Chapter VI: Part 6

There is no state in the Union that gives a Tennesseean a warmer welcome than Texas, because her lap is full of Tennesseeans, and, moreover, she is naturally hospitable and kind. There is a place on her fat knee for every troubled soul, a kiss of sunshine on her lips and a lump of sugar in her hand for every weeping wanderer.

O, glorious empire state of the sun-kissed South, with thy hundred and seventy-five thousand square miles of as rich a country as was ever tickled by the plow or the pick, and as ever laughed a harvest of cotton and grain for the comfort and happiness of man! With thy cattle on a thousand hills, thy countless flocks, thy gushing wells of oil, thy fields of rice and sugar cane stretching far away like the sweet fields of Eden on the other side of Jordan! With thy fatness thou canst feed and warm the world! I wonder why the poor huddle in the smoke and filth of crowded cities when Texas smiles and beckons them to her landscapes of beauty, where the prairie flowers bloom and the sunshine plays with the zephyrs from the Gulf and sometimes scuffles with a cyclone. I wonder why toiling millions dwell amid blackened walls only to be slaves to heartless masters, when untouched fields invite the happy home and virgin soil still waits for the plowman and his merry song. I wonder why helpless children are doomed to die by thousands in polluted hovels and crowded alleys, when the green meadows of Texas bid them come and chase the butterflies among the bluebells and the daisies, and the blossoming hills call them hither to romp and play where the happy birds sing and the cows come home in the evening fragrant with the breath of alfalfa and the sweet wild grasses of the plains. Texas is a Paradise for the poor, it is a third heaven for the rich.

But I am about to forget that I was talking about my lecture tour. Let me see!—O, yes!—“All aboard for Nashville!” the conductor cries. Well, the rest of my story I will tell around the happy hearthstone of home.

FOOLISH DREAMERS.

It is a marvelous truth that this golden era of the world’s history has inspired no great poets that rank with Byron and Burns and Tom Moore and a long list of other immortals who have enriched literature with their songs; and it has developed but few prose writers worthy to wear the mantles of Blackstone and Kent in law, of Gibbon and Macaulay in history, and Scott and Bulwer in romance and fiction.

It is well we call it the golden era, for it is an era of commercialism, when men are trampling literature and art and music under their feet in the mad rush for gold and the gilded glory that it buys. To be a millionaire is greater in the estimation of modern worshipers of mammon than to be a Goldsmith; and a multimillionaire is greater in their gold-jaundiced eyes than a William Shakespeare. The highest aspiration of these nervous and strenuous generations is the acquirement and hoarding of gold. Religion is tinged with it. Politics is its ally—and alloy in the ratio of sixteen of gold to one of Patriotism. And most of the business and social relations of this enlightened age are purely golden and measured only by the circumference of a dollar. The English poet sounded the keynote of true philosophy when he sang:

“Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”

The true wealth of a nation rests not so much on bricks of gold as upon golden thought—the riches of brain and heart—the treasures of truth and the pure and beautiful sentiments of life. In the wild scramble for sordid gain and the golden reins of power in these wing-footed days of avarice and materialism, the angels of happiness no longer beckon from the landscape and the stream nor call from the sweet solitudes of the forest; but they stand tip-toe on the burnished domes and glittering towers of the city and the town, with crowns of gold in their hands. And the brain and brawn of the land gather there from the hills and hollows to climb after them on a thousand ladders of dreams. But the environments of domes and towers, while they stimulate the brain to grasp great financial problems and to weave the web of glory around the thrones of money kings, contract the nobler and better ideals and impulses of the heart to the gilded forms of artificial pleasure.

Did you ever watch a bevy of city swells and society belles swinging and whirling under flaming chandeliers until the coat-tails of the swells popped like whip crackers and the skirts of the belles flapped like the sails of a schooner in a high wind? That was a piping gale of pleasure in high life in the town. Did you ever attend a great reception in the heart of the metropolis? It was a gorgeous scene of icicles and spectacles, of broadcloth, and jewels arrayed in white slippers and costly gowns of richest colors; and the icicles and spectacles bowed to the jewels, and the jewels bowed to the icicles and spectacles and they held sweet converse on the subject of their bicycles and tricycles and various and sundry articles and drank champagne and sherry and all got very merry and wound up with oysters and dill pickles. And then the tipsy icicles and spectacles got in their elegant vehicles and went home with the jewels in the morning. That was the cream of urban civilization. Did you ever gaze on a gaudy throng of bald-headed Apollos and painted Minervas walling their eyes in speechless rapture before the garish lights of the grand opera? How the fans and ribbons fluttered and the side-whiskers swayed and spluttered amid the inscrutable harmonies of Wagner! That was the tuneless pandemonium of urban music. Did you ever watch the bulls and bears of finance turn the stock exchange into a howling wilderness of confusion in the struggle to raise or lower prices? That was the third heaven of artificial pleasure and excitement in the city.

But what is a thrill of victory in the gambling hell of frenzied finance compared with the joy a fisherman feels down on the farm when a game trout strikes his baited hook in the darkening eddy of a crystal stream and the good reel sings as he gives him line and the fishing rod bends and the waters splash? What is the gilded club room where the wizards of finance meet to sip and smoke and shuffle the cards of fortune compared with a fisherman’s tent and a fisherman’s luck on the bank of a moonlit river where hearts are trumps and souls overflow with song and story?

Did you ever hear the tale of Mark Antony, the funeral orator of Rome and the Romeo of the Nile? He went angling in Egypt one day on the royal barge with the beautiful Cleopatra and he fished and fished and fished, unrewarded by a nibble, until the hours grew dull and heavy. But the cunning queen conceived a plan to change her lover’s luck and unfolded the scheme to a slave; and the slave secretly dived from the larboard side of the boat and hung a dried herring on the General’s hook and then gave his line a vigorous pull. “By Jupiter!” shouted Mark Antony, “I have hooked a monstrous fish.” “Take care, my lord, and give him line lest he drag thee into the sea,” cried the dark-eyed queen, as she chuckled behind her fan.

“By the gods! that fish shall flounder on thy deck, or I shall flounder beneath the waves!” cried the impetuous Roman. He squared himself and gave a mighty jerk, but fell sprawling on his back at the feet of the laughing queen, and when he looked up and saw nothing but a little dried herring dangling among the ropes above him, he blandly smiled and dryly said: “He was a monstrous fish while biting, but between his bite and my jerk, he has wonderfully shriveled. But he’s the oldest looking fish and has the loudest smell of any that ever perfumed the royal barge.”

And so many an ambitious Antony sits in the stock exchange of the great city and drops his hook in the sea of speculation, and he fishes and fishes with his little wad of hard earned cash, until some shrewd manipulator, just to change his luck, takes the little wad off and gives the line a heavy pull, and when our guileless Antony thinks he has hooked a million, he jerks and falls at the feet of fickle fortune, and finds dangling in the air above him only the dried herring of a shrivelled hope, and there is nothing left but the aged look of an empty purse and the smell of a dream that is vanished!

LEISURE HOURS

For Conference Between the Magazine and its Readers.

When The Taylor Publishing Company made its announcement of the forthcoming appearance of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE, its statements were received with interest by all, with enthusiastic approval by many and with predictions of disaster by sundry Jeremiahs and Thomases. For the last named class the fact that a Southern magazine had not succeeded, though many had been projected, was sufficient reason for the conclusion that none could succeed, and possible success versus probable failure was discussed throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Meanwhile, Governor Robert L. Taylor and his co-laborers in the enterprise, imbued with a belief in the feasibility of the venture, with the idea of the vital necessity to the people of the South of a literary periodical which might adequately and fittingly represent the literary life and customs and romance and ideals of the South, and with an indomitable intention of firmly establishing such a useful vehicle of thought and expression, proceeded with their organization. Literature in regard to BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE was prepared, a campaign of publicity was inaugurated, articles and stories were secured for the first number, paper was bought, and an issue of 10,000 copies was determined upon, as amply sufficient for the first number.

But herein the projectors of the enterprise underestimated the demands of their friends. No sooner was the prospectus issued which indicated the character of the magazine and gave a partial list of the contents of the first number, than the mails were congested with correspondence; agents were appointed by the hundred; subscriptions poured in; and it was decided to print 15,000 copies instead of 10,000 copies.

The size of the magazine, too, grew rapidly in the hands of the staff, until, instead of the 116 pages originally planned, it was found desirable to give 164 pages. This was rendered necessary, in part, by the large amount of advertising secured; and this is one of the best indexes of the faith of the people in the success of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE. Hard-headed men of business do not give up their money for mere sentiment or out of compliment to even so eminent and widely loved a man as Governor Taylor. No. They look upon BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE as a valuable advertising medium—and they are right.

At last, on the 21st of March, the eagerly awaited magazine appeared, and far surpassed the most sanguine expectations of its readers. In the intrinsic merit of its articles, stories and departments, in its dainty and appropriate cover, in its numerous and handsome illustrations, in its excellent typography and press-work, and equally in its well displayed and interesting advertisements it fully satisfied the most critical. The realization of a literary magazine worthy of the South was apparent.

And yet the Jeremiahs, silenced as to the initial number, muttered _sotto voce_: “Well, you can’t do it again.” Nevertheless, the present number bears internal evidence that we have “done it again.” And we shall “do it” every time. This we promise. We shall no longer pay heed to that (fortunately small) class which experiences a melancholy pleasure in making direful predictions.

The avidity with which the first number of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE was greeted was astounding even to the editor-in-chief and his staff, notwithstanding the thousands of encouraging letters, the enormous influx of subscriptions, even before a type had been set, and the fact that the interest was not confined to the South but was manifested with especial earnestness by the people of the North. Letters of congratulation by the bushel, and complimentary editorials, reviews and press notices have told the tale from Androscoggin to San Jose. Space, of course, precludes the reproduction of them here, even if it were desirable, but the following selection from a letter of the senior member of one of the largest advertising agencies in the United States is so significant that it is felt that its insertion will be pardoned:

“I thought it was hardly possible there could be a place for another magazine, and consequently took little interest in your first announcements. When your first number came to hand, however, I was so attracted by the dainty cover showing the ‘fiddle’ with which the name of Bob Taylor is so intimately associated in the minds of those who know anything of the South, and especially of Tennessee, that I carried it home last night, and did not lay it aside until every word in it by Bob Taylor had been read and several of the articles re-read.

“Heartiest congratulations on the merit of the first number, the character of which, if maintained in succeeding numbers, will surely make a place for this new apostle of sunshine.

“Only give us more of Bob Taylor, if possible. Why not let him have a page between each other article each number may contain. Why restrict him to a department or departments? John Brisben Walker wrote the entire September, 1904, _Cosmopolitan_ unaided. It is believed Bob Taylor could write an entire number without any assistance if he would make up his mind to do so, and it would be certain to prove a hummer.”

Fifteen thousand copies is a large number for the first issue of any magazine; yet they were exhausted within one week after the magazine came from the press, and thousands of copies have since been ordered by agents and dealers, while an ever increasing army of new subscribers demand, like so many Oliver Twists, with vehemence and iteration—MORE, MORE. _And yet every copy is sold!_

It is a situation that pleases while it embarrasses, and it gives the valuable pointer that we must provide larger issues, which we shall do, that no one may miss a single number.

Considering these facts, so briefly outlined, we would not be human were we not elated and happy and thankful. And yet we have not, we trust, been spoiled by lavish praise, but rather spurred on to greater efforts to measure up to our opportunities, to the expectations of the Southern people, and to our mission to exploit the virtues, resources and capabilities of this section, while bringing every month more sunshine and happiness into the heart of every reader of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE.

* * * * *

For the information of new subscribers we repeat that we invite, for insertion in this department, communications on all subjects of unusual interest and importance, such as

Prose and poetry of sentiment, fact and fancy.

Forgotten or unpublished bits of history and tradition.

Anecdotes of famous men and women, and of quaint and curious occurrences.

The best short stories and tales you have heard or read, if unusual or unfamiliar.

Suggestions for the special benefit of BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE—how it may be improved, what it should contain, what it should admit.

Industrial Energy and Enterprise of the Old South.

There is little danger that the glories and beauties of the Old South, as reflected in its social life and ideals, will be forgotten in the industrial progress and prosperity of the New, for these things have been made immortal by the sure touch of tradition and literature, but there is another phase of the old regime well worth our pride and attention, which seems to have well nigh faded out of popular impression and consideration. We refer to the industrial and commercial activity achieved by the South before the war, of which the general idea takes so small and disparaging account. It is tacitly assumed and loosely declared that previous to 1860 the South lived in ease and sloth upon slave-labor and the cotton crop, paying no heed to manufactures or industrial development, and that before the wonderful business progress of the last decade commercial enterprise and ability were unknown qualities in this section. There were heroes before Agamemnon, however, and the truth is that long before the New South existed in phrase or fact, the Old South was holding its own in wealth-producing industries with other sections of the country.

In a pamphlet, published some years ago, Mr. Richard H. Edmonds, of Baltimore, first drew attention to these facts, and in so doing performed a unique and important service to historic truth, no less than to sectional pride. “Facts about the South” is the title of Mr. Edmond’s brochure and he prefaces his summary of present prosperity and prophecy of future development by a somewhat novel presentation of Southern industrial conditions previous to 1860. He boldly challenges the assumption that the South during that period was not fully abreast of the times in all business interests and quotes indubitable statistics and historic records to prove his case. In the decade between 1850 and 1860 the growth in Southern railroad and manufacturing interests was especially marked, the government reports showing a greater percentage of gain in the South than in New England and the Middle States, or, indeed, the whole country at large. Moreover, the popular idea crediting the Old South with producing only cotton, rice and sugar, is clearly disproved by Mr. Edmonds, who gives the figures of Southern crop production for 1860, showing a condition of agricultural diversity and prosperity unsurpassed in any part of the country.

This vigorous protest against a prevailing delusion should be read in its entirety by every Southerner who, as he reads of the thrift and energy of the Old South, will be inspired with a firmer faith in the growth and strength of the New, recognizing in the industrial development of to-day, as Mr. Edmonds expresses it, “not a novel creation” in this section, but “the result of evolution.”

* * * * *

MR. EDITOR:

After all the flowery speeches and kind words that have been
showered upon BOB TAYLOR’S MAGAZINE, all of which I heartily
endorse, I am afraid you will not appreciate what I am going
to say, but I’ll say it, nevertheless; it will be as good as a
corrective; too much sweets are always cloying.

I have read the magazine through from cover to cover, even to
the advertisements, and found everything good, better, best, yet
I was disappointed and will tell you why. There was no smallest
fraction thereof devoted to women. Why is this thus? It cannot be
that you do not think women of enough importance as to be worthy
some part of it especially fitted for her eye alone. I know our
editor-in-chief doesn’t feel that way, at least he does not talk
that way, as every woman knows who ever talked to him for five
minutes by the clock. I don’t mean a page devoted to Housewives,
Motherhood, Cooking Recipes, or Fancy Work, altogether. These
are all good, every one of them, and we are all more or less
interested in them, but a page, pure and simple, devoted to
things that women are specially interested in. Will you rise and
explain, and satisfy several women?

E. A. C.

The above communication is self-explanatory and is published for what it is worth. Possibly others of our friends may have something to say along this line. At any rate, whatever is worthy of space, pertaining to women, can, at least for a time, find expression in this department.

“LOCAL COLORING.”

(Dedicated to Our Descriptive Writers.)

The tale told thrillingly of lemon skies,
Of salmon hills beneath a blue sunrise;
It feelingly described a cerise field
Where purple rabbits ate pink onions, peeled.

The color card passed to another pen,
And lightning changes awed our common ken;
For lo, we’re told those hills are palest mauve,—
Like molten gold the fiery sun above.

The lemon sky has veered to cherry red,—
Maroon, the field where purple rabbits fed;
Has Nature cursed us with a spotted land?
Nay, “highly colored” tales are in demand.

HESTER GREY.

IN TENNESSEE.

Where the Mississippi washes
Round the shores of Tennessee,
There’s a large and stately forest,
And it’s very dear to me.

There I roamed in days of boyhood
With companions free from care,
As the tree tops sway ed above us
With the west wind playing there.

There we hunted ducks and turkeys;
Or as leaves came drifting down,
Sat and watched the graceful squirrel—
Heard the distant deep-mouthed hound.

I can see the old tent standing,
Scent the fragrant coffee pot,
And can see the fish a-frying
On the coals so red and hot.

We could hear the steamboat whistle,
Coming to us from afar;
And the wild geese loudly calling
Far out on the sandy bar.

As the darkness gathered round us,
The tree tops bare and high
Seemed to touch with inky fingers
The azure autumn sky.

And the shadows in beneath them,
Where the firelight did not go,
Made a background for dream pictures
In those days of long ago.

Ah, those faces in the firelight
Glowed with ruddy health and joy,
As I pictured golden futures
Round the camp fire as a boy.

I have walked the crowded city,
With restless, weary feet—
In search of praise and pleasure—
But neither seemed complete.

For the wine the city offers
Must be drunk in little sips,
Or like the Dead Sea apples
’Twill be ashes on the lips.

So I’m going back a-camping,
’Neath the sunset’s mellow glow,
There to dream the dreams of boyhood
As in days of long ago.

G. W. BROWDER.

_Clinton, Ky._

A People Peculiar.

Twenty years or more ago, riding through the flat, palmetto-fringed pine woods of east Florida, before Standard Oil Flagler built his coast railroad to Miami, sundry lean, swarthy, active people of both sexes, were frequently to be met with, more especially in and about St. Augustine, and to the southward towards New Smyrna. They are doubtless to be found there yet, though the great influx of miscellaneous strangers renders their racial traits less noticeable than formerly.

Ask one of the large-framed Swedes, Germans, or other scions of a more pronounced North-of-Europe type, who and what these Latin looking peasantry are, the chance is you will be answered, or at least would have been at the time I alluded to above:

“When folks want to be civil they call them Minorcans; when they don’t they are mighty apt to say something about Doc. Turnbull’s niggers. So, there you are—take your choice.”

As a matter of fact, they are a really worthy and industrious element of our composite population, not unlike the descendants of Longfellow’s Acadians, the “Cajuns” of southern Louisiana. Though of a hybrid sort of Spanish ancestry, from the Balearic Isles in the Mediterranean Sea, they have Americanized themselves through several generations of quiet usefulness in an humble, unobtrusive way.

What is their history? How came they here?

That takes us back to the year 1767. The Floridas had only recently been ceded by Spain to England, when some fifteen hundred colonists, mostly from Minorca, one of the Balearic group, were landed at Musquito Inlet, one hundred miles south of St. Augustine.

Many think that the only people held as slaves in the South prior to the Civil War, were negroes, or possibly in very early colonial times, a few spiritless tribes of Indians. Yet these colonists (ancestors of the present Minorcans now strung along the lagoons and bayous of the east coast, intermittently for many leagues) were made, willy-nilly, for nine long, weary years, to toil amid the swamps and hammocks of what is now Volusia County, as the virtual slaves of a British Trading Company of that era, headed by Sir Wm. Duncan and a Dr. Andrew Turnbull, shrewd Scotchmen of wealth and social position, who operated their scheme from London; Sir William being the resident manager there, and a financial magnate on the Stock Exchange himself.

Turnbull, the immediate head of the colony in Florida, was hard-hearted, energetic, indomitable and persevering—one of that unconscionable, never-give-up sort of task masters, who worked the helpless peasants mercilessly in the malarious swamps embraced within the area of the immense land grant held by the Company’s charter.

Tradition avers that he founded the original town of New Smyrna, dug drainage canals, built stone warehouses, cleared several thousand acres of dense forest, and began to raise indigo on a large scale.

The contracts of the colonists, under which they were to receive allotments of land, proper wages and maintenance, were ruthlessly and systematically violated. The region was then remote and inaccessible, and the poor, ignorant peasantry, helpless to a degree hard to realize, in our own day, outside of, perhaps, Siberia, or Tibet, in far-off Asia.

So isolated was that section from all connection with the outside world that this sort of thing went on for years without its being known, even at St. Augustine. The lands were not divided, nor the wages paid. Instead the Minorcans were compelled to work like the Israelites in Egypt, under harsh overseers, amid all the discomforts of a semi-tropic wilderness, environed by savage tribes to the west and south, trailed by bloodhounds to prevent escape, punished like convicts, and wretchedly housed and fed. Guarded also by armed men, their condition was, indeed, most forlorn and miserable.

It was said that our own Revolution against Great Britain had been going on for a year or more, before these long suffering Minorcans heard that such a thing had been even considered by the more northerly colonies. Then, however, the worm turned. There was a great uprising, for such a life, now tinged with a ray of hope, was unendurable.

Harsh measures were resorted to by Turnbull, who also evoked the aid of the civil law, claiming that the Minorcans had violated their contracts as a sort of “Redemptioners,” bound to serve for a stipulated period, etc. Some of the ring leaders were taken to St. Augustine by soldiers, and five actually condemned to death. Of these, two were pardoned; one was reprieved, on condition that he act as executioner of the remaining two; a number of others were, for a time, imprisoned.

The wretched colonists, however, continued to run away in larger numbers, either defying or defeating recapture, so that Turnbull eventually found himself without labor. The town, the plantations, and the various public works were deserted, and the vast enterprises thus despotically inaugurated, were at last stranded.

In vain did he, in the name of the now semi-defunct London Trading Company, make most liberal offers of land and wages to his recalcitrant and vanishing slaves. They wanted no more of Turnbull, his methods, or his works. The entire scheme fell through; Dr. Andrew Turnbull went back to England a ruined man; the town crumbled into ruins, the indigo plantations lapsed into a second forest growth; the labyrinth of ditches filled up, until only the remains of the old canal, some crumbling coquina ruins, and the name of the chief despot himself, now given to the ancient land grant which was the scene of his cruelties, and known generally as Turnbull Hammock, are left as mementoes of one of the gloomiest pages of our by no means untroubled colonial annals.

Instead of a natural increase in numbers during ten years of bondage and escape, not more than seven or eight hundred of the immigrants were left. But they were naturally thrifty and economical. Once scattered out and doing for themselves, unburdened by the incubus of Turnbullism, their numbers and resources gradually increased. Probably several thousand of their descendants, more or less intermixed with alien blood, still occupy the land of their forefathers’ adoption. These are small farmers (engaged in truck, and semi-tropic fruit growing), fishermen, boat sailors, and petty traders. A few have risen to social and political eminence as well as wealth. But these cases are rather exceptional.

As a whole, they are patriotic American citizens. The late war with Spain, for the relief of Cuba, proved that. Many of the younger men volunteered for service. Some even went to the Philippines.

“Free America vur beeg contree,” said a returned soldier to one of his home folks who had never seen a hill higher than some of the great shell mounds on the eastern shore of the Matanzas River. “Mountains higher than clouds, lakes wide like sea. Minorcans vur small people. Room for ever’one here. Home best place after all.”

And so it is, even for the posterity of those so woefully misused by the British Trading Company’s George the Third methods, as to be miscalled five generations later by local detractors, “Turnbull’s slaves.”

WM. PERRY BROWN.

The Mosquito.

There are more than three hundred and fifty tribes belonging to the mosquito race. These have been classified by the detectives of science into twenty-two families, and all placed in the same category with gnats, which are looked upon by most people as suspicious characters. These families are known by names of such “learned length and thundering sound” that it is thought safest to abstain from giving a list of them here; but like man, they may be known better by their color, habits and eccentricities than by name.

The mosquito is cosmopolitan, for he has explored and settled many parts of the arctic regions, including Alaska, Greenland and Iceland, and established his home on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, and in the remotest islands of the sea. He had very probably discovered America before Christopher Columbus set sail for the new world, and it is now pretty certain that he first colonized New Jersey.

He has figured extensively in the history of the world, yet he wears no laurel wreath of glory for valor in war. All martial victories and renown of his race belong to the gentler (?) sex of the family. She is a kind of Joan of Arc, of a fierce, restless and war-like spirit; but it is consoling to know that she is less savage in the temperate than in the torrid zone; for, we are informed by travelers that in the tropics she often leads her legions in a charge with fixed bayonets directly upon a sleeping man’s face, when they fall upon him in myriads, like pelting hailstones out of a storm-cloud.

There are instances of record in which her furious armies have filled the air for many miles, darkening the heavens like dense columns of flying cloud, and attacking man and beast like blood-thirsty demons. A Greek historian relates that such an army once swooped down upon ancient Greece and drove the inhabitants from their homes.

Besides being thus famous as a soldier, she enjoys the unique distinction of being a queen of song. Strange to say, in this gift she has a complete monopoly, while the male has been left to regret the sad fate of being forever songless and silent. However, he has been well compensated for this privation. Some tribes of his race have less musical talent than others; but those who have studied his anatomy, habits and genius declare that in tribes in which there are queens of song, he is, without doubt, the king of listeners, since nature has provided him with many hundreds of ears, no doubt to enhance his pleasure from vocal music. These curious ears are small hairs located on his antennæ, or feelers, which, like the strings of harp or violin under the touch of a virtuoso, tremble in unison with the harmony that flows from the living melodion of his queen, until his soul is on fire with melody. Not one of these delicately attuned ears ever seems to be shocked by a falsetto note from the vocal chords of his charmer. To him her song, like that of Wynomoinen, the magical singer, or the sirens of mythical story, is full of the power of enchantment; and the eavesdroppers of science who watch him and listen, tell us that he draws near her whenever she pours out her soul in song. The manner in which she produces her buzzing tones is very wonderful: The lower or contralto note is the result of the rapid vibration of her wings at the rate of three thousand per minute. It is not remarkable, then, that her flight is so swift from her enraged human pursuer. But when she trills and yodles and sings her high soprano, her fantastic music flows from stridulating organs which resemble tiny drums at the openings of minute air tubes. These higher runs thrill Monsignor Mosquito into ecstacies of pure delight. His ravished soul is borne out upon the silver sea of song as he sits on a honeysuckle sipping nectar, listening the while to the wooing voices of his divine inamoratas—the Pattis, Nilssons and Nordicas of his race. But not so with the human auditor of the mosquito prima donna who lies peacefully on his bed at night under the hypnotic spell of sweet sleep. Perchance it is midnight’s holy hour when he is suddenly awakened by a still small voice more pricking than the voice of conscience. He springs up and lights the gas or lamp and tries to draw nigh unto lady mosquito as did her enchanted knight with wings; he is thirsting for her life while she is thirsting for his blood.

But not only is our heroine celebrated in history as a warrior and a vocalist, but as a most dangerous enemy of mankind. Nature has seen fit to give her a long nose, or proboscis, which, according to the Darwinian theory, might prove her to be related to the elephant. She does not hesitate “to stick her nose into other people’s business,” and this is precisely the thing which, in the case of mosquitoes as of men, leads her into irreparable injury to humanity and very frequently to her own instant demise.

Those versed in the origin and evolution of the Culex (a nickname for the mosquito) teach us that his ancient grandmothers did not have the blood-sucking habit, but acquired it in later ages. Whether in acquiring this habit she was beset, like Mother Eve in Eden, by the power of a mighty temptation through the wily arts of his Satanic majesty, we are unable to say with certainty; but we are informed by her anatomists that alongside her formidable proboscis with its suction pump fixtures, are from two to six keen lances or spears, admirably adapted for making the necessary incisions in the skin of man and beast. Armed with such weapons for drawing blood, it is easy to guess how, during some of her nightly wanderings as a minstrel, temptation might have won an easy victory over her by giving her a taste of blood. It is probable that while on one of these lonely serenades she became enamored of some sleeping Apollo, and, stooping down to snatch a sweet warm kiss from his lordly brow, accidentally stuck her bill through the rosy cuticle and drew blood—taking another sip she said it was good, and thus she contracted the blood-sucking habit.

It is interesting to note that as with many other nations of the air so with this one, there is a sort of national anthem to which the Culex patriots seem more devotedly attached than human patriots are to theirs. Its divine strain, to the chivalrous male, is the very keynote of love, and he is charmed by its resistless power and drawn toward it as a beetle to a beacon light, or a boat to a whirlpool; for when its clarion note is sounded, like the weird, wild melody of Orpheus of old that thrilled dumb brutes and drew them in myriads around him, he is caught up and borne onward by its powerful pull to the spot whence the music comes.

While experimenting with harmonic telegraphy, a scientist of the South who resides at Jackson, Miss., happened to strike this key, and he reports that the mosquito came toward the “sounder” in great swarms. He soon afterwards devised a machine for electrocuting every mosquito that should respond to the magical note. Upon the very first trial they came teeming to the “sounder,” and when he turned on the electric current by pressing a button, they fell dead by the scores at his feet.

What a boon to humanity this novel application of electricity is destined to be. With such an instrument having a “sounder” attached, the disturbed sleeper of the future, who is not overly fond of mosquito song, can touch a button, by his bedside, to set the “sounder” to going, and then press another button to turn on the deadly current, and thus instantly electrocute every mosquito that disturbs his slumbers without ever moving from his pillow. Now, it has been urged by some that only the male mosquitoes will answer to the note made by the “sounder,” and thus only they would suffer death by the device. But this is by no means established, and even if shown to be true, it is evident that upon the males being thus dispatched the females would soon all withdraw or pine away with grief.

How vastly different and superior is the male Culex to the female from an ethical standpoint. He is opposed to war and is a harmless vegetarian and honey-sucker, while the female is a dangerous savage. He does not find his happiness in sucking the blood of his human or other neighbor, but in the contemplation of the beautiful. He may well be called the poet of his race; for he ever lives among the nectar drips and the paradises of color and perfume of the waiting flowers. He soars aloft into the sweeter, purer air to bathe his pinions in seas of radiant sunshine. He roams among the beauties of nature, seeking its sweets from every bud and leaf. All thoughts that flit across his microscopic brain are free from blood and war. He loves the beautiful wherever he finds it in the visible and tangible world and even in the fascinating buzz of his mosquito prima donna. But as ideally good as he seems to be, he, like man, has his faults and frailties. He is fond of travel and has been caught with many of his female companions stealing long rides on Pullman palace cars and ocean steamers. He is also very fond of beer, wine and whisky, and has been found “dead drunk” on sundry occasions. In this taste for intoxicants the female Culex does not indulge.

The mosquito has been recently charged with murder, arrested and brought to trial before a competent tribunal composed of medical men and others, and convicted. They have proved that his spouse is the principal and he the accomplice. The evidence shows that they belong to a family of mosquitoes, known by the infamous name of _Anopheles_, and they have used malaria, yellow fever and several other diseases with which to slay man; that the female is the entertainer of a very small creature, a kind of Jonah, whom she swallows, and after a time he gets down from her stomach into her proboscis, and when she bites her human victim he leaps into the wound where he remains and eats red-blood corpuscles, and when grown he breaks up into from six to ten pieces, each piece making a new animal life like the original; that they go on multiplying in this way into millions in the blood upon which they feast, and thus produce these dreadful maladies and consequent death.

WATAUGA.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

CONDUCTED BY GENELLA FITZGERALD NYE.

PRISON LIFE OF JEFFERSON DAVIS. By Bvt. Lt. Col. John J. Craven,
M.D. G. W. Dillingham Company, New York. Price, $1.20.

The recent controversy concerning General Miles and the shackling of Jefferson Davis while the latter was a prisoner of war at Fortress Monroe, makes this new edition of Dr. Craven’s book, originally published in 1866, of timely value and importance. Dr. Craven was the medical adviser of Mr. Davis during most of his imprisonment, and his notes, taken from daily and intimate intercourse with his patient, form the basis of this volume. While written with professional reserve and military discretion, it is a most satisfactory and reliable account of the facts concerning the imprisonment of Mr. Davis, and throws an interesting and significant light on his character as viewed on close range by a political enemy at a time when prejudice and passion so generally usurped the place of judgment. Dr. Craven frankly expresses his original prejudiced and bitter attitude toward his patient, even to naming the precise occasion on which a kindlier sentiment was aroused in his breast. A stronger, sincerer tribute to Mr. Davis’ character could hardly be conceived than this plain and unadorned record of the change effected in the attitude of an honest enemy toward the man whom he abhorred as a kind of moral monster. Dr. Craven was not only impressed with the learning and ability of his distinguished prisoner, but again and again bears impartial witness to his modesty, fortitude, and unselfishness, relating conversations and incidents which particularly impressed him at the time. The strength of that impression is sufficiently evinced by the fact that Dr. Craven had the courage to publish such a book at a time when sectional feeling ran so high.

The facts in regard to the shameful treatment of Mr. Davis by General Miles are fully confirmed by copies of the official reports bearing on the matter, and the account is a painful commentary on the injustice and cruelty of the policy allowed to rule in regard to a conquered people. Mr. Davis was sick and feeble; moreover, he was closely guarded night and day, in an impregnable fortress. Under the circumstances his shackling was a wanton and unnecessary humiliation of a helpless man, and the bare relation of the incident as witnessed by Dr. Craven, though set down without comment or criticism, is enough to make the blood of any generous reader boil with indignation and revolt. It is impossible to doubt the honesty and accuracy of such a record, and it must remain a heavy indictment against those responsible for the outrage here detailed. Dr. Craven’s son, who republishes this book, is fully justified in so doing, not only for the satisfaction of a present interest, but for the consideration of future generations.

THE MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM ASHE. By Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Harper and
Brothers, New York. Price, $1.50.

Mrs. Ward in her latest novel works very much the same combination which proved to so exactly fit the public taste in “Lady Rose’s Daughter,” and if the result is not the same success, it will be only because the popular impression will be dulled by repetition. Again we have a heroine nurtured in a scandalous menage in Paris and shadowed by a criminal heredity, and Lady Kitty, like Julie in the earlier novel, has two lovers, contrasted in character much as were Delafield and the caddish young soldier to whom Julie so nearly yielded. The crucial moment of temptation, however, comes to Lady Kitty after her marriage, and the hand of fate which snatched Julie from danger plunges the later heroine into the abyss of ruin and disgrace. William Ashe, like Marchmont, is of a noble house and high in political circles, but he is not quite so much of an archangel, though he, too, exhibits a patient and tolerant forbearance toward the indiscretions and errors of the woman he loves, which, however philosophical, somewhat removes him from the normal human type and its sympathies. Geoffrey Cliffe, the objectionable lover, is a poet instead of a soldier, but he, too, woos Kitty to disgrace and finally meets a violent death. Both novels are elaborate studies of heredity, and in each the final decision between irretrievable error and duty hangs upon an unforeseen incident which turns the scales like a fate.

Again Mrs. Ward has drawn on real life for her characters and plot. The Byronic inspiration of Geoffrey Cliffe is sufficiently obvious and the suggestion of Lady Caroline Lamb’s story is plainly to be read in Lady Kitty and her obsession. More than one prominent political figure of a generation ago has been promptly identified by the English reviewers.

Of the two heroines, Lady Kitty is a better realization than Julie, who, to our mind quite failed to keep the novelist’s promise of intellectual brilliancy and social magnetism. It is really a wonderful and poignant impression conveyed by Mrs. Ward’s elaborate picture of Lady Kitty, frail and fair, passionate and weak, poetic and frivolous, sweet and perverse—with a lack of moral and mental balance which spells for us nothing less than insanity. For after all, we are disposed to question whether such a character is not properly a study in alienism rather than in feminine psychology. That she was not a responsible agent, but merely the unfortunate creature of her own impelling fancies and passions, is the view stressed by every implication of the author, and indeed, against the very shady record of Lady Kitty’s life can only be pleaded temperamental insanity and hereditary sin.

An equally elaborate, but not so successful, piece of work is the presentation of William Ashe. He is depicted as a kind of Admirable Crichton—handsome, learned, amiable—a scholar, a statesman, and a social lion. “Religiously he was a skeptic, enormously interested in religion. Politically he was an aristocrat, enormously interested in liberty.” But with all the author’s keen analysis and clever descriptive phrases, this versatile and philosophical hero never becomes very real to our perceptions or sympathies. It would seem that his creator had fashioned and molded him carefully and perfectly, but had failed to breathe into him the breath of life.

Mrs. Ward’s rich literary equipment is no less manifest in this novel than in her previous works, and her power to deal with the larger interests of life is undiminished. The old time English society novel in her hands has been expanded, dignified, transformed, into a serious and significant presentation of life and its problems. Her outlook on the world of thought, of affairs, and of men and women is technically informed and philosophically impartial; her talent is enormously efficient. Perhaps her remarkable ability was never better demonstrated than when she made in “Lady Rose’s Daughter” a deliberate bid for a wider and lower kind of popular favor. The new appeal, so marked in that book and in “The Marriage of William Ashe,” was so skilfully turned and has been so successful in enlarging the writer’s clientele, that as a literary _tour de force_, it challenges a kind of unwilling admiration. There seem to be lacking to her marvelous gifts and powers only the touch of spontaneity, the flash of dramatic fire.

THE GEORGIANS. By Will N. Harben, author of “Abner Daniel,” “The
Substitute,” etc. New York: Harper and Brother. Price, $1.50.

The plain people of the South, the sturdy common folk who made no pretensions to aristocratic grandeur but who in self-respect, prosperity and character, formed in this section, as elsewhere, the backbone of civilization and society, have not received their due representation in Southern fiction, generally speaking. Baronial splendors, “po’ white trash” peculiarities, and darky picturesqueness have been the favored themes of most Southern story-tellers, moving in the lines of least resistance to romantic and dramatic interest, while the great middle class has been made to occupy a disproportionately small place in their pictures of Southern life. It is not mere accident that the Georgia writers have given us the fullest and best treatment of this class, for in Georgia pre-eminently it dominated and colored the political and social body to a marked degree. Richard Malcolm Johnson, Joel Chandler Harris, and Watson have all given us stories with a strong flavor of the soil and the people who chiefly owned and cultivated it, and Mr. Harben’s tales of north Georgia have been notably successful in this line of fiction.

In “Abner Daniel,” Mr. Harben achieved one of the rarest things in modern fiction—a genuine creation. Typically, sympathetically, imaginatively, Abner Daniel rings true; in spirit and letter he is a perfect presentation. Broadly human as he is unmistakably North Georgian, he may be described as a Southern David Harum; but of the two characters Abner Daniel seems to us far more vital, far less dependent on his make-up and gags for reality. In “The Georgians,” Abner reappears, this time as the _deus ex machina_ of a mysterious murder case, involving the love affair and various other interests of the story. The little village of Darley is sketched faithfully and sympathetically, and it is peopled with folk, whom we either know, or instinctively recognize as real. Under the not very deceptive alias of Tom P. Smith, Mr. Harben pictures a certain noted evangelist of Georgia and his revivalist methods, while as a companion piece he presents Jack Bantram, of another ecclesiastical type, who makes a simple and direct appeal to conscience and manhood. The religious ideals and customs of such communities have never received fuller or more sympathetic treatment than in this story, and, indeed, we may find here in simple, but effective narration, a most truthful picture of plain, provincial Georgia life in all its phases and forms. Among the real historical novels—those which are recording the vanishing social history of our nation—“The Georgians” deserves place and consideration.

MYSTERIOUS MR. SABIN. By E. Phillips Oppenheim, Author of “A
Prince of Sinners,” “Anna, the Adventuress,” etc. Boston:
Little, Brown and Company. Price, $1.50.

A most remarkable as well as mysterious individual is the villain of Mr. Oppenheim’s latest yarn. He appears in London with a beautiful girl who turns all the men’s heads and inspires young Lord Wolfenden with a sudden and serious passion. By a curious coincidence this young man’s father is a retired admiral, with a mania for writing up the coast defenses of England, while Mr. Sabin’s mission in England is to get possession of these papers to sell to the German Emperor. A political intrigue is involved, in which Mr. Sabin, as agent for the French Bourbons, has conceived the brilliant scheme of buying Germany’s aid with naval secrets of England, fully set forth in the maps and notes of the naval monomaniac. The success of these plans would be followed by war between England and Germany, and the coronation of Princess Helene—the mysterious young lady, of course—as Queen of France. There are all sorts of complications and sensational happenings, and just as things begin to look rather dark for the lovers and the peace of England, a nihilistic order checks Mr. Sabin’s operations and crushes his hopes and ambitions. This winds up the troubles of Wolfenden and his Princess, and prefaces the most remarkable and exciting adventures of Mr. Sabin as he flees incognito to America to escape the wrath of the disappointed war lord of Germany. Greatly to the reader’s relief, this most engaging villain arrives safely in Boston Harbor and we leave him settling down to a peaceful obscurity with his first love, to whom his bitterest enemy had rather inconsequentially directed him before he left England.

To the critical eye, the machinery of Mr. Oppenheim’s story is somewhat too evident, and occasionally it rattles and creaks, but it goes at a rapid rate, and the result is just what is intended—an interesting and exciting story, to be read with easy and pleasurable interest and forgotten immediately.

THE MONKS’ TREASURE. By George Horton, Author of “Like Another
Helen.” Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Price, $1.50.

Walter Lythgoe, the nephew of Erasmus Lythgoe, head of the great Lythgoe Baking Powder, is sent by the firm to Greece to lay in a supply of crude cream of tartar, and is dispatched on his errand with the admonition, “Keep out of all scrapes and complications with women.” Naturally the first thing done by the young man as he arrives on the island of Andros is to fall in love with a fair maiden and to immediately involve himself in the most gratuitous scrapes and astounding complications ever concocted for a novel hero to wriggle out of. Of course the fair maiden whom he loves so artlessly and chivalrously as the servant of the missionary turns out to be a duchess, and equally, of course, the treasure discovered by Walter and his friend in the vault of the monastery is her stolen patrimony. Walter conceives the brilliant scheme of carrying off the bags of gold, and after a series of incredible adventures, in which he and his Scotch crony pit their wits and courage against a jealous Greek lover and some murderous monks, the hero sails out triumphant from the island of Andros with his lady love and a trunk full of treasure.