Chapter VI: Part III (2)

There was a smooth place on the rope. The roughness had been worn away by contact of human hands. Abraham Axtell's hands--the same that covered his face before the young girl's picture, that digged the grave, and so gently soothed his sister that very morning--had worn it smooth. It was out of my reach, too high up for me to attain unto; and so I held it tightly lower down. The ungrateful rope was very prickly; it hurt me, but I held fast, and slowly, surely drew it down. Too slowly; there was not sound enough to frighten a bird out of the belfry, had one been there to listen; but Aaron, on his knees within his study, praying for the gift of healing, that he might restore sick souls, would hear. Once more I drew the rope, with a tiny persistence that was childish, amusing. A baby-tone came to me from the bell, accustomed to other things. I had gained courage from the two attempts; it grew rapidly; and soon, out into the people's homes, the sounding strokes were ringing, clear, sonorous, and true. I had never noticed how long a time the "first bell" rang. It was the last Sunday morning's service of the sexton. He might be expected to linger a little in the net-work of memory; and thus, anxious to do my duty well, I rang on.

The neighbor's boy opened the door and put his head inside; and then he opened his eyes wondrously wide at me, and, frightened, ran away. I left my bell to tone itself to silence, with little sighing notes, like a child sobbing itself into sleep, and called after him. The rough boy came to me. I asked "if he would do me a favor." He said, "of course he would."

"I wish you to build the church-fires; and don't tell any one that you saw me ringing the bell."

"If you tell me not to, I sha'n't," was his laconic reply.

I went home, my latest duty done. I saw, far down the willow-arched street, Mr. Axtell coming.

With closed blinds, and room of silence, I ought to have found rest; but I did not. I heard Aaron go out. I trusted that he had got the proper sermon. I heard the second bell ring. It was so near, how could I help it? I heard the congregation singing. Triumphant joy was the impression that the song brought to my darkened room. I thought of the letter that was in my pocket. It did not please me to feel that it was out of my keeping. I took it thence, and held it in my hands. It had no envelope. It was written upon soft, white paper, and was addressed to some one: to whom I would not see. Not if my happiness depended upon it, would I sacrifice the trust reposed in me. Holding the letter thus, a face came to memory. It was the third face of the three that had been painted in anthracite. I could not tell where I had known it in life. It did not seem as if it belonged to mortal time. I got up, opened the blinds for a moment, and looked in the glass. I saw myself,--and yet,--yes, there was a similitude to that I saw in memory; and then that strange, sad seeming of soul-sense, that says, "Such as you are, you have been _somewhere_ for ages," overwhelmed and sent shakings of solemn ague to me.

"I'm getting ill," I thought; "I'll have no more of this."

I looked at a bottle of chloroform standing conveniently near, took it up, and drew out the stopper. Lifting it to the light, I looked at it. Quiet and calm and peaceful it reposed, unconscious of ill done or to be done by itself. It was so innocent that I could not let it sin by hurting me. I gazed again at my reflection in the glass, and a sudden intuition taught me a startling truth.

It may have been, nay, must have been, the innocence born of the lucent chloroform, reflected in my own face; but I was certain that the mirror and the Axtell house contained two pictures that were the one like the other. I smiled at the fancy. The illusion, if illusion it was, fled. The picture on the wall never smiled from out the canvas. I took dark winding-cloths and bound them about my head, covering the hair and forehead, all the while watching the effect produced in the mirror. The result was somewhat striking, it is true, but not of the agreeable style. I unbound my frontlet, taking off the black phylactery, whose memorable sentence, written in white letters, had been visible to myself alone. A contrast suggested itself to me. I would try white; and so I materialized the suggestion, and stood looking the least bit in the world like a nun, bound about with my white vestments, and had obtained only one very unsatisfactory glimpse of the effect produced upon the sensitive heart of quicksilver, when I found that that subtile heart responded to influences other than mine. What I discovered was another face, not in the most remote degree like mine,--as different as it could possibly be,--a face belonging to the carboniferous strata of the human ages. Had it been imitating me? Its race are eminent for imitative genius. A queer sort of a nun it was, wearing neither black nor white, but high tropical hues. Repose of being did not belong to this face. It darted around, and looked into my eyes.

"Goodness o' mercy Miss Anna, what ails thee's little head? is it quite turned with being up o' nights? Lie down, little honey! let old Chloe bathe it for thee." And Chloe hummed around the room like a bee; she folded up the petals of light that I had unbudded when I wanted to see what manner of face I had. Strange fancy it is that the extra fairy gives to mortals, this breaking up of roses and dolls and joys, to find what is in them!

I was pleased to have Chloe come in, to take charge of me. I had gone a little way beyond my own proper realm, and it was grateful to feel my centrifugal tendencies overcome by this sable centripetency of force, that took off my strange habitings,--only the paraphernalia of headache to her. Pillowing the head supposed to be tormented with pain, Chloe went about to remedy the evil by drowning it in lavender-water. I let her think what she pleased, and bravely lifted up the mount of my head, like Ararat of old unto the great deluge; but she would not let me talk as I pleased. Chloe was half a century old, with a warm, affectionate, red heart under her black seeming; and it pulsated around me now, as I lay there, under her care, in absolute quiet, hushed to content by her humming ways and words.

The second hymn of the church-service was sending its voice of worship up unto the Lord of all the earth, and Chloe and I, two of the children of that Lord, upon His earth, were awed by it. "The neighbor's boy must have left a window open," I thought. The fruitage of song blossomed on, the petalled notes withered and fell, and Chloe garnered in her harvest from the field, with a quaintly expressed regret that she "wasn't in the meadows of the land of Canaan, where taller songs were growing."

"Never mind, Chloe," I said; "the hymns of earth are very sweet; you can wait a little longer, can't you?"

"Don't you talk, child; you'll make your head ache again. Yes, old Chloe is willing to wait; there's honey and sugar left on the ground for her to find, only she's old now, she can't _stoop to pick it up_ as well as she could once."

"What do you mean, Chloe?"

"Didn't I tell ye you mustn't talk, Miss Anna? Don't be trying to trouble yourself with old Chloe's meanings: they haven't any understanding in them for other people to find out."

"Why not, Chloe?"

"Thee's talking again, Miss Anna. It's the Lord's thoughts that are given to black Chloe, and she hasn't anything to dress them up in but her own, poor, old, ragged words, that a'n't fit to use any way; so Chloe'll wait until she gets something better to make 'em 'pear to belong to the Lord that owns 'em"; and Chloe still soothingly bathed my head, which I think was aching all the while, only I should not have found it out, if she had not told me it.

"I want to ask you a question, Chloe."

"Well, just one, honey!"

"Am I much like--do I look as my mother used to?"

"Blessed child! no, no more 'n I do; only ye've both got white faces from the good Lord, and He didn't please to give Chloe anything better than a black one."

"What did she look like?"

"Thee's not to talk one word more. Chloe must go and look after Master Aaron's dinner; he doesn't like husks to feed on. Mistress Percival was like an angel, when the Lord took her from the earth. I'm afraid old Chloe wouldn't know her now, she's been so long with Seraphim and Cherubim in the Great City with the light of the Celestial Sun shining in her face. I'm afraid Chloe wouldn't dare to speak to her, if she was to meet her in the shining street of the New Jerusalem."

"She would know you, though, Chloe."

"There isn't any night there, Miss Anna; she couldn't see me; I'm black and wicked"; and Chloe dropped something upon my hand. It was a tear from her great eyes.

"Your soul will be white, Chloe. Christ will make it so."

"Well, well, honey, don't you trouble yourself 'bout my soul. The Lord made it, and I guess He'll take care of it, when it gets free from the earth"; and Chloe went down to look after a fragment of the very earth she was anxious to escape from.

I heard this child of "Afric's golden sands" singing a song to soothe her soul among the dinner-deeds that she was enacting. Then I thought me of the earth lying in the hollow of God's hand, and in some way I wished that I might get in-between the earth and the Holding Hand, and a wisp of the sweet hymn, "Nearer to Thee, my God," floated out from my heart's voice, almost with music in it. And the wishing words melted into an air of prayer. I felt the mighty Hand around me. I put myself fearlessly into the loving depths thereof, engraved with lines of life, and slept securely there. Did the divine fingers draw me a little more closely, and press the lines engraven on the Hand into my soul, and leave an impression of dreams there? I felt myself going swiftly on and up through a skyey gradient, and the soft, balmy air, displaced by my passing through, fell back into its own place with pearly music. I wanted to open my eyes and see where I was going; but I could not. I was passive in action, active in thought only. Then, the music growing fainter and fainter as the atmosphere became more celestially rarefied, I felt the supporting Hand going away from me. One after another the fingers loosened their hold, and yet I did not feel that I was falling. It was gone, and I floated on. With its absence came the wish for action. My eyes were unloosed, and I looked up. Far above me I saw the Hand that had brought me up hither. It had gone on before, and was waiting my coming. I made an effort to reach it.

A voice came; and clouds, rosy, ambient, such as angels hang around the pavilion of the sun, were unfolding their glory-woven webs and weaving me in. "It is good to be here," I whispered to my spirit's inmost sense of hearing; and the voice that I heard spake these words unto me:--

"You have been brought up hither to learn your mission upon the earth to which you go."

Old, prophetic, syllabic sounds, lisped in the place whence I had come, were given unto me, and I answered,--

"Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth!"

Then a rushing wind of sound filled my ears, and I saw the flashing of a wing of angel in among the cumulosity of clouds, and it made an opening into an ethereous region beyond. An oval, azurous picture was before me, set in this rolling, surging frame of ambient gold and silver glory.

"It is not for me to see in there," I thought; and I shut my eyes.

The voice that I had heard before spake once more:--

"Learn what thy God would have thee to do. Look up!"

Obeying the mighty behest, I beheld, and an ovaline picture, painted in the artistry of heaven, let down from the crystalline walls, that I might not see, and held fast by a cord of gold, safe in an angel's keeping, God had sent for me to look upon.

It was not such as masters of earth toil to paint. It was a living group that I saw.

Four figures stood there.

The first one was the face that I had just asked Chloe the semblance of. Loving past expression's power. The love emitted from those eyes brought tears into mine, and I heard one of them go dropping down, down into the cloudy deep below, as one day I had heard one falling elsewhere, on a cold stone.

Two hands were wafted out towards me, and the lips were just parted, as if waiting for coming words. I looked and listened, a little blinded by the glory and my tears.

"Go forth, dear child, to the work thy God appoints for thee to do!"

I looked up a little higher, just over the face of my mother, and, in holiest benediction, the Hand that had brought me up hither was laid upon her head. One stood beside her, leaning upon her shoulder. I recognized the face of the mysterious young girl.

"Will you do something for me on the earth, whence I have been called?" she asked.

The mighty voice that rang amid the clouds bade me "Answer." And tremulously, as if my poor earth-words had no place in the exceeding brightness, I gave an "I will."

"Comfort you the one afflicted. Tell him to look no longer into my grave. Let him not wander beside the marble foam that surges up from the Sea of Death, for that the Lord hath prepared another way for his footsteps. Lead him a little while on the earth, and then"----

I know not what more she would have spoken, for the Hand closed her lips. I sought my mother's face. It was gone. Another came forward. I felt involuntarily for the cold Hand that one night wandered under the sod in search of the face that now I saw in this picture let down from crystalline walls.

"I have a message for you," were the words I heard. "Tell her that I know what she would tell me: I have been made to know it here, where all things are clear: tell her that my forgiveness is as large as the heaven to which I have been permitted to enter in. Give her of the love that I did not when I might have done it."

The Hand was offered to her. Pleadingly, she looked up at it. For a moment my eyelids were heavy. When the weight was lifted, only one figure remained upon the celestial canvas. I could not see the countenance thereof: hands were clasped tightly over it.

"One more message the Lord permits for earth," said a touching, trembling, praying voice. "Say unto one sinning, that I have prayed unto the Christ that died for him,--that his mother is always praying for her son. Find out his sin, and solace his soul with the knowledge of my prayers."

The angel-wing that had cleaved the sky to let this picture in lifted her upon its pinions, and bore her through the azure, and I saw the great Hand open, as of one casting out many seeds upon the earth. Again an angel-wing swept its way among the clouds, and folds of opaline glow pavilioned the entrance into cerulean heights, and a solemn voice uttered these words out of the great All-Where around me:--

"I am the Lord thy God. I will show thee the way wherein I would have thee to walk. Rest thy soul in my love, and it shall satisfy thee."

With heart and soul and voice, my all of being cried out.--

"Only let Thy hand hold me!"

I awoke with one of those awful heart-exciting starts that come in sleep, such as a new planet might give when first projected into its orbit, before centrifugal and centripetal forces have time to exert their influences. I wonder what it is. Can it be a misstep, in the darkness, into the abyss between the land of waking and the land where there are nor years nor months nor days, where the soul abides in Lethe,--save when some wing troubles the waters for a little while?

I was wearied, with the weariness of one having come from long journeying. I closed my eyes again, and tried to sleep. Chloe looked in at me.

"Have you had a nice sleep, Miss Anna?" she asked, as I moved at her coming.

"I fear not, Chloe," I said; "my head doesn't behave nicely since I awoke. Bring me the bottle of chloroform: it's just there, upon the bureau."

Chloe went hurrying, bustling out of the room, and brought me the chloroform from some other part of the house.

"Where did you bring this from?" I asked; "do you use chloroform?"

"I've a horror of all pisons," said Chloe; "I didn't like to leave this near you; pisons is very bad for young people."

Smiling at Chloe's prudent fears for me, I inhaled a little of the friend, dangerous, and to be trusted only a little way, like the most of friends, and gave it back to Chloe. The honest woman restored it to her pocket in the presence of my two eyes. I had had enough of it, and I let her carry it away,--a victory she enjoyed, I knew, and it cost me nothing, save a smile at her idle fears for me. I did not know then that Chloe had, in her semi-century of life, found a reason for her dread of poisons, among which she evidently promoted chloroform to a high power in the field of active service.

I arose with a _new_ feeling in my existence. I felt that I had been led into a strange avenue of life, constellated with the Southern Cross, which I had never yet seen. It was daylight now. I must await the coming of the hours when God maketh the darkness to curtain round the earth, that He may come down and walk in "the groves and grounds that His own feet have hallowed," that He may look near at what the children of men will to do. I must await this hour, when heaven will be thick with legions of starry eyes, that look down through the empyrean at their God walking among men.

Is it wonderful that they tremble so, when He who saith, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," seeth so much to awaken the eye that "never slumbereth nor sleepeth" to retribution? If angels tremble so, safe in heavenly heights, how ought poor sinful man to fear for himself, lest that vengeance overtake him, ere he have time to cry, "Have mercy!"

I took up the Holy Bible, and opened it, as I often had done before, with the belief at work within my heart, that whatsoever words my eyes first fell upon would be prophetic to me. I opened and read, "I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work."

And I, kneeling, prayed, "Show me, my God, what Thou wilt have me to do, or to be! Work Thou within me! Let the one little atom of Thyself that Thou hast given into my keeping be so holily guarded, so sacredly kept, that, at the fast, it may come back a fibre of Thine own Self, and be received into the Great Existence that liveth forever and ever!"

I arose and walked forth into this newness of life, enveloped with a halo of the Divine effluence, in which I hoped forever to dwell,--or if forever had any meaning to me, it was in an existent now.

I passed through Aaron's study, and an awe of reverence led me to pause before the table where he had worked for so many days, worked to make God's salvation seem harmonious with man's free-will; and, in loving all suffering human kind, newness of love for Aaron and for his cool-browed wife came to me: not that I had not loved them long, but there come neap-tides into the oceans of emotion, and work solemnly, awfully, until great frothings from the storm lie all a-tremble on the coasts of the land whither our course tends in the daily, hourly round of life.

I'm very glad Aaron didn't come in just then. It is good to be with God alone, in deep emotions. It never was meant by the Good Spirit for man to behold what is in his brother-man. I think we'd all fly--as far apart as the Universe would give us leave. Just let the effervescence of one life o'erlip the cup and fall into another, and the draught would be a drink of electricity. Who would care to taste it? Not Aaron, I'm sure. And so I shook out this crispy lace of emotion that was rather choking in my throat, and went down to where Chloe watched the elements whence all this chemistry had been evolved.

"I thought ye'd be coming after somewhat to eat," Chloe said; "but I knew, if I asked you, you'd sure say,' No, honey'"; and she went about to "do me good," in her own way.

I heard the afternoon's latest hymn sung in the church whilst I waited. I saw the great congregation come out, and, with divided ways, go each homeward. Sophie had not returned. I wanted to hear from Miss Axtell. Last of all walked Aaron. With bent head and slow musingness of step, he came to his home. I met him at the entrance.

"Are you tired with preaching, Aaron?" I asked.

He looked up, at my unusual accost; and I think there must have been somewhat unwonted about me, he looked at me so long.

"No," he said, "I've had a pleasant field to-day: there are violets, even in my pathways, Anna."

"Sophie's a pansy," I said.

"Sophie's a Sharon rose," spake Aaron.

He looked inquiringly at me, and added,--

"And you, Anna?"

"An aloe, Aaron."

He smiled the least in the world, and said,--

"Had I been asked, instead of being the asker, I should have made answer, 'She's a Japan rose.'"

"Oh, Aaron, no fragrance! that's not complimentary."

"Crush the leaves of heliotrope in the cup, Anna."

I did not understand what he meant, then; perhaps I do not now: some figure of speech from the Orient, I fancy, with a glow of meaning about it visible only to poetic vision. I lost my way, blinded in seeking to penetrate the mystery, and was brought back to Redleaf by two welcome events: the cup Chloe brought, and the letter Aaron gave, with a beseeching of pardon for having forgotten to give it in the morning.

I read my letter, interluding it with little commas of sipping at the cup. It was from my father, very brief, but somewhat stirring. Here it lies before me now.

"My MYRTLE-VINE,--

"I want you at home. I am well; but that is no reason why I should
not need your greenness on my walls. Come home, dear child, on the
morrow. Do not fail me. You never have; 't would be cruel now, when
spring is coming, the very time of hope. Waitingly,

"Your father,

"JULIUS PERCIVAL."

"What puts you in such a turmoil, Anna?" Aaron asked. "What has happened at home?"

I thought he had been duly attending to the state of his own inward hopes and fears, instead of mine. Slightly disconcerted by his gray eyes, the very same that disturb turbulent boys in church-time, I turned away from them, went to the door, and leaning against the side thereof, looking the while up at the sky, I answered,--

"I'm going home on the morrow, Aaron."

"Going home?" he repeated, as if the words had borne an uncertain import. "Pray tell me, what has occurred?"

"It pleases my father to have me there. He gives no reason."

"What will Sophie say? She's hardly seen you since you came, you've been so usefully employed. I hope you have not hurt yourself. I wish you were going back with brighter color in your cheeks."

"There is something in Nature besides mere coloring," I said, and looked for the answer.

It was better than I thought to get.

"What?" he asked.

"Two things, Aaron,--conception and form."

Aaron mused awhile.

"What gave you the idea?" he asked, his musing over.

"Sermons in granite," I answered; and I looked at the sunshine, the afternoon radiance that fell soothingly into the winter-wearied grass lying in the graveyard, waiting like souls for the warmth of love to enlife them.

Aaron said,--

"Sandstone and limestone you mean, Anna."

"Oh, no,--granite. I mean the Axtells."

"I'm glad you've found anything comprehensible enough to call a sermon in them," he answered. "Ill, dying, and in affliction, they are impenetrable to me." And Aaron turned away and went in.

LEAMINGTON SPA.

MY DEAR EDITOR,--

You can hardly have expected to hear from me again, (unless by
invitation to the field of honor,) after those cruel and terrible
notes upon my harmless article in the July Number. How could you find
it in your heart (a soft one, as I have hitherto supposed) to treat
an old friend and liege contributor in that unheard-of way? Not that
I should care a fig for any amount of vituperation, if you had only
let my article come before the public as I wrote it, instead of
suppressing precisely the passages--with which I had taken most
pains, and which I flattered myself were most cleverly done. The
interview with the President, for example: it would have been a
treasure to the future historian; and I hold you responsible to
posterity for thrusting it into the fire. However, I cannot lose so
good an opportunity of showing the world the placability and
sweetness that adorn my character, and therefore send you another
article, in which, I trust, you will find nothing to strike
out,--unless, peradventure, you think that I may disturb the
tranquillity of nations by my plan of annexing Great Britain, or my
attempted adumbration of a fat English dowager!

Truly, yours,

A PEACEABLE MAN.

In the course of several visits and stays of considerable length we acquired a homelike feeling towards Leamington, and came back thither again and again, chiefly because we had been there before. Wandering and wayside people, such as we had long since become, retain a few of the instincts that belong to a more settled way of life, and often prefer familiar and commonplace objects (for the very reason that they are so) to the dreary strangeness of scenes that might be thought much better worth the seeing. There is a small nest of a place in Leamington--at No. 16, Lansdowne Circus--upon which, to this day, my reminiscences are apt to settle as one of the coziest nooks in England, or in the world; not that it had any special charm of its own, but only that we stayed long enough to know it well, and even to grow a little tired of it. In my opinion, the very tediousness of home and friends makes a part of what we love them for; if it be not mixed in sufficiently with the other elements of life, there may be mad enjoyment, but no happiness.

The modest abode to which I have alluded forms one of a circular range of pretty, moderate-sized, two-story houses, all built on nearly the same plan, and each provided with its little grass-plot, its flowers, its tufts of box trimmed into globes and other fantastic shapes, and its verdant hedges shutting the house in from the common drive and dividing it from its equally cozy neighbors. Coming out of the door, and taking a turn round the circle of sister-dwellings, it is difficult to find your way back by any distinguishing individuality of your own habitation. In the centre of the Circus is a space fenced in with iron railing, a small play-place and sylvan retreat for the children of the precinct, permeated by brief paths through the fresh English grass, and shadowed by various shrubbery; amid which, if you like, you may fancy yourself in a deep seclusion, though probably the mark of eye-shot from the windows of all the surrounding houses. But, in truth, with regard to the rest of the town and the world at large, an abode here is a genuine seclusion; for the ordinary stream of life does not run through this little, quiet pool, and few or none of the inhabitants seem to be troubled with any business or outside activities. I used to set them down as half-pay officers, dowagers of narrow income, elderly maiden ladies, and other people of respectability, but small account, such as hang on the world's skirts rather than actually belong to it. The quiet of the place was seldom disturbed, except by the grocer and butcher, who came to receive orders, or the cabs, hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which the ladies took an infrequent airing, or the livery-steed which the retired captain sometimes bestrode for a morning ride, or by the red-coated postman who went his rounds twice a day to deliver letters, and again in the evening, ringing a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail. In merely mentioning these slight interruptions of its sluggish stillness, I seem to myself to disturb too much the atmosphere of quiet that brooded over the spot; whereas its impression upon me was, that the world had never found the way hither, or had forgotten it, and that the fortunate inhabitants were the only ones who possessed the spell-word of admittance. Nothing could have suited me better, at the time; for I had been holding a position of public servitude, which imposed upon me (among a great many lighter duties) the ponderous necessity of being universally civil and sociable.

Nevertheless, if a man were seeking the bustle of society, he might find it more readily in Leamington than in most other English towns. It is a permanent watering-place, a sort of institution to which I do not know any close parallel in American life: for such places as Saratoga bloom only for the summer season, and offer a thousand dissimilitudes even then; while Leamington seems to be always in flower, and serves as a home to the homeless all the year round. Its original nucleus, the plausible excuse for the town's coming into prosperous existence, lies in the fiction of a chalybeate well, which, indeed, is so far a reality that out of its magical depths have gushed streets, groves, gardens, mansions, shops, and churches, and spread themselves along the banks of the little river Leam. This miracle accomplished, the beneficent fountain has retired beneath a pump-room, and appears to have given up all pretensions to the remedial virtues formerly attributed to it. I know not whether its waters are ever tasted nowadays; but not the less does Leamington--in pleasant Warwickshire, at the very midmost point of England, in a good hunting neighborhood, and surrounded by country-seats and castles--continue to be a resort of transient visitors, and the more permanent abode of a class of genteel, unoccupied, well-to-do, but not very wealthy people, such as are hardly known among ourselves. Persons who have no country-houses, and whose fortunes are inadequate to a London expenditure, find here, I suppose, a sort of town and country life in one.

In its present aspect, the town is of no great age. In contrast with the antiquity of many places in its neighborhood, it has a bright, new face, and seems almost to smile even amid the sombreness of an English autumn. Nevertheless, it is hundreds upon hundreds of years old, if we reckon up that sleepy lapse of time during which it existed as a small village of thatched houses, clustered round a priory; and it would still have been precisely such a rural village, but for a certain Doctor Jephson, who lived within the memory of man, and who found out the magic well, and foresaw what fairy wealth might be made to flow from it. A public garden has been laid out along the margin of the Leam, and called the Jephson Garden, in honor of him who created the prosperity of his native spot. A little way within the garden-gate there is a circular temple of Grecian architecture, beneath the dome of which stands a marble statue of the good Doctor, very well executed, and representing him with a face of fussy activity and benevolence: just the kind of man, if luck favored him, to build up the fortunes of those about him, or, quite as probably, to blight his whole neighborhood by some disastrous speculation.

The Jephson Garden is very beautiful, like most other English pleasure-grounds; for, aided by their moist climate and not too fervid sun, the landscape-gardeners excel in converting flat or tame surfaces into attractive scenery, chiefly through the skilful arrangement of trees and shrubbery. An Englishman aims at this effect even in the little patches under the windows of a suburban villa, and achieves it on a larger scale in a tract of many acres. The Garden is shadowed with trees of a fine growth, standing alone, or in dusky groves and dense entanglements, pervaded by woodland paths; and emerging from these pleasant glooms, we come upon a breadth of sunshine, where the green sward--so vividly green that it has a kind of lustre in it--is spotted with beds of gemlike flowers. Rustic chairs and benches are scattered about, some of them ponderously fashioned out of the stumps of obtruncated trees, and others more artfully made with intertwining branches, or perhaps an imitation of such frail handiwork in iron. In a central part of the Garden is an archery-ground, where laughing maidens practise at the butts, generally missing their ostensible mark, but, by the mere grace of their action, sending an unseen shaft into some young man's heart. There is space, moreover, within these precincts, for an artificial lake, with a little green island in the midst of it; both lake and island being the haunt of swans, whose aspect and movement in the water are most beautiful and stately,--most infirm, disjointed, and decrepit, when, unadvisedly, they see fit to emerge, and try to walk upon dry land. In the latter case, they look like a breed of uncommonly ill-contrived geese; and I record the matter here for the sake of the moral,--that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person or thing, unless we behold it in the sphere and circumstances to which it is specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably within a circuit of only a few yards,--a sad emblem, it seemed to me, of the mental and moral perplexities in which we sometimes go astray, petty in scope, yet large enough to entangle a lifetime, and bewilder us with a weary movement, but no genuine progress.

The Leam, after drowsing across the principal street of the town beneath a handsome bridge, skirts along the margin of the Garden without any perceptible flow. Heretofore I had fancied the Concord the laziest river in the world, but now assign that amiable distinction to the little English stream. Its water is by no means transparent, but has a greenish, goose-puddly hue, which, however, accords well with the other coloring and characteristics of the scene, and is disagreeable neither to sight nor smell. Certainly, this river is a perfect feature of that gentle picturesqueness in which England is so rich, sleeping, as it does, beneath a margin of willows that droop into its bosom, and other trees, of deeper verdure than our own country can boast, inclining lovingly over it. On the Garden-side it is bordered by a shadowy, secluded grove, with winding paths among its boskiness, affording many a peep at the river's imperceptible lapse and tranquil gleam; and on the opposite shore stands the priory-church, with its church-yard full of shrubbery and tombstones.

The business-portion of the town clusters about the banks of the Leam, and is naturally densest around the well to which the modern settlement owes its existence. Here are the commercial inns, the post-office, the furniture-dealers, the ironmongers, and all the heavy and homely establishments that connect themselves even with the airiest modes of human life; while upward from the river, by a long and gentle ascent, rises the principal street, which is very bright and cheerful in its physiognomy, and adorned with shop-fronts almost as splendid as those of London, though on a diminutive scale. There are likewise side-streets and cross-streets, many of which are bordered with the beautiful Warwickshire elm, a most unusual kind of adornment for an English town; and spacious avenues, wide enough to afford room for stately groves, with foot-paths running beneath the lofty shade, and rooks cawing and chattering so high In the tree-tops that their voices get musical before reaching the earth. The houses are mostly built in blocks and ranges, in which every separate tenement is a repetition of its fellow, though the architecture of the different ranges is sufficiently various. Some of them are almost palatial in size and sumptuousness of arrangement. Then, on the outskirts of the town, there are detached villas, inclosed within that separate domain of high stone fence and embowered shrubbery which an Englishman so loves to build and plant around his abode, presenting to the public only an iron gate, with a gravelled carriage-drive winding away towards the half-hidden mansion. Whether in street or suburb, Leamington may fairly be called beautiful, and, at some points, magnificent; but by-and-by you become doubtfully suspicious of a somewhat unreal finery: it is pretentious, though not glaringly so; it has been built, with malice aforethought, as a place of gentility and enjoyment. Moreover, splendid as the houses look, and comfortable as they often are, there is a nameless something about them, betokening that they have not grown out of human hearts, but are the creations of a skilfully applied human intellect: no man has reared any one of them, whether stately or humble, to be his life-long residence, wherein to bring up his children, who are to inherit it as a home. They are nicely contrived lodging-houses, one and all,--the best as well as the shabbiest of them,--and therefore inevitably lack some nameless property that a home should have. This was the case with our own little snuggery in Lansdowne Circus, as with all the rest: it had not grown out of anybody's individual need, but was built to let or sell, and was therefore like a ready-made garment,--a tolerable fit, but only tolerable.

All these blocks, ranges, and detached villas are adorned with the finest and most aristocratic names that I have found anywhere in England, except, perhaps, in Bath, which is the great metropolis of that second-class gentility with which watering-places are chiefly populated. Lansdowne Crescent, Lansdowne Circus, Lansdowne Terrace, Regent Street, Warwick Street, Clarendon Street, the Upper and Lower Parade: such are a few of the designations. Parade, indeed, is a well-chosen name for the principal street, along which the population of the idle town draws itself out for daily review and display. I only wish that my descriptive powers would enable me to throw off a picture of the scene at a sunny noontide, individualizing each character with a touch: the great people alighting from their carriages at the principal shop-doors; the elderly ladies and infirm Indian officers drawn along in Bath-chairs; the comely, rather than pretty, English girls, with their deep, healthy bloom, which an American taste is apt to deem fitter for a milkmaid than for a lady; the moustached gentlemen with frogged surtouts and a military air; the nursemaids and chubby children, but no chubbier than our own, and scampering on slenderer legs; the sturdy figure of John Bull in all varieties and of all ages, but ever with the stamp of authenticity somewhere about him.

To say the truth, I have been holding the pen over my paper, purposing to write a descriptive paragraph or two about the throng on the principal Parade of Leamington, so arranging it as to present a sketch of the British out-of-door aspect on a morning walk of gentility; but I find no personages quite sufficiently distinct and individual in my memory to supply the materials of such a panorama. Oddly enough, the only figure that comes fairly forth to my mind's eye is that of a dowager, one of hundreds whom I used to marvel at, all over England, but who have scarcely a representative among our own ladies of autumnal life, so thin, careworn, and frail, as age usually makes the latter. I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies retain their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to suggest that an American eye needs use and cultivation before it can quite appreciate the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me that an English lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined and delicate, so far as her physique goes, than anything that we Western people class under the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits down, it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she can fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and stern, not always positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth and weight of feature, but because it seems to express so much well-founded self-reliance, such acquaintance with the world, its toils, troubles, and dangers, and such sturdy capacity for trampling down a foe. Without anything positively salient, or actively offensive, or, indeed, unjustly formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a seventy-four gun-ship in time of peace; for, while you assure yourself that there is no real danger, you cannot help thinking how tremendous would be her onset, if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort to inflict any counter-injury. She certainly looks tenfold--nay, a hundredfold--better able to take care of herself than our slender-framed and haggard womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that the English dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fortitude, and strength of character than our women of similar age, or even a tougher physical endurance than they. Morally, she is strong, I suspect, only in society, and in the common routine of social affairs, and would be found powerless and timid in any exceptional strait that might call for energy outside of the conventionalities amid which she has grown up.

You can meet this figure in the street, and live, and even smile at the recollection. But conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare, brawny arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other corresponding development, such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but a spectacle to howl at in such an overblown cabbage-rose as this.

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the case, that the matrimonial bond cannot be held to include the three-fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? And as a matter of conscience and good morals, ought not an English married pair to insist upon the celebration of a Silver Wedding at the end of twenty-five years, in order to legalize and mutually appropriate that corporeal growth of which both parties have individually come into possession since they were pronounced one flesh?

The chief enjoyment of my several visits to Leamington lay in rural walks about the neighborhood, and in jaunts to places of note and interest, which are particularly abundant in that region. The high-roads are made pleasant to the traveller by a border of trees, and often afford him the hospitality of a wayside-bench beneath a comfortable shade. But a fresher delight is to be found in the foot-paths, which go wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idyls and eclogues. These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him; for, with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the property of the public as the dusty high-road itself, and even by an older tenure. Their antiquity probably exceeds that of the Roman ways; the footsteps of the aboriginal Britons first wore away the grass, and the natural flow of intercourse between village and village has kept the track bare ever since. An American fanner would plough across any such path, and obliterate it with his hills of potatoes and Indian corn; but here it is protected by law, and still more by the sacredness that inevitably springs up, in this soil, along the well-defined footprints of centuries. Old associations are sure to be fragrant herbs in English nostrils: we pull them up as weeds.

I remember such a path, the access to which is from Lovers' Grove, a range of tall old oaks and elms on a high hill-top, whence there is a view of Warwick Castle, and a wide extent of landscape, beautiful, though bedimmed with English mist. This particular foot-path, however, is not a remarkably good specimen of its kind, since it leads into no hollows and seclusions, and soon terminates in a high-road. It connects Leamington by a short cut with the small neighboring village of Lillington, a place which impresses an American observer with its many points of contrast to the rural aspects of his own country. The village consists chiefly of one row of contiguous dwellings, separated only by party-walls, but ill-matched among themselves, being of different heights, and apparently of various ages, though all are of an antiquity which we should call venerable. Some of the windows are leaden-framed lattices, opening on hinges. These houses are mostly built of gray stone; but others, in the same range, are of brick, and one or two are in a very old fashion,--Elizabethan, or still older,--having a ponderous framework of oak, painted black, and filled in with plastered stone or bricks. Judging by the patches of repair, the oak seems to be the more durable part of the structure. Some of the roofs are covered with earthen tiles; others (more decayed and poverty-stricken) with thatch, out of which sprouts a luxurious vegetation of grass, house-leeks, and yellow flowers. What especially strikes an American is the lack of that insulated space, the intervening gardens, grass-plots, orchards, broad-spreading shade-trees, which occur between our own village-houses. These English dwellings have no such separate surroundings; they all grow together, like the cells of a honey-comb.

Beyond the first row of houses, and hidden from it by a turn of the road, there was another row (or block, as we should call it) of small, old cottages, stuck one against another, with their thatched roofs forming a single contiguity. These, I presume, were the habitations of the poorest order of rustic laborers; and the narrow precincts of each cottage, as well as the close neighborhood of the whole, gave the impression of a stifled, unhealthy atmosphere among the occupants. It seemed impossible that there should be a cleanly reserve, a proper self-respect among individuals, or a wholesome unfamiliarity between families, where human life was crowded and massed into such intimate communities as these. Nevertheless, not to look beyond the outside, I never saw a prettier rural scene than was presented by this range of contiguous huts; for in front of the whole row was a luxuriant and well-trimmed hawthorn hedge, and belonging to each cottage was a little square of garden-ground, separated from its neighbors by a line of the same verdant fence. The gardens were chock-full, not of esculent vegetables, but of flowers, familiar ones, but very bright-colored, and shrubs of box, some of which were trimmed into artistic shapes; and I remember, before one door, a representation of Warwick Castle, made of oyster-shells. The cottagers evidently loved the little nests in which they dwelt, and did their best to make them beautiful, and succeeded more than tolerably well,--so kindly did Nature help their humble efforts with its verdure, flowers, moss, lichens, and the green things that grew out of the thatch. Through some of the open door-ways we saw plump children rolling about on the stone floors, and their mothers, by no means very pretty, but as happy-looking as mothers generally are; and while we gazed at these domestic matters, an old woman rushed wildly out of one of the gates, upholding a shovel, on which she clanged and clattered with a key. At first we fancied that she intended an onslaught against ourselves, but soon discovered that a more dangerous enemy was abroad; for the old lady's bees had swarmed, and the air was full of them, whizzing by our heads like bullets.