Chapter XVIII (3)

It is the destiny of the middle of the nineteenth century--well may we be forgiven, if we pronounce it with some pride--unhesitatingly to defend the African slave-trade, and to smile at what sickly philanthropists used to consider the unutterable woe, the unmeasured crime, and the diabolical hard-heartedness of that traffic. We have changed all this; and, to say the truth, it was high time to discover that the negro-trade forms a charming chapter in the history of Europe, and that the protracted efforts to put it down were unchristian and unstatesmanlike. Pitt, Roscoe, Wilberforce, Burke, Washington, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Lowndes,--puny names! short-sighted men! By the African slave-trade, creatures that are hardly deserving the name of men, on account of organic, intellectual, and moral incapacity, are forcibly carried into the regions of Christian religion and civilization, there to become civilized in spite of their unfitness for civilization. The mariners, usually occupied in risking life or health merely for the sake of base traffic and filthy lucre, are suddenly transformed into ministering agents of civilization and religion. It gives a priestly character to the captain of a slave-ship,--to him that is willing to break the laws of his country, even daring the gallows, for the benefit of the sable brother, and of his law-abiding conservative society. How different from those dark times when the poet could say, _--Homo ignoto homini lupus est!_ The missionary only endeavors to carry the Church to Africa; the slave-trader carries Africa to the Church, to civilization, and to the auction-table.

There are but two more returns to truth and justice necessary,--the Inquisition and the Witch-Trials. These restored, we may safely congratulate ourselves on having regained the ground on which our race stood before the Reformation, that untoward event, whence all the mischief dates that has befallen man in the shape of human rights, liberty, and other deplorable things, as lately a grave writer--not a Catholic, nor a Jew either--gravely assured us. Gentle readers, let us not be impatient. Progress has been of late so rapid, that many of you, it is to be hoped, will yet have an opportunity of hailing the return of those two noble institutions, _pro majore gloriâ Dei_, for which they always existed, as long as chill and misty skepticism did not extinguish their glowing poetry. Ah! happy times! poetic age! when there existed not only "words that burn," but also laws that burned!

In the mean time, it may not be inappropriate to commence the consideration of a topic somewhat farther removed from us, but which, according to our humble opinion, ought not to remain wholly beyond the limits of a candid, liberal, and unprejudiced examination,--we mean the important question, Whether the choicest of all substances, the most delicate of all muscular texture, that substance of which kings, philosophers, policemen, and supporters of crinoline are fashioned by the plastic hand of Nature, ought forever to be excluded from the reproductive process of wasted energy and proportionably consumed nervous and cerebral fibre. Reader, do not shrink; grant us a patient ear. You do not know how rapidly you may change your own opinion and feelings. Do you not remember with what awe we first read in the "Almanach des Gourmands," that a certain _sauce piquante_ was so fine that with it a man would eat his own mother? This was only twenty years ago; yet all of us, now, are helping a high-bred gentleman, trading, on a gigantic scale, in the bones of his great ancestor. What sublimity of peddling!

To those who say, It is unnatural to eat our friends, we would answer, that it is the office of civilization to remove us farther and farther from Nature. Analyze the present magnitude called Lady, and you can arithmetically state it, how little of it is nature-woman, and how much is hoop-civilization. To those, again, who object, that it is too primitive, we would reply, that the highest civilization is always a return to Nature, which is likewise exemplified by many of our ladies in the ball-room,--we mean by their upper portion.

But _revenons à nos moutons_. The Rev. Messrs. Williams and Calvert, missionaries, for many long years, among the Fijians, state, in their recently published work, that those unsophisticated children of Nature eat "long pig,"--as they call, with graceful humor, roast-man, in contradistinction to "short-pig," by which they designate our squealing fellow-roasters,--from three different motives.--When a chief has a gala-day, or desires to signal his arrival by a right royal feast, it is considered befitting to slaughter some men, to let the blood run in the path of royalty, and to have on the table some _roast-homme_. Our Captain Wilkins told us, years ago, that, for this _roast-homme_, a plump Fijiana, of some twelve or thirteen years, is preferred. They know very well what is good!--The second motive is hatred. When a Fijian mortally hates a person, he endeavors to kill him; and having killed the enemy, why should the victim not be eaten?--Lastly, it would seem that affectionate regard, especially for a favorite wife, sometimes rises to a mordant passion and an unconquerable longing for material assimilation,--so much so, that the loving husband roasts his Penelope, and neighbors are invited to participate in his better fourth or fifth, as the polygamic case may be. Perhaps, years after, when with less demonstrative nations the memory of the beloved one would have passed away, the Fijian Fidelio may smack his lips, and exclaim, with Petrarch's fervor,--

"Perchè Morte fura
Prima i migliori, e lascia star i rei:
Questa aspettata al regno degli Dei
Cosa bella mortal passa e non dura."

Now we are very anxious not to be misunderstood by our readers. In writing this paper, we do not mean to urge the reintroduction of Cannibalism among us at once. The public mind may not yet be ripe for it; but we desire to assist in placing the subject in its proper light, and in showing that an enlightened impartiality can find very much in defence of the Fijians,--more, indeed, than the Rev. Mr. Froude has been able to accumulate in favor of his wife-devouring hero,--or than Mr. Spratt can say in favor of humanization in general, and the breaking-up of the Union in particular, by the reopening of the African slave-trade,--or than our venerable chief-justice has contrived to say in favor of reintroducing slavery in conquered territory, where positive law had abolished or excluded it, by the abstract Constitution itself, _proprio vigore_, (not quite unlike a wagoner, it seems to us, that carries the soil of distant parts, _ipsâ adhesione_, as it sticks to his boots, into the tavern-room,) without special law, which even the ancient civilians very stupidly declared to be necessary. First, you will remember, it was passionately maintained that the Constitution of the United States does not know the Common Law; and now it is insisted that Common Law (so far as slavery is concerned) is as inherent in the Constitution as the black pigment is in the negro. You cannot wash it out; it inheres physiologically in the Constitution. I tell you, reader, we are _fast_ people indeed; we travel fast in our opinions, with now and then a somerset for the delectation of the philosopher.

Let us sit down, and have a philosophical conversation; above all, let us discard sentiment, feeling,--what you call heart, and all that sort of thing. You know how much mischief Las Casas has done by allowing his feelings to interfere when the Spaniards roasted Indians, from what he chose to call diabolical lust of gold, and sheer, abstract cruelty. Poor Bishop! He belonged to the softs. Let us be philosophers, economists, and, above all, Constitutionalists. Some philosophers, indeed, have said that all idea of Right and Wrong, and the idea that there is a difference between the two, must needs, first of all, start from sentiment; but leave, I implore you, such philosophic fogyism behind you.

First, then, as to the principle of Right. It is a fact, that most tribes and races, probably all nations in their earliest days, have killed old and useless parents, and have eaten enemies, once slain,--perhaps friends, too. Some nations carried the eating of human flesh far down into their civilized periods and into recent times. The Spaniards found the civilized Aztecs enjoying their _petits soupers_ of babes _à la Tartare_, or gorgeous dinners on fattened heroes _aux truffes_. Have you forgotten that from that fine Introduction to Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" a flavor of roast "long pig" steams into our nostrils as from a royal kitchen? Eating our equals, therefore, is sound Common Law of all mankind, even more so than slavery, for it exists before slavery can be introduced. Slavery is introduced when the prisoner of war may be made to work,--when the tilling of the soil has commenced; though then not always; for we now know that slavery was introduced among the Greeks at a comparatively late period: but killing parents and eating enemies exists in the hunter's state, and at those periods when people find it hard work to obtain food, each one for himself, to keep even a starved body and a little bit of soul together. Chewing our neighbor is even better, for it is older Common Law, than the universal buying of a wife and consequent selling of daughters which exists even now over far the greater portion of the globe. We take it that our species began with eating itself without paying for the fare. Partaking of our neighbor precedes all _lex scripta_, all statute law, all constitutions. As to ourselves in particular, whose law is the English law, we know that the Druids sacrificed human beings to their gods; and every one knows full well, that man, when in gastronomic contact with the gods, always appropriates the most savory morsels and the largest portions of the sacrifice to himself, leaving to the ethereal taste of Jove or Tezcatlipoca the smell of some burnt bones or inwards. Yet there is no law on record abolishing human sacrifices. We know, indeed, that some Teutonic tribes, when they adopted Christianity, positively prohibited the eating of horse-flesh, but no law ever forbade to honor our fathers and mothers by making them parts of our feasts; so that no lawyer of the true sort will deny, that, to this day, the right of sacrificing fellow-men, and the reasonable concomitant of eating the better portion of the sacrifice, still exists. Greeks and Romans have sacrificed men; why should not we? That men have their individual rights is no valid objection. Rights depend exclusively upon the law; and the law, we have shown, does not grant equal rights (at least, not equal destinations) to the Eater and the Eatee; for it seems to be one thing to eat, and another to be eaten. It was a very silly maxim of the ancient Civil Law, That the law, the _regula_, is derived from the right (_jus_), not the _jus_ from the law. Has not a Supreme Court in one of our States lately denied to a negro even the right to choose between liberty and slavery,--the choice being left to him by his deceased master,--because the creature (which, when doing wrong, is responsible and has a will imputed to him) has no will to choose, because it cannot have any, says the Supreme Court of that State?

However, it will doubtless be objected by some, that it is simply disgusting to eat our fellow-creatures of the same species,--that it is unnatural and against our religion,--and that so remarkable a diversity of taste can be explained only on the ground of our belonging to different races. We do not believe that the Fijians belong to a different race. Fijian, or Fijician, results, by a slight change of letters, from the word Phoenician; and there can be no doubt that the Fijians are descendants of those Phoenicians who, according to Herodotus, sailed, in the reign of the Egyptian King Necho, from the Persian Gulf round the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules. How they came to be wafted to the opposite hemisphere is not for us to explain, nor do we know it. Suffice it to say, that Fijician and Phoenician are the same word. Possibly old Admiral Hanno preceded Captain Cook. Who can prove the contrary?

As to the first of these objections, we admit that some people may feel a degree of aversion to _roast-homme_; but so does the Mahometan abominate roast "short pig"; and a Brahmin, taken to Cincinnati and its environs, at the sanguinary hog-murder time, would die outright, of horror. We almost died, ourselves, at the sickening sight of that porcian massacre. _De gustibus non est disputantibus_, as our colonel used to say. Disgust, is the result of a special treaty of amity and reciprocity between the stomach and the imagination, differing according to difference in the contracting parties. We have known many persons who would not touch mutton, and others who would rather starve than eat oysters; while we ourselves revolt at sourkrout, which, nevertheless, millions of Germans, French, and Americans consider delicious. Disgust is arbitrary; it does not furnish us with a philosophical ground for argumentation. The Fijian does not feel disgust at the flavor of a well-roasted white sailor; and as long as he does not insist upon our relishing his fare, what right have we to ask him to feel disgusted? When the panther-tailed Aztec priest fattened his prisoner, or carried along the children decked with wreaths, soon to be smothered in their own juice, he cannot have felt disgust, any more than the Malay, of whom Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles tells us, that, with epicurean refinement, he cut the choicest bits from his living prisoner, in order to baste them to a turn and season them with choice pepper.

Is it unnatural? We have once seen, with our own eyes, a very large unroasted "small pig" devour one of her own piglets, whilst the others lustily drew nourishment from the grunting mother. It look our appetite away for forty-eight hours; yet it was nature; and in some portions of Europe, people express the highest degree of fondness by the expressive phrase,--"I could eat you." We may rely upon it, that, as Mr. Agassiz says,--"There is no difference in kind, but only in degree."

With reference to religion, we readily acknowledge that dining _à la Fijienne_ does not appear exactly to be a divine institution, as slavery has recently been discovered to be. From olden times it used to be the belief of superstitious man that there was a divine afflatus in liberty; but our profound theological scholars and Biblical critics have found out that the divinity is on the other side. Neither Tertullian nor Austin, neither St. Bernard nor any Pope, good or bad, neither Luther, Bossuet, Calvin, nor Baxter, no commentator, exegetist, or preacher, ever found out, what these profoundest inquirers have at length discovered, that slavery is divine, like matrimony. Had they discovered this great truth before the Catholic Church settled the number of sacraments, there must have been eight instead of seven. Why was their advent so late?

Possibly these grave and candid, deep and fervent theologians, whose opinions on theology are quoted everywhere, whose works are spread over the globe, and whose lore is stupendous, may yet discover that there is a divine flavor even in a soup _à la Mexicaine_. One thing, however, is quite certain, namely,--that there is no prohibition of digestively assimilating our neighbor with ourselves, from one end of the Bible to the other. Was not Fielding's parson logical, who preferred punch to wine, because it is nowhere spoken ill of in Scripture? When Baron Viereck was rebuked by a friend for having given his daughter in marriage to the King of Denmark, the Queen, undivorced, continuing to occupy the throne, the shrewd father replied, that he had found no passage in the Bible that prohibits a King of Denmark from having two wives; and has not the democratic Fijian as good a right to that logic as the noble Baron had?

To say the truth, all these objections are founded mainly upon sentiment, and we trust that morbid sentimentality will have no weight in an age which ridicules the horror of the British Commons at the descriptions of the middle passage, and demands calm judgment when the question arises, how to increase the number of representatives and the profits on sugar and cotton,--in our poetic age, in which republican senators have openly declared their chivalrous allegiance to the sovereign substance of which night-caps are made, and petticoats,--to His Majesty, King Cotton,--not a very merry king, it must be owned, as young King Charles was, or old King Cole, but still a worthy sovereign; for, after all, he is but a new and most bulky avatar of Almighty Dollar.

No objection whatsoever can be made to the _deglutinatio Fijiana_ on the score of utility. The islands of the Fijians are but small; no Fijian Attila can lead forth his hosts into neighboring countries; no Fijian Goths can pour down from Polynesian Alps into an Oceanic Italy; no Athenians can there send sons and gods to a Coreyra: and no Fijian Miles Standish can there walk up and down before his pipe-clayed bandoleers in foreign colonies. How, then, can an over-increase of population be more harmoniously prevented than by making the young and sleek furnish the starving with a plump existence? Is it not, economically viewed, the principle of Dr. Franklin's smoke-consuming pipe applied to the infinitely more important sphere of human existence? The festive table, to which, according to the great Malthus, Nature declines inviting a large portion of every well-peopled country, will never be known by the happy Fijian Say or Senior, so long as wise conservatism shall not change its old and sacred laws, and shall allow Nature to invite one happy portion as guests, and another happy portion as savory dishes. It is Nature in modest simplicity, as it is exhibited in half-a-dozen mice in a deep kettle, of whom one survivor and material representative remains. The Chinese expose female infants, and lawful infanticide has been abolished in some districts of the British East Indies within these thirty years only. Would it not be wiser to reassimilate the tender dear ones, and think of them ever after with smacking memory?

It is true, indeed, that, upon the whole, Fijian gastronomy leers more toward the tender sex than toward that which in our country wears the trousers uncrinolined. But, we submit, is this a fair objection? Why _is_ the tender sex more _tender?_ Lately, when an orator had strongly expressed himself against the maxim of patriotic office-hunters,--"To the victor belong the spoils," he was very logically asked,--"And pray, Sir, to whom should the spoils belong, if not to the victor?" So we would ask, should any one complain of girls being thus economized by men,--"Who, in the name of common sense, should, if not men? Would you have them perform that sacrificial duty for one another?"

But whatever may be thought, by some of our lovely readers, of this last argument, (which henceforth may be termed _argumentum marcianum_,) and which, in the case before us, will always be an _ex parte_ argument, all will agree that no objection can be taken to making repasts on _porcus longus_ once fairly killed,--for instance, on heroes stretched on the battle-field. This was the cogent argument of the New Zealander, after baptism,--used in discussing the topic with the Rev. Mr. Yale. Willing to give up slaughtering fellow-men for the sake of eating them, he could not see why it was not wicked to waste so much good food.

If it were objected, that, admitting the making of your enemy's flesh flesh of your own flesh would necessarily lead to skirmishes, "surprise-parties," and battles for the sole purpose of getting a dinner,--to a sort of pre-prandial exercise, as in fishing,--we would simply answer, "Too late!" Our friends who desire the reopening of the African slave-trade declare that they wish to buy slaves only. When statesmen, and missionaries, and simple people with simple sense and simple hearts, cry out to them, "Stop! for the sake of our common Father, stop! By reopening the slave-trade, you revive the vilest crimes, and, for every negro ultimately sold to you on the coast, you cause the murder of at least ten in the interior, not to speak of those that are coolly massacred in the barracoon, when no demand exists,"--the satisfactory reply is: "We have nothing to do with all that; we do not travel beyond the record. We buy the negro who is a slave; what made him a slave we do not care to know. The pearl in the market does not show the toil of the fisher." And so the Fijian would properly reply: "Do not mix up different subjects. I rescue my departed brother from ignominious decay, and remake a man of him. How he came to depart,--that belongs to quite a different chapter."

This utilitarian view acquires a still greater importance when applied to criminals under sentence of capital punishment. Soon after Beccaria, it was asked, if we mistake not, by Voltaire: "Of what use is the dead body of a criminal? You cannot restore the victim to life by the execution of the murderer." And many pardons in America have been granted on the assumption that no satisfactory answer could be given to the philosophical question: "What use can the swinging body of the poor creature be to any one?" The Fijian alone has a perfectly satisfactory reply.

The missionaries, already named in this paper, give a long account of the execution of a supposed Fijian conspirator, which ends with these words: "At last he was brought down to the ground by a club; after which he was eaten."

We can discern many advantages to be derived from the introduction of what we will call "_pâtés penitentiaires_."

There would be no waste of food.

The sentence of the judge would sound more civilized; for, instead of hearing the odious words, "You shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead," words would be pronounced somewhat like these: "You shall be taken to Delmonico, and there and by him be served up on such a day, as _scélérat en papillotes_."

There would be a greater readiness in jurors to convict interesting criminals, who now-a-days cannot be found guilty,--especially were a law passed that the jury should have the criminal. We read in the "Scottish Criminal Trials," that a woman, clearly convicted of an atrocious murder, was, nevertheless, found not guilty. The astonished lord justiciary asked the foreman, how it was possible to find the prisoner not guilty, with such overwhelming evidence, and was answered: "Becaase, my laird, she is purty." Would not the delicacy of the prisoner have been an additional reason for finding her guilty with Fijian jurors?

Fourthly, there would be an obvious national advantage in some countries, in which the government is at one and the same time busily engaged in finding cheap food for the people, and in transporting annually many hundreds of political _suspects_ to killing colonies. It is, indeed, surprising, that so sagacious and parental a government as that of Napoleon the Third,--may His Majesty be long preserved for the civilization of France, the peace of Europe, and the glory of mankind in general!--it is surprising, that his all-providing and all-foreseeing government has not long ago discovered how the craving of the national stomach for food, and of the popular mind for political purification, might be stilled by no longer transporting political offenders and _suspects_ to French Guiana or Lambessa, where they uselessly and ignobly perish, but by sentencing them, instead, to the enviable lot of making a feast for their brethren. Would not every Socialist, receiving permission thus to help feed society, exclaim: _C'est magnifique! mais c'est sublime!_

When Robespierre was in the zenith of his guillotinacious glory, the _bonnes_ would sit around the scaffold, minding children and knitting stockings, to see the head of a marquis or of a shoemaker fall. We leave it to every reader, whether there would not be more historic unity and poetic completeness in the _tableau_, were we to read that these good creatures dined upon the _ci-devant_, after the execution.

Imperial Rome is the _beau idéal_ of the present government of _la belle France_; and we must own, that, when perusing the exhilarating pages of Suetonius, it has often occurred to our mind that there is something wanting in the list of high deeds related of those superb specimens of humanity exhibited in the Caligulas and Heliogabali. They did so much for cookery! Yet they seem never to have risen above an indirect consumption of their subjects, by feeding their lobsters with ignoble slaves; never did they directly bestow upon Roman freemen the honor of being served up for the imperial table. Nero murdered his mother and bade his teacher open his own veins. Would it not read much more civilized, if the annals of the empire were telling us: _Nero, jam divus, leniter dixit: O Seneca, Pundit delectabilis et philosophe laute, quis dubitet te libentissime mihi hodie proferre artocreatem stoicum?_

Strange as it may appear to some readers, that thus the polished Romans might have learned a lesson of civilization from the Fijians, they will not reject our suggestion, when they reflect, that, only a short time ago, they were, probably, as much surprised at finding the government of so great a country as France adopting imperial Rome as a model body-politic. Familiarize your mind with the idea, and all difficulties vanish. It is only the last step which costs,--not the first.

There are many more reasons that might be urged in favor of the Fijians. We are not aware that the reverend missionaries have given any statistical tables, showing a regularity in the annual numbers of consumed persons, male and female, classed according to the reasons why consumed; but no one can doubt that such tables might be given, and if so, the whole question of anthropophagism could be very easily buckled up in a tidy little valise. The Fijians, in the plural, we take it, have little or nothing to do with it; it is the abstract, will-less, impersonal Fijian--who, according to the learned Ferrari,[A] would be called, now, Podesta Fijian, now Consul Fijian, now Papa Fijianus--that snuffs the flavor of his own dear natural _pot à feu_; and Right or Wrong, Just or Unjust, Commendable or Revolting, are schoolboy distinctions, no longer recognized by the philosophical historian, who treats all moral questions and national movements like questions of natural philosophy,--like social chemistry, in which so puerile a word as poison has no place. Arsenic is arsenic with certain effects, and nothing more; and society poisons itself annually to such an amount, arithmetically expressed.

[Footnote A: _Histoire des Revolutions d'Italie, ou Guelf's et Gibelins_. Par J. Ferrari. Paris, 1858.]

We ask leave to add two suggestions in favor of the Fijians, both, it would seem, of philosophic importance. If you do not like the Fijian national dish,--_national_ in more than one sense,--have the dear sons of Nature, as Carlyle probably would call them, not the right to reply,--"We do not like your _sauerkraut_, if you are a German; your _polenta_, if you are an Italian; your _olla podrida_, if you are a Spaniard; nor your _grit_, if you are a Dane; your bacon and greasy greens, if you are a Southerner; nor your baked beans, if you are a Northerner; nor any other stuff called national dishes,--all of which are vile, except English roast beef and plum-pudding, and Neapolitan maccaroni."

The other suggestion is this: Is it likely that Nature has placed the Fijians exactly in the same meridian with Greenwich, which in some measure may be called the meridian of civilization, for nothing?--is it likely that all the solar and cosmic influences which must result from this fact have really left the Fijian in that state of hyper-brutality which you think is proved by his _menage_? Is it, we ask, fairly to be supposed? We think not.

We do not presume to know whether we have carried conviction to the minds of our readers; but even if we have not,--if we have only been sufficiently fortunate to give the first impulse to the great inquiry, we shall be satisfied. If we consider the history of some opinions now openly preached and vehemently maintained,--how timidly they were first hinted at, within our own recollection, and with what surprising rapidity they have risen to an unblushing amplitude, rustling and sweeping proudly and defiantly along the Broadway of human events and opinions,--how that which but a lustre ago was wicked is now virtuous,--we see no reason for despair; and our century may yet witness the time when it will be considered the highest mixture of philosophic courtesy and Christian urbanity to make the most graceful semi-lateral bow, as you pass your friend in the street, and, kissing the tip of your finger, to lisp, with bending head and smiling eye,--

"May I never disagree with you!"

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

WHAT HE SAID, WHAT HE HEARD, AND WHAT HE SAW.

[_The Professor talks with the Reader. He tells a Young Girl's Story_.]

When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the balance of creation was disturbed. The materials that go to the making of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate nature of one man's-worth of masculine constituents. These combined to make our first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the previous creation of our common father. All this, mythically, illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemically.

The man implies the woman, you will understand. The excellent gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of miracles at the present day. So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.

Where would she come from?

Oh, that's the miracle!

----I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear some fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a clairvoyant, seeing it all beforehand.

----I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and Harry, Baltimoreans, both! Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples, and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the whiteness of the flesh of cocoa-nuts, and his laugh that set the chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling banquets in those gay times! Harry, champion, by acclamation, of the College heavyweights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! Who forgets the great muster-day, and the collision of the classic with the democratic forces? The huge butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good weight,--steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant. No words from Harry, the Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first, and do the talking, if there is any, afterwards. No words, but, in the place thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of those inglorious and inevitable Yankee _clinches_, followed by a general _melée_, which make our native fistic encounters so different from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an English fair, where everything was done decently and in order, and the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition, and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.

I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day, though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression. But all of us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and goodwill to men,--just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first heavy-heeled aggressor that came along. You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention. See whether this sounds true or not.

Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and Scrab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking of. With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise, traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-skinned racers, in great perfection. After the soldiers had come from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals who had not had the fight taken out of them. The little Yorkshire groom thought he must serve out somebody. So he threw himself into an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language, expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his attentions. I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so much more of than Americans, for the most part. However, one of the Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there, sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow, as if it had been with his fist,--and knocked him heels over head and senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field. This ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French _savate,_ which is not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English pugilistic science.--These are old recollections, with not much to recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a little something.

The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember. He recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you of. Both have been long dead. How often we see these great red flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,--and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers, flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer is all that is left to us of the generation it belonged to!

I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.

There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she ought, of course, to be sitting. One of the "positive" blondes, as my friend, you may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the finishing touch to a picture. I can't help being struck with her, for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled with.--It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody can see that our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.

Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as nice as a three-volume novel.

Little Boston is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement of having such a charming neighbor next him. I judge so mainly by his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might happen, or that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which struck him silent, at any rate. I made several conversational openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does. I even went so far as to indulge in a fling at the State House, which, as we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,--so I thought. I don't think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.

I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the table, to make room for another new-comer of the lady sort. A well-mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,--pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,--features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her.--

* * * * *

My record is a blank for some days after this. In the mean time I have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine for a boarding-house romance before a year is out. It is very curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have heard of. Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely pillow,--a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.

There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons table-boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young fellows being always hungry----Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a geode.

* * * * *

_Aphorism by the Professor._

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of high-water to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.

The crucial experiment is this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established. If the subject of the question changes color and expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.

* * * * *

----Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned _a second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks, taking an active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer took him _a week_.--You have, my full-grown friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted?"--I am the Professor. I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then. The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections, and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story, which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the unconscious subject of my brief delineation.

* * * * *

IRIS.

You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd poem written by an old Latin tutor? He brought up at the verb _amo_, I love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living dictionary for him at the word _filia_, a daughter. The poor man was greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her. _Lucretia_ and _Virginia_ were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying, though he had read them a hundred times.

--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber. To them her wrongs briefly. Let them see to the wretch, she will take care of herself. Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart. She slides from her seat, and falls dying. "Her husband and her father cry aloud."--No,--not Lucretia.

--Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl. She engaged to a very promising young man. Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy to her,--must have her at any rate. Hires a lawyer to present the arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.

There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All right. There are two sides to everything. _Audi alteram partem_. The legal gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.--A doubtful case. Let the young lady be under the protection of the Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.--Father thinks it best, on the whole, to give in. Will explain the matter, if the young lady and her maid will step this way. _That_ is the explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall, meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia!

The old man thought over the story. Then he must have one look at the original. So he took down the first volume and read it over. When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,--if that was what they were to get for being good girls,--he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative. But it was impossible to call his child Virginia. He could never look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.

_Dido_ would be a good name, and a fresh one. She was a queen, and the founder of a great city. Her story had been immortalized by the greatest of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius Maro," as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey. So he took down his Virgil,--it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,--and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido. It wouldn't do. A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end. He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,

"--misera ante diem, subitoque accensa
furore";

but when he came to the lines,

"Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"

he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.

"_Iris_ shall be her name!"--he said. So her name was Iris.

--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation. It is only a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries. These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or stone and iron. I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated starvation. They _may_, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on the head. Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have passed through the successive stages of inanition.

In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the process in question. You see, they do get food and clothes and fuel, in appreciable quantities, such as they are. You will even notice rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the _water of crystallization_ to scholars, and you can never get them away till the poor fellows effloresce into dust. Do not be deceived. The tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcerated with milk watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless; his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too thick for summer. The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room. In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.

--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus. Her blood-name, which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter backwards. The poor lady, seated with her companion at the chess-board of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.

The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late companion, with her name and age and _Eheu!_ upon it,--a smaller one at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished tenderly.