Chapter III (1)

I have often wondered at the freshness, loquacity and altogether unreal tone of the duellists' rooms pending an encounter; and I can only liken it to the mind of an assiduous chess-player, which still even in dreams is tilting with ivory knights and banning with puppet bishops. Such fancies are accepted among duelling men as the real sentiments that move and govern society. To Lind Mason, who was naturally made of paste-board and stuffed with bran, they were the breath in his nostrils. He vapored of the family as if, instead of plain Brown, it had been born in the purple. Payne on his return had said, "The funk wanted to apologize," and that "Lind had a soft thing of it," chaffing his principal not a little over the prospects of his aunt's generosity.

"Ye-as," said Lind, negligently drawing the long silky moustache and beard through the hollow of his hand and letting the points drop. "Woodlawn. We talked it over. 'Marry, my boy,' said the old girl, 'and settle.' 'All right!' said I, 'aunty: _I'll_ marry, and _you_ settle.' Payne and I made out a liberal schedule of my liabilities for her lawyer last night. My motto is, be off at the tap if you can, or a wink before it, and come down the quarter under the whip. I consider my autograph on Aunt Fanny good for a thousand any day. T'other day I said to Payne I wanted the stick and two hoops ($100), and Aunt Fanny just said, 'Double it, and arrange with your cousin Sue.' Soon as this baggytell is over little Sue Brown jines the Masons.--Here's to her, gentlemen! and no heeltaps. No need to say fellows of this party are welcome to our table;" and he delicately tipped off the wine, saying "he had drunk better."

"Payne says the fellow will apologize," said one. "What will you do?"

"Well," drawled Mason, dipping a cracker in the fragrant sherry and munching, "a fellow that saw it all from Mill Springs to Appomattox doesn't care for these little things. If it was the first time, or even the second or third, I wouldn't stand it. But after that the thing loses its gloss and gets to be a confounded bore. You see it's getting up so early; and there's your man squatting on the grass like a hurt wild-duck, and all the fellows scared and ugly, and poking at you as if it was your fault. And the confounded police, and the bother of keeping out of the way, and maybe lose the spring meeting. It gets to be deuced low, fellows. No: if the little man will own up and quit annoying somebody--" with a lazy wink. "I drink to Sue Mason, _née_ Brown, gentlemen. I don't care: he may get off whole. Of course a written apology."

"Apology," said Major Johnstone, whose impressible nature went with the extremists. "My God, sir! is a venerable lady of wealth and fashion--of the American peerage, by George, sir! American peerage--to be insulted in an assembly of her nearest relatives, and the base scullion to escape with a bare 'Sorry for it'? A pocket full of apologies and a back full of bruises, as Tom Marshall said, by George! Look at Rule 10, Tipperary Code," slapping Barrington's _Sketches_ emphatically. "No, sir! Such an example would corrupt American youth."

"Bosh!" said another, who sat on the side of the bed and rocked his legs alternately as if for a wager. "That rot is past salting down. A lady's name involved! Our chivalrous principal is right. Honorably adjusted, satisfactory, etc., is the end of it."

"But a blow?" said the major, like a weathercock in contradictory flaws, and running over the leaves. "Here is Rule 5--"

"That's Payne," said one, interrupting the major unceremoniously at a step outside.

"Payne never walked that fast in his life," was the reply. "Payne was born tired. There's somebody with him."

The door opened, and Deane Lee in gray tweed, from foot to forage-cap the dashing soldier, saluted. "Honor to report from Captain Nettles," he said, touching his cap. Military titles prevail on such occasions.

"Will you join us?" said Payne, motioning to the refreshments, as Mason read the note.

"Don't care if I do. Plain: no cooked drinks for me," said the envoy briefly.

This struck the major as having a judicial bearing upon the coats of the stomach. He cocked his chin and began unconsciously to imitate the dashing stranger.

"An unfortunate affair," said Payne. He had thought it amusing, absurd, but something in this young fellow impressed him also, and he said it, and meant it.

"D---- unlucky!" said the other, in much the same tone as if he had said "lucky." "But my man is all right. He had to hunt me up, or I'd been in your lines before now." He took the ice from the tumbler, dashed off the moisture, and ate it like a salamander.

The major was possessed. He whispered behind his hand to his neighbors, "Never saw but one like him."

"Who?" asked several, for the easy, cool assurance of Bob Nettles's second affected them all.

The major shook his head and sighed grievously.

"Was he killed?" asked one eagerly.

"Kill him!" said the major in hollow emphasis of scorn: "no, sir."

"Died, then?" suggested another.

"No, sir," said the major: "his worst enemy could not say that of him. No, he didn't die."

"Drowned?" put in a third, venturing at the major's conundrum.

"No, sir," said the major gutturally. "Water couldn't drown him. It is not wet enough. Lost."

"Lost!" marvelled his auditors at this sphinx. "How?"

"Married," said the major in basso-profundo, husky with emotion.

Such an ornament lost to the chivalry of duelling accentuated their admiration of his after-type in Bob's second.

"When I last saw him," continued the major, in the tone of Griffith describing the last hours of Wolsey--

"Well?" ejaculated all in one voice.

"He was buying seed-corn."

Degradation could no lower go, and in the pause they could hear the blue fly buzz in the window-pane.

Mason had beckoned Payne aside. The two found that reply a hard nut to crack. Payne had regarded the duel as a huge hoax, and counted on easily bluffing the burgher's second. But bluffing those steely nerves yonder, that stood at ease with a suggestion of military accoutrements, was not to be thought of. Nor could his principal go out, under the pretext of controlling the associations of Walter Brown's family, without Walter Brown's approval.

"For proper reasons, no doubt," said Payne courteously, "your principal ignores what is, with us, the gravamen of his offence--his behavior in the house of Mr. Mason's relations."

Pretty well covered for Mr. Payne, but it would not do.

"Don't want to ignore anything," said Deane Lee. "Just don't want petticoats mixed up in it. My man does not pledge worth a--pyrotechnic." He had got it in at last, and with a step--a peremptory refusal to submit to dictation of any kind.

Payne felt outmanœuvred and crowded. He saw Bob Nettles was not to be bullied out of little Sue, and they must give up that point. "My principal is disposed to waive that part," said Payne haughtily, "rather than involve others."

"All right!" said Deane carelessly. "It's not in the regulations--but come to taps. We want this thing over before reveille. I've got an infernal mule-team to yank up and down these streets after that."

It was done with the easiest nonchalance, yet Wilde Payne felt he was bitted and spurred, and the butt of this ridiculous duel might prove to be the man who had brought it about.

"I don't know where he picked up Deane Lee," said he after his rival left; "but Deane will fight his man. It isn't going to be such a soft thing, after all."

"He is only a street-car conductor," said a callow Brown, who looked on, and thought all this very heroic and fine.

"I don't care," said the major, rising on his crutch, "but if that man drives a mule, it is a credit, sir--to the mule; and, gentlemen, I wish you well out of it--I do, by George!" and he stumped off and out of the room. The major's departure was as significant as the sinking of the mercury in the sealed tube: it indicated a stormy atmosphere outside, setting in favor of the other side.

But an incident just then, seeming to confirm some of Mason's vaporing, created a profound sensation, and so complicated and embarrassed the duel for that gentleman as to tax all his ingenuity and address to come out of it with anything like credit. It adds a lustre to his boast that he was "betting on a certainty" and "intended to put the saddle on the right horse." A servant presented a card on a tray, with "Lady in ladies' parlor C wishes to see Captain Mason."

Mason took it up, looked flushed, flattered, more pompous than ever. "Here, Payne," said he; and the two whispered.

"You'd better not," said Payne critically: "it will compromise you."

"But she knows I am here--meddlesome servant, etc." In fact, Mason was too flattered by the visit to deny the lady or himself.

"Poor girl!" was whispered about--"desperately attached."--"She needn't be uneasy: it's the other fellow ought to be looked after."

To explain who this mysterious visitor was we must go back a little.

Sudie arose the morning after her garden-party flushed and feverish, with a strange consciousness of being unlike herself. She drifted from room to room; peeped into the parlor, with its fading garlands, in a little superstitious awe of her last night's vision, and then took to standing at the gate or looking from the west windows toward the city, as if she expected some one. But she did not: it was only that all her anxiety lay there. At 10 A.M. she took the pony carriage to town and hurried to Aunt Fanny, only to learn that the etiquette of the code had excluded the dowager's messenger, and that Her Majesty was so incensed thereat as to resolve to let matters take their course. This by no means satisfied Sudie. She thought it horrible, wicked. She would see papa--she had all a child's confidence in papa--and he could stop it. Passing the hotel, an impulse seized her to appeal to her cousin; for he was her cousin, Sudie repeated to herself to justify her resolution; and so, without any formed plan of appeal, she sent up her card. She was enough confused and embarrassed at her cousin's entrance to have deceived a wiser man than Lind Mason; but, luckily, he was better at reading the backs of his cards than a woman's face, and, to his credit, felt supremely silly.

"Cousin Lind," said the little girl, speaking the first thought in her mind, "I was going to see papa, and--" and she broke down.

"Hem! Mr. Brown is in the city, ha? Of course," blundered Mason, shy as an awkward girl to her first lover, and obstinately turning that eye away from her on which Bob Nettles had left his mark.

"And--and--" hesitated Sudie, with a little shuddering, nervous laugh, like a smothered cry, "have you and Mr. Nettles met this morning?"

To do Mason justice, he was too artificial and shallow to retain any resentments. He was only confused at his novel position, and before he could muster a reply Sudie went on: "Because I want you and him to be friends," with that tremulous laugh again; "and I should be so mad if--if he was to--to hurt you."

"By Joe!" thought Lind, "what am I to do if she proposes outright?" He was terribly scared: no one is so timid as one of these fast, horsey men in the presence of an innocent, pure-minded girl. The situation was trying: he thought it was his cue to put his arm about her and say something; but when he saw how she sat back in the chair, and had tested his own nerves, he felt he could not do it. Little Sue, therefore, had it all to herself, recovering courage by her own freedom, without any conception of what was troubling the thoughts of the great, handsome, awkward booby before her. "Aunt Fanny wants you to be friends," she continued, "and so do I."

Mason began to pluck up a little at this. The association of Aunt Fanny's name suggested that she had talked the matter over with her niece, as she had with him, and broken the ice for him. He looked over his shoulder to see if the parlor was clear. She was leaning forward now, holding out two plump little hands, like a child going to beg, and with a sly, roguish look too. He thought he could do it now: he would drop gracefully on one knee and--

And Sudie went on: "Somebody else will be mad too, you don't know." A half whisper from the roguish pucker of those dimpling lips: "Ma'amselle Hortense."

The blood rushed to that ensanguined face till it looked like a great romanete apple: "Hortense?"

"Yes," with a half-dozen mischievous, confidential little nods. "There! Now you go right straight and see Mr. Nettles, and tell him _I_ sent you; and if he doesn't behave himself to you, just let _me_ know." And, nodding intelligence, little Sue rose with a rustle and flutter of puffs and bows, in childish confidence of having done her whole duty and stopped that wicked, wicked business.

That skilful card-player Mason was as completely stumped as if some one had raked down the stakes on a pair of deuces against his exhibit of the four aces. Nothing but the most gracious condescension and chaste humility of salutation had passed between him and his aunt's French maid; yet shrewd little Sudie, with her intuitive woman's instinct, had shot her arrow in the dark and cloven the wand.

She went out in the innocent simplicity of her childlike faith, and it was hours before she came to realize how utterly she had failed in stopping the execution of that deadly purpose.

How often is it the case with her sex that, having no other coin than the affections, so dear to themselves, they over-value them for others, and only know from finding them soiled and trampled in the mud how little they are estimated in the hard and selfish dealings of man with man! But the little girl went off, happy in her delusion. God bless the rest of heart from apprehension that it gave her!

But Mason had to slip aside into the hotel bar and drink a mighty jorum of brandy before he could rejoin his friends. As he thought of all the confounded annoyances and embarrassments growing out of the little girl's discovery, including the loss of her hand and fortune, the terse and pithy brevity of his summing-up of the situation was an epitome of Spartan eloquence. It was, "D---- it!"

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

THE DOINGS AND GOINGS-ON OF HIRED GIRLS.

Leave the town and the highway, journey onward deep among the hills, and in their farthest nooks and crannies you will come to places where the hired girls are living happily. You will come to places where the hired girls do not long to be old nor long to be dead--spots where there are no vulgar, insulting rich, untrained to the management of servants and ignorant of the routine of good housework--neighborhoods where the maxim of the ancient noblesse of France, that only the low-born are hard with their hirelings, still prevails. In Mid New York, for instance, are regions sweet as Thessaly, hilly, shaggy with woods, and peopled by descendants of the Puritans bearing old Shakespearian names--Ford, Page, Peck and Scroop--a yeomanry on whom the rich soil of their present seats has had a powerful effect: they enjoy their hills in health and mellow content, and their servants live at ease with them.

The New York farmer of Puritan descent is a patriot. He can never enough gloat over the number of Britishers his ancestors killed at the battle of Lexington. He loves politics. He is great at voting. He stands up for his candidate almost to the fighting-point. Squires Catesby and Plunket did have a little fight at the Forge Hollow election; not actually coming to blows--that would be too absurd for men of their figure and property--but hunching and shouldering each other around the tavern bar-room until they hunched the stove over and the chairs and tables upside down. A farmer of their type has a mind busied in operating, American fashion, on every conceivable topic--you will see such a one in town, broad-shouldered as an Egyptian statue, matching silk for his wife after selling a herd of cattle--and this kind of man is not the one to be "snooping round the house" worrying his servants. His wife is like himself, a comfortable person to serve. It would be hard to find a more luxurious woman, one fonder of taking naps and of driving about the country paying visits--our opulent New York farmer has not the least suspicion that his wife can walk anywhere--and partly because of a paucity of fashionable calls and milliners' windows, partly because the country doctor is such a good one to make her think she needs medicine, she cultivates a gentle hypochondria, spins talk spider-like from her own frame, thinks she lives in a sort of human oven where she is in constant peril of being overdone, and so is tender of her domestics, lest they be overdone. The rich farmer's wife does not wash trencher nor scrape dish; she boils not, neither does she skin apple or potato; she occupies herself with fancy-work that would make Solomon in all his glory stare. You ought to see her best bedroom: it is a bower of bonbonnerie of her own make. Its treatment, as an architect would say, is in the Decorated pocketed style--pockets on the wall for papers; pockets for rags and scraps; a double pocket for slippers; one for your watch, one for your comb, one for lamplighters, one for burnt matches; ever so many others for what you can't guess; and all beaded, bugled, tasselled and embroidered to form a perfect zodiac of splendors.

Though the country wife is kind to her domestics, she has a knack of getting the best out of them. The girl who scorches things and boils tea as if some incantation of double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and teapot bubble, had got into her head--the girl who stands like a Stoughton bottle and bawls "Ma'am!" whenever she is spoken to--the slow girl who can't tell time, forgets to put on the teakettle, and never gets beyond "one I, one--two I, two," on the kitchen clock--the small servant with the bad cold who _will_ sit by the parlor fire coughing, snuffing and breathing hard--the girl like an overgrown man who slobbers dish-water on the floor and steps in it--the Deutsche girl who spoils the parlor clock turning it upside down to dust it thoroughly,--these and worse become reliable people under the sway of the old-fashioned country housewife. The Deutsche girl becomes a paragon in the farmhouse, quickly falling into Yankee ways and picking up Yankee kitchen phrases, and turning them with a bold originality. "Them clothes is bone dry," says the Deutsche girl. "Oh land! yes: they got a bone drying to-day. I gave them clothes a bone rubbing and a bone boiling, and to-morrow they'll get a bone ironing, you bet," says she. Next to her rank the Dane and the Swede. The Irish girl is never a congenial inmate of the farmhouse. The Irish girl is too noisy and too much given to lying. The last might be endured--the farmer's wife would rather hear an Irish girl tell forty lies than sing one song--but the noise she makes talking to the butcher's boy, the peddler, the essence-man and the ash-gatherer is insufferable; and when the Irish rag-merchant bursts open the kitchen door roaring, "God bless you! you're a real lady; got any rags? don't sell to them theivin' Jews, they're villains; sold your rags to a man that pays more than me? divil a man in the county pays more than me," why, the farmhouse quiet is torn to ribbons. And then the Irish girl is cross to visitors, who form the solace and charm of country life. "I wants no lady-visitors around me; they makes too much bodderin' wid towels and wather; they're always a-washin' of theirselves. They wants a clean towel to every one of their tin fingers: they're afraid us gurrels sha'n't earn our wages. Give me men for my money: they ain't always a-cleanin' of theirselves," growls the Irish girl.

No girl of any species can compare with an oldish American hired girl. Give Sar' Ann her due. She works at a spanking pace; she is "poison clean;" she can do up a shirt fit for a funeral, and she is a dabster at cooking. In butchering or in haying and harvesting she will pitch in and work without a murmur until she is pale and damp with weariness, and at such times will let her hair go until her head looks like Encke's comet, one halo of frowse, with a frowsy knob in its periphery. Still, she will put up with no asperity from her mistress: "the foodle ages" are done with, look you! as to Sar' Ann. Let her mistress once reprimand her, she turns the tables on that lady slap, dab. "It's a poor story," ejaculates Sar' Ann, "for you to talk so, Mis' Fife. I've dug and delved for you six year, and run my daylights out of me, and I won't do it no longer. It's jaw, jaw, jaw with you till I'm worn to a shadder. I've spunked up now, Mis' Fife, and I'll light out. I never crep' nor crawled to nobody, and I won't begin now. I'll throw my dishcloth right smack up the chimbly, and I'll clear." If you have a servant who understands her rights and business better than you do yours, where are you? "Why, there you are," as the man in the play says.

In the farmhouse kitchen you sometimes find a girl rare, now-a-days, outside of old portraits, and one seen only in spots as sequestered as the haunts of the deer and wild-duck. She has hair of a burnished copper color, eyes so fair they reflect crystal sparkles of light from their lashes, a pure skin, round cheeks, a delicate cocked-up nose, a chin all weakness and a look of wistful propitiation. Another girl peculiar to country kitchens, not so rare, but delicious, is a fresh, dark nymph of a temperament both gay and imperturbable. This one has almost perfect beauty--black hair that should be crowned with water-cresses, black eyes with a thrilling glance, and a sudden, frank, enchanting smile. Perhaps you will say her nose and lips are a line too heavy: there is no skimping in her outlines. The country-people never find out that she is handsome. "Adeline would be quite handsome if she was not so dark," say they.

A well-to-do farmhouse, where the work is "done up" early, is a pleasant place to work in. Adeline has an hour of liberty every day in which she may stand in the door "dressed up," looking out over the meadows, or run to The Corners to "borry a teaspoonful of soda," or look over a newspaper. If Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne Cecil, marquis of Salisbury (what a sound that has!), were the farmer's guest, Adeline would condescend to talk to him during this hour when she is waiting for tea-time. "I guess you feel pretty lonesome over here," she would say; and when he replied that he felt "like a crumb of bread at the bottom of a trowsers pocket," as he probably would, she would try to amuse him with innocent rustic familiarity. It never occurs to her that she is not as good as "them kings" or anybody else, she has such an idea of her own smartness and respectability. At five o'clock she sits down to tea with her mistress. The men-folks take supper after milking is done, the farmer supping with his men that he may talk over the harvest. When there is company the hired people have all the good things going--jelly-cake sixteen streaks deep, floating islands, preserves, tarts, pound-sweet apples boiled in sweet cider, boiled tongue, inconceivable pickles, cabbage salad--everything. After a company supper the hired man is just able to crawl out and perch himself on the dooryard fence, where he sits blown up as by hydraulic pressure until bedtime brings him the deep satisfaction of a hired man's sleep.

A circumstance that makes farmhouse servitude agreeable is, that the hired girl's friends are welcome there. Her mother comes often to see her. This interesting old woman has a face dried down as if to last for ages, strong gray hair and a smile that drives back a score of wrinkles in her cheeks, being "tough as a biled owl." She wears a black bombazine dress, and under it a heavy quilted petticoat, in which she invariably sleeps, goodness gracious only knows why. She comes in with the remark, "Sorry to hender;" she calls flowers "blummies," houses, "housen," bouquets, "beaupots;" terminates her assertions with "'sfurzino" ("as far as I know"), and talks with a muffled yang-yang, as if she had an invisible tumor at the end of her nose. Her observations would remind you of something in Browning's _Aristophanes' Apology_--

You too, my Chrusomelolthian-Phaps
Girl-goldling-beetle-beauty,

for example. Her conversation has the effect of hasheesh for lengthening the apparent duration of time: the Happy Thought man would call it dry as an extinct volcano; it drives everybody to the wall; is a perfect battering-ram for that--all talk and no wool, you know. She is perpetually finding mares' nests and getting news by the "grapevine telegraph," and she is always looking for signs in the air, in the embers, in candle-snuff, in empty teacups, as if mysterious laws like Kepler's threaded the universe and she knew the clue to them. If the cat turns her tail to the fire, the hired girl's mother thinks something will happen. She has a great deal of trouble. "Trouble sticks to me," says she. She keeps turkeys which are creatures that assert their American origin by running away to the woods and going wild at every opportunity, and a respectable old lady in cap and spectacles cannot chase wild turkeys through the woods; besides, they insist on roosting in her neighbors' cherry trees, a proceeding sure to kill the trees. And she keeps a cow with a genius for opening gates. Her cow has a habit of standing meditatively before a garden gate swinging her tail, but suddenly, after looking cautiously round, she will hook one horn into the gate by a quick twirl of her head, and by giving it a series of searching shakes will unfasten the latch, after which she will shoulder herself into the garden and take off its cream in great content. These facts are calculated to inflict a wound on neighborly peace not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but all the king's horses and all the king's men could not make it whole again. The hired girl's mother keeps hens too, and being a lone woman lets them run round the house for company. In winter you will be surprised to see a hen's face looking from her parlor window with an air of being at home.

The hired girl's sister and sister's husband also come frequently to see her, riding in an old wagon drawn by a large, gray, famished horse that devours the farmer's oats by the bushel. The sister's husband is a carpenter by trade. He usually has a large boil or carbuncle on his arm that gives him leisure, and he sits by the kitchen fire with his chair tilted back, rubbing a grease spot on the wall from his bushy black hair and getting redder and redder in the face, talking about his boil until his head looks like a lampwick that has burned too long and needs snuffing. They stay until the sisters begin to quarrel. "Your coffee is dish-water and your gravy paste," sneers the hired girl's sister before she goes, alluding to the fact that thin coffee and fried pork gravy, in which are lumps that break on the tongue and fill the mouth with dry flour, are the vulnerable points of the farmhouse breakfast.

When there is a young girl in the kitchen, she is on good terms with the jingle-legged boys of the farm. She is interested in their pets, especially in that funny one of the bear tribe that has the head of a fox with shaggy whiskers round his sharp visage, and that sits on his hind legs and holds his food in his hands and looks around him when he eats, and that makes friends so insinuatingly with the puppies, kittens and ducks until he finds a chance to devour them--the raccoon. Of evenings, when the barefoot boys sit on the kitchen lounge tired with their long day's work, yet scuffling and knocking their elbows and knees together, she keeps up an incessant tittering with them. And in the beginning of the season, when they clear out the leavings of last year's pease, beans and seed-corn from the garret, she has a good time with the boys a-dodging the wasps that fly through the garret singing their bass buzz and carrying blobs of mud like boxing-gloves on their feet, and taking such irregular zig-zags their course cannot be foreseen. She wastes her time then watching quivering fights between spiders and unfortunate wasps that have become entangled in cobwebs among the rafters. "She has found a te-he's nest with a lot of ha-ha's eggs in it," says the farmer's wife, listening at the foot of the garret-stairs. "That girl is not worth her keep." The girl has another gala-day with the boys if the bees swarm in May: that brings a mild jollity to the house, because

A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
In June
Is worth a silver spoon;
In July
It ain't worth a fly.

She thinks it is fun to see the bees make a rush at the hired man blundering about in the way, and when he throws his hat at them, thinking to fool them, and sets to whipping his own ears, and the wise creatures settle in his hair, and the boys madly whisk hay in the air for his salvation, she "laughs like ten christenings."

Much farmhouse work has a trace of pleasure. Such is going a-greening in mornings of the still season before grasshoppers chirp or moths flutter or bats whir or dewdrops patter--mornings when people look up and repeat the distich,

Mackerel sky! mackerel sky!
It won't be long wet, and it won't be long dry.

While the girl gathers skokeweed, milkweed, dock and dandelion from the fields, deerweed from the corners of the fence that runs around the woods, cowslip from the fragrant swamp, and adder's tongue and crinkle-root from the black forest earth, to make a dish loved by women and hated by men, she sees the airy attacks of crows upon a hawk, and his escape from them by sailing up, up, in circles delightful to contemplate for their height and immensity to altitudes his enemies cannot attain. At times she is near enough to a hawk to catch one glance from his bright, observant, defiant eye--a different glance from that of the caged bird. At times she finds an owl dreaming on the edge of a wood, and gazes long into its strange, deep, contemplative, satisfying eyes, and recollects the boys say an owl knows whether a hunter's gun is loaded or not. She sees the crows make an attack on the owl too, rushing upon it with a wild "ha! ha!" of multitudinous laughter and clattering of wings that are met with still indifference, for the owl knows that not one dares venture within reach of its iron claw and bending beak. And, ah, too rarely, she beholds an eagle on the dry branch of a tall pine. He, like the owl, encounters with nonchalance the insolent hate of the crows, who caw, flap their wings about his head and perch around him in myriads. When he rises, as he waves his broad and long wings in the leisurely movements that plunge him so swiftly through the blazing sky, the eagle will grasp a crow in his talons and drop it dead on the plain, where the girl picks it up, a mass of crushed feathers.

To go blackberrying is a fête. It falls on a day when the morning meadows, veiled in cobwebs strung with drops of dew, assert that though

The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow.
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear.

They go in straw hats and sun-bonnets, with tinkling milkpails and buckets in their wagon, and driving the sleek bay brood mare as carefully as if she were crammed with nitro-glycerine and would blow up at a touch. They travel merrily along a road that is nothing but "the bare possibility of going somewhere;" they pass through a pair of bars; they follow a lonely farm-track; they stop in a stump-lot, where they leave the mare in a doze, and, crossing the light baked earth of the clearing still covered with puff-balls and the dry stalks and kexes of forest plants, they dive into the berry-patch, a steep gulf of briers terraced by former berry-seekers. As they pick their way downward in the hot sunshine, the pealing sound of waters comes up to meet them through dense woods beneath their feet, for a broad, dark, perfumed stream, margined with pebbles and yeasty and barmy with foam, rushes through the bottom of the ravine. Refreshing is its odor when the berry-pickers reach it: they quaff its moist breath as one would drink some melanagogue, some old medicine able to cure sorrow or fear. The sight of its heavy verdure and of its gurges heaped high with froth lifts them like immortal thoughts. Half an hour of skipping stones on the water, a lunch on a rock, a drive homeward with their wagonload of fruit, and the day's work is done.

There is a ball in summer for the hired girl's delectation. You should stand in the village street and look up at the lighted tavern ball-room, and listen to the thundering floor. You would see the heads of the village tailor, harness-maker and photographer bobbing up and down; the hired man's head, with its heavy forelock whipping his forehead; the white brow and swarthy cheeks of the farm-boy leaping above the rest; and the hired girl's rosy face shaken up with scores of other young girls' faces, wagging, whirling, swaying, in delirious arcs and parabolas, and all wearing a perturbed and anxious expression, as if they were hard put to it to keep track of the fiddler's "Swing pardners once and a half; all sashay; allemand left," and so on. The hired girl dances "every heat," and at half-past three rides home through a landscape like a line from Milton, giving a vast idea of night and darkness and the stillness brooding over a woody, pastoral country. As she lifts the kitchen latch she sees a line of citron-green light behind the eastern hills, and

The curled moon
Is like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf.

Later comes the hired man on foot, having run the risk of being "chawed up" by farmhouse dogs for a mile and a half. The two seek their beds through Saharas of darkness in woodhouse, kitchen, back entry and back stairs, and at five are both up milking and milk-skimming.

Going to funerals is a heart's delight for the hired girl. She relishes the ride in fine weather, the good funeral sermon, the sight of other people's best clothes and furniture, the touch of tragedy we all like in life, the cheerful reaction after the solemnity, and the staving good supper she cooks when they come home.

"Bill, go up to Ford Hill and find out about that funeral," is her entreaty on the eve of the event.

Bill has been raking with the horse-rake, or, worse, mowing pease all day. Whatever you have to do in this world, if you have ever mowed pease, that you will acknowledge to be the hardest work you have ever done. Bill is tired. There is a hole in the toe of his boot into which a stiff pea-straw has thrust itself once in five minutes all day--a circumstance exhausting to the nervous system of a hired man. And he had the heifer to hunt before milking. The old cows wait at the bars to come up, but the heifer stays a mile away at the top of the pasture. Bill can see her every night lying with her ears pricked up against the sky, and never stirring until she feels a pebble against her forehead. Then she gallops homeward as if remembering that Bill's motto is a kick in time saves nine. However, Bill likes to accommodate. "I'm off like a pot-leg," says he.

"What time is it to be?" asks the hired girl when he returns.

"I forgot to ask," he replies.

"Who's a-going to preach?"

"Nobody said," is the answer.

"Is it at the house or church?"

"I didn't think to find out," returns he.

"Well, you _are_ a nimshi!" declares she.

"Go yourself next time," rejoins he.

"I wish I had your wooden head for a chopping-bowl," says she.

"Gaul darn it! you're never suited," says he.

"Needn't get your Dutch up: we're going together. You may depend on takin' on us to that funeral: him and her is going," says she.

"Walking is too good for you, by thunder!" says he.

"It's a sin to be as mad as hops at nothing," says she.

"I'm as much of a angel as you be: put a pair of wings on you, you'd be a hen turkey," says he.

"I ain't a goose: I've got a head on me, Bill Blowers."

"So has a pin."

"If I'm a pin, you let me be: children and fools shouldn't play with edge tools. I'm a pin that'll go to that funeral, then. It'll be a good funeral--singing and everything right up to the handle."

"Plague take it! I knowed how it would be when I started on the arrant," he grumbles.

"You're blue as a whetstone now, but a couple of fritters big as rhinoceroses on your plate to-morrow night will set you up again, I guess," she says.

The hired man has a monstrous inaptitude for doing an errand. The time he spends going to the Green to get the horses shod is enormous. He can be depended on for nothing but to come home across lots when the dinner-horn blows.

Said the farmer to his hired man, "Go to the Holler and bring the square immediately."--"That saws my legs off," he added soon after, seeing "Square" Catesby pounding along the road toward the farm with a face of great importance and concern, the hired man in full swing behind, evidently bringing him.

Melvine, a fat, lazy farmer--so fat he had lost his voice, probably inside of him somewhere--while dozing away a winter afternoon yawned to such an immoderate degree that he dislocated his jaw. The hired man was despatched to the village for a doctor, and in the course of revolving ages returned, without the doctor. "Where is the doctor?" cried the folks. "He wasn't to hum," replied the hired man.--"Misery to tell! Didn't you bring one? Go back and get one," shouted they. The hired man mogged off, hitched up again, and after an interminable period, during which Melvine cast figurative ashes on his bald head (if they had been actual wood-ashes and "lively" he could not have suffered worse), did bring a doctor. The doctor gave Melvine's jaw a tap: it flew into place. Here pause: trouble no kind heart with the hired man's fate when Melvine regained the use of his jaw.

The hired girl's autumn and winter beam with long evenings of leisure, when neighbors drop in for talk, games and stories go round, and spitzenbergs and gillyflowers, nutcakes, cider, and butternuts that make cider taste wonderfully delicious, are enjoyed. In farm-houses among the hills games are played that were known to the hearths of the Angles. "Saddleback" is one. The farmer takes a brand from the fire, saying,

"Robin's alive--as live as a bee:
If he dies in my hand, you may saddleback me;"

and gives it to his next neighbor, who repeats the verse and hands the brand to his neighbor; and thus it goes round the circle. He in whose hand the brand goes out ('tis the hired man, of course, who never can scramble through his verse half fast enough) must be blind-folded and guess what objects are held before him, all he guesses wrong to be placed on his back at the end of his guessing. Then he lies face down on the floor, while kitchen tables and chairs, skillets, pokers, tongs, frying-pans, the bread-board, the rolling-pin, the egg-beater, all are piled on his back; after which he rises slowly and overturns the things with a house-quaking crash which is rather interesting to hear and see. Antique stories that were never written, or, if at all, were written in dead languages that tell no tales at the present time, fill the lapse of the winter evening until it is time honest folks were in bed and thieves a-jogging. Listen to this: it has the flavor of a sip of mulse from a yew-tree keg. It was told among the Druids, maybe, long ago in gray-lit ages a thousand years before the mediæval darkness, when King Cymbeline was building his city of Warwick, and his fair daughter Imogen was having adventures in a cavern. Call it _How Cunning paid better than Industry_.

Richard was a hard-working, saving farmer: his brother Ned was a lazy lout. Ned's cow died, and he hung the cowskin up in the barn to dry, too lazy to carry it to market. After the cowskin was dried up, Ned started for town to sell it. On the way, feeling lazy, he wrapped himself in his cowskin and went to sleep in a barn's hay-mow. Night came, and some robbers with a lantern entered the barn to count their gold. Ned with a groan rolled himself down from the mow, horns, hoofs and tail, and the robbers fled in terror, leaving their money behind. "Where did you get your gold?" asked Richard, seeing his brother's treasure.--"I sold my cowskin for a penny a hair," answered Ned. Then Richard killed his cows, dried their skins and took them to market. Enraged at not selling them, he fell upon his brother, tied him in a bag and took him to the river to drown him. Before throwing him in he thought he would give Ned a good licking; so he went to the woods to get some withes. While he was gone a man with a flock of sheep came by, who, seeing Ned struggling in the bag on the river-bank, asked, "What are you doing in the bag?"--"Going to heaven," replied Ned.--"How is that?" questioned the man.--"You get in here and you will see," said Ned. The man untied the bag, and took Ned's place therein. Ned tied him up, and drove the sheep off to market. When Richard returned from the woods he gave the shepherd in the bag a basting, threw him into the river, and after the last bubble had risen to the surface went home, where he found Ned counting a pile of gold. "Whence that treasure?" asked Richard.--"The bubbles you saw when you drowned me turned into sheep, and I took them to town and sold them," quoth Ned.

As a rule, the hired girl and the hired man are not good friends: he derides her, and she scorns him. "I do expise that Bill Blowers: he don't know beans when the bag's untied. He's as bashful as nothing," says she. She likes the farm-hand by the day: she often visits his cotland on the edge of a woods. He really is a man to respect, knows a reason for the crooks in the mully scythe and in the light cradle's snath, and can tell the time of day by holding his hoe-handle straight in the sunshine and looking at its shadow on the ground. The hired girl particularly hates the Scotch hired man, a fellow with a face like a wig-block, white hair and eyebrows, and a working-suit made apparently of old snuff-rags and flatiron-holders. He keeps his eye on the blue-ringed cider pitcher of winter evenings, and, to the huge disgust of his comrades, drinks up the vial of cider vinegar placed in the pail with the boiled potatoes and sweet, buttery pork which form their lunch when they go to the forest chopping. Ralph Waldo Emerson says that an awkward man is graceful when he is asleep or at work or agreeably amused. It is perfectly evident that Emerson has never seen the Scotch hired man. When _he_ is asleep his knurly limbs are twisted to an indescribable pitch, his right elbow under his head, his left in the small of his back; when at work he humps himself out of all proportion; and when agreeably amused he canters about as does a new-born calf with its legs thrust out at different angles.

The hired girl does fall in love with the English hired man on occasion. "Stay me with flagons and comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love!" cries the farmer's wife then. 'Tis a fine thing for the hired man. He escapes the miseries human beings have to endure going courting--the "slicking up," the hair-oiling, the blacking of wrinkly, turn-up-toed fine boots, the wearing of a fine shirt that must have been made to fit a pelican, it is so bulgy-bosomed, and the awful and stiffening sensations a man feels when he goes into a stark neat parlor to see a girl. He does his courting with rolled-up sleeves and the dust of the bean-thrashing in his hair. The English hired man is a prize for the girl. When first he comes to America he wears coarse linen, heavy shoes, corduroys and a pair of broad, inelastic, red and white suspenders, capable of sustaining several tons, that he bought in Liverpool before sailing. He eats a leg of mutton and potatoes to match at a sitting; he slips the half of a custard pie on to his plate, and takes down a whole "boiled Indian" like smoke if it stands at his hand. He ignores salt-spoons, sugar-spoons and butter-knives, and, if the truth must be told, cleans his knife in his mouth. (The man whom Professor Proctor, the astronomer, saw at Des Moines putting his knife down his throat and sticking it into the butter, and wrote home to the _Gentleman's Magazine_ about, was an English hired man on his travels.) Nevertheless, living among decent people corrects these blemishes in the Englishman, and his merits soon shine undimmed. He has a hale countenance; he has length of limb, breadth of grasp, glorious plenitudes of health, English self-conceit, the taste for toil and distaste for pleasure; and he has a talent for economizing. He carries his money around until it is worked into a hard ball in his pocket-book, so that when he wants to lend some he has to peel it off. Vast are the revenues of parsimony. "Sense and economy must rule in a world that is made of sense and economy." The English hired man is the first of adventurers. His wages are waiting for him; his farm is prepared; bees, beeves, orchards and fields of wheat are his for the taking. The hired girl marries him, and her career ends in a blaze of happiness and prosperity.

MARY DEAN.

THE CHEF'S BEEFSTEAK

On the morning of the twenty-fifth of February, Mr. Nibby glanced out of the window and unhesitatingly pronounced himself the most miserable man in Mentone. There is a certain savage joy in such a conviction of supreme wretchedness, and Mr. Nibby, while he called himself the most miserable of men, experienced a feeling of satisfaction and was conscious of a pre-eminence among his fellow-creatures. At the same moment Fräulein Rottenhöfer looked forth from the window above, her blond hair dishevelled, her eyes red with weeping, and wrung her hands with a gesture of passionate despair. "Oh, why was I ever born?" she sighed.

To a casual and philosophical observer the disquiet of these two people might have seemed sufficiently perplexing, unless he had remembered that our world lies within ourselves, and not in external circumstance. They happened to gaze from their respective windows at the same time, with this abstracted aspect, unaware of their mutual propinquity and unacquainted with each other's history: the two stories of the hotel might well have represented separate worlds. Fräulein Rottenhöfer had travelled from Bonn to Mentone in the train of that distinguished invalid the Baroness von Merk: Mr. Nibby was a forlorn waif from the New World. He wore at this hour an Oriental dressing-gown of gorgeous hues, but he had laid aside his cigar unsmoked, and his face was sallow with illness as he presented it to the sun's pitiless inspection.

The beauty of the scene on which Fräulein Rottenhöfer looked with that hand-wringing of desperation, and Mr. Nibby below stairs, in the gorgeous dressing-gown, surveyed so dolefully, is unsurpassed on that coast of enchantment, the Riviera--realm of pure skies, purple mountains capped by glittering snow-peaks, the smoky gray of olive-orchards, and gleaming sea acquiring the splendor of melting jewels in the glow of fiery sunsets. The Hôtel des Jasmins was a small establishment of exquisite elegance and the highest reputation: its fame for select privacy, an irreproachable cuisine and lovely surroundings may be said to have gone forth to all lands. The _chef_ was known to be an artist for whose valuable services the proprietors of other mansions had basely plotted and conspired, as the Hôtel des Jasmins was kept by a woman; but, fortunately, their evil endeavors had been thus far frustrated by the devotion of the great man to madame's interests. Countless nobles had appended their names to the glorious record of the office register: Belgian counts, French marquises and German princes had all been sheltered beneath this roof and reflected lustre on the name of the hotel. The suite of rooms through which plain, republican Mr. Nibby now prowled like an unhappy ghost had once been tenanted by an English lord, who had been kind enough to depart this life in the state bed.

"What shall I try next?" quoth Mr. Nibby gloomily, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of the dressing-gown. Then he opened the sash and leaned one elbow on the window-ledge.

The whole garden sparkled with the morning freshness. Marble steps led down to the green sward; the balustrade was draped in a luxuriant mantle of heliotrope that loaded the air with the fragrance of clustering blossoms; the beds of roses and geranium swept like a wave of color in the direction of those nooks of shrubbery where the fervent heat of noonday was tempered by a canopy of delicate foliage. Mr. Nibby's eye roved languidly over the fountain with its column of silvery spray and gushing spouts formed by the gaping mouths of grotesque heads. Mr. Nibby detested that fountain: its babbling music kept him awake at night. Beyond the garden was a margin of rustling palms and a glimpse of blue Mediterranean sea. If any aspect of Nature could lure forth a man into the balmy beauty of a perfect day, it must be such a vision of loveliness as this one--the garden blooming with a Southern warmth of color and richness of perfume, that margin of palms affording views of the sea--a crystal shield--and on the other side a reach of orange plantation, the boughs powdered with snowy blossoms.

The weak human clay asserted itself instead, and Mr. Nibby merely groaned. He had passed a sleepless night; he was wretchedly ill; and, so far from improving his health by journeying in Europe, as he had hoped to do, he now looked back regretfully to the days when he suffered from mild dyspepsia in his native land. Constant nausea had afflicted the unfortunate gentleman since he came to the Mediterranean shore and took up his residence at the charming Hôtel des Jasmins, where madame made out the most extortionate bills, although he subsisted on the sparsest diet.

"I might be poisoned," soliloquized Mr. Nibby with another groan.