Chapter II (1)

It was not Laidley who entered, but Mrs. Combe, then the most-famous clairvoyant in the United States. According to statements of men both shrewd and honest she had lately succeeded in bringing the dead back to them in actual bodily presence. The voice was heard, then the spirit slowly grew into matter beside them. They could feel and see its warm flesh, its hair and clothing, and even while they held it it melted again into the impalpable air, and was gone. The account was attested by persons of such integrity and prominence as to command attention from scientific men. They knew, of course, that it was a trick, but the trick must be so well managed as to be worth the trouble of exposure. Hence, Mrs. Combe upon her entrance was received with silent, keen attention.

She was a tall pillar-like woman, with some heavy drapery of black velvet or cloth about her: there were massive coils of coarse black hair, dead narrow eyes of the same color, a closely-shut jaw: no point of light in the figure, but a rope of unburnished gold about her neck. She stood with her hands dropped at her sides, immovable, while her husband, a greasy little manikin with a Jewish face, turned on the light and waved the attention of the audience to her: "This is Miriam Combe, the first person since the Witch of Endor who has succeeded in materializing the shpirits of the dead. Our meeting here to-day is under peculiar shircumstances. A zhentleman unknown to me and Mrs. Combe, but who, I am told, is near death, desires to recall the shpirit of a dead friend. Zhentlemans will reconize the fact that the thing we propose to do depends upon the states of minds and matters about us. If these elements are disturbed by unbelief or by too much light or noise when the soul shtruggling to return wants silence and darkness, why--it cannot make for itself a body--dat's all."

"You compel belief, in a word, before you prove to us that we ought to believe," said a professor from a Baptist college in New Jersey, smiling blandly down upon him. "Scientifically--"

"I knows noting of scientifics. I knows dat my wife hash de power to ashist de souls to clode demselves wid matter. I don't pretend to explain where she got dat power, I don't know what ish dat power: I only know she hash it. If zhentlemans will submit to the conditions, they shall zhoodge for demselves."

"Now, the ignorance of this man impresses me favorably," said the professor to his friends. "He is evidently incapable of inventing a successful trick even of conjuring. If any great unknown force of Nature has chosen him or his wife as tools, we should not despise the manifestation because the tools are very gross matter. They are the steel wire charged with the lightning, perhaps."

Dr. Dehr came forward and touched the motionless woman, shaking his head solemnly: "She is highly charged with electricity now, sir. The air is vital, as I might say, with spiritual presences. I have no doubt, gentlemen, before we part, that we shall see one of the most remarkable phenomena of the nineteenth century."

"How well she poses!" whispered Miss Fleming to the judge. "But the stage-properties are bad: the velvet is cotton, and the gold brass-gilt."

"Now, to me," said the judge emphatically, "there is a dreadful reality, a dead look, in her face. What Poe would have made of this scene! There was a man who could grapple with these supreme mysteries! No! that woman undoubtedly has learned the secret of life and of death. She can afford to be passive." The judge's very whisper was judicial, though pulpy.

It was not possible that the woman should have heard them, yet a moment after she lifted her eyes and motioned slowly toward them.

"God bless my soul, ma'am! You don't want me!" cried the judge.

Waring half rose, laughing, but with cold chills down his backbone, and then dropped into his seat, relieved: "You are the chosen victim, Miss Fleming."

Cornelia went up to the medium. She was confident the whole affair was a vulgar trick, but there was a stricture at her heart as if an iron hand had been laid upon it. The energy went out of her step, the blood from her face.

The woman laid her hand on her arm. "I need you," she said in a deep voice. "You have great magnetic force: you can aid this soul to return to life if you will. Sit there." She placed both her hands lightly on Cornelia's forehead. Miss Fleming dropped into the seat: she could not have done otherwise.

"Before we opens the seance," proceeded Combe, "zhentlemans can examine de cabinet and convince demselves dere is no trick."

The cabinet was a light triangular structure of black walnut, about seven feet in height, placed in one corner of the room, though with an open space between it and the wall. It moved on casters: the door was on the side facing the audience. Miss Fleming observed with amusement that the seat given her removed her to the farthest distance from this door.

"You will notish dat dere is absolutely noting in de cabinet but a chair--zhoost de walls and de floor and de chair. Miriam will sit there, and de door will be closed. When it opens you will see de embodied spirit beside her."

"Hillo!" cried the judge, "what's this behind the cabinet?"

"It is a window overlooking de garden: I had it boarded up to prevent you sushpecting me of trickery. But you sushpect mine boards, mein Gott! Exshamine dem, exshamine dem! Go outside."

The judge did so. "They are screwed on honestly enough," he said to the spectators. "A ghost had need of a battering-ram to come through that window. It opens on an area thirty feet deep."

The woman went into the cabinet and the door was closed. Steps were heard upon the stairs.

"It ish de zhentleman who calls for de shpirit to appear," said Combe in a whisper.

The door opened, and Laidley, supported by Captain Swendon, entered, giving a quick appealing look about him as he halted for a moment on the threshold. The dignity of approaching death was in his weak, ghastly face, and the judge rose involuntarily, just as he would have stood uncovered if a corpse had gone by. Laidley took the seat which the captain with his usual bluster placed for him opposite the door of the cabinet. Combe turned out the lights: the room was in absolute darkness. The judge moved uneasily near to Waring: "Don't laugh at me, Mr. Waring. But I really feel that there is a Presence in this room which is not human. I wish I had listened to my wife. She does not approve of this sort of thing at all: she thinks no good churchman should meddle with it. But there is _something_ in the room."

"Yes, I am conscious of what you mean. But it is a physical force, not spiritual. Not electricity, either. It is something which has never affected my senses before. Whatever it is, it is the stock in trade of these people."

They were ordered by Combe to join hands, and everybody obeyed excepting the captain's daughter, who stood unnoticed by one of the curtained windows.

A profound silence followed, broken by a stifled sob from some over-nervous woman. The low roll of an organ filled the void and died. After that there was no complete sound but at intervals the silence took breath, spoke in a half-articulate wail, and was dumb again.

Pale nebulous light shone in the cabinet and faded: then a single ray fell direct on Laidley's face. It stood out from the night around like a bas-relief--livid, commonplace, a presentment of every-day death. Each man present suddenly saw his own grave open, and the world beyond brought within reach through this insignificant man.

"The spirits of many of the dead are present," said the sepulchral voice within the cabinet. "What do you ask of them?"

Laidley's lips moved: he grasped the arms of his chair, half rose: then he fumbled mechanically in his pocket for his cigar-case, and not finding it sank back helplessly.

"What do you ask of them? Their time is brief."

"I'm a very ill man," he piped feebly: "the doctors give me no hope at all. I want advice about a certain matter before--before it's too late. It is a great wrong I have done that I want to set right."

"Can any of the dead counsel you? Or do you summon one soul to appear?"

"There is but one who knows."

"Call for her, then."

Laidley looked about him uncertainly: then he said in a hoarse whisper, "Virginie Morot!"

The captain sprang to his feet: "My wife? No, no! for God's sake!"

The light was swiftly drawn back into the cabinet and extinguished. After several minutes the voice was heard again: "The spirit summoned is present. But it has not the force to resume a material body unless the need is urgent. You must state the question you would have answered."

"I must see Virginie here, in bodily presence, before I'll accept any answer," said Laidley obstinately. "I'll have no hocus-pocus by mediums or raps. If the dead know anything, she knows why I need her. I have had money to which she had a--well, a claim. I've not spent it, perhaps, in the best way. I have a mind now to atone for my mistake by leaving it to a charity where I know it will do great good."

An amazed whistle broke through the darkness from the corner where the judge sat. The captain caught Laidley's shoulder. "William," he whispered, "surely you forget Jane."

Laidley shook him off. "The money is my own," he said loudly, "to do with as I choose. But if Virginie can return from the dead, she shall decide for me."

"It's enough to bring her back," muttered the judge. "Do you hear that?" thumping Waring's knee--"that miserable shrimp swindling her child in order to buy God's good-will for himself!"

There was a prolonged silence. At last a voice was heard: "She will appear to you."

The organ rolled heavily, low soft thunders of music rose and fell, a faint yellowish vapor stole out from under the cabinet and filled the darkness with a visible haze. Captain Swendon stumbled to his feet and went back to his daughter: "I can't bear it, child! I can't bear it!" dropping into a chair.

She took his hand in her own, which were quite cool, and stroked and kissed it. But she did not speak nor take her eyes from the door of the cabinet.

It opened. Within sat Miriam, immovable, her eyes closed. Beside her stood a shadowy luminous figure covered with a filmy veil. It moved forward into the room. So thick was the vapor that the figure itself appeared but a shade.

Laidley stooped forward, his hands on his knees, his lips apart, his eyes dilated with terror.

The veil slowly fell from the face of the spirit, and revealed, indistinctly as the negative of a photograph, a small thin woman with eager, restless eyes, and black hair rolled in puffs high on the head in the fashion of many years ago.

"Virginie!" gasped Laidley.

The captain shuddered, and hid his face. His daughter, with a quick step backward, threw aside the curtains and flung open the shutters. The broad daylight streamed in.

Combe sprang toward her with an oath.

The young girl held back the curtain steadily. "We need fresh air," she said smiling resolutely in his face.

The rush of air, the daylight, the cheerful voice wakened the room as out of a vision of death. The men started to their feet; there was a tumult of voices and laughter; the materialized soul staggered back to reach the cabinet. The whole of the cheap trickery was bared: her hair was an ill-fitting wig, the chalk lay in patches on her face, the vapor of Hades was only salt burning in a dish: the boards removed from the window showed her snug hiding-place inside.

Dr. Dehr's fury made itself heard above the confusion: "You have brought Spiritualism into disrepute by your infernal imposture!" clutching the poor wretch by the shoulder, while another intemperate disciple called loudly for the police. The woman began to sob, but did not utter a word.

"Let her go, doctor," said Mr. Waring, coming up. "We paid to see a farce, and it was really a very nice bit of acting. This poor girl was hired, no doubt: she is only earning her living."

"What has she done?" cried Dehr. "Spiritualism in Philadelphia never has attracted the class of investigators that are here to-day, and she--" shaking her viciously--"she's an impostor!"

"Damnation! she's a woman!" wrenching his hand from her. She gave Waring a keen furtive glance, and drew quickly aside. While some of the seekers after truth demanded their five dollars back with New England obstinacy, and Combe chattered and screeched at them, she stood in the middle of the room, immovable, her sombre sallow face set, her tawdry stage-properties about her--the crown of false black hair, the sweeping drapery, the smoking dish with fumes of ghastly vapor.

Mr. Waring went up to a short, broadly-built man in gray who had been seated in the background during the seance. "I did not know that you were in town or here, Mr. Neckart," he said with a certain marked respect. "That is not an unpicturesque figure, I think. She would serve as a study of Night, now--a stormy, muggy town-night, full of ooze and slime." Mr. Waring's manner and rhetoric were uneasy and deferential. Mr. Neckart was a power in a region quite outside of the little fastidious gossiping club of men and women whom he was wont to call the World.

"Your Night, apparently, has little relish for the morning," he said.

The woman's threatening eyes, in fact, were fixed on the tall fair girl, the captain's daughter, who stood in the window, busied with buttoning her father's overcoat and pinning his empty sleeve to his breast. She was looking up at him, and talking: the wind stirred her loose pale-gold hair; behind her branches of white roses from a vine outside thrust themselves in at the window: the birds chirped in the rustling maples beyond.

"What a wonderful effect of light and color!" said Waring, who had lounged through studios and galleries enough to enable him to parcel out the world into so many bits of palette and brush-work. "Observe the atmosphere of sunshine and youth. Cabanel might paint the girl's face for the Dawn. Eyes of that profound blue appear to hold the light latent."

"There seems to be unusual candor in them," said Mr. Neckart, glancing carelessly at Jane again, and drawing on his gloves. "A lack of shrewdness remarkable in an American woman."

"The Swendons are Swedes by descent, you know. A little phlegm, a lack of passion, is to be expected, eh? Now, my own taste prefers the American type--features animated by a nimbler brain; as there, for example," looking toward Miss Fleming. "Ugly beyond apology. But there is a subtle attraction in it."

"No doubt you are right. I really know very little about women," indifferently. He nodded good-evening, glancing at his watch as he went out.

The captain was conscious of some malignant influence at his back, and turning, saw the woman, who had gradually approached, and now stood still. He hastily stepped between her and his daughter: "Good God! Stand back, Jane! This woman is following you."

"She looks as if she had the evil eye. But they are very fine eyes," said the young girl, inspecting her quietly, as if she had been a toad that stood suddenly upright in her way.

"I owe you an ill turn, and I shall pay it," said the woman with a tragic wave of the arms. "I had a way to support myself and my boy for a year, and you have taken it from me."

"It was such a very poor way! Such a shabby farce! And it was my mother that--" She stopped, a slight tremor on the fair, quiet face.

"Oh, I shall pay you!" The woman gathered her cheap finery about her and swept from the room.

In the confusion Judge Rhodes had sought out Laidley, full of righteous wrath on behalf of his friend the captain, against this limp fellow who was going to enter heaven with a paltering apology for dishonesty on his lips. Laidley, however, was reclining in the easy-chair with his eyes closed, and the closed eyes gave so startling an appearance of death to the face that the judge was thrown back in his headlong charge. "Why, why, William! I'm sorry to see you looking so under the weather," he said kindly.

Laidley's eyes began to blink: he smiled miserably: "It's too late to throw the blame on the weather, judge. Though I'm going back to Aiken next week. I came North too soon."

"This affair has turned out a more palpable humbug than I expected," trying to approach the point at issue by a gentle roundabout ascent. "I wish Van Ness had been here--Pliny Van Ness. There's a man whose advice I seek since I came to Philadelphia on all important matters. A man whose integrity, justice--God bless me, William! You must know Pliny Van Ness. Why don't you take his counsel, instead of meddling with these wretched mediums? Raising the dead to tell you what to do? Bah! If you had asked me, now--"

Laidley had drawn himself up in the chair, his watery eyes gathering a faint eagerness: "Sit down. Here. I wish to speak to you, judge. Nobody will hear us."

"Certainly. As you ask me now--I know the whole case. Don't try to talk: it only makes you cough. You want to say that the property--"

"I want to say nothing about the property. My will was made last week. I am determined to throw my means into that channel where it will best contribute to God's service. He will not scorn a late repentance. But Van Ness--it was about Van Ness I wanted to talk to you."

"If your will was made last week, why did you try to bring back poor dead Virginie to advise you?"

"I don't know," said Laidley, coughing nervously--"I don't know. I thought she would confirm me--I--I want to be just to her daughter, God knows!"

"What is your idea of justice?"

"Why this--this," eagerly, catching the judge's red, fat hand in his cold fingers. "Jane will be a woman whom Van Ness would be apt to approve. I know he's fastidious. But she's very delicate and fair--as fine a bit of human flesh as I ever saw. As for mind, she has none. A mere child. He could mould her--mould her. Eh? I think I could throw out an inducement which would lead him to look favorably on her--when she's of a marriageable age, that is. If the girl were married to such a man as Van Ness, surely she would be well placed for life. Nobody could blame me for not making an heiress of her."

"Jane? Van Ness?" said the judge thoughtfully. "Well, Van Ness is a man whom any woman in the country should be proud to marry. But he is impregnable to that sort of thing. And Jane is but a child, as you say. The scheme seems to me utterly unfeasible, Laidley. Besides, what has it to do with her claims on you?"

"It has everything to do with them. I give her instead of money a home and husband such as no money can buy. They must be brought together, judge. You must do it. I have a word to say to Van Ness that will open his eyes to her merits. I will plant the seed, as I might say. It will grow fast enough."

The judge was silent as he helped Laidley, still talking eagerly, down the stairs and into his carriage. The whole fantastic scheme was, as he saw, the cowardly device of the dying man to appease his conscience. That this poor creature should have any power to influence Van Ness, the purest and strongest of men, was a mere bit of braggadocio, which surely did not deceive even Laidley himself.

But what could he do? To stab with reproach, even to argue with this nerveless, worn-out man, flaccid in mind and body, seemed to the kindly old fellow as cruel as to torture a dying fish or other cold-blooded creature of whose condition or capacity for suffering he could have no just idea.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE SWEETENER.

Spring blossom, rose of June and autumn-cluster
Appeal alike unto the bloom of health,
In whose spontaneous, overflowing lustre
Is half the secret of the season's wealth.

The pallid cheek may warm to apple-flushes,
The fevered lip kiss fondly sweets of June,
The languid palate leap to fruitage luscious,
Yet weary of their day before the noon.

'Tis laughing Health, with an unhindered fountain
Of joy upbubbling from her being's core,
Whose lavish life embraces vale or mountain,
And drains delight at every opened door.

MARY B. DODGE.

AN ENGLISH EASTER.

It may be said of the English as is said of the council of war in Sheridan's farce of _The Critic_ by one of the spectators of the rehearsal, that when they _do_ agree their unanimity is wonderful. They differ among themselves greatly just now as regards the machinations of Russia, the derelictions of Turkey, the propriety of locking up the Reverend Arthur Tooth for his Romanizing excesses, the histrionic merits of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters; but neither just now nor at any other time do they fail to conform to those social observances on which Respectability has set her seal. England is a country of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with her being so interesting to foreign observers. The English individual character is very positive, very independent, very much made up according to its own sentiment of things, very prone to startling eccentricities; and yet at the same time it has beyond any other this peculiar gift of squaring itself with fashion and custom. In no other country, I imagine, are so many people to be found doing the same thing in the same way at the same time--using the same slang, wearing the same hats and cravats, collecting the same china-plates, playing the same game of lawn-tennis or of "polo," flocking into the same skating-rinks. The monotony of this spectacle would soon become oppressive if the foreign observer were not conscious of this latent capacity in the performers for the free play of character; he finds a good deal of entertainment in wondering how they reconcile the traditional insularity of the individual with this perpetual tribute to custom. Of course in all civilized societies the tribute to custom is being constantly paid; if it is less observable in America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think, because individual independence is greater, but because custom is more sparsely established. Where we have customs people certainly follow them; but for five American customs there are fifty English. I am very far from having discovered the secret; I have not in the least learned what becomes of that explosive personal force in the English character which is compressed and corked down by social conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of the manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the fermenting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most striking example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is of course the universal church-going. In the sight of all England getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its hat and drawing on its gloves and taking its wife on its arm and making its offspring march before, and so, for decency's, respectability's, propriety's sake, making its way to a place of worship appointed by the State, in which it respects the formulas of a creed to which it attaches no positive sense and listens to a sermon over the length of which it explicitly haggles and grumbles,--in this great exhibition there is something very striking to a stranger, something which he hardly knows whether to pronounce very sublime or very puerile. He inclines on the whole to pronounce it sublime, because it gives him the feeling that whenever it may become necessary for a people trained in these manoeuvres to move all together under a common direction, they will have it in them to do so with tremendous force and cohesiveness. We hear a good deal about the effect of the Prussian military system in consolidating the German people and making them available for a particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to say that the military punctuality which characterizes the English observance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A nation which has passed through the mill will certainly have been stamped by it. And here, as in the German military service, it is really the whole nation. When I spoke just now of paterfamilias and his _entourage_ I did not mean to limit the statement to him. The young unmarried men go to church; the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members of society. (That last epithet must be taken with a grain of allowance. No one in England is irresponsible, that perhaps is the shortest way of describing the country. Every one is free and every one is responsible. To say what it is people are responsible to is of course a great extension of the question: briefly, to social expectation, to propriety, to morality, to "position," to the classic English conscience, which is, after all, such a considerable affair.)

The way in which the example of the more comfortable classes imposes itself upon the less comfortable may of course be noticed in smaller matters than church-going; in a great many matters which it may seem trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observation nothing, however, is trivial. So I may cite the practice of keeping the servants out of the room at breakfast. It is the fashion, and so, apparently, through the length and breadth of England, every one who has the slightest pretension to standing high enough to feel the way the social breeze is blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those at table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of waiting and perambulating, and it has just that vice against which, in English history, all great movements have been made--it is arbitrary. But it flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking into each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree to endure it for gentility's sake. Another arbitrary trifle is the custom of depriving the unhappy visitor of a napkin at luncheon. When it is observed that the English luncheon differs from dinner only in being several degrees more elaborate and copious, and that in the London atmosphere it is but common charity, at any moment, to multiply your guest's opportunities if not for ablution at least for a "dry polish," it will be perceived that such eccentricities are the very wantonness and pedantry of fashion. But, as I say, they flourish, and they form part of an immense body of prescriptive usages, to which a society possessing in the largest manner, both by temperament and education, the sense of the "inalienable" rights and comforts of the individual, contrives to accommodate itself. I do not mean to say that usage in England is always uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the contrary, few strangers can be unfamiliar with that sensation (a most agreeable one) which consists in perceiving in the excesses of a custom which has struck us at first as a mere brutal invention, a reason existing in the historic "good sense" of the English race. The sensation is frequent, though in saying so I do not mean to imply that even superficially the presumption is against the usages of English society. It is not, for instance, necessarily against the custom of which I had it more especially in mind to speak in writing these lines. The stranger in London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes out of town, and that if he has no mind to be left as lonely as Marius on the ruins of Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a temporary absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort of unexpectedness in this vernal exodus of a body of people who, but a week before, were apparently devoting much energy to settling down for the season. Half of them have but lately come back from the country, where they have been spending the winter, and they have just had time, it may be supposed, to collect the scattered threads of town-life. Presently, however, the threads are dropped and society is dispersed, as if it had taken a false start. It departs as Holy Week draws to a close, and remains absent for the following ten days. Where it goes is its own affair; a good deal of it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that city I remember how, when I woke up on Easter Monday and looked out of my window, I found the street covered, overnight, with a sort of snow-fall of disembarked Britons. They made, for other people, an uncomfortable week of it. One's customary table at the restaurant, one's habitual stall at the Theatre Francais, one's usual fiacre on the cab-stand, were very apt to have suffered pre-emption. I believe that the pilgrimage to Paris was this year of the usual proportions: and you may be sure that people who did not cross the Channel were not without invitations to quiet old places in the country, where the pale, fresh primroses were beginning to light up the dark turf and the purple bloom of the bare tree-mosses to be freckled here and there with verdure. In England country-life is the obverse of the medal, town-life the reverse, and when an occasion comes for quitting London there are few members of what the French call the "easy class" who have not a collection of dull, moist, verdant resorts to choose from. Dull I call them, and I fancy not without reason, though at the moment I speak of their dullness must have been mitigated by the unintermittent presence of the keenest and liveliest of east winds. Even in mellow English country homes Easter-tide is a period of rawness and atmospheric acridity--the moment at which the frank hostility of winter, which has at last to give up the game, turns to peevishness and spite. This is what makes it arbitrary, as I said just now, for "easy" people to go forth to the wind-swept lawns and the shivering parks. But nothing is more striking to an American than the frequency of English holidays and the large way in which occasions for change and diversion are made use of. All this speaks to Americans of three things which they are accustomed to see allotted in scantier measure. The English have more time than we, they have more money, and they have a much higher relish for holiday taking. (I am speaking of course always of the "easy classes.") Leisure, fortune and the love of sport--these things are implied in English society at every turn. It was a very small number of weeks before Easter that Parliament met, and yet a ten days' recess was already, from the luxurious Parliamentary point of view, a necessity. A short time hence we shall be having the Whitsuntide Holidays, which I am told are even more of a festival than Easter, and from this point to midsummer, when everything stops, it is an easy journey. The business men and the professional men partake in equal measure of these agreeable diversions, and I was amused at hearing a lady whose husband was an active member of the bar say that, though he was leaving town with her for ten days and though Easter was a very nice bit of idleness, they really amused themselves with more gusto in the later recess, which would come on toward the end of May. I thought this highly probable, and admired so picturesque a chiaroscuro of work and play. If my phrase has a slightly ironical sound this is purely accidental. A large appetite for holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know what to do with them when taken, is the sign of a robust people, and judged by this measure we Americans are rather ill-conditioned. Such holidays as we take are taken very often in Europe, where it is sometimes noticeable that our privilege is rather heavy in our hands. Tribute rendered to English industry, however (our own stands in no need of compliments), it must be added that for those same easy classes I just spoke of things are very easy indeed. The number of persons available for purely social purposes at all times and seasons is infinitely greater than among ourselves; and the ingenuity of the arrangements permanently going forward to disembarrass them of their superfluous leisure is as yet in America an undeveloped branch of civilization. The young men who are preparing for the stern realities of life among the gray-green cloisters of Oxford are obliged to keep their terms but one half the year; and the rosy little cricketers of Eton and Harrow are let loose upon the parental home for an embarrassing number of months. Happily the parental home is apt to be an affair of gardens, lawns and parks.

Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic period; there is really an approach to sackcloth and ashes. Private dissipation is suspended; most of the theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge dusky city seems to take on a still sadder coloring and a sort of hush steals over its mighty uproar. At such a time, for a stranger, London is not cheerful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays in a row--a spectacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sunday and a "bank-holiday," if I remember aright, had joined hands with a Christmas Day and produced the portentous phenomenon to which I allude. I betrayed, I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive character, for I remember being told in a consolatory way that I needn't fear; it would not come round again for another year. This information was given me apropos of that surprising interruption of one's relations with the laundress which is apparently characteristic of the period. I was told that all the washerwomen were drunk, and that, as it would take them some time to revive, I must not look for a speedy resumption of these relations. I shall not forget the impression made upon me by this statement; I had just come from Paris and it almost sent me spinning back. One of the incidental _agrements_ of life in the latter city had been the knock at my door on Saturday evenings of a charming young woman with a large basket covered with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her head a frilled and fluted muslin cap which was an irresistible advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable _blanchisseuse_ was _sober_ is altogether too gross a compliment; but I was always grateful to her for her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her talkative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised upon her crisp, dense hair and her well-made dress was fitted to her well-made waist. I talked with her; I _could_ talk with her; and as she talked she moved about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest ease. Then her light step carried her off again, talking, to the door and with a brighter smile and an "Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her, leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic a creature a washerwoman may be. London, in December, was livid with sleet and fog, and against this dismal background was offered me the vision of a horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky! She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance, and she almost frightened me away.

I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not creditable to my fortitude, because I found that the information given me was not strictly accurate and that at the end of three months I had another array of London Sundays to face. On this occasion however nothing occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have just sketched, though I devoted a good deal of time to observing the manners of the lower orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were very much _en evidence_, and it was an excellent occasion for getting an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the background and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets were void of carriages and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the "masses" were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I strolled about and watched them at their gambols. The heavens were most unfavorable, but in an English "outing" there is always a margin left for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky city, beneath the shifting gloom of the sky the grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of weather-proof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the railway stations overflowed and the Thames embankment was covered. The "masses," I think, are usually an entertaining spectacle, even when observed through the glutinous medium of London bad weather. There are indeed few things in their way more impressive than a dusky London holiday; it suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at superficially the British capital is one of the most interesting of cities, and it is perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most felt its interest. London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than any European city of graceful and decorative incident; and though on festal days, like those I speak of, the populace is massed in large numbers at certain points, many of the streets are empty enough of human life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic hideousness. A Christmas Day or a Good Friday uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk along the streets, having no fellow-pedestrians to look at, you look up at the brown brick house-walls, corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight stiff window-slits and finished, by way of a cornice, with a little black line resembling a slice of curb-stone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker street--a delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying monuments, and it would seem that a city made up of them should have no claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. London, however, is not made up of them; there are architectural combinations of a statelier kind, and the impression moreover does not rest on details. London is picturesque in spite of details--from its dark-green, misty parks, the way the light comes down leaking and filtering from its cloudy skies, and the softness and richness of tone which objects put on in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede. Nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aerial gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to the picturesque this is a constant entertainment, and yet this is only part of it. What completes the effect of the place is its appeal to the feelings, made in so many ways, but made above all by agglomerated immensity. At any given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners you have a sense of its hugeness, and petty places acquire a certain interest from their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere, else is so much human life gathered together and nowhere does it press upon you with so many suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating kind; far from it. But they are of every possible kind, and this is the interest of London. Those that were most forcible during the showery Easter season were certain of the more perplexing and depressing ones; but even with these was mingled a brighter strain.

I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good Friday afternoon--walked from Piccadilly across the Green Park and through St. James's Park. The parks were densely filled with the populace--the elder people shuffling about the walks and the poor little smutty-faced children sprawling over the dark damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a dense group of people about the entrance, but I squeezed my way through them and succeeded in reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impossible to advance, and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my nose into the church and promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly compact and, beneath the Gothic arches, the odor was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are too plentiful. Whereever you go you make the observation. Go to the theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find that, before you arrive, there are people enough on the field. You are a tight fit in your place wherever you find it; you have too many companions and competitors. You feel yourself at times in danger of thinking meanly of the human personality; numerosity, as it were, swallows up quality, and such perpetual familiarity contains the germs of contempt. This is the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to own a "park"--an artificial solitude. To get one's self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak-studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth, at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But I walked back through the parks in the midst of these "circumstances," and I found that entertainment which I never fail to derive from a great English assemblage. The English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest people in Europe that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe that the fact requires proof. I never see a large number of them without this impression being confirmed; though I hasten to add that I have sometimes felt it to be woefully shaken in the presence of a small number. I suspect that a great English crowd would yield a larger percentage of handsome faces and figures than any other. With regard to the upper class I imagine this is generally granted; but I should extend it to the whole people. Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer by their good looks they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some forms of ragged picturesqueness. It is the hard prose of misery--an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that two-thirds of the London faces, among the "masses," bear in some degree or other the traces of liquor, which is not a beautifying fluid. The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently once handsome. A very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon--the pallid, stunted, misbegotten and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest an equal degree of misery. But when these abatements are made, the observer is still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-modeled faces and bodies well put together; of strong, straight brows and handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, finished chins and well-poised heads, of admirable complexions and well-disposed limbs.

All this, I admit, is a description of the men rather than of the women; but to a certain extent it includes the women. There is much more beauty among English women of the lower class than strangers who are accustomed to dwell upon their "coarseness" recognize. Pretty heads, pretty mouths and cheeks and chins, pretty eyes too, if you are content with a moderate brilliancy, and at all events charming complexions--these seem to me to be presented in a very sufficient abundance. The capacity of an Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as unlimited, and even if (I repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is most freely exercised, yet among the daughters of the people one sees a great many fine points. Among the men fine points are strikingly numerous--especially among the younger ones. Now the same distinction is to be made--the gentlemen are certainly handsomer than the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman with another, they are physically very well appointed. Their features are finished, composed, as it were, more harmoniously than those of many of their nearer and remoter neighbors, and their figures are apt to be both powerful and compact. They present to view very much fewer accidental noses and inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and ill-planted heads of hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always from the sidewalk, it may be said that as the spring increases in London and the symptoms of the season multiply, the beautiful young men who adorn the West-End pavements, and who advance before you in couples, arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial, are among the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have it at heart to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they are also very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples are uglier than the American; we are far from producing those magnificent types of facial eccentricity which flourish among older civilizations. American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and meanness; English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America there are few grotesques; in England there are many--and some of them are almost handsome!

The element of the grotesque was very noticeable to me in the most striking collection of the shabbier English types that I had seen since I came to London. The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of Mr. George Odger, which befell some four or five weeks before the Easter period. Mr. George Odger, it will be remembered, was an English radical agitator, of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a perverse desire to get into Parliament. He exercised, I believe, the useful profession of shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that opens but to golden keys. But he was a useful and honorable man, and his own people gave him an honorable burial. I emerged accidentally into Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and the spectacle was one I should have been sorry to miss. The crowd was enormous, but I managed to squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab that was drawn up beside the pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at the play. Though it was a funeral that was going on I will not call it a tragedy; but it was a very serious comedy. The day happened to be magnificent--the finest of the year. The funeral had been taken in hand by the classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament, and it had the character of a great popular "manifestation." The hearse was followed by very few carriages, but the cortege of pedestrians stretched away in the sunshine, up and down the classic gentility of Piccadilly, on a scale that was highly impressive. Here and there the line was broken by a small brass band--apparently one of those bands of itinerant Germans that play for coppers beneath lodging-house windows; but for the rest it was compactly made up of what the newspapers call the dregs of the population. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan mob, men and women, boys and girls, the decent poor and the indecent, who had scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up on their passage, and were making a sort of solemn spree of it. Very solemn it all was--perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along in an interminable line, and as I looked at them out of the front of my hansom I seemed to be having a sort of panoramic view of the under side, the wrong side, of the London world. The procession was filled with figures which seemed never to have "shown out," as the English say, before; of strange, pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in the Piccadilly sunshine. I have no space to describe them more minutely, but I found in the whole affair something memorable. My impression rose not simply from the radical, or as I may say for the sake of color, the revolutionary, emanation of this dingy concourse, lighted up by the ironical sky; but from the same causes that I had observed a short time before, on the day the queen went to open Parliament, when in Trafalgar Square, looking straight down into Westminster and over the royal cortege, were gathered a group of banners and festoons, inscribed in big staring letters with mottoes and sentiments which a sensitive police-department might easily have found seditious. They were mostly in allusion to the Tichborne claimant, whose release from his dungeon they peremptorily demanded, and whose cruel fate was taken as a pretext for several sweeping reflections on the social arrangements of the time and country. These portentous standards were allowed to sun themselves as freely as if they had been the manifestoes of the Irish Giant or the Oriental Dwarf at a fair. I had lately come from Paris, where the police-department _is_ sensitive, and where revolutionary placards are not observed to adorn the base of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. I was, therefore, the more struck on both of the occasions I speak of with the admirable English practice of letting people alone--with the good sense and the good humor and even the good promise of it. It was this that I found impressive as I watched the "manifestation" of Mr. Odger's underfed partisans--the fact that the mighty mob could march along and do its errand, while the excellent quiet policemen stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear and comfortable.