Chapter IV: Part 4

Mr. Blaine was so strong and so weak, so delicate and so tenacious, that he was as constant a puzzle to those who loved him as to his enemies, to the best-informed as to the most ill-informed. Those very near to him took the liberty of laughing at him about his two overcoats, and his going to bed and sending for a doctor in the afternoon, and getting off with gayety to the opera in the evening; about an alleged indigestion followed by eating a confection that would have tested the hardihood of a young candy-eater. One who studied him with affection wrote of him that he had an association of qualities giving at once sensitiveness and endurance, and we were indebted to this for the faculties, the capacities, that made up the man whose influence had been so remarkable and his popularity a phenomenon. He was of fine sensibilities, and there was nothing on earth or in the air that did not tell him something. He was like an instrument of music that a breath would move to melody, and that was ever in tune for any wind that blew, and yet had patient strength, and wore like steel. He had a rare make-up of refinement and power, and life was sweeter and brighter and more costly far to him than to the ordinary man.

It was after his first and, as it turned out, final defeat for the Presidency, in his earliest effort for the office, that his fame grew splendid. His campaigning was fascinating, and his speeches, as the years passed, took greater variety. In his tour when a candidate in 1884, his addresses were marvellous in aptitude and in a thousand felicities. There was much said of the fact that he was not a lawyer, and an affected superiority to him by gentlemen whose profession permitted "fees," and there was a system of deprecation to the effect that he only harangued, that he had neither originality nor grace. But after Garfield's death and the retirement of the Secretary from the Cabinet, he turned to writing history "as a resource," and his great work is of permanent value to the country, while his Garfield oration is one of the masterpieces of the highest rank; and there came straight from his brain two far-flashing ideas--that of the union of American nations, and to protect the policy of protection with reciprocity--and in the two there is the manifestation of that crowning glory of public life which enters the luminous atmosphere of immortality--statesmanship. That he had not the opportunity of the execution of these policies--of guiding and shaping their triumph--was not his fault but his fate. Their time may be coming but slowly, yet it surely will come. His zeal in behalf of making the protective principle irresistible by associating it intimately with reciprocity, was so strong that he grew impatient when others were tedious in comprehension; and there was a story of his concluding a sharp admonition to the laborers on the tariff schedules by "smashing his new silk hat on a steam-heater in the committee-room." He was asked by a friend who rode out with him to see the statue that he thought the most accurate and impressive of all the likenesses of Lincoln and was fond of driving to see, located in a park east of the Capitol--that by Story--whether he had "smashed a new silk hat" on a steam-heater on behalf of reciprocity; and he softly responded, "It was not a new hat."

That Mr. Blaine was keenly disappointed when defeated for the Presidency at Cincinnati, there is no doubt; and that he began then to see that it was not his destiny to be President, is certain.

There is a great contrast in his favor in his manner of bearing this disappointment with that of Clay and Webster under somewhat similar circumstances. Clay was furious at the nomination of General William Henry Harrison, and greeted with unmeasured denunciation those responsible for that judicious act; and Webster was bitter when Taylor and Scott were nominated in the first instance, but came, after a time, grandly out of the clouds. It is an interesting coincidence that Webster when Secretary of State was a candidate for the Presidential nomination against his chief, President Fillmore, and died, on the 24th of October, 1852, a few months after Scott's triumph at Baltimore and a few days before the popular election of Pierce. The enduring memory of Mr. Blaine appeared in the last October he lived, in the precise remark, when something was said of the death of Webster, "Ah! day after to-morrow it will be forty years since Webster died." The news of the nomination of Hayes, Blaine received serenely, and before the vote was declared in the convention sent the nominee a cordial telegram of congratulation. When he knew at Augusta in 1884 that he was beaten, he said: "Personally I care less than my nearest friends would believe, but for the cause and for many friends I profoundly deplore the result." And that was the entire truth. He felt that he had not been fairly beaten, but he gave utterance only to the public wrong done in the unfairness, and left that expression as a warning to the country. He did not, as we have seen, follow the example of Clay, who persistently favored his own candidacy. On the contrary, Blaine did not covet the Presidency, and tried to avoid the personal strife of 1884, and not for any of the apprehensive motives attributed to him by those who acted upon the feeling in his case that the spirit of justice was malevolent.

I feel that I should not now deal fairly with the public if I did not give here the letter from Blaine in my possession, that more completely than any published gives expression to his personal bearing when defeated.

LETTER FROM MR. BLAINE TO MR. HALSTEAD.

(Personal.)

AUGUSTA, MAINE, _16th Nov., '84._

DEAR MR. HALSTEAD:--I think there would be no harm to the
public and no personal injustice if you should insert the
three enclosed items in your editorial columns.

I feel quite serene over the result. As the Lord sent upon us
an ass in the shape of a preacher, and a rainstorm, to lessen
our vote in New York, I am disposed to feel resigned to the
dispensation of defeat, which flowed directly from these
agencies.

In missing a great honor I escaped a great and oppressive
responsibility. You know--perhaps better than any one--how
_much I didn't want_ the nomination; but perhaps, in view of
all things, I have not made a loss by the canvass. At least I
try to think not. The other candidate would have fared hard in
Maine, and would have been utterly broken in Ohio.

Sincerely,

JAMES G. BLAINE.

Of course all this is private.

_P.S._--This note was written before receipt of yours. Pray
publish nothing of the kind you intimate unless you first
permit me to see the proof. Don't be afraid of the enclosed
items. They are rock-ribbed for truth and for a good rendering
of public opinion.

Mr. Blaine refers in the closing paragraph to the proposition I made to him to publish the true story of his candidacy--substantially the same pressed upon the attention of General Sherman. Between them they suppressed me, but it is due them that this chapter of history should be known now that they are gone.

I had the privilege of walking with Mr. Blaine in the beautiful and fragrant parks at Homburg, in Southern Germany, in the summer of 1887, and discussing with him the question whether he should be a candidate for the Republican nomination the next spring. He then seemed to be very well, but exertion speedily fatigued him. He was on sight a very striking personage, and always instantly regarded with interest by strangers. His personal appearance was of the utmost refinement and of irreproachable dignity. His absolute cleanliness was something dainty, his dress simple but fitting perfectly and of the best material. His face was very pale, but his sparkling eyes contradicted the pallor.

His form was erect, and his figure that of youth. His hair and beard were exquisitely white. His mouth had the purity of a child's, and he never had tasted tobacco or used spirituous liquors, save when his physician had recommended a little whiskey, and then not enough to color a glass. He drank sparingly of claret and champagne, caring only for the flavor. He was gentle, kindly, genial, and in a manly sense beautiful. There are many distinguished English people at Homburg in the season, and they were gratified to meet Mr. Blaine, and charmed with him. It required no ceremony to announce him as a personage--a man who had made events--and he never posed or gave the slightest hint, in his movements, of conscious celebrity. I never saw him bothered by being aware of himself but once, and that was when, across the street from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the dusk of an evening, he shaded his face with his hand, and looked curiously at ten thousand people who were gazing at the house, and shouting madly for him, expecting that he would appear at a window and make acknowledgment of their enthusiasm. Suddenly he saw in the glance of one beside him that he was curiously yet doubtfully regarded, and hastened away in fear of his friends, who in their delight at discovering him would have become a mob.

In Homburg he seemed to care for others' opinions about the proper course for him to take; and the substance of that which I had to say--and he seemed to think me in a way representative--was that he alone must decide for himself, as he only knew all the circumstances and elements that must be considered in a decision. Once we walked the main street of the town in the night--and it is then a very lonely place, for it is the fashion to get up in the morning at six o'clock, and take the waters and the music--and that time I was impressed, and the impression abided, that the inner conviction of Mr. Blaine was he had not the vitality to safely take the Presidency if he held it in his hand; that he believed the office would wear him out--that it was a place of dealing with persons who would worry away his existence; that he felt he could not endure the wear and tear and pressure of the first position, and preferred the Secretaryship of State, with the hope of going on with his South American policy, which he had developed in Garfield's time, brief as that was; and I conjectured that all this had been in his mind when he wanted Sherman and Lincoln to be the ticket in 1884. And it occurred to me with so much force as the logic of many things he said, that I accepted it as true, and was reminded of his weary exclamation once of a good friend whose moods were changeable: "Now that he is right, stay with him. He takes the health out of me with his uncertainties."

The Secretaryship of State he cared for; in that office the world was all before him, and he was fully himself, and was not fretted by a perpetual procession of favor-seekers. The argument his urgent admirers used with him was that it would be easier to make up his mind than to convince a President, and that as the Chief of State he could throw the work on the Cabinet; but he was not satisfied. The Florence letter to me seemed familiar, for it was a reminder of Homburg, and its sincerity was in all the lines and between the lines; and it was addressed to a friend in Pittsburg, that it might not be suppressed in New York. He had very close and influential friends who did not divine his true attitude, or would not admit that they had, and insisted that he was really well and strong and tough, better than he had been, and that he should not be humored in his fancy that he was an invalid. This feeling continued even to 1892, though he had been meantime painfully broken by a protracted illness. It will be remembered that in the correspondence between General Harrison as President-elect and Mr. Blaine, when the Secretaryship of State was offered and accepted, there appeared harmony of views concerning Pan-Americanism; that Mr. Blaine enjoyed the office and that his official labors during the Harrison Administration were of the highest distinction, showing his happiest characteristics. The difference as to duties that arose between the President and the Secretary was forgotten, and their mutual sympathies abounded, when there came upon them, in their households, the gravest, tenderest sorrows.

From a photograph by Miss F.B. Johnston.]

When Mr. Blaine was for the last time in New York on his way to Washington, stopping as was his habit at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, he asked me to walk with him to his room, fronting on Twenty-third Street, on the parlor floor; and he slowly, as if it were a task, unlocked the door. There was a sparkle of autumnal crispness in the air, and he had a fire, that glittered and threw shadows about fitfully. There was not much to say. It was plain at last that Mr. Blaine was fading, that he had within a few weeks failed fast. His great, bright eyes were greater than ever, but not so bright. His face was awfully white; not that brainy pallor that was familiar--something else! He seated himself in the light of the fire, on an easy-chair. There was a knock at his door, and a servant handed him a card, and he said: "No;" and we were alone. I could not think of a word of consolation; and in a moment he appeared to have forgotten me, and stared in a fixed, rapt dream at the flickering flame in the grate. It occurred to me to get up and go away quietly, as conversation was impossible--for there was too much to say. It came to me that I ought not to leave him alone. Something in him reminded me of the mystical phrases of the transcendent paragraph of his oration on Garfield, picturing the death of the second martyred President, by the ocean, while far off white ships touched the sea and sky, and the fevered face of the dying man felt "the breath of the eternal morning."

Some weeks earlier Mr. Blaine and I had had a deep talk about men and things, and he was very kind, and his boundless generosity of nature never revealed itself with a greater or sadder charm. He now remembered that conversation--as a word disclosed--and said: "I could have endured all things if my boys had not died." The door opened, and his secretary walked in--and I took Mr. Blaine's hand for the last time, saying, "Good-night," and he said, with a look that meant farewell--"Good-by."

His grave is on a slope that when I saw it was goldenly sunny, and the turf was strewn by his wife's hand with lilies--for it was Easter morning! Close at his left was a steep, grassy bank, radiantly blue with violets, and there was in the shining air the murmurous hum of bees, making a slumbrous, restful music. Blaine's monument is a hickory tree whose broken top speaks of storms, and at his feet is a stone white as new snow, and on it only--and they are enough--the initials "J.G.B.," that were the battle-cry of millions, and are and shall be always to memory dear.

[Footnote I: This related to a matter General Sherman had mentioned in another letter, and did not refer to the subject I was trying to get him to consider.]

[Footnote J: General Sherman differed in this judgment with Blaine and many Republicans who were not unfriendly to Arthur.]

THE NEW STATUE OF WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.

BY FRANK B. GESSNER.

The erection of an equestrian statue of General William Henry Harrison, in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a fitting but also a tardy commemoration of a man who rendered his State and the nation most distinguished services. For fifty years there has been talk of doing him honor in some such fashion, and even the statue which as this Magazine goes to press is being formally dedicated in Cincinnati (in the presence of a grandson of the subject who is himself an ex-President), has been completed for some years, and has been stowed away in dust and darkness because there was not public interest enough in the matter to meet the cost of setting it up.

Although now almost a forgotten figure, General Harrison was one of the ablest and worthiest of our public men. Born in Berkeley, Virginia, February 9, 1773, he grew to manhood with the close of the Revolution and the establishment of the national government. His father was the friend of Washington, and when the son went into the Western wilds he held a commission as ensign signed by the first of the Presidents. At the age of thirty he was a delegate in Congress from the Northwest Territory. For a succeeding decade he was governor of that wide stretch of country which in time he saw carved into States all owing much to his genius as warrior and statesman. In the second war with Great Britain he commanded the Western armies, and won the notable victories of Tippecanoe and the Thames. The first gave him a name which became the slogan of the Whigs in the memorable campaign of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." At the battle of the Thames fell Tecumseh, whose death broke the Indian power east of the Mississippi. After the war of 1812 General Harrison was successively Congressman, Senator of the United States, and Minister to Colombia.

From a photograph by Landy, Cincinnati.]

Returning in 1830 to his home at North Bend, on the line between Indiana and Ohio, he lived more or less in retirement until 1836, when he was made the Whig candidate for President. He was defeated; but in 1840 he was again the nominee, and, after the greatest campaign of the century, was elected, defeating Martin Van Buren. The campaign of 1840 was called the "log-cabin and hard-cider" campaign, though the reputed log-cabin home of the Whig candidate was in reality a spacious mansion. General Harrison was inaugurated March 4, 1841, and on April 4, a month later, he died in the White House, a victim of exposure and the wearing importunities of office-seeking constituents. Something of the character of the man is disclosed in his last words, spoken four hours before his death. To whom he thought himself speaking can only be conjectured--Vice-President Tyler, some authorities claim; but he was heard by his physician to say: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."

Physically, General Harrison has been described as "about six feet high," straight and rather slender, and of "a firm, elastic gait," even in his last years. He had "a keen, penetrating eye," a "high, broad and prominent" forehead, and "rather thin and compressed lips."

From a painting in possession of the Harrison family.]

Mrs. Harrison was not with her husband at his death, and never became an inmate of the White House. For that reason there hangs on its walls no portrait of her, among those of the various ladies of the mansion. She was the daughter of John Cleves Symmes, a scion of the Colonial aristocracy. She loved better than the excitement of social life in Washington the domestic peace of her North Bend home and the society of her thirteen children, growing up in usefulness and honor. In her youth she had been a great belle, and she remained a beautiful woman even in her declining years. She was educated in that first fashionable school for young women in America founded by Isabella Graham in the city of New York. A sister, Polly Symmes, was also a famous beauty. They went together to share their father's fortunes in the unsettled West, and both found their fates in the hand of the Miamis. Polly married Peyton Short, who became a millionaire.

Mrs. Harrison had been detained by illness from going with her husband to witness the proudest event of his life, his inauguration; and she had purposed following him to Washington later in the spring, when the weather should be more favorable for the long, wearisome journey by stage-coach. But, alas! before the spring fully opened, instead of following him to Washington she was following his body to its silent, stone-walled tomb, overlooking the wide sweep of the Ohio southward. This noble woman lived to be eighty-nine and to see her grandson, Benjamin Harrison, now ex-President, a general in the Union army. She retained to the last much of her beauty and that sweetness of disposition which has endeared her memory to those of her blood who knew her best. She sleeps by the side of her husband in the old vault at North Bend.

The Cincinnati statue of General Harrison is the work of L.T. Rebisso, who made the statue of General McPherson which stands in one of the circular parks in Washington, and the equestrian statue of General Grant for the city of Chicago. Its cost, which, exclusive of the pedestal, is twenty-seven thousand dollars, is paid by the city. Mr. Rebisso has given a portrayal of Harrison unlike any of the more familiar pictures. These usually present a decrepit old man, from whose eye have vanished that fire of youth and flash of soul which made Harrison a leader of men. The Rebisso statue, as will be seen by the reproduction of it given herewith, presents a soldier in the full flower of vigorous manhood. And this conception is no mere ideal of fancy, but is taken from a portrait painted in 1812, which now hangs in the house of a grandchild of General Harrison near the old North Bend homestead.

THE SILENT WITNESS

BY HERBERT D. WARD

There are many hamlets in New Hampshire, five, ten miles or even more from the railroad station. To the chance summer visitor the seclusion and the rest seem entrancing. The glamour of mountain scenery and trout effectually obliterates the brave signs of poverty and struggle from before the irresponsive eyes of the man of city leisure. He carelessly gives the urchin, mutely pleading in front of the unpainted farm-house, a few cents for his corrugated cake of maple-sugar, and asks the name of a distant peak. If he should notice, how would he know the meaning of the scant crops of hay and potatoes, or of the empty stall? Sealed to him is the pathos in the history of the owners of the stone farm. His thoughts scarcely glance at the piteous wife plaiting straw hats; the only son, whose rare happiness consists in a barn dance in the village three miles below, and whose large eyes contract with increasing age, and lose all expression except that of anxiety.

There was a time perhaps when the backbone of the New World used to be straightened by men of a mountain birth. The question whether the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire produce giants of trade or law to-day as they did fifty years ago, is an open one. So the grand old stock is run out of the soil? And is it replaced by the sons and grandsons of those sturdy farmers themselves, who buy back the rickety homesteads, and remodel them into summer cottages?

Michael Angelo said that "men are worth more than money," and if what was an axiom then is true in these fallen days of purse worship, Mrs. Abraham Masters was the richest woman under the range of Mount Kearsarge. For her son Isaac was the tallest, the strongest, the tenderest, and truest boy in the county; but her farm of a hundred acres, the only inheritance from a dead husband, was about the poorest, most unprofitable, and most inaccessible collection of boulders in the mountains.

It was situated upon the cold shoulder of a hill, sixteen miles from the nearest station. The three-mile trail which led from the village would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy road. What a site for a hotel! Yet the hotel did not materialize, and the "view" neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors of the desolate spot.

"Never mind, I reckon we'll pull through," Isaac used to comfort his mother.

"You're a good boy, Ikey. If the Lord is willin', I guess I am," she answered with quaint devoutness.

But the Lord did not seem to be willing, and one spring He caused a late frost in June to kill most of the seed, and a drouth in July and August to wither what was left, and starvation stared in the faces of the widow and her son. At this time, Isaac began to "keep company," and to talk of getting married in the next decade. He was twenty-two, and had a faithful, saving disposition, when there was anything to save. And whether he became engaged because there was nothing but love to harvest, or whether, woman-like, Abbie Faxon loved him better than she did her other suitors because of his poverty and misery, and was willing to tell him so, I cannot pretend to decide. At any rate, Isaac brought Abbie one afternoon from the village, three miles below, and the two women kissed and wept, and Isaac went out and stood alone facing the view; the apple in his throat rose and fell, and great tears blinded his sight.

We can make no hero of Isaac, for he was none. His heart was as simple and as clean as a pebble in a brook. Country vices had not smirched him. He had a mind only for his mother, and the farm, and earning a living--and a heart for Abbie. Great thoughts did not invade his head. But this afternoon, as he stood there on the gray rock, his heart bursting with his happiness, which was made perfect by his mother's blessing, an apprehension for the future--bitter, breathless, began to arouse him. The promise of the horizon suddenly became revealed to him. The distant line of green, now bold, now sinuous, now uncertain, had never asked him questions before, had never exasperated him with a meaning.

But now he saw the tips of spires flecking the verdure of the far-off valleys. He saw the hurrying smoke of a locomotive. He saw with awakening vision, starting from that dead farm of his, the region of trade and life. A film had fallen from his eyes. The energetic arrow of love had touched his ambition, and his round, rosy face became indented with lines of resolve. He turned and walked with a new tread into the house.

"Mother! Abbie!" he blurted out, "I'm going away. I'm going to Boston." He stopped and stammered as he saw the horror-stricken faces before him.

"Lord a-mercy!"

"Ikey! Air you teched?"

"No," he resumed stoutly, "I be'ant. There's Dan Prentiss--he went--see what he done; and Uncle Bill, he--"

"We hain't heard nothing from your Uncle Bill since he sot out. That was twelve years ago, the spring your father built them three feet on the shed." Mrs. Masters spoke firmly.

"Never mind, mother, I'm going to Boston, and I will come back. I'm going to earn my livin'. I'm strong and willin', and as able as Dan Prentiss. Ye needn't be scared, I ain't going yet. I'll finish up the fall work fust. I'm going for the winter anyway, and Abbie'll come an' live with you, mother--won't you, Abbie, dear? She's the only mother you've got now. Your folks can spare you."

Here Abbie announced bravely, "I will, Ikey, if you must go."

She blushed deeply as she said it, and the sight of her pretty color so moved the young man that, having the bashfulness of his native crops, he rushed out into the glory of the sunset, and sat upon the granite boulder watching until the gray, the purple, and then the black had washed out the white steeples from the distant valley.

Isaac Masters was of the boulder type. How many decades was the smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a glacier until it reached its halt? But now it would need a double charge of dynamite to shake it from its base. It generally took the mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such a simple problem as the quantity of grain his horse should have at a feed when the spring planting began; but when once his intention was fixed it withstood all opposition. But this time he was astonished at his own temerity of mind, as his mother and sweetheart were; and the more profoundly he pondered over the gravest decision of his life, the more did it seem to him an inspiration, perhaps from the Deity himself.

But Isaac was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success. He had worked on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly. He had fought the rocks, and the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for his life, and never had a thought of food or of comfort visited him unaccompanied by the necessity for labor.

"I can work fourteen hours a day, mother, and live upon pork and beans, as well as the next man." He stood to his full height, displaying to the pale woman the outlines of massive muscular development. His hands were huge and callous, their grip the terror of his mates after a husking bee. He had measured his great strength but once; that was in the dead of winter, with the snow drifted five feet deep between the barn and the house. A heifer, well grown, had been taken sick, and needed warmth for recovery. Isaac swung the sick beast over his shoulders, holding its legs two in each hand before his head, and strode through the storm, subduing the battling snow with as much ease as he did the bellowing calf. His mother met him at the woodshed door. Behind the gladiator rose the forbidding background of a stark mountain range; but to her astonished and unfocussed sight, her son seemed greater than the mountain, and more compelling than its peaks. From that hour his whisper was her law; and from that day--for how could the adoring mother help telling her quarterly caller all about the heifer?--Isaac had no more wrestling matches in the valley.

August burned into September, and September, triumphant in her procession of royal colors, marched into October, the month of months. Mrs. Masters had already completed her pathetic preparations for her son's departure. There, in the family carpet-bag, which his father had carried with him on his annual trip to Portland, were stowed a half dozen pairs of well-darned woollen stockings, the few decent shirts that Isaac had left, his winter flannels, which had already served six years, his comb and brush, a hand mirror that had been one of his mother's wedding presents, likewise a couple of towels that had formed a part of her self-made trousseau; and we must not forget the neckties that Abbie had sewed from remnants of her dresses, and which Isaac naïvely considered masterpieces of the haberdasher's art.

At the mouth of the deep bag Mrs. Masters tucked a Bible which fifty years ago had been presented to her husband by his Sunday-school teacher as a prize for regular attendance. This inscription was written in a wavering hand upon the blank page:

"_In the eighth year of the reign of Josiah, while he was yet
young, he began to seek after the God of David his father_.--
2 Chron. xxxiv. 3."

"For," said Mrs. Masters softly to Abbie, after she had read the inscription aloud, and had patted the book affectionately, "this is the first prize my Josiah ever had, an' the Lord knows he thought more on it than he did of Lucy, his mare. An' if there should happen any accident to Isaac, they'd find by opening of his bag that ef he was alone in a far country he was a Christian, nor ashamed of it, neither."

Isaac had only money enough saved up to take him as far as Boston, and to board him in the cheapest way for several days.

"If I can't work," he said proudly, straightening to his full height, "no one can!"

It is just such country lads as this--strong, self-reliant, religious--who, when poverty has projected them out of her granite mountains upon granite pavements, each as hard and bleak as the other, by massive determination have conquered a predestined success.

Too soon, for those who were to be left behind, the day of separation came. Mrs. Masters's haggard face and Abbie's red eyes told of unuttered misery.

But Isaac did not notice these signs of distress. He was absorbed in his future. The last bustle was over, the last breakfast gulped down amid forced smiles and ready tears, the last button sewed on at the last moment; and now Mrs. Masters's lunch of mince pie, apples, and doughnuts was tenderly tucked into the jaws of the carpet-bag; thereby disturbing a love letter that Abbie had hidden there. A young neighbor had volunteered to drive Isaac down the mountain to the station.

"All aboard! Hurry up, Ike!" cried this young person, consulting his silver watch, and casting a look of mingled commiseration and envy upon the giant, locked in the arms of the two women, who hardly reached to the second button of his coat. Isaac caught the glance, and started to tear himself away. But his mother laid her gnarled hand gently upon his arm, and led him into the unused parlor.

"Just a minute, Abbie dear, I want to be alone with my boy," she waved the girl back. "Then you can have him last. It's my right an' your'n!"

She closed the door, and led him under the crayon portrait of his father, framed in immortelles. She raised her arms, and he stooped that they might clasp about his neck.

"Isaac," she said hoarsely, "I ain't no longer young nor very strong. Remember 'fore you go away from the farm that you're the son of an honest man, an' a pious woman, and"--dropping with great solemnity into scriptural language--"I beseech you, my son, not to disgrace your godly name."

With partings like this the primitive Christians must have sent their sons into the whirlwind of the world.

Then Isaac broke down for the first time, and with the tears streaming, he lifted his mother bodily in his arms, and promised her, and kissed her. "Mother trusts you, Ikey," was all she could say. But his time had come. There was a crunching of wheels.

"Now go to Abbie. Leave me here! Good-by; you have always been a good boy, dear." Mrs. Masters's voice sank into a whisper; the strong man, moved as he was, could not comprehend her exhaustion.

Abbie was waiting for him at the door, and he went to her. The impatient wagon had gone down the road. They were to cut through the pasture, and meet it at the brook. There they were to part.

They clasped hands. Isaac turned. A gaunt, gray face, broken, helpless, hopeless, peered out beneath the green paper shade of the parlor window. If he had known--a doubt crossed his brain, but the girl twitched his hand, and the cloud scattered. Down the hill they ran, down, until the brook was reached. There they stood, panting, breathless, listening. There were only a few minutes left, and they hid behind an oak tree and clasped.

* * * * *

It was long after dark when the train came to its halt in its vaulted terminus. It was due at seven, but an excursion on the road delayed it until after nine. However, this did not disconcert Isaac Masters. He hurried out to the front of the station, where the row of herdics greeted him savagely. Carrying his father's old carpet-bag, he looked from his faded hat to his broad toes the ideal country bumpkin; yet his head was not turned by the rumbling of the pavements, the whiz of the electrics, the blaze of the arc lights, nor by the hectic inhalations that seem to comprehend all the human restlessness of a city just before it retires to sleep. His breath came faster, and his great chest rose and fell; these were the only indications of acclimation. Isaac had started from home absolutely without any "pull" or introduction but his own willingness to work. Utterly ignorant of the city, and knowing no one in it, on the way down in the train he had marked out a line of conduct from which he determined not to be swerved.

To the mountain mind the policeman becomes the embodiment of a righteously executed law. At home, their only constable was one of the most respected men in the community. Isaac argued from experience--and how else should he? This was his syllogism:

A policeman is the most respectable of men in my town.

This man before me is a policeman.

Therefore he must be the most upright man in the city. I will go to him for advice.

The city casuist might have smiled at the major premise--and laughed at the ingenuous conclusion. Yet if brass buttons, a cork hat and a "billy" are the emblems of guardianship and probity, the country boy has the right argument on his side, and the casuist none at all.

It never occurred to Isaac that the policeman could either make a mistake of judgment, or meditate one. Therefore he approached the guardian of the peace confidently.

This gentleman, who had noticed the traveller as soon as he had emerged from the depot, awaited his approach with becoming dignity. The patronage and disdain that the metropolis feels for the hamlet were in his air.

"Excuse me, sir--I want to ask you--" began Isaac, after a proper obeisance.

"Move on, will yer!"

"But I wanted to ask you--"

"Phwat are ye blockin' up the road fur, young man?"

"I want you to help me!"

"The ---- you do!" He looked about ferociously. "Look here, sonny, if ye don't move along, an' have plenty of shtyle about it, I'll help ye to the lock-up--so help me--!"

Isaac looked down upon the man, whom he could have crushed with one swoop of his hands. The consternation of his first broken ideal possessed his heart. With a deadly pallor upon his face, he hurried up the clanging street, and the coarse laughter of brutes tingled in his ears. He swallowed this rough inhospitality, which is the hemlock that poisons country faith. Take from the pavement enough dust to cover the point of a penknife, and insert it in the arm of a child, and in a week it will be dead with tetanus. After this first encounter with the protectors of the people, Isaac felt as if his soul had been bedaubed with mud. He experienced a contracting tetanus of the heart. Had he not planned all the lonesome day to cast himself upon the kindness of the first policeman whom he saw? What other guide or protector was there left for him in the strange city? The rebuff which he had received half annihilated his intelligence.

Isaac could no more put up at the great hotel he saw on his right than the majority of us can take a trip to Japan. Isaac hurried on. Why did he leave home? The fear of a great city is more teasing than the terror of a wilderness or of a desert. There the trees or the rocks or the sand befriends you. But in the city the penniless stranger has no part in people or home or doorsteps. Every one's heart is against him. It is the anguish of hunger amid plenty, the rattling of thirst amid rivers of wine, the serration of loneliness amid humanity thicker than barnacles upon a wharf pile. Such a terror--not of cowardice, but of friendlessness--seized Isaac Masters, and a foreboding that he might possibly fail after all made his spine tingle. Still he drove on. He had passed through the main street--or across it--he did not know--until the electric lights cast dim shadows, until stately banks had given way to unkempt brick fronts, until the glittering bar-rooms had been exchanged for vulgar saloons--until--

Masters came to a sudden halt, and dropping his bag, uttered a loud cry. The curtained door of a grog-shop opened upon him. A hatless man dashed out, swearing horribly, and all but fell into Isaac's arms. With a cry of terror the runner dodged the pedestrian, and bolted down the street. Not twenty feet behind him bounded his pursuer.

By this time the country boy had slipped into the shadow of the building, where he could see without being seen. In that moment Isaac caught sight of a dazed group of men within, and the profile of the pursuer against the hot light of the saloon. He saw a brute holding a pistol in his out-stretched hand. Before Isaac understood the situation, the weapon shot out two flames and two staccato reports. These were followed by the intense silence which is like the darkness upon the heels of lightning.

Isaac's eyes were now strained upon the creature who was shot. He saw the man stagger, throw up his hands, and fall. He heard a groan. At that time the murderer with the smoking revolver was not more than ten paces away. As he fired, he had stopped. When he saw his victim fall, he gave a hoarse laugh.

By this time the lights in the saloon were put out, and its occupants had fled. The rustle of human buzzards flocking to the tragedy had begun. A motion that the murderer made to escape aroused the New Hampshire boy to a fierce sense of justice. A few bounds brought him by the side of the ruffian, who looked upon him with astonishment, and then with inflamed fear. Isaac furiously struck the pointed pistol to the pavement, and grasped the fellow's waist. Then he knew that he had almost met his match. Isaac held his opponent's left arm by the wrist, and tightened the vise. The murderer held the boy around his neck with a contracting grip such as only a prize-fighter understands. Neither spoke a word. It was power--power against skill.

There was a crash and a cry and a fall. But not until Isaac knew that the man under him was helpless did he utter a sound. Then he called: "Police! Police!"

The answer was a blinding blow upon the crown of his head. Then, before his head swam away into unconsciousness, he felt a strange thing happen to his wrists.

* * * * *

The first lieutenant, the captain, and the superintendent are different beings from the officer of the street, who has no gilt stripes upon his sleeves. The one, having passed through all grades, is supposed to have been chosen not only because of his fidelity and bravery, but because of his discriminating gentleness or gentlemanliness. The other, a private of the force, often a foreigner, with foreign instincts, and eager for promotion (that is, he means to make as many arrests as possible), confuses the difference between rudeness and authority, brutality and law. By the time he is a sergeant sense has been schooled into him, and he ought to know better.

The superintendent looked at Isaac steadily and not unkindly, while he listened to the officer's story.

"Off with those bracelets!" he said, sternly.

Isaac Masters regarded the superintendent gratefully. For the first time since he had been rebuffed by the station policeman, his natural expression of trust returned to his face.

"I'll forgive him," said the boy of a simple, Christian education. "It was dark--and he made a mistake." Isaac wiped the clotted blood from his cheeks. "Can I go now?"

Even a less experienced man than the white-haired superintendent would have known that the young man before him could no more have committed a crime or told an untruth than an oak. The policeman who had clubbed him, perhaps with the best intentions in the world, hung his head.

"Let me hear your story first." The superior officer spoke in his most fatherly tones. He really pitied the country lad.

"What is your name? Where do you come from? How did you get there? Tell me all about it. Here, sergeant, get him a glass of water, first."

"Perhaps a little whiskey would do him good," suggested a night-hawk who had just opened the door of the reporters' room. Blood acts terribly upon even the most stolid imagination. Beneath that red-streaked mask it needed all the experience of the superintendent to recognize the innocence of a juvenile heart. As Isaac in indignant refusal turned his disfigured head upon the youthful representative of an aged paper, he seemed to the thoughtless reporter the incarnation of a wounded beast. The young fellow opened the door, and beckoned his mates in to see the new show that was enacting before them. It is only fair to say that it is due to the modern insanity of the press for prying into private affairs that the worst phase of the tragedy I am relating came to pass.

Isaac Masters told his story eagerly and simply.

"I have done nothing to be arrested for," he ended, looking at the superintendent with his round, honest eyes. "I only did my duty as anybody else would. Now let me go. Tell me, Mr. Officer, where I can get a decent night's lodging, for I am going home to-morrow. I've had enough of this city. I want to go home!"

Something like a sob sounded in the throat of the huge boy as he came to this pathetic end. Every man in the station, from the most hardened observer of crime to the youngest reporter of misery, was moved. Isaac himself, still dizzy from the effects of the blow, nauseated by the prison smell, the indescribable odor of crime which no disinfectants can overcome, confounded by the surroundings into which he had been cast, and trembling with the nameless apprehension that all honest people feel when drawn into the arms of the law, swayed and swooned again.

The sergeant and the reporters (for they were not without kind hearts) busied themselves with bringing him to. From an opposite bench the murderer lowered, between scowls of pain, upon the man who had crushed him. There had been revealed to him a simplicity of soul residing in a body of iron. He saw that the country lad had fainted, not from physical weakness, but because of mental anguish. Such an apparent disparity between mind and body had not been brought to the saloon-keeper's experience before.

"He is the only witness, you say, officer?" inquired the chief. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, sorr!"

"We'll have to hold him, then. It's a great pity. I don't suppose he could get a ten-dollar bail." The superintendent shook his gray head thoughtfully. His subordinates did the same, with an exaggerated air of distress.

"Where am I? Oh!" What horror in that exhalation, as Isaac realized the place he was in! He staggered to his feet.

"Give me my bag, quick!" he exclaimed. "I will go."

"I'm afraid you can't go yet." The superintendent spoke as if he hated to do his duty.

"Not go? Why not? You have no right to hold an innocent man!"

"In cases of assault and murder, the witnesses must be held until they can furnish bail. That is the law." The white-haired man hurried his explanation, as if he were ashamed of it.

"I will come back."

The officer shook his head.

"I give you my word I will." Isaac clasped the rail pleadingly.

"I'll have to lock you up to-night; the judge will settle the amount of your bail to-morrow."

"Lock me up? I tell you I have no friends here! How can I get bail? Where will you put me?"

"Show him his cell," replied the chief to his sergeant.

"Come along," said the policeman kindly. "All witnesses are treated that way. We'll give you the most comfortable quarters we've got."

He took Isaac by the arm after the professional manner. The young man flung off the touch. For an instant his eyes swept the station menacingly. What if he should exert his strength! There were two--three--four officers in the room. He might even overpower these, and dash for liberty. He saw the livid reflection of electric lights through the windows. Unconsciously he contracted his sinews, and tightened his muscles until they were rigid. Then the hopelessness of his position burst upon him like a red strontian fire. He felt blasted by his disgrace.

"What are you doing to me?" he cried out. "Put me in prison? My God! This will kill my mother!"

The next morning at ten o'clock Tom Muldoon was released on ten thousand dollars bail. The surety was promptly furnished by the alderman of the--th Ward. Muldoon was to present himself before the grand jury, which met the first Monday in each month. As this was the beginning of the month, his appearance could not be required for three weeks at least, and by mutual agreement of the district attorney and the counsel for the defendant, action might be put off for one or even for two months more, pending the recovery or eventual death of the assaulted. This would give the saloon-keeper plenty of time for the two ribs that Isaac Masters had crushed, to mend!

There are sensitive men and women who would go insane after spending an innocent night in a cell. In the dryest, the largest, the best of them there is everything to debase the manhood and nauseate the soul. The tin cup on the grated window-sill, half-filled with soup which the last occupant left; the cot to the right of the hopeless door, made of two boards and one straw mattress; and that necessity which is the nameless horror of such a narrow incarceration--that which suffocates and poisons; then the flickering jet up the concrete corridor, casting such fitful shadows by the prisoner's side that he starts from his cot in terror to touch the phantoms lest they be real; the alternate waves of choking heat and harrowing cold; the hammering of the steam-pipes; the curses, the groans, and the eruptive breathing of the sleeping and the drunken; the thoughts of home, and friends, and irreparable disgrace; the feeble hope that, after all, the family will not hear of this so far away; and the despair because they will--mad visions of suicide; blasphemy, repentant tears and prayers, each chasing the other amid the persistent thought that all things are impotent but freedom. Oh, what a night! What a night!

There are souls that have existed five, ten years under the courtine of Catharine in the Petropavlovskaya Fortress--drugged, tortured, at last killed like rats in a hole. All the while the maledict banner of the Romanoffs writhes above them. What has been the power to keep alive thousands of prisoners in those bastions, beyond the natural endurance of the flesh? The glory of principle.

No wonder that a ghastly face and haggard eyes and wavering steps followed the keeper to the American court-room the next morning; for nothing could be tortured into a principle to stimulate Isaac's courage. It is easy to die for right, but not for wrong.

There were three short flights of iron that led past tiers of cells, through the tombs, into the prisoner's dock. Isaac dully remembered the huge coils of steam-pipe that curled up the side of the wall. He thought of pythons. As he passed by, the prisoners awaiting sentence held the rods of their doors in their hands, like monkeys, and swore, and laughed, and shot questions at the keeper as he passed along.

"Have you no friends in the city?" proceeded the judge, after he had examined the witness.

Isaac shook his head disconsolately. "I have about five dollars; that is all, and my bag--and, sir, my character."

"Then I am afraid I shall have to hold you over in default of bail until the trial." The judge nodded to the sheriff to bring on the next case.

"Where are you taking me?"

"To the City Jail," answered the sheriff curtly. "Come along!" With a mighty effort Isaac wrenched himself loose, and strode to the bar.

"Judge!" he cried. "Judge, you wouldn't do that! Let me go! I will come back on the trial. Look at me, Judge! What have I done? Why should I be sent to prison? I am an honest man!"

But the judge was used to such scenes, and he turned his head wearily away.