of the nursery-window, saw his mother take by the hand his weeping sister (much cast down by the fraternal wickedness) and lead her to the nest of another mother-bird, and then and there encourage her to perform the same act of spoliation. True, the eggs were not speckled and small, but of a very pretty white, and quite a handful for the juvenile fingers. But the bereaved "parient" was not slender and active,—in fact, was rather a tame, confiding, dumpy and dull, pepper-and-salt-colored dame. Her complaints were not touching, but rather ludicrous,—so much so, indeed, as to suggest to the human hen-bird that "Biddy was laughing to think what a nice breakfast little Carrie would have off her nice eggs!" The young Trenck, from aloft beholding, could not but stumble upon certain "glittering generalities," as, that "eggs was eggs," and that the return of them on the fowl's part, in consideration of an advance of corn, was not altogether a voluntary barter,—quite, in short, after the pattern of Coolie apprenticeship. And thus the high moral lesson of the morning was sadly shaken. Of course this boy did not belong to any of the model mammas, for whom we are writing.

A large fragment of the Nursery Blarney-Stone has been made over, to have and to hold, to the writers of the Children's Astor-Place Library. We yawn over poetical justice in novels, and only tolerate it as an amusing absurdity in genteel comedy, for the sake of getting the curtain rapidly down over the benedictory guardian and the virtue-rewarded fair, who are impatient themselves to be off to a very different distribution of cakes and ale. We know that the hero and the heroine walk complacently away in the company of the dejected villain to wash off their rouge and burnt cork, and experience the practical domestic felicity which is ordered for them on the same principles as for us who sit in the pit and applaud. If it were not so, and if we did not know it to be so, and if we did not know that they know that we know it, we should perhaps feel very differently.

Why must we, then, be conscientiously constrained to mark out such a very different plan for our children at home? Why is the life of little boys and girls in books always pictured on the foot-lights pattern? We remember that we were of those good little boys and girls,—quite as good as that one who saved his pennies for the missionary-box, or that other who hemmed a tiny pocket-handkerchief against the nasal needs of a forlorn infant in Burmah; but we don't remember ever (then or since) to have encountered any of those delightful (and strong-minded) mothers or those sensible and always well-informed fathers of whom we read. Neither in our own particularly pleasant home, nor in any where we went, (at three, P.M., to take an early tea with preparatory barmecidal rehearsals on doll's china,) did we ever meet them. Perhaps they were the progenitors of the authors of the books. Mr. Thackeray has introduced us to sundry gentlemen and ladies bearing a faint likeness to them; but he also permitted us to behold Lady Beckie Crawley ne Sharpe boxing little Rawdon's ears, and to meet Mrs. Hobson Newcome at one of her delightful "at homes," where Runmun Loll, of East Indian origin, was the lion of the evening.

We couldn't get through five pages of Hannah More, on a wet day, at the dreariest railway-station, when the expected train was telegraphed as "not due under two hours." What have the innocent heirs of our name done, that Hannah should continue under numberless noms-de-plume to cater for them?

We know there must have been a large lump of the Blarney-Stone, conglomerate probably, kept in the desk of our reverend instructor in the ways of syntax and the dismal paths of numbers. We have a lively recollection of the countless tables of foreign coins which we committed to memory, and of the provoking additions and subtractions we underwent to reduce to dollars and cents of the Federal denomination the fortunes of a score of Rothschilds. But when, under the shadow of the Drachenfels, we attempted to reimburse the Teutonic waiter for a cup of caf noir, we were ignominiously constrained to hold forth a handful of coin and to await the white-jacketed and bearded one's pleasure, as he helped himself.

We have a strong impression that we should never have attained to our present proud position of being allowed to write for (and be printed in) the "Atlantic Monthly," without much previous polish, through the companionship of the fairer sex. Why was it made a crime worthy of Draconian sternness to address our she-comrades in the pleasant paths of learning? Why did we behold the severe Magister Morum himself, in utter forgetfulness of his own rule, mingle in the mazy dance on an evening occasion, at which we were allowed to sit up? Did the girls of a larger growth lose their dangerous qualities on arriving at belle-hood? Why were our primary billets-doux confiscated, and our offending palms, like Cranmer's, visited with the first penalty, though we had been obliged to walk blushingly the gauntlet of fifty pairs of maiden eyes and deliver to the "female principal" of the girls' school across the entry notes which we have since but too much reason to conclude bore no reference to the affairs of the school-realm? There is a bit of the Blarney-Stone (always of the nursery formation) which we are sure is discoverable to the true geologic eye in the underpinning of the Fifth Congregational Society's house of worship,—then called a meeting-house, now, we believe, styled a church. For all sermons therein delivered were supposed to be for our personal edification; albeit we were not, by reason of our tender years, specifically exposed to the heresies of Origen or Pelagius. It must have been on some afternoon when we were absent, then, that Dr. Baxter delivered the discourse of which we found a commentary written on the fly-leaf of the hymn-book in our pew,—"Terribly tedious this P.M., isn't he?" We have always felt that a great opportunity was lost to us. We should doubtless have been permitted to indulge unchecked in the solution of that lost mystery of our boyhood, as to the exact number of little brass rods in the front of the gallery, to scratch our initials with a pin upon the pew-side, or, propped by the paternal arm, to sweetly slumber till nineteenthly's close. No such sermon was ever pronounced in our hearing. Oh, golden time of youth! precious season thus lost! We intend yet revisiting that ancient and time-worn edifice, and, borrowing the keys of the sexton, we mean to revel in all and sundry those delights of "boyhood's breezy hour" from which we were debarred by that untimely absence. Like the old gentleman who visited nightly Van Amburg's exhibition of the head-in-the-lion's-mouth feat, in the moral certainty that a single absence would fall inevitably upon the one night when Leo would vary the programme by decapitation,—so we lost the one afternoon when that dull discourse diversified the pious eloquence of Jotham Baxter, D.D., disciple of Dr. Hopkins and believer in Cotton Mather. Many a refreshing slumber has sealed our eyes under subsequent outpourings of divinity, but never with that entire sense of permissible indulgence which then would certainly have been ours. Why was it—except for the Blarney-Stone—that we were always checked in any Sabba'day notes and queries of what we had noticed in the sanctuary? Why was it wicked and deserving of a double infliction of catechism (Assembly's) for us to have seen that Bob Jones had a new jacket, and that he took five marbles and a jack-knife (in aggravating display) out of its pockets, while our mother and sisters were enabled, without let or hindrance to the most absorbing devotion, to chronicle every bonnet and ribbon within the walls of the temple?

Certainly, the family-physician carried—as well he might—a bit of the precious rock in his waistcoat-pocket; for all our subsequent experience of materia medica has never revealed to us the then patent fact, that all our bodily ailments were the consequence of those particular sports which damaged clothes and disturbed the quiet of the household. Surely, the connection between the measles and sailing on the millpond was about as obvious as that between Macedon and Monmouth; and whooping-cough must have had a very long road to travel, if it originated in our nutting frolic, when we returned home with a ghastly gash in our trousers-knee.

The Blarney-Stone got into our "Manual of History"; for either it or the "Boston Centinel" must have made some egregious mistakes as to the character of some famous men who nursed our country's fortunes. So, too, did the author of "Familiar Letters on Public Characters"; for he was anything but an indorser of the History-Book, with its wood-cuts (after Trumbull and West) of the death of General Wolfe, exclaiming, "They run who run the French then I die happy," and of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, with its amazing portraits of the first six Presidents, and the death of Tecumseh. Nay, we have found hard work to reconcile our faith, as per History-Book, in the loveliness of those gentlemen whom stress of weather and a treacherous pilot put ashore upon Plymouth beach, (where they luckily found a rock to step upon,) with a certain sweet pastoral called "Evangeline." We found ourselves, just after reading the proceedings of the Plymouth Monument Association, the other day, pondering over the possible fate of the Dutch colony of the Mannahattoes, supposing that the Mayflower had made (as was purposed) the Highlands of Neversink instead of Shankpainter Hill at the end of Cape Cod. It was a perilous meditation, for we found our belief in Plutarch's Lives, the Charter Oak, and the existence of the Maelstrm all sliding away from under us. "Think," we said, "if New York had been Boston, how it would have fared with the good Knickerbockers!"

Who was our geographer? Why did he insist upon our believing that all French men and women passed their time in mutual bows and "curchies," and that all Italians were on their knees to fat priests, clean and rosy-looking? Why did he palm upon us that outrageous fiction of three kings (like those of Cologne) sitting in full ermine robes, with gold crowns on their heads, all alone in a sort of summer-parlor, where the heat, must have been at 80 in the shade, engaged in disparting Poland? We have seen, say, a million of Frenchmen, and nearly the same of Italians, since then, with a dozen or so of kings and emperors,—but never the faintest likeness to those deluding pictures. We learned at the same time, by painful rote, the population of various capital cities; but we cannot find in any statistic-book gazetteer, neither in McCulloch nor in Worcester, any of the old, familiar numbers. Also in that same Wonder-Book of Malte-Brun, edited by Pietro il Parlatore, we recall a sketch of a boy running for life down a slope of at least 45, just before a snowball some five hundred times as big as the one our school-boys unitedly rolled up in the back-yard. It was a snowball, round, symmetrical, just such a magnified copy of the backyard one as might be expected to follow a boy in dreams after too much Johnny-cake for supper. And that was an avalanche. We have stood since then under the shadow of the Jungfrau, on the Wengern Alp, at the selfsame spot where Byron beheld the fall of so many. We had the noble lord's luck, (as most people have.) and saw dozens, but not one big snowball.

We believe there has been reform since that day. Thanks to the London "Illustrated News" and the "Penny Magazine," juster ideas visit the ingenious youth of the present age. But we solemnly declare that we grew up in the belief that the President of the United States was daily ushered to his carriage by a long array of bareheaded and bowing menials, and that his official dress was a cocked hat and knee-breeches. We furthermore make affidavit that we supposed all the nobility of Europe to be in the habit of driving four-in-hand over wooden-legged beggars. And we also depose and say, that we had no other idea of royalty than as continually clad in coronation-robes, with six peers in the same, with huge wigs, as attendants. All this upon the faith of that same Malte-Brun, la P.P. Wasn't this a pretty dish to set before—not a king-but a young republican, who fancied himself the equal of kings? And lastly, upon the same authority, we held that "the horrible custom of eating human flesh does not belong exclusively to any nation." We have seen, we repeat, men and cities. We have dined at the Rocher de Cancale, the Maison Dore, at Delmonico's, at German Gasthauses, at Italian Trattorias, at "Joe's" in London, the Trosachs Inn in the Highlands, and upon all peculiar and national dishes, from the sardines au gratin of Naples to the sauer kraut of Berlin, from the "one fish-ball" of Boston to the hog and hominy of Virginia,—but never yet upon any carte did we encounter "Cold Missionary" or "Enfans en potage Fijien."

Where, we repeat, is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? or rather, where is it not?

The gentle reader (prepared to corroborate with many a juvenile reminiscence) must by this time be prepared for our moral; and it is very briefly this:—Is it not time to consider the budding brain as entitled to fair play? We, the dear middle-aged people, must surely remember that it has taken us much toil and trouble to unlearn many things. We know, that, when we pen anything for our coevals, it is with due attention to such facts as we can command,—that we have a wholesome fear of criticism,—that, if we make blunders in our seamanship, even though professedly land-lubbers, some awful Knickerbocker stands by with the Marine Dictionary in hand to pounce upon us. But for the poor little innocents at home any cast-off rags of knowledge are good enough. We hand down to them the worn-out platitudes of history which we have carefully eschewed. We humbug their inexperience with the same nursery fables beneath whose leonine hide our matured vision detects the ass's ears.

We have been writing lightly enough, but with a purpose. For, absurd as may seem the fictions we have sported with, are they not types of many other far more serious ones which we cram down the throats of our rising generation, long after we ourselves have begun to disbelieve them? There is a conventional teaching which we decorously administer, and leave our pupils to disavow it when they can. History is still taught in our public and private schools, seasoned with all the exploded blunders of the past. Men grow up to full manhood with ideas of foreign lands as ridiculous and unfounded as the pictures over which we have been amusing ourselves just now in our old Geography. Young America is ignorant enough, Heaven knows, of a great deal he ought to learn; but what shall we say of our persistently cramming him with what he ought not to learn? No exploding process is strong enough, it would seem, to blow away the countless pretty stories with which juvenile histories are embroidered. Niebuhr and Arnold have forever finished Romulus and Remus and the Livian legends, for maturer beliefs; but childhood goes on in the same track. Lord Macaulay's Romance of English History has been riddled by the acute reviewers; but he will be abridged for the use of schools, and not a fiction about William Penn, or John of Marlborough, or Grahame of Claverhouse, be left out.

Can you plant a garden with weeds and then pull them up again in secure trust that no lurking burdocks and Canada thistle shall remain? Dear model mothers and prudent papas, be not afraid of wholesome fiction, as such, duly labelled and left uncorked. It will be far better to administer plenty of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad" and "Arabian Nights," good ringing old ballads with a healthy sentiment at bottom of manly honor and womanly affection, fairy stories and ancient legends, than all the mince-meat histories and biographies that nurse-wise have been chewed soft for the use of tender gums. Let us all, for the benefit of ourselves, keep clear of cant; but if cant we must, why let it be for those who will cant back again, laughing in their sleeves the while, and not for the dear little faces so solemnly upturned to ours, whose honest blue eyes (black or green, if you please, as you take your tea) confidingly meet ours.

American education, especially home education, is wanting not in quantity so much as quality; in that it is fearfully lacking, and we, the educators, are the ones to blame for it.



THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.

CHAPTER V.

AN OLD-FASHIONED DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER.

It was a comfort to get to a place with something like society, with residences which had pretensions to elegance, with people of some breeding, with a newspaper, and "stores" to advertise in it, and with two or three churches to keep each other alive by wholesome agitation. Rockland was such a place.

Some of the natural features of the town have been described already. The Mountain, of course, was what gave it its character, and redeemed it from wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary country-villages. Beautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it dignity, it had yet closer relations with the town over which it brooded than the passing stranger knew of. Thus, it made a local climate by cutting off the northern winds and holding the sun's heat like a garden-wall. Peach-trees, which, on the northern side of the mountain, hardly ever came to fruit, ripened abundant crops in Rockland.

But there was still another relation between the mountain and the town at its foot, which strangers were not likely to hear alluded to, and which was oftener thought of than spoken of by its inhabitants. Those high-impending forests,—"hangers," as White of Selborne would have called them,—sloping far upward and backward into the distance, had always an air of menace blended with their wild beauty. It seemed as if some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe over the bare, precipitous flanks of the rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest chance-support, and, so sliding, crush the village out of being, as the Rossberg when it tumbled over on the valley of Goldau.

Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short residence in it, because they were haunted day and night by the thought of this awful green wall piled up into the air over their heads. They would lie awake of nights, thinking they heard the muffled snapping of roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side were tugging to break away, like the snow from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees were clinging with all their fibres to hold back the soil just ready to peel away and crash down with all its rocks and forest-growths. And yet, by one of those strange contradictions we are constantly finding in human nature, there were natives of the town who would come back thirty or forty years after leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening mountain-side, as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls. The old dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction. If the mountain should ever slide, they had a kind of feeling as if they ought to be there. It was a fascination like that which the rattlesnake is said to exert.

This comparison naturally suggests the recollection of that other source of danger which was an element in the everyday life of the Rockland people. The folks in some of the neighboring towns had a joke against them, that a Rocklander couldn't hear a bean-pod rattle without saying, "The Lord have mercy on us!" It is very true, that many a nervous old lady has had a terrible start, caused by some mischievous young rogue's giving a sudden shake to one of these noisy vegetable products in her immediate vicinity. Yet, strangely enough, many persons missed the excitement of the possibility of a fatal bite in other regions, where there were nothing but black and green and striped snakes, mean ophidians, having the spite of the nobler serpent without his venom,— poor crawling creatures, whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag. Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably experience a certain gratification in this infinitesimal sense of danger. It was noted that the old people retained their hearing longer than in other places. Some said it was the softened climate, but others believed it was owing to the habit of keeping their ears open whenever they were walking through the grass or in the woods. At any rate, a slight sense of danger is often an agreeable stimulus. People sip their crme de noyau with a peculiar tremulous pleasure, because there is a bare possibility that it may contain prussic acid enough to knock them over; in which case they will lie as dead as if a thunder-cloud had emptied itself into the earth through their brain and marrow.

But Rockland had other features which helped to give it a special character. First of all, there was one grand street which was its chief glory. Elm Street it was called, naturally enough, for its elms made a long, pointed-arched gallery of it through most of its extent. No natural Gothic arch compares, for a moment, with that formed by two American elms, where their lofty jets of foliage shoot across each other's ascending curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of green. When one looks through a long double row of these, as in that lovely avenue which the poets of Yale remember so well,—

"Oh, could the vista of my life but now as bright appear As when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!"—

he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer than any minster, with all its clustered stems and flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.

Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and patient. It has a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere and makes arrangements for coming up by-and-by. So, in spring, one finds a crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small compared to those, succulent vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of them, slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as Herod's innocents. One of them gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has established a kind of right to stay. Three generations of carrot and parsnip-consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let your great-grandson look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two feet of clean girth, three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed oak nor insect-haunted linden ever lifted into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its Gothic-arched vista. In this street were most of the great houses, or "mansion-houses," as it was usual to call them. Along this street, also, the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were chiefly congregated. It was the correct thing for a Rockland dignitary to have a house in Elm Street.

A New England "mansion-house" is naturally square, with dormer windows projecting from the roof, which has a balustrade with turned posts round it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard before its door, as its owner shows a respectable expanse of clean shirt-front. It has a lateral margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master wears his white wrist-bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs. It may not have what can properly be called grounds, but it must have elbow-room, at any rate. Without it, it is like a man who is always tight-buttoned for want of any linen to show. The mansion-house which has had to button itself up tight in fences, for want of green or gravel margin, will be advertising for boarders presently. The old English pattern of the New England mansion-house, only on a somewhat grander scale, is Sir Thomas Abney's place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers for the family, and wrote those blessed hymns of his that sing us into consciousness in our cradles, and come back to us in sweet, single verses, between the momenta of wandering and of stupor, when we lie dying, and sound over us when we can no longer hear them, bringing grateful tears to the hot, aching eyes beneath the thick, black veils, and carrying the holy calm with them which filled the good man's heart, as he prayed and sung under the shelter of the old English mansion-house.

Next to the mansion-houses, came the two-story, trim, white-painted, "genteel" houses, which, being more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded close up to the street, instead of standing back from it with arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses. Their little front-yards were very commonly full of lilac and syringa and other bushes, which were allowed to smother the lower story almost to the exclusion of light and air, so that, what with small windows and small windowpanes, and the darkness made by these choking growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some of these houses were the most tomb-like, melancholy places that could be found anywhere among the abodes of the living. Their garnishing was apt to assist this impression. Large-patterned carpets, which always look discontented in little rooms, hair-cloth furniture, black and shiny as beetles' wing-cases, and centre-tables, with a sullen oil-lamp of the kind called astral by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre,—these things were inevitable. In set piles round the lamp was ranged the current literature of the day, in the form of Temperance Documents, unbound numbers of one of the Unknown Public's Magazines with worn-out steel engravings and high-colored fashion-plates, the Poems of a distinguished British author whom it is unnecessary to mention, a volume of sermons, or a novel or two, or both, according to the tastes of the family, and the Good Book, which is always Itself in the cheapest and commonest company. The father of the family with his hand in the breast of his coat, the mother of the same in a wide-bordered cap, sometimes a print of the Last Supper, by no means Morghen's, or the Father of his Country, or the old General, or the Defender of the Constitution, or an unknown clergyman with an open book before him,—these were the usual ornaments of the walls, the first two a matter of rigor, the others according to politics and other tendencies.

This intermediate class of houses, wherever one finds them in New England towns, are very apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory. They have neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor the comfort of the farm-house. They are rarely kept at an agreeable temperature. The mansion-house has large fireplaces and generous chimneys, and is open to the sunshine. The farm-house makes no pretensions, but it has a good warm kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable there with the rest of the family, without fear and without reproach. These lesser country-houses of genteel aspirations are much given to patent subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion. The chilly parlor and the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the warmest welcome. If one would make these places wholesome, happy, and cheerful, the first precept would be,—The dearest fuel, plenty of it, and let half the heat go up the chimney. If you can't afford this, don't try to live in a "genteel" fashion, but stick to the ways of the honest farm-house.

There were a good many comfortable farm-houses scattered about Rockland. The best of them were something of the following pattern, which is too often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but infinitely less pleasing kind of rustic architecture. A little back from the road, seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden building, two stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to within a few feet of the ground. This, like the "mansion-house," is copied from an old English pattern. Cottages of this model may be seen in Lancashire, for instance, always with the same honest, homely look, as if their roofs acknowledged their relationship to the soil out of which they sprung. The walls were unpainted, but turned by the slow action of sun and air and rain to a quiet dove- or slate-color. An old broken mill- stone at the door,—a well-sweep pointing like a finger to the heavens, which the shining round of water beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping eye,—a single large elm a little at one side,—a barn twice as big as the house,—a cattle-yard, with

"The white horns tossing above the wall,"—

some fields, in pasture or in crops, with low stone walls round them,—a row of beehives,—a garden-patch, with roots, and currant-bushes, and many-hued holly-hocks, and swollen-stemmed, globe-headed, seedling onions, and marigolds, and flower-de-luces, and lady's-delights, and peonies, crowding in together, with southernwood in the borders, and woodbine and hops and morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,—these were the features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men. Such are the recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm with the after-dinner flush of the red wave out of which Memory arises, as Aphrodite arose from the green waves of the ocean.

Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and looking like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the air,—as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow out of their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's glass eyes with their sharp-pointed weathercocks.

The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England meeting-house. It was a large barn with windows, fronted by a square tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted and raised on legs, out of which rose a slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at its summit. Inside, tall, square pews with flapping seats, and a gallery running round three sides of the building. On the fourth side the pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board hanging over it. Here preached the Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D.D., successor, after a number of generations, to the office and the parsonage of the Reverend Didymus Bean, before mentioned, but not suspected of any of his alleged heresies. He held to the old faith of the Puritans, and occasionally delivered a discourse which was considered by the hard-headed theologians of his parish to have settled the whole matter fully and finally, so that now there was a good logical basis laid down for the Millennium, which might begin at once upon the platform of his demonstrations. Yet the Reverend Dr. Honeywood was fonder of preaching plain, practical sermons about the duties of life, and showing his Christianity in abundant good works among his people. It was noticed by some few of his flock, not without comment, that the great majority of his texts came from the Gospels, and this more and more as he became interested in various benevolent enterprises which brought him into relations with ministers and kind-hearted laymen of other denominations. The truth is, that he was a man of a very warm, open, and exceedingly human disposition, and, although bred by a clerical father, whose motto was "Sit anima mea cum Puritanis," he exercised his human faculties in the harness of his ancient faith with such freedom that the straps of it got so loose they did not interfere greatly with the circulation of the warm blood through his system. Once in a while he seemed to think it necessary to come out with a grand doctrinal sermon, and then he would lapse away for while into preaching on men's duties to each other and to society, and hit hard, perhaps, at some of the actual vices of the time and place, and insist with such tenderness and eloquence on the great depth and breadth of true Christian love and charity, that his oldest deacon shook his head, and wished he had shown as much interest when he was preaching, three Sabbaths back, on Predestination, or in his discourse against the Sabellians. But he was sound in the faith; no doubt of that. Did he not preside at the council held in the town of Tamarack, on the other side of the mountain, which expelled its clergyman for maintaining heretical doctrines? As presiding officer, he did not vote, to be sure, but there was no doubt that he was all right; he had some of the Edwards blood in him, and that couldn't very well let him go wrong.

The meeting-house on the other and opposite summit was of a more modern style, considered by many a great improvement on the old New England model, so that it is not uncommon for a country parish to pull down its old meeting-house, which has been preached in for a hundred years or so, and put up one of these more elegant edifices. The new building was in what may be called the florid shingle-Gothic manner. Its pinnacles and crockets and other ornaments were, like the body of the building, all of pine wood,—an admirable material, as it is very soft and easily worked, and can be painted of any color desired. Inside, the walls were stuccoed in imitation of stone,—first a dark-brown square, then two light-brown squares, then another dark-brown square, and so on, to represent the accidental differences of shade always noticeable in the real stones of which walls are built. To be sure, the architect could not help getting his party-colored squares in almost as regular rhythmical order as those of a chess-board; but nobody can avoid doing things in a systematic and serial way; indeed, people who wish to plant trees in natural clumps know very well that they cannot keep from making regular lines and symmetrical figures, unless by some trick or other, as that one of throwing up into the air a peck of potatoes and sticking in a tree wherever a potato happens to fall. The pews of this meeting-house were the usual oblong ones, where people sit close together with a ledge before them to support their hymn-books, liable only to occasional contact with the back of the next pew's heads or bonnets, and a place running under the seat of that pew where hats could be deposited,—always at the risk of the owner, in case of injury by boots or crickets.

In this meeting-house preached the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, a divine of the "Liberal" school, as it is commonly called, bred at that famous college which used to be thought, twenty or thirty years ago, to have the monopoly of training young men in the milder forms of heresy. His ministrations were attended with decency, but not followed with enthusiasm. "The beauty of virtue" got to be an old story at last. "The moral dignity of human nature" ceased to excite a thrill of satisfaction, after some hundred repetitions. It grew to be a dull business, this preaching against stealing and intemperance, while he knew very well that the thieves were prowling round orchards and empty houses, instead of being there to hear the sermon, and that the drunkards, being rarely church-goers, get little good by the statistics and eloquent appeals of the preacher. Every now and then, however, the Reverend Mr. Fairweather let off a polemic discourse against his neighbor opposite, which waked his people up a little; but it was a languid congregation, at best,—very apt to stay away from meeting in the afternoon, and not at all given to extra evening services. The minister, unlike his rival of the other side of the way, was a down-hearted and timid kind of man. He went on preaching as he had been taught to preach, but he bad misgivings at times. There was a little Roman Catholic church at the foot of the hill where his own was placed, which he always had to pass on Sundays. He could never look on the thronging multitudes that crowded its pews and aisles or knelt bare-headed on its steps, without a longing to get in among them and go down on his knees and enjoy that luxury of devotional contact which makes a worshipping throng as different from the same numbers praying apart as a bed of coals is from a trail of scattered cinders.

"Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor laborers and working-women!" he would say to himself. "If I could but breathe that atmosphere, stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies, and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead of droning over these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!" The intellectual isolation of his sect preyed upon him; for, of all the terrible things to natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to a minority. No person that looked at his thin and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye, his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard his querulous, though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his life was an uneasy one, that he was engaged in some inward conflict. His dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing a belief which made him a passenger on board a shipwrecked planet, was yet a most good-humored and companionable gentleman, whose laugh on week-days did one as much good to listen to as the best sermon he ever delivered on a Sunday.

A few miles from Rockland was a pretty little Episcopal church, with a roof like a wedge of cheese, a square tower, a stained window, and a trained rector, who read the service with such ventral depth of utterance and rrreduplication of the rrresonant letter, that his own mother would not have known him for her son, if the good woman had not ironed his surplice and put it on with her own hands.