Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

We have also some admirable specimens of his correspondence with his son John, who, after his preliminary education at the school at Bury St. Edmund's, became, in 1622, in his seventeenth year, a member of Trinity College, Dublin, near his uncle and aunt Downing, parents of the famous Sir George Downing. These are beautiful and wise and generous expressions of a father's love and advice and dealings with a son, exposed to temptation at a critical age, and giving promise of the abilities and virtues which he afterwards exhibited so nobly as Governor of Connecticut. In one of the letters, to which the father asks replies in Latin, he writes, "I will not limit your allowance less than to ye uttermost of mine own estate. So as, if £20 be too little (as I always accounted it), you shall have £30; & when that shall not suffice, you shall have more. Only hold a sober & frugal course (yet without baseness), & I will shorten myself to enlarge you." In another letter there is this fit commemoration of his father, Adam, dying at the age of seventy-five:--"I am sure, before this, you have knowledge of that wh., at the time when you wrote, you were ignorant of: viz., the departure of your grandfather (for I wrote over twice since). He hath finished his course: & is gathered to his people in peace, as the ripe corn into the barn. He thought long for ye day of his dissolution, & welcomed it most gladly. Thus is he gone before; & we must go after, in our time. This advantage he hath of us,--he shall not see ye evil wh. we may meet with ere we go hence. Happy those who stand in good terms with God & their own conscience: they shall not fear evil tidings: & in all changes they shall be ye same."

There are likewise letters to the student at Dublin from his brother Forth, who succeeded him at the school at St. Edmund's. It is curious to note in these epistles of the school-boy the indifferent success of his manifestly sincere effort to use the technical language of Puritanism and to express its aims and ardors. The youth evidently feels freer when writing of the fortunes of some of his school-mates. This same Forth Winthrop became in course a student at Cambridge, and we have letters to his father, carried by the veritable Hobson immortalized by Milton.

The younger John went, on graduating, to London, to fit himself for the law. His name is found on the books as admitted to the Inner Temple in 1624. He appears early to have cherished some matrimonial purposes which did not work felicitously. Not liking his profession, he turned his thoughts toward the sea. He obtained a secretaryship in the naval service, and joined the expedition under the Duke of Buckingham, designed to relieve the French Protestants at Rochelle, in 1627. He afterwards made an Oriental tour, of the stages of which we have some account in his letters, in 1628-9, from Leghorn, Constantinople, etc. He was thwarted in a purpose to visit Jerusalem, and returned to England, by Holland. Notwithstanding the industrious fidelity of his father as a letter-writer, the son received no tidings from home during his whole absence of nearly fifteen months. What a contrast with our times!

Before undertaking this Oriental tour, the younger John had had proposals made to him, which seem to have engaged his own inclinations, to connect himself with Endecott's New-England enterprise. He wrote to consult the wishes of his father on the subject; but that father, who in less than two years was to find himself pledged to a more comprehensive scheme, involving a life-long exile in that far-off wilderness, dissuaded his son from the premature undertaking. It does not appear that the father had as yet presented to his mind the possibility of any such step. Yet, from the readiness which marked his own earnest and complete sympathy in the enterprise when first we find him concerned in it, we must infer that he had much previous acquaintance and sympathy with the early New-England adventurers from the moment that a religious spirit became prominent in their fellowship. He was a man who undertook no great work without the most careful deliberation, and a slow maturing of his decision.

During the absence of John at the East, many interesting and serious incidents occurred in the personal experience and in the domestic relations of his father, which doubtless helped the preparation of his spirit for the critical event of his life. He had that severe and threatening illness in London already referred to. We have many letters covering the period, filled with matter over which, as so full of what is common to the human heart in all time, we linger with consenting sympathy. A wayward and unconverted son, Henry by name, caused his father an anxiety which we see struggling painfully with parental affection and a high-toned Christian aim for all the members of his family. The son's course indicated rather profitlessness and recklessness than vice. He connected himself with an enterprise at Barbadoes. He drew heavily on his father's resources for money, and returned him some tobacco, which the father very frankly writes to him was "very ill-conditioned, foul, & full of stalks, & evil-colored." He came over in the same expedition, though not in the same ship, with his father, and was accidentally drowned at Salem, July 2, 1630. In the first letter which the good Governor wrote to his wife after his landing here, dated "Charlestown, July 16, 1630," are these sentences:--"We have met with many sad & discomfortable things, as thou shalt hear after; & ye Lord's hand hath been heavy upon myself in some very near to me. My son Henry! my son Henry! ah, poor child!" While the father was writing from London to this son, then supposed to be at Barbadoes, he had other matters of anxiety. His endeared brother-in-law, Fones, died, April 15, 1629, and four days afterwards Winthrop was called to part, at Groton, with his venerated mother, who died under the roof where she had lived so happily and graciously with his own family in his successive sorrows and delights.

The loss or resignation of his office, with the giving up of his law-chamber in London, and his evident premonitions of the sore troubles in affairs of Church and State which were soon to convulse his native land, doubtless guided him to a decision, some of the stages and incidents of which have left no record for us. Enough, however, of the process may still be traced among papers which have recently come to light, to open to us its inner workings, and to explain its development. A ride with his brother Downing into Lincolnshire, July 28, 1629, finds an entry in Winthrop's "Experiences," that it may mark his gratitude to the Providence which preserved his life, when, as he writes, "my horse fell under me in a bogge in the fennes, so as I was allmost to ye waiste in water." Beyond all doubt this ride was taken by the sympathizing travellers on a prearranged visit to Isaac Johnson, another of the New-England worthies, at Sempringham, on business connected with the Massachusetts enterprise. But the first recovered and extant document which proves that Winthrop was committing himself to the great work is a letter of his son John's, dated London, August 21, 1629, in reply to one from his father, which, it is evident from the tenor of the answer, had directly proposed the embarking of the interest of the whole family in the enterprise. A certain mysterious paper of "Conclusions," referred to by the son, had been inclosed in the father's letter, which appears to be irrecoverable. There has been much discussion, with rival and contested claims and pleas, as to the authorship of that most valuable and critical document containing the propositions for the enterprise, with reasons and grounds, objections and answers. Our author urges, with force of arguments and the evidence of authentic papers, entirely to our satisfaction, that John Winthrop was essentially and substantially the digester and exponent of those pregnant considerations. The correspondence which follows proves how conscientiously the enterprise was weighed, and the reasons and objections debated. Godly ministers were consulted for their advice and coöperation. No opposition or withholding of any shade or degree would seem to have been made by any member of Winthrop's family; his gentle, meek-hearted, but most heroic and high-souled wife, being, from first to last, his most cordial sympathizer and ally. We next find him entering into the decisive "Agreement," at Cambridge, with eleven other of the foremost adventurers to New England, which pledged them "to inhabit and continue there." It was only after most protracted, and, we may be sure, most devout deliberation, that the great decision was made, which involved the transfer of the patent, the setting up of a self-governing commonwealth on the foreign soil, and the committal of those who were to be its members to a life-long and exacting undertaking, from which there were to be no lookings-back. A day was appointed for the company to meet, on which two committees were chosen, to weigh and present with full force, respectively, the reasons for a removal, and the reasons against it. The "show of hands," when these committees reported, fixed the purpose of the company on what they did not hesitate to believe was the leading of Providence.

From that moment we find Winthrop busy with cares and efforts of the most exacting character, drawing upon all his great energies, and engaging the fondest devotion of his manly and Christian heart. He gave himself, without stint or regret, with an unselfish and supreme consecration, to the work, cherishing its great aim as the matter of his most earnest piety, and attending to its pettiest details with a scrupulous fidelity which proved that conscience found its province there. We seem almost to be made spectators of the bustle and fervor of the old original Passover scenes of the Hebrew exodus. It is refreshing to pause for a moment over a touch of our common humanity, which we meet by the way. Winthrop in London "feeds with letters" the wife from whom he was so often parted. In one of them he tells her that he has purchased for her the stuff for a "gowne" to be sent by the carrier, and he adds, "Lett me knowe what triminge I shall send for thy gowne." But Margaret, who could trust her honored husband in everything else, was a woman still, and must reserve, not only the rights of her sex, but the privilege of her own good taste for the fitnesses of things. So she guardedly replies,--in a postscript, of course,--"When I see the cloth, I will send word what triminge will serve." In a modest parenthesis of another letter to her, dated October 29, 1629, he speaks of himself, as if all by the way, as "beinge chosen by ye Company to be their Governor." The circumstances of his election and trust, so honorable and dignified, are happily told with sufficient particularity on our own Court Records. Governor Cradock, his honored predecessor, not intending immediate emigration, put the proposition, and announced the result which gave him such a successor.

Attending frequently upon meetings of the Company, and supervising its own business as well as his private affairs, all having in view what must then have been in the scale of the time a gigantic undertaking, full of vexations and embarrassments, Winthrop seizes upon a few days of crowded heart-strugglings to make his last visit at the dear homestead, and then to take of it his eternal farewell. How lovingly and admiringly do we follow him on his way from London, taking his last view of those many sweet scenes which were thenceforward to embower in his memory all the joys of more than forty years! He did not then know for what a rugged landscape, and for what uncouth habitations, he was to exchange those fair scenes and the ivy-clad and -festooned churches and cottages of his dear England. His wife, for reasons of prudence, was to remain for a while with some of his children, beside his eldest son, and was to follow him when he had made fit preparation for her. His last letters to her (and each of many was written as the last, because of frequent delays) after the embarkation of the company, are gems and jewels of a heart which was itself the pure shrine of a most fond and faithful love. His leave-taking at Groton was at the end of February, 1630; his embarkation was on March 22. The ships were weather-bound successively at Cowes and at Yarmouth, whence were written those melting epistles. A letter which he wrote to Sir William Spring, one of the Parliamentary members from Suffolk, a dear religions friend of his, overflows with an ardor and intenseness of affection which passes into the tone and language of feminine endearment, and fashions passages from the Song of Solomon into prayers. One sentence of that letter keeps sharp its lacerating point for the reader of to-day. "But I must leave you all: our farewells usually are pleasant passages; mine must be sorrowful; this addition of forever is a sad close." And it was to be forever. Winthrop was never to see his native land again. Many of his associates made one or more homeward voyages. A few of them returned to resume their English citizenship in those troublous times which invited and exercised energies like those which had essayed to tame a wilderness. But the great and good leader of his blessed exodus never found the occasion, we know not that he ever felt the prompting, to recross the ocean. The purpose of his life and soul was a unit in its substance and consecration, and it had found its object. For nineteen years, most of them as Governor, and always as the leading spirit and the recognized Moses of the enterprise, he was spared to see the planting and the building-up which subdued the wilderness and reared a commonwealth. He had most noble and congenial associates in the chief magistrates of the other New-England colonies. Bradford and Winslow of Plymouth, Eaton of New Haven, his own son and Haynes and Hopkins of Connecticut, and Williams of Providence Plantations, were all of them men of signal virtue. They have all obtained a good report, and richly and eminently do they deserve it. They were, indeed, a providential galaxy of pure-hearted, unspotted, heroic men. There is a mild and sweet beauty in the star of Winthrop, the lustre of which asks no jealous or rival estimation.

* * * * *

THE PLANTING OF THE APPLE-TREE.

Come, let us plant the apple-tree!
Cleave the tough greensward with the spade;
Wide let its hollow bed be made;
There gently lay the roots, and there
Sift the dark mould with kindly care,
And press it o'er them tenderly,
As, round the sleeping infant's feet,
We softly fold the cradle-sheet:
So plant we the apple-tree.

What plant we in the apple-tree?
Buds, which the breath of summer days
Shall lengthen into leafy sprays;
Boughs, where the thrush with crimson breast
Shall haunt and sing and hide her nest.
We plant upon the sunny lea
A shadow for the noontide hour,
A shelter from the summer shower,
When we plant the apple-tree.

What plant we in the apple-tree?
Sweets for a hundred flowery springs,
To load the May-wind's restless wings,
When, from the orchard-row, he pours
Its fragrance through our open doors;
A world of blossoms for the bee;
Flowers for the sick girl's silent room;
For the glad infant sprigs of bloom.
We plant with the apple-tree.

What plant we in the apple-tree?
Fruits that shall swell in sunny June,
And redden in the August noon,
And drop, as gentle airs come by
That fan the blue September sky;
While children, wild with noisy glee,
Shall scent their fragrance as they pass,
And search for them the tufted grass
At the foot of the apple-tree.

And when above this apple-tree
The winter stars are quivering bright,
And winds go howling through the night,
Girls, whose young eyes o'erflow with mirth,
Shall peel its fruit by cottage-hearth,
And guests in prouder homes shall see,
Heaped with the orange and the grape,
As fair as they in tint and shape,
The fruit of the apple-tree.

The fruitage of this apple-tree
Winds and our flag of stripe and star
Shall bear to coasts that lie afar,
Where men shall wonder at the view,
And ask in what fair groves they grew;
And they who roam beyond the sea
Shall look, and think of childhood's day,
And long hours passed in summer play
In the shade of the apple-tree.

Each year shall give this apple-tree
A broader flush of roseate bloom,
A deeper maze of verdurous gloom,
And loosen, when the frost-clouds lower,
The crisp brown leaves in thicker shower;
The years shall come and pass, but we
Shall hear no longer, where we lie,
The summer's songs, the autumn's sigh,
In the boughs of the apple-tree.

And time shall waste this apple-tree.
Oh, when its aged branches throw
Thin shadows on the sward below,
Shall fraud and force and iron will
Oppress the weak and helpless still?
What shall the tasks of mercy be,
Amid the toils, the strifes, the tears
Of those who live when length of years
Is wasting this apple-tree?

"Who planted this old apple-tree?"
The children of that distant day
Thus to some aged man shall say;
And, gazing on its mossy stem,
The gray-haired man shall answer them:
"A poet of the land was he,
Born in the rude, but good old times;
'Tis said he made some quaint old rhymes
On planting the apple-tree."

* * * * *

RAY.

So Beltran was a Rebel.

Vivia stood before the glass, brushing out black shadows from her long, fine hair. There lay the letter as little Jane had left it, as she had let it lie till all the doors had clanged between, as she had laid it down again. She paused, with the brush half lifted, to glance once more at the clear superscription, to turn it and touch with her finger-tips the firm seal. Then she went on lengthening out the tresses that curled back again at the end like something instinct with life.

How long it had been in coming!--gradual journeys up from those Southern shores, and slumber in some comrade's care till a flag of truce could bear it across beneath the shelter of its white wing. Months had passed. And where was Beltran now? Living,--Vivia had a proud assurance in her heart of that! Her heart that went swiftly gliding back into the past, and filling old scenes with fresh fire. Thinking thus, she bent forward with dark, steady gaze, as if she sought for its pictures in the uncertain depths of the mirror, and there they rose as of old the crystal gave them back to the seeker. It was no gracious woman bending there that she saw, but a scene where the very air infused with sunlight seemed to glow, the house with its wide veranda veiled in vines, and above it towering the rosy cloud of an oleander-tree, behind it the far azure strip of the bay, before it the long low line of sandy beach where the waters of the Gulf forever swung their silver tides with a sullen roar,--for the place was one of those islands that make the perpetual fortifications of the Texan coast. Vivia, a slender little maiden of eleven summers, rocks in a boat a rod from shore, and by her side, his length along the warm wave, his arm along the boat, a boy floats in his linen clothes, an amphibious child, so undersized as to seem but little more than a baby, and yet a year her senior. He swims round and round the skiff in circling frolics, followed by the great dog who gambols with them, he dives under it and comes up far in advance, he treads water as he returns, and, seizing the painter, draws it forward while she sits there like Thetis guiding her sea-horses. Then, as the sun flings down more fervid showers, together they beach the boat and scamper up the sand, where old Disney, who has been dredging for oysters in the great bed below, crowns his basket with little Ray, and bears him off perched aloft on his bent back. Vivia walks beside the old slave in her infantile dignity, and disregards the sundry attempts of Ray's outstretched arms, till of a sudden the beating play of hoofs runs along the ground, and Beltran, with his morning's game, races by on his fiery mustang, and, scarcely checking his speed as he passes, stoops from the saddle and lifts the little girl before him. Vivia would look back in triumph upon Ray in his ignoble conveyance, but the affair has already been too much for him, he has flung himself on the instant from old Disney's basket, as if he were careless whether he fell under the horse's feet or not, but knowing perfectly well that Beltran will catch him. And Beltran, suddenly pulling up with a fierce rein, does catch him, bestows him with Vivia, slightly to her dainty discomfort, and dashes on. Noon deepens; Vivia does not sleep, she seeks Ray, Ray who does not sleep either, but who is not to be beguiled. For, one day, the child in his troubled dreams had been found by Beltran with a white coil of fangs and venom for his pillow; and never since has Beltran taken his noontide siesta but Ray watches beside him till the thick brown lashes lift themselves once more. For, if Ray knows what worship is, he would show you Beltran enshrined in his heart, this brother a dozen years his elder, who had hailed his birth with stormy tears of joy, who had carried him for years when he was yet too weak to walk, who in his own full growth would seem to have absorbed the younger's share, were it not that, tiny as Ray may be, his every nerve is steel, made steel, though, by the other, and so trained and suppled and put at his service. It was Beltran who had first flung him astride the saddle and sent him loping off to town alone, but who had secretly followed him from thicket to thicket, and stood ready in the market-place at last to lift him down; it was Beltran who had given him his own rifle, had taught him to take the bird on the wing, had led him out at night to see the great silent alligator in his scale-armor sliding over the land from the coast and plunging into the fresh waters of the bay,--who took him with him on the long journeys for gathering in the cattle of the vast stock-farm, let him sleep beside himself on the bare prairie-floor, like a man, with his horse tethered to his boot, told him the spot in the game on which to draw his bead, showed him what part to dress, and made him _chef de cuisine_ in every camp they crossed; it was he who had taught him how to hold himself in any wild stampede, on the prairie how to conquer fire with fire, to find water as much his element as air; it is Beltran, in short, who has made him this little marvel which at twelve years old he finds himself to be,--this brother who serves him so, and whom he adores, for whom he passionately expresses his devotion,--this brother whom he loves as he loves the very life he lives. So Vivia, too, sits down at Beltran's feet that day, and busies herself with those pink plumes of the spoonbill's wings which he brought home to her,--so that, when he wakes, he sees her standing there like the spirit of his dream, her dark eyes shining out from under the floating shadowy hair, and the rosy wings trembling on her little white shoulders. And just then Beltran has no word for Ray, the customary smiling word always waited for, since his eyes are on the vision at his feet, and straightway the child springs down, springs where he can intercept Beltran's view, seems to rise in his wrath a head above the girl, and, looking at Beltran all the while, slaps Vivia on the cheek. Instantly two hands have clasped about his wrists, two hands that hold him in a vice, and two eyes are gazing down into his own and paralyzing him. Still the grasp, the gaze, continue; as Vivia watches that look, a great blue glow from those eyes seems to cloud her own brain. The color rises on Ray's cheeks, his angry eyes fall, his chest heaves, his lips tremble, off from the long black lashes spin sprays of tears, he cannot move, he is so closely held, but slowly he turns his head, meets the red lips of the forgiving girl with his, then casts himself with sobs on Beltran's breast. And all that evening, as the sudden heavy clouds drive down and quench sunset and starlight, while they sit about a great fire, Beltran keeps her at his side and Ray maintains his place, and within there is light and love, and without the sand trembles to the shock of sound and the thunder of the surf, and the heaven is full of the wildly flying blast of the Norther.

Still, as Vivia gazed into the silent mirror, the salient points of her life started up as if memory held a torch to them in their dark recesses, and another picture printed its frosty _spiculæ_ upon the gray surface of the glass before her. No ardent arch of Southern noontide now, no wealth of flower and leaf, no pomp of regnant summer, but winter has darkened down over sad Northern countries, and white Arctic splendor hedges a lake about with the beauty of incomparable radiance; the trees whose branches overhang the verge are foamy fountains, frozen as they fall; distantly beyond them the crisp upland fields stretch their snowy sparkle to touch the frigid-flashing sapphire of the sky, and bluer than the sky itself their shadows fall about them; every thorn, every stem, is set, a spike of crusted lustre in its icy mail; the tingling air takes the breath in silvery wreaths; and wherever the gay garment of a skater breaks the monotone with a gleam of crimson or purple, the shining feet beneath chisel their fantastic curves upon a floor that is nothing but one glare of crystal sheen. And here, hero of the scene, glides Beltran, master of the Northern art as school-days made him, skates as of old some young Viking skated, all his being bubbling in a lofty glee, with blue eyes answering this icy brilliance as they dazzle back from the tawny countenance, with every muscle rippling grace and vigor to meet the proud volition, lithely cutting the air, swifter than the swallow's wing in its arrowy precision, careless as the floating flake in effortless motion, skimming along the lucid sheathing that answers his ringing heel with a tune of its own, and swaying in his almost aërial medium, lightly, easily, as the swimming fish sways to the currents of the tide. Scoring whitely their tracery of intricate lines, the groups go by in whorls, in angles, in sweeping circles, and the ice shrinks beneath them; here a fairy couple slide along, waving and bowing and swinging together; far away some recluse in his pleasure sports alone with folded arms, careening in the outward roll like the mast of a phantom-craft; everywhere inshore clusters of ruddy-cheeked boys race headlong with their hawkey-sticks, and with their wild cries, making benders where the ice surges in a long swell: and constantly in Beltran's wake slips Vivia, a scarlet shadow, while a clumsy little black outline is ever designing itself at her heels as Ray strives in vain to perfect the mysteries of the left stroke. All about, the keen air breathes its exhilaration, and the glow seems to penetrate the pores till the very blood dances along filled with such intoxicating influence; all above, the afternoon heaven deepens till it has no hidden richness, and between one and the pale gold of the coldly reddening horizon the white air seems hollow as the flaw in some great transparent jewel. Still they wind away in their gladness, when hurriedly Beltran reaches his hand for the heedless Vivia's, and hurriedly she sees terrifying grooves spreading round them, a great web-work of cracks,--the awful ice lifts itself, sinks, and out of a monstrous fissure chill death rises to meet them and ingulf them. In an instant, Ray, who might have escaped, has hurled himself upon them, and then, as they all struggle for one drowning breath in the flood, Vivia dimly divines through her horror an arm stretched first towards Ray, snatched back again, and bearing her to safety. Ray has already scrambled from the shallow breach where his brother alone found bottom; waiting hands assist Beltran; but as she lingers that moment shivering on the brink, blindly remembering the double movement of that arm beneath the ice, she silently asks, with a thrill, if he suffered Ray to save himself because he was a boy, and could, or because--because she was Vivia!

Southern noontide, winter twilight lost themselves again, as Vivia gazed, in the soft starry gleam of an April midnight. A quiet room, dimly lighted by a flame that dying eyes no longer see; two figures kneeling, one at either side of the mother,--the little apple-blossom of a mother brought up to die among her own people,--one shaking with his storm of sobs, the other supporting the dear, weary head on his strong breast, and stifling his very heart-beat lest it stir the frail life too roughly. And the mother lifts the lids of her faint eyes, as when a parting vapor reveals rifts of serene heaven, gazes for a moment into the depths of her first-born's tenderness, gropes darkly for his fingers and for the hot little hand thrust eagerly forth to meet hers, closes one about the other, and folds them both upon her own heart. Then Beltran bends and gathers from the lips the life that kindled his. With a despairing cry, Ray flings himself forward, and dead and living lie in Beltran's arms, while the strong convulsion of his heart rends up a hollow groan from its emptiness. And Vivia draws aside the curtain, and the gentle wind brings in the sweet earthy scent of fresh furrows lately wet with showers, and the ever-shifting procession of the silent stars unveil themselves of gauzy cloud, and glance sadly down with their abiding eyes upon these fleeting shadows.

After all, who can deny that there is magic in a mirror, a weird atmosphere imprisoned, between the metal and the glass, borrowing the occult powers of the gulf of space, and returning to us our own wraith and apparition at any hour of the day or night when we smite it with a ray of light,--reaching with its searching power into the dark places where we have hidden ourselves, and seizing and projecting them in open sight? Who doubts that this sheeny panel on so many walls, with wary art slurring off its elusive gleam, could, at the one compelling word, paint again the reflections of all on which it silently dreams in its reticent heart,--the joy, the grief, the weeping face, the laughing lip, the lover's kiss, the tyrant's sneer, almost the crouched and bleeding soul on which that sneer descended, of which some wandering beam carried record? When we remember the violin, inwardly ridged with the vibrations of old tunes, old discords, who would wonder to find some charactery of light tracing its indelible script within the crystal substance? And here, if Vivia saw one other scene blaze out before her and vanish, why not believe, for fancy's sake, that it was as real a picture as the image of the dark and beautiful girl herself bending there with the carmine stain upon her cheek, the glowing, parted lips, the shining eyes, the shadowy hair?

Late spring down on the Maryland farm: you know it by the intense blue through that quaint window draped with such a lushness of vines, such a glory of blossom. In at the open door, whose frame is arabesqued with hanging sprays of sweetbrier, with the pendent nest, with fluttering moth-wings sunshine-dusted, with crowds of bursting buds, pours the mellow sun in one great stream, pours from the peach-orchards the fragrant breeze laden with bird-song. A girl, standing aside, with clasped hands drooping before her, her gaze upon a shadow on the floor in the midst of that broad stream of light. Casting that shadow, under the lintel, a young man clad for travel. Since he left his Southern home, ruin has befallen it; he dares not ask one lapped in luxury to share such broken fortunes as his seem to-day, even though such stout shoulders, so valiant a heart, buffet them. If she loves, it is enough; they can wait; their treasure neither moth nor rust can corrupt; their jewel is imperishable. If she loves--He is looking in her eyes, holding to her his hands. Slowly the girl meets his glance. A long look, one long, silent look, infinitude in its assurance, its glow wrapping her, blue and smiling as heaven itself, reaching him like the evening star seen through tears,--a word, a touch, had profaned with a trait of earthliness so remote, so spiritual a betrothal. He goes, and still the upward-smiling girl sees the sunshine, hears the bird-song,--a boy dashes by the door and down the path to meet the last, close-lingering embrace of two waiting arms at the gate,--and then there is nothing but Vivia bending and gazing at herself in the glass with a flushed and fevered eagerness of rapture.

"The wild, sweet tunes that darkly deep
Thrill through thy veins and shroud thy sleep,
That swing thy blood with proud, glad sway,
And beat thy life's arterial play,--
Still wilt thou have this music sweep
Along thy brain its pulsing leap,--
Keep love away! keep love away!

"The joy of peace that wide and high
Like light floods through the soaring sky,
The day divine, the night akin,
Heaven in the heart, ah, wilt thou win,
The secret of the hoarded years,
Life rounded as the shining spheres,--
Let love come in! let love come in!"

she sang, to case her heart of its swelling gladness.

But here Vivia dared not concentrate her recollections, dared not dally with such distant delight,--twisted and tossed her hair into its coils, and once more opened the letter. Ray had not lived for three years under converging influences, years which are glowing wax beneath the seal of fresh impressions, years when one puts off or takes on the tendencies of a lifetime,--Ray had not lived those three school-years without contracting habits, whims, determinations of his own: let her have Beltran's reasons to meet Ray's objections.

They were up at the little meadow-side cottage of Mrs. Vennard, Ray's maternal aunt, a quiet widow, who was glad to receive her dying sister in her house a year and a half ago, as she had often received her boys before, and who was still willing to eke out her narrow income with the board of one nephew and any summer guest; and as that summer guest, owing to an old family-friendship that overlooked differences of rank and wealth, Vivia had, for many a season, been established. Here, when bodings of trouble began to darken her sunny fields, she had, in early spring, withdrawn again, leaving her maiden aunt to attend to the affairs of the homestead, or to find more luxurious residence in watering-places or cities, as she chose. For Vivia liked the placid life and freedom of the cottage, and here, too, she had oftenest met those dear friends to whom one winter her father, long since dead, had taken her, and half of all that was pleasant in her life had inwoven itself with the simple surroundings of the place. Here, in that fatal spring when the first tocsin alarmed the land, Ray, now scarcely any longer a boy, yet with a boy's singleness of mind, though possessing neither patience nor power for subtilties of difficult reason and truth, thinking of no lonely portion, but of the one great fact of country, had been fired with spontaneous fervor, and had ever since been like some restive steed champing the bit and quivering to start. As for Vivia, she was a Maryland woman. Too burningly indignant, the blood bubbled in her heart for words sometimes, and she would be glad of Beltran's weapons with which to confront Kay when he returned from Boston, whither, the day before, without a word's explanation, he had betaken himself. So she turned again to the open letter, and scanned its weightiest paragraphs.

"There is a strange reversal of right and wrong, when the American Peace Society declares itself for war. There is, then, a greater evil than war, even than civil war, with its red, fratricidal hands?--Slavery. But, could that be destroyed, it would be the first great evil ever overcome by force of arms. They fight tangibly with an intangible foe; tangible issues rise between them; the black, intangible phantom hovers safe behind. But even should they visibly succeed, is there not left the very root of the matter to put forth fresh growth,--that moral condition in which the thing lived at all? An evil that has its source in the heart must be eradicated by slow medicinal cure of the blood. To fight against the stars in their courses, one must have brands of starry temper. No sudden shocks of battle will sweep Slavery from the sphere. Can one conquer the universe by proclamation? 'Lyra will rise to-morrow,' said some one, after Cæsar reformed the calendar. 'Doubtless,' replied Cicero, 'there is an edict for it.' But, believe me, there can be no broad, stupendous evil, unless it be a part of God's plan; and in His own time, without other help from us than the performance of our duty, it will slough off its slime and rise into some fair superstructure. Our efforts dash like spray against the rock,--the spray is broken, the rock remains. To annihilate evil with evil,--that is an error in itself against which every man is justified in taking up his sword.

"So far, I have allowed the sin. Yet, sin or not, in this country the estate of the slave is unalterable. Segregately, the institution is their protection. For though there is no record of the contact of superior and inferior races on a basis of equality, where the inferior did not absorb the superior, yet, if every slave were set free to-day, imbruted through generations, it could not be on a basis of equality that we should meet, and they would be as inevitably sunk and lost as the detritus that a river washes into the sea. If the black stay here, it must be as a menial. In his own latitudes, where, after the third generation, the white man ceases to exist, he is the stronger; there the black man is king: let him betake himself to his realm. Abolition is impracticable, colonization feasible; on either is gunpowder wasted: one cannot explode a lie by the blast.

"But saying the worst of our incubus that can be said, could all its possible accumulation of wrong and woe exceed that of four years of such a war as this? Think a moment of what this land was, what a great beacon and celestial city across the waves to the fugitives from tyranny; think of our powerful pride in eastern seas, in western ports, when each ship's armament carried with it the broadside of so many sovereign States, when each citizen felt his own hand nerved with a people's strength, when no young man woke in the morning without the perpetual aurora of high hopes before him, when peace and plenty were all about us,--and then think of misery at every hearth, of civilization thrust back a century, of the prestige of freedom lost among the nations, of the way paved for despots. And how needlessly!

"They taunted us, us the source of all their wealth, with the pauper's deserting the poor-house; we put it to proof; when, lo! with a hue and cry, the blood-hounds are upon us, the very dogs of war. So needless a war! For has it not been a fundamental principle that every people has a right to govern itself? We chose to exercise that right. Was it worth the while to refuse it? Exhausted, drained, dispeopled, they may chain a vassal province to their throne; but, woe be to them, upon that conquering day, their glory has departed from them! The first Revolution was but the prologue to this: that was sealed in blood; in this might have been demonstrated the progress made under eighty years of freedom, by a peaceful separation. It is the Flight of the Tartar Tribe anew, and the whole barbarous Northern nation pours its hordes after, hangs on the flank, harasses, impedes, slaughters,--but we reach the shadow of the Great Wall at last. If we had not the right to leave the league, how had we the right to enter? If we had not the right to leave, they also had not the right to withhold us. Yet, when we entered, resigning much, receiving much, retaining more, we were each a unit, a power, a commonwealth, a nation, or, as we chose to term it, a State,--as much a state as any of the great states of Europe, as Britain, as France, as Spain, and jealously ever since have we individually regarded any infringement on our integrity. That, and not the mere tangle of race that in time must unravel itself, is the question of the age. Long ago it was said that our people, holding it by transmission, never having struggled for it, would some day cease rightly to value the one chief bulwark of liberty. Nothing is more true. They of the North will lose it, we of the South shall gain it; for, battling on a grander scale than our ancestors, the South is to-day taking out the great _habeas corpus_ of States!"

No matter whether all this was sophistry or truth. Beltran had said it,--that was enough; so strongly did she feel his personality in what he wrote, that the soul was exultant, jubilant, defiant, within her. Other words there were in the letter, such words as are written to but one; the blood swept up to Vivia's lips as she recalled them, and her heart sprang and bounded like one of those balls kept in perpetual play by the leaping, bubbling column of a fountain. She was in one of those dangerous states of excitement after which the ancients awaited disaster. That last picture of the mirror dazzled her vision again; she saw the sunshine, smelt the perfume, heard the bird-song. How a year had changed the scene! The house was a barrack; now down in her Maryland peach-orchards the black muzzles of Federal cannon yawned, and under the flickering shadows and sunshine the grimy gunners, knee-deep in grass and dew, brushed away the startled clover-blooms, as they touched fire to the breach. Beltran was a Rebel. Vivia was a Rebel, too! She ran down-stairs into her little parlor overflowing with flowers. As she walked to and fro, the silent keys of her pianoforte met her eye. Excellent conductors. Half standing, half sitting, she awoke its voices, and, to a rolling, silvery thunder of accompaniment, commenced singing,--

"The lads of Kilmarnock had swords and had spears
And lang-bladed daggers to kill cavaliers,
But they shrunk to the wall and the causey left free
At one toss of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee!
So fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Saddle my horses and call up my men,
Open your west-port and let me gae free,
For it's up with the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!"

Some one in the distance, echoing the last line with an emphasis, caught her ear in the pause. It was Ray. He had already returned, then. She snatched the letter and sped into the kitchen, where she was sure to find him.

Mrs. Vennard rocked in her miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork. Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,--usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy at home, whither she had brought a cookery-book through which Ray declared he expected to eat his way,--bustled about from room to room. Ray sat before the fire in the kitchen and toasted some savory morsel suspended on a string athwart the blaze.

"Where have you been, Ray?" said Vivia, approaching, with her glowing cheeks, her sparkling eyes. "And what are you doing now?"

"Trying camp-life again," replied Ray, looking up at her in a fixed admiration.

"I've had a letter from Beltran."

"Oh! where is he?" cried Ray.

"Beltran is in camp."

"And where?"

"Perhaps on the Rio Grande, perhaps on the Potomac."

"Do you mean to say," cried Ray, springing up, while string and all fell into the coals, "that Beltran, my brother"--

"Is a Rebel."

"Then I am a rebel, too," said Ray, chokingly, sitting down again, and mechanically stooping to pick up the burning string,--"a rebel to him!"

"You won't be a rebel to him, if you'll listen to reason,--his reason."

"He's got no reason. It's only because he was there."

"Now, Raymond Lamar! if you talk so, you sha'n't read the letter!"

"I don't want to read it."

"Have you left off loving Beltran, because he differs from you?"

"Left off loving Beltran!"

Vivia waited a moment, leaning on the back of his chair, and then Ray, bending, covered his face with his hands, and the large tears oozed from between his brown fingers.

Little Jane, whipping the frothy snow of her eggs, went on whipping all the harder for fear Ray should know she saw him. And Vivia, with one hand upon his head, took away the brown fingers, that her own cool, fragrant palm might press upon his burning lids. Such sudden tears belong to such tropical natures. For there was no anger or sullenness in Ray's grief; he was just and simply sorry.

"He must have forgotten me," said Ray, after a sober while.

"There was this note for you in mine, and a draft on New York, because he thought you might be in arrears."

"No, I'm not. Aunty can have the draft, though; she may need it before I come back," said Ray, brokenly, gazing into the fire. "Do you suppose Beltran wrote mine or yours first?"

"Yours."

"Then you've the last thing he ever set his hand to, perhaps!"

"Don't talk so, child!" said Vivia, with an angry shiver. "Come back! Where are you going?"

"I enlisted, yesterday, in the Kansas Cavalry."

"Great heavens, Ray! was there not another regiment in all the world than one to be sent down to New Mexico to meet Beltran and the Texan Rangers?" cried Vivia, wringing her hands.

Ray was on his feet again, a swarm of expletives buzzing inarticulately at his lips.

"I never thought of that," said he, whiter than ashes.

"What made you? oh, what made you?"

"There was no other company. I liked this captain. He gave me to-day's furlough. I'm going to-night; little Jane's promised to fix my traps; she's making me these cookies now, you see. Pshaw! Beltran's up on the Potomac, or else you couldn't have gotten this letter,--don't you know? You made my heart jump into my mouth!"

And resuming his seat, to find his string and jack in cinders, he turned round astride his chair and commenced notching his initials into its back, with cautious glances at his aunt.

"That's for little Jane to cry over after I'm gone," said he.

"Ray--How do you think Beltran will like it?"

"I can't help what Beltran likes. I shall be doing God's work."

"Beltran says God does His own work. He only requires of us our duty."

"That is my duty."

"You feel, Ray, as if you were possessed by the holy ardor of another Sir Galahad!"

"I feel, Vivia, that I shall give what strength I have towards ridding the world of its foulest disease."

"With what a good grace that comes from you!"

"With all the better grace."

"The old Berserker rage over again!"

"Quite as fine as running amuck."

"Ray, the race that does not rise for itself deserves its fate."

"Vivia, no race deserves such a fate as this one has found."

"Idle! I have seen slavery; own slaves: there is nothing monstrous in it."

"In Maryland."

"Anywhere."

"Wailing children, sundered families, women under the lash"--

"You know very well, Ray, that there is a law against the separation of families."

"I never heard of it."

"Audubon says there is."

"A little bird told him," interpolated Jane.

"But I've seen them separated."

"I don't believe," urged Vivia, "but for exceptional abuses, there's a system providing for a happier peasantry on the face of the earth."

"It can't be a good system that allows such abuses."

"There are even abuses of the sacraments."

"Pshaw, Vivia!"

"Well, Ray, I don't believe in this pseudo-chivalry of yours, any more than Beltran does."

"If Beltran said black was white, you'd think that true!"

"_If_ Beltran said so, it _would_ be true."

"It's no more likely that he should be right than that I should be."

"You couldn't have spoken so about Beltran once!"

"Well, black or white, slave or free, never think I shall sit by and see my country fall to ruins."

"Your country? Do you suppose you love it any more than I do?"

"You're a woman."

"Suppose I am a woman, you unkind boy"--

"Well, you only love half of it,--the Southern half."

"I love my whole country!" cried Vivia, all aflame. "I love these purple, rust-stained granites here, the great savannas there,--the pine forests, the sea-like prairies,--every river rolling down its rocky bed,--every inch of its beautiful, glorious soil,--all its proud, free people. I love my whole country!"

"Only you hate some of its parasites. But Beltran would tell you that you haven't got any country. You may love your native State. As for country, it's nothing but a--what-you-may-call-it."

"Very true. It is in observing the terms of that what-you-may-call-it,--that federation, that bond,--in mutual concessions, in fraternal remembrances, that we gain a country. And what a country!"

"Yes, what a country, Vivia! And shall I consent to resign an atom of it while there's a drop of blood in my body, to lose a single grain of its dust? When Beltran brought me here three years ago, I sailed day and night up a mighty river, from one zone into another,--sailed for weeks between banks that were still my own country. And if I had ever returned, we should have passed by the thundering ledges of New England, Jersey surfs and shallows, the sand-bars of the Carolinas, the shores of Florida lying like a faint green cloud long and low upon the horizon,--sailing a thousand miles again in our own waters. Enormous borders! and throughout their vast stretch happiness and promise! And shall I give such dominion to the first traitor that demands it? No! nor to the thousandth! There she lies, bleeding, torn, prostrate, a byword! Why, Vivia, this was my country, she that made me, reared me, gladdened me! It is the now crusade. I understand none of your syllogisms. My country is in danger. Here's my hand!"

And Ray stood erect, bristling and fiery, as some one reddening in the very light of battle.

And answering him only with flashing eyes, Vivia sang, in her triumphant, thrilling tones,--

"Hark to a wandering child's appeal,
Maryland! my Maryland!
My mother State, to thee I kneel,
Maryland! my Maryland!
For life and death, for woe and weal,
Thy peerless chivalry reveal,
And gird thy beauteous limbs with steel,
Maryland! my Maryland!"

"You're a wicked girl, Vivia, if you _are_ as beautiful as Phryne!" exclaimed Ray, while little Jane picked herself up from the table, across which she had been leaning with both arms and her dish-towel, and staring forgetfully at him.

Vivia laughed.

"Well, you young fanatic," said she, "we can't convert each other. We are both incontrovertible. Let us be friends. One needs more time than we have to quarrel in."

"Yes," said Ray. "I am going this afternoon, and I shall drink of every river west of the Mississippi before I come back. It's a wild life, a royal life; I am thirsty for its excitement and adventure."

"Jane," called Mrs. Vennard from within, "did you find all the nests to-day?"

"All but two, Ma'am," said little Jane, as she let a tempting odor escape from the tin oven. "The black hen got over the fence last night; she's down in the lot. And the cropple-crown laid away."

"You'd better get them."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"If you'd just as lief."

"Oh, yes, Ma'am!"

"We'll go, too," said Ray.

"Oh, no, you needn't."