Chapter IV: Part 4

A stranger visiting the prison for the first time would find it hard to divine for what purpose these walls of grating had been built. But on the appointed days when the friends of the prisoners are allowed to enter the prison, their use is sadly evident. It would not be safe to permit wives and husbands, and mothers and sons, to clasp hands in unrestrained freedom. A tiny file, a skein of silk, can open prison-doors and set captives free; love's ingenuity will circumvent tyranny and fetters, in spite of all possible precautions. Therefore the vigilant authority says, "You may see, but not touch; there shall be no possible opportunity for an instrument of escape to be given; at more than arm's length the wife, the mother must be held." The prisoners are led in and seated on a bench upon one side of these gratings; the friends are led in and seated on a similar bench on the other side; jailers are in attendance in both rooms; no words can be spoken which the jailers do not hear. Yearningly eyes meet eyes; faces are pressed against the hard wires; loving words are exchanged; the poor prisoned souls ask eagerly for news from the outer world,--the world from which they are as much hidden as if they were dead. Fathers hear how the little ones have grown; sometimes, alas! how the little ones have died. Small gifts of fruit or clothing are brought; but must be given first into the hands of the jailers. Even flowers cannot be given from loving hand to hand; for in the tiniest flower might be hidden the secret poison which would give to the weary prisoner surest escape of all. All day comes and goes the sad train of friends; lingering and turning back after there is no more to be said; weeping when they meant and tried to smile; more hungry for closer sight and voice, and for touch, with every moment that they gaze through the bars; and going away, at last, with a new sense of loss and separation, which time, with its merciful healing, will hardly soften before the visiting-day will come again, and the same heart-rending experience of mingled torture and joy will again be borne. But to the prisoners these glimpses of friends' faces are like manna from heaven. Their whole life, physical and mental, receives a new impetus from them. Their blood flows more quickly, their eyes light up, they live from one day to the next on a memory and a hope. No punishment can be invented so terrible as the deprivation of the sight of their friends on the visiting-day. Men who are obstinate and immovable before any sort or amount of physical torture are subdued by mere threat of this.

A friend who told me of a visit he paid to the Prison Mazas, on one of the days, said, with tears in his eyes, "It was almost more than I could bear to see these poor souls reaching out toward each other from either side of the iron railings. Here a poor, old woman, tottering and weak, bringing a little fruit in a basket for her son; here a wife, holding up a baby to look through the gratings at its father, and the father trying in an agony of earnestness to be sure that the baby knew him; here a little girl, looking half reproachfully at her brother, terror struggling with tenderness in her young face; on the side of the friends, love and yearning and pity beyond all words to describe; on the side of the prisoners, love and yearning just as great, but with a misery of shame added, which gave to many faces a look of attempt at dogged indifference on the surface, constantly betrayed and contradicted, however, by the flashing of the eyes and the red of the cheeks."

The story so impressed me that I could not for days lose sight of the picture it raised; the double walls of iron grating; the cruel, inexorable, empty space between them,--empty, yet crowded with words and looks; the lines of anxious, yearning faces on either side. But presently I said to myself, It is, after all, not so unlike the life we all live. Who of us is not in prison? Who of us is not living out his time of punishment? Law holds us all in its merciless fulfilment of penalty for sin; disease, danger, work separate us, wall us, bury us. That we are not numbered with the number of a cell, clothed in the uniform of a prison, locked up at night, and counted in the morning, is only an apparent difference, and not so real a one. Our jailers do not know us; but we know them. There is no fixed day gleaming for us in the future when our term of sentence will expire and we shall regain freedom. It may be to-morrow; but it may be threescore years away. Meantime, we bear ourselves as if we were not in prison. We profess that we choose, we keep our fetters out of sight, we smile, we sing, we contrive to be glad of being alive, and we take great interest in the changing of our jails. But no man knows where his neighbor's prison lies. How bravely and cheerily most eyes look up! This is one of the sweetest mercies of life, that "the heart knoweth its own bitterness," and, knowing it, can hide it. Hence, we can all be friends for other prisoners, standing separated from them by the impassable iron gratings and the fixed gulf of space, which are not inappropriate emblems of the unseen barriers between all human souls. We can show kindly faces, speak kindly words, bear to them fruits and food, and moral help, greater than fruit or food. We need not aim at philanthropies; we need not have a visiting-day, nor seek a prison-house built of stone. On every road each man we meet is a prisoner; he is dying at heart, however sound he looks; he is only waiting, however well he works. If we stop to ask whether he be our brother, he is gone. Our one smile would have lit up his prison-day. Alas for us if we smiled not as we passed by! Alas for us if, face to face, at last, with our Elder Brother, we find ourselves saying, "Lord, when saw we thee sick and in prison!"

A Companion for the Winter.

I have engaged a companion for the winter. It would be simply a superfluous egotism to say this to the public, except that I have a philanthropic motive for doing so. There are many lonely people who are in need of a companion possessing just such qualities as his; and he has brothers singularly like himself, whose services can be secured. I despair of doing justice to him by any description. In fact, thus far, I discover new perfections in him daily, and believe that I am yet only on the threshold of our friendship.

In conversation he is more suggestive than any person I have ever known. After two or three hours alone with him, I am sometimes almost startled to look back and see through what a marvellous train of fancy and reflection he has led me. Yet he is never wordy, and often conveys his subtlest meaning by a look.

He is an artist, too, of the rarest sort. You watch the process under which his pictures grow with incredulous wonder. The Eastern magic which drops the seed in the mould, and bids it shoot up before your eyes, blossom, and bear its fruit in an hour, is tardy and clumsy by side of the creative genius of my companion. His touch is swift as air; his coloring is vivid as light; he has learned, I know not how, the secrets of hidden places in all lands; and he paints, now a tufted clump of soft cocoa palms; now the spires and walls of an iceberg, glittering in yellow sunlight; now a desolate, sandy waste, where black rocks and a few crumbling ruins are lit up by a lurid glow; then a cathedral front, with carvings like lace; then the skeleton of a wrecked ship, with bare ribs and broken masts,--and all so exact, so minute, so life-like, that you believe no man could paint thus any thing which he had not seen.

He has a special love for mosaics, and a marvellous faculty for making drawings of curious old patterns. Nothing is too complicated for his memory, and he revels in the most fantastic and intricate shapes. I have known him in a single evening throw off a score of designs, all beautiful, and many of them rare: fiery scorpions on a black ground; pale lavender filagrees over scarlet; white and black squares blocked out as for tiles of a pavement, and crimson and yellow threads interlaced over them; odd Chinese patterns in brilliant colors, all angles and surprises, with no likeness to any thing in nature; and exquisite little bits of landscape in soft grays and whites. Last night was one of his nights of reminiscences of the mosaic-workers. A furious snow-storm was raging, and, as the flaky crystals piled up in drifts on the window-ledges, he seemed to catch the inspiration of their law of structure, and drew sheet after sheet of crystalline shapes; some so delicate and filmy that it seemed as if a jar might obliterate them; some massive and strong, like those in which the earth keeps her mineral treasures; then, at last, on a round charcoal disk, he traced out a perfect rose, in a fragrant white powder, which piled up under his fingers, petal after petal, circle after circle, till the feathery stamens were buried out of sight. Then, as we held our breath for fear of disturbing it, with a good-natured little chuckle, he shook it off into the fire, and by a few quick strokes of red turned the black charcoal disk into a shield gay enough for a tournament.

He has talent for modelling, but this he exercises more rarely. Usually, his figures are grotesque rather than beautiful, and he never allows them to remain longer than for a few moments, often changing them so rapidly under your eye that it seems like jugglery. He is fondest of doing this at twilight, and loves the darkest corner of the room. From the half-light he will suddenly thrust out before you a grinning gargoyle head, to which he will give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with one roll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snapping that you involuntarily draw your chair further back. Next, in a freak of ventriloquism, he startles you still more by bringing from the crocodile's mouth a sigh, so long drawn, so human, that you really shudder, and are ready to implore him to play no more tricks. He knows when he has reached this limit, and soothes you at once by a tender, far-off whisper, like the wind through pines, sometimes almost like an Aeolian harp; then he rouses you from your dreams by what you are sure is a tap at the door. You turn, speak, listen; no one enters; the tap again. Ah! it is only a little more of the ventriloquism of this wonderful creature. You are alone with him, and there was no tap at the door.

But when there is, and the friend comes in, then my companion's genius shines out. Almost always in life the third person is a discord, or at least a burden; but he is so genial, so diffusive, so sympathetic, that, like some tints by which painters know how to bring out all the other colors in a picture, he forces every one to do his best. I am indebted to him already for a better knowledge of some men and women with whom I had talked for years before to little purpose. It is most wonderful that he produces this effect, because he himself is so silent; but there is some secret charm in his very smile which puts people _en rapport_ with each other, and with him at once.

I am almost afraid to go on with the list of the things my companion can do. I have not yet told the half, nor the most wonderful; and I believe I have already overtaxed credulity. I will mention only one more,--but that is to me far more inexplicable than all the rest. I am sure that it belongs, with mesmerism and clairvoyance, to the domain of the higher psychological mysteries. He has in rare hours the power of producing the portraits of persons whom you have loved, but whom he has never seen. For this it is necessary that you should concentrate your whole attention on him, as is always needful to secure the best results of mesmeric power. It must also be late and still. In the day, or in a storm, I have never known him to succeed in this. For these portraits he uses only shadowy gray tints. He begins with a hesitating outline. If you are not tenderly and closely in attention, he throws it aside; he can do nothing. But if you are with him, heart and soul, and do not take your eyes from his, he will presently fill out the dear faces, full, life-like, and wearing a smile, which makes you sure that they too must have been summoned from the other side, as you from this, to meet on the shadowy boundary between flesh and spirit. He must see them as clearly as he sees you; and it would be little more for his magic to do if he were at the same moment showing to their longing eyes your face and answering smile.

But I delay too long the telling of his name. A strange hesitancy seizes me. I shall never be believed by any one who has not sat as I have by his side. But, if I can only give to one soul the good-cheer and strength of such a presence, I shall be rewarded.

His name is Maple Wood-fire, and his terms are from eight to twelve dollars a month, according to the amount of time he gives. This price is ridiculously low, but it is all that any member of the family asks; in fact, in some parts of the country, they can be hired for much less. They have connections by the name of Hickory, whose terms are higher; but I cannot find out that they are any more satisfactory. There are also some distant relations, named Chestnut and Pine, who can be employed in the same way, at a much lower rate; but they are all snappish and uncertain in temper.

To the whole world I commend the good brotherhood of Maple, and pass on the emphatic indorsement of a blessed old black woman who came to my room the other day, and, standing before the rollicking blaze on my hearth, said, "Bless yer, honey, yer's got a wood-fire. I'se allers said that, if yer's got a wood-fire, yer's got meat, an' drink, an' clo'es."

Choice of Colors.

The other day, as I was walking on one of the oldest and most picturesque streets of the old and picturesque town of Newport, R.I., I saw a little girl standing before the window of a milliner's shop.

It was a very rainy day. The pavement of the side-walks on this street is so sunken and irregular that in wet weather, unless one walks with very great care, he steps continually into small wells of water. Up to her ankles in one of these wells stood the little girl, apparently as unconscious as if she were high and dry before a fire. It was a very cold day too. I was hurrying along, wrapped in furs, and not quite warm enough even so. The child was but thinly clothed. She wore an old plaid shawl and a ragged knit hood of scarlet worsted. One little red ear stood out unprotected by the hood, and drops of water trickled down over it from her hair. She seemed to be pointing with her finger at articles in the window, and talking to some one inside. I watched her for several moments, and then crossed the street to see what it all meant. I stole noiselessly up behind her, and she did not hear me. The window was full of artificial flowers, of the cheapest sort, but of very gay colors. Here and there a knot of ribbon or a bit of lace had been tastefully added, and the whole effect was really remarkably gay and pretty. Tap, tap, tap, went the small hand against the window-pane; and with every tap the unconscious little creature murmured, in a half-whispering, half-singing voice, "I choose _that_ color." "I choose _that_ color." "I choose _that_ color."

I stood motionless. I could not see her face; but there was in her whole attitude and tone the heartiest content and delight. I moved a little to the right, hoping to see her face, without her seeing me; but the slight movement caught her ear, and in a second she had sprung aside and turned toward me. The spell was broken. She was no longer the queen of an air-castle, decking herself in all the rainbow hues which pleased her eye. She was a poor beggar child, out in the rain, and a little frightened at the approach of a stranger. She did not move away, however; but stood eying me irresolutely, with that pathetic mixture of interrogation and defiance in her face which is so often seen in the prematurely developed faces of poverty-stricken children.

"Aren't the colors pretty?" I said. She brightened instantly.

"Yes'm. I'd like a goon av thit blue."

"But you will take cold standing in the wet," said I. "Won't you come under my umbrella?"

She looked down at her wet dress suddenly, as if it had not occurred to her before that it was raining. Then she drew first one little foot and then the other out of the muddy puddle in which she had been standing, and, moving a little closer to the window, said, "I'm not jist goin' home, mem. I'd like to stop here a bit."

So I left her. But, after I had gone a few blocks, the impulse seized me to return by a cross street, and see if she were still there. Tears sprang to my eyes as I first caught sight of the upright little figure, standing in the same spot, still pointing with the rhythmic finger to the blues and reds and yellows, and half chanting under her breath, as before, "I choose _that_ color." "I choose _that_ color." "I choose _that_ color."

I went quietly on my way, without disturbing her again. But I said in my heart, "Little Messenger, Interpreter, Teacher! I will remember you all my life."

Why should days ever be dark, life ever be colorless? There is always sun; there are always blue and scarlet and yellow and purple. We cannot reach them, perhaps, but we can see them, if it is only "through a glass," and "darkly,"--still we can see them. We can "choose" our colors. It rains, perhaps; and we are standing in the cold. Never mind. If we look earnestly enough at the brightness which is on the other side of the glass, we shall forget the wet and not feel the cold. And now and then a passer-by, who has rolled himself up in furs to keep out the cold, but shivers nevertheless,--who has money in his purse to buy many colors, if he likes, but, nevertheless, goes grumbling because some colors are too dear for him,--such a passer-by, chancing to hear our voice, and see the atmosphere of our content, may learn a wondrous secret,--that pennilessness is not poverty, and ownership is not possession; that to be without is not always to lack, and to reach is not to attain; that sunlight is for all eyes that look up, and color for those who "choose."

The Apostle of Beauty.

He is not of the twelve, any more than the golden rule is of the ten. "A greater commandment I give unto you," was said of that. Also it was called the "new commandment." Yet it was really older than the rest, and greater only because it included them all. There were those who kept it ages before Moses went up Sinai: Joseph, for instance, his ancestor; and the king's daughter, by whose goodness he lived. So stands the Apostle of Beauty, greater than the twelve, newer and older; setting Gospel over against law, having known law before its beginning; living triumphantly free and unconscious of penalty.

He has had martyrdom, and will have. His church is never established; the world does not follow him; only of Wisdom is he known, and of her children, who are children of light. He never speaks by their mouths who say "Shalt not." He knows that "shalt not" is illegitimate, puny, trying always to usurp the throne of the true king, "Thou shalt."

"This is delight," "this is good to see," he says of a purity, of a fair thing. It needs not to speak of the impurity, of the ugliness. Left unmentioned, unforbidden, who knows how soon they might die out of men's lives, perhaps even from the earth's surface? Men hedging gardens have for centuries set plants under that "letter of law" which "killeth," until the very word hedge has become a pain and an offence; and all the while there have been standing in every wild country graceful walls of unhindered brier and berry, to which the apostles of beauty have been silently pointing. By degrees gardeners have learned something. The best of them now call themselves "landscape gardeners;" and that is a concession, if it means, as I suppose it does, that they will try to copy Nature's landscapes in their enclosures. I have seen also of late that on rich men's estates tangled growths of native bushes are being more let alone, and hedges seem to have had some of the weights and harness taken off of them.

This is but one little matter among millions with which the Apostle of Beauty has to do; but it serves for instance of the first requisite he demands, which is freedom. "Let use take care of itself." "It will," he says. "There is no beauty without freedom."

Nothing is too high for him, nothing too low or small. To speak more truly, in his eyes there is no small, no low. From a philanthropy down to a gown, one catholic necessity, one catholic principle; gowns can be benefactions or injuries; philanthropies can be well or ill clad.

He has a ministry of co-workers,--men, women, and guileless little children. Many of them serve him without knowing him by name. Some who serve him best, who spread his creeds most widely, who teach them most eloquently, die without dreaming that they have been missionaries to Gentiles. Others there are who call him "Lord, Lord," build temples to him and teach in them, who never know him. These are they who give their goods to the poor, their bodies to be burned; but are each day ungracious, unloving, hard, cruel to men and women about them. These are they also who make bad statues, bad pictures, invent frightful fashions of things to be worn, and make the houses and the rooms in which they live hideous with unsightly adornments. The centuries fight such,--now with a Titian, a Michel Angelo; now with a great philanthropist, who is also peaceable and easy to be entreated; now with a Florence Nightingale, knowing no sect; now with a little child by a roadside, holding up a marigold in the sun; now with a sweet-faced old woman, dying gracefully in some almshouse. Who has not heard voice from such apostles?

To-day my nearest, most eloquent apostle of beauty is a poor shoemaker, who lives in the house where I lodge. How poor he must be I dare not even try to understand. He has six children: the oldest not more than thirteen, the third a deaf-mute, the baby puny and ill,--sure, I think (and hope), to die soon.

They live in two rooms, on the ground-floor. His shop is the right-hand corner of the front room; the rest is bedroom and sitting-room; behind are the bedroom and kitchen. I have never seen so much as I might of their way of living; for I stand before his window with more reverent fear of intruding by a look than I should have at the door of a king's chamber. A narrow rough ledge added to the window-sill is his bench. Behind this he sits from six in the morning till seven at night, bent over, sewing slowly and painfully on the coarsest shoes. His face looks old enough for sixty years; but he cannot be so old. Yet he wears glasses and walks feebly; he has probably never had in any one day of his life enough to eat. But I do not know any man, and I know only one woman, who has such a look of radiant good-cheer and content as has this poor shoemaker, Anton Grasl.

In his window are coarse wooden boxes, in which are growing the common mallows. They are just now in full bloom,--row upon row of gay-striped purple and white bells. The window looks to the east, and is never shut. When I go out to my breakfast the sun is streaming in on the flowers and Anton's face. He looks up, smiles, bows low, and says, "Good-day, good my lady," sometimes holding the mallow-stalks back with one hand, to see me more plainly. I feel as if the day and I had had benediction. It is always a better day because Anton has said it is good; and I am a better woman for sight of his godly contentment. Almost every day he has beside the mallows in the boxes a white mug with flowers in it,--nasturtiums, perhaps, or a few pinks. This he sets carefully in shade of the thickest mallows; and this I have often seen him hold down tenderly, for the little ones to see and to smell.

When I come home in the evenings, between eight and nine o'clock, Anton is always sifting in front of the door, resting his head against the wall. This is his recreation, his one blessed hour of out-door air and rest. He stands with his cap in his hand while I pass, and his face shines as if all the concentrated enjoyment of my walk in the woods had descended upon him in my first look. If I give him a bunch of ferns to add to his nasturtiums and pinks, he is so grateful and delighted that I have to go into the house quickly for fear I shall cry. Whenever I am coming back from a drive, I begin to think, long before I reach the house, how glad Anton will look when he sees the carriage stop. I am as sure as if I had omniscient sight into the depths of his good heart that he has distinct and unenvious joy in every pleasure that he sees other people taking.

Never have I, heard one angry or hasty word, one petulant or weary cry from the rooms in which this father and mother and six children are struggling to live. All day long the barefooted and ragged little ones play under my south windows, and do not quarrel. I amuse myself by dropping grapes or plums on their heads, and then watching them at their feast; never have I seen them dispute or struggle in the division. Once I purposely threw a large bunch of grapes to the poor little mute, and only a few plums to the others. I am sorry to say that voiceless Carl ate all his grapes himself; but not a selfish or discontented look could I see on the faces of the others,--they all smiled and beamed up at me like suns.

It is Anton who creates and sustains this rare atmosphere. The wife is only a common and stupid woman; he is educating her, as he is the children. She is very thin and worn and hungry-looking, but always smiles. Being Anton's wife, she could not do otherwise.

Sometimes I see people passing the house, who give a careless glance of contemptuous pity at Anton's window of mallows and nasturtiums. Then I remember that an apostle wrote:--

"There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.

"Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me."

And I long to call after them, as they go groping their way down the beautiful street,--

"Oh, ye barbarians, blind and deaf! How dare you think you can pity Anton? His soul would melt in compassion for you, if he were able to comprehend that lives could be so poor as yours. He is the rich man, and you are poor. Eating only the husks on which you feed, he would starve to death."

English Lodging-Houses.

Somebody who has written stories (is it Dickens?) has given us very wrong ideas of the English lodging-house. What good American does not go into London with the distinct impression that, whatever else he does or does not do, he will upon no account live in lodgings? That he will even be content with the comfortless coffee-room of a second-rate hotel, and fraternize with commercial travellers from all quarters of the globe, rather than come into relations with that mixture of vulgarity and dishonesty, the lodging-house keeper?

It was with more than such misgiving that I first crossed the threshold of Mrs. ----'s house in Bedford Place, Bloomsbury. At this distance I smile to remember how welcome would have been any alternative rather than the remaining under her roof for a month; how persistently for several days I doubted and resisted the evidence of all my senses, and set myself at work to find the discomforts and shortcomings which I believed must belong to that mode of life. To confess the stupidity and obstinacy of my ignorance is small reparation, and would be little worth while, except for the hope that my account of the comfort and economy in living on the English lodging-house system may be a seed dropped in due season, which shall spring up sooner or later in the introduction of a similar system in America. The gain which it would be to great numbers of our men and women who must live on small incomes cannot be estimated. It seems hardly too much to say that in the course of one generation it might work in the average public health a change which would be shown in statistics, and rid us of the stigma of a "national disease" of dyspepsia. For the men and women whose sufferings and ill-health have made of our name a by-word among the nations are not, as many suppose, the rich men and women, tempted by their riches to over-indulgence of their stomachs, and paying in their dyspepsia simply the fair price of their folly; they are the moderately poor men and women, who are paying cruel penalty for not having been richer,--not having been rich enough to avoid the poisons which are cooked and served in American restaurants and in the poorer class of American homes.

Mrs. ----'s lodging-house was not, so far as I know, any better than the average lodging-houses of its grade. It was well situated, well furnished, well kept, and its scale of prices was moderate. For instance, the rent of a pleasant parlor and bedroom on the second floor was thirty-four shillings a week, including fire and gas,--$8.50, gold. Then there was a charge of two shillings a week for the use of the kitchen-fire, and three shillings a week for service; and these were the only charges in addition to the rent. Thus for $9.75 a week one had all the comforts that can be had in housekeeping, so far as room and service are concerned. There were four good servants,--cook, scullery maid, and two housemaids. Oh, the pleasant voices and gentle fashions of behavior of those housemaids! They were slow, it must be owned; but their results were admirable. In spite of London smoke and grime, Mrs. ----'s floors and windows were clean; the grates shone every morning like mirrors, and the glass and silver were bright. Each morning the smiling cook came up to take our orders for the meals of the day; each day the grocer and the baker and the butcher stopped at the door and left the sugar for the "first floor front," the beef for the "drawing-room," and so on. The smallest article which could be required in housekeeping was not overlooked. The groceries of the different floors never got mixed, though how this separateness of stores was accomplished will for ever remain a mystery to me; but that it was successfully accomplished the smallness of our bill was the best of proof,--unless, indeed, as we were sometimes almost afraid, we did now and then eat up Dr. A----'s cheese, or drink the milk belonging to the B's below us. We were a party of four; our fare was of the plain, substantial sort, but of sufficient variety and abundance; and yet our living never cost us, including rent, service, fires, and food, over $60 a week. If we had chosen to practise closer economies, we might have lived on less. Compare for one instant the comfort of such an arrangement as this, which really gave us every possible advantage to be secured by housekeeping, and with almost none of the trouble, with any boarding or lodging possible in New York. We had two parlors and two bedrooms; our meals served promptly and neatly, in our own parlor. The same amount of room, and service, and such a table, for four people, cannot be had in New York for less than $150 or $200 a week; in fact, they cannot be had in New York for any sum of money. The quiet respectfulness of behavior and faithful interest in work of English servants on English soil are not to be found elsewhere. We afterward lived for some weeks in another lodging-house in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, at about the same price per week. This house was even better than the London one in some respects. The system was precisely the same; but the cooking was almost faultless, and the table appointments were more than satisfactory,--they were tasteful. The china was a pleasure, and there were silver and linen and glass which one would be glad to have in one's own home.

It may be asked, and not unnaturally, how does this lodging-house system work for those who keep the houses? Can it be possible that all this comfort and economy for lodgers are compatible with profits for landlords? I can judge only from the results in these two cases which came under my own observation. In each of these cases the family who kept the house lived comfortably and pleasantly in their own apartment, which was, in the London house, almost as good a suite of rooms as any which they rented. They certainly had far more apparent quiet, comfort, and privacy than is commonly seen in the arrangements of the keepers of average boarding-houses. In the Malvern house, one whole floor, which was less pleasant than the others, but still comfortable and well furnished, was occupied by the family. There were three little boys, under ten years of age, who had their nursery governess, said lessons to her regularly, and were led out decorously to walk by her at appointed seasons, like all the rest of good little English boys in well-regulated families; and yet the mother of these children came to the door of our parlor each morning, with the respectful air of an old family housekeeper, to ask what we would have for dinner, and was careful and exact in buying "three penn'orth" of herbs at a time for us, to season our soup. I ought to mention that in both these places we made the greater part of our purchases ourselves, having weekly bills sent in from the shops, and in our names, exactly as if we were living in our own house. All honest lodging-house keepers, we were told, preferred this method, as leaving no opening for any unjust suspicions of their fairness in providing. But, if one chooses to be as absolutely free from trouble as in boarding, the marketing can all be done by the family, and the bills still made out in the lodgers' names. I have been thus minute in my details because I think there may be many to whom this system of living is as unknown as it was to me; and I cannot but hope that it may yet be introduced in America.

Wet the Clay.

Once I stood in Miss Hosmer's studio, looking at a statue which she was modelling of the ex-queen of Naples. Face to face with the clay model, I always feel the artist's creative power far more than when I am looking at the immovable marble.

A touch here--there--and all is changed. Perhaps, under my eyes, in the twinkling of an eye, one trait springs into life and another disappears.

The queen, who is a very beautiful woman, was represented in Miss Hosmer's statue as standing, wearing the picturesque cloak that she wore during those hard days of garrison life at Gaeta, when she showed herself so brave and strong that the world said if she, instead of that very stupid young man her husband, had been king, the throne need not have been lost. The very cloak, made of light cloth showily faced with scarlet, was draped over a lay figure in one corner of the room. In the statue the folds of drapery over the right arm were entirely disarranged, simply rough clay. The day before they had been apparently finished; but that morning Miss Hosmer had, as she laughingly told us, "pulled it all to pieces again."

As she said this, she took up a large syringe and showered the statue from head to foot with water, till it dripped and shone as if it had been just plunged into a bath. Now it was in condition to be moulded. Many times a day this process must be repeated, or the clay becomes so dry and hard that it cannot be worked.

I had known this before; but never did I so realize the significant symbolism of the act as when I looked at this lifeless yet lifelike thing, to be made into the beauty of a woman, called by her name, and cherished after her death,--and saw that only through this chrysalis of the clay, so cared for, moistened, and moulded, could the marble obtain its soul.

And, as all things I see in life seem to me to have a voice either for or of children, so did this instantly suggest to me that most of the failures of mothers come from their not keeping the clay wet.

The slightest touch tells on the clay when it is soft and moist, and can produce just the effect which is desired; but when the clay is too dry it will not yield, and often it breaks and crumbles beneath the unskilful hand. How perfect the analogy between these two results, and the two atmospheres which one often sees in the space of one half-hour in the management of the same child! One person can win from it instantly a gentle obedience: that person's smile is a reward, that person's displeasure is a grief it cannot bear, that person's opinions have utmost weight with it, that person's presence is a controlling and subduing influence. Another, alas! the mother, produces such an opposite effect that it is hard to believe the child can be the same child. Her simplest command is met by antagonism or sullen compliance; her pleasure and displeasure are plainly of no account to the child, and its great desire is to get out of her presence.

What shape will she make of that child's soul? She does not wet the clay. She does not stop to consider before each command whether it be wholly just, whether it be the best time to make it, and whether she can explain its necessity. Oh! the sweet reasonableness of children when disagreeable necessities are explained to them, instead of being enforced as arbitrary tyrannies! She does not make them so feel that she shares all their sorrows and pleasures that they cannot help being in turn glad when she is glad, and sorry when she is sorry. She does not so take them into constant companionship in her interests, each day,--the books, the papers she reads, the things she sees,--that they learn to hold her as the representative of much more than nursery discipline, clothes, and bread and butter. She does not kiss them often enough, put her arms around them, warm, soften, bathe them in the ineffable sunshine of loving ways. "I can't imagine why children are so much better with you than with me," exclaims such a mother. No, she cannot imagine; and that is the trouble. If she could, all would be righted. It is quite probable that she is a far more anxious, self-sacrificing, hard-working mother than the neighbor, whose children are rosy and frolicking and affectionate and obedient; while hers are pale and fretful and selfish and sullen.

She is all the time working, working, with endless activity, on hard, dry clay; and the neighbor, who, perhaps half-unconsciously, keeps the clay wet, is with one-half the labor modelling sweet creatures of Nature's own loveliest shapes.

Then she says, this poor, tired mother, discouraged because her children tell lies, and irritated because they seem to her thankless, "After all, children are pretty much alike, I suppose. I believe most children tell lies when they are little; and they never realize until they are grown up what parents do for them."

Here again I find a similitude among the artists who paint or model. Studios are full of such caricatures, and the hard-working, honest souls who have made them believe that they are true reproductions of nature and life.

"See my cherub. Are not all cherubs such as he?" and "Behold these trees and this water; and how the sun glowed on the day when I walked there!" and all the while the cherub is like a paper doll, and the trees and the water never had any likeness to any thing that is in this beautiful earth. But, after all, this similitude is short and paltry, for it is of comparatively small moment that so many men and women spend their lives in making bad cherubs in marble, and hideous landscapes in oil. It is industry, and it keeps them in bread; in butter, too, if their cherubs and trees are very bad. But, when it is a human being that is to be moulded, how do we dare, even with all the help which we can ask and find in earth and in heaven, to shape it by our touch!

Clay in the hands of the potter is not more plastic than is the little child's soul in the hands of those who tend it. Alas! how many shapeless, how many ill-formed, how many broken do we see! Who does not believe that the image of God could have been beautiful on all? Sooner or later it will be, thank Christ! But what a pity, what a loss, not to have had the sweet blessedness of being even here fellow-workers with him in this glorious modelling for eternity!

The King's Friend.

We are a gay party, summering among the hills. New-comers into the little boarding-house where we, by reason of prior possession, hold a kind of sway are apt to fare hardly at our hands unless they come up to our standard. We are not exacting in the matter of clothes; we are liberal on creeds; but we have our shibboleths. And, though we do not drown unlucky Ephraimites, whose tongues make bad work with S's, I fear we are not quite kind to them; they never stay long, and so we go on having it much our own way.

Week before last a man appeared at dinner, of whom our good little landlady said, deprecatingly, that he would stay only a few days. She knew by instinct that his presence would not be agreeable to us. He was not in the least an intrusive person,--on the contrary, there was a sort of mute appeal to our humanity in the very extent of his quiet inoffensiveness; but his whole atmosphere was utterly uninteresting. He was untrained in manner, awkwardly ill at ease in the table routine; and, altogether, it was so uncomfortable to make any attempt to include him in our circle that in a few days he was ignored by every one, to a degree which was neither courteous nor Christian.

In all families there is a leader. Ours is a charming and brilliant married woman, whose ready wit and never-failing spirits make her the best of centres for a country party of pleasure-seekers. Her keen sense of humor had not been able entirely to spare this unfortunate man, whose attitudes and movements were certainly at times almost irresistible.

But one morning such a change was apparent in her manner toward him that we all looked up in surprise. No more gracious and gentle greeting could she have given him if he had been a prince of royal line. Our astonishment almost passed bounds when we heard her continue with a kindly inquiry after his health, and, undeterred by his evident readiness to launch into detailed symptoms, listen to him with the most respectful attention. Under the influence of this new and sweet recognition his plain and common face kindled into something almost manly and individual. He had never before been so spoken to by a well-bred and beautiful woman.

We were sobered, in spite of ourselves, by an indefinable something in her manner; and it was with subdued whispers that we crowded around her on the piazza, and begged to know what it all meant. It was a rare thing to see Mrs. ---- hesitate for a reply. The color rose in her face, and, with a half-nervous attempt at a smile, she finally said, "Well, girls, I suppose you will all laugh at me; but the truth is, I heard that man say his prayers this morning. You know his room is next to mine, and there is a great crack in the door. I heard him praying, this morning, for ten minutes, just before breakfast; and I never heard such tones in my life. I don't pretend to be religious; but I must own it was a wonderful thing to hear a man talking with God as he did. And when I saw him at table, I felt as if I were looking in the face of some one who had just come out of the presence of the King of kings, and had the very air of heaven about him. I can't help what the rest of you do or say; _I_ shall always have the same feeling whenever I see him."

There was a magnetic earnestness in her tone and look, which we all felt, and which some of us will never forget.

During the few remaining days of his stay with us, that untutored, uninteresting, stupid man knew no lack of friendly courtesy at our hands. We were the better for his homely presence; unawares, he ministered unto us. When we knew that he came directly from speaking to the Master to speak to us, we felt that he was greater than we, and we remembered that it is written, "If any man serve me, him will my Father honor."

Learning to Speak.

With what breathless interest we listen for the baby's first word! What a new bond is at once and for ever established between its soul and ours by this mysterious, inexplicable, almost incredible fact! That is the use of the word. That is its only use, so far as mere gratification of the ear goes. Many other sounds are more pleasurable,--the baby's laugh, for instance, or its inarticulate murmurs of content or sleepiness.

But the word is a revelation, a sacred sign. Now we shall know what our beloved one wants; now we shall know when and why the dear heart sorrows or is glad. How reassured we feel, how confident! Now we cannot make mistakes; we shall do all for the best; we can give happiness; we can communicate wisdom; relation is established; the perplexing gulf of silence is bridged. The baby speaks!

But it is not of the baby's learning to speak that we propose to write here. All babies learn to speak; or, if they do not, we know that it means a terrible visitation,--a calamity rare, thank God! but bitter almost beyond parents' strength to bear.

But why, having once learned to speak, does the baby leave off speaking when it becomes a man or a woman? Many of our men and women to-day need, almost as much as when they were twenty-four months old, to learn to speak. We do not mean learning to speak in public. We do not mean even learning to speak well,--to pronounce words clearly and accurately; though there is need enough of that in this land! But that is not the need at which we are aiming now. We mean something so much simpler, so much further back, that we hardly know how to say it in words which shall be simple enough and also sufficiently strong. We mean learning to speak at all! In spite of all which satirical writers have said and say of the loquacious egotism, the questioning curiosity of our people, it is true to-day that the average American is a reticent, taciturn, speechless creature, who, for his own sake, and still more for the sake of all who love him, needs, more than he needs any thing else under heaven, to learn to speak.

Look at our silent railway and horse-cars, steamboat-cabins, hotel-tables, in short, all our public places where people are thrown together incidentally, and where good-will and the habit of speaking combined would create an atmosphere of human vitality, quite unlike what we see now. But it is not of so much consequence, after all, whether people speak in these public places or not. If they did, one very unpleasant phase of our national life would be greatly changed for the better. But it is in our homes that this speechlessness tells most fearfully,--on the breakfast and dinner and tea-tables, at which a silent father and mother sit down in haste and gloom to feed their depressed children. This is especially true of men and women in the rural districts. They are tired; they have more work to do in a year than it is easy to do. Their lives are monotonous,--too much so for the best health of either mind or body. If they dreamed how much this monotony could be broken and cheered by the constant habit of talking with each other, they would grasp at the slightest chance of a conversation. Sometimes it almost seems as if complaints and antagonism were better than such stagnant quiet. But there need not be complaint and antagonism; there is no home so poor, so remote from affairs, that each day does not bring and set ready, for family welcome and discussion, beautiful sights and sounds, occasions for helpfulness and gratitude, questions for decision, hopes, fears, regrets! The elements of human life are the same for ever; any one heart holds in itself the whole, can give all things to another, can bear all things for another; but no giving, no bearing, no, not even if it is the giving up of a life, if it is done without free, full, loving interchange of speech, is half the blessing it might be.

Many a wife goes down to her grave a dulled and dispirited woman simply because her good and faithful husband has lived by her side without talking to her! There have been days when one word of praise, or one word even of simple good cheer, would have girded her up with new strength. She did not know, very likely, what she needed, or that she needed any thing; but she drooped.

Many a child grows up a hard, unimpressionable, unloving man or woman simply from the uncheered silence in which the first ten years of life were passed. Very few fathers and mothers, even those who are fluent, perhaps, in society, habitually _talk_ with their children.

It is certain that this is one of the worst shortcomings of our homes. Perhaps no other single change would do so much to make them happier, and, therefore, to make our communities better, as for men and women to learn to speak.

Private Tyrants.