May 6, 1829, Abbot Academy opened with eighty-five pupils, from the little ones who did not know their letters, to young women of eighteen and twenty. One who was there says, "Henrietta Jackson (afterwards Mrs. Dr. Cyrus Hamlin) sat at my left." Another describes the three gifted daughters of Professor Stuart, one of whom became the first wife of Professor Phelps and the mother of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who in her turn has likewise been a pupil of the school. As we look over the list of the girls who went in and out under the Ionic porch of the new academy, we see they were by inheritance and nature well worthy the broad and generous course of study marked out for them by Dr Jackson, Samuel Farrar and the others. That course, of more than half a century ago, was as wide as any laid down in the women's colleges to-day; and although it was gradually modified in conformity with popular sentiment, still it speaks well for the sagacity and practical wisdom of the trustees. It is pleasant to note that Dr. Jackson lived to see his theories of women's education carried into practice by the establishment of colleges for them. Mr. Charles Goddard, grandson of Dr. Langdon, president of Harvard University, was the first principal of Abbot Academy. He was tall and fine looking, with refined and polished manners, worshipped by the little girls and greatly admired by the older ones, who, as one of their number writes "woke up wonderfully and enjoyed their studies exceedingly." "It was the universal opinion," says another, "that the advantages offered by Abbot Academy were very superior to anything in the region, and the building was considered commodious and elegant." French and German were taught by Dr. William Gottlieb Schauffler, whose romantic history and extraordinary musical gifts had already attracted much personal interest, and whose after career has made his name a household word from the shores of the German Ocean to the Stairs of the Bosphorus. Who wonders that he was a hero to those girls of fifty years ago? No theological student called upon them who had not some story to tell of his enthusiasm, daring or cleverness, and how eagerly must they have listened as the adventures of his magic flute were dwelt upon.



For twenty-one years Abbot Academy was under the charge of principals who were all college graduates and men of exceptional powers, uncommon cultivation, and thorough interest in their work. There was no fund (then as now it depended upon its fees, systematically as low as possible) to pay running expenses, and although its superior character as a school attracted as many pupils as it could accommodate it had a hard struggle to live. Very early in its existence it was evident that its great lack was a boarding-house for students from a distance, and many attempts were made to remedy the deficiency. If the principal had a family, he accommodated all he could; the trustees provided for several brief periods common tables, but generally they lived in private houses scattered about the village.

In 1853 two great events took place. The first was the offering of the principalship to a woman, and the second the resolve of the trustees "that it is indispensable to the prosperity, and even perpetuity of the Academy, to raise the sum of eight thousand dollars in order to procure suitable accommodations for the boarding pupils." Although the link may not be apparent, the second is really the logical result of the first for it was the enthusiasm of Miss Nancy J. Haseltine, who had accepted the position of principal, that urged them on with an irresistible force. She had come to them from Townsend, Mass., bringing a large following of pupils, and she found it impossible to provide for them satisfactorily, besides she saw clearly, as the Punchard Free School was opened in Andover that year, Abbot Academy must henceforth, as time has proved, depend chiefly upon patronage from out of town. There was no doubt about the situation of the new building, the only land the trustees owned was the acre given them by Deacon Newman in 1829; so they must set it in the rear of the Academy, but where could they get the money? Again, man's extremity was God's opportunity. Deacon Peter Smith, who offered the resolution, promised $1,000, Mr. John Smith $1,500, though in reality the brothers Smith gave before the house was finished enough to amount to $6,611. Justly was it named Smith Hall, for its whole cost was but seven thousand thirty-three dollars and sixty-four cents. But how was the great empty house to be furnished? Mrs. H. B. Stowe, then living in Andover, talked it over with Mrs. Dr. Jackson and Mrs. Professor Park and declared a festival should do it. And the festival did bring in $2,000 which furnished Smith Hall, and prouder, happier women never slept on Andover Hill than those who had so courageously and triumphantly carried the plan through.

Smith Hall has now been far more than a quarter of a century the home of the pupils of the academy, during that portion of the time when they are not attending to modern languages. Poverty has been its constant companion, sternly forbidding any unnecessary expenditures, yet it has always presented a cheerful, even tasteful appearance to strangers, as well as to the scores of girls who cherish its memory tenderly. The highly successful term of Miss Nancy J. Haseltine was all too brief, and after her, Miss Maria J. Brown and Miss Emma L. Taylor, sister of Dr. S. H. Taylor, filled the last three years of the first thirty of Abbot Academy. In September, 1859, the present principal, Miss Philena McKeen, entered upon her duties, bringing with her from Oxford, Ohio, her sister, Miss Phebe F. McKeen, as first assistant. Miss McKeen's management of affairs has been as wise as fortunate, as disinterested as successful, and Abbot Academy now stands among the very first of the girls' schools in the country.

The year 1862 is memorable as being the first of a series pleasant to chronicle. The institution was never in a higher condition of prosperity and usefulness, and when, in 1865, the trustees were perplexed by the good news that Smith Hall was insufficient for the number of pupils from out of town, Hon. George L. Davis of North Andover, who had for some time been one of their number, happily solved the difficulty by buying what was known as the Farwell estate, which joined the academy grounds on the north-east corner, and presenting it to the school. It was gratefully named Davis hall, and for many years has been occupied by all pupils studying French, that language being the one ordinarily spoken in the house. Previously Mr. Davis had added two acres of land in the rear of Smith Hall, and in the autumn of 1865 assisted in the purchase of the house belonging to Rev. J. W. Turner, on the southern boundary line of the grounds. That house, known first as South Hall, is now German Hall, German being spoken there in daily life, as French is at Davis Hall. To the fact that pupils studying these languages are thus kept out of the way of English speech for so large a portion of school hours is ascribed their unusual success in the difficult accomplishment of easy and correct conversation in a foreign tongue. The amount of Mr. Davis' benefactions up to 1879 was more than $7,000.

At the annual meeting in 1870, the trustees expressed special obligations to Mr. Nathaniel Swift, who had filled the office of treasurer since 1852, and congratulated him upon the wonderful transformation which he had wrought in the grounds. Instead of poor stony pasture land were broad smooth lawns, gravelled walks, flower borders, well-trimmed hedges, and rustic seats in charming spots, which told not only of the exquisite taste which ever guided his hand, but of his considerate thoughtfulness wherever the pleasure or comfort of the pupils was concerned. During the autumn of 1877, in order to secure the whole of the beautiful grove adjacent to their property, the trustees bought fourteen acres, thus making their real estate something more than twenty-two acres.

In the quarter of a century since Miss McKeen came to Abbot Academy, besides these imperatively needed houses, and these greatly prized acres, many valuable collections scientific, artistic and literary have been added; but, as ever, the great want is room, that the pupils may have the benefit of their use, which is impossible in their present scattered condition. The school observed its Semi-Centennial in June, 1879, and extended a hearty welcome to nearly three thousand of its alumnae. The position was favorable for a survey of its present situation, its past history and its future prospects. Thorough examination of the past proved it had done excellent work; its list of pupils from all parts of the country, constantly increasing, showed it had taken deep root, but its future prospects appeared to be imperilled by its environment. On every hand it was crippled by want of buildings, want of endowment, want indeed of everything necessary to the comfort of a school. It was mentioned with amazement that half its collections were packed in boxes, its books were in every room of the building, wherever a shelf could find room, its pianos in the public parlors, and as for its boarding accommodations, so insufficient were they, it is a wonder to those familiar with the arrangements of the more recent girls' schools and colleges, that Abbot Academy has any boarding pupils at all. That it does, and frequently to its fullest extent, proves to the entire satisfaction of thoughtful persons the superior character of its instruction. Numerous highly valued and gratefully remembered gifts flowed in at the Semi-Centennial, but no sums sufficient to warrant the beginning of new buildings; so the teachers went on doing the best they could, spite of their great disadvantages, and their best was so good, that in 1884 the pressure became so strong, that several architects of Boston and vicinity entered into a free competition, submitting plans for the contemplated structures, and those drafted by Messrs Hartwell and Richardson, were accepted by the trustees, who appointed a building committee, consisting of Mr. Warren F. Draper, treasurer of Abbot Academy since 1876, chairman; Prof. J. W. Churchill, Andover, and Mr. James White, Boston. All these gentlemen are trustees, and in the heartiest sympathy with the high aims of the institution. The plans thus approved by the trustees were laid before the Alumnae Association at a meeting in June, 1885, and enthusiastically approved. It was then found that they had in their treasury an accumulation of small gifts amounting to between seven and eight thousand dollars, which they had been collecting for the purpose, and the announcement that the trustees, at the first meeting held for the purpose, had subscribed $12,500, was deemed very encouraging. Since that time the trustees have increased their subscription two thousand dollars, and, through the efforts of Miss McKeen, Andover people have pledged about $10,000. In short, about $36,000 has been raised up to the present time. But new buildings will cost $100,000; perhaps, even with the most vigilant and judicious economy, $150,000. Where and how can the remainder be obtained? It occurred to many friends that it would be a pleasant and perhaps a profitable thing to have a social meeting in Boston to consider the question and inspect the plans. Mrs. Daniel Chamberlin (before marriage Miss Abbie W. Chapman), the popular and efficient acting-principal of Abbot Academy in 1853, and now president of its Alumnae Association, kindly offered her pleasant parlors in Chester Square for the purpose. There on the 12th of January, was held a most delightful gathering, where the speakers were as choice as they were felicitous, and the company as rarely homogeneous as heartily interested.

Rev. Edward G. Porter of Lexington, one of the trustees, to whose indefatigable efforts the occasion owed a large portion of its success, called the meeting to order, and in the absence of Hon. Rufus S. Frost, who had been expected to preside, invited Professor Churchill to the chair. Professor Churchill whose gift of graceful speech never fails, introduced with a few delightful words Prof. E. A. Park, who has been president of the board of trustees more than twenty-five years. Professor Park responded: "The roof of the first edifice for Abbot Academy was laid the 28th of October, 1828. One week after that day I became a member of Andover Theological Seminary. I heard at once of the new and beautiful building; I think I was the first college graduate who walked on the floor of the present Academy Hall. It was said to be the best school edifice in Essex County or even the state of Massachusetts. Thus it began its existence with an aspiration in fine architecture. The style of this edifice is not so classical now as it was fifty-six years ago. When the academy received its new telescope it was too poor to provide it a suitable place. Therefore a dome was erected on the roof, which disturbed the symmetry of the Grecian architecture. The telescope does good service under the dome; but it is a sign of the indigence of the academy. When I reflect on the progress made by other institutions, I am astonished at the march of events. Twenty years after the founding of Abbot Academy, the little settlement at Chicago had not been heard of at Andover. When Rev. Dr. Joel Hawes received his first request to provide a missionary for that settlement, he asked a friend of mine, 'Where is Kick-a-go?' That little settlement of 'Kickago' has now received a fund of more than three million dollars for a city library. When our academy was founded, no man in Andover suspected that California would become one of our United States; but California has recently received twelve million dollars for the founding of a University. I was acquainted with the founder of Smith College in Northampton, and also with the founder of Abbot Academy. In some particulars the two ladies had a marked resemblance to each other. The founder of Smith College gave to it four hundred thousand dollars; the founder of Abbot Academy gave to it $10,109.04. Those four cents have played a conspicuous role in the history of the academy. They have been a sign of its indigence from its earliest to the present day."

"Abbot Academy has real estate valued at forty thousand dollars. Its apparatus, library, furniture, etc., are valued at ten thousand dollars. Its productive and available funds are valued at $33,636. This valuation was made two years ago; and it is now safe to say that the whole property of the institution, including real and personal estate, amounts to no more than ninety thousand dollars. The number of books in its library is 2,630. The number of its books relating to the fine arts is 233. The number of its art illustrations is 3,284. Still it has no convenient rooms for its books, pictures, casts. They are highly valuable, but are scattered in different and obscure places. It has a good cabinet of specimens illustrating conchology. Where is the cabinet? A large part of it I have never seen. It is kept in the boxes in which it was sent to the academy. Where is the scientific apparatus? Where is it?

"The rooms for the pupils are not large enough. Two students live by day and by night in one small chamber. The passages between the rooms are too narrow. The recitation rooms are too small and not well ventilated. The teachers have no adequate support, and could readily obtain much larger salaries for far less work in other institutions. For such reasons the academy asks for an enlarged endowment. It needs $150,000 for its new buildings. Thus far it has received promise of only $36,000. If it receive a generous increase of funds it will flourish; if it does not, it will not flourish as it should. Other institutions will attract its scholars. We cannot expect that future instructors will have a spirit of self-denial equal to that of its present and past instructors.

"After his 7th of March speech, Daniel Webster said to the Bostonians, 'You have conquered your climate, you have now nothing to do but to conquer your prejudices.' He meant that New Englanders had overcome the laws of nature, which had provided them with little except ice and granite; and nothing was left for them to conquer except their prejudices against the system of slavery. Now the teachers of Abbot Academy have conquered themselves, and there is nothing left for them to subdue except the laws of nature. They cannot subdue these laws. They cannot resist the attractions which other institutions have received from large funds, commodious dormitories, and suitable lecture-rooms and halls. The two Misses McKeen have devoted a high degree of skill and energy to the upbuilding of this institution; but they have had a superior ancestry. They inherited strength and fortitude. They descended from the sturdy men and women who settled Londonderry, New Hampshire.

"James McKeen of Londonderry was connected by marriage with James McGregor, the first minister of that town, who was a remarkable man. He was asked to leave his New Hampshire parish and go to the First Presbyterian Church in New York city. He declined. Londonderry was a more promising field for usefulness than New York. Londonderry has since succumbed. By the aid of the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean, New York has gone ahead.

"A traveller walking through Fifth Avenue and then through the roads of Londonderry can detect the superiority of New York with the naked eye. Unless Abbot Academy receive a larger and richer endowment than it now has, it will be to other institutions what the New Hampshire township is to the commercial emporium of our land.

"Why not allow our academy to decline? What special reasons are there for giving a new impulse to it? We ask for our new buildings because our academy is the oldest incorporated institution in the land for the higher culture of young ladies exclusively. Its age gives it a title to support. The antiquity of a school is a rich treasure to it. Scores of matrons, teachers, missionaries, have been trained in this school, and have performed signal services in our Western settlements, in Constantinople, in Japan, and in other distant parts of the world. The affections of these pupils are still entwined around this ancient academy. Again, we need our new buildings as monuments to the past services of teachers who have adorned and honored the school. Their example of faithful work and of exemplary self-denial ought to receive a visible and fitting memorial.

"Still another reason is that the endowment for which we ask will encourage future instructors to imitate the example of their predecessors. I have been conversant with many schools, I have not known one in which the principles of mental and moral philosophy, of the English and the Latin language, and of the fine arts have been more thoroughly and faithfully studied than in Abbot Academy. We do not expect there will ever be a theatre or an opera in the neighborhood of our academy; but we do expect that if we can obtain the pecuniary aid which we need, our school will be the resort of ladies who will devote themselves with zeal and care to the study of science, and more than all to the study of the word of God."

Professor Churchill then spoke in a very forcible and interesting manner of the aims of Abbot Academy, its wish to emphasize the home as well as the school. In a second article upon the institution it is hoped his remarks will be given in detail in connection with a more extended consideration of the aim to which he referred. Mr. Hartwell, for Messrs. Hartwell and Richardson, then explained the principal points of their plans, drawings of which were hung upon the walls. He concluded by expressing the heartiest interest in the academy and a most earnest wish for the success of the good plans in its behalf. Mr. Porter read a letter from Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, a portion of which follows:—

Abbot Academy has no superior. Its graduates go forth fitted for life's true work. The education they have received has been admirably adapted to form both mind and heart. It has had the social, intellectual and spiritual elements in due proportion.... I have sent six daughters to Abbot Academy and do not fear to compare the result as seen in their training, with the results attained in any other institution of our land, provided the persons selected are of equal natural gifts. The missionary work of Abbot Academy has been wide in extent and noble in character, both at home and abroad; and should be understood by friends of missions. It cannot be spared; its work, its history, its example, make it one of our choicest schools for the education of women, and I pray God it may be abundantly, richly endowed.

Mr. Edwin Reed of Cambridge, who married an Abbot Academy graduate, after felicitous compliments to the school, made a graceful, sparkling speech, from which we quote,—"The wise, judicious, painstaking administration of affairs there goes always to the roots of character, and gives us:—

'The perfect woman, nobly planned To warn, to comfort, and command.'

One uniform spirit of devotion to the highest good of all presides there, and impresses itself on every pupil. Indeed, I am not sure, if I had my way and could educate but one of the sexes, that I would not take the girls, and give them the colleges of the land, in preference to the present occupants. This would be hard on the boys, but, if I should 'turn the rascals out' and put their sisters in, it would be for this reason, great men always have great mothers. No great man ever lived who did not derive the native strength of his character directly from the mother who bore him. Mothers impress their qualities on their sons, and to get a generation of great men at the earliest possible moment, I would adopt the order of nature and secure first a generation of great mothers."

Dr. McKenzie spoke affectionately of the academy and its toilsome growth, saying that almost every object in the school had its history. He referred to the great force of the demands made by schools and colleges, and said that it was a sign of health and vigor when a school asked for better accommodations, because it had wider opportunities for usefulness. Mr. Porter proposed a committee to attend to the matter in this section, as follows, Rufus S. Frost, James White, Edwin Reed, C. F. P. Bancroft, Mrs. Daniel Chamberlin, Miss Annie Means, Miss Caroline A. Holmes, Miss Josephine Wilcox and Mrs. Laura A. W. Fowler. The committee was subsequently enlarged by adding the names of Rev. Edward G. Porter and Miss Mary E. Fowle. After the business the meeting adjourned to the dining-room, where Mrs. Chamberlin had thoughtfully and kindly provided a delicious entertainment, which fitly ended the delightful afternoon.

The Rev. Phillips Brooks acknowledged his kinship to the founder of Abbot, and in substance said: "No institution so takes on personality as a school. I see the various colleges almost as if they had features, and we may have some such feeling regarding Abbot Academy. Then there is so much in the quality of an old institution, if it keeps abreast of the times. The period of the founding of Abbot was an interesting one. It was a time when old ideas were being left behind and a new thought was just taking the place of the old. Great processes, which have not yet begun to fulfil themselves, had just begun to appear. No one can think of the academy without feeling grateful for that religious character which it is easier for an old school to keep than for a new one to acquire. Then, too, there is an advantage in its location, for there is much economy and much value in the educational atmosphere of a town like Andover."

The plan provides for four buildings; the main or central one, where the family life will be carried on, connected by corridors with the smaller French and German Halls, and containing, not only parlors, school offices, dining-rooms, and suites for teachers and pupils; but a beautiful library, a spacious reading-room, and upon its third floor, commodious music-rooms shut off from each other and the corridors by walls and doors of such construction that sound cannot pass through. French and German Halls furnish each a family sitting-room cheery with open fires and charming with artistic finish; suites for pupils and teachers, but neither kitchen nor dining accommodations, as all meals are to be taken in the main building. To this purpose the western front of the lower or basement story has been devoted. The young ladies coming from the language houses pass by separate staircases to their own dining-room on the north and south side of the central one, where the English-speaking pupils sit. These side dining-rooms can be shut off or thrown into the central apartment at will, and in this way freedom for the foreign language is secured and the whole number of pupils centralized; a more economical arrangement than the present one of three separate kitchens. Indeed, apart from economy, and outside the great advantage this plan affords to the students of French and German, the Faculty of Abbot Academy emphatically prefer the division of the school into distinct families; the cottage system insuring in their opinion much greater certainty of health, and opportunities for the direct personal influence important in the development of character. The fourth building is the academy, where prayers and recitations will be conducted, and where public gatherings will be suitably accommodated. The three living-houses are arranged for one hundred and twenty-five pupils only, two pupils occupy single beds in one bedroom and sharing a parlor. The architecture is after the eleventh century Romanesque; the material brick, with freestone trimmings, and the effect of all simple, suitable, dignified.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] Abbot Academy, then called Abbot Female Academy, was incorporated Feb. 26, 1829; Moravian Brothers established schools for girls, Bethlehem, Pa., 1749; Rev. Joseph Emerson opened seminaries for girls in Byfield, Saugus, and Wethersfield, 1815; charter obtained for Adams Academy, Derry, N. H., 1823; Miss Lyon's seminary, Ipswich, 1828; Bradford Academy limited its work to girls, 1836; Mount Holyoke, 1835; Vassar College, Smith College, and Wellesley College later, but dates are uncertain, as confusion results from lack of definiteness as to whether they represent the year of founding, opening, or incorporation.

[D] Miss Sarah Abbot, Founder of Abbot Academy, Andover, was born in Andover, Oct. 3. 1762; married Nehemiah Abbot, first Steward of Andover Theological Seminary, often called Divinity College; died in 1848, in the house on Andover Hill, occupied for many years by the family of Dr. Samuel C. Jackson, and now the residence of Prof. E. J. Hincks; buried in the cemetery of the South Church, Andover.



THE ORIGINAL NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE.

BY REV. EDGAR BUCKINGHAM.

The magazine which first bore this title was established in the year 1831, by Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham. There were not at that time many monthly periodicals in the country; it was long before the days of the Atlantic and Putnam's. The New-England originated in the desire of my brother Edwin, who, at that date, was just twenty-one years of age, to rise to a higher position than that of editor of a daily paper. He had been for some years connected with my father, first, as assistant editor of the New England Galaxy, and then of the Boston Courier. People estimate very differently now the position of the editor of one of our city dailies; but at that time, though such an editor had an influence and a very great one, he could not be said to rule so far in political and social life, and to be so nearly supreme, as he has since become through the talents and labors of the Bennetts, of Greeley, of Raymond, of Thurlow Weed, and of Samuel Bowles. It is true, Mr. Bryant, of the Evening Post, was already at his station, so was Joseph E. Chandler, of Philadelphia; and Gales and Seaton, of the National Intelligencer; and Nathan Hale also, of the Boston Advertiser, exerted an important influence, wherever that paper was read. But an editor now addresses every day ten thousand or a hundred thousand readers, where fifty years ago the issue of his paper was limited to little more than a thousand copies. My brother Edwin felt, apparently, that to be editor of a monthly magazine would bring him into closer connection and intimacy with the leading men of literary eminence throughout the country, and so the magazine was originated by him and by my father on his account.

Edwin was an accomplished writer at that early day. He had not learned the art at school; for he left school altogether when he was fourteen years of age. At that early period of life, he entered into the printing-office of the New England Galaxy, learning to set type, and, shortly, came to have charge of the making up of the paper. My father often said that the best school education one could get was at the compositor's stand. Edwin early began to write for the paper, and I remember, now, with what admiration an article of his on "Massachusetts" was read more than sixty years ago, and while he was yet a boy. The Galaxy was sold in 1827; and my father and brother gave themselves up more particularly to the editorship of the Courier. Before Edwin was twenty-one, he spent some winters in Washington, as special correspondent of the newspaper; and while there attracted no little attention from the great men of the nation. He was a young man of active habits, and during the trial of the Whites, at Salem, for the murder of Joseph White, in 1830, at which Mr. Webster made one of his most powerful efforts as a lawyer and advocate, Edwin reported the proceedings. He drove down to Salem in the morning, and back at night with the proceeds of his daily labor, over the cold and foggy marshes of Lynn. Then he took a cold, from the effects of which he never recovered. He used the severest remedies, and, in October, 1832, he sailed for Smyrna; after spending some months there in a home where friendship and kindness did all that nature and skill could accomplish, and finding all means ineffectual, he started for home to die; but a few days before reaching his native land he breathed his last. His remains were committed to the deep in May, 1833. A cenotaph at Mt. Auburn commemorates his birth and death. It bears the inscription of being placed there by "Boston Mechanics." Edwin believed in the mechanic arts, and in what are called laboring men. He had himself been of them. It was fitting also his monument should be reared at Mt. Auburn; it was one of the first stones erected there. He had been himself greatly instrumental in carrying to success the project of turning "Sweet" Auburn, as it had been called, into a cemetery where the ashes of the loved and illustrious might be gathered for a final resting-place.

The Magazine started well, and may be said to have been wholly successful, compared with other literary undertakings of the day, and with the just expectations of the proprietors. My father and brother had capable, willing, illustrious helpers. The first article of the first number was by Dr. Frothingham, of Boston, than whom no more elegant scholar, no finer writer was to be found in New England; Hon. Edward Everett contributed a playful article of some length to the same number. Hon. George S. Hillard, long known also in Boston for his fine scholarship, contributed a long review of the "Chanting Cherubs," a greatly admired piece of sculpture by Horatio Greenough then on exhibition in Boston. Hon. William Austin of Charlestown contributed a most ingenious and interesting story, not surpassed by fiction of the present day. Among the contributors to the first number were also Dr. Samuel G. Howe, and Hon. Timothy Walker of Cincinnati; Rev. Leonard Withington of Newbury, Mass., a gentleman who lived long and quietly in that secluded village, but wielded a vigorous pen, and had a very thoughtful mind; his contribution was of a very kindly and wise article on the religious character of Lord Byron,—an article well worth republication as an introduction to any complete collection of the works of that great poet. One would say such a combination of the literary strength of Massachusetts was a good setting off for a new magazine.

The gentlemen above named, all or most of them, continued their contributions for other months and years. In addition to these whose names I have given, there were in succeeding numbers articles from Richard Hildreth, the historian, Park Benjamin, the poet, John G. Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor Longfellow, Miss Hannah F. Gould, Dr. W. B. O. Peabody, of Springfield, Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, long known and honored and loved in his position in Cambridge as guardian and friend of the young men in college. But the list would be too long to enumerate all the fine scholars and eminent writers who gathered to make up the NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE. My father and brother were very successful in securing the labors especially of young men,—my brother, because he was young himself,—my father, because always he was quick to discern rising merit, and ready and earnest to help forward young men to success and eminence. The list above given is that mostly of men who at that time were still in early youth.

The fifth volume of the Magazine, in July, 1833, records my brother's death and the solitude of the senior editor. The number is prefaced by a picture of my brother, which shows him as a handsome young man, at the age of twenty-two; but the lithograph cannot give his fair complexion, the clearness of his large blue eyes. It was accompanied by an elegiac poem, by Charles Sprague, well known then, and not forgotten since, as one of our most finished poets, and one of our most pathetic writers. The work that then devolved upon my father, not only as editor of a daily paper, but as a man of public activity and usefulness, member as he was for many years of the Legislature, chairman of committees, to whose reports he devoted an immensity of labor, was sufficient to require him to give up the Magazine. Besides its more strictly literary articles, contributed mostly by others, though my father wrote some of the literary articles himself, the Magazine presented every month a review of the public proceedings of Congress and of many of the State governments, the most of which, I think, were prepared by himself, and usually a long series of obituary notices. These last were of citizens of different parts of the country, and came undoubtedly from different hands. But of people of distinction, citizens of Boston, who died from 1831 to 1835, my father's pen probably produced almost all of the eulogies. The warmth of his friendship, his readiness to see all good, to forgive all imperfections, his skill as a writer, made such articles from his pen exceedingly interesting and admirable.

In December, 1834, my father wrote his valedictory, and on the first of January, 1835, announced that the proprietorship had passed into the hands of Dr. Samuel G. Howe and John O. Sargent, Esq. In looking over the papers of the seven volumes, which filled out my father's editorship, very many articles are found of the highest merit,—as the names of the contributors given above would assure the reader; and if some of inferior worth are at times mingled with them, they probably had some interest at the time they were written; and the Magazine on the whole would be pronounced, I suppose, worthy of general commendation.

* * * * *

It is the Nemesis of pedantry to be always wrong. Your true prig of a pedant goes immensely out of his way to be vastly more correct than other people, and succeeds in the end in being vastly more ungrammatical, or vastly more illogical, or both at once.—Cornhill Magazine.



IRISH HOME RULE AGITATION:

ITS HISTORY AND ISSUES.

BY REV. H. HEWITT.

By far the most thorny problem of British statesmanship at the present moment is the persistent and pressing demand made by the Irish people through the Irish press and their representatives in Parliament for the repeal of the Union and the recognition of their right to national self-government. Incessantly, earnestly, eloquently, the question has been agitated for the past dozen years or so. Adroitly and skilfully it has been manipulated by some of the most brilliant, sagacious, and resolute agitators Ireland has ever known. Slowly but steadily it has grown, passing from stage to stage with ever-brightening prospect of ultimate success, until it has now become the aspiration, we might almost say, the one, quenchless, all-absorbing passion of the Irish people. The consequence is that the first calm moment after a most exciting and vigorous electoral contest, during which "the fire out of the bramble" has devoured many "cedars of Lebanon," the two great parties in the State find themselves face to face with a difficulty which, even for the most zealous aspirant to place and power, robs the honors and emoluments of office of more than half their charm. Neither Liberal nor Conservative will care to incur the displeasure of the Queen and the implacable wrath of the English aristocracy—both Whig and Tory—by consenting to the political divorcement of Ireland, and to what would be regarded as the disruption of the empire. For it is felt, not without good reason, that the indirect and ultimate consequences of the severance would be far more serious than any direct and immediate effects. The efforts of popular statesmen, in recent times, have been mainly directed toward the maintenance of the prestige of the Crown. This was the sole motive of Lord Beaconsfield's "spirited foreign policy." It was the one consideration that made the "Imperial Titles Bill," and the imperial measures of which it proved to be the too significant prelude, so immensely popular in London. So sure was he of the strength and predominance of this patriotic sentiment in England that he made his appeal almost exclusively to it, in asking in 1880 for a fresh lease of power. The occasion was critical, he said. "The peace of Europe, and the ascendency of England in the councils of Europe" depended upon the verdict the country was now called upon to give. The policy of the party opposed to his own was declared to be a "policy of decomposition." But the concession of self-government in the form demanded by the Irish Parliamentary party, whatever might be the political necessity pleaded in justification of it, would be certain to be interpreted in England, in the colonies and dependencies of the British empire, and by all foreign States, as a sure omen of the decline of the British Crown. To us it is utterly inconceivable that the Queen, who is profoundly conscious of her power, keenly sensitive as to her royal dignities, rights, and prerogatives, and proud, as she has reason to be, of her long and prosperous reign, should ever consent to a policy of dismemberment, by whatever political party proposed. The Conservatives cannot afford to purchase the influence and assistance of the Irish vote at the price Mr. Parnell has fixed and is every way likely to insist on. They would have to belie the best traditions of the party, and discredit the cardinal principles of their once powerful and still deeply revered chief—the late Lord Beaconsfield—to whom Home Rule meant "veiled rebellion," and presented a danger "scarcely less disastrous than pestilence and famine." The Liberals are equally unlikely to risk the integrity and unity of the party by the concession of a claim which even an advanced Radical like Mr. Chamberlain has condemned as unwarrantable, unwise, and impossible to be granted. Still this and nothing less than this is the hope and expectation of the great majority of the Irish people. This and nothing less will be the demand of the Irish leaders as soon as Parliament assembles at the beginning of the ensuing year.

In order to a clear and correct understanding of the position of Irish affairs at the present juncture, and of the nature and ground of the Home Rule demand, it will be necessary briefly to sketch the history of the agitation's genesis and growth. It is all the more necessary to do this as there are few political or social problems, even in England itself, more grievously misunderstood and wantonly misstated. It is truly surprising how much confusion, ignorance, and irrational antipathy may be nursed and maintained by an excited state of public feeling and a partisan and prejudiced press. Mr. Justin McCarthy complains with some bitterness that "people found their deepest sympathies stirred by the sufferings of cattle and horses in Ireland, who never were known to feel one throb of compunction over the fashionable sin of torturing pigeons at Hurlingham." And the words he quotes from a letter addressed to the Times of Dec. 3, 1880, by the illustrious General Gordon, after a visit to the much afflicted country, show with equal clearness the sad condition of affairs in Ireland, and the apparent incapability of the English public to realize it. "I have been lately over the south-west of Ireland," he wrote, "in the hope of discovering how some settlement could be made of the Irish question, which, like a fretting cancer, eats away our vitals as a nation." After the bold and, as some would think, unstatesmanlike proposal, "that the government should, at a cost of eighty millions, convert the greater part of the south-west of Ireland into Crown lands, in which landlords should have no power of control," Gordon concluded, "I must say, from all accounts and my own observations, that the state of our fellow-countrymen in the parts I have named is worse than that of any people in the world, let alone Europe. I believe that these people are made as we are, that they are patient beyond belief, loyal, but at the same time broken-spirited and desperate, living on the verge of starvation, in places where we would not keep our cattle.... Our comic prints do an infinity of harm by their caricatures. Firstly, the caricatures are not true, for the crime in Ireland is not greater than that in England; secondly, they exasperate the people on both sides of the Channel, and they do no good. It is ill to laugh and scoff at a question which affects our existence."

To Gordon's appeal on behalf of Ireland no one was more ready to listen with sympathy than the Prime Minister himself. The claims and grievances of the people whose magnanimous endurance, self-restraint, and patience had so excited Gordon's admiration and called forth his warmest words of praise, the great Liberal statesman had never been slow to recognize. Ireland has not always been willing to be grateful to him; but he has always striven to be more than just to her, and has more than once incurred the odium and reproach of the aristocracy of England, and even the disaffection of many of his followers, in his truly heroic "attempts to mitigate the miseries of the Irish people." When he surprised the country by his sudden and unexpected dissolution of Parliament in 1874, he had certainly done something to earn the gratitude and confidence of Ireland. He had disestablished the Irish Protestant Church. He had passed a Land Act, which at the time (1870) was regarded as a valuable contribution to the settlement of the land problem, aiming, as it did, first, to give the tenant some security of tenure where, as in the majority of cases, he had been practically unable to plead any rights as against the landlord; second, to encourage the making of needful improvements throughout the country; and, thirdly, to promote the establishment of a peasant proprietorship. In the attempt to confer a third great boon on the discontented nation in the shape of the Irish University Education Bill, he and his administration went to pieces on the immovable rock of Protestant prejudice.

Of course the provisions of the Land Act, while they occasioned some fretting and exasperation among the land-owners, who are in the habit of regarding every effort of legislation for the benefit of their tenants with a fixed sense of calamity, failed entirely to satisfy the more aggressive and eager of the Irish Parliamentary party. The Land Act had not taken its place upon the statute book before a meeting of representative Irishmen was called in Dublin with the view of framing some scheme of Home Government, and organizing measures for its advocacy in Parliament, and in the towns and cities of Ireland. In the course of discussion, one of the speakers used the words "Home Rule," and they were formally and forthwith adopted as the war-cry of the Nationalist party.

For the first five years the new organization made little headway. Its leader, Mr. Isaac Butt, was an able man—a lawyer of some distinction and a Protestant—but he was not a man to set the Thames on fire; he was not the man to control the fierce and fiery young politicians that had begun to flock to the standard of the National cause. With unromantic dutifulness to his place and his party, he annually brought his motion for Home Rule before the notice of the House, and was supported by some fifty or sixty members and a few sympathetic Radicals, but the Conservative government and its solid majority were of one mind on the matter. Mr. Butt died in 1879, and Mr. Shaw succeeded to the leadership, but on the organization of the Land League in the same year, he was quietly shunted in favor of Mr. Parnell, who, as the Corypheus of the party, has so far displayed great skill, coolness, and self-command, and has been rewarded in Ireland by regal ovations, and by the suggestive title of the "uncrowned king."

Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell, who was declared by one of the speakers at a recent meeting of Irish citizens held in Faneuil Hall, and more recently by Mr. J. B. O'Reilly in the North American Review, to be of American birth, is really a man of English descent. One of his ancestors was the poet Parnell. Another, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards created Lord Congleton, was the associate of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne in the reform movement of 1829-32. He was a graduate of Cambridge University, and a Protestant in religion. By birth, by training, and by creed, he seemed to be of all persons the most unsuited to the task in which he has been so eminently successful. "In 1871, after some years of travel in America, among other places, he settled down on his estate at Avondale, in Wicklow, within whose boundaries is to be found Moore's Vale of Avoca, with its meeting waters." Like many who in spite of early failures have afterwards risen to distinction, Mr. Parnell's first public appearance was a great disappointment to himself and his friends. Before the electors of Dublin he completely broke down in his first attempt at public speaking, and the great city which has since showered upon him the highest honors it can give, rejected him. In 1875, he entered the House of Commons for the first time as member for Meath. For the first few years of his Parliamentary life he was mainly distinguished for the skill and unwearied persistency of his tactics as an obstructionist, though he also succeeded in carrying useful amendments to such measures as the Factories and Workshops Bill and the Bill for the Abolition of Flogging in the Army and Navy.

The Land League organization gave him just the kind of political machinery he wanted, though the credit of its creation belongs more to Michael Davitt and John Dillon than to him. It soon became immensely popular in Ireland, and, for a time, its orders and decrees superseded the established law of the land, with the seeming result of replacing social order and tranquillity by a condition of widespread anarchy, confusion, and lawlessness. It is only fair to say, however, that the Land League meetings did not create but only revealed the misery, distress, and discontent of the Irish rural populace. The country had recently suffered from a severe visitation of famine. Evictions for non-payment of rent had been steadily increasing for several years past. In 1877 the number stood at 463; in 1878 it swelled to nearly 1,000; at the end of 1880 it had actually reached 2,110. A bill was introduced by one of the Irish members with a view to mitigating the rigors of the law as regarded the impoverished tenantry. The government refused to adopt the measure, but sought to meet the case by framing a remedial scheme of their own which was introduced under the name of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill. This bill, which was vigorously assailed from opposite quarters in the Commons, was unceremoniously rejected by the Lords, who denounced it as a flagrant encroachment on the rights of property. It must ever be regretted in the interests of mere humanity that Mr. Gladstone's government did not compel the recalcitrant peers to abandon their attitude of defiance in regard to that much-needed piece of ameliorative legislation. The House of Lords takes nothing so ill as open and avowed conflict with a powerful and popular ministry. In such a case the issue is never doubtful. And if the ministry had shown a determination to nail their colors to the mast, the Lords would have lost no time in unfurling a flag of truce. As it was, their practical acquiescence in the rejection of the bill consummated the rupture between the Irish party and themselves. The speeches of the chiefs of the Land League grew fierce, and at times violent, in their denunciation of Her Majesty's ministers. Mr. W. E. Forster, especially, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, a man of invincible resolution and ineradicable prejudices, and yet withal a man of much rugged kindliness of nature, became the victim of incessant interrogation and attack in Parliament, and the object of an unrelenting and quenchless hate in Ireland.

At one time the tone and temper of leading agitators were all that could be desired. "Abstain," said Mr. Davitt, "from all acts of violence, repel every incentive to outrage. Glorious indeed will be our victory, and high in the estimation of mankind will our grand old fatherland stand, if we can so curb our passions and control our actions in this struggle for free land, as to march to success through privation and danger without resorting to the wild justice of revenge, or being guilty of anything which could sully the character of a brave and Christian people." Later on Mr. Davitt's feelings were less calm and his language less measured, mild and sober; as when, for instance, he pictured to his excited auditors "the wolf-dog of Irish vengeance leaping across the Atlantic to redress and avenge the wrongs of Ireland." Mr. John Dillon went further still, and ventured to intimate in a speech delivered at Kildare the advisability of military drill and general preparation for a resort to arms should the necessity arise.

Among the various means, legitimate and otherwise, adopted by the League for the accomplishment of its ends, was that form of social ostracism now familiarly known as "boycotting." Captain Boycott was an Englishman, employed as agent of Lord Earne, and occupied a farm at Ballinrobe, near Lough Mask. Emboldened by the powerful protection of the League, Lord Earne's tenants had refused to pay the stipulated rents, and Boycott served notices of eviction upon them. Whereupon not only the tenants on the estate but the population for miles on every side of him resolved not to have anything to do with him in any shape, whether of barter, business, or intercourse, nor was any one else permitted to relieve his isolation, or do him or his family any service, or supply him with any necessity of life. The Orangemen of Ulster organized and went armed to his relief, and under the protection of a small band of soldiers and police, his harvests were gathered in, and his produce conveyed to the nearest available market. Boycott went to England for a short time, and on his return to Lough Mask at once extricated himself from his painful and perilous position by giving up his agency. His unexpected surrender, strange to tell, brought about a complete revulsion of feeling among the dwellers of that wild and lovely district. He now became as popular as he had before been obnoxious. In the course of a speech delivered at a mass meeting of from fifteen to twenty thousand men at Waterford, in September, 1883, Michael Davitt said, "It was better for all concerned that the truth should be plainly and bluntly told, in order that English quack statesmen might be saved the trouble of proposing half measures to satisfy the Irish people.... Let the landlords of Ireland resign their unpopular positions, follow the example of Captain Boycott, and nobody would molest them, but if they did not, they would be grievously surprised by and by, for they would make the discovery which Captain Boycott had made, that the English government would find that it did not pay from an Imperial point of view to support a worse than useless class against the Irish nation. The 'lifeboat for the landlords,' as Lord Derby had once called the Land Act (1881), rescued them from the rocks upon which they were hurled by the waves of the Land League, but they had not reached the shores of safety yet. There were other breakers ahead that would do more damage to their rotten system than the storm of the Land League. When the laborers and the artisans of Ireland or of England and Scotland were enfranchised, was it to be supposed that the educated millions of industry would allow the national patrimony—the land—to be any longer the property of a useless class? In the language of scripture, the landlords would be asked to give an account of their stewardship, for they could be no longer stewards."

While, however, the Land Leaguers were jubilant at the success of their movement, the government were preparing to take strenuous measures for its suppression. Its leaders, Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, Mr. T. D. Sullivan, Mr. Sexton, along with the Treasurer, Mr. Egan, and the Secretary, Mr. Brennan, and several others, were prosecuted by the Crown on the charge of inciting to outrage. The prosecution, however, broke down, as everybody expected it would, through disagreement of the jury.

When Parliament assembled in January, 1881, the policy announced for Ireland was, as usual, one of concession and coercion. There was to be a Land Act, and there was to be a Bill which would give the Lord-lieutenant "power by warrant to arrest any person reasonably suspected of treason, treasonable felony, or treasonable practices, and the commission, whether before or after the Act, of crimes of intimidation, or incitement thereto." The conflict over the latter bill, which was first introduced, made the House of Commons more like a bear-garden than a place of rational deliberation and debate. Even Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone became exasperated, and charged back upon their assailants with an energy and violence quite unwonted. Mr. Gladstone's speech in particular aroused the House, angered the Irish members, and proved to be the prelude to a prolonged conflict with systematic obstruction, which went on for some time, night and day, without break. Even Mr. Parnell for the moment lost all self-command, entered into an angry conflict with the Prime Minister, defied the ruling of the Speaker, and was expelled the House, as Mr. Dillon had been the evening before. Some thirty others of the National party followed his example of defiance with a similar result. At the close of February the Coercion Bill was sent up to the Lords, and on the beginning of March received the Queen's assent. The end of July saw the third reading of the Land Bill in the Commons, after long and wearisome debate. The Lords amended it to death, and sent it back to the Commons—the poor and pithless shadow of its former self. Restored to life in the Lower House, it was again presented for the acceptance of the peers. Again they struck at its vitality, but the Commons said, Nulla vestigia retrorsum. A thousand popular platforms and almost the whole provincial press called upon the government to be firm; mass meetings in London and other large cities and towns clamored for the abolition of the House of Lords and the extinction of hereditary rule. Eventually the courage of the peers gave way, and the Land Bill of 1881 became law.

The closing months of the year saw the Land League chiefs in Kilmainham Prison. Mr. Gladstone on his visit to Leeds, early in October, had met with a reception more than royal from the folks of Yorkshire. For two or three days special trains from every part of that densely populated county poured into the great emporium of the cloth-trade thousands of enthusiastic admirers eager to catch a near glimpse of the foremost statesman of the age as he rode from point to point through the barricaded streets. In one of the speeches made during the visit, he had strongly reprobated the policy and proceedings of Mr. Parnell. At a meeting in Wexford, a few days after, Mr. Parnell replied with some bitterness. A few days more brought the exciting news of the arrests by the Irish Executive. The situation was desperate. The imprisoned leaders at once issued a manifesto calling upon the tenantry of Ireland to withhold payment of rents. This was a direct violation of the law, as well as a great political blunder, and the government at once seized the occasion as a fitting opportunity for suppressing the Land League and the advanced Nationalist press. In the session of 1882 there appeared a manifest indisposition on the part of a majority of the cabinet to give further sanction to the policy of Mr. Forster in Ireland. The imprisoned Home Rulers were released from Kilmainham on conditions which he thought perilously lenient, and he resigned, as also did Earl Cowper. The entry of the new Lord-lieutenant, Earl Spencer, on the 6th of May, into the Irish capital, promised well; but the assassin had bargained with the fates for the day, and before the sun had ceased to shed his bright beams on the green grass and budding trees of Phoenix Park, a scion of the noble house of Devonshire and his companion in office had been immolated on the altar of Irish vengeance before the eyes of the new viceroy as he stood in the window of the viceregal lodge. The civilized world was horror-struck. Ireland expressed her profound regret at a transaction which was thought to have been planned and executed by some designing foe. Messrs. Parnell, Dillon, and Davitt hastily met to disclaim any sympathy with the crime and to denounce the criminals. The rest of the story is now familiar and needs not be retold. The government was known to have been contemplating a milder regime for Ireland; but the disastrous incident of the 6th of May drove them back upon their former policy. A Crimes Bill was passed, followed by a measure of alleviation, known as the Arrears Bill, with the view of keeping the scales of justice even. In the middle of August the exhibition of Irish Art and Manufactures was opened in Dublin, and the unveiling of the statue of O'Connell, in Sackville Street, was part of the programme of the ceremonies. On the following day, Messrs. Parnell and Dillon received the freedom of the city, and Mr. E. D. Gray, M. P., proprietor of Freeman's Journal, and High Sheriff of Dublin, was committed to Richmond gaol for contempt of Court.

Whatever necessity may be pleaded for such measures as these, they only had one result, namely, the steady advancement of the Irish National cause. Dynamite explosions in London, Glasgow, and elsewhere, troubles in Egypt and the Soudan, complications with Russia as to the Afghan frontier, left little time for attention to Irish affairs during the last years of the existence of the Liberal ministry. The Irish Nationalist leaders had convinced themselves that they owed no gratitude to the government, and could hope for nothing from the Liberal party, except "chains, imprisonment, and death," to cite the words of Mr. Gladstone's recent reply to the Irish citizens of St. Louis. They had been long biding their time and watching for their opportunity, when suddenly it presented itself. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Childers, in presenting the Annual Budget, "ran a tilt" against the "beer and spirit" interest—a sin unpardonable, for any minister in England. The Budget was defeated, and ministers accepted the hint, rejoicing that, for a time at least, their troubles were ended.

Meanwhile the organization of the Irish National party had been developed to a point of perfection in anticipation of the New Reform Bill. That bill promised nothing in particular either to Gladstone or Salisbury, and it has given to neither any particular advantage over the other. In the counties the Liberal interest has advanced; in the boroughs it has markedly declined. But it promised everything to Parnell, and the fulfilment has been equal to the promise. It is no exaggeration to say that with a compact following of eighty-six he is virtually "master of the situation." But his position, on the other hand, is undoubtedly very critical. It is one which few men are likely to envy; it is one which not one in a thousand is competent to fill. Will he be equal to it? Where Grattan—sagacious, eloquent, high-minded and sincere—so signally failed, is Parnell likely to succeed? To-day his party is united, enthusiastic and strong, but when the hour for compromise and concession arrives, will the unanimity be maintained? Does Mr. Parnell himself know how much to ask, how little he ought to take, and where to draw the limit of compromise? Repeatedly Mr. Gladstone has invited Irish leaders to bring forward some definite scheme, and let the country know what they meant by "Home Rule." The cry, as a party watchword, has served admirably—seldom has a couple of words served so well—because, as expressing Irish National aspirations, it meant everything in general and nothing in particular; but the moment is at hand when it will be necessary to reduce it to a definite and feasible scheme of domestic government and policy. When that moment comes, will the prince of obstructionists in St. Stephen's prove himself equally capable as a constructive statesman on College Green? Should Mr. Gladstone find himself in a position soon after the opening of Parliament (he is not in a position now) to enter into practical negotiation with Mr. Parnell, may not the latter discover, as many an able and successful leader of men has done before him, that the next sad thing to a great defeat is a great victory? It is no secret that the demand Mr. Parnell, as the head of the Irish Nationalist party, is commissioned to make on behalf of Ireland, is a demand for national self-government almost, if not quite, amounting to national independence: it is equally well known that no British statesman would ever think, in the present state of public sentiment, of countenancing such a claim. For ourselves we do not venture to forecast the issue of the conflict; for "prophecy is the most gratuitous style of error." We content ourselves with hoping that the settlement may be speedy, pacific, satisfactory, and lasting.



ELIZABETH.[E]

A ROMANCE OF COLONIAL DAYS.

BY FRANCES C. SPARHAWK, Author of "A Lazy Man's Work."

CHAPTER XXX.

AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE.

While Archdale, full of emotions that he did not try to analyze, went on toward Grand Battery, a figure, eluding him, crept softly to one of the hospital tents, lifted the curtain a little way without being observed at first, and stood looking in, an interested spectator, not because human suffering, patience, and courage were upon exhibition here, but because here he would find some one who could give him information that he wanted.

In a few minutes Nancy Foster, passing by the door, looked up and saw him watching her. She had become too well used to unfamiliar faces and to messages at all hours and was too well protected to feel alarm.

"Oh! la! how you startled me," she cried. "What do you want? Dr. Waters?"

"Hush!" he said, and beckoned to her to draw nearer. "I want to speak to that lady yonder, only for a moment. Do you think she would come here?" Harwin, for it was he, was a fine illustration of the proverb that he who asks timidly, teaches denial. If he had demanded her mistress, Nancy would have spoken to her at once. Now she scanned the intruder curiously, and judged from the hesitation of his manner that his errand was not urgent.

"No, she can't," she answered, with the decision wanting in the other. "Don't you see how she's driven? And she's got to go away some time and get a little rest. You'll have to come tomorrow."

"To-morrow!" he echoed drearily. Was it for this that he had come from the fleet in the dispatch boat, and was braving all dangers? He took a resolution from despair. He fell back until Nancy had gone and was again intent upon her work.

At last he stepped forward noiselessly and began to make the half circuit of the tent toward Elizabeth. Nancy, pre-occupied, passed by him without speaking.

Elizabeth had sent for fresh water to moisten the lips of the dying soldier whom she had told Archdale about. She had just filled her cup a second time, and was on her way toward her especial charge for that night, when Edmonson asked her for water. Ashamed of her impatience at the simple request, she turned toward him, walking carefully with her eyes upon her mug, not to waste a refreshment that had to be brought from a distance. Suddenly, she found herself almost running against the intruder. She looked up.

But the apology froze upon her lips. She retreated hastily several steps, the water splashed unheeded over her trembling fingers. Edmonson, who was always watching her, called to Nancy, "Your mistress, girl! Quick!" and turned to look for her.

Nancy had gone to her patients in the next tent. But his voice helped Elizabeth to recover herself. She stood firm again, but her rigid expression did not change. With a bow, the intruder began:—

"May I venture—"

She interrupted him. "Do not speak to me, or stay here. Go!" She was like marble, only that her eyes blazed. Her hand pointed toward the door emphasizing her repulsion. Edmonson looked in amazement at this new power, to him a new attraction.

The other drew back precipitately a few steps. Then he stopped and stood looking at her, the questions that he had meant to put so boldly struggling with something not unlike fear. For Elizabeth's look and tone were terrible. She was an embodied indignation. At the moment he believed her Archdale's wife. Her hand pointing toward the door was turning him beyond the reach of all that was dearest to him. Yet for a moment it seemed as if he could not resist her, as if he were forever to be in exile. But he remembered that it was Katie Archdale's world that was looking at him out of those pitiless eyes, and condemning him. He had tried so hard to get news of Katie; he had even written her father a business letter, and had ended it by a covert inquiry for news of her. Not one word but business had come in the answer. Then, learning that Elizabeth was here, he had contrived to be sent ashore, for he had been with Commodore Warren through the siege, had risked meeting Archdale, had risked everything for this chance of the news he hungered for. He had been sure that the person whom he recollected as Mistress Royal must answer whatever questions he might choose to put to her. And now must he go away starving within sight of food? In desperation he tried to summon back his assurance.

"Only let me ask you if Katie—Mistress—," he began again, taking a hasty step toward her. But again she stopped him, and this time without a word. As he tried to meet her look, gradually his eyes fell. He made no further effort to speak. Step by step he fell backward, until at a distance from her he stood still looking at her as if strength failed him, even to retreat. Elizabeth turned to Edmonson, and gave him the water left in her cup.

"Is that Harwin?" he asked hoarsely, holding it back from his lips until she had answered him.

"Yes," she said, as if to end the subject. "Drink. I must go."

He sipped hastily, without thirst, and handed back the cup. "Thank you," he said. As she turned away, her hand was trembling again. She swept her eyes in the opposite direction from Harwin if he should still be there. Edmonson, after a long glance at her, lay watching him. Here was his evil genius. But for Harwin what would not have been? In a flash the future that he had planned, a thousand times more blissful than his former dreams, came up before him, and, fading, left the present all the more blank. His wounded right arm moved convulsively. Harwin remained still where Elizabeth's last repulse had left him. He seemed trying to swallow his chagrin, and wrap the tatters of his dignity about him before he moved away. Perhaps he was in a dream of the woman whose very name he had not been allowed to utter. Elizabeth was beside Melvin again, and Edmonson still kept his eyes fixed upon Harwin, who was standing between him and her, and gradually and painfully he raised his right arm toward the pillow.

Archdale had been met by an orderly, and had gone to the General's tent instead of to the Battery. Pepperell was alone.

"Sit down," he said. "No, let us go out into the air. Warren's dispatches have just come," he added, as the two passed out of the tent. "He expects two or three large ships in any day. I shall arrange for the general attack as soon as they come up." He smiled at Archdale's enthusiastic endorsement. "You like the smoke of battle," he said. "But the fact is, you have an eye for military situations. Of course I have quite made up my mind, but I should like to hear what you have to say." And he laughed, and took his young friend's arm with a freedom not too common in those stately times. But Pepperell was a man who, born in any age or place, would have found himself at home there, and controlling affairs, not controlled by them. He had come to Louisburg with very little experience in military matters; he had never even seen a siege. He led an army of fishermen, backwoodsmen, farmers, who had left their employments at their country's call. But these had the strong hearts and the quick wits that more than a hundred years later, when the land awoke from a dream of peace, made it rise up a nation of soldiers.

The General and Archdale went to a hillock that commanded a view of the harbor, and of the city constantly illuminated by the bursting shells, as were also the forts and the army encamped there. The luridness of war was over everything. They stood looking toward the island which, ever since the assault, had hurled its fire at them incessantly.

"And what would you do with that Battery?" asked the General.

"Annihilate the Battery," retorted the young man. "It can be done. I think you could rake it best from the Light House."

"I believe I will try. Say nothing of this, Archdale. I shall wait a day or two for those ships. It would be awkward, wouldn't it, if the French ones came instead?" His words were light, but the other perceived his deep anxiety.

"What would you do then?" he asked.

"Take Louisburg,—or die."

Archdale turned towards him impulsively. "Yes, you will," he cried, "you will lead us into Louisburg." He waited a moment. "Before the general attack—," he began, and hesitated.

"Oh, I'll send the rest of the hospital off to Canso," interposed Pepperell, "all I can of it; our house there is full now. And the nurses,—you may be sure that they shall go. That's what you mean?"

"Yes, you think of everything."

"Mr. Royal has been impressing the same necessity upon me." And the General laughed.

"Where is he?" asked Stephen quickly.

"He has been with his daughter all the afternoon, I believe, but a while ago he went up to the Batteries with Col. Vaughan.

"But Elizabeth Royal is not a woman to be forgotten," Pepperell went on, "even if her father were not my old friend, and at my elbow."

"No," said the young man. Then he made a remark about military affairs, and the subject of the attack was renewed.

Suddenly came the report of a pistol different from the roar of the cannon, and so unexpected and near that it startled the listeners as if its sharpness had broken in upon the still night.

"Where was that?" cried the General.

Not only sound, but intuition guided Archdale. For the element that was a sharper discord than war was to be found in the place to which his feet were rushing. If not himself for victim, who then? In another moment he threw back the door of the hospital tent in which Elizabeth was, and entered.

He was none too soon. Elizabeth, swaying beside the couch of the dying soldier, fell as Archdale reached her. He lifted her, and carried her to her own tent. She was too faint to resist, or appeal. Nancy, whom the shot had summoned, followed, holding back her grief and terror because help and silence were what her mistress needed. Archdale had stayed but a moment in the tent. But he had seen everything, Harwin unhurt rushing toward his assailant, the surgeon wrenching the pistol from the disabled hand that had missed its aim, and Edmonson's face wild with horror at the lodgment that his ball had found. He had seen all, and he comprehended all.

CHAPTER XXXI.

EYES UNSEALED.

Edmonson sat with a terrible fierceness in his face.

Harwin had never seen him before, but he had heard of him, and, through Katie, of his former attentions to Elizabeth, and he divined who had fired that shot meant for himself.

"Come up to me," called Edmonson, turning suddenly upon him. "I've no weapon now. My face can't turn you to stone, though I'd be a Medusa to do it. But no, I'll do better than that. Come here! come here!" he repeated excitedly.

Harwin went up to him in silence, reading as he went a lesson that wrote itself on his mind as if in letters of blood. The man before him was well-born, well-educated, and skilled in all the graces of society, accepted even in court circles; yet, as he lay there, he looked a slave, for the nobility of freedom had gone, and the mark of the brute nature was on his forehead, and in his hand that he stretched out with the longing in it to grasp his victim. The soldier on the bed next his, who had spent a good part of his thirty years of life in a fishing-smack, who knew nothing of books beyond what the common-school education had given him, and less of any life but his own venturesome calling, who beyond knowledge of the sea and its dangers had been taught only by the quickness of his own wit and the honor of his own heart,—this man, as he turned attentive eyes upon the approaching figure, Harwin involuntarily glanced at. In a flash of insight he saw in the uprightness of the sailor's face the beauty of such strength. Then he looked back at Edmonson, and there he saw his own heart in exaggeration, and he trembled.

As he went up to Edmonson, the latter raised himself from his elbow, and sitting upright leaned as near him as he could.

"Do you know me?" he asked.

The other nodded, "Mr. Edmonson."

"Yes. Do you know that I was to have married Mistress Royal?" Harwin assented again. "Who told you?"

"Mistress Archdale."

"Ah! yes, the little golden-haired one that thinks herself such a beauty."

"She is infinitely more than she can think herself," cried Harwin.

Edmonson turned upon him a look of malign triumph. "Ah!" he said. "You suffer, too." He was silent for an instant. "But then you think that you may yet win her," he said. "Who knows?" and he watched his listener closely, "Women are strange," he added. "She'd be flattered by your having been a scamp for her sake; she is not like the other one." He saw the light flash into Harwin's eyes and leave its bright mark along his cheek, and he smiled. "But you never shall," he said. "You might, but you never shall. Did you see what happened a minute ago?" he went on in stifled tones. "I shot her, and he carried her out,—not the yellow-haired one, oh, no, but,—Did you see his face?" he hissed with a look that made Harwin draw back at its fierceness. "But we shall be even; we will fight." He sat a moment watching Harwin, and then went on: "You will be interested in hearing that Mistress Archdale is engaged to Lord Bulchester, my friend. Your doings, too. But you shall pay for all," as Harwin stepped back in consternation. "Already, you see you've begun, but this is not the end."

"Calm yourself," said Harwin laying his hand nervously on the other's shoulder, "control yourself. This is very bad, if you're wounded."

"Control myself!" sneered Edmonson. "I never have done it in my life, and I'm not likely to do it now at the command of a coward and a sneak. Now will you fight with me?"

"Certainly. But I want to know why it is with you?"

Edmonson seemed about to shout his answer, then, recollecting where he was, said with a passion more dreadful for its suppression, "Why? Because but for you I should be in paradise now, and by reason of you I am in——." Suddenly his speech was arrested by what seemed to him in its vividness a vision rather than a remembrance. He was again one of the gay carousers at the London inn, he was scoffing at Bulchester, and drinking that frightful pledge to meet them all again in one hundred years. Had he kept his appointment already? He would have a long while to wait. The act had seemed to him nothing, the recollection of it now made him shudder. All at once, the scene stood out to him in a lurid light, and through this he seemed to see a horror in Elizabeth Royal's face. For one moment the whirl of anguish and remorse blinded him. The next, that Archdale pride, so grand in a worthy cause, so fatal when in the hands of caprice and passion, was driving him on again. But as he was about to speak, the surgeon's voice by his bed commanded him to stop, for his own sake and for others. "Not another word," it said. "One,—I must speak one," returned Edmonson. "Then I have done, I promise you. Stand back and count off one minute." He leaned close to Harwin as the doctor yielded. "I give you a chance of honorable duel," he said. "You'll take it, or there's no place on earth where my sword is too short to reach you. You've taught me how to stab in the back; I shall not forget it. But I give you your chance. You'll fight?"

"Yes."

"Weapons?"

"Swords."

Edmonson smiled derisively.

"You think my sword arm will not be strong enough?" he asked. "I shouldn't advise you to depend upon that. Time—when I am able. Place—we'll settle that afterward. We can't find seconds here—too much Puritanism; they would interfere. But we can arrange it; we're honorable men," he sneered. "I may depend upon you?"

"Yes."

"If not—beware! Now, surgeon, only one thing more," as Harwin left the tent. "How much have I hurt Mistress Royal?"

"Lovell has gone with them. When he returns you shall hear."

"You will certainly tell me?"

"Certainly."

"Then I have done with you to-night." And he threw himself back on his pillow, and lay silent and watchful until the other surgeon entered. Hours after, he fell into an uneasy sleep.

Elizabeth's injury was slight. When she recovered from the shock and the faintness, she declared that there was no wound at all—that the ball had merely grazed her, and the report of the pistol and her fatigue had done the rest.

"You always seem to be round sort of handy when we want anything," remarked Nancy to Archdale as she looked up from wiping the few drops of blood from Elizabeth's ear.

"Half an inch to the left," said Stephen hastily, as he stood watching her, "and—"

"Yes," she answered, "and then—." She looked up, seeing him indistinctly in the flaring light of the candle. But in her mind there was a fair woman standing beside him. But for Elizabeth's idle words this vision would have been a reality instead of a a hopeless dream. She felt the pain of this so keenly now that it seemed to her it would have been a good thing if the ball had swerved half an inch to the left. Then her father, who had been found on his way back, came in hastily, and as Elizabeth glanced at his face she knew that life ought to be dear to her.

"Elizabeth," he said, as Archdale left them, "have you not had enough of it yet? Come home now. You have already done a great work."

The girl raised herself slowly, for she still felt a touch of faintness.

"Yes, father, I will go home at once," she answered, "if you will tell me that it is the sort of thing that you have been trying all my life to teach me to do."

After Mr. Royal had left her, and Nancy was asleep, Elizabeth lay a long time thinking. She perceived now the whole truth about Edmonson. She was in a coil of struggle, and perhaps of crime. It seemed as if she herself must be guilty, as all the consequences of what she had supposed the jest of a summer evening rose before her.

Yet, for all this imagining, there was in her heart the comfort of innocence.

In the morning the shadow of danger seemed to shrink away in the sunlight, and Elizabeth went back to her duties with a spirit firm, if not untroubled. She saw nothing to give her fresh alarm. She found that Edmonson had excused his act to the spectators as a touch of delirium accompanying fever, and the next day he had fever beyond question, though not enough to be very dangerous.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

FOOTNOTES:

[E] Copyright, 1884, by Frances C. Sparhawk.



EDITOR'S TABLE.

Brutal and inhuman deeds are not changed in character or color by differences in latitude or longitude. The people of Quitman, Ga., committed a deed of this character when they put the torch of the incendiary to a school-house where ignorant colored children, in charity's sweet name, were being nurtured into nobler manhood and womanhood. This act of inhumanity, clearly inspired if not wholly sanctioned by a majority sentiment in the community, is not a solecism in history. In 1832-3, Prudence Crandall taught a successful school for girls in Canterbury, Conn., to which she admitted a colored girl, an intelligent church member, who desired to prepare herself to teach children of her own color. All Canterbury was thrown into a state of intense excitement and indignation by this act, and Miss Crandall had to choose between the expulsion of her colored pupil and the loss of her white ones. She pluckily faced the tumult, refused to sacrifice what she regarded as a principle, and her fashionable school opened its doors as an institution for colored girls only.

Increased excitement followed. A local politician, afterward a member of Congress, became the leader in a bitter and disgraceful prosecution of the brave woman, and, when they found it impossible to drive her from her position by ordinary measures, secured the passage of a law making it a crime to open a school for colored children without the consent of the selectmen of the town. The power of the State of Connecticut was thus invoked, and used for the crushing of one brave little Quakeress. Miss Crandall was arrested, and imprisoned in a cell from which a murderer had just gone to the gallows. Her case was tried in August, 1833. One jury failed to agree. Another found her guilty. The case was appealed, and proceedings quashed on the ground of an informality, the higher court thus evading the question raised as to the constitutionality of the law. An attempt to burn Miss Crandall's house followed, and on the night of Sept. 9, 1834, it was made untenantable under the assaults of a mob.

The subject of this bitter and relentless persecution, Mrs. Prudence (Crandall) Philleo, is still living, and tardy justice comes forward to recognize the wrong of a half century ago. The children of her persecutors unite with others in a petition to the lawmaking power which was induced to brand her as a criminal, to atone for past wrongs by present relief.

It is safe to say that the Canterbury of to-day would gladly blot from history this story of the Canterbury of a half century ago.

It is equally safe to say that the Quitman of fifty years to come (and much sooner) will gladly bury in oblivion the story of the burning school-house and frightened and helpless females and children, which the Quitman of to-day has put upon the page of current history.