Chapter XXXV (6)

Naturally, knowing his bellicose proclivities, we were fully prepared to hear that the general's love-affair was intimately connected with the war-period; for Mrs. Marcellus herself proposed that the general should follow Mr. McLaughlin's example and relate, not his last love-affair necessarily, but his most romantic one. Everybody present respected the active, self-helpful wife of the postmaster too much to desire, even for a joke, that the fine sentiments which drew such a woman into marriage should be made the theme of a story told by a fireside for the beguilement of a winter's evening. So the general started by saying that prior to courting and wedding his dear wife he had been led into an affair of the heart: with a contrite spirit he confessed that that affair was one which might have had the most fatal consequences. Luckily, his eyes were opened in time. But had circumstances been otherwise, had the government at Washington known the brink on which he stood, he who was now honored by his country's confidence to the extent of the postmastership of the town of Hurville might instead be figuring in the reprobatory annals of the republic's history along with Benedict Arnold and Major André. The conviction instantly spread among the listeners that we were now to learn that the general himself on some important occasion had failed to advance his left flank: if so, we should have him on the hip in future--the left hip, of course. But the dreadful episode occurred, it seemed, not on the battle-field, but during the leisure hours when nothing was astir in camp. It was no question of infantry, cavalry or artillery, but the old, old story of a pair of brown eyes. "She" was a Southern girl; they met by chance; he ordered her to walk under the flag; she smiled at him as she did so; stolen interviews followed; she swore to renounce her allegiance to the "Lost Cause" and accompany him to the North. Deceived by her promises, he told her when, how and at what time the corps was to strike tents and leave the locality--secret information. On the night prior to the morning they had fixed upon to go the order to march was countermanded, and the general hastened to his lady-love to tell her the change of plans. Thinking to give her a lover's surprise, he crept up to the veranda of her house on tip-toe and noiselessly peered into the parlor where his enchantress was wont to sit swinging away the heavy hours in the sweet dalliance of a rocking-chair. To his surprise, he found she was not alone: a Confederate officer stood by her side, his arm encircling her taper waist, his lips ever and anon tasting the honey that dwelt on hers. In intervals between these caresses the treacherous beauty poured into her lover's ear all she had gleaned about the change of base of the army from her too credulous brigadier. A movement made the next day by the Confederates showed they had formed designs in accordance with the information the girl imparted, but the Unionist plan having been altered the consequence was in no degree disastrous to our troops.

The termination of this story found the listeners all very silent. No one seemed to know what comment to make. From the pained expression of the brigadier's face it was evident that he still looked upon the experience as one which but for an accident might have brought danger to the country and shame and disgrace to himself. Mrs. Marcellus said, as usual, just the right word. She assured the general that she could not see in what way he had swerved from his duty as a loyal soldier in the affair, since the lady had won his confidence by the false assertion that she desired to renew her allegiance to the flag.

The editor now had the floor. The editor is of course the oracle of the community, and his newspaper, in the opinion of the entire population of Hurville--including himself--is an organ which for real power and earnest writing exceeds any of the monster dailies of the large cities, whose fame, stupidly enough, extends the length and breadth of the land, while the _Hurville Gazette_ blushes unseen, claiming only an average circulation of two thousand; and some say this is an exaggerated figure. The editor's story was of course thoroughly characteristic--editorial, so to speak--the recital going straight to the point at issue without redundant phraseology or extraneous matter of any kind: it was, in fact, a report, as epigrammatic as a six-lined local paragraph, boiled down to the utmost limit of concentrated fact-essence. Yet the gist of the story greatly surprised us. He had become interested in an anonymous female contributor of love-poems sent every week to a newspaper he was then editing in the West. At length, by dint of perseverance, he had unveiled the incognita of the poetess, in time won her affections, and finally married her. The general impression was that this must refer to a former wife, of whom we had never heard, for every one knew the editor's better half to be a diligent housekeeper, patient mother, a ceaseless sewing-machinist, a walking encyclopædia of cookery-recipes, and the least literary woman of our set. Poetry she never read, and she had even been known to sneer at rhymesters, especially those of her own sex, who, she averred, might find some better and more profitable way of passing their time than scribbling nonsense. Yet this change of views, the editor now assured us, was due solely to the influence of time and a very large and uncommonly obstreperous family of boys.

The next speaker was the head of the firm of E.T. Perkins & Co., dry-goods merchants of the Perkins Block. An extremely religious though not a bigoted man, generous, good-natured and jovial, everybody likes him, and we all looked forward with pleasure to hearing his story. He seemed to have difficulty at first in remembering anything sufficiently unusual in its incidents to interest us; for, as he said, we all knew that he had married Mrs. Perkins when he was a clerk in the dry-goods store of her late father, and had succeeded to the business on his death, his wife giving great impetus to trade by her own extravagance in dress, which spread like a contagion among the other ladies of the town, who until then had been mostly satisfied with nice calicoes and cheap merinos. As for love-affairs, continued Mr. Perkins, if he had ever had any before he met Mrs. Perkins he couldn't remember them; but in a _friendly_ way a curious kind of thing had happened to him many years ago in New York, when he was in the white-goods department of one of the big wholesale houses. He was a very young man, not twenty-one, and trying hard to do right amid the trials and temptations of the great city. He was a church-member, and in aid of the funds of the church to which he belonged he had taken one winter a subscription to a course of lectures to be delivered in some hall down town which has now disappeared. Seats were reserved for ticket-holders; and so it happened that he found himself twice a week seated next a lady and her husband to whom he had been previously introduced by a friend after service one Sunday evening, but with whom he had had till then but a bowing acquaintance. Now they fell to chatting of course. He considered the lady very handsome, though older than himself--about thirty perhaps. She was of a full figure--might even have been called stout--with rosy cheeks, pouting lips, laughing black eyes, glossy hair, and a gay, pleasant manner that was very attractive. Her husband was very much the senior of his wife, and was cross, ugly, lame and asthmatic. Sometimes he would leave the hall in the middle of a lecture and go and sit outside in the cold till it was over, when he would join his wife, grumbling at everything in general and her in particular. During these absences Mr. Perkins and the lady had time to exchange many of their views on various subjects, which were found to be very much in accord. In brief, the acquaintance was so pleasant that young Perkins, at the last lecture of the course (the husband having stepped out), made bold to hint that he would be glad to have it continue, and would be happy to call, if agreeable. To his surprise, the lady whispered a few hurried words in his ear of a startling character. Her husband was exceedingly jealous--utterly without cause, of course--and the idea of a young gentleman calling at the house in a friendly way was one that was not to be entertained for an instant. This was a state of things such as young Perkins had never dreamed possible except in the exaggerated and wearisome pages of long-winded novels and unreadable poems in cantos. He immediately exalted himself into a hero of romance, nor was the sensation diminished when he felt the folds of a bit of note-paper slipped between his fingers as he shook hands with the lady at parting. When he returned home he made himself acquainted with the contents of the mysterious billetdoux, and the sentiment of adventure was heightened when he read therein a request which the lady must have written previously to coming to the lecture-hall, since it was in ink. She desired, she said, to bid him adieu before parting _for ever_, and as it was impossible for her to do that at her own home, on account of _something_, she had asked a friend of hers to let her see him at _her_ house. The call must be made at rather an _unusual_ hour--half-past six in the morning. She was going to see a departing friend to the _boat_, and she would stop in Hudson street on her way back. Now, what was more natural, continued Mr. Perkins, for a foolish young fellow to do than to go to the place on the day appointed? The hour _was_ rather unusual, and the morning being bitterly cold the experience was anything but pleasant. The friend's house proved to be in a very disagreeable neighborhood, and the parlor into which he was ushered was a small, musty room, with a dirty carpet on the floor, and otherwise furnished with a few cane-seat chairs and a rickety marble-topped centre-table, the place being rendered still more uninviting by a sheet-iron stove which belched forth volumes of smoke from the unwilling beginnings of a rebellious fire that had just been kindled in it. Mr. Perkins sat down in the cheerless apartment, and waited long, half numbed with cold. Having left his home so early, he was breakfast-less, and that fact did not render his condition any the more comfortable. The romance of the adventure oozed out of him from every pore in an almost perceptible stream. The absurdity of the situation became every moment more painfully apparent, when at length in walked the lady. But could this indeed be she? Why, she was completely changed. Instead of the gay, bright, trim, rosy, laughing, sparkling-eyed lady of the evenings, he beheld a stout, untidy, sallow-complexioned, faded-out woman of forty. She was old enough to be his mother--old enough to be ashamed of herself. Never was a youth's foolish illusion more quickly dispelled. He took her proffered hand listlessly, and declined the invitation to reseat himself, pleading the necessity for getting to the store at once. His exit must have been farcical in its abruptness. The most jealous husband in the world could have found no occasion for complaint in such conduct, unless indeed he had changed his views and objected to his wife being treated so cavalierly. The lady's billetdoux had indeed possessed the essential element of truth, as opposed to the fiction of poetry: they bade each other adieu before parting _for ever_.

There may be little enough humor in this story, given thus barely, but Mr. Perkins's droll tone of voice and the mirthful twinkle in his eye kept us in peals of laughter while he related the adventure. The history gained an added zest from the frankness of the narrator, for it proved once again how little the gold of his nature was cheapened by the dross of an assumed ultra-holiness, which more than anything else is repulsive to young people when coming from a religious Mentor. "Was _you_ ever a little girl?" asks the pranksome Miss Lotta in one of her nursery-rhyme plays of a particularly cross and crabbed old grenadier of an aunt. A similar question was never propounded to Mr. Perkins. No boy in Hurville--even the copper-toed ruffians of the editor's wife--entertains any doubts of the unadulterated boyishness, at some remote period, of Mr. Perkins. His pious monitions and enthusiastic essays to lead the boys in the path of a noble manhood lose nothing from the knowledge.

It was now the turn of Mrs. Marcellus to speak. We peremptorily bade her unfold herself, as did Hamlet the Ghost. She smiled and craved a minute's grace in which to serve us all anew fresh jorums of the fragrant Kyshow Congou--a tea unparalleled which she imports herself direct from Oxford Circus in famed London Town--and when the incense of the fragrant brew rose on the ambient air of the yellow satin drawing-room our hostess desired us to rattle our teaspoons and clatter our cups and saucers with a will, as she thought, she said, that a little confusion would enable her to get through the recital with more courage. In spite of this request, the most unobtrusive mice could scarcely have been more noiseless than we as we listened to her narrative, not a word of which escaped our attentive ears.

"You know," began Mrs. Marcellus, "that it is now five years since the double wedding of my two darling daughters, parting from whom was such a dreadful cross for me to bear. Every mother knows how sharp a pang it gives to transfer to another, almost a stranger--a man whose very existence six months or a year before was unknown to us--the treasured being whose smiles and tears have been since babyhood her mother's rain and sunshine. Ah me! if mothers suffer in this way at the marriage of one daughter, think how doubly great must the trial have been to me when I was called upon to relinquish both my girls at once--to see them both go away on the train, joyous and happy with the men of their choice, while nothing was left for me but to come back here into the empty house and begin a new plan of existence with the vivifying and soul-sustaining element of constant and ever-present love left out! I don't think any one in Hurville had the slightest glimmering of an idea of what I suffered."

Mr. Perkins, who sat next her, shook her hand in testimony of the appreciation of all Hurville of her kindness in never once remitting (in spite of her private feelings) the pleasant social gatherings which were so prized by the community; and all present gave audible assent to the unanimity of opinion on this head.

"You know that some two months before the double wedding I took my daughters to New York for the purpose of completing the purchases I considered necessary to furnish each with a suitable trousseau. Much had been bought here at Mr. Perkins's nice store, almost all the underclothing which was so much admired by their Boston friends when the girls arrived at their husbands' homes was made here by the neat fingers of our Hurville seamstresses, but there were a few things for which the New York style was necessary, or at least so the girls thought, and that was the same thing. We were in New York about ten days, and though every moment, except when we were asleep, was absorbed by the intricate duties of our shopping, my sense of approaching loneliness grew deeper and sadder, until it became so overwhelming that in spite of my efforts to conceal it from them I feared my daughters would observe my melancholy, and that it would cast a gloom over the last joyous days of their maidenhood. But they were too full of spirits and excitement to notice it, and attributed whatever was unusual in my manner to the exceptional fatigue of the occasion. Finally, our task seemed finished, and we started for home laden with purchases, leaving a number of unfinished orders, which were to be sent us by express when completed. We got to the dépôt rather late, and I found a long line of people standing before me at the ticket-office window. I was almost at the tail of an elongated serpent of humanity which wriggled forward with despairing slowness, and after standing a while I impatiently left the ranks and went to where my daughters were sitting. 'We shall never get all that baggage checked in time,' I said: 'I'm afraid we can't get off by this train.' At that moment a young gentleman who was awaiting his turn, and was only the second or third person from the window, leaned toward us and said to me, 'I'll get your tickets for you if you'll allow me. How many? Three?'--'Yes,' I answered: 'three for Hurville, please,' offering him the money. 'Never mind that now: wait till I bring you the tickets;' and I saw him pay for them out of his well-stuffed wallet. Of course I refunded, with many thanks, as soon as he brought the tickets, which he did in a minute or two, and I then hurried away to check the baggage, while the girls went on the train to secure seats together and get the conductor to let us face each other.

"We had a pleasant day for our journey, but the train was uncomfortably crowded. A succession of way-passengers, one after another, absorbed our vacant seat, and prevented the girls from indulging in that exchange of secret, and in general highly-laughable, confidences with which young people of their age are always bubbling over. Some of these local passengers were not very pleasant company, being frequently encumbered with market-baskets which were not only in everybody's way, but proclaimed by unmistakable odors the nature of their contents. Seeing that it was impossible for us to retain the fourth seat, and having learned from the conductor that there was no room in the parlor-car, it was really a great relief, as a certainty of escape from unpleasant companionship, when the same young gentleman who had kindly helped me at the ticket-office came up and asked if we had any objection to his sitting there, as he had given up two seats in succession to ladies, and had been standing the most of the time since we left New York. Of course we assented, and for the first time I examined our fellow-traveller minutely. He was very good-looking--a blond, a style of coloring that I have always particularly admired in a man when it does not degenerate into effeminacy, as it certainly did not in this instance. In figure he was tall and slender, with the erect and graceful carriage of the accomplished soldier, not the awkward stiffness of the recruit. His eyes were a deep, rich blue, almost violet--eyes that in themselves would have been sufficient to make a woman's reputation for beauty: his long silken moustache shaded from blond to golden red, and was parted fanlike over his vermilion lips, fragrant and glowing with youth and health. His manners were essentially those of distinguished society, and his well-cut gray travelling-suit, his superlatively fine linen, his tiny gold watch-chain with a valuable pearl set in the slide, his fresh gloves, his dark-blue necktie carelessly twisted in a sailor's knot, his fine shoes fitting every curve of his aristocratic foot and covered by neat cloth gaiters buttoned at the side, his elegant travelling-rug rolled in a pair of Russia-leather straps, his stylish umbrella, his fine handkerchief embroidered evidently in Paris in quite a new way--a fac-simile of a seal in red wax, with a monogram and crest standing out upon it--above all, his silver-fitted travelling-bag, even finer than those we had priced at Tiffany's for one hundred and fifty dollars each,--all gave evidence of a position of something more than ease in regard to money; while his beautifully-white teeth, his exactly-parted hair, his scrupulously-tended hands, all spoke of that extreme care of the person which unmistakably indicates the habit of contact with people of dignity and good-breeding. Remember, friends, I did not judge my new friend from the point of view, naturally restricted, of Hurville. I looked at him from the summits of the forty centuries of civilization of the European capitals, and I at once adjudged him to be a man of the world and a gentleman.

"Of course we fell into conversation, and his tone of thought and mode of expression fully coincided with the elevated character of his appearance. He was English by descent, he told us, but American by birth. His reading had evidently been extensive, and his comments on every subject that arose showed that an original as well as a scholarly mind had been brought to bear upon it. Yet never was he so absorbed in the discussion as to neglect any of those attentions which are so agreeable, even so necessary, to ladies while travelling. His politeness was constantly on the alert, and his quick eye detected wants even before they were fully felt, much less spoken of.

"His journey might or might not be so long as ours. He had taken his ticket for a place he named, a small station in Pennsylvania, where his father's horses and carriage would be waiting to drive him to the town where their home was, a bustling lumber-centre back among the Alleghanies some twenty miles off the railway. His father was the owner of an immense tract of timber-land there, a property which had come into his hands many years ago in England as an offset to a very bad debt incurred by some scamp who had inherited it, but had never seen it and knew not whether it was valueless or the reverse. For thirty years his father had paid taxes on these unpromising forest-lands, and then suddenly there was a rush of enterprise in that direction and the property became a fortune. The timber was of the finest and the demand for it unlimited. He was his father's business-representative in the cities, and had been to Europe also, where he had visited their English relations, who were very high-toned and all that, but not quite so well off now as those of the family who were in the plebeian bustle of successful trade-enterprise in America--to wit, his father and himself. If the coachman and team were at the station when we arrived (we were to take supper there), he should go home with him: if the man and horses were _not_ there, he should find a telegram from his father, in which case he was to go on to Pittsburg, and would see us at breakfast in the morning at the place where we changed cars for Hurville.

"In the course of conversation I mentioned to him the peculiar and interesting circumstance which had called us to New York, the girls both blushing and ejaculating in a duet, 'Oh don't, mamma!' But I know so well the heart of youth, both male and female, that I did not think it right to expose this young man to a misconception in regard to the position of my girls, more especially as ever since he had joined us he had sat and gazed at the seat which I occupied with my younger daughter with a look in his eyes which betrayed the secret of an inward and sudden yearning which was almost pain. To my surprise, the announcement of the approaching wedding of both my girls produced no especial effect upon him. He seemed interested, and indulged in a little graceful badinage; but this was what struck me as so strange: every time he spoke to the girls he was smiling and gay and joking, but every time he turned his eyes on me his expression of face, his whole manner, changed. His gaze became riveted on my features, and his soulful eyes lingered there with a fixity that abashed and disconcerted me. I could not understand it. Why did he look at me so? Years had passed since last that sort of gaze had been fastened upon my face, for it was a gaze which unmistakably says, 'You have made an impression upon me which I cannot resist: everything about you is pleasing to me.' Try as I would to avoid this look, turn my head as I might to escape the gaze of those bewitching eyes--even when I closed my own and feigned sleep--still I felt their tender rays upon me, and never once did I find it otherwise.

"It is this point of the story, friends, where I feel confession so difficult. You who have known me for fifteen years, pursuing unswervingly the prosaic path of duty, will find it difficult to understand the power of the impression this stranger made upon my poor heart, widowed in its prime and at that moment about to be further robbed of all it had to love and cherish. All the years during which I had employed the most rigid rules of subjection over myself seemed to vanish like a mist. Every moment I felt more and more strongly a belief that this new-born passion was sincere, and knew that if it should really prove so the time when it would meet with full and grateful return on my part would not be far distant.

"So wore on the daylight hours. Dusk came early, and after the lamps were lit first one and then the other of my girls wrapped herself in her shawl, and cuddling together on one seat with the head of each on the other's shoulders, they both dropped asleep. He and I were now sitting side by side. For a long time neither spoke. I persistently stared out of the window at the flying landscape, almost invisible now in the increasing darkness; but I could feel, though I did not even glance at him, that he had turned in his seat, his elbow resting on the back of it, his cheek on his hand and his eyes on me. At length he bent over toward me, and in so low a tone of voice that the girls could scarce have heard it had they been awake he whispered, 'Will you permit me to say a few words to you?'

"'I have no objection,' I answered coldly--'always with the proviso that what you have to say to me is something which it will be no derogation of my dignity as a mother of grown daughters to hear.'

"'Could you, madam, for a moment believe me capable of saying anything unworthy you, unworthy myself?' he exclaimed reproachfully. 'Oh no: I do not think I have given you any cause to believe me other than a gentleman. I am not in search of a love-affair, believe me, nor have I hitherto been considered as at all of an impressionable nature. I am perhaps not quite so young as I look, and certainly the opportunity of meeting beautiful and fascinating women has not been lacking to me. I know scores of such, and still I have borne hitherto an unoccupied heart. Now, I -- But I am tongue-tied: I fear to give offence. I know very well you would not let me tell you that you have inspired in me one of those passions which, born in an instant, often shape a whole destiny--that I love you as fondly as a man ever loved a woman. No, no, do not stop me. I say that I do _not_ make such assertions, because I know you would not allow me; but there is one thing I will make bold to do--one favor I must crave at your hands. Will you grant it?'

"'What is it?'

"'This: that you will let me count myself among your friends. Give me that foothold, and something I feel here in my innermost heart tells me that by it I may lift myself to a niche in yours which no other man now fills. Let time try the sincerity of what I say. All I ask of you is that if I ever come to Hurville (as I surely shall if I'm alive), you will allow me to call upon you merely as a friend: I ask no more.'

"'Are you sincere in this wish?'

"'As Heaven is my judge, I am. In less than an hour this train will arrive at the station where, in all probability, we shall have to part. I cannot endure to think that in a formal shake of the hand at a railway-dépôt you and I are going to separate, never perhaps to meet in this world again. Both of us have made plenty of such impromptu acquaintances before now, and have seen the end of them approach with the utmost indifference, and never given another thought to these chance friendships of a passing hour. But I feel in my innermost heart that this meeting between you and me was brought about by the hand of Providence itself, and for a purpose that we at this early stage of our knowledge of each other cannot divine. I will not, I cannot, see it fade away. Will you give me leave to come and see you at Hurville?'

"'With pleasure,' I replied.

"He sprang to my side as I assented, pressing against me so closely that I withdrew myself hastily lest it should become an open embrace. Yet even as I repulsed him he smiled fondly on me and said in a tender voice, 'Thank you, my friend: this is all I ask. I shall soon see you again, and I warn you I shall see you often. I am willing to take my chances for the future. Time will try me.'

"'Come, come!' I answered: 'these hints and insinuations are mere folly. It would be disingenuous in me to pretend not to understand them; but let them stop here: let us banish all nonsense. I am older than yourself by some years, and when you become better acquainted with me you will find that there is nothing in the least extraordinary about me. I am simply a middle-aged, might even be called an old, woman, wrapped up in a pleasant but very unromantic set of friends, and with all the love of my nature buried in the grave of a dead past, except what survives in the persons of those two sizable young ladies who sit nodding opposite.'

"'Every word you say,' he said, again drawing near to me in an affectionate way, 'but confirms the impression you first made upon me. I think you are a woman of the noblest nature, the soundest sense, the warmest heart, I ever met. I admire you as much, as deeply, as I respect you. But this you must permit me to say: you are doing yourself a great injustice by laying out for yourself a loveless future. You will feel the heart-void very powerfully when your daughters leave you. You are _not_ an old woman, even in years, while in appearance you are not even middle-aged: no one would dream of your being the mother of these young ladies. Now, is it right in a woman so exceptionally endowed with affections as you are to say you will never love again? Leave the future to take care of itself: you do not know what it has in store for you.'

"With that he pressed my hand, and I pressed his in return, and then drew away from him, and, covering my face with my veil, nestled, half frightened, half joyous, into the window-corner. The emotion he had caused me filled my eyes with tears, yet whether I shed them in happiness or sorrow I could not tell. There was the dead love, the girlhood's sweet dream so cruelly finished, my long conviction that on this earth never again would the delicious oneness of wedded life be mine. Could it really be that I had inspired in the bosom of this thoughtful young man the sentiments which lead to the devotion of one soul to another? Even as I questioned thus my inner self I raised my veil, and meeting the fixed gaze of those lovely eyes they smiled an assent, and I sank back, trembling in the ecstasy of my new-found joy.

"We arrived at the supper-station, and with his usual gentlemanly care our friend helped us from the car and escorted us into the supper-room. He seated us at a table, and turning down a chair for himself he whispered in my ear, 'I'll go now and see if there is a despatch for me. If there is I shall just have time to jump on the Western-bound train. That is it, there: it is only waiting for this connection. If there is no despatch and my father's man is here, I will come back and have supper with you before starting home. In any case I'll see you soon in Hurville.'

"I was too agitated to partake of food. I tried to sip some scalding tea, but could not, and rising from the table told the girls to pay for the supper when they had finished: they would find me outside on the platform. I heard the whistle of the departing westward train, and as its ponderous weight thundered over the gleaming rails I saw that he was in it, kneeling on a seat and peering anxiously out, trying, no doubt, to get a parting glimpse of me. Just as he was whirled away I saw the flutter of a handkerchief, and knew that at the last instant he had recognized me where I stood.

"'Where's our friend?' said one of the girls, who had now finished supper and come out. 'I thought he was going to have supper: he turned down a chair.'

"'He left on the Western-bound train,' I answered.

"'I suppose he got the despatch he expected and hadn't time to come in and say good-bye.'

"It was the first time a secret had ever come between me and my daughters. I felt distressed, and even guilty.

"'Girls,' said I when we were again seated in the train, 'what did you think of our travelling-companion?'

"My elder girl thought he was a perfect gentleman, evidently rich, very well bred, very handsome, and, strange to say with all this, a scholar. She had no doubt he moved in the best society wherever he went.

"My younger girl's impression was quite different. In spite of all he had told us about his wealthy father and his lumber-forests, she said she didn't believe but what if the truth were known he would be discovered to be a New York drummer in the button business or perhaps a Western man in the ham trade.

"'Well, my dears, I am going to tell you something about him that will surprise you. He is not what you have said, Minnie, nor what you have said, Jennie, nor what he himself said: he is simply nothing more nor less than a pickpocket!'

"The girls were first horrified, then they laughed: the farce of a thing is very apparent to heedless youth. No doubt the other youthful individual was laughing at the farcicality now. As for me, I could scarcely see the joke. The matter was not so serious as it might have been, however, for the bulk of my money was stitched in the bosom of my dress; but I had kept out about four hundred dollars to pay for a set of silverware which was not ready at the last moment, and that money my friend had seen in my pocket-book when I paid him for the tickets. I discovered the loss at the supper-table almost the instant he left my chair, and my rising and going outside was the natural impulse to stop a thief. I knew now only too well when the transfer had taken place: it was at that blissful moment when this new pattern of a Romeo had pressed up to the side of his silly and elderly Juliet in a tender half embrace. The youthful philosopher was quite right in saying I did not know what the future had in store for me: I had not the remotest conception that in less than an hour it would disclose to my dull mind that I had met a pickpocket in the guise and with the apparent feelings of a gentleman--not to say a lover."

The termination of this recital naturally drew forth comment. Henry L. Thompkins said he really thought better of his nephews now: at least, they never picked pockets. McLaughlin startled the company by declaring that he had met this very man some thirty-five years ago when he was lying off the Bahama Islands--he was sure of it: and even an exact computation, which showed conclusively that the individual in question could not have been born then, was not sufficient to shake him in his belief. Mr. Perkins observed that he hoped the young man might meet Christian influences, and so reform: it was a pity he could not have had Mrs. Marcellus's Christian friendship, for it might have been his salvation. The brigadier's conclusion was that the whole plan was a scheme of deep revenge which had a much broader basis than the mere purloining of a pocket-book. It was the old story of national hatred on the part of England. This man was of English derivation: that he was an American born was no matter--was, in fact, most probably untrue. But Englishmen could not bear, even after the lapse of a century, to think that this grand empire was not under the control of the British crown. The military facts connected with the war of the Revolution had been so galling: Washington's masterly strategy in always advancing his left flank had proved, as it ever must, the utter annihilation of the redcoats, and had occasioned a series of defeats hard then and now for the proud-spirited British nation to bear. Depend upon it, this pocket had been picked in a spirit of international revenge. When Cornwallis--

Here the editor advanced _his_ left flank unexpectedly by asking Mrs. Marcellus if he might put the story in print: the fellow should really be hunted down, if possible, even at this late hour, and brought to punishment. But our hostess would not consent to this, and motioned to me with a smile to begin my confession. But just at that moment the good-night lamp was brought in, and never since then have stories been in order at Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays.

OLIVE LOGAN.

AUTOMATISM.

TWO PAPERS.--I.

A new-born babe has been defined as a lump of possibilities: it is a mass of rudiments, the unfolding of which constitutes its growth. But _protoplasm_, which, unlike the babe, is a structureless substance, of undefined form and apparently void, is the basis of _all_ life, and contains within itself the germs of an infinite development. The microscopist sees in it only a transparent mass, the chemist so many atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. But while seemingly the same in its chemical constitution, it differs immeasurably in its properties--always distinguished, however, by the soul of unrest that is within it, by its never-ceasing, self-sustained and self-generated movements. Protoplasm makes the saliva which moistens the morsel of bread; protoplasm bides its time in the new-laid egg; protoplasm weaves the tissue of the most highly endowed brain: its agency, in short, is visible in all the meanest and the supremest acts of life. No difference can be detected between its highest and its lowest forms. Yet difference must exist. The most primitive forms of life consist of simple specks of protoplasm, mere masses of organic slime, in which the particles enjoy all the life-functions share and share alike. As the babe develops into the man, so in ascending the scale of life, from the protoplasm of the infusorial am[oe]ba to that of a Newton's brain, it is step by step along a constant development and separating of dormant powers. There is nothing in the man that was not in rudiment in the babe, and so also does the am[oe]ba in its microscopic speck represent the life-power of a universe.

In the separation of the protoplasm for various specific duties very early is a part of it set aside to constitute a so-called nervous system. The simplest form of this system occurs in the sac-like infusoria known as ascidians. This nervous apparatus is composed of a grayish central mass and certain white fibres which radiate from this mass to the outer surface of the sac that constitutes the body of the ascidian. The central mass contains much of very active protoplasm: it is for the ascidian the chief source of all nervous power and action, and is the simplest form of a so-called "nerve-centre." In the higher forms of life the nerve-centre is very complex, but is really formed by superadding small centres, like to the single central nerve-mass of the ascidian, one above the other, and binding them together with innumerable threads of white matter. The white threads seen in the ascidian are the earliest expressions of the white cords of the higher animals which every one knows as nerves. It is the function or office of the gray nerve-centre to originate waves of nervous influence, whilst to the white threads is given the duty of conducting such waves or impulses. The two parts may be well compared to the cells and the conducting wires of a galvanic battery. There are always at least two sets of the nerve-threads or conductors--one leading from the surface of the body to the nerve-centre, and the other from the centre to the exterior of the organism. Those fibres which start from the surface carry impulses to the centre, and are known by the scientist as afferent nerves: in the higher animals they conduct to the centres of consciousness impulses which give rise to sensations; hence they are often known as _sensory_ nerves. The nerve-threads which carry impulses away from the centre to the outer regions of the body are known as efferent nerves, because through them motion is produced as _motor_ nerves.

To the primitive organic slime, which is the lowest form of life, consciousness can hardly come. The ascidian with its distinct though simple nervous system is a different and much higher being. In its microscopic world some floating particle touches it roughly: the ever-sensitive end of the afferent nerve thrills; the vibrations pass along the nerve-fibres to the central nerve-mass and provoke it into action: forthwith it sends down the efferent nerve a strong impulse which travels out until it reaches a mass of contractile tissue known as a muscle and causes it to shorten. In the ascidian, however, the limits of nerve-life are very narrow--no eye to see, no ear to hear, no separation of one kind of sensation from another, if indeed there be sensation at all, for we do not know whether the ascidian lives like the plant, to itself unknown, or whether it enjoys a twilight of semi-consciousness, feeling dimly its own existence and that of surrounding objects. The movements which it makes do not seem to emanate from consciousness, but always to originate in the contact of some foreign body with the exterior of its organism. The central mass of nervous protoplasm appears never to flash of its own volition nervous energy to the muscle, but only when aroused by an impulse from without. All movements seem to be _reflex_--that is, produced by an impulse passing up from the surface along the afferent nerve to the central mass, and thrown or reflected back, as it were, along the motor nerve to the muscle.

Such simple reflex movements occur in all, even the highest, animals as the most primitive expressions of nervous energy. The exigences of lives fuller than that of the ascidian demand, however, other movements, whose complexity is continually increasing as the scale of life is traversed. Keeping pace with this elevation of function is a progressive setting apart of certain parts of the nervous system for certain purposes. In other words, as function or office becomes more complicated and more separate and particular, so also does the anatomy or structure of the nervous system. The whole nerve-life of the ascidian dwells in one cell or central point and a few fibres: that of the man is divided up between some millions of similar cells and fibres, each set aside for the performance of only one act or class of actions. Special powers everywhere require special structure. From the nervous system of the ascidian to that of man is a transition like that from the universal workman of a barbarous society to the complex factory of modern civilization, in which one man does only one little thing, but does this perfectly.

The general structure of the nervous system in all vertebrates from the frog to the man may be thus described: The cerebral hemispheres, or _upper brain_, a large double central nerve-mass which has no distinct nerves; the _lower brain_, which is also situated within the cranium, but below the cerebral hemispheres, and is provided with afferent and efferent nerves; and a _spinal cord_, which springs out of the lower brain and has an abundant supply of nerves connecting it with all parts of the body.

Of these great central nerve-tracts the spinal marrow is the simplest in construction. It is the "silver cord" of the old Hebrew poet, and owes its whitish appearance to the innumerable nerve-like fibres which run up and down or across to bind all parts of the cord together or to pass out from it into the nerves. In the central portions of the spinal marrow is a continuous tract of gray matter which is composed of an infinitude of protoplasmic masses closely resembling the central nerve-mass of the ascidian. This gray matter is indeed a series of such nerve-centres, each capable of discharging energy precisely as the central nerve-mass of the polyp does. The white fibres are the conductors of impulses: during life they are continually occupied in carrying messages to and fro between different portions of the spinal gray matter, or up and down--that is, to and from the brain.

In order to study the functions of the spinal cord the physiologist takes a frog from the ditch and with one sweep of a sharp knife beheads it, or, what is the same thing, severs the spinal cord just as it enters the skull. No pain is produced, or at most a momentary pang. The spinal cord is thus isolated from the two brains, and all conscious sensibility is lost. The heart continues to beat, and life may go on for hours, but all the muscles are relaxed and the whole body is without feeling. Hang the creature up, and the long legs dangle passive and motionless. Bring, however, a cup of strong vinegar slowly upward from beneath the leg, and the moment the irritating liquid touches the toes the foot is drawn up. The parallel of this experiment may be repeated in the hospital ward. Cross the dangling, insensitive legs of that man whose back has been broken by some one of the murderous engines of modern civilization, and strike it smartly just below the knee with the edge of the hand, when out flies the leg; or as the patient lies in bed tickle the soles of his feet and see how they are drawn up, although all sensibility has vanished. Such movements as these in the frog or in the man are evidently similar to the wrigglings caused in the ascidian by the contact of an external bit of matter. They are, in a word, reflex: to produce them an impulse has travelled up the sensory or afferent nerves to the gray matter of the spinal cord, and has been reflected back along the efferent or motor nerves to the muscles.

It is possible that in the ascidian the impulse which causes a reflex movement may be dimly perceived, and therefore awaken some sort of consciousness, but the man whose spinal cord is broken by accident or disease feels nothing below the injury, even if his feet be burnt to a crisp. It is plain that any faculty of consciousness which existed in the central nerve-mass of the polyp has been taken away from the spinal cord of the vertebrate, to be concentrated and perfected within the skull; or, in other words, that in the man, and also in the frog, consciousness and ordinary reflex movements have been separated, the one pertaining to the higher, the other to the lower, nerve-centres.

These unconscious reflex movements are in man of prime importance and frequency. The machinery of conscious movement is far more complex than that of reflex action, and every new cog-wheel, so to speak, involves a loss of time as well as of motion. Most of us do not appreciate the period of time between the willing and the making of a movement, yet the astronomer has to take note of it, and, finding that it varies in individuals, allows for the "personal equation" of the observer. We all recognize that one man is slower than another--_i.e._ that his physical machinery of thinking and doing moves more slowly than does that of his fellow. Every sportsman must have paralleled a little personal experience of my own. Last fall I shot at a flying quail between which and myself at the time of firing a sturdy oak tree raised its trunk. The bird was put up, aimed at, and the impulse sent by the will to the trigger-finger: before the impulse reached the finger I distinctly recognized that the bird had dodged behind the tree, but the countermand sent by the conscious will to the finger could not overtake the first order, and so, in defiance of my wishes, the gun was discharged.

There are many processes necessary to comfortable human life for which consciousness is far too slow in its operations. Had the eye to wait for conscious perception the dust which whirls in the air would soon blind it; but, as Nature has arranged the mechanism, when the speck approaches the eye the lid shuts instantly through a reflex act, even though the man be unconscious or sight has been lost. It will be noticed that in this movement of the eyelid a purpose is served: it is as though the man perceived the speck and willed to close the lid in order to protect the eye. An action done to serve an apparent end is spoken of by the physiologist as "purposive." It would seem at first that such an action implies consciousness, but it has just been shown that this--in regard to the eye, at least--is not the case, and before this paper is ended it will be demonstrated that adaptation for a useful end is no proof that an action is directed by consciousness.

If, instead of putting the feet of the prepared frog spoken of a few paragraphs back in acidulated water, we drop the irritant upon the thigh, the corresponding foot is raised at once and bent upward so as to brush off the acid. If the foot has been cut off, the bleeding stump will still be bent upward, and if it be too short to reach the irritated spot, then the other foot will be raised and a determined effort be made to remove the offending liquid. All these movements certainly look as though the frog felt the acid and endeavored to get rid of it. Not so, however. Drop this same frog into water which is gradually heated. The batrachian does not try to get out, but sits motionless until he is boiled. Surely, if he felt the drop of vinegar on his foot, much more would he feel the boiling water bathing his whole surface. Curiously enough, if the acid be put upon the leg of the frog while in the water, the movements will be the same as if he were on the table.