Chapter XXIX (6)

We see in hemlock shade the reedy shallow,
Where, screened by dusky leaves,
The guileless moose comes down to browse and wallow
On still balsamic eves.

The great blue heron starts as if we sought her,
On pinions of surprise,
And to our lure the darlings of the water
In pink and crimson rise.

Still gliding on, how throng the sweet romances
Of Youth's enchanted land!
A lordly eagle, as our bark advances,
Glares on us, sad and grand.

Onward we float where mellow sunset glory
Streams o'er the lakelet's breast,
And every ripple tells a golden story
Of the transfigured west.

Onward, into the evening's calm and beauty,
To camp and sleep we go:
Thrice bless'd are lives, in tasks of love and duty,
That end in such a glow!
--HORATIO NELSON POWERS.

THE RUIN OF ME.

(TOLD BY A YOUNG MARRIED MAN.)

I am Poverty scuffing about in old shoes and rubbers. I _was_ one of those who, at a good salary, think up smart things to put around in the corners of the Chicago _Times_. When every newspaper, from the London _Punch_ down, was making jokes about Elihu Burritt's _Sanskrit for the Fireside_, it was I who beat them all by saying in solid nonpareil, "The best way to learn Sanskrit is to board in a family of Sanskritters." It was I who said, "Let the Communists carry pistols: they may shoot each other;" and, "Sara Bernhardt's children are articles of _virtu_."

_O quam me delectat_ Sara Bernhardt! I love such diversified, such picturesque gifts. Sculpture, painting, acting, writing! This is why I loved Lydia, who was an adept at numberless arts and accomplishments. She was a brunette with a clear, cream-tinged skin, red cheeks, rolling black eyes, ripe velvety lips, and hair of a beautiful hue and rich lustre--raven black, yet purple as the pigeon's wing in the sun. I believe it is true that dark people belong to the pre-historic races: centuries of sunlight are fused in their glowing complexion. Blondes are beautiful--both the rosy ones with pinkish eyelids and warm golden locks, and the pale ones with ash-colored hair, gray eyes and dark brows and lashes--but a florid brunette excels them all.

In seeing Lydia you would make the mistake that you usually make in judging girls: entering among them, you think their attitudes proclaim their traits. For instance, you take the most giggling one for a simpleton, but afterward learn that she is a good scholar and has accepted the Greek chair in a Western college, and looking again you see she has a strong frame, a capable head and large bright eyes. Lydia dressed in the mode, wore the high-heeled shoes that give such a dainty look to the foot and gait, and came into a room with a great effusion of fashionableness; yet she was not in the least what she seemed. She had a great deal of what is more pleasing than mere appearance, and that is character. She was ambitious and energetic. She did tatting when she did nothing else--said it concealed her lack of repose and liability to fidget. She was able to draw _la quintessence de tout_: she could make a mountain-spring of a mole-hill. She also had a touch of temper: those who are perfectly amiable are nothing else.

I was a youth blue-eyed and fair of face, tall, thin and having a complying spirit that has been--But let me not anticipate. The race after fashion ever wearied me--I shall stop early at some standing-collar or heavy-neckcloth period--and I never cared much for money--could live with it or without it, desiring "this man's art or that man's scope" rather than his cash. There is such a great majority of poor folks, I expected to be one of them; still, I had a taste for honesty, asked favors of nobody, considered the least debt a degradation, and thought myself better than most rich people. I was of the family and the religion of Plato, who peddled oil to pay his expenses while travelling in Egypt.

We discover in others what they most wish to hide: therefore I early discovered that Lydia's mother, who had a large girl-family, and who knew that the supply of some one to love greatly exceeds the demand, was anxious to secure me as a son-in-law. I was glad of it, for, let poets and novelists say what they will, the young fellow who marries with the approval of friends drifts happily on, while the rash boy who weds against the good sense of his elders is dragged bleeding along a rough way. So I married Lydia, and began life in gladness and content. I liked her family and they liked me. It puzzles me to see how the English mother-in-law, who is a grum-voiced, dogmatic and belligerent person with a jointure to bequeath, came to be engrafted on our literature. The inoffensive delicacy of an American elderly woman forbids her the role of her British sister. Our mother-in-law troubles are mostly confined to our low foreign population. Neither have we a character similar to the silly, spiteful, dried-up old maid of English literature and its American imitations, our spinsters being generally stout and jolly personages and rather over-fond of children. My mother-in-law was very nice, and we were the best of friends.

Rich relations, as a general thing, are abominable: the mere possession of one sometimes makes a person disagreeable. Show the person with a rich cousin the most secluded cot among mountains, and, "Oh, you should see my cousin's house on Michigan Avenue!" is the reply; or a beautiful room speaking the noble quality of its occupant, and, "Call that nice? You should see my cousin's house on Michigan Avenue!" is remarked. But Lydia's rich relations, the Stenes of Chicago, appeared to be exceptions. They were very clannish people, fond of their own kin to the last degree. They came from Michigan, and were of the old colony stock, regular Yankee-Doodle folks, the older ones and many of the younger ones still using New England idioms and quaint phrases that came long ago from the East--yes, from the holts of old England's Suffolk perhaps. You could not persuade one of them to call jelly anything but "jell" or a repast anything but a "meal of victuals," and they said "dooty" and "roomor" and "noos" and "clawg," and sometimes would pop out "his'n" and "her'n." Several of the Stenes had been in business thirty years in metropolitan Chicago, yet they spoke in the twang of a Yankee hill-country. The women of the family were famous housekeepers--too neat to keep a cat lest there might be a cat hair on the carpet, and never liking visitors unless there was a dreadful note of preparation, and then they received grandly. To show Lydia their good-will, they gave her profuse wedding-presents and a splendid trousseau. On my side I bought a neat cottage, paying cash down--all the money I had. It was one of a square of cottages principally occupied by young married people having plenty of children, and a joyous crew they were. Our street had a broad roadway and flagged sidewalks edged with neat turf in which fine trees were growing, and was lined with beautiful homes of varied architecture, suggesting charming interiors. A row of tall, "high-stoop" New York houses with dark stone trimmings stood next to a row of English basements of tuck-pointed brick, and next to them was a range of houses of light, cheerful Joliet stone, with awnings at the windows and carriage-steps as clean as gravestones. Then came an old cottage fixed up nobby, then a comfortable old wooden mansion, then a splendid dwelling in the style of the fifteenth century, and after that the palace of a railway grandee. Here and there on a corner stood a Gothic church. All day well-dressed people trod our pavements and beautiful carriages rolled by our windows. Our cottage was my ideal of perfection: it had few rooms, but those spacious. We had no sitting-room. Let me see: what does that word suggest to my mind? A table heaped with stale newspapers, a stand piled with sewing, a darned carpet, scratched furniture and fly-specked wall-paper.

Lydia's presents filled our house. All were Eastlake and in good taste, the colors sage-green, pumpkin-yellow and ginger-brown, dashed with splashes of peacock feathers and Japanese fans. The vases were straddle-legged and pot-bellied Asiatic shapes. Dragons in bronze and ivory, sticky-looking faience and glittering majolica, stood in the corners. Silk embroideries representing the stork--a scrawny bird with a scalp-lock at the back of its neck, looking like a mosquito when flying--and porcelain landscapes out of drawing, like a child's first attempts, peopled by individuals with the expression of having their hair pulled, hung 'twixt our dados and friezes. Lydia's young-lady friends gave her their works in oil or water-colors done in a fine, free-hand style that may one day form a school of its own. Our Chicago girls are people of _nous_. Their talk is "fluent as the flight of a swallow:" their manners are delightful--American manners must be excellent, so many Englishmen marry American girls. Their playing makes us glad the seven poor strings of the old musicians have been multiplied to seven times seven: no Chicago girl is a musician unless she has the masters at her finger-tips. And they are readers too. You would suppose, judging from the papers, that our Chicagoans are inordinately fond of reading about the indiscretions of rustic wives, and are given to a perusal of the news in startling headlines: but such is not the fact. We are great readers of the distinguished magazines and of first-rate books, and our taste for art is keen. When we go abroad we don't care so much for mountains and rivers--they are like potatoes and pork to a man who is visiting: we have them at home--but we _are_ after art. Ruskin says no people can be great in art unless it lives among beautiful natural objects; which is hard on us Chicago folks. If we had any mountainous or rocky tracts we should not live in them. If we possessed a Mount Vesuvius we should use it for getting up bogus eruptions to draw tourists to our hotels, and we should tap the foot of the mountain to draw off the lava for our streets.

Lydia's finery had a subduing effect upon me, who had bounded my aspirations to what was distinctly within my grasp--namely, things

Plain, but not sordid--though not splendid, clean.

Lydia was an expert housekeeper. "I love a little house that I can clean all over," said she. She would have liked a Roman villa made of polished marble, that could be scrubbed from top to bottom, or a house of the melted and dyed cobble-stones that some genius has promised to give us. Her china-closet was a picture, with platters in rows and cups hanging on little brass hooks under the shelves. Our whole house was exquisite, and became quite renowned for its elegance and charm. Lydia's exuberant vitality was attractive: her relations and friends liked to come there. Some of our friends were of the high, haughty, tone-y sort, which would have been well enough if we had not incurred debts in our housekeeping.

What and how great the merit and the art
To live on little with a thankful heart!

Lydia's rich uncle, Nathan Stene, gave us a bookcase that caused my heart to sink with an appalling premonition at its first appearance, it was so huge and high. How we got it into our parlor without cutting off the top and bottom words cannot explain. That bookcase was my first step toward ruin. I had a good many books--not of scientific but of delightful literature, the best works of the best authors--and my books were as shabby as Charles Lamb's library. There never were such dilapidated volumes as my De Quinceys. Lydia had _Young Mrs. Jardine_ and lots of other

Stickjaw pudding that tires the chin,
With the marmalade spread ever so thin;

and her books were new-looking. She said mine looked disgustingly dirty in our new bookcase, so I had them rebound; and this was my next step toward ruin. Lydia wanted a long peacock-feather duster to dust the top of the bookcase. I bought that. Our only long tablecloth was a damask, engarlanded and diapered and resplendent with a colored border warranted to wash. I had to buy napkins to go with it. I bought a butter-knife to match a solid silver butter-dish, and a set of individual salt-spoons to match salt-cellars, and nut-picks and crackers to match something else. Moreover, there was a magnificent opera-glass that required to be matched with theatre-going--_not_ as I was wont to go, in an old overcoat having its pockets stuffed with old playbills. But why enumerate?

On the strength of her wedding-presents Lydia became a gladiatrix in the arena of society. She already belonged to three clubs: she joined four more--Private Theatrical, a History of Art, a Conversation and a Suffrage Club. I myself belong to but one, the Cremation Club--am an officer in that: I split kindlings. As the bordered tablecloth was suitable for lunch-parties, Lydia entertained her friends at an hour when I was about town looking up paragraphs, but I have no doubt she carried it off bravely, and their discussions were as important as those of a poultry convention on the question of feathers or no feathers on chickens' legs.

At this time I found that great feasts make small comforts scarce. Often, on coming home and finding Lydia out, I had Ionic hours alone, when I refreshed myself with the great shouting, cheering and laughter of the Greek armies and people that gladden our dull hearts even now, and for want of anything better I regaled myself on the feasts offered by Machaon (first Scotchman) in the _Iliad_, and by Nestor, on the table with azure feet and in the goblet with four handles and four feet, with gold turtles drinking at the brim from the handles. Or I supped with Achilles while Patroclus turned the meat on the bed of wide, glowing embers and the tent brightened in the blaze. Once, when I was seeking something for that newspaper bore, Woman's Sphere, I lunched with the Suffragists. Each character of the Suffrage Club was as clear as a figure cut on a sapphire. The president, a matron of sixty wearing waving gray hair and dressed in black, with plenty of white lace under her chin, had the air of a woman used to command a large family and accustomed to plenty of money and to good society. Her voice was the agreeable barytone of her years, its thin tones entirely gone, and her good English was like gentle music: nevertheless, an occasional strong tone or gesture revealed her determined will. The Suffragists were handsomely dressed, were self-possessed and appreciative of each other's company, and were of all ages, one being a plain young girl quietly looking on and enjoying the world more than a self-wrapped belle is capable of doing.

But to my tale, which is to me more absorbing than _Rob Roy, Robinson Crusoe_ and _Boots at the Swan_ combined. Of all our visitors I preferred Uncle Nathan Stene. Not that I liked him personally. He was the typical rich man: I should know he was rich wherever I met him. There are thousands like him: they despise me utterly. Uncle Nathan had a scorn for poor people. He disdained whole States that gave him a bad market, and regarded young fellows who smoke and go to the theatre as beggars' dogs. He was of middle height, with reddish complexion, sandy hair and eyebrows, quick, sharp gray eyes, and features of a short, clean, close aquiline cut, with thin, dry lips--a man of iron, pig iron. When young he might have been facetious, but he had concentrated his energies entirely on money, till there was nothing left to go in other directions, and his humor was now as sombre as the grin of a hanged man. He had self-conceit, which is a talent when combined with some other qualities. Doctor Johnson's observation, that to make money requires talents, is true: a dull man cannot do it. Uncle Nate had to remember thirty thousand articles in his business of wholesale druggist. He was a perfect devil-fish for sucking the goodness from every business he was concerned in--banking, railroading, and so on. He belonged to the Chicago Board of Trade, and was particularly useful in getting those fellows in Indianapolis on a string, sending the wheat up, up, until the Hoosiers had made a few hundred thousands, and then, when they thought they were going to make millions, letting it down and scooping them. My habit of listening intently to Uncle Nate's telegrammatic style of talk caused him to like me. I resembled King Lear: I talked with those who were wise, and said little, and Nathan's aphorisms about trade and politics made good paragraphs when boiled down to the crisp cracklins.

While I worked and Lydia entertained we were waltzing like the wind down to ruin. No use to cry, "Ho! great gods! Hilloa! you're wanted here!" On we went.

Worrying over pecuniary affairs gradually sapped my mind. To lose one's eyes or all one's relations, or to be bitten by a mad dog, will not unhinge the brain so completely as pecuniary anxiety. My paragraphs, spite of Nate's verbum saps., lost their originality. I resigned my post on the _Times_. I became the collector on commission of certain rents of Uncle Nathan's. Whoso collects rents in Chicago tenements should know how to box or else to run: I could do neither. I got little or nothing out of the devils and devillets, my respected uncle's tenants. He had a genius for the despatch of business: I had none; therefore he concluded I was an ass, and wondered how he came to be pleased with me. Oh, 'tis a good thing to know what you can do, and to do that, and know what you cannot do, and leave that alone. Dull as weeds of Lethe was my task. 'Twas terrible! I thought it would never end. No greater misery could be imagined than what I endured in Nathan's service.

One morning of those days I picked up a note in Lydia's writing hastily scrawled as follows: "I have discovered your retreat: I must see you. At seven o'clock wave the lamp three times across the window if all is well."

In my undecided way I pinned the note to the blue silk pincushion on Lydia's dressing-case. I had a sudden jealous suspicion of an acquaintance of ours, a furiously-striking English traveller--"Bone-Boiler to the Queen" or something--who had a long, silky, sweeping moustache blowing about in the wind, and parted his hair "sissy." But I went to work all the same.

That day Uncle Nate was a worse screw than ever. "How is it you never hit a clam?" asked he.

"Your tenants have nothing, so I get nothing," I replied.

"Nonsense! They must have something. Drunken loafers are driving about in livery-rigs everywhere--sure sign of prosperity."

"Your people are not out," I said.

"They sit around the house reading yesterday's newspapers."

"They can't get work," said I.

"Everybody that wants to work is in the ditch now-a-days: _that_ I _know_" said the old man.

"Some are sick."

"They are well enough to walk three miles to a brewery after a free drink."

"Some are too young to work."

"Hah! what's the use of having a parcel of young ones to be poor relations to the rest of the world?" asked he.

"Some are positively starving," said I.

"What of that? You have to let them starve. Five hundred thousand starved in India last year, a country overrun with sacred snakes and animals of all sorts that they might have eaten. Three millions starved in China, and they tore up their English railway, the only thing that could save them. What are you going to do about it? Starving! Bet they are wallowing in the theatre every night," said Nathan.

"The theatre with Lawrence Barrett! I wish they might see anything so elevating. Perhaps _Othello_ might make some impression on them, such a stupendous temperance lecture it is!" I groaned.

"If _you_ would leave the theatre alone you wouldn't be quite so short as you are now," asserted Uncle Nate, almost popping open with contempt.

"'Short,' man! 'Short' in your throat!" shouted I, forgetting myself.

"Yes, short; and it's my opinion you've shorted me in this business."

I could not kick our uncle out of his premises, so I got out myself, not to return; and I left in debt to him as well as to the rest of the world. I went homeward. Though it was August, a cold wind blew from the lake, whipping the large, flapping leaves of the castor-bean plants in the front yards to rags. I quaffed the lake in the wet wind. "No wonder," I thought, "we're three parts water: our world is." A young fellow on the street-car platform smoked a cigar that smelled like pigweed, cabbage-stalks and other garden rubbish burning, and made me sick. He enjoyed it, though: in fact, all, including the street-car driver himself, were on that day more than usually engaged in the intense enjoyment of being Chicagoans. All but me, miserable. The very windows and pavements of our streets, being clean and cold, sent a chill to my bones.

When I reached home Lydia was pinning on her habergeon, her neck-armor of ribbons and lace, before the mirror. "What is this?" I asked, pointing to the suspicious note, still pinned to the cushion.

"That's the note that has to be found in my room in the play of _Lost in London_," she answered, turning the great lamps of her eyes on mine.

As I had nothing to say to this, I went and lay down on the sofa before the parlor-fire. Though a grate in January is a poor affair--I never knew any human being who really depended on one in winter to speak in praise of it--on a cool August day it is delicious. I fell into a warm doze before the fire, then into a series of agreeable naps. When Lydia said supper was ready I did not want any, and at bedtime I was too stiff to move easily.

After this, during several weeks, my bedchamber became to me a place full of sweet dreams and rest and quiet breathing. Luxurious indifference, a pleasure in hearing the crickets in the grass of the midsummer gardens, and voices talking afar--a satisfaction in seeing the polished walnut, marble and china and plenteous linen towels of my washstand, my altar to Hebe, and in seeing through a window,

While day sank or mounted higher,
The light, aerial gallery, golden railed,
Burn like a fringe of fire

on some remote palace of the city. These and other sensations of malarial fever occupied me for a while. In half dreams I then enjoyed the minutest details of life in an old farm-house that had been my home, or walked through a picture-gallery I had once frequented, seeing each picture strangely perfect and splendidly limned. Light diet and keeping quiet--which every Westerner knows to be the cure of this fever--cured me. I came forth looking like a _swairth_, one of those words marked "obs." in the dictionary--means phantom of a person about to die. It ought to be revived; so here goes--_swairth_.

Leaden before, my eyes were dross of lead.

I was pale and lank, but things had settled themselves in my mind: I had gone back to my old ideas of honor and freedom; my mind was made up.

"Well, Lydia," said I, "you wanted to manage: you were bound to wear the breeches. As you make your pants, so you must sit in them."

"You awful man!" said she.

"Now I will manage," said I.

"Indeed! Nothing would please me better," said she.

"I will sell our house and all that's in it, and get out of debt," said I.

"You mean to be one of the lower classes and wear old rags," she exclaimed.

"We have no class-distinctions but the Saving Class and the Wasting Class. I shall be of the first class. As to clothes, they are despicable," I replied.

"People who despise clothes can't get any."

"Well, I've done all I'm going to do toward developing the West, which consists in getting into debt, as far as I can see."

When an able woman submits she submits completely. Lydia put our house in order. I filled the streets with dodgers advertising our sale. I have not been a paragraphist for nothing: the sale was a success. I paid a part of my debts, and gave notes for the rest that will keep my future poor. I started in again on the _Times'_ city force. To board I hate: it's a chicken's life--roosting on a perch, coming down to eat and then going back to roost. So I got a little domicile in "The Patch." When the teakettle has begun to spend the evening the new cheap wallpaper, the whitewash and the soapsuds with which the floor has been scrubbed emit peculiar odors.

"It smells poor-folksy here," says Lydia.

"All the better!" say I.
--MARY DEAN.

SHORT STUDIES IN THE PICTURESQUE.

Although our American climate, with its fierce and pitiless extremes of temperature, will never give the lush meadows and lawns of moist England, yet in the splendid and fiery lustres of its autumn forests, in its gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and in the wild beauty of its hills and mountains there is that which makes an English Midland landscape seem tame in comparison. The rapid changes of temperature in summer and the sudden rising of vast masses of heated air produce cloud-structures of the most imposing description, especially huge, irregular cumulus clouds that float in equilibrium above us like colossal icebergs, airy mountain-ranges or tottering battlemented towers and "looming bastions fringed with fire."

Yon clouds are big with flame, and not with rain,
Massed on the marvellous heaven in splendid pyres,
Whereon ethereal genii, half in pain
And half in triumph, light their mystic fires.

The brilliant deep-blue Italian skies of the Middle and Southern States are full of poetry, and will repay the most careful and prolonged study. I have seen, far up in the zenith, silvery fringes of cirrus clouds forming and melting away at the same moment and in the same place, ethereal and evanescent as a dream, easel-studies of Nature. Sometimes the clouds take the form of most airily-delicate brown crape, "hatchelled" on the sky in minute lines and limnings. Now the sky looks like a sweet silver-azure ceiling, the blue peeping here and there through tender masses of silver frosting. The skies of the New England coast States are filled, during a large part of spring, summer and autumn, with a white and dreamy haze, and do not produce cloud-phenomena on such an imposing scale as the more brilliant skies of the interior. I shall never forget a vast and glowing sunset-scene I once witnessed in the Ohio Valley. It lasted but a few moments, but what a spectacle! The setting sun was throwing his golden light over the intensely green earth, and suffusing the irregular masses of clouds now with a tender rosy light and now with delicate saffron. All along the eastern horizon extended a black-blue cloud-curtain of about twenty degrees in height, across which played the zigzag gold of the lightning. Overhead hung the gigantic ring of a complete rainbow (a rare phenomenon), looking like the iridescent rim of some vast sun that had shot from its orbit and was rapidly nearing our earth. In the north the while slept the sweet blue sky in peace. What a phantasmagoria of splendor, "the magic-lantern of Nature"! What a rich contrast of color!--the black and the gold, the green, saffron, rose and azure, and the whole crowned with a rainbow garland of glowing flowers. I felt assured that no sunset of Italy or Greece could fling upon the sky more costly pictures than these.

The delicacy and accuracy of touch exhibited in _The Scarlet Letter_ and in _Oldport Days_ can hardly be appreciated to the full by those who are unacquainted with certain mellow and crumbling towns and hamlets of the New England coast, especially of the warm south coast. Soft mists rise in summer like "rich distilled perfumes" from the warm Gulf Stream off Long Island Sound and drift landward in invisible airy volumes. Suddenly, as at a given signal, the sky becomes troubled, grows dun: trembling dew-specks glister upon the leaves, and in a few moments the gray fog starts out of the air on every side and clings to tree, crag and house like shroud to corpse. It is this warm moisture that gives to the south-coast hamlets their mellow tint. I have especially in mind at this moment one romantic village whose stout old yeoman elms hold their protecting foliage-shields over many a gray mansion as rich in tradition as the House of the Seven Gables, and only awaiting the touch of some wizard hand to become immortalized. The prevailing tint of these old houses, and of everything that a lichen can take hold of, is a sage-gray. There seems to be something in the sea-breezes unusually favorable to the growth of lichens, and they hold high carnival everywhere, growing in riotous exuberance on every tree and rock and fence. I saw whole board fences so thickly tufted and bearded with a rich, particolored mosaic of lichens that from base-board to cope-board there was scarcely a square foot of the original wood to be seen. On any hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe's House of Usher, only not ghostly as that is. It is a strange _je ne sais quoi_ that eludes description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of visible heat.

Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one has. It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions of savages and of the great men who have honored it with their presence. The town, moreover, is set off by a framework of the most enchanting and varied scenery--river, streamlet, ocean, lighthouse, hills with flower-and-grass-tufted crags, and forests, while on any summer's day one may see, far away and "sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill," some neighboring village with its graceful spire of purest white gleaming and flaming in the hot sunshine, like marble set in a foil of malachite.

A window of my room looked out upon a crystal stream that wound down through the salt-meadows to the sea, and twice a day, under the influence of the seemingly-mysterious systole and diastole of the tides, spread out into a wide-glittering lake and anon crept back again into its sinuous bed. This water was as fickle and wanton and many-mooded as a coquettish girl. Now its translucent glassy surface is unruffled by a single wrinkle, and in its brilliant depths every minutest feature of yonder drifting hay-barge is weirdly mirrored. I look out again, and the face of the water is working with rage under the lashing of the wind: at the same time its face seems white with fear, and its ghostly arms are tossing, now in defiance and now in piteous appeal. But now, as I gaze, the winds in their uncouth gambols tear a huge rent in the cloud-tent they had raised over the earth, and in the sweet blue beyond appears the calm and smiling face of the sun. Before its glance the wind-phantoms slink away in fear and the now quiet streamlet smiles through its tears.

The stiff formality and the ridiculous solemnity of the old Puritan times still linger about these secluded New England hamlets. But each winter a huge Christmas tree is set up in the church of the village I have mentioned, and loaded with presents. The winter I was there I went to see the distribution. Recollecting the delightful Christmas days of my own childhood, I was anticipating great pleasure. Of course I was going to look in on a scene of childish joy, of shouting and laughing, and eating of candy and pop-corn in unlimited quantities. Memories of the stories of Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers were floating through my mind as I crunched the crisp snow under my feet on my way to the church. I remembered the rapture of those Christmas mornings at home, when we children stole down stairs by candlelight to the warm room filled with the aromatic perfume of the Christmas tree, that stood there resplendent with presents from old Santa Claus--Noah's arks, mimic landscapes, dolls, sleds, colored cornucopias bursting with bonbons, and especially those books of fairy-tales from whose rich creamy pages exhaled a most divine and musty fragrance. Ah, the memory of our childhood's hours! what is it but that enchanted lake of the Arabian tale, from whose quiet depths we are ever and anon drawing up in our nets some magic colored fish? Well, I reached the church. The children, dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, were sitting in the high-backed pews in solemn silence, while a reverend gentleman was delivering a solemn exhortation to gratitude and goodness. Another followed. "Very well, gentlemen," thought I, "but now please to retire and give up the field to these children." But no. The superintendent of the Sunday-school now advanced: the children marched up one by one, as their names were called, and received their presents from him. Some of them came very near grinning (poor things!), but in general they looked as if they were going to their execution. When all was done _the meeting was dismissed_!

Sauntering through the streets of this village, and making note of the quaint idiosyncrasies and irregularities of character and manner displayed by its humbler folk, I thought of the sentiment which Thoreau so exquisitely expresses in his _Week_: "The forms of beauty fall naturally around him who is in the performance of his proper work, as the curled shavings drop from the plane and borings cluster round the auger." Picturesqueness characterizes the New England white laborer, as it does the Southern black laborer: especially is this true of those who have emigrated from Europe when of adult age, and have been unable to lay aside the picturesque features of their Old-World life.

One winter evening I discovered, a few miles from the village, one of this class: he was, on the whole, the strangest human being whom it has ever been my fortune to meet. About dusk I found myself some distance away from the village, near the great bridge that spans the river where it debouches into the sea. The water was heaving in long, slow swells. A deep silence had fallen over the earth. The evening red was reflected in the sea in rich blood dye, while the colored lights of the bridge and the lighthouse glowed and burned in the deep, here writhing along the waves like long golden and crimson sea-serpents, and there shooting down long streamers of light into the waves, to serve, I fancied, as hanging lamps for that vast black, star-bespangled abyss of the sky, that weird sunken dome, that inverted world, over which the water lay stretched out like thin, translucent red glass, and to look down into whose immeasurable and dizzy depths thrilled me both with pleasure and a kind of terror--that vague feeling of pain which the sublime always excites in the mind.

I crossed the bridge and wandered along the opposite side of the river by a lonely path. Suddenly I saw smoke curling up from a small recess of the beach. It was a full mile from any human habitation known to me, and I hesitated for a moment about advancing upon such a place at dusk, especially as the winter was one of the gloomiest in the period of our long financial depression. However, I decided to go on. Several overturned fishing-boats lay upon the beach, with a net drying upon one of them. A few clamshells were scattered about, and near the door of a small cabin lay a pile of split kindlings. The cabin was considerably smaller in size than an English railway-carriage, and nestled under the overhanging bank of the river. No human being was visible at first. But presently I detected by the red glow of his pipe a man in the interior of the cabin. I sat down on a boat, not venturing to approach nearer and beard the old lion in his lair. But on his inviting me to come in I went up to the door. It was, however, only a meaningless form of speech that led him to say "Come in," for it would hardly have been possible to get into a cabin only five feet wide, with the man himself sitting by a large rusty stove right over against the door. He placed a bootjack in the doorway for me to sit down upon. There was no window in the cabin. Firkins of fish were piled up along the sides of the interior, and in the dim background I saw a rude framework covered with straw which served as a bed.

And now for the human being there. The most noticeable peculiarity about the strange old hermit was an enormous wen which hung down from the front part of his neck. This wen was fully as large as a man's head. Long yellow hair hung over his shoulders, and a huge red beard reached to the middle of his breast--

His beard a foot before him, and his hair
A yard behind.

His moustache alone showed signs of the scissors: he had there cleared a path through the russet jungle of his beard, that an entrance might be had to the inner man. The eyes that looked out from this thicket of hair had not that hard, dangerous, angry look that experience of such persons had taught me to expect, but they expressed loneliness. He told of the high tides of the month of January in a certain year, when the water rose so as to enter his cabin and ponderous cakes of ice were knocking and grinding against its sides in the night. We talked of fish. He spoke of fyke-nets and drag-nets and warp-lines, and of eel-spearing through the ice. He took especial delight in telling me how the snow in winter was swept away from his door in a clean circle by the broom of some friendly wind. "It is the wind that does it," said he with touching naivete. It almost seemed to the poor old man's lonely heart like a special favor on the part of the wind, like a tender feeling and relenting on the part of the icy-hearted winter wind for him in his solitude and sadness as he lay there cast out on the desolate shore of the world, deformed and shattered in health--

Gleich einer Leiche
Die grollend ausgeworfen das Meer--

"Like a corpse which the bellowing sea
has cast out."

Strange life! O utter barrenness of existence! A pipe, a fire, fish, rags and a bed of straw. God pity thee! God pity thee, thou poor stricken deer! Take heart, man, take heart! Be brave, and dash away the bitter tear. Look up from the lowly cabin-door into the solemn night with its golden-burning stars, and even the loosened harp-strings of thy shattered old frame will vibrate and tremble to the eternal melodies that thrill through the mystic All: "God is in his heaven."

Dickens and Hawthorne have each written of canal-life in America, the one in a satirico-humorous way, the other sympathetically. People side with one or the other according as their disposition is active and restless or indolent and epicurean. I fight under the banner of Hawthorne in defence of the canal. The following sketch of one of the old picturesque Pennsylvania canals may be called a vignette, for it is a fragment without definite border or setting. But admirers of Dickens are respectfully requested to note that it is no mere fancy sketch of a poetic mind, but was drawn from Nature, every bit of it.

The first and most novel sensation I experienced was that of the quiet and seemingly mysterious gliding movement of the boat. Ever and anon we passed through a lock. How strange and thrilling the feeling, to stand on the deck and see yourself slowly sinking into the great mossy box, and then to see the great valves of the lock slowly open, disclosing what seemed a new land and fresh vistas of green landscape! It was like the opening of the gates of the future (I pleased myself with fancying) to my triumphant progress. Gate after gate swung back its ponderous valves: I was Habib advancing from isle to isle of the enchanted sea. I uttered the word of power, and the huge unwieldy gates of opposition swung back with sullen and unwilling deference, compelled to respect the talisman I held. But hark! Hear the sweet notes of the supper-horn floating through the cool gloom of twilight as the tired reapers trudge home with their grain-cradles swung over their shoulders. Listen to the tinkling mule-bells on the tow-path, see the bright crimson tassels of the bridles, and the gayly-decorated boats, their cabin-roofs adorned with pots of herbs and flowers.

As we glide down the canal, ever and anon we see some empty returning boat (called "light boat" in the technical canal phrase) rounding a curve before us, It comes nearer: the horses walk the same tow-path: how _are_ the boats to pass without confusion? Ah, the riddle is solved. Our captain (who holds the helm while the boy, his assistant, is down in the cabin preparing supper) calls out suddenly, at the last moment, "Whoa!" The well-trained horses instantly stop; the momentum of the boat carries it on; the rope slackens, disappears in the water, except at the two ends; the approaching horses step over it, and the approaching boat glides over it. When the approaching "light boat" has passed nearly or entirely over the rope our captain shouts to his horses to go on: the rope tightens, and all is as before.

The parts of the canal lying between the locks are called "levels." On long levels we could often see one or two boats far ahead of us and going in the same direction. Nothing could be prettier than the thin blue streamer of wood-smoke trailing out from the stovepipe of the cabin-roof against the bright green of the foliage along the banks. It told us the cheery news that the fragrant coffee or tea was a-making in the cozy little cabin below. And now, when supper is done, the captain brings up his guitar and plays sweet plaintive airs as we glide through the quiet evening shadows. Night deepens: the stars come out one by one, and are reflected in the smooth dark water below in dreamy, dusky splendor. We brush the dew from the heavy foliage as we pass along. Lithe alders and heavy vines trail in the cool flood, and the fresh evening air is filled with grateful harvest-scents and the perfume of unseen flowers. And now our pretty painted lamp-board is fixed in its place in the bow. The bright lamp throws its rich golden splendor before us. The lamp is hid from us by the board which holds it. We stand behind in the dark, and watch the overhanging sprays of foliage making strange, grotesque shadows that move fantastically and sport and clutch and writhe like wanton fiends, while the solid banks of foliage themselves, reflected in the water below, look, one fancies, like hanging gardens in the weird world to which the water is but a window, and far, far down upon whose dusky floor the flowers are golden stars.

The canal over which I am now conducting my readers is one of the oldest in the country. For many miles it is cut out of the solid rock, following the windings of the river and clinging close to the contours of the hills. The particolored rocks jut out in great square blocks, which, in summer, are usually tufted with grass or flowers. There is an indescribable air of coziness and safety about the amphibious life one leads on such a canal. You can here snap your fingers at the terrors of the cruel water. Here the mocking waves cannot "curl their monstrous heads" as on the sea, when with blind fury they dash against the helpless ship their ponderous and shapeless forms, while sailors and passengers alike are every moment expecting the final stroke that shall sink them beneath the waves. On the canal you cannot be drowned, on the canal you cannot be wrecked. The shore is so delightfully near! You exult in the friendly companionship of the rocky wall that towers above you, and in the assuring presence of the flowers and shrubs that cling there or reach out to you their thin elvish hands. You feel that here untamed Nature (that great wolf) cannot get her claws upon you. Upon this thread of water you are soothed by the thought that you are under the friendly and beneficent protection of man.

About nine or ten o'clock each evening the boats tie up at some lock. At all of these locks there are refreshment-stands and neat taverns of which the traveller must avail himself, since there are no accommodations for visitors on the boats. On the fourth day, wishing to vary my experience, I boarded another boat. Her deck was the very model of neatness. Verily the spirit of either a Yankee housewife or a Dutch vrow must have presided over that boat and tyrannized over the poor wretches who managed it. Black Care seemed to sit continually upon their brows. They were living scrubbing-brushes. They were scrub-mad. From morn to dewy eve they scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and doubtless in their dreams they still scrubbed on. The crew consisted of a man and his wife, their boy and an old uncle of the boy. I found, to my delight, that the boy was a very communicative young gentleman, flowing freely in talk without any pumping on my part. The various quaint technical phrases which I learned from him shall now be imparted to the reader. The _berme_, or _heel-path_, is the side of the canal opposite the tow-path; _basins_ are small coves in the canal where boats may lie over; _stop-lock_, a sort of quay; the _bit_, a timber-head at the bow of the boat. _Snub her!_ is a phrase of command, meaning, "Tie the boat to a post on the bank." _Pipe-poles_ are steering-poles. The _stern pile_ (of coal on this canal) is in a large crib near the stern and just in front of the cabin, and is placed in this particular part of the long and unwieldy boat in order to make her obey the helm better. _Timber-heads_ project above the deck to "snub" lines on. _Tow-posts_ are short upright posts near the bow, to which the tow-line is fastened. The _combings_ are the pieces the hatches rest on and surround the hold in an oval form. The _wale-plank_ is the edge of the deck, projecting out over the water like a welt around the entire circumference of the boat.

It may surprise many persons to learn that on the tablelands of the Alleghany Mountains there are still thousands of square miles of virgin forests of hemlock and pine through which roam bears and deer in considerable numbers. The hemlock trees are rapidly succumbing, however, to the axe of the lumberman and the bark-peeler. Bark-peeling is the great industry there, almost every mountain-hollow along the lines of the few railways that have penetrated the region in Pennsylvania having its tannery in active operation. This tanning business, by the way, is in a very prosperous condition, owing to the foreign demand for the liquor extracted from the bark as well as to the steadiness of the leather market. There is a primitive freshness in the life of the mountaineers and lumbermen of the Alleghanies like that of the mining regions of the far West. There is a sprinkling of Canadians among the lumbermen, and as a whole they are the most honest, good-natured, childlike set of men in existence. They are the true priests of those high and dim-green temple-aisles--priests of Nature one might call them. The cabins of the bark-peelers are made of rough, sweet-smelling hemlock planks. The smell of the hemlock bark is fresh and tonical, and appetizing in the highest degree. The men eat fabulous quantities of food: some require five meals a day. I well remember my first meal in a mountain hemlock shanty. Imagine a long table of unpainted boards with X-shaped legs, and along each side of the table benches for seats. Let there be upon the table three large bowls of black sugar, here and there towering stacks of white bread (the slices an inch thick at least), and beside each cover a teacup and saucer, a huge bowl filled to the brim with steaming-hot apple-sauce, together with a bowl of the same dimensions containing beans. Now blow the supper-horn, and hearken to the far halloo from the mountain-side. Twenty blowzed and bearded men, ravenous and wild-eyed with hunger, presently file into the room. They sit down: there is an awful and solemn silence--they are evidently impressed with the momentous importance of the occasion. You find your face growing long; you think of funerals; make a timid and humble remark which you hope will be acceptable and within the range of their comprehension. No answer: you evidently have their pity. No word breaks the sullen silence, except an occasional request to pass something, uttered with an effort as if the speaker had the lockjaw. The meal is bolted with frightful rapidity, generally in five or six minutes. I remember that I was considerably scared and dazed, on my first acquaintance with these mountain-fauns, at seeing such a systematic snatching and grabbing, such a ferocious plying of knives and forks and rattling of cups, by those huge-limbed, brawny, whiskered fellows.

It is difficult to describe the perennial beauty of the hemlock trees, with their dark, rich foliage-masses and aromatic odor. It seems a sacrilege to destroy them so ruthlessly. When stripped of their bark and stained with the dark-red sap, they look like fallen giants spoiled of their armor, lying there prone and white-naked, as if there had been a battle of the giants and the gods. These giants were perfumed, it seems. Their huge green plumes are now withered and torn, and their red blood oozes slowly from their bodies in thin and trickling streams. You think of Ossian's heroes, of Thor and his hammer, of the Anakim or of the steeple-high Brobdignagian cavalry, and almost expect to hear groans issuing from the colossal trunks that cumber the ground on every side.

Everything is on a large scale in these mighty forests. The horizon of your life noiselessly widens, rolls gradually back into immeasurable distances, and "deepens on and up." There is elasticity and stretch in your thoughts. If you have read Richter, his towering, godlike dreams of time and eternity here find their fit interpretation. He had his Fichtelgebirge, and you have your hemlock mountains. Life seems heroic once more: you exult in existence, and fondly think that here you could be happy for ever. To live far away from the cruel, hurrying world in a sweet little hamlet you wot of, sunk in the heart of the mountains at the bottom of a deep, mossy mountain-chalice--a chalice of richest chasing and filled with the pure wine of God, the mountain-air; to live there during the long summer days; to stand in the flush of dawn with bared head and inhale the fragrance of the dew-drenched grass and the scarlet balsams; to walk with hushed step through the wide forests, communing with the powerful sylvan spirits that labor there, watching with what miraculous delicacy of touch their unseen fingers weave the rich fantastic shrouds of fern and moss that deck the dead and fallen trees or anon give to the living their faint and mottled tints of green and gray;--to live thus through the summer hours, and through autumn, winter, spring watch the unrolling of the gorgeous scroll of Time,--this, you think, were living to some purpose!--WILLIAM SLOANE KENNEDY.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE PARIS SALON OF 1880.