Chapter XXXV: Under the White Stars (1)

During the whole glad evening Wenna had been queen of the feast, and her subjects had obeyed her with a joyous submission. They did not take quite so kindly to Mabyn, for she was sharp of tongue and imperious in her ways, but they knew that they could tease her elder sister with impunity--always up to the well-understood line at which her authority began. That was never questioned.

Then at nine o'clock the servants came, some on foot and some on dog-carts, and presently there was a bundling of tiny figures in rugs and wraps, and Wenna stood at the door to kiss each of them and say good-bye. It was half-past nine when that performance was over.

"Now, my dear Miss Wenna," said the old clergyman, "you must be quite tired out with your labors. Come into the study; I believe the tray has been taken in there."

"Do you know, Mr. Trewhella," said Mabyn boldly, "that Wenna hadn't time to eat a single bit when all those children were gobbling up cake? Couldn't you let her have a little bit--a little bit of cold meat, now?"

"Dear! dear me!" said the kind old gentleman in the deepest distress, "that I should not have remembered!"

There was no use in Wenna protesting. In the snug little study she was made to eat some supper; and if she got off with drinking one glass of sherry, it was not through the intervention of her sister, who apparently would have had her drink a tumblerful.

It was not until a quarter past ten that the girls could get away.

"Now I must see you young ladies down to the village, lest some one should run away with you," the old clergyman said, taking down his top-coat.

"Oh no, you must not--you must not indeed, Mr. Trewhella!" Mabyn said anxiously. "Wenna and I always go about by ourselves; and far later than this, too. It is a beautiful, clear night. Why--"

Her impetuosity made her sister smile. "You talk as if you would rather like to be run away with, Mabyn," she said. "But indeed, Mr. Trewhella, you must not think of coming with us. It is quite true what Mabyn says."

And so they went out into the clear darkness together, and the door was shut, and they found themselves in the silent world of the night-time, with the white stars throbbing overhead. Far away in the distance they could hear the murmur of the sea.

"Are you cold, Mabyn, that you tremble so?" said the elder sister.

"No, only a sort of shiver in coming out into the night-air."

Whatever it was, it was soon over. Mabyn seemed to be unusually cheerful. "Wenna," she said, "you're afraid of ghosts."

"No, I'm not."

"I know you are."

"I'm not half as much afraid of ghosts as you are, that's quite certain."

"I'll bet you you won't walk down through the wood."

"Just now?"

"Yes."

"Why, I'll not only go down through the wood, but I'll undertake to be home before you, though you've a broad road to guide you."

"But I did not mean you to go alone."

"Oh," said Wenna, "you propose to come with me? Then it is you who are afraid to go down by yourself? Oh, Mabyn!"

"Never mind, Wenna: let's go down through the wood, just for fun."

So the two sisters set out arm in arm, and through some spirit of mischief Wenna would not speak a word. Mabyn was gradually overawed by the silence, the night, the loneliness of the road, and the solemn presence of the great living vault above them. Moreover, before getting into the wood they had to skirt a curious little dingle, in the hollow of which are both a church and churchyard. Many a time the sisters had come up to this romantic dell in the spring-time to gather splendid primroses, sweet violets, the yellow celandine, and other wild flowers that grew luxuriantly on its steep banks; and very pretty the old church looked then, with the clear sunshine of April streaming down through the scantily-leaved trees into this sequestered spot. Now the deep hole was black as night, and they could only make out a bit of the spire of the church as it appeared against the dark sky. Nay, was there not a sound among the fallen leaves and underwood down there in the direction of the unseen graves?

"Some cow has strayed in there, I believe," said Mabyn in a somewhat low voice, and she walked rather quickly until they got past the place and out on to the hill over the wooded valley.

"Now," said Wenna cheerfully, not wishing to have Mabyn put in a real fright, "as we go down I am going to tell you something, Mabyn. How would you like to have to prepare for a wedding in a fortnight?"

"Not at all," said Mabyn promptly, even fiercely.

"Not if it was your own?"

"No. Why, the insult of such a request!"

According to Mabyn's way of thinking it was an insult to ask a girl to marry you in a fortnight, but none to insist on her marrying you the day after to-morrow.

"You think that a girl could fairly plead that as an excuse--the mere time to get one's dresses and things ready?"

"Certainly."

"Oh, Mabyn," said Wenna far more seriously, "it is not of dresses I am thinking at all; but I shudder to think of getting married just now. I could not do it. I have not had enough time to forget what is past; and until that is done how could I marry any man?"

"Wenna, I do love you when you talk like that," her sister cried. "You can be so wise and reasonable when you choose. Of course you are quite right, dear. But you don't mean to say he wants you to get married before he goes to Jamaica, and then to leave you alone?"

"Oh no. He wants me to go with him to Jamaica."

Mabyn uttered a short cry of alarm: "To Jamaica! To take you away from the whole of us! Why--Oh, Wenna, I do hate being a girl so, for you're not allowed to swear! If I were a man now! To Jamaica! Why don't you know that there are hundreds of people always being killed there by the most frightful hurricanes and earthquakes and large serpents in the woods? To Jamaica! No, you are not going to Jamaica just yet. I don't think you are going to Jamaica just yet."

"No, indeed, I am not," said Wenna with a quiet decision. "Nor could I think of getting married in any case at present. But then--don't you see, Mabyn?--Mr. Roscorla is just a little peculiar in some ways--"

"Yes, certainly."

"--and he likes to have a definite reason for what you do. If I were to tell him of the repugnance I have to the notion of getting married just now, he would call it mere sentiment, and try to argue me out of it: then we should have a quarrel. But if, as you say, a girl may fairly refuse in point of time--"

"Now, I'll tell you," said Mabyn plainly: "no girl can get married properly who hasn't six months to get ready in. She might manage in three or four months for a man she was particularly fond of; but if it is a mere stranger, and a disagreeable person, and one who ought not to marry her at all, then six months is the very shortest time. Just you send Mr. Roscorla to me and I'll tell him all about it."

Wenna laughed: "Yes, I've no doubt you would. I think, he's more afraid of you than of all the serpents and snakes in Jamaica."

"Yes, and he'll have more cause to be before he's much older," said Mabyn confidently.

They could not continue their conversation just then, for they were going down the side of the hill between short trees and bushes, and the path was only broad enough for one, while there were many dark places demanding caution.

"Seen any ghosts yet?" Wenna called out to Mabyn, who was behind her.

"Ghosts, sir? Ay, ay, sir! Heave away on the larboard beam. I say, Wenna, isn't it uncommon dark?"

"It is uncommonly dark?"

"Gentlemen always say uncommon, and all the grammars are written by gentlemen. Oh, Wenna, wait a bit: I've lost my brooch."

It was no _ruse_, for a wonder: the brooch had indeed dropped out of her shawl. She felt all over the dark ground for it, but her search was in vain.

"Well, here's a nice thing! Upon my--"

"Mabyn!"

"Upon my--trotting pony: that was all I was going to say. Wenna, will you stay here for a minute, and I'll run down to the foot of the hill and get a match?"

"How can you get a match at the foot of the hill? You'll have to go on to the inn. No, tie your handkerchief round the foot of one of the trees, and come up early in the morning to look."

"Early in the morning?" said Mabyn. "I hope to be in--I mean asleep then."

Twice she had nearly blurted out the secret, and it is highly probable that her refusal to adopt Wenna's suggestion would have led her sister to suspect something had not Wenna herself by accident kicked against the missing brooch. As it was, the time lost by this misadventure was grievous to Mabyn, who now insisted on leading the way, and went along through the bushes at a rattling pace. Here and there the belated wanderers startled a blackbird, that went shrieking its fright over to the other side of the valley, but Mabyn was now too much preoccupied to be unnerved.

"Keeping a lookout ahead?" Wenna called.

"Ay, ay, sir! No ghosts on the weather quarter! Ship drawing twenty fathoms and the mate fast asleep. Oh, Wenna, my hat!"

It had been twitched off her head by one of the branches of the young trees through which she was passing, and the pliant bit of wood, being released from the strain, had thrown it down into the dark bushes and briers.

"Well I'm--No, I'm not!" said Mabyn as she picked out the hat from among the thorns and straightened the twisted feather. Then she set out again, impatient over these delays, and yet determined not to let her courage sink.

"Land ahead yet?" called out Wenna.

"Ay, ay, sir, and the Lizard on our lee. Wind south-south-west and the cargo shifting a point to the east. Hurrah!"

"Mabyn, they'll hear you a mile off."

It was certainly Mabyn's intention that she should be heard at least a quarter of a mile off, for now they had got down to the open, and they could hear the stream some way ahead of them, which they would have to cross. At this point Mabyn paused for a second to let her sister overtake her: then they went on arm-in-arm.

"Oh, Wenna," she said, "do you remember 'young Lochinvar'?"

"Of course."

"Didn't you fall in love with him when you read about him? Now, there _was_ somebody to fall in love with! Don't you remember when he came into Netherby Hall, that

The bride-maidens whispered, ''Twere better by far
To have matched our fair cousin with young Lochinvar'?

And then you know, Wenna--

One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear,
When they reached the hall-door, and the charger stood near;
So light to the croup the fair lady he swung,
So light to the saddle before her he sprung!
'She is won! we are gone--over bank, bush and scaur!
They'll have fleet steeds that follow,' quoth young Lochinvar.

That _was_ a lover now!"

"I think he was a most impertinent young man," said Wenna.

"I rather like a young man to be impertinent," said Mabyn boldly.

"Then there won't be any difficulty about fitting you with a husband," said Wenna with a light laugh.

Here Mabyn once more went on ahead, picking her steps through the damp grass as she made her way down to the stream. Wenna was still in the highest of spirits.

"Walking the plank yet, boatswain?" she called out.

"Not yet, sir," Mabyn called in return. "Ship wearing round a point to the west, and the waves running mountains high. Don't you hear 'em, captain?"

"Look out for the breakers, boatswain."

"Ay, ay, sir. All hands on deck to man the captain's gig! Belay away there! Avast! Mind, Wenna, here's the bridge."

Crossing over that single plank in the dead of night was a sufficiently dangerous experiment, but both these young ladies had had plenty of experience in keeping their wits about them in more perilous places.

"Why are you in such a hurry, Mabyn?" Wenna asked when they had crossed.

Mabyn did not know what to answer: she was very much excited, and inclined to talk at random merely to cover her anxiety. She was now very late for the appointment, and who could tell what unfortunate misadventure Harry Trelyon might have met with?

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "Why don't you admire young Lochinvar? Wenna, you're like the Laodiceans."

"Like the what?"

"Like the Laodiceans, that were neither cold nor hot. Why don't you admire young Lochinvar?"

"Because he was interfering with another man's property."

"That man had no right to her," said Mabyn, talking rather wildly, and looking on ahead to the point at which the path through the meadows went up to the road. "He was a wretched animal, I know: I believe he was a sugar-broker, and had just come home from Jamaica."

"I believe," said Wenna--"I believe that young Lochinvar--" She stopped. "What's that?" she said. "What are those two lights up there?"

"They're not ghosts: come along, Wenna," said Mabyn, hurriedly.

* * * * *

Let us go up to this road, where Harry Trelyon, tortured with anxiety and impatience, is waiting. He had slipped away from the house pretty nearly as soon as the gentlemen had gone into the drawing-room after dinner, and on some excuse or other had got the horses put to a light and yet roomy Stanhope phaeton. From the stable-yard he drove by a back way into the main road without passing in front of the Hall: then he quietly walked the horses down the steep hill and round the foot of the valley to the point at which Mabyn was to make her appearance.

But he dared not stop there, for now and again some passer-by came along the road; and even in the darkness Mrs. Trelyon's gray horses would be recognized by any of the inhabitants of Eglosilyan, who would naturally wonder what Master Harry was waiting for. He walked them a few hundred yards one way, then a few hundred yards the other; and ever, as it seemed to him, the danger was growing greater of some one from the inn or from the Hall suddenly appearing and spoiling the whole plan.

Half-past ten arrived, and nothing could be heard of the girls. Then a horrible thought struck him that Roscorla might by this time have left the Hall, and would he not be coming down to this very road on his way up to Basset Cottage? This was no idle fear: it was almost a matter of certainty.

The minutes rolled themselves out into ages: he kept looking at his watch every few seconds, yet he could hear nothing from the wood or the valley of Mabyn's approach. Then he got down into the road, walked a few yards this way and that, apparently to stamp the nervousness out of his system, patted the horses, and finally occupied himself in lighting the lamps. He was driven by the delay into a sort of desperation. Even if Wenna and Mabyn did appear now, and if he was successful in his prayer, there was every chance of their being interrupted by Roscorla, who had without doubt left the Hall some time before.

Suddenly he stopped in his excited walking up and down. Was that a faint "Hurrah!" that he heard in the distance. He went down to the stile at the junction of the path and the road, and listened attentively. Yes, he could hear at least one voice, as yet a long way off, but now he had no more doubt. He walked quickly back to the carriage. "Ho, ho, my hearties!" he said, stroking the heads of the horses, "you'll have a Dick Turpin's ride to-night."

All the nervousness had gone from him now: he was full of a strange sort of exultation--the joy of a man who feels that the crisis in his life has come, and that he has the power and courage to face it.

He heard them come up through the meadow to the stile: it was Wenna who was talking--Mabyn was quite silent. They came along the road.

"What is this carriage doing here?" Wenna said.

They drew still nearer.

"They are Mrs. Trelyon's horses, and there is no driver."

At this moment Harry Trelyon came quickly forward and stood in the road before her, while Mabyn as quickly went on and disappeared. The girl was startled, bewildered, but not frightened; for in a second he had taken her by the hand, and then she heard him say to her, in an anxious, low, imploring voice, "Wenna, my darling, don't be alarmed. See here: I have got everything ready to take you away; and Mabyn is coming with us; and you know I love you so that I can't bear the notion of your falling into that man's hands. Now, Wenna, don't think about it. Come with me. We shall be married in London: Mabyn is coming with you."

For one brief second or two she seemed stunned and bewildered: then, looking at the carriage, and the earnest suppliant before her, the whole truth appeared to flash in upon her. She looked wildly round. "Mabyn--" she was about to say, when he guessed the meaning of her rapid look:

"Mabyn is here. She is quite close by--she is coming with us. My darling, won't you let me save you? This indeed is our last chance, Wenna."

She was trembling so that he thought she would fall; and he would have put his arms round her, but that she drew back, and in so doing she got into the light, and then he saw the immeasurable pity and sadness of her eyes.

"Oh, my love," she said with the tears running down her face, "I love you! I will tell you that now, when we speak for the last time. See, I will kiss you; and then you will go away."

"I will not go away--not without you--this night. Wenna, dearest, you have let your heart speak at last: now let it tell you what to do."

"Oh, must I go? Must I go?" she said; and then she looked wildly round again.

"Mabyn!" called out Trelyon, half mad with joy and triumph--"Mabyn, come along! Look sharp! jump in! This way, my darling!"

And he took the trembling girl and half lifted her into the carriage.

"Oh, my love, what am I doing for you this night?" she said to him with her eyes swimming in tears.

But what was the matter with Mabyn? She was just putting her foot on the iron step when a rapidly approaching figure caused her to utter a cry of alarm, and she stumbled back into the road again. The very accident that Trelyon had been anticipating had occurred: here was Mr. Roscorla, bewildered at first, and then blind with rage when he saw what was happening before his eyes. In his desperation and anger he was about to lay hold of Mabyn by the arm when he was sent staggering backward half a dozen yards.

"Don't interfere with me now, or by God I will kill you!" Trelyon said between his teeth, and then he hurried Mabyn into the carriage.

What was the sound then that the still woods heard under the throbbing stars through the darkness that lay over the land? Only the sound of horses' feet, monotonous and regular, and not a word of joy or sorrow uttered by any one of the party thus hurrying on through the night.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

CAMP-FIRE LYRICS.

I.--CAMP--IN THREE LIGHTS.

Against the darkness sharply lined
Our still white tents gleamed overhead,
And dancing cones of shadow cast
When sudden flashed the camp-fire red,

Where fragrant hummed the moist swamp-spruce,
And tongues unknown the cedar spoke,
While half a century's silent growth
Went up in cheery flame and smoke.

Pile on the logs! A flickering spire
Of ruby flame the birch-bark gives,
And as we track its leaping sparks,
Behold in heaven the North-light lives!

An arch of deep supremest blue,
A band above of silver shade,
And, like the frost-work's crystal spears,
A thousand lances grow and fade,

Or shiver, touched with palest tints
Of pink and blue, and changing die,
Or toss in one triumphant blaze
Their golden banners up the sky,

With faint, swift, silken murmurings,
A noise as of an angel's flight,
Heard like the whispers of a dream
Across the cool clear northern night.

Our pipes are out, the camp-fire fades,
The wild auroral ghost-lights die,
And stealing up the distant wood
The moon's white spectre floats on high,

And lingering sets in awful light
A blackened pine tree's ghastly cross,
Then swiftly pays in silver white
The faded fire, the aurora's loss.

EDWARD KEARSLEY.

OVERWORKED WOMEN.

In traveling through continental Europe one sees in the fields certain coarse and blackened creatures who walk somewhat erect, and in that respect resemble human beings. If you regard them with attention, they will stop to offer you some rude but humble mark of respect: if you heed them not, they will go on, as they have always gone on, with the work that is before them, and from which they never cease but to sleep or die. They have hands which are large and horny: they have faces somewhat like those of men, but coarse, hideous and furrowed with the lines of exposure. They speak, they have a language, but their words are few and relate only to the heavy drudgery which is before them. These humble and debased animals are women.

I remember, while traveling some years ago through the State of Pennsylvania with Mr. Foster, who was then the Vice-President of the United States, we saw from the window of the railway-carriage in which we were sitting a woman barelegged and at work in the fields. She was digging potatoes on some mountain-patch.

"Thank God," said Mr. Foster, "that I never saw such a sight in my own country before!"

According to the census of 1870 there were in the United States, out of a total population of 38,500,000, less than 400,000 females occupied in the labor of agriculture, either as field-hands or indoor workers. Of this number, 373,332 were hired laborers, and 22,681 the cultivators of their own lands. All of the former, and two-thirds of the latter, were freed-women in the late Slave States, and only 7994 females were employed in agriculture, either as laborers or proprietors, in or out of doors, in the Free States.

The States in which these few farm-women of the North were chiefly found were Wisconsin, which claimed 1387; Pennsylvania, 1279; and Illinois, 1034. In Pennsylvania the farm-women belonged almost exclusively to the population known as the "Pennsylvania Dutch," descendants of the Hessians and other Germans who settled in the State at the close of the Revolutionary War; in Illinois and Wisconsin they were recent immigrants from Europe, chiefly Germans, and for the most part, it is presumed, widows, who preferred to till the land left by their husbands rather than part with it.

With the exception of these trifling numbers, which, including even the freed-women, amount to but seven per cent. of the whole number of males employed in agriculture, it may be said, with entire correctness, that in the United States woman has been raised above the necessity of field-labor.

This is so far from being the case in Europe that in some countries all the women, except the few belonging to the aristocratic and bourgeois classes, are employed in the fields. One-third of the entire rural laboring population of Prussia and one-half of that of Russia are females. The following figures are from official sources:

COUNTRY. Total population. Total occupied in agriculture. United States, 1870 38,558,371 5,922,471 Prussia, 1867 19,607,710 3,286,954 Europ. Russia, exclud. Baltic Provs., 1863 59,097,859 26,362,435

Of whom Percentage of female Males. Females. to male agriculturists. 5,525,503 396,968 7 2,232,741 1,054,213 47

13,444,842 12,917,593 98

To every 100 men employed in field-work, there are in Russia 98 women, in Prussia 47, and in the United States but 7; and of the latter, nearly all are freed-women of the African race. I have heard men sneer at this statement, which I regard as matter for boasting--men who regretted it was true: "You Americans make too much of your women. You educate them above their rank in life, dress them like dolls and keep them for show. They are idle, and become enfeebled and vicious, and their progeny, if indeed they have any, partake of the same characteristics."

It is not alone foreigners who hold this language. There is among our own countrymen a growing class of admirers of what they are pleased to term the robust female, and "robust" with this class means hard-worked.

We have already seen the debased condition to which field-work, apparently, has reduced the peasant-women of continental Europe: we have seen that they resemble animals as much as they do women, so heavy and unremitting is the toil with which they are burdened.

"This only makes them hardy," cries the advocate of the robust school, who believes that hard work is good for everybody, even for women, yet carefully avoids it himself--avoids even hard thinking, which might teach him better doctrine. "It is thus that women become the mothers of a race of heroes."

Heroes! Moon-calves, rather; but we shall see.

Mr. Harris-Gastud in his late report to the British Foreign Office on Prussia, after mentioning the north-eastern provinces of that country, and the immorality, drunkenness and thieving propensities of its peasantry, thus continues (p. 361): "The system of contract laborers, under obligation to bring one or two other laborers into the field, is in some measure responsible for the immorality, inasmuch as the one or two, so to speak, gang-laborers, are usually girls, who live in the same room as the family. Children are not carefully tended and reared. The wives are obliged to work daily throughout summer and autumn, and on many properties in winter also. They go very early to work, are free half an hour before midday to prepare the dinner and do other household work, and return to work till sunset. The children come badly off. Often there is no older child to take charge of the little ones, who are consequently left to themselves in the house. A direct result is the great mortality of children. From 1858 to 1861 there died in the province of Prussia, out of a total population of 2,190,072, an annual average of 21,290 children under one year, and of 40,845 children under ten years, being 0.97 and 1.86 per cent. of the population; whereas in the Rhine province, with a population of 2,112,959, the percentages were 0.57 and 1.12 respectively."

In 1870 in the United States, with a total population in town and country of 38,558,371, the number of deaths of children under one year was 110,445, and under ten years 229,542, being 0.29 and 0.59 respectively. In other words, where one child dies in the United States, _two_ die in the Rhenish provinces of Prussia, and _more than three_ in one of the north-eastern provinces.

I was in Berlin in the autumn of 1872, when there was a meeting there of the emperors of Germany, Russia and Austria. Every preparation had been made for this august convocation, among others that of banishing from the streets all unpleasant sights. Yet on that occasion, when Unter den Linden was crowded with carriages and horsemen and well-dressed people, when Russia and Austria were dashing about in open barouches, with outriders before and guardsmen behind, and the eye encountered on all sides the bravery of military uniforms and arms and waving pennants, I saw in a side-street a woman drawing a hand-cart laden with some heavy substance that was piled up to the height of four or five feet above the rails of the cart. Beside this poor slave, who withal carried an infant upon her back which could not have been more than a few weeks old, struggled a dog, with whom she was harnessed to the cart. Poor wretch! I thought, and the husband recently dead, too! I could not think of her as a _widow_, for, in truth, she did not look human enough. She was not over thirty years of age, but a coarser-looking hag I never saw the picture of. Presently a man in crossing the street indulged in some pleasantry at her expense, when she threatened to call her husband to chastise him. Husband? Yes, sure enough, there he was, walking leisurely _behind_ the cart, with his hands in his pockets, smoking his pipe and gazing at the sights along the route.

If we would know the origin of this brutality to women wherever it is practiced, we must look for it in the history of slavery, for there we shall always find it. It was not the peasant-man who first brutalized his wife and daughter, but the lord. If the ancient rights of the peasantry had not been molested, and an oppressive system of feudal exactions forced upon men who once were free and owners of the soil they tilled, the slavery of women could hardly have occurred. It is now nearly seventy years since the first decree that eventually resulted in the abolition of serfdom in Prussia was promulgated, and time is rapidly effacing many of the social evils which that institution entailed. But this is not the case with Russia, where emancipation was only declared ten years ago, and is not completed even yet. The causes that superinduce the degradation and debasement of women can therefore still be seen at work in that country, and are thus depicted by an eye-witness. He is speaking of the condition of the peasantry of Russia subsequent to the decree of emancipation, and so far as my own observation in that country goes, I can corroborate all that he says: "Their food begins to get scantier and scantier, and toward spring they get more and more famished. The officer of government (who since the act of emancipation replaces the officer of the lord of the manor) comes and energetically demands the payment of arrears. Driven to desperation, the peasant acknowledges to the mayor of the village the cause of his want of punctuality--viz., the demands made upon him by his family, and particularly by his wife. 'Give her a good thrashing,' is the advice of the mayor. The mujik goes home, ties his wife by her hair to the tail of a cart, and flogs her unmercifully with a whip. At a convenient opportunity he will give his mother a knock or two on the head with a log of wood. If any member of the family should die from privation, his death is attributed to fate." Passing to the description of a village community of higher civilization, the author continues: "The chief features of such a village are fewer thrashings, a more perceptible tendency to personal adornment on the part of the women, a larger number of bachelors, and the existence even of old maids--_i. e._, in the sense only of unmarried women. In such villages _fêtes_ are held each Sunday, and all the village games, accompanied by much kissing, terminate in the coarsest sensuality. Immorality prevails, followed by infanticide." (_Condition of the Laboring Classes of Russia_, by N. Flerofski, 1869.)

For the sake of obtaining an additional laborer in the family it was customary for the Russian serf to marry his son of tender years to a woman of riper age, particularly in households where the father had become a widower, and where, consequently, the family had lost a female laborer. The son was then sent out to work in the fields, and this circumstance, together with the subjection and degradation of women in a social organization in which even the man was a mere chattel, favored the existence of a crime that greatly complicated the relations of blood in a peasant family, and often led to the brutal treatment of helpless wives by infuriated husbands. Nor did the evil stop even with a partial amelioration of the cause, but tended for a time to reproduce itself; for the son, grown to a ripe age and bound to a wife now old and wrinkled, would revenge himself by treating his own son in the manner in which he had been treated himself.

Says Flerofski: "Women who assist in floating barges down the rivers from the province of Vologda (in North-eastern Russia, three hundred to five hundred miles above Nijni-Novgorod) to Nijni-Novgorod receive two and a half roubles (about $2) for the journey. Both men and women work until they become exhausted, and return back to their villages on foot. Their master, the contractor, who is bound to support them until they return, hastens as much as possible their homeward tramp, in order to save expense, compelling them to walk eighty versts (fifty-five miles) a day along village roads and byways. They will sometimes have to wade for twenty miles through water and mud up to their knees.... The peasant is ready to carry any burden, to suffer anything, to impose any privations on his family, provided his principal object be attained, which is to obtain means of paying his quit-rent and taxes. For that purpose he will not unfrequently send his young daughter alone to float timber down the rivers. Bending under the weight of labor unfitted for her age or sex, the unhappy creature becomes the object of every form of bad usage. Without sufficient experience or force of will, compelled to spend days and nights among dissolute men, she falls an unwilling victim.... The laborer is so poor, miserable and debased that he cannot save his daughter from exposure to positions in which she must voluntarily or involuntarily be drawn into a course of immorality. His principal care is to place her where she can earn some money."

In some of the industrial districts of Russia villages may still be found populated at certain seasons of the year exclusively by women and children. The women plough the land, sow, reap, work on the roads and pay the taxes. They fill the offices of _starosta_ (policeman) and tax-gatherer; in short, conduct the entire communal administration. On the shores of the White Sea women often drive the post-carts, whence that branch of the service has taken the name of _sarafannaya_ or "petticoat post." Where are the men who should be seen in these villages of Amazons--the fathers, husbands, brothers, sons of these hard-worked women? Drafted into the army or gone to seek work in the adjacent towns.

The terrible burdens which the government and social system of Russia heap upon the peasant-man can best be realized from a description of its effects upon the unhappy creature whom this man, himself a slave in all but name, may treat--nay, almost must treat--as a slave. To pay the quit-rent and taxes the peasant hires himself to the neighboring lord to mow his corn at sixty-five cents an acre--a price which falls to forty cents an acre before the harvest is completed. At the most, he can earn an average of twenty-five cents a day, for his food has been poor, his body is weak, his hands tremble, his scythe is antiquated and blunders at its work. Yet swath after swath marks the sweep of his arms, and his poor dull mind is filled with the thought of the day of liberation that is drawing nigh. Still, he has not earned by a good deal the sum that will save him from starvation. Starvation! Why? Because should he fail to pay, the lord has the power, and will not fail, to seize every piece of property which the peasant has in the world--his cow, his bed, his clothing, even the uncut corn upon his little field, the very bread from off his table. Where is that lord? Has he no heart, no mercy? Alas! he is far away, in Vienna, in Rome, in Paris. He is at the Carnival, the opera, the club-house. He has presented a diamond necklace to Schneider, he has bought a new race-horse, he has lost fifty thousand francs at _rouge et noir_. Meanwhile, his agent and the law do his cruel bidding far away at home upon the bleak plains of Russia, and the peasant works under them as Damocles sat under the sword.

In such peril and fear shall the woman stand idle? Idle she never is, even from inclination, her household duties, the care of the young, the ministration to the sick and feeble, the preparation of the daily meal, being sufficient to keep her fully employed. But shall she stop at these when failure on the man's part may to-morrow sweep away not only the few articles of clothing and the one or two of furniture they possess, but also the food which is to last them during the coming year? The thought is death itself. She must go to the fields. No matter how young her child, nor how near to death her aged mother or father; no matter how rigorous the climate or deficient her clothing: she must go to the fields. They are miles away, perhaps--for in Russia, serfdom, the communal system and other circumstances have forced the peasantry to live in villages--but go she must, with the child on her back or left ailing and uncared-for in the hut, with the sick or dying behind her and misery all around. Arrived at the scene of her unnatural labors, she applies herself to them with an energy which despair alone could engender, and which ends in completely unsexing her. She becomes weatherbeaten, coarse and repulsive. Her hands are like knots of wood; she is covered with dirt; her bones have grown large; her step is ungainly; she speaks in husky tones; she swears, drinks and fights. Meanwhile the corn ripens. After gigantic efforts she succeeds in harvesting it. At best it would have repaid the seed but three times, but gathered and threshed with insufficient skill or barbarous tools, it scarcely more than doubles the perilous investment. Then this poor creature casts herself upon the earth and weeps, for are not both parent and child dead from exposure, from insufficient food, from the lack of that attention which she alone could have conferred? The links that bound her poor, rugged, but still woman's heart to both the sad past and the hopeful future are severed, and she is almost alone in the world. But her husband returns, and his joyful looks reanimate her. He has succeeded. The tax is paid, and they are free for another year. But at what a cost!

This sketch is far from being exaggerated. Too often does it happen that despite these sacrifices the tax is not paid. Says Flerofski: "Along that road walks a peasant's family in sorrowful procession, shedding bitter tears. Is it a funeral? No, it is only the last calf being led for sale with the aid of the local authorities. It is necessary to levy rents with strictness, for are not the proprietors already ruined?" (He means, ironically, by the emancipation of the serfs.) "And, in fact, were it not for the deep impression thus made on the peasant, did he not know that his last food-giving beast would be taken from him, his last pot of milk carried out of his hut, although wanted for his newborn child, which would perish without it, the landed proprietors could not collect the tenth part of their rents."

In 1856 the Rev. T. Giliarofski, gold-medalist and corresponding member of the Russian Geographical Society, published an inquiry into the frequency and causes of infant mortality in the province of Novgorod, the results of which are true to this day concerning the greater part of Central, Eastern and Northern Russia. Let those who believe that it is wise and merciful to subject women to hard work read the ghastly story. In the first place, the reverend author mentions the notorious fact that the statistics of illegitimate births in Russia, in which they are stated to be but one-thirtieth of all the births, are kept down by the great prevalence of certain practices, to which it is not necessary to make further allusion here than to say that they put to shame all the implications contained in Dr. Storer's erroneous pamphlet as to the habits of Massachusetts women. Next, the Russian priest states that the number of births is nearly the same in each month of the year, and that out of 10,000 children born, 5537 die during the month of their birth. Three out of four registered births in the months of July and August are deaths before the termination of those months severally. By the twelfth month death summons three-fourths, five-sevenths, or even six-sevenths, of the infants born in some districts of Novgorod.

Now listen to the cause of this frightful waste of human life: "It is the great mortality in July and August that causes the terrible destruction of infant life in Russia. Those months are the months of harvest, when the peasant-women are forced by necessity to leave their newborn infants to be nursed by children four or five years old, or by old women whose hands can no longer grasp the reaping-hook. Fed on sour rye bread and cabbage- or mushroom-water, working as much as the men, having less sleep, keeping more religious fasts, the peasant-women are only exceptionally capable of rearing their children by the natural process."... "I have seen children not a year old left for twenty-four hours entirely alone, and in order that they should not die of hunger feeding-bottles were attached to their hands and feet." In other cases poultices of rye bread, oatmeal, curds, etc. are placed over the infants' mouths by the miserable mothers who are obliged to leave them to work in the fields. These poultices frequently choke or suffocate the child. Domestic animals invade the hut, and deprive the infant of even this wretched food. The cries of the child for sustenance produce internal distensions which result in hernia and other disorders of a like nature, which are very common in Russia. We shall see presently to what degree these sad marks of neglect affect the strength and physical capacity of those who survive such an infancy and become men.

Meanwhile, let us regard for a moment the sufferings of the peasant mothers. Their confinement frequently takes place in a hut devoted to the purposes of a steam-bath, or, in summer, in a barn, stable or outhouse. Many a poor woman is obliged to bear her great trial unattended--perhaps even without those appliances the absence of which will compel her, even against her better nature, to follow the instinct of brutes. In three days, at the utmost, she leaves the scene of her unspeakable agony and resumes her household duties, even her hard field-work. Cases occur in which the mother of only one day is forced by the hardship of circumstances to take to the field. Of course, these women, so cruelly enslaved, are to the last degree ignorant. What time, even if opportunity offered, have they for schooling, or even discourse? None whatever. They are but little superior in intellect to animals. Naturally, this ignorance begets superstition, and from this source arise new perils for their miserable offspring. On the third day after birth it is considered necessary to baptize the child by complete immersion in water, from which it is held by the Russian Church to be a sin to remove the chill. A large proportion of the deaths of infants in the colder months of the year are attributed by native writers to this cause.

Mothers who have been able to suckle their own children generally wean them at the expiration of twelve months, and popular custom, which takes rank as a superstition, has appointed two days in the year for that purpose--one in July, the other in January. Both of these periods are unfavorable to the child: in July the cattle are mostly afflicted with disorders, and their milk is hurtful; in January they give but little milk. Various devices, more or less prejudicial to health, are resorted to by the mother to effect a purpose to which the grossest ignorance and superstition alone impel her. One of the mildest of these is separation from her child for a week or longer: frequently she returns to find it a corpse.

And now let us see what sort of men are born of these overworked women. According to the statistical tables of Brun and Zernof, the number of persons of both sexes alive between the ages of fifteen and sixty was in Russia only 265 in 1000; in the United States in 1870 the number was 558. In Great Britain there are 548 adults to every 1000 population, and in Belgium 518; so that Russia, which, from the subjection of the weaker sex and their exposure to hardship, should, according to some persons, produce the greatest number of heroes, in fact produces but half as many adults, heroes or otherwise, as the other countries named, where women do but little field-labor.

Even among those who from their ages are to be classed in Russia as productive, great allowance must be made for physical incapacity. A large number of the men are afflicted with deformity or disease: many of them can scarcely drag themselves along. Out of 174,000 men brought up from the villages to recruiting centres to supply the annual contingent (84,000 men) of 1868, more than one-fourth (44,000) were rejected for disease and other physical defects, not inclusive of short stature. In Prussia, the other principal European country where women are compelled to field-work, out of every 1000 men liable to military service in 1864, no less than 467 were rejected for disease and other physical defects, not inclusive of short stature. These are the heroes whom female slavery brings forth!

Woman is an invalid, says Michelet, therefore she must not work. Woman is not an invalid, therefore she is willing to work, and does work. But that work has its proper sphere at the domestic hearth; and so long as fortune does not lift the family above the cares of daily want, or genius elevate the individual to the rank of teacher or leader, there should it be suffered to remain.

ALEXANDER DELMAR.

SPRING JOY

The wet red glebe shines in the April light,
The gray hills deepen into green again;
The rainbow hangs in heaven; thin vapors white

Drift o'er the blue, and freckle hill and plain
With many moving shades; the air is strong
With earth's rich exhalations after rain.

Like a new note breaks forth the ancient song
Of spring-tide birds, with fresh hope, fresh delight.
Low o'er the fields the marsh-hawk sails along;

Aloft small flocks of pigeons wing their flight;
Alive with sound and movement is the air;
The short young grass with sunlight rain is bright;

The cherry trees their snow-white garlands wear;
The garden pranks itself with leaf and flower;
Quick with live seeds the patient earth lies bare.

Oh joy! to see in this expectant hour
The spirit of life, as on creation's day,
Striving toward perfect form! No fear hath power,

No sense of failure past hath strength to sway
The immortal hope which swells within the breast,
That this new earth matures not toward decay,

But toward a beauty hitherto unguessed,
A harvest never dreamed. These mild bright skies,
This lovely uncompleted world, suggest

A powerful joy, a thrill of high surprise,
Which no fruition ever may inspire,
Albeit each bud should flower, each seed should rise.

EMMA LAZARUS.

HOW LADY LOUISA MOOR AMUSED HERSELF.

I.

The earl of Birndale was the magnate of the district. He was a tall, strong, coarse-looking man: had he chanced to have been born in the position of a coal-heaver, no one would have been surprised if he had been hauled up before a magistrate for beating his wife or for squaring his fists at any time and at any person as the humor seized him; or if he had been a wharf-porter, he would have heaved a load on his shoulders and carried it in a way to make puny specimens of the race sick with envy. But he was born the son of an earl, and the coal-heaver propensities had been trained and trimmed in patrician fashion. An earl on occasion may fly into a passion, but he may not beat his wife: the earl of Birndale did the one, and didn't do the other, nor was he in the least conscious of the undeveloped coal-heaver he carried about with him. On the contrary, his pride of birth and rank was enormous. His physical strength not having been exercised in carrying loads, it had brought him to his sixtieth year younger and more erect than many men of forty, and even yet he employed it in felling trees: a high civilization goes back for its amusement to what was the toil of primeval times. And he never walked about his property without a hammer and nails, so that if he came to any fence broken or breaking down, he could mend it, as was very right and proper; but when people hear of an earl, they connect the title with something lofty in the way of employment, and it is certain that the village joiner would have mended the fences better than the earl. But no doubt it was an innocent amusement, and _noblesse_ did not _oblige_ the earls of Birndale: every man of them had always done what was right in his own eyes. Why, the brother whom this earl had succeeded passed a good deal of his time knitting, but he was the only one of his race that had taken to that peaceful, aged-woman-looking employment: the rest had not knitted anything except their brows, and all of them had been pretty good at that.

There had been statesmen of the race, and there had been blackguards, and there had been some of them who combined both characters in their own persons. This earl had been in Parliament, for a short time even in the cabinet, and for several years he had been governor in one of the colonies; and in each of these positions he had made a respectable figure. Every one has heard of the Swedish chancellor's remark to his son: "Go, my son, and see with how little wisdom the world is governed." If the earl had not great wisdom, he had a strong will; and a strong will, backed by rank and wealth, will go a very long way even when accompanied by a small modicum of intellect. He was a Tory of the Tories--not of course, however, for the family had never stuck to one line of politics--and he held that most men need to be governed, and that only a few are fit to govern the rest, of which few he himself was an illustrious example. But since his return from abroad he had not taken, or desired to take, a lead in political matters: he preferred living quietly on his estates, and for the greater part of the year at Birns Castle, as the seat of the Birndale family was called, the village in its neighborhood being known as "The Birns."