Chapter III: There Was a King in Thule (1)

He never took that advice. He had already transformed Sheila into a heroine during the half hour of their stroll from the beach and around the house. Not that he fell in love with her at first sight, or anything even approaching to that. He merely made her the central figure of a little speculative romance, as he had made many another woman before. Of course, in these little fanciful dramas, written along the sky-line, as it were, of his life, he invariably pictured himself as the fitting companion of the fair creature he saw there. Who but himself could understand the sentiment of her eyes, and teach her little love-ways, and express unbounded admiration of her? More than one practical young woman, indeed, in certain circles of London society, had been informed by her friends that Mr. Lavender was dreadfully in love with her; and had been much surprised, after this confirmation of her suspicions, that he sought no means of bringing the affair to a reasonable and sensible issue. He did not even amuse himself by flirting with her, as men would willingly do who could not be charged with any serious purpose whatever. His devotion was more mysterious and remote. A rumor would get about that Mr. Lavender had finished another of those charming heads in pastel, which, at a distance, reminded one of Greuze, and that Lady So-and-so, who had bought it forthwith, had declared that it was the image of this young lady who was partly puzzled and partly vexed by the incomprehensible conduct of her reputed admirer. It was the fashion, in these social circles, to buy those heads of Lavender when he chose to paint them. He had achieved a great reputation by them. The good people liked to have a genius in their own set whom they had discovered, and who was only to be appreciated by persons of exceptional taste and penetration. Lavender, the uninitiated were assured, was a most cultivated and brilliant young man. He had composed some charming songs. He had written, from time to time, some quite delightful little poems, over which fair eyes had grown full and liquid. Who had not heard of the face that he painted for a certain young lady whom every one expected him to marry?

The young man escaped a great deal of the ordinary consequences of this petting, but not all. He was at bottom really true-hearted, frank and generous--generous even to an extreme--but he had acquired a habit of producing striking impressions which dogged and perverted his every action and speech. He disliked losing a few shilling at billiards, but he did not mind losing a few pounds: the latter was good for a story. Had he possessed any money to invest in shares, he would have been irritated by small rises or small falls; but he would have been vain of a big rise, and he would have regarded a big fall with equanimity, as placing him in a dramatic light. The exaggerations produced by this habit of his fostered strange delusions in the minds of people who did not know him very well: and sometimes the practical results, in the way of expected charities or what not, amazed him. He could not understand why people should have made such mistakes, and resented them as an injustice.

And as they sat at dinner on this still, brilliant evening in summer, it was Sheila's turn to be clothed in the garments of romance. Her father, with his great gray beard and heavy brow, became the King of Thule, living in this solitary house overlooking the sea, and having memories of a dead sweetheart. His daughter, the princess, had the glamour of a thousand legends dwelling in her beautiful eyes; and when she walked by the shores of the Atlantic, that were now getting yellow under the sunset, what strange and unutterable thoughts must appear in the wonder of her face! He remembered no more how he had pulled to pieces Ingram's praises of Sheila. What had become of the "ordinary young lady, who would be a little interesting, if a little stupid, before marriage, and after marriage sink into the dull, domestic hind"? There could be no doubt that Sheila often sat silent for a considerable time, with her eyes fixed on her father's face when he spoke, or turning to look at some other speaker. Had Lavender now been asked if this silence had not a trifle of dullness in it, he would have replied by asking if there were dullness in the stillness and the silence of the sea. He grew to regard her calm and thoughtful look as a sort of spell; and if you had asked him what Sheila was like, he would have answered by saying that there was moonlight in her face.

The room, too, in which this mystic princess sat was strange and wonderful. There were no doors visible, for the four walls were throughout covered by a paper of foreign manufacture, representing spacious Tyrolese landscapes and incidents of the chase. When Lavender had first entered this chamber his eye had been shocked by these coarse and prominent pictures--by the green rivers, the blue lakes and the snow-peaks that rose above certain ruddy chalets. Here a chamois was stumbling down a ravine, and there an operatic peasant, some eight or ten inches in actual length, was pointing a gun. The large figures, the coarse colors, the impossible scenes--all this looked, at first sight, to be in the worst possible taste; and Lavender was convinced that Sheila had nothing to do with the introduction of this abominable decoration. But somehow, when he turned to the line of ocean that was visible from the window, to the lonely shores of the island and the monotony of colors showing in the still picture without, he began to fancy that there might be a craving up in these latitudes for some presentation, however rude and glaring, of the richer and more variegated life of the South. The figures and mountains on the walls became less prominent. He saw no incongruity in a whole chalet giving way, and allowing Duncan, who waited at table, to bring forth from this aperture to the kitchen a steaming dish of salmon, while he spoke some words in Gaelic to the servants at the other end of the tube. He even forgot to be surprised at the appearance of little Mairi, with whom he had shaken hands a little while before, coming round the table with potatoes. He did not, as a rule, shake hands with servant-maids, but was not this fair-haired, wistful-eyed girl some relative, friend or companion of Shiela's? and had he not already begun to lose all perception of the incongruous or the absurd in the strange pervading charm with which Sheila's presence filled the place?

He suddenly found Mackenzie's deep-set eyes fixed upon him, and became aware that the old man had been mysteriously announcing to Ingram that there were more political movements abroad than people fancied. Sheila sat still and listened to her father as he expounded these things, and showed that, although at a distance, he could perceive the signs of the times. Was it not incumbent, moreover, on a man who had to look after a number of poor and simple folks, that he should be on the alert?

"It iss not bekass you will live in London you will know everything," said the King of Borva, with a certain significance in his tone. "There iss many things a man does not see at his feet that another man will see who is a good way off. The International, now--"

He glanced furtively at Lavender.

"--I hef been told there will be agents going out every day to all parts of this country and other countries, and they will hef plenty of money to live like gentlemen, and get among the poor people, and fill their minds with foolish nonsense about a revolution. Oh yes, I hear about it all, and there iss many members of Parliament in it; and it iss every day they will get farther and farther, all working hard, though no one sees them who does not understand to be on the watch."

Here again the young man received a quiet, scrutinizing glance; and it began to dawn upon him, to his infinite astonishment, that Mackenzie half suspected him of being an emissary of the International. In the case of any other man he would have laughed and paid no heed, but how could he permit Sheila's father to regard him with any such suspicion?

"Don't you think, sir," he said boldly, "that those Internationalists are a lot of incorrigible idiots?"

As if a shrewd observer of men and motives were to be deceived by such a protest! Mackenzie regarded him with increased suspicion, although he endeavored to conceal the fact that he was watching the young man from time to time. Lavender saw all the favor he had won during the day disappearing, and moodily wondered when he should have a chance of explanation.

After dinner they went outside and sat down on a bench in the garden, and the men lit their cigars. It was a cool and pleasant evening. The sun had gone down in red fire behind the Atlantic, and there was still left a rich glow of crimson in the west, while overhead, in the pale yellow of the sky, some filmy clouds of rose-color lay motionless. How calm was the sea out there, and the whiter stretch of water coming into Loch Roag! The cool air of the twilight was scented with sweetbrier. The wash of the ripples along the coast could be heard in the stillness. It was a time for lovers to sit by the sea, careless of the future or the past.

But why would this old man keep prating of his political prophecies? Lavender asked of himself. Sheila had spoken scarcely a word all the evening; and of what interest could it be to her to listen to theories of revolution and the dangers besetting our hot-headed youth? She merely stood by the side of her father, with her hand on his shoulder. He noticed, however, that she paid particular attention whenever Ingram spoke; and he wondered whether she perceived that Ingram was partly humoring the old man, at the same time that he was pleasing himself with a series of monologues, interrupted only by his cigar.

"That is true enough, Mr. Mackenzie," Ingram would say, lying back with his two hands clasped round his knee, as usual: "you've got to be careful of the opinions that are spread abroad, even in Borva, where not much danger is to be expected. But I don't suppose our young men are more destructive in their notions than young men always have been. You know every young fellow starts in life by knocking down all the beliefs he finds before him, and then he spends the rest of his life in setting them up again. It is only after some years he gets to know that all the wisdom of the world lies in the old commonplaces he once despised. He finds that the old familiar ways are the best, and he sinks into being a commonplace person, with much satisfaction to himself. My friend Lavender, now, is continually charging me with being commonplace. I admit the charge. I have drifted back into all the old ways and beliefs--about religion and marriage and patriotism, and what not--that ten years ago I should have treated with ridicule."

"Suppose the process continues?" suggested Lavender, with some evidence of pique.

"Suppose it does," continued Ingram carelessly. "Ten years hence I may be proud to become a vestryman, and have the most anxious care about the administration of the rates. I shall be looking after the drainage of houses and the treatment of paupers and the management of Sunday schools--But all this is an invasion of your province, Sheila," he suddenly added, looking up to her.

The girl laughed, and said, "Then I have been commonplace from the beginning?"

Ingram was about to make all manner of protests and apologies, when Mackenzie said, "Sheila, it wass time you will go in-doors, if you have nothing about your head. Go in and sing a song to us, and we will listen to you; and not a sad song, but a good merry song. These teffles of the fishermen, it iss always drownings they will sing about from the morning till the night."

Was Sheila about to sing in this clear, strange twilight, while they sat there and watched the yellow moon come up behind the southern hills? Lavender had heard so much of her singing of those fishermen's ballads that he could think of nothing more to add to the enchantment of this wonderful night. But he was disappointed. The girl put her hand on her father's head, and reminded him that she had had her big greyhound Bras imprisoned all the afternoon, that she had to go down to Borvabost with a message for some people who were leaving by the boat in the morning, and would the gentlemen therefore excuse her not singing to them for this one evening?

"But you cannot go away down to Borvabost by yourself, Sheila," said Ingram. "It will be dark before you return."

"It will not be darker than this all the night through," said the girl.

"But I hope you will let us go with you," said Lavender, rather anxiously; and she assented with a gracious smile, and went to fetch the great deerhound that was her constant companion.

And lo! he found himself walking with a princess in this wonder-land through that magic twilight that prevails in northern latitudes. Mackenzie and Ingram had gone on in front. The large deerhound, after regarding him attentively, had gone to its mistress's side, and remained closely there. Lavender could scarcely believe his ears that the girl was talking to him lightly and frankly, as though she had known him for years, and was telling him of all her troubles with the folks at Borvabost, and of those poor people whom she was now going to see. No sooner did he understand that they were emigrants, and that they were going to Glasgow before leaving finally for America, than in quite an honest and enthusiastic fashion he began to bewail the sad fate of such poor wretches as have to forsake their native land, and to accuse the aristocracy of the country of every act of selfishness, and to charge the government with a shameful indifference. But Sheila brought him up suddenly. In the gentlest fashion she told him what she knew of these poor people, and how emigration affected them, and so forth, until he was ready to curse the hour in which he had blundered into taking a side on a question about which he cared nothing and knew less.

"But some other time," continued Sheila, "I will tell you what we do here, and I will show you a great many letters I have from friends of mine who have gone to Greenock and to New York and Canada. Oh yes, it is very bad for the old people: they never get reconciled to the change--never; but it is very good for the young people, and they are glad of it, and are much better off than they were here. You will see how proud they are of the better clothes they have, and of good food, and of money to put in the bank; and how could they get that in the Highlands, where the land is so poor that a small piece is of no use, and they have not money to rent the large sheep-farms? It is very bad to have people go away--it is very hand on many of them--but what can they do? The piece of ground that was very good for the one family, that is expected to keep the daughters when they marry, and the sons when they marry, and then there are five or six families to live on it. And hard work--that will not do much with very bad land and the bad weather we have here. The people get downhearted when they have their crops spoiled by the long rain, and they cannot get their peats dried; and very often the fishing turns out bad, and they have no money at all to carry on the farm. But now you will see Borvabost."

Lavender had to confess that this wonderful princess would persist in talking in a very matter-of-fact way. All the afternoon, while he was weaving a luminous web of imagination around her, she was continually cutting it asunder, and stepping forth as an authority on the growing of some wretched plants or the means by which rain was to be excluded from window-sills. And now, in this strange twilight, when she ought to have been singing of the cruelties of the sea or listening to half-forgotten legends of mermaids, she was engaged with the petty fortunes of men and girls who were pleased to find themselves prospering in the Glasgow police-force or educating themselves in a milliner's shop in Edinburgh. She did not appear conscious that she was a princess. Indeed, she seemed to have no consciousness of herself at all, and was altogether occupied in giving him information about practical subjects in which he professed a profound interest he certainly did not feel.

But even Sheila, when they had reached the loftiest part of their route, and could see beneath them the island and the water surrounding it, was struck by the exceeding beauty of the twilight; and as for her companion, he remembered it many a time thereafter as if it were a dream of the sea. Before them lay the Atlantic--a pale line of blue, still, silent and remote. Overhead, the sky was of a clear, pale gold, with heavy masses of violet cloud stretched across from north to south, and thickening as they got near to the horizon. Down at their feet, near the shore, a dusky line of huts and houses was scarcely visible; and over these lay a pale blue film of peat-smoke that did not move in the still air. Then they saw the bay into which the White Water runs, and they could trace the yellow glimmer of the river stretching into the island through a level valley of bog and morass. Far away, toward the east, lay the bulk of the island--dark green undulations of moorland and pasture; and there, in the darkness, the gable of one white house had caught the clear light of the sky, and was gleaming westward like a star. But all this was as nothing to the glory that began to shine in the south-east, where the sky was of a pale violet over the peaks of Mealasabhal and Suainabhal. There, into the beautiful dome, rose the golden crescent of the moon, warm in color, as though it still retained the last rays of the sunset. A line of quivering gold fell across Loch Roag, and touched the black hull and spars of the boat in which Sheila had been sailing in the morning. That bay down there, with its white sands and massive rocks, its still expanse of water, and its background of mountain-peaks palely colored by the yellow moonlight, seemed really a home for a magic princess who was shut off from all the world. But here, in front of them, was another sort of sea and another sort of life--a small fishing-village hidden under a cloud of pale peat-smoke, and fronting the great waters of the Atlantic itself, which lay under a gloom of violet clouds.

"Now," said Sheila with a smile, "we have not always weather as good as this in the island. Will you not sit on the bench over there with Mr. Ingram, and wait until my papa and I come up from the village again?"

"May not I go down with you?"

"No. The dogs would learn you were a stranger, and there would be a great deal of noise, and there will be many of the poor people asleep."

So Sheila had her way; and she and her father went down the hillside into the gloom of the village, while Lavender went to join his friend Ingram, who was sitting on the wooden bench, silently smoking a clay pipe.

"Well, I have never seen the like of this," said Lavender in his impetuous way: "it is worth going a thousand miles to see. Such colors and such clearness! and then the splendid outlines of those mountains, and the grand sweep of this loch! This is the sort of thing that drives me to despair, and might make one vow never to touch a brush again. And Sheila says it will be like this all the night through."

He was unaware that he had spoken of her in a very familiar way, but Ingram noticed it.

"Ingram," he said suddenly, "that is the first girl I have ever seen whom I should like to marry."

"Stuff!"

"But it is true. I have never seen any one like her--so handsome, so gentle, and yet so very frank in setting you right. And then she is so sensible, you know, and not too proud to have much interest in all sorts of common affairs--"

There was a smile in Ingram's face, and his companion stopped in some vexation: "You are not a very sympathetic confidant."

"Because I know the story of old. You have told it me about twenty women, and it is always the same. I tell you, you don't know anything at all about Sheila Mackenzie yet: perhaps you never may. I suppose you will make a heroine of her, and fall in love with her for a fortnight, and then go back to London and get cured by listening to the witticisms of Mrs. Lorraine."

"Thank you very much."

"Oh, I didn't mean to offend you. Some day, no doubt, you will love a woman for what she is, not for what you fancy her to be; but that is a piece of good-fortune that seldom occurs to a youth of your age. To marry in a dream, and wake up six months afterward--that is the fate of ingenuous twenty-three. But don't you let Mackenzie hear you talk of marrying Sheila, or he'll have some of his fishermen throw you into Loch Roag."

"There, now, that _is_ one point I can't understand about her," said Lavender eagerly. "How can a girl of her shrewdness and good sense have such a belief in that humbugging old idiot of a father of hers, who fancies me a political emissary, and plays small tricks to look like diplomacy? It is always 'My papa can do this,' and 'My papa can do that,' and 'There is no one at all like my papa.' And she is continually fondling him, and giving little demonstrations of affection, of which he takes no more notice than if he were an Arctic bear."

Ingram looked up with some surprise in his face. "You don't mean to say, Lavender," he said slowly, "that you are already jealous of the girl's own father?"

He could not answer, for at this moment Sheila, her father and the big greyhound came up the hill. And again it was Lavender's good fortune to walk with Sheila across the moorland path they had traversed some little time before. And now the moon was still higher in the heavens, and the yellow lane of light that crossed the violet waters of Loch Roag quivered in a deeper gold. The night-air was scented with the Dutch clover growing down by the shore. They could hear the curlew whistling and the plover calling amid that monotonous plash of the waves that murmured all around the coast. When they returned to the house the darker waters of the Atlantic and the purple clouds of the west were shut out from sight, and before them there was only the liquid plain of Loch Roag, with its pathway of yellow fire, and far away on the other side the shoulders and peaks of the southern mountains, that had grown gray and clear and sharp in the beautiful twilight. And this was Sheila's home.

[To be continued.]

FOOTNOTES:

[G] "My black-haired girl, my pretty girl, my black-haired girl, don't leave me." _Nighean dubh_ is pronounced _Nyean du_.

[H] Literally, _Gearaidh-na'h-Aimhne_--"the cutting of the river."

[I] Another name given by the islanders to these stones is _Fir-bhreige_, "false men." Both names, False Men and the Mourners, should be of some interest to antiquarians, for they will suit pretty nearly any theory.

WINTER.

The golden sunshine has fled away,
The clouds o'erhead hang heavy and gray,
The world is woefully sad to-day;

And I am thinking of you, dear, you.
The cold clay hides from the rain and dew
The tenderest heart that the world e'er knew.

Why should I think of you when the rain
Smiteth so sharply the window-pane,
And the wild winds round the old house 'plain?

You were so sweet and sunny and bright,
Ever your presence brought life and light,
And I recall you in storm and night.

When snow-shrouds hang on the corpse-cold trees,
When sharp frosts sting and the north winds freeze,
What has your mem'ry to do with these?

O fair lost love! O love that is dead!
The pleasant days from my life are fled,
The rosy morns and the sunsets red.

The light has faded from out my life,
Leaving the clouds and the stormy strife,
And the keen sharp cold that cuts like a knife.

The days and the months, how slow they glide,
Gray-robed and cold-breathed and frozen-eyed!
The summer died for me when you died.

O world of woe and of want and pain!
O heaven of clouds and storm and rain!
When shall I find my summer again?

LUCY H. HOOPER.

NEW WASHINGTON.

A stranger visiting the national capital should begin by leaving it. He should cross the Anacostia River at the Navy-yard, climb the heights behind the village of Uniontown, be careful to find exactly the right path, and seat himself on the parapet of old Fort Stanton. His feeling of fatigue will be overcome by one of astonishment that the scene should contain so much that is beautiful in nature, so much that is exceedingly novel if not very good in art, and so much that has the deepest historical interest. From the blue hills of Prince George's county in Maryland winds the Anacostia, whose waters at his feet float all but the very largest vessels of our navy, while but six miles above they float nothing larger than a Bladensburg goose. To the left flows the Potomac, a mile wide. Between the rivers lies Washington. A vast amphitheatre, its green or gray walls cloven only by the two rivers, appears to surround the city. "Amphitheatre" is the word, for within the great circle, proportioned to it in size and magnificence, dwarfing all other objects, stands the veritable arena where our public gladiators and wild beasts hold their combats. This of course is the Capitol, whose white dome rises like a blossoming lily from the dark expanse below.

Along these summits are the remains of a chain of earthworks that completely enveloped the capital. They are all overgrown by verdure, and are fast disappearing; but whenever the site of one is relieved against the clear sky a grassy embrasure or a bit of rampart may yet be seen from a distance. Here stretched

The watchfires of a hundred circling camps,

whose light is in the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic," for it was a personal view of them, and of these altars built in the evening dews and damps, which gave form to the great lyric. Here in a few years, when more of the business-men of Washington shall have learned how to do business, or when her social development shall have detained the cultured and wealthy who now come and go, will be found a circle of beautiful villas and nearly all the luxuries of summer life.

Below the high bank opposite, where the Congressional Cemetery skirts the city, where some famous men are actually buried, and where Congress places cenotaphs that look like long rows of antiquated beehives for all who die while members of that body, a line of black dots crosses the Anacostia like the corks of a fisherman's seine. They are the piles that upheld a bridge in the summer of 1814. On the hills to the right the little army of five thousand redcoats made a feint toward this bridge, and caused the Americans to burn it. Away to the left, across the Potomac, stretches Long Bridge, which was also fired the next night by the British and by the fleeing inhabitants of the captured town.

The eight miles of Virginia shore visible from Washington contain really but three objects. Two or three dark chimneys and steeples and a few misty outlines are all one needs to see of Alexandria, which is six miles down the river, and appears about as ancient as its Egyptian namesake. Nearer, the monotony is broken by the tower of Fairfax Seminary; nearer still, among the oaks of Arlington, by the mansion of Custis-Lee, imposing, pillared and cream-colored; or it was the last in the days when cream had a color.

Descending from the old fort, the stranger should go at once to Georgetown and climb up into the little burying-ground of Holyrood. The view thence will give him all that was excluded from the other. He will now be prepared to examine Washington in detail, and as this is not a guide-book he shall go his way alone. But the "gentle reader" is requested to linger an hour longer upon the natural walls and look down with me on the dark city.

Below is such a growth of beautiful and strange that we can understand it only by remembering that we look down on all the United States. Into that problem of squares and circles and triangles wise men from the East plunge and see Beacon street; wise men from the West plunge and see Poker Flat; and from the highest ground we can find we will try to see the whole of Washington. We cannot distinguish a friend's house from an enemy's. The lines are mingled and the colors blended by our distance. Individuals are lost to sight entirely. What would be such a conflict of sounds down there that we should never be certain of what we heard, is now so faint a hum that it does not disturb us or affect our speech. We have risen into a better atmosphere, and find that some things which were ugly have grown good and graceful.

To allude to all the noted and novel things in this complicated scene would be to fill a book, and enough pre-Raphaelites are already browsing there. Giving due attention to particulars in their places, we must yet give effects in sweeping strokes, steering as best we can between the Scylla of didactic details and the Charybdis of glittering generalities.

The candid observer wonders not that Washington is so far below what it ought to be, but that it exists as a city at all. It has suffered calamities that would have extinguished any other place. The vitality that could survive them would seem capable of surviving anything. Other towns have had to contend against natural disadvantages, but they have had the aid of citizens who knew what they wanted, and who used the public money and energy and brains for the public good. But here has been the novel sight of a city having every natural advantage, yet compelled to fight its own citizens for life; to see the public money and energy and brains--what little there were--used to kill not only the town, but the people in it; to support men of weight in the community who really did not want it polluted by trade or manufactures or any such vulgar things.

The Capitol, which now, like the Irishman's shanty, has the front door on the back side, was made to face the east because in that direction lay as fine a site as ever a town possessed, and there the city was to be built. To the westward the ground was such that men are living who as boys waded for reed-birds and caught catfish where now is the centre of business. The necessity of transforming this tract in the very beginning of trade retarded the general growth incalculably. The owners of the good ground didn't want to do anything themselves, and were too greedy to let anybody else. The Executive Mansion, a mile to the westward, attracted other public buildings about it; the people who had to support themselves bought real estate in the swamps; those who lived without business of their own followed them of course; and the fine plateau prepared by Nature has been touched only so far as improvement has been compelled by forces radiating from the other side of the Capitol. The life and trade that tend to crystallize around one centre are still much dissipated by the policy that ruined Capitol Hill; but as this can no longer endanger the general prosperity, it is now more a blessing than a calamity. It makes sure and speedy the reclamation of the waste places, while the improvement of all the good ones must take place at last. The owners of the barren sites which yet break the continuity of blocks in good localities can sit still and "hold on" if they please, but they must expect to see the "worthless" tracts--Swampoodle, Murder Bay and Hell's Bottom--fill with life and rise in value faster than their own.

Another calamity, which has grown with the city instead of being outgrown, is the changes that have been permitted to take place in the Potomac. Long Bridge, instead of being built so as to permit an uninterrupted flow of the stream, was composed for a great distance of an earthen road--a dam--arresting half the water of the river. This temporarily benefited the Georgetown channel, no doubt, by forcing all the water into it. But a marsh is rising in the middle of the stream, creeping rapidly up to the Washington wharves, threatening the health of the city, and so crippling its commerce that an expensive remedy must be speedily applied. There is some difference of opinion as to the comparative injuries and benefits arising from the bridge, but the fact remains clear that this important river has suffered needless injury to a degree that is deplorable. In the past, however, the fault has been as much with the city as with Congress. That body cannot improve rivers where there is no commerce to be benefited, nor give new facilities to towns that do not make the most of what they have. But the gazer from Fort Stanton--glancing beyond the Navy-yard and the shot-battered monitors that lie there, across Greenleaf's Point and the Arsenal, made tragic by the death of many a British soldier and of the Lincoln-Seward assassins half a century later--overlooking the wharves of Washington and dimly descrying the masts at Georgetown, now sees a traffic that has earned a consideration it has not received. A few weeks ago we paused in an after-dinner walk, down there on the Arsenal boulevard, to watch the troubles of a crew and the labors of a tug which were altogether too suggestive. A senseless fellow of a captain came sailing up the river from a foreign port, his vessel laden with a valuable cargo, and attempted a landing at Washington. He knew no better than to suppose that the capital of this nation, on one of our finest rivers, possessing all its days a navy-yard, would permit itself to be approached by a merchantman. He stuck in the mud within a hundred yards of the wharf. There he spent three or four days in anxiety and chagrin, and finally got a tug to pull him back into navigable water. He swung about, made haste down the river and took his vessel to another port, uttering some natural oaths, no doubt, and wondering what kind of country he had got into. A small vessel going from Washington to Georgetown heads for Chesapeake Bay, passes up around the island of filth accumulated by the bridge, and sails four miles in ascending two.

Bordering the broad belt of grass and trees which we see sweeping gracefully through the heart of the city from the Capitol to the President's, where rise the towers of the Smithsonian, the roof of the Agricultural Bureau, and all that is built of the Washington Monument, there stretched another calamity, which existed some fifty years, which was at last extinguished during 1872 at an immense cost to the city, which was one of the "improvements" of the past, which once employed the public money and energy--we cannot repeat brains--to kill not only the town, but the people in it. This was the great pestiferous open sewer that stole into a filthy existence under the name of the Washington Canal.

But there was a greater misfortune than any of these. Slavery need only be mentioned. More of Washington's present defects are attributable to it in one way or another than to all else. Yet under this crowning calamity, added to the others, the undulating plain before us, which appears so sluggish from the height to which we have climbed, has within seventy-five years passed from a wilderness into a city of one hundred and eleven thousand inhabitants. Although the general government kept the breath of life in it during a period when perhaps nothing else could have done so, yet such a growth, under all the circumstances, cannot be accounted for without recognizing an inherent strength that has never been acknowledged by the multitudes who come to "see" Washington. It proves that she may have a significance of her own. The visitor should remember that New York and Boston are enjoying, and Philadelphia has nearly reached, the third century of their lives.

This scene from the heights is a fascinating one for the day-dreamer. Everything is in harmony with the past character of the capital. Everything is misty, vast, uncertain, grand and ill-defined. One does not see clearly the boundaries--the city and country are one. Every street we trace in the distance, almost every building, almost every foot of ground, has gathered something of tradition from the lives of the statesmen, generals, jurists, diplomates who have lived and wrought here for three-quarters of a century. The visions that passed before the eyes of Washington as he stood on the Observatory Hill there, a subaltern under Braddock, contemplating the wilderness about him and imagining the future; the pictures that filled the fancy of the intractable L'Enfant as he defined the great mall and thought of the gardens between the Tuileries and the Chamber of Deputies; Andrew J. Downing giving his last days to such an arrangement of the trees and grass as would be worthy of the design; President Madison and his cabinet, with a useless little army at their heels, flying in despair from yonder bloody hillside; Admiral Cockburn derisively riding an old mare up Pennsylvania Avenue; the burning Capitol and White House lighting up the gloom of that hideous night; Stephen Decatur shot to death just round the bend of the Anacostia there; the conflicts by tongue and pen that have again and again gone on here till the whole country swayed; Gamaliel Bailey silencing a mob at his door; the histories that lie buried under the thirty thousand headboards that gleam like an army of ghosts among the trees of Arlington; Abraham Lincoln gasping his life away in that little Tenth street house; his assassin dashing in darkness across the bridge at our feet, over which we have just passed, and spurring almost into the shadow of the parapet where we stand;--all these things, and a hundred more as tempting to the dreamer, come crowding on the mind at every glance. Yet who stops to call Washington a romantic city? When the White House, just visible from those tree-tops, shall have ceased, as it soon must do, to be the home of the chief magistrate, what future magician shall summon down those cheerless stairways the ghostly procession of dead Presidents, as our first literary necromancer marshaled the shades of royal governors across the threshold of the Province House? We turn from all this to speak of the practical affairs of to-day which await us in the city, with a reluctance that delays our feet as we descend.

A phrase applied, we believe, by Dickens, when writing of the avenues here many years ago, and illustrating his remarkable faculty of telling the most truth when he exaggerated most, rises so constantly to mind when one considers what Washington has been, that we are tempted to make it a kind of text. He described the great houseless thoroughfares as "beginning nowhere and ending in nothing." That phrase sets old Washington before the reader as the literal truth could never do.

But the reader must now remember that old Washington is going--that a new Washington has come. The city is no longer disposed to make apologies, wait for generosity or beg for patronage. It is disposed--and has proved its disposition--to take off its seedy coat and go to work in its own way. Its waiting is now only for enlightened judgment from others, and its begging is only for justice.

The change of local government in 1871, when Congress gave the District of Columbia a legislature and a representative, was the particular event from which may be dated such innovations as make necessary a revision of the popular opinion. The visitors who come this month, and who have not been here since the last inauguration, will have to learn the capital anew. While the establishment of the territorial government and the organization of its outgrowths--particularly the Board of Public Works--mark the new departure by physical changes, all will understand that it was the first gun at Charleston, startling the stagnant pool here, which set in motion the successive waves that carried the city up to this departure. The public affairs of the city became practically unmanageable. A joint-stock company could not organize for the most trifling business without depending on the slow and uncertain action of Congress for a charter. A few active men, who saw that the old order of things could be endured no longer, met quietly in 1870 at the house of an honored citizen on K street to see what further they could see. They continued to meet at each other's homes, lightening their interchange of thought for the public by such an extension of hospitality as drew into their circle many influential Congressmen, and converted them to the new idea that there was something in Washington besides the national service. The result was, that the city government was abolished; a legislative assembly was created; a governor was appointed by the President of the United States; and a delegate was sent to Congress, instead of a crowd of lobbyists, to represent the District of Columbia. This delegate is always to be a member of the committee on the District, Congress has the constitutional right of exclusive legislation, and the Assembly cannot impose taxes of any consequence without especial authority from the people.

The wisdom of the change was doubted at first by many real friends of progress, who thought they saw grave legal complications arising; who knew what popular government in a large city, with no restriction of the election franchise, might mean; who at times thought of New York with a shudder; who knew that as Washington was the centre of everything political, it was necessarily the centre of political corruption; that her alleys were crowded with ignorant freedmen; that her ward politicians were as unscrupulous and skillful as the same class in other cities; and who thought it safer to trust the average Congressman than the small political trader and his chattels. But Congress sits as a perpetual court of appeal on the spot where its members can judge from personal knowledge, ready to overrule any act of the Assembly that can be shown to be a bad one; and one house of the Assembly, with the governor and executive boards, is appointed by the President. The election of the larger house and of the delegate to Congress is sufficient security to the people, and Washington is to-day in most respects the best-governed city of its size in the United States. The powers of the little Assembly are very limited: the governor can veto its measures; Congress can override them both; the President can veto the acts of Congress; two-thirds of Congress can still surmount this veto. This complicated system may retard good measures, but it is not probable that any very bad one can long survive under it.

The Baron Haussmann here is the Board of Public Works. It is grading, filling, paving, planting, fencing, parking, and making the thoroughfares what they would never have become by ordinary means. At last we see what Washingtonians never saw before--vast public operations having a consistent and tangible shape; obeying a purpose that can be understood, defined and executed; beginning somewhere and ending in something. Within its sphere this Board has despotic power: it would be worthless with any less. It dares to strike without fear or favor, and hit whoever stands in the way: the way would never be cleared if it did not. It makes bitter enemies by its inexorable exactions: the public cannot be served except at the expense of the individual. A strong party has fought it by injunctions and failed: the same persons will no doubt continue to fight, while the Board will no doubt continue to vindicate itself and go on with its work. It made some mistakes which wrought hardships to individuals who wished it well, but such were the difficulties before it at the outset that it might have made greater mistakes and still been forgiven. It is to be hoped that it will have enemies enough to watch it closely, criticise it sharply and hold it to a strict accountability; but should it have enough to really interfere with its present course, then we shall have to add one more, and a great one, to the list of Washington's calamities. The new blood that created it is able to sustain it, while the air it has done so much to purify is already laden with blessings from the lips of strangers.

In the matter of public improvements an equitable adjustment of relations--always heretofore uncertain and unsatisfactory--between the District and the general government still remains to be accomplished, and at this writing is impatiently awaited by the city. Congress should explicitly define for itself a course that can be depended upon, so that the city can go ahead and know what it ought to do. The general government, promising great things which began nowhere and ended in nothing, laid out the city for its own use, and gave more space to streets and ornamental grounds than to buildings. The plan was wise and good, but did not appear so until the liberal citizens, unable to endure the disgrace of such a city as the nation thrust upon them, taxing themselves six millions of dollars for street purposes, went generously to work, with their own money improved the immense fronts of the government property, which pays no taxes, evolved something tangible out of the old cloudy-magnificent plan, and gave the country, so far as they could, a decent capital.

There is another important matter for adjustment. The city has left nothing undone that money and labor could do to make the public schools the best in the United States. It is doubtful whether there has ever before been seen in any city or State an expenditure for public schools so generous, under all the circumstances, as that of Washington within the past few years. The best school-houses here are the best the Prussian commissioners, who lately came to inspect them, had ever seen. A very great number of the pupils educated by the city are the children of government servants whose homes are in the States, and who pay no considerable taxes here. Every State and Territory has received a liberal allotment of public land for school-purposes except the District of Columbia, which has probably done more for schools without the endowment, considering the time and taxable property at command, than any State has ever done with it.

Of course the city has received many benefits from the general government, but the considerable ones have been indirect. The excellent water-works, for instance, costing about three millions of dollars, were built with the nation's money and by army engineers, because the nation needed them, and show how entirely identical are the interests of both parties. Their respective duties, while they need defining anew, are so wedded that there is no room for serious difference. It is really a matter for congratulation that the general government held back and did not take more of the improvements into its own hands. The city's present claims are by so much stronger: the two governments can work in harmony, and any efforts that are now made will not be thrown away. Had Congress acted sooner we might have had more Washington canals, and Washington and Georgetown street-cars, and similar Congressional "improvements," beginning nowhere but in ignorance or selfishness, and ending in nothing but nuisances. The improvement of the interiors of the national grounds, however, by the general government, is now keeping pace with that of the exteriors by the city as nearly as is possible under present legislation, and their superintendence has become at last an office of some practical consequence to Washington. The general government owns about one-half of the property in the District, and during seventy years has expended for the improvement of the thoroughfares a little over one million of dollars. The city during the same time has expended for the same purpose nearly fourteen millions of dollars.

The old Washington idea seems to have consisted in finishing a city before it was begun. To use an architectural figure, the capital of the column has been well designed and partly carved, but the base is not yet laid. Those characteristics which the builders thought would be a sure foundation of greatness have proved insufficient in the past and will prove so in the future. The infusion of new blood has done wonders within ten years, but there is still needed the admixture of another current. Wealth and ideality--supposed to be possessed by all who are attracted hither--do not raise a man above material wants or fail to multiply them. When Washington shall give her utmost attention to satisfying the vulgarest common wants of common people, she will have taken her first real step toward--anything. She has had enough of fog and moonshine. She wants for a proper period the most unmitigated materiality--not as an end, of course, but as the first means of making something else possible. She will be made our republican Paris, if made so at all, by the aid of the shops, the wonderful skilled labor, the economical living of poor people, on which rested, as well as on higher things, the splendors of the imperial Paris. The average American lady goes to that city to buy "things," as well as to visit the Louvre, and while the late emperor endeavored to make his capital the social centre of the world, he did not scorn to make it a fashionable market and foster a Palace of Industry.

That Washington is an admirable place for manufactures is clear to all who have sought the facts. Whether she will ever become a manufacturing city is a question that must be settled by the citizens themselves. Whoever doubts that the growth of skilled labor here will be an indispensable condition of the higher growth that is sought fails to understand modern civilization, and should not have survived the days when things began nowhere and ended in nothing. The old thoroughbred Washingtonian will never invest a dollar to build a railroad or a modern workshop, of course. He does not know anything about them, and does not want to. His idea of business is to get real estate, and "hold on" till somebody else makes it valuable. Gentlemen of new Washington, Hercules will stand idle till he sees your own shoulders at the wheel. When you shall have the faithful, enlightened manual labor of New England, you may expect such flowers as Yale and Harvard and the aesthetic fruits they enfold. You may be unable to see any intimate connection between such labor and such culture, but nevertheless it exists. Old Washington could not see it, and now you are compelled to bury old Washington out of sight. It is time for Mohammed to start if he wants his mountain.