Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

The latest history of New York City says that 500,000 people in New York, or more than one-third, live in tenement houses, and that the densest blocks in London do not compare, in the number of inhabitants, with the same space in the dense quarters of New York. A single block is referred to on Avenue B, which has fifty-two tenement houses, the population of them amounting to nearly 2,400 persons. One single house in New York is said to have 1,500 inhabitants, and often a house with twenty-five feet front accommodates 100 souls. Of course height is the great point to give such area. If you enter New York and walk toward the east side through the streets which run so close together, but which are all happily of fair width, and all straight, you will see row after row of red brick houses, generally built to the height of five or six stories. In themselves they are rather neat to look at, except for the signs of population at every window, where on a hot and steaming day everybody seems to press to get the air. You can see the baby at the breast, the hunchback elder child, the man rolling cigars, the Chinaman washing, the woman running her sewing machine, the musician practicing on the bugle, the dentist, perhaps, filling teeth in a tenement house at modest rates to suit. You may also see some quiet old German smoking his pipe and reading science, unaware that anything is much worse than it generally is in the world. These houses have a common entrance below, sometimes in the middle, generally at the side. Through this entrance pours in and out the population going above; the stairways are generally narrow, the steps worn almost through, sometimes loungers and children are playing in the halls, and our fastidious habits are much shocked at the necessary familiarity engendered.

Yet it is to be remembered that as one’s day is, so is his strength, even in the matter of smells, and while there are tenement evils there are also tenement house virtues. The close sociability engenders another species of Christianity. The policeman is near at hand to correct any evils. While the summers are dreadfully hot, the winters are also long and cold, and the two things most needed in a tenement house are coal and sunlight.

The tenement house laws have been made at Albany by the landlords of these houses, many of whom are rapacious and merciless. Not a single day is given by law, I understand, to a tenant who does not pay the rent. The landlord is permitted to put his agent or constable in any apartment and set the things on the sidewalk, whatever may be the disaster or the disease within. Many of these tenement houses have been built up by the sales of liquor and beer, and probably the majority of our Irish saloon-keepers project a corner in which they do business into a tenement house above, and they both provide the rum and collect the rent. Possibly the men above stairs drink away their wages in the saloon below, while the women work at something to keep the rent up.

In some cases, especially among the more rural Irish, the shanty in the suburbs is substituted for tenement house life. As you walk along some of the newly filled streets, composed of great rocks which have been blasted in one spot to fill up another spot, you will look down into a former meadow, now a mere hole surrounded by four dungeon walls of stone, and there you will see three or four shanties pitched together on suffrance, made of old boards taken out of some fence or from dry goods boxes. Unaware of anybody being about, you can sit there and hear the whole domestic menage going on; see Patrick, very drunk, sociably quarreling with his wife, who is not far behind him in her potations. They perhaps keep a cow somewhere down there under the planks, and this cow is being milked more or less all the time, and if the milk can not be sold it helps to support the life of the squatters.

Again, you will go into some far quarter of this island, many miles from the business centers, and to your surprise you will there find another species of tenement house, showing that this system of herding together and economizing room is the fate of this city at least. There seems to be no future for the tenement house system. The laws passed by our state legislature with reference to this city are more apt to be in favor of the tenement house proprietor than of the tenant. The tenants hardly know where the legislature is, while the tenement house owner is informed by his lawyer or lobbyist of what is going on. As far as philanthropy goes, it despairs of accomplishing anything in the midst of such a dense population. Of course, when things become outrageous, the police report them to the Board of Health, or the tenants take the law into their own hands.

This gregarious life leads to great independence of character among the women; the average survivor of the tenement house is no puny, frightened creature, but a very active animal, ready to scratch, retort, appeal to law, and loves and marries as she wishes. There is some natural deviation from virtue, as from cleanliness, yet the recuperative principle in women, as in men, is at least redeeming, and it is to be doubted whether the vices in the tenement houses exceed those in the fashionable streets.

It is believed here that the worst class of people New York possesses are the Bohemians from northern Austria. This degraded race was at one time, or until the emperors destroyed it politically, the repository of most of the vices of Europe. Among the Bohemians you find the domestic virtues at the lowest ebb, and socialism at its lewdest. A manufacturer was recently telling me of two Bohemians in his employment who grew weary of their wives, and without any other marriage, and without quarrel, they agreed, men and women, to change partners, and continue to live and work together. At a recent strike of cigar makers in this city, a working woman who stripped tobacco was set upon by three men and knocked down because she preferred to take lower wages rather than keep idle and support some of the demagogue patrols.

New York, however, has no such dens to-day as it had forty years ago, when the Five Points was in the height of its orgies. Through that old swampy quarter of the city broad streets have been cut, and manufactories have been established. I have my doubts whether, at this moment, the worst features of New York’s population are not to be found in some of the rougher suburbs off the island. The draft riots of 1863 assisted the peace and order of New York by bringing about a collision between the very bad elements and the law. The police, who are generally hated by the vicious as the visible representatives of the law, received from that moment a degree of discipline which has ever since been kept up, and the militia regiments of New York City have been provided with large armories, and are in a fair state of discipline.

Of course, in such a rank soil as this island, the gentler virtues do not grow, but my observation of some rural districts, many hundred miles from this city, is that they are far below the tenement house quarter in intelligence, and not above it in morals. The matter of virtue is to a large extent involved in the race; it will take a long time to debauch, utterly, people descended from the British and Germanic races. Fortunately, we have not had much immigration from the south of Europe, but the Italian quarter is attracting some attention, as possibly the worst we possess. The Chinese in New York are self-reliant, and a good many of them have shown a decided bias to be Christianized. I lived near a church, two or three years ago, where I one day observed a large number of Chinese, and glancing up at the church I saw that it was a Baptist one. On inquiry I found that a Chinaman who attended the Sunday-school of that church had been murdered by some semi-American roughs, and his classmates had come to pay the last honors to him. Like Americans, they came in cabs, and came filing out of that church quiet, uncomplaining, injured specimens of our common brotherhood.

Legally, a tenement house in New York is one house occupied by more than three families living independently of each other, and doing their cooking on the premises. All tenement houses are compelled to have fire-escapes built outside of the house, of iron. There is one quarter of New York City where 300,000 persons are said to live on a square mile. Observers now say that not one-third, but one-half of the population of New York City lives on the tenement house plan.

A superficial observer here would think that the greatest misery on the globe was to be found in this tenement house quarter, yet I think that much of this sympathy will be thrown away, because in the large majority of cases the people who live under this system would not exchange it for any other.

THE CAÑONS OF THE COLORADO.

A lecture delivered on Saturday, April 26, in the National Museum, Washington, D. C., by Major J. W. Powell, Director of the U. S. Geological Survey.

The lecturer at the outset stated that the valley of the Columbia River might be divided into two portions; the lower third lying but little above the sea level, the other two-thirds of the valley area drained by the Colorado and its tributaries being five to eight thousand feet above the level of the sea.

On the summit and sides of the mountain were thousands of lakes of clear water, which received their supply from the masses of snow which are collecting throughout the winter on the mountain ranges, filling the gorges and half burying the forests. In summer the snow melted and poured down the mountain sides in millions of cascades, eventually forming the Colorado River, which grew into a mad torrent ere it reached the Gulf of California. Eventful indeed would be the history of these waters if traced from their starting point. Some of these streams ran across arid plateaus, being fed in their course by intermittent showers. Each year their channels became deeper and deeper, cutting their way out of solid rock. Every river, brook, creek and rill ran into a cañon, so that these vast areas were traversed by a labyrinth of deep gorges hewn out of the rock by the ever-flowing streams. If the Colorado plateau had been in such a country as the District of Columbia, the land lying adjacent to the river courses would have been washed down by the rains and streams, and instead of cañons there would now be a broad system of valleys. It was an error to regard that Colorado plateau as a region of great erosion or degradation. It was a vast system of cañons, caused by the water eating its way through the hard rock, with lofty stone walls on either side.

Major Powell said that in 1867 and 1868 he had explored the Grand River and other tributaries of the Colorado, and these expeditions thrilled him with a desire to explore the vast cañons of the Colorado River itself. Accordingly in May, 1869, he started for this purpose with a small party of men and four boats from a point a few miles below where now the Union and Pacific Railroad crosses Yukon River. The first forty or fifty miles of their course was through low cañons, cut through the green and alcove lands of that region. Their course was southward. As they descended the river, a mountain seemed to stand athwart their path, and into this mountain the river penetrated. They followed around the base for a hundred miles or so, meeting the river beyond. Now, why had not the river flowed _round_ the mountain instead of cutting its way _through_? The answer was exceedingly simple. Because the river was there before the mountain, and had the right of way, keeping steadfastly on its southward course, across which the lands had been gradually elevated. These land upheavals had taken place very slowly, enabling the river to force its passage as the land rose inch by inch.

At last they reached the junction of the Grand and the Green rivers—the head of the Colorado River—some three thousand feet below the general surface of the country. At that point the cañon was about three thousand feet in depth. One of the boats had been lost, and one of the men had left them before reaching this point. The walls of the cañon here were about half a mile high. One of these they determined to scale at a point a little below their camp, where there was a gorge—a natural break in the wall. Half way up further progress seemed impossible, but by crawling round a narrow ledge of rock they were enabled to resume their toilsome climb. From this point they could see the river fifteen hundred feet below them, wildly rushing and tossing, and at the same distance above them was the cañon’s brink that seemed to blend with the sky. Again the wall was found to have broken down, but by crawling up a fissure so narrow that they could press against the hinder side with their backs, while forcing with hands and feet their steep and dangerous path upward, they finally emerged into the upper world, where they could look out at the broad expanse of landscape. Away to the north were orange and azure cliffs, two and three thousand feet high; to the west were the Wasatch Mountains, and a plateau with a hundred dead volcanoes on its back, while to the east was another group of dead volcanoes. Thirty or forty miles away in the same direction were seen forests of green and masses of gray volcanic rock clothed with patches of snow; green, gray and silver, resplendent in that noon-day sun. To the south was a labyrinth of cañons.

On the following day they commenced the exploration of the Colorado River. From this starting point it was about seven hundred miles to the foot of the Grand Cañon. Through the entire series of cañons the river tumbled down more than 5,000 feet. The lecturer here stated that the fall of the Mississippi from Cairo down was about four inches to the mile, and of the Ohio some eight inches, and that the Colorado carried about as much water as the Ohio at Louisville. In some places the river was wide, and here its fall did not exceed that of the Ohio or Upper Mississippi. The fall in Marble Cañon, however, was from ten to three hundred feet to the mile! The boats, with the exception of the one in which he and Major Powell traveled, were about twenty-two feet long and decked, so that there were three water-tight compartments in each boat. His boat, in which were two other men, was only sixteen feet in length. This led the way, while the other boats, laden with provisions, etc., followed. The roar of the water in the cañon could be heard a long way off. The chief difficulty in navigating was riding the waves, which differed greatly from that of the sea. In the case of the latter the water remained, simply rising and falling, while the _form_ alone rolled on; but in the former the water of the wave rolled on, the form being fixed. As long as the boat could be kept on the waves, all was well, but the great tendency was to drift into the whirlpool in the center. Three miles below the junction of the Grand and the Green rivers appeared a series of rapids and falls, and nearly two weeks were spent in running through this difficult portion of the river. Having passed through Cataract Cañon, they encountered Narrow Cañon, where the river for seven miles rushed down a steep declivity. Seven miles again below a stream came in on the right side. Up this the leading boat went, and one of the men, in reply to a query from another in one of the boats following, as to the nature of the water in this new stream, called out, “A dirty devil,” and by that name it was designated on the maps. It was a stream of red mud, having along its course hot mineral springs. The odor was fetid and foul, resembling, as the lecturer graphically described it, “One of those alabaster boxes of ointment with which they used to anoint abolitionists in the brazen days of yore.” Below Narrow Cañon was Glen Cañon, stretching for a hundred and fifty miles through homogeneous sandstone of a beautiful color, its walls often perpendicular and indented with glens, alcoves and caves. The latter were formed by the rain-showers running down the sides of the wall, and slowly eating them away. At the foot of the homogeneous sandstone was a soft, friable, crumbling sandstone, and through this the river had cut some fifty miles of its course. In the next cañon—Marble Cañon—was a series of cataracts and rapids which made progress very difficult. Here the falls were too steep to be “run,” and the boats were therefore let down by a line. First one was lowered, then the second passed down to and beyond the first, and then the third past the first and second.

When these falls had been passed, they found themselves at the head of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, which was about two hundred and seventy miles long, varying from five to six thousand feet in depth. Here they stopped several days to examine the cañon before entering it. Where the rocks were sandstone the river was comparatively quiet, but where limestone prevailed it presented a much more threatening appearance. In some places the river was very narrow, the entire volume of water being compressed into a width of not more than fifty feet. For a distance of twenty or thirty miles a curious set of buttresses stood out from the wall of the cañon, and between each two of these was a bay where the waters would sweep around seething and boiling. Sometimes lofty pinnacles of rock rose from the river’s bed, past which the boats darted with fearful rapidity. Many days were spent in traversing this part of the cañon. The weather was gloomy and much rain fell in showers, which in that region had a very different effect from those which fall in our own districts. There every drop was precipitated—as it were—into one vast rain trough, soon causing the waters to swell. At first was heard in the distance the patter of the drops on the rocks; then came the noise caused by the rills and brooks hurrying their streams to the main river, and louder yet the larger creeks and rivulets hurled their foaming waters, soon swelling the river itself into a furious and maddening torrent. The black clouds overhead appeared to be miles above them, mingling with the very skies. Through this dark cañon they worked their way, examining the rocks, toiling from daylight to dark. They were now living on half rations, as the supplies of food were fast decreasing. Suddenly was seen a fearful rapid, only three or four hundred yards below. A landing was effected and the camp pitched on a projecting rock some fifty feet above the water. The boats had to be hauled up out of the way of the torrent. In continuing the journey on the following morning, great difficulty was experienced in rounding this rock. The boats were pitched almost against it, and instantly rebounded on the retiring water. A few days later Diamond Cañon was reached. Here two streams came in, one from either side. A fearful “fall” was in sight, which, after long and careful consideration, it was determined to “run.” Here three of the men grew faint-hearted and left the party. It was afterward learned that they had fallen in with Indians and been killed.

The anxiety attending the resolution to “run” this “fall” was fearful. The lecturer said that he paced up and down a little sand-plot all night without sleeping or resting. In the morning rations were given to the deserters, who determined to watch the fate of the rest of the party. The “run” was successfully made, and it was hoped that the other three would then be induced to follow. This, however, they would not do. On the next day the most difficult point in the entire journey was reached, owing to obstructions caused by lava rocks. In one place a dam was found, the waters rushing over in a cataract. This it was also decided to “run,” on the right hand side. The decision was however reversed when the fearful danger of the attempt was realized. But already one of the boats had been let down to the very head of the fall, where the men were attempting to hold it by winding the rope around a great block of lava. There was one man who had been a whaler—named Bradley—in the boat. The roar of the waters was so deafening that no voice could be heard. At length he was seen to take out his knife with perfect composure, and in an instant he cut the rope, knowing that otherwise the boat would have been dashed to pieces by striking heavily against the wall of the cañon. A moment later, and he and the boat were hurled over the cataract, probably never to be seen again. But a few moments later he appeared a few hundred yards below, waving his hand. All haste was made to reach him, fearing he might be severely bruised, but in the hurry to reach him one of the party (the lecturer) fell overboard and was picked up by this invulnerable old whaler.

On the next day the foot of the Grand Cañon was reached. Thence they went to Virgin River, and from that point to Salt Lake, after which they hastened home.

In conclusion, the lecturer said that if all the sands that had been eroded by the rivers of that region, and washed into the ocean, could be brought into one mass, they would form a rock one mile and a half thick, and bigger than New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania put together.

THE COURTS OF THREE PRESIDENTS.

THIERS, MACMAHON, GRÉVY.

We all read in the newspapers how, on the day when the Duke of Albany’s lamentable death occurred, M. Jules Ferry, the French Prime Minister and Secretary for Foreign Affairs, gave a dinner party. An Englishman having expressed astonishment that this dinner had not been put off, a Frenchman answered by asking whether Lord Granville would countermand a banquet in case M. Wilson, M. Grévy’s son-in-law, were to die? Our countryman seems to have concluded that Lord Granville would not let his hospitalities be interfered with by M. Wilson’s decease; and perhaps he was right. M. Daniel Wilson holds more effective power than was ever possessed by a Dauphin of France; but his father-in-law is only the chief of a government, not the head of a court, and M. Wilson’s existence has therefore never been brought officially to the cognizance of foreign rulers. It does not follow, however, that because M. Wilson is a private person, the French government is bound to look upon the relations of foreign monarchs as being exactly in the same position as this gentleman. It is more than probable that if Marshal MacMahon were still president, the foreign secretary would not have given a dinner on the day when a child of the Queen of England had died suddenly on French soil. It is equally probable that there would have been no such dinner if M. Thiers or M. Gambetta had been president.

Presidents are not all alike. In their views as to the functions of a republic—in their opinions as to the amount of authority which a republican ruler may exercise over his ministers, as to the more or less pomp in which he should live, as to the etiquette which he should enforce, and as to the relations which he should personally maintain with the rulers of other countries, M. Grévy and his predecessors have all differed from one another. The three presidents who have governed France since 1871 have in fact been so dissimilar in their characters, tastes, principles, and objects, that it is really curious to compare their various methods of living and ruling.

M. Thiers was seventy-four years old when he became supreme ruler of France, after the siege of Paris. After the first vote of the Assembly, which appointed him chief of the executive, M. Thiers took up his residence at the Préfecture, in the apartments which M. Gambetta had vacated.

“Pah! what a smell of tobacco!” he exclaimed, when he strutted into the ex-dictator’s study; and presently Madame Thiers, her sister Mdlle. Dosne, and the solemn M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, added their lamentations to his. They had been going the round of the house, and found all the rooms tenanted by hangers-on of M. Gambetta’s government, who had not yet received notice to quit, and who hoped perhaps that they might retain their posts under the new administration. All these gentlemen smoked, read radical newspapers, refreshed themselves with absinthe, or beer, while transacting the business of the state; and played billiards in their leisure moments. They were dismissed in a pack before the day was over; but Madame Thiers decided that it would require several days to set the house straight; and so M. Thiers’ removal to the Archbishop’s palace, where Monseigneur Guibert (now Cardinal), whom he afterward raised to the see of Paris, offered him hospitality. M. Thiers would, no doubt, have liked very much to sleep in Louis XIV.’s bed, and to have for his study that fine room with the balcony, on which the heralds used to announce the death of one king and the accession of another in the same breath. His secretary and faithful admirer, M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, went about saying that it was fitting the “national historian” should be lodged in the apartments of the greatest of the kings; but this idea did not make its way at all. M. Thiers ended by saying that the rooms were too large, while Madame Thiers despised them for being full of draughts and having chimneys which smoked. Nevertheless, M. Thiers was nettled at seeing that the Republicans objected quite as much as the Royalists to see him occupy the royal apartments. “Stupid fellows!” he exclaimed on seeing a caricature which represented him as a ridiculous pigmy, crowned with a cotton nightcap, and lying in an enormous bed surrounded by the majestic ghosts of the Bourbon kings. Then half-angry, half-amused, he ejaculated with his usual vivacity: “Louis XIV. was not taller than I, and as to his other greatness I doubt whether he would ever have had a chance of sleeping in the best bed of Versailles if he had begun life as I did.” Shortly after this, M. Mignet meeting Victor Hugo spoke to him in a deprecating way about the fuss which had been made over this question of the royal apartments. “I don’t know,” answered the poet. “Ideas of dictatorship would be likely to sprout under that tester.” This was reported to Thiers, who at once cried: “I like that! If Victor Hugo were in my place, he would sleep in the king’s bed, but he would think the dais too low, and have it raised.”

It was quite impossible for Thiers to submit to any of the restraints of etiquette. He was a _bourgeois_ to the finger-tips. His character was a curious effervescing mixture of talent, learning, vanity, childish petulance, inquisitiveness, sagacity, ecstatic patriotism, and self-seeking ambition. He was a splendid orator, with the shrill voice of an old costerwoman; a _savant_, with the presumption of a schoolboy; a kind-hearted man, with the irritability of a monkey; a masterly administrator, with that irrepressible tendency to meddle with everything, which worries subordinates, and makes good administration impossible. He was a shrewd judge of men, and knew well how they were to be handled, but his impatience prevented him from acting up to his knowledge. He had a sincere love of liberty, with all the instincts of a despot. He was most charming with women, understood their power, and yet took so little account of it in his serious calculations that he often offended, by his Napoleonic brusqueness, ladies who were in a position to do him harm, and did it.

M. Feuillet de Conches had to give up M. Thiers as hopeless. What was to be done with a president who, at a ceremonious dinner to Ambassadors and Ministers, would get up from table after the first course and walk round the room, discussing politics, pictures, the art of war, or the dishes on the _menu_? Mr. Thiers’ own dinner always consisted of a little clear soup, a plate of roast meat—veal was that which he preferred—some white beans, peas, or lentils, and a glass saucer of jam—generally apricot. He got through this repast, with two glasses of Bordeaux, in about a quarter of an hour, and then would grow fidgety. “Is that good that you are eating?” he would say to one of his guests, and thence start off on to a disquisition about cookery. Telegrams were brought to him at table, and he would open them, saying, “I beg your pardon, gentlemen, but the affairs of France must pass before everything.” If he got disquieting news he would sit pensive for a few moments, then call for a sheet of paper and scribble off instructions to somebody, whispering directions to his major-domo about the destination of the missive.

But if he received glad tidings, he would start from his chair and frisk about, making jokes, his bright gray eyes twinkling merrily as lamps through his gold-rimmed spectacles. After dinner there was always a discussion, _coram hospitibus_, between him and Madame Thiers as to whether he might take some black coffee. Permission to excite his nerves being invariably refused, he would wink, laughing, to his friends, to call their attention to the state of uxorious bondage in which he lived, and then retire to a high arm-chair near the fire, where he soon dropped off to sleep. Upon this, Madame Thiers would lay a forefinger on her lips, saying, “Monsieur Thiers sleeps;” and with the help of her sister she would clear the guests into the next room, where they conversed in whispers while the President dozed—a droll little figure with his chin resting on the broad red ribbon of his Legion of Honor, and his short legs dangling about an inch above the floor. It was always very touching to see the care with which M. Thiers’ wife and sister-in-law ministered to him. The story has been often told of how M. Thiers having been forbidden by doctors to eat his favorite Provençal dish of fish cooked with garlic, M. Mignet, the historian, used to smuggle some of this mess enclosed in a tin box into his friend’s study, and what a pretty scene there was one day when Madame Thiers detected these two countrymen enjoying the contraband dainty together.

M. Thiers had naturally a great notion of his dignity as president of the republic, and he was anxious to appear impressively on all state occasions; but the arrangements made to hedge him about with majesty were always being disconcerted by his doing whatever it came into his head to do. His servants were dressed in black, and he had a major-domo who wore a silver chain and tried to usher morning visitors into the president’s room in the order of their rank; but every now and then M. Thiers used to pop out of his room, take stock of his visitors for himself, and make his choice of those whom he wished to see first. Then the most astonishing and uncourtly dialogues would ensue:

“Monsieur le Président, this is the third time I have come here, and I have waited two hours each time.”

“My friend, if you had come to see me about the affairs of France, and not about your own business, we should have had a conversation long ago.”

Precedence was always given by M. Thiers to journalists, however obscure they might be. Ambassadors had to wait while these favored ones walked in. A journalist himself, the quondam leader-writer of the _National_ extended the most generous recognition to the brethren of his craft, but he also did this because he was wide awake to the power of the press, and had generally some service to ask of those whom he addressed as “my dear companions.” He had such a facility for writing that when a journalist came to him “for inspiration” he would often sit down and dash off in a quarter of an hour the essential paragraph of a leader which he wished to see inserted. At the time of the Paris election of April, 1873, when his friend the Comte de Rémusat, then foreign secretary, was the Government candidate with the insignificant M. Barodet opposing him, a writer on the _Figaro_ called at the Elysée and M. Thiers wrote a whole article of a column’s length for him. It was printed as a letter in leaded type with the signature “An old citizen of Paris;” and a very sprightly letter it was, which put the issue lying between M. de Rémusat and his radical adversary in the clearest light. However, the electors of Paris acted with their usual foolishness in preferring an upstart to a man of note, and within a month of this M. Thiers resigned in disgust.

Marshal MacMahon accepted the presidency without any desire to retain it. If anything seemed certain at the time of his accession, it was that Legitimists and Orleanists would soon patch up their differences and that a vote of the Assembly would offer the crown to Henri V. The Ministry formed under the auspices of the Duc de Broglie labored to bring about this consummation, and the Marshal was prepared to enforce the decrees of the Assembly whatever they might be. At the same time he established his household at once on a semi-royal footing, as though he intended there should be at least a temporary court to remind French noblemen of old times, and to give them a foretaste of the pomps that were coming. M. Thiers had been a _bourgeois_ president; the Marshal-Duke of Magenta was a _grand seigneur_. Under Madame Thiers’ frugal management the £36,000 a year allowed to the president sufficed amply to cover all expenses; under the Duchess de Magenta’s management the presidential income did not go half way toward defraying outlay. The Marshal had a comfortable private fortune (not equal to M. Thiers’), but he was only enabled to hold such high estate in his office by means of the assistance pressed upon him by wealthy relatives.

The first signs of returning splendor at the Elysée were seen in the liveries of the new president’s servants. Instead of black they wore gray and silver, with scarlet plush, hair powder, and on gala occasions wigs. M. Thiers, when he went to a public ceremony, drove in a substantial landau, with mounted escort of the Republican Guard, and his friends—he never called them a suite—followed behind in vehicles according to their liking or means. Marshal MacMahon with the Duchess and their suite were always enough to fill three dashing landaus. These were painted in three or four shades of green, and lined with pearl gray satin; each would be drawn by four grays with postilions in gray jackets and red velvet caps; and the whole cavalcade was preceded and followed by outriders. Going to reviews, however, the Marshal of course rode, and this enabled him to make a grand display with his staff of _aides de camp_. M. Thiers had a military household of which his cousin General Charlemagne was the head; but this warrior never had much to do, and it was no part of his business to receive visitors. Anybody who had business with M. Thiers could see him without a letter of audience by simply sending up a card to M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire. Marshal MacMahon, on the contrary, was as inaccessible as any king. Visitors to the Elysée in his time were passed from one resplendent officer to another till they entered the smiling presence of Vicomte Emmanuel d’Harcourt, the President’s secretary, and this was the _ne plus ultra_. Against journalists in particular the Marshal’s doors were inexorably locked. So far as a man of his good-natured temper could be said to hate anybody, the Duke of Magenta hated persons connected with the press. For all that, he did not object altogether to newspaper tattle, for whilst he read the _Journal des Débats_ every evening from a feeling of duty, he perused the _Figaro_ every morning for his own pleasure.

The sumptuous ordinance of Marshal MacMahon’s household was rendered necessary in a manner by the Shah of Persia’s visit to Paris in 1873. It is a pity that M. Thiers was not in office when this constellated savage came to ravish the courts of civilized Europe by his diamonds and his haughtily brutish manners, for it would have been curious to see the little man instructing the Shah, through an interpreter, as to Persian history or the etymology of Oriental languages. In the Marshal, however, Nasr-ed-Din found a host who exhibited just the right sort of dignity; and all the hospitalities given to the Shah both at Versailles and Paris—the torchlight procession of soldiers, the gala performance at the opera, the banquet at the Galerie des Glaces—were carried out on a scale that could not have been excelled if there had been an emperor on the throne. In the course of the banquet at Versailles the Shah turned to the Duchess of Magenta and asked her in a few words of French, which he must have carefully rehearsed beforehand, why her husband did not set up as emperor. The Duchess parried the question with a smile; but perhaps the idea was not so far from her thoughts as she would have had people imagine.

It was a really comical freak of fortune that brought M. Jules Grévy to succeed Marshal MacMahon. The story goes that during the street fighting of the Revolution of 1830, a law-student was kicked by one of the king’s officers, for tearing down a copy of the ordinances placarded on a wall. The officer was armed, the student was not; so the latter ran away and lived to fight another day. For the officer, as it is said, was Patrice de MacMahon, and the law-student Jules Grévy. M. Grévy is a man of talent and great moral courage, but he owes his rise to an uncommon faculty for holding his tongue at the right moment. “I kept silent, and it was grief to me,” says the Psalmist. M. Grévy may have felt like other people at times, an almost incomparable longing to say foolish things; but having bridled his tongue he was accounted wiser than many who had spoken wisely. Under the empire he practiced at the bar, continued to make money, was elected in his turn _bâtonnier_, or chief bencher as we might say, to the Order of Advocates, and in 1868 was returned to the Corps Législatif by his old electors of the Jura—in which department he had by this time acquired a pretty large landed estate. A neat, creaseless sort of man, with a bald head, a shaven chin and closely-trimmed whiskers, he looked eminently respectable. The only reprehensible things about him were his hat and his hands. He always wore a wide-awake instead of the orthodox chimney-pot, and he eschewed gloves. If his hands were cold he put them into the pockets of his pantaloons. Some pretended to descry astuteness in this contempt for the usages of civilized man, for the wide-awake is more of a radical head-dress than a silk hat. But it never occurred to M. Grévy at any time since he first achieved success, to regulate his apparel, general conduct, or words, in view of pleasing the Radicals.

The Assembly elected after the war at once chose M. Grévy for its speaker, and he took up his abode in the Royal Palace, from which party jealousies had debarred M. Thiers. But he did not alter his manner of life one whit on that account. In Paris and Versailles he was to be seen sauntering about the streets looking in at shop windows, dining in restaurants, or sitting outside a café smoking a cigar and sipping iced coffee out of a glass. He had a brougham, but would only use it when obliged to go long distances. It often happened that setting out for a drive he would alight from his carriage and order his coachman to follow, and for hours the puzzled and disgusted coachman would drive at a walking pace behind his indefatigable master, who took easy strides as if he were not in the slightest hurry.

There is one point of resemblance between M. Grévy and the Marshal, for M. Grévy is a keen sportsman; but in most other things the two differ, though in sum M. Grévy differs more from M. Thiers than he does from the Marshal. His manner of living at the Elysée is dignified without ostentation. His servants do not wear gray and scarlet liveries; but the arrangements of his household are more orderly than those of M. Thiers could ever be. His servants in black know well how to keep intruders at a distance. No mob of journalists, inventors and place hunters calls to see M. Grévy in the morning. On the other hand, three or four times a week a great number of deputies, artists, journalists and officers may be seen going into the Elysée as freely as if they were entering a club. They do not ask to see the President or the latter’s secretary, M. Fourneret, but they make straight for a magnificent room on the ground floor overlooking the garden, which has been converted into a fencing saloon, and there they find M. Daniel Wilson, _le fils de la maison_. All these _habitués_, who form the court of the Third Republic, keep their masks, foils and flannels at the Elysée, and set to work fencing with each other as if they were at Gâtechair’s or Paz’s. Presently a door opens and the President walks in. For a moment the fencing stops, the combatants all turn and salute with their foils, whilst the visitors stand up. But, with a pleasant smile and a wave of the hand, M. Grévy bids the jousters to go on, and then he walks round the room, saying something to everybody, and inviting about half a dozen of the guests to stay to breakfast.

M. Grévy has allowed his beard to grow of late, and he is almost always attired in evening clothes, with the _moiré_ edge of his scarlet _cordon_ peeping over his waistcoat. But for the rest he is the same unassuming man as ever, and he takes life very easily. Now and then the Cabinet meets at the Elysée in the Salle des Souverains, and he presides over it. It is worth observing that in this Salle there are the portraits of a dozen sovereigns of the nineteenth century, including Queen Victoria, but not a symbol of any kind to remind one that it is a Republican Government that sits in this room. Even the master of the house has more in him of the Constitutional Monarch than of the President. The Constitution has conferred upon him large powers which he never uses; he seems to keep his eye on the portrait of the English Queen whilst his ministers discourse. Whatever papers are offered for his signature he signs, and then it is _Bon jour, Messieurs; au revoir_; and while the ministers disperse the President makes his way to his private apartments, where he finds his daughter and his grandchild, in whose company he sometimes takes more delight than in that of statesmen.

Now and then there is a dinner at the Elysée, twice a week at least there are evening receptions, and about twice in the winter there are grand balls. On all these occasions everything is done in the best possible style, and the President discharges his functions of host with a serenity which disarms all criticism. He says nothing much to anybody, but he is the same to all. If by chance he falls into deep conversation with any particular guest, nobody need suspect that state matters are being discussed. The probabilities are that the President will be talking about the next performance of his new breechloader at Mont-sous-Vaudrey. Moreover, what makes M. Grévy more puzzling and interesting at once to those who behold him so simple in his palace, is the knowledge which all have, that when his time comes for leaving the Elysée he will walk out of it as coolly as he went in, without wishing that his tenancy had been longer, and certainly without doing anything to prolong it. His only anxiety will be to see that his gun-case suffer no damage at the door.—_Abridged from Temple Bar._

* * * * *

Thus God has willed
That man when fully skilled
Still gropes in twilight dim,
Encompassed all his hours
By fearfullest powers
Inflexible to him.
That so he may discern
His feebleness,
And e’en for earth’s success
To Him in wisdom turn,
Who holds for us the keys of either home,
Earth and the world to come.

—_Cardinal Newman._

ASTRONOMY OF THE HEAVENS.

By PROF. M. B. GOFF.

FOR JULY.

THE SUN.

We now enter upon what is usually called the “heated term,” in earnest. The “Dog Days” are upon us, that is, we say they are; but the statement is a somewhat doubtful one. We have the story that the ancients regarded the Dog Star, _Sirius_, in the constellation _Canis Major_, as the source of “unnumbered woes,” because it rose a short time before the sun about the season of their year that the hot weather set in, and diseases incident to their climate more than usually prevailed. It is said that they estimated this period as continuing for the space of forty consecutive days, beginning twenty days before, and continuing twenty days after what was called the heliacal (that is, rising just long enough before the sun to be visible) rising of the Dog Star. Now, the difficulty we moderns find in fixing the limits of these days is this: The heliacal rising of the star for any one place can readily be found; but when determined for one place, it would not suit for another in a different latitude. Besides, the right ascension of Sirius, on account of the precession of the equinoxes, is constantly increasing, and hence for the same place these days fall later each year, in the course of time occurring even in mid-winter. Almanac makers, when they notice them at all, seem to take the liberty of treating them to suit their own convenience. For example, one of this year’s publications announces that “Dog Days” begin on the 21st of July, and end on the 30th of August, making, as we see by including one extreme date, altogether the forty days claimed by the ancients. But in this latitude, on the former date, the star rises at 5:43 a. m., one hour and five minutes _after_, and on the latter date at 3:06 a. m., two hours and twenty minutes _before_ sunrise. Others fix the time from July 3rd to August 11th (forty days), without any respect to the rising of _Sirius_, which on the former date appears above our horizon at 6:51 a. m., or two hours and seventeen minutes after, and on the latter date at 4:18 a. m., forty-nine minutes before sunrise. Others, again, making an effort, we presume, to adapt them to our climate, regard them as continuing only thirty-two days, namely, from July 24th to August 24th. Taking it all in all, we may as well leave them to the Egyptians and Ethiopians, among whom the ideas in regard to them seem to have originated, as a superstition of the past ages, taking our “heated term” at its usual time, July and August, and throwing our “Dog Days,” as some do physic, “to the dogs.”

Whether we account for it by the extreme heat or not, it is nevertheless a fact that the sun lags along behind our clocks during this entire month; on the 1st, not reaching the meridian till 12:03:41 p. m.; on the 15th till 12:05:44 p. m., and on the 30th till six minutes and nine seconds after noon. The time of the sun’s rising on the 1st, 15th and 30th, is 4:33, 4:43 and 4:56 a. m.; and the time of setting on the same dates is 7:34, 7:29 and 7:17 p. m., respectively. The 30th day of this month will be about forty minutes shorter than the 1st, the latter being fifteen hours one minute, and the former fourteen hours and twenty-one minutes in length. The time from daybreak to the end of twilight is, on the 1st, 19 hours 24 minutes. Sun is due west on the 30th at 5:29 p. m. Its greatest elevation above the horizon in latitude 41° 30′, is 71° 33⅔′.

THE MOON

Exhibits the following phases: Full moon, 5:02 a. m. on the 8th; last quarter, 4:30 p. m. on the 15th; new moon, 7:46 a. m. on the 22nd; first quarter on the 29th, at 4:53 p. m. On the 1st it sets at 12:11 a. m., and on the 30th, at 11:51 p. m. On the 15th, rises at 11:32 p. m. On the 4th, at 7:54 a. m., and again on the 31st at 11:00 p. m. it is at its maximum distance from the earth. On the 20th, at 1:36 a. m. is nearest the earth. Its greatest elevation, equal 67° 13⅔′, occurs on the 19th; and its least elevation, amounting to 29° 42⅔′ on the 5th.

MERCURY.

This planet will be morning star till the 13th, after which it will be evening star till the end of the month. It rises on the 1st at 3:41 a. m.; sets on the 15th at 7:41 p. m., and on the 30th at 8:07 p. m., on which latter date it is possibly visible to the naked eye. Its motion during the month is direct, and amounts to 62° 30′ 31.5″. On the 17th at 6:00 a. m. it is nearest the sun; on the 12th at 1:00 a. m., 6° 20′ north of Venus; on the same date, at midnight, is in superior conjunction with the sun; that is, it is in a line with the earth and sun, and in the order, Earth, Sun, Mercury; on the 23rd, at 3:00 a. m., 1° 10′ north of Jupiter; and on the 23rd, at 7:05 a. m., 6° 30′ north of the moon. Diameter decreases from 5.6″ to 5.4″.

VENUS.

A view of Venus during this month through a telescope of moderate power would be an interesting sight, since she now presents the appearance of our moon in its first or last quarter, and thus seems quite different from the simple star that is visible to the naked eye. She will be evening star till the 11th, at which time she reaches her inferior conjunction, that is, reaches a point directly between the earth and the sun; after which she will be morning star, not only to the end of this month, but for several successive months. Of course, for a number of days both before and after conjunction, she will, on account of her proximity to the sun, be invisible. We shall miss her “beaming countenance,” but we know that she will appear again. On the 1st she sets at 8:14 p. m., and rises on the 15th at 4:38 a. m., and on the 30th at 3:17 a. m. On the 21st at 6:28 a. m. she is 1° 11′ south of the moon; and on the 29th at 11:00 a. m., farthest from the sun.

MARS

Has from the 1st to 30th a direct motion of 15° 36′ 32″, and although much reduced in apparent diameter, is still quite a prominent object in the evening sky, following westward in the wake of Jupiter. His diameter decreases from 5.6″ to 5.2″. He rises in the forenoon, and sets as follows, in the evening: On the 1st at 10:47; on the 15th at 10:11; and on the 30th at 9:31. On the 26th at 5:04 p. m. he is 2° 5′ north of the moon.

JUPITER