Backlog Studies...................................................................................................................................................1

Charles Dudley Warner ............................................................................................................................1

FIRST STUDY........................................................................................................................................1

SECOND STUDY...................................................................................................................................6

THIRD STUDY .....................................................................................................................................13

FOURTH STUDY.................................................................................................................................20

FIFTH STUDY......................................................................................................................................27

SIXTH STUDY.....................................................................................................................................36

SEVENTH STUDY ...............................................................................................................................44

EIGHTH STUDY..................................................................................................................................47

NINTH STUDY .....................................................................................................................................56

TENTH STUDY....................................................................................................................................63

ELEVENTH STUDY............................................................................................................................67

The fire on the hearth has almost gone out in New England; the hearth has gone out; the family has lost its

center; age ceases to be respected; sex is only distinguished by a difference between millinery bills and

tailors' bills; there is no more toastandcider; the young are not allowed to eat mincepies at ten o'clock at

night; half a cheese is no longer set to toast before the fire; you scarcely ever see in front of the coals a row of

roasting apples, which a bright little girl, with many a dive and start, shielding her sunny face from the fire

with one hand, turns from time to time; scarce are the grayhaired sires who strop their razors on the family

Bible, and doze in the chimneycorner. A good many things have gone out with the fire on the hearth.

I do not mean to say that public and private morality have vanished with the hearth. A good degree of purity

and considerable happiness are possible with grates and blowers; it is a day of trial, when we are all passing

through a fiery furnace, and very likely we shall be purified as we are dried up and wasted away. Of course

the family is gone, as an institution, though there still are attempts to bring up a family round a "register." But

you might just as well try to bring it up by hand, as without the rallyingpoint of a hearthstone. Are there any

homesteads nowadays? Do people hesitate to change houses any more than they do to change their clothes?

People hire houses as they would a masquerade costume, liking, sometimes, to appear for a year in a little

fictitious stonefront splendor above their means. Thus it happens that so many people live in houses that do

not fit them. I should almost as soon think of wearing another person's clothes as his house; unless I could let

it out and take it in until it fitted, and somehow expressed my own character and taste. But we have fallen into

the days of conformity. It is no wonder that people constantly go into their neighbors' houses by mistake, just

as, in spite of the Maine law, they wear away each other's hats from an evening party. It has almost come to

Am I mistaken in supposing that this is owing to the discontinuance of big chimneys, with wide fireplaces in

them? How can a person be attached to a house that has no center of attraction, no soul in it, in the visible

form of a glowing fire, and a warm chimney, like the heart in the body? When you think of the old

homestead, if you ever do, your thoughts go straight to the wide chimney and its burning logs. No wonder

that you are ready to move from one fireplaceless house into another. But you have something just as good,

you say. Yes, I have heard of it. This age, which imitates everything, even to the virtues of our ancestors, has

invented a fireplace, with artificial, iron, or composition logs in it, hacked and painted, in which gas is

burned, so that it has the appearance of a woodfire. This seems to me blasphemy. Do you think a cat would

lie down before it? Can you poke it? If you can't poke it, it is a fraud. To poke a woodfire is more solid

enjoyment than almost anything else in the world. The crowning human virtue in a man is to let his wife poke

the fire. I do not know how any virtue whatever is possible over an imitation gaslog. What a sense of

insincerity the family must have, if they indulge in the hypocrisy of gathering about it. With this center of

untruthfulness, what must the life in the family be? Perhaps the father will be living at the rate of ten

thousand a year on a salary of four thousand; perhaps the mother, more beautiful and younger than her

beautified daughters, will rouge; perhaps the young ladies will make waxwork. A cynic might suggest as the

motto of modern life this simple legend,"just as good as the real." But I am not a cynic, and I hope for the

rekindling of woodfires, and a return of the beautiful home light from them. If a woodfire is a luxury, it is

cheaper than many in which we indulge without thought, and cheaper than the visits of a doctor, made

necessary by the want of ventilation of the house. Not that I have anything against doctors; I only wish, after

they have been to see us in a way that seems so friendly, they had nothing against us.

My fireplace, which is deep, and nearly three feet wide, has a broad hearthstone in front of it, where the live

coals tumble down, and a pair of gigantic brass andirons. The brasses are burnished, and shine cheerfully in

the firelight, and on either side stand tall shovel and tongs, like sentries, mounted in brass. The tongs, like the

twohanded sword of Bruce, cannot be wielded by puny people. We burn in it hickory wood, cut long. We

like the smell of this aromatic forest timber, and its clear flame. The birch is also a sweet wood for the hearth,

with a sort of spiritual flame and an even temper,no snappishness. Some prefer the elm, which holds fire

so well; and I have a neighbor who uses nothing but appletree wood,a solid, family sort of wood, fragrant

also, and full of delightful suggestions. But few people can afford to burn up their fruit trees. I should as soon

think of lighting the fire with sweetoil that comes in those graceful wickerbound flasks from Naples, or

with manuscript sermons, which, however, do not burn well, be they never so dry, not half so well as printed

Few people know how to make a woodfire, but everybody thinks he or she does. You want, first, a large

backlog, which does not rest on the andirons. This will keep your fire forward, radiate heat all day, and late in

the evening fall into a ruin of glowing coals, like the last days of a good man, whose life is the richest and

most beneficent at the close, when the flames of passion and the sap of youth are burned out, and there only

remain the solid, bright elements of character. Then you want a forestick on the andirons; and upon these

build the fire of lighter stuff. In this way you have at once a cheerful blaze, and the fire gradually eats into the

solid mass, sinking down with increasing fervor; coals drop below, and delicate tongues of flame sport along

the beautiful grain of the forestick. There are people who kindle a fire underneath. But these are conceited

people, who are wedded to their own way. I suppose an accomplished incendiary always starts a fire in the

attic, if he can. I am not an incendiary, but I hate bigotry. I don't call those incendiaries very good Christians

who, when they set fire to the martyrs, touched off the fagots at the bottom, so as to make them go slow.

Besides, knowledge works down easier than it does up. Education must proceed from the more enlightened

down to the more ignorant strata. If you want better common schools, raise the standard of the colleges, and

so on. Build your fire on top. Let your light shine. I have seen people build a fire under a balky horse; but he

wouldn't go, he'd be a horsemartyr first. A fire kindled under one never did him any good. Of course you

can make a fire on the hearth by kindling it underneath, but that does not make it right. I want my hearthfire

It must be confessed that a woodfire needs as much tending as a pair of twins. To say nothing of fiery

projectiles sent into the room, even by the best wood, from the explosion of gases confined in its cells, the

brands are continually dropping down, and coals are being scattered over the hearth. However much a careful

housewife, who thinks more of neatness than enjoyment, may dislike this, it is one of the chief delights of a

woodfire. I would as soon have an Englishman without sidewhiskers as a fire without a big backlog; and I

would rather have no fire than one that required no tending,one of dead wood that could not sing again the

imprisoned songs of the forest, or give out in brilliant scintillations the sunshine it absorbed in its growth.

Flame is an ethereal sprite, and the spice of danger in it gives zest to the care of the hearthfire. Nothing is so

beautiful as springing, changing flame,it was the last freak of the Gothic architecture men to represent the

fronts of elaborate edifices of stone as on fire, by the kindling flamboyant devices. A fireplace is, besides, a

private laboratory, where one can witness the most brilliant chemical experiments, minor conflagrations only

wanting the grandeur of cities on fire. It is a vulgar notion that a fire is only for heat. A chief value of it is,

however, to look at. It is a picture, framed between the jambs. You have nothing on your walls, by the best

masters (the poor masters are not, however, represented), that is really so fascinating, so spiritual. Speaking

like an upholsterer, it furnishes the room. And it is never twice the same. In this respect it is like the

landscapeview through a window, always seen in a new light, color, or condition. The fireplace is a window

Yet direct heat is an agreeable sensation. I am not scientific enough to despise it, and have no taste for a

winter residence on Mount Washington, where the thermometer cannot be kept comfortable even by boiling.

They say that they say in Boston that there is a satisfaction in being well dressed which religion cannot give.

There is certainly a satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hickory fire which is not to be found in the fieriest

blasts of a furnace. The hot air of a furnace is a sirocco; the heat of a woodfire is only intense sunshine, like

that bottled in Lacrimae Christi. Besides this, the eye is delighted, the sense of smell is regaled by the fragrant

decomposition, and the ear is pleased with the hissing, crackling, and singing,a liberation of so many

outdoor noises. Some people like the sound of bubbling in a boiling pot, or the fizzing of a fryingspider.

But there is nothing gross in the animated crackling of sticks of wood blazing on the earth, not even if

chestnuts are roasting in the ashes. All the senses are ministered to, and the imagination is left as free as the

The attention which a woodfire demands is one of its best recommendations. We value little that which

costs us no trouble to maintain. If we had to keep the sun kindled up and going by private corporate action, or

act of Congress, and to be taxed for the support of customs officers of solar heat, we should prize it more than

we do. Not that I should like to look upon the sun as a job, and have the proper regulation of its temperature

get into politics, where we already have so much combustible stuff; but we take it quite too much as a matter

of course, and, having it free, do not reckon it among the reasons for gratitude. Many people shut it out of

their houses as if it were an enemy, watch its descent upon the carpet as if it were only a thief of color, and

plant trees to shut it away from the mouldering house. All the animals know better than this, as well as the

more simple races of men; the old women of the southern Italian coasts sit all day in the sun and ply the

distaff, as grateful as the sociable hens on the south side of a New England barn; the slow tortoise likes to

take the sun upon his sloping back, soaking in color that shall make him immortal when the imperishable part

of him is cut up into shell ornaments. The capacity of a cat to absorb sunshine is only equaled by that of an

White must be the color of civilization; it has so many natural disadvantages. But this is politics. I was about

to say that, however it may be with sunshine, one is always grateful for his woodfire, because he does not

Yet I cannot but confess to a difference between sunlight and the light of a woodfire. The sunshine is

entirely untamed. Where it rages most freely it tends to evoke the brilliancy rather than the harmonious

satisfactions of nature. The monstrous growths and the flaming colors of the tropics contrast with our more

subdued loveliness of foliage and bloom. The birds of the middle region dazzle with their contrasts of

plumage, and their voices are for screaming rather than singing. I presume the new experiments in sound

would project a macaw's voice in very tangled and inharmonious lines of light. I suspect that the fiercest

sunlight puts people, as well as animals and vegetables, on extremes in all ways. A woodfire on the hearth is

a kindler of the domestic virtues. It brings in cheerfulness, and a family center, and, besides, it is artistic. I

should like to know if an artist could ever represent on canvas a happy family gathered round a hole in the

floor called a register. Given a fireplace, and a tolerable artist could almost create a pleasant family round it.

But what could he conjure out of a register? If there was any virtue among our ancestors,and they labored

under a great many disadvantages, and had few of the aids which we have to excellence of life,I am

convinced they drew it mostly from the fireside. If it was difficult to read the eleven commandments by the

light of a pineknot, it was not difficult to get the sweet spirit of them from the countenance of the serene

When the fire is made, you want to sit in front of it and grow genial in its effulgence. I have never been upon

a throne,except in moments of a traveler's curiosity, about as long as a South American dictator remains on

one,but I have no idea that it compares, for pleasantness, with a seat before a woodfire. A whole leisure

day before you, a good novel in hand, and the backlog only just beginning to kindle, with uncounted hours of

comfort in it, has life anything more delicious? For "novel" you can substitute "Calvin's Institutes," if you

wish to be virtuous as well as happy. Even Calvin would melt before a woodfire. A great snowstorm, visible

on three sides of your widewindowed room, loading the evergreens, blown in fine powder from the great

chestnuttops, piled up in ever accumulating masses, covering the paths, the shrubbery, the hedges, drifting

and clinging in fantastic deposits, deepening your sense of security, and taking away the sin of idleness by

To deliberately sit down in the morning to read a novel, to enjoy yourself, is this not, in New England (I am

told they don't read much in other parts of the country), the sin of sins? Have you any right to read, especially

novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the day in some employment that is called practical? Have

you any right to enjoy yourself at all until the fagend of the day, when you are tired and incapable of

enjoying yourself? I am aware that this is the practice, if not the theory, of our society,to postpone the

delights of social intercourse until after dark, and rather late at night, when body and mind are both weary

with the exertions of business, and when we can give to what is the most delightful and profitable thing in

life, social and intellectual society, only the weariness of dull brains and overtired muscles. No wonder we

take our amusements sadly, and that so many people find dinners heavy and parties stupid. Our economy

leaves no place for amusements; we merely add them to the burden of a life already full. The world is still a

I confess that the morning is a very good time to read a novel, or anything else which is good and requires a

fresh mind; and I take it that nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind. I suppose it is

necessary that business should be transacted; though the amount of business that does not contribute to

anybody's comfort or improvement suggests the query whether it is not overdone. I know that unremitting

attention to business is the price of success, but I don't know what success is. There is a man, whom we all

know, who built a house that cost a quarter of a million of dollars, and furnished it for another like sum, who

does not know anything more about architecture, or painting, or books, or history, than he cares for the rights

of those who have not so much money as he has. I heard him once, in a foreign gallery, say to his wife, as

they stood in front of a famous picture by Rubens: "That is the Rape of the Sardines!" What a cheerful world

it would be if everybody was as successful as that man! While I am reading my book by the fire, and taking

an active part in important transactions that may be a good deal better than real, let me be thankful that a

great many men are profitably employed in offices and bureaus and country stores in keeping up the gossip

and endless exchange of opinions among mankind, so much of which is made to appear to the women at

home as "business." I find that there is a sort of busy idleness among men in this world that is not held in

disrepute. When the time comes that I have to prove my right to vote, with women, I trust that it will be

remembered in my favor that I made this admission. If it is true, as a witty conservative once said to me, that

we never shall have peace in this country until we elect a colored woman president, I desire to be rectus in

The fireplace, as we said, is a window through which we look out upon other scenes. We like to read of the

small, bare room, with cobwebbed ceiling and narrow window, in which the poor child of genius sits with his

magical pen, the master of a realm of beauty and enchantment. I think the open fire does not kindle the

imagination so much as it awakens the memory; one sees the past in its crumbling embers and ashy grayness,

rather than the future. People become reminiscent and even sentimental in front of it. They used to become

something else in those good old days when it was thought best to heat the poker red hot before plunging it

into the mugs of flip. This heating of the poker has been disapproved of late years, but I do not know on what

grounds; if one is to drink bitters and gins and the like, such as I understand as good people as clergymen and

women take in private, and by advice, I do not know why one should not make them palatable and heat them

with his own poker. Cold whiskey out of a bottle, taken as a prescription six times a day on the sly, is n't my

idea of virtue any more than the social ancestral glass, sizzling wickedly with the hot iron. Names are so

confusing in this world; but things are apt to remain pretty much the same, whatever we call them.

Perhaps as you look into the fireplace it widens and grows deep and cavernous. The back and the jambs are

built up of great stones, not always smoothly laid, with jutting ledges upon which ashes are apt to lie. The

hearthstone is an enormous block of trap rock, with a surface not perfectly even, but a capital place to crack

butternuts on. Over the fire swings an iron crane, with a row of pothooks of all lengths hanging from it. It

swings out when the housewife wants to hang on the teakettle, and it is strong enough to support a row of

pots, or a mammoth caldron kettle on occasion. What a jolly sight is this fireplace when the pots and kettles

in a row are all boiling and bubbling over the flame, and a roasting spit is turning in front! It makes a person

as hungry as one of Scott's novels. But the brilliant sight is in the frosty morning, about daylight, when the

fire is made. The coals are raked open, the split sticks are piled up in openwork crisscrossing, as high as the

crane; and when the flame catches hold and roars up through the interstices, it is like an outofdoor bonfire.

Wood enough is consumed in that morning sacrifice to cook the food of a Parisian family for a year. How it

roars up the wide chimney, sending into the air the signal smoke and sparks which announce to the farming

neighbors another day cheerfully begun! The sleepiest boy in the world would get up in his red flannel

nightgown to see such a fire lighted, even if he dropped to sleep again in his chair before the ruddy blaze.

Then it is that the house, which has shrunk and creaked all night in the pinching cold of winter, begins to

glow again and come to life. The thick frost melts little by little on the small windowpanes, and it is seen

that the gray dawn is breaking over the leagues of pallid snow. It is time to blow out the candle, which has

lost all its cheerfulness in the light of day. The morning romance is over; the family is astir; and member after

member appears with the morning yawn, to stand before the crackling, fierce conflagration. The daily round

begins. The most hateful employment ever invented for mortal man presents itself: the "chores" are to be

done. The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that today is like yesterday, but

he believes tomorrow will be different. And yet enough for him, for the day, is the wading in the snowdrifts,

or the sliding on the diamondsparkling crust. Happy, too, is he, when the storm rages, and the snow is piled

high against the windows, if he can sit in the warm chimney corner and read about Burgoyne, and General

Fraser, and Miss McCrea, midwinter marches through the wilderness, surprises of wigwams, and the stirring

"Come, gallants, attend and list a friend Thrill forth harmonious ditty; While I shall tell what late befell At

I should like to know what heroism a boy in an old New England farmhouseroughnursed by nature, and

fed on the traditions of the old wars did not aspire to. "John," says the mother, "You'll burn your head to a

crisp in that heat." But John does not hear; he is storming the Plains of Abraham just now. "Johnny, dear,

bring in a stick of wood." How can Johnny bring in wood when he is in that defile with Braddock, and the

Indians are popping at him from behind every tree? There is something about a boy that I like, after all.

The fire rests upon the broad hearth; the hearth rests upon a great substruction of stone, and the substruction

rests upon the cellar. What supports the cellar I never knew, but the cellar supports the family. The cellar is

the foundation of domestic comfort. Into its dark, cavernous recesses the child's imagination fearfully goes.

Bogies guard the bins of choicest apples. I know not what comical sprites sit astride the ciderbarrels ranged

along the walls. The feeble flicker of the tallowcandle does not at all dispel, but creates, illusions, and

magnifies all the rich possibilities of this underground treasurehouse. When the cellardoor is opened, and

the boy begins to descend into the thick darkness, it is always with a heartbeat as of one started upon some

adventure. Who can forget the smell that comes through the opened door;a mingling of fresh earth, fruit

exhaling delicious aroma, kitchen vegetables, the mouldy odor of barrels, a sort of ancestral air,as if a door

had been opened into an old romance. Do you like it? Not much. But then I would not exchange the

The log was white birch. The beautiful satin bark at once kindled into a soft, pure, but brilliant flame,

something like that of naphtha. There is no other wood flame so rich, and it leaps up in a joyous, spiritual

way, as if glad to burn for the sake of burning. Burning like a clear oil, it has none of the heaviness and

fatness of the pine and the balsam. Woodsmen are at a loss to account for its intense and yet chaste flame,

since the bark has no oily appearance. The heat from it is fierce, and the light dazzling. It flares up eagerly

like young love, and then dies away; the wood does not keep up the promise of the bark. The woodsmen, it is

proper to say, have not considered it in its relation to young love. In the remote settlements the pineknot is

still the torch of courtship; it endures to sit up by. The birchbark has alliances with the world of sentiment

and of letters. The most poetical reputation of the North American Indian floats in a canoe made of it; his

picturewriting was inscribed on it. It is the paper that nature furnishes for lovers in the wilderness, who are

enabled to convey a delicate sentiment by its use, which is expressed neither in their ideas nor chirography. It

is inadequate for legal parchment, but does very well for deeds of love, which are not meant usually to give a

perfect title. With care, it may be split into sheets as thin as the Chinese paper. It is so beautiful to handle that

it is a pity civilization cannot make more use of it. But fancy articles manufactured from it are very much like

all ornamental work made of nature's perishable seeds, leaves, cones, and dry twigs,exquisite while the

pretty fingers are fashioning it, but soon growing shabby and cheap to the eye. And yet there is a pathos in

"dried things," whether they are displayed as ornaments in some secluded home, or hidden religiously in

bureau drawers where profane eyes cannot see how white ties are growing yellow and ink is fading from

The birch log holds out very well while it is green, but has not substance enough for a backlog when dry.

Seasoning green timber or men is always an experiment. A man may do very well in a simple, let us say,

country or backwoods line of life, who would come to nothing in a more complicated civilization. City life is

a severe trial. One man is struck with a dryrot; another develops seasoncracks; another shrinks and swells

with every change of circumstance. Prosperity is said to be more trying than adversity, a theory which most

people are willing to accept without trial; but few men stand the drying out of the natural sap of their

greenness in the artificial heat of city life. This, be it noticed, is nothing against the drying and seasoning

process; character must be put into the crucible some time, and why not in this world? A man who cannot

stand seasoning will not have a high market value in any part of the universe. It is creditable to the race, that

so many men and women bravely jump into the furnace of prosperity and expose themselves to the drying

The first fire that is lighted on the hearth in the autumn seems to bring out the cold weather. Deceived by the

placid appearance of the dying year, the softness of the sky, and the warm color of the foliage, we have been

shivering about for days without exactly comprehending what was the matter. The open fire at once sets up a

standard of comparison. We find that the advance guards of winter are besieging the house. The cold rushes

in at every crack of door and window, apparently signaled by the flame to invade the house and fill it with

chilly drafts and sarcasms on what we call the temperate zone. It needs a roaring fire to beat back the enemy;

a feeble one is only an invitation to the most insulting demonstrations. Our pious New England ancestors

were philosophers in their way. It was not simply owing to grace that they sat for hours in their barnlike

meetinghouses during the winter Sundays, the thermometer many degrees below freezing, with no fire,

except the zeal in their own hearts,a congregation of red noses and bright eyes. It was no wonder that the

minister in the pulpit warmed up to his subject, cried aloud, used hot words, spoke a good deal of the hot

place and the Person whose presence was a burning shame, hammered the desk as if he expected to drive his

text through a twoinch plank, and heated himself by all allowable ecclesiastical gymnastics. A few of their

followers in our day seem to forget that our modern churches are heated by furnaces and supplied with gas. In

the old days it would have been thought unphilosophic as well as effeminate to warm the meetinghouses

artificially. In one house I knew, at least, when it was proposed to introduce a stove to take a little of the chill

from the Sunday services, the deacons protested against the innovation. They said that the stove might benefit

those who sat close to it, but it would drive all the cold air to the other parts of the church, and freeze the

people to death; it was cold enough now around the edges. Blessed days of ignorance and upright living!

Sturdy men who served God by resolutely sitting out the icy hours of service, amid the rattling of windows

and the carousal of winter in the high, windswept galleries! Patient women, waiting in the chilly house for

consumption to pick out his victims, and replace the color of youth and the flush of devotion with the hectic

of disease! At least, you did not doze and droop in our overheated edifices, and die of vitiated air and

disregard of the simplest conditions of organized life. It is fortunate that each generation does not

comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous. It is something also that

each age has its choice of the death it will die. Our generation is most ingenious. From our public

assemblyrooms and houses we have almost succeeded in excluding pure air. It took the race ages to build

dwellings that would keep out rain; it has taken longer to build houses airtight, but we are on the eve of

success. We are only foiled by the illfitting, insincere work of the builders, who build for a day, and charge

When the fire on the hearth has blazed up and then settled into steady radiance, talk begins. There is no place

like the chimney corner for confidences; for picking up the clews of an old friendship; for taking note where

one's self has drifted, by comparing ideas and prejudices with the intimate friend of years ago, whose course

in life has lain apart from yours. No stranger puzzles you so much as the once close friend, with whose

thinking and associates you have for years been unfamiliar. Life has come to mean this and that to you; you

have fallen into certain habits of thought; for you the world has progressed in this or that direction; of certain

results you feel very sure; you have fallen into harmony with your surroundings; you meet day after day

people interested in the things that interest you; you are not in the least opinionated, it is simply your good

fortune to look upon the affairs of the world from the right point of view. When you last saw your

friend,less than a year after you left college,he was the most sensible and agreeable of men; he had no

heterodox notions; he agreed with you; you could even tell what sort of a wife he would select, and if you

Well, Herbert came to visit me the other day from the antipodes. And here he sits by the fireplace. I cannot

think of any one I would rather see there, except perhaps Thackery; or, for entertainment, Boswell; or old,

Pepys; or one of the people who was left out of the Ark. They were talking one foggy London night at

Hazlitt's about whom they would most like to have seen, when Charles Lamb startled the company by

declaring that he would rather have seen Judas Iscariot than any other person who had lived on the earth. For

myself, I would rather have seen Lamb himself once, than to have lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great

delight, has not changed; I should know him anywhere,the same serious, contemplative face, with lurking

humor at the corners of the mouth,the same cheery laugh and clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There is

nothing so winning as a good voice. To see Herbert again, unchanged in all outward essentials, is not only

gratifying, but valuable as a testimony to nature's success in holding on to a personal identity, through the

entire change of matter that has been constantly taking place for so many years. I know very well there is here

no part of the Herbert whose hand I had shaken at the Commencement parting; but it is an astonishing

Such a wide chance for divergence in the spiritual. It has been such a busy world for twenty years. So many

things have been torn up by the roots again that were settled when we left college. There were to be no more

wars; democracy was democracy, and progress, the differentiation of the individual, was a mere question of

clothes; if you want to be different, go to your tailor; nobody had demonstrated that there is a mansoul and a

womansoul, and that each is in reality only a halfsoul,putting the race, so to speak, upon the halfshell.

The social oyster being opened, there appears to be two shells and only one oyster; who shall have it? So

many new canons of taste, of criticism, of morality have been set up; there has been such a resurrection of

historical reputations for new judgment, and there have been so many discoveries, geographical,

archaeological, geological, biological, that the earth is not at all what it was supposed to be; and our

philosophers are much more anxious to ascertain where we came from than whither we are going. In this

whirl and turmoil of new ideas, nature, which has only the single end of maintaining the physical identity in

the body, works on undisturbed, replacing particle for particle, and preserving the likeness more skillfully

than a mosaic artist in the Vatican; she has not even her materials sorted and labeled, as the Roman artist has

his thousands of bits of color; and man is all the while doing his best to confuse the process, by changing his

climate, his diet, all his surroundings, without the least care to remain himself. But the mind?

It is more difficult to get acquainted with Herbert than with an entire stranger, for I have my prepossessions

about him, and do not find him in so many places where I expect to find him. He is full of criticism of the

authors I admire; he thinks stupid or improper the books I most read; he is skeptical about the "movements" I

am interested in; he has formed very different opinions from mine concerning a hundred men and women of

the present day; we used to eat from one dish; we could n't now find anything in common in a dozen; his

prejudices (as we call our opinions) are most extraordinary, and not half so reasonable as my prejudices; there

are a great many persons and things that I am accustomed to denounce, uncontradicted by anybody, which he

defends; his public opinion is not at all my public opinion. I am sorry for him. He appears to have fallen into

influences and among a set of people foreign to me. I find that his church has a different steeple on it from

my church (which, to say the truth, hasn't any). It is a pity that such a dear friend and a man of so much

promise should have drifted off into such general contrariness. I see Herbert sitting here by the fire, with the

old look in his face coming out more and more, but I do not recognize any features of his mind,except

perhaps his contrariness; yes, he was always a little contrary, I think. And finally he surprises me with, "Well,

my friend, you seem to have drifted away from your old notions and opinions. We used to agree when we

were together, but I sometimes wondered where you would land; for, pardon me, you showed signs of

I am silent for a good while. I am trying to think who I am. There was a person whom I thought I knew, very

fond of Herbert, and agreeing with him in most things. Where has he gone? and, if he is here, where is the

If his intellectual and moral sympathies have all changed, I wonder if his physical tastes remain, like his

appearance, the same. There has come over this country within the last generation, as everybody knows, a

great wave of condemnation of pie. It has taken the character of a "movement!" though we have had no

conventions about it, nor is any one, of any of the several sexes among us, running for president against it. It

is safe almost anywhere to denounce pie, yet nearly everybody eats it on occasion. A great many people think

it savors of a life abroad to speak with horror of pie, although they were very likely the foremost of the

Americans in Paris who used to speak with more enthusiasm of the American pie at Madame Busque's than

of the Venus of Milo. To talk against pie and still eat it is snobbish, of course; but snobbery, being an aspiring

failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things. To affect dislike of pie is something. We have no statistics

on the subject, and cannot tell whether it is gaining or losing in the country at large. Its disappearance in

select circles is no test. The amount of writing against it is no more test of its desuetude, than the number of

religious tracts distributed in a given district is a criterion of its piety. We are apt to assume that certain

regions are substantially free of it. Herbert and I, traveling north one summer, fancied that we could draw in

New England a sort of diet line, like the sweeping curves on the isothermal charts, which should show at least

the leading pie sections. Journeying towards the White Mountains, we concluded that a line passing through

Bellows Falls, and bending a little south on either side, would mark northward the region of perpetual pie. In

this region pie is to be found at all hours and seasons, and at every meal. I am not sure, however, that pie is

not a matter of altitude rather than latitude, as I find that all the hill and country towns of New England are

full of those excellent women, the very salt of the housekeeping earth, who would feel ready to sink in

mortification through their scoured kitchen floors, if visitors should catch them without a pie in the house.

The absence of pie would be more noticed than a scarcity of Bible even. Without it the housekeepers are as

distracted as the boardinghouse keeper, who declared that if it were not for canned tomato, she should have

nothing to fly to. Well, in all this great agitation I find Herbert unmoved, a conservative, even to the

undercrust. I dare not ask him if he eats pie at breakfast. There are some tests that the dearest friendship may

"The fact is, that when we consider the correlation of forces, the apparent sympathy of spirit manifestations

with electric conditions, the almost revealed mysteries of what may be called the odic force, and the relation

of all these phenomena to the nervous system in man, it is not safe to do anything to the nervous system that

"Hang the nervous system! Herbert, we can agree in one thing: old memories, reveries, friendships, center

The best talk is that which escapes up the open chimney and cannot be repeated. The finest woods make the

best fire and pass away with the least residuum. I hope the next generation will not accept the reports of

But do we talk as well as our fathers and mothers did? We hear wonderful stories of the bright generation that

sat about the wide fireplaces of New England. Good talk has so much shorthand that it cannot be

reported,the inflection, the change of voice, the shrug, cannot be caught on paper. The best of it is when

the subject unexpectedly goes crosslots, by a flash of shortcut, to a conclusion so suddenly revealed that it

has the effect of wit. It needs the highest culture and the finest breeding to prevent the conversation from

running into mere persiflage on the one handits common fateor monologue on the other. Our

conversation is largely chaff. I am not sure but the former generation preached a good deal, but it had great

practice in fireside talk, and must have talked well. There were narrators in those days who could charm a

circle all the evening long with stories. When each day brought comparatively little new to read, there was

leisure for talk, and the rare book and the infrequent magazine were thoroughly discussed. Families now are

swamped by the printed matter that comes daily upon the centertable. There must be a division of labor, one

reading this, and another that, to make any impression on it. The telegraph brings the only common food, and

works this daily miracle, that every mind in Christendom is excited by one topic simultaneously with every

other mind; it enables a concurrent mental action, a burst of sympathy, or a universal prayer to be made,

which must be, if we have any faith in the immaterial left, one of the chief forces in modern life. It is fit that

When there is so much to read, there is little time for conversation; nor is there leisure for another pastime of

the ancient firesides, called reading aloud. The listeners, who heard while they looked into the wide

chimneyplace, saw there pass in stately procession the events and the grand persons of history, were kindled

with the delights of travel, touched by the romance of true love, or made restless by tales of adventure;the

hearth became a sort of magic stone that could transport those who sat by it to the most distant places and

times, as soon as the book was opened and the reader began, of a winter's night. Perhaps the Puritan reader

read through his nose, and all the little Puritans made the most dreadful nasal inquiries as the entertainment

went on. The prominent nose of the intellectual NewEnglander is evidence of the constant linguistic

exercise of the organ for generations. It grew by talking through. But I have no doubt that practice made good

readers in those days. Good reading aloud is almost a lost accomplishment now. It is little thought of in the

schools. It is disused at home. It is rare to find any one who can read, even from the newspaper, well.

Reading is so universal, even with the uncultivated, that it is common to hear people mispronounce words

that you did not suppose they had ever seen. In reading to themselves they glide over these words, in reading

aloud they stumble over them. Besides, our everyday books and newspapers are so larded with French that

The newspaper is probably responsible for making current many words with which the general reader is

familiar, but which he rises to in the flow of conversation, and strikes at with a splash and an unsuccessful

attempt at appropriation; the word, which he perfectly knows, hooks him in the gills, and he cannot master it.

The newspaper is thus widening the language in use, and vastly increasing the number of words which enter

into common talk. The Americans of the lowest intellectual class probably use more words to express their

ideas than the similar class of any other people; but this prodigality is partially balanced by the parsimony of

words in some higher regions, in which a few phrases of current slang are made to do the whole duty of

exchange of ideas; if that can be called exchange of ideas when one intellect flashes forth to another the

remark, concerning some report, that "you know how it is yourself," and is met by the response of "that's

what's the matter," and rejoins with the perfectly conclusive "that's so." It requires a high degree of culture to

use slang with elegance and effect; and we are yet very far from the Greek attainment.

The fireplace wants to be all aglow, the wind rising, the night heavy and black above, but light with sifting

snow on the earth, a background of inclemency for the illumined room with its pictured walls, tables heaped

with books, capacious easychairs and their occupants,it needs, I say, to glow and throw its rays far

through the crystal of the broad windows, in order that we may rightly appreciate the relation of the

widejambed chimney to domestic architecture in our climate. We fell to talking about it; and, as is usual

when the conversation is professedly on one subject, we wandered all around it. The young lady staying with

us was roasting chestnuts in the ashes, and the frequent explosions required considerable attention. The

mistress, too, sat somewhat alert, ready to rise at any instant and minister to the fancied want of this or that

guest, forgetting the reposeful truth that people about a fireside will not have any wants if they are not

suggested. The worst of them, if they desire anything, only want something hot, and that later in the evening.

And it is an open question whether you ought to associate with people who want that.

I was saying that nothing had been so slow in its progress in the world as domestic architecture. Temples,

palaces, bridges, aqueducts, cathedrals, towers of marvelous delicacy and strength, grew to perfection while

the common people lived in hovels, and the richest lodged in the most gloomy and contracted quarters. The

dwellinghouse is a modern institution. It is a curious fact that it has only improved with the social elevation

of women. Men were never more brilliant in arms and letters than in the age of Elizabeth, and yet they had no

homes. They made themselves thickwalled castles, with slits in the masonry for windows, for defense, and

magnificent banquethalls for pleasure; the stone rooms into which they crawled for the night were often

little better than dogkennels. The Pompeians had no comfortable nightquarters. The most singular thing to

me, however, is that, especially interested as woman is in the house, she has never done anything for

HERBERT. I doubt if woman has real ingenuity; she has great adaptability. I don't say that she will do the

same thing twice alike, like a Chinaman, but she is most cunning in suiting herself to circumstances.

THE FIRETENDER. Oh, if you speak of constructive, creative ingenuity, perhaps not; but in the higher

ranges of achievementthat of accomplishing any purpose dear to her heart, for instanceher ingenuity is

THE YOUNG LADY STAYING WITH US. I never saw a man do it, unless he was burned out of his

THE FIRETENDER (not noticing the interruption). Having set her mind on a total revolution of the house,

she buys one new thing, not too obtrusive, nor much out of harmony with the old. The husband scarcely

notices it, least of all does he suspect the revolution, which she already has accomplished. Next, some article

that does look a little shabby beside the new piece of furniture is sent to the garret, and its place is supplied by

something that will match in color and effect. Even the man can see that it ought to match, and so the process

goes on, it may be for years, it may be forever, until nothing of the old is left, and the house is transformed as

it was predetermined in the woman's mind. I doubt if the man ever understands how or when it was done; his

wife certainly never says anything about the refurnishing, but quietly goes on to new conquests.

THE MISTRESS. And is n't it better to buy little by little, enjoying every new object as you get it, and

assimilating each article to your household life, and making the home a harmonious expression of your own

taste, rather than to order things in sets, and turn your house, for the time being, into a furniture wareroom?

THE YOUNG LADY. For my part, I never can get acquainted with more than one piece of furniture at a

HERBERT. I suppose women are our superiors in artistic taste, and I fancy that I can tell whether a house is

furnished by a woman or a man; of course, I mean the few houses that appear to be the result of individual

taste and refinement,most of them look as if they had been furnished on contract by the upholsterer.

HERBERT. With a vengeance, sometimes. In the study, for example. My chief objection to woman is that

she has no respect for the newspaper, or the printed page, as such. She is Siva, the destroyer. I have noticed

that a great part of a married man's time at home is spent in trying to find the things he has put on his

THE YOUNG LADY. Herbert speaks with the bitterness of a bachelor shut out of paradise. It is my

experience that if women did not destroy the rubbish that men bring into the house, it would become

THE FIRETENDER. I confess women do a great deal for the appearance of things. When the mistress is

absent, this room, although everything is here as it was before, does not look at all like the same place; it is

stiff, and seems to lack a soul. When she returns, I can see that her eye, even while greeting me, takes in the

situation at a glance. While she is talking of the journey, and before she has removed her travelinghat, she

turns this chair and moves that, sets one piece of furniture at a different angle, rapidly, and apparently

unconsciously, shifts a dozen little knickknacks and bits of color, and the room is transformed. I couldn't do

THE MISTRESS. That is the first time I ever knew a man admit he couldn't do anything if he had time.

HERBERT. Yet with all their peculiar instinct for making a home, women make themselves very little felt in

THE MISTRESS. Men build most of the houses in what might be called the readymadeclothing style, and

we have to do the best we can with them; and hard enough it is to make cheerful homes in most of them. You

will see something different when the woman is constantly consulted in the plan of the house.

HERBERT. We might see more difference if women would give any attention to architecture. Why are there

THE FIRETENDER. Want of the ballot, doubtless. It seems to me that here is a splendid opportunity for

THE YOUNG LADY. They have no desire to come to the front; they would rather manage things where they

THE FIRETENDER. If they would master the noble art, and put their brooding taste upon it, we might very

likely compass something in our domestic architecture that we have not yet attained. The outside of our

houses needs attention as well as the inside. Most of them are as ugly as money can build.

THE YOUNG LADY. What vexes me most is, that women, married women, have so easily consented to give

HERBERT. They dislike the dust and the bother. I think that women rather like the confined furnace heat.

THE FIRETENDER. Nonsense; it is their angelic virtue of submission. We wouldn't be hired to stay

THE YOUNG LADY. That has a very chivalrous sound, but I know there will be no reformation until

HERBERT. They are just now rebelling about something else; it seems to me yours is a sort of

THE MISTRESS. I'll join that movement. The time has come when woman must strike for her altars and her

THE MISTRESS. Thank you, Herbert. I applauded you once, when you declaimed that years ago in the old

Just then the doorbell rang, and company came in. And the company brought in a new atmosphere, as

company always does, something of the disturbance of outdoors, and a good deal of its healthy cheer. The

direct news that the thermometer was approaching zero, with a hopeful prospect of going below it, increased

to liveliness our satisfaction in the fire. When the cider was heated in the brown stone pitcher, there was

difference of opinion whether there should be toast in it; some were for toast, because that was the

oldfashioned way, and others were against it, "because it does not taste good" in cider. Herbert said there,

More wood was put on, and the flame danced in a hundred fantastic shapes. The snow had ceased to fall, and

the moonlight lay in silvery patches among the trees in the ravine. The conversation became worldly.

Herbert said, as we sat by the fire one night, that he wished he had turned his attention to writing poetry like

The remark was not whimsical, but satirical. Tennyson is a man of talent, who happened to strike a lucky

vein, which he has worked with cleverness. The adventurer with a pickaxe in Washoe may happen upon like

good fortune. The world is full of poetry as the earth is of "paydirt;" one only needs to know how to "strike"

it. An able man can make himself almost anything that he will. It is melancholy to think how many epic poets

have been lost in the teatrade, how many dramatists (though the age of the drama has passed) have wasted

their genius in great mercantile and mechanical enterprises. I know a man who might have been the poet, the

essayist, perhaps the critic, of this country, who chose to become a country judge, to sit day after day upon a

bench in an obscure corner of the world, listening to wrangling lawyers and prevaricating witnesses,

It is fortunate for the vanity of the living and the reputation of the dead, that men get almost as much credit

for what they do not as for what they do. It was the opinion of many that Burns might have excelled as a

statesman, or have been a great captain in war; and Mr. Carlyle says that if he had been sent to a university,

and become a trained intellectual workman, it lay in him to have changed the whole course of British

literature! A large undertaking, as so vigorous and dazzling a writer as Mr. Carlyle must know by this time,

since British literature has swept by him in a resistless and widening flood, mainly uncontaminated, and

leaving his grotesque contrivances wrecked on the shore with other curiosities of letters, and yet among the

It is a temptation to a temperate man to become a sot, to hear what talent, what versatility, what genius, is

almost always attributed to a moderately bright man who is habitually drunk. Such a mechanic, such a

mathematician, such a poet he would be, if he were only sober; and then he is sure to be the most generous,

magnanimous, friendly soul, conscientiously honorable, if he were not so conscientiously drunk. I suppose it

is now notorious that the most brilliant and promising men have been lost to the world in this way. It is

sometimes almost painful to think what a surplus of talent and genius there would be in the world if the habit

of intoxication should suddenly cease; and what a slim chance there would be for the plodding people who

have always had tolerably good habits. The fear is only mitigated by the observation that the reputation of a

It is believed by some that the maidens who would make the best wives never marry, but remain free to bless

the world with their impartial sweetness, and make it generally habitable. This is one of the mysteries of

Providence and New England life. It seems a pity, at first sight, that all those who become poor wives have

the matrimonial chance, and that they are deprived of the reputation of those who would be good wives were

they not set apart for the high and perpetual office of priestesses of society. There is no beauty like that which

was spoiled by an accident, no accomplishmentsand graces are so to be envied as those that circumstances

rudely hindered the development of. All of which shows what a charitable and goodtempered world it is,

Nothing is more beautiful than the belief of the faithful wife that her husband has all the talents, and could , if

he would, be distinguished in any walk in life; and nothing will be more beautifulunless this is a very dry

time for signsthan the husband's belief that his wife is capable of taking charge of any of the affairs of this

confused planet. There is no woman but thinks that her husband, the greengrocer, could write poetry if he

had given his mind to it, or else she thinks small beer of poetry in comparison with an occupation or

accomplishment purely vegetable. It is touching to see the look of pride with which the wife turns to her

husband from any more brilliant personal presence or display of wit than his, in the perfect confidence that if

the world knew what she knows, there would be one more popular idol. How she magnifies his small wit, and

dotes upon the selfsatisfied look in his face as if it were a sign of wisdom! What a councilor that man would

make! What a warrior he would be! There are a great many corporals in their retired homes who did more for

the safety and success of our armies in critical moments, in the late war, than any of the "high

cockalorum" commanders. Mrs. Corporal does not envy the reputation of General Sheridan; she knows

very well who really won Five Forks, for she has heard the story a hundred times, and will hear it a hundred

times more with apparently unabated interest. What a general her husband would have made; and how his

HERBERT. Nonsense. There isn't a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband,

weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs

and specifications of her own. That knowledge, however, she ordinarily keeps to herself, and she enters into a

league with her husband, which he was never admitted to the secret of, to impose upon the world. In nine out

of ten cases he more than half believes that he is what his wife tells him he is. At any rate, she manages him

as easily as the keeper does the elephant, with only a bamboo wand and a sharp spike in the end. Usually she

flatters him, but she has the means of pricking clear through his hide on occasion. It is the great secret of her

THE YOUNG LADY STAYING WITH Us. And you call this hypocrisy? I have heard authors, who thought

HERBERT. Nothing of the sort. It is the basis on which society rests, the conventional agreement. If society

is about to be overturned, it is on this point. Women are beginning to tell men what they really think of them;

and to insist that the same relations of downright sincerity and independence that exist between men shall

exist between women and men. Absolute truth between souls, without regard to sex, has always been the

THE MISTRESS. Yes; but there was never a poet yet who would bear to have his wife say exactly what she

thought of his poetry, any more than be would keep his temper if his wife beat him at chess; and there is

HERBERT. Well, women know how to win by losing. I think that the reason why most women do not want

to take the ballot and stand out in the open for a free trial of power, is that they are reluctant to change the

certain domination of centuries, with weapons they are perfectly competent to handle, for an experiment. I

think we should be better off if women were more transparent, and men were not so systematically puffed up

MANDEVILLE. Deliver me from transparency. When a woman takes that guise, and begins to convince me

that I can see through her like a ray of light, I must run or be lost. Transparent women are the truly dangerous.

There was one on shipboard [Mandeville likes to say that; he has just returned from a little tour in Europe,

and he quite often begins his remarks with "on the ship going over; "the Young Lady declares that he has a

sort of roll in his chair, when he says it, that makes her seasick] who was the most innocent, artless,

guileless, natural bunch of lace and feathers you ever saw; she was all candor and helplessness and

dependence; she sang like a nightingale, and talked like a nun. There never was such simplicity. There was n't

a soundingline on board that would have gone to the bottom of her soulful eyes. But she managed the

captain and all the officers, and controlled the ship as if she had been the helm. All the passengers were

waiting on her, fetching this and that for her comfort, inquiring of her health, talking about her genuineness,

and exhibiting as much anxiety to get her ashore in safety, as if she had been about to knight them all and

THE MISTRESS. What harm? It shows what I have always said, that the service of a noble woman is the

MANDEVILLE. If she is noble, and not a mere manager. I watched this woman to see if she would ever do

THE FIRETENDER. Did you ever see her again? I presume Mandeville has introduced her here for some

MANDEVILLE. No purpose. But we did see her on the Rhine; she was the most disgusted traveler, and

seemed to be in very ill humor with her maid. I judged that her happiness depended upon establishing

controlling relations with all about her. On this Rhine boat, to be sure, there was reason for disgust. And that

MANDEVILLE. When we got aboard at Mayence we were conscious of a dreadful odor somewhere; as it

was a foggy morning, we could see no cause of it, but concluded it was from something on the wharf. The

fog lifted, and we got under way, but the odor traveled with us, and increased. We went to every part of the

vessel to avoid it, but in vain. It occasionally reached us in great waves of disagreeableness. We had heard of

the odors of the towns on the Rhine, but we had no idea that the entire stream was infected. It was intolerable.

The day was lovely, and the passengers stood about on deck holding their noses and admiring the scenery.

You might see a row of them leaning over the side, gazing up at some old ruin or ivied crag, entranced with

the romance of the situation, and all holding their noses with thumb and finger. The sweet Rhine! By and by

somebody discovered that the odor came from a pile of cheese on the forward deck, covered with a canvas; it

seemed that the Rhinelanders are so fond of it that they take it with them when they travel. If there should

ever be war between us and Germany, the borders of the Rhine would need no other defense from American

soldiers than a barricade of this cheese. I went to the stern of the steamboat to tell a stout American traveler

what was the origin of the odor he had been trying to dodge all the morning. He looked more disgusted than

before, when he heard that it was cheese; but his only reply was: "It must be a merciful God who can forgive

The above is introduced here in order to illustrate the usual effect of an anecdote on conversation. Commonly

it kills it. That talk must be very well in hand, and under great headway, that an anecdote thrown in front of

will not pitch off the track and wreck. And it makes little difference what the anecdote is; a poor one

depresses the spirits, and casts a gloom over the company; a good one begets others, and the talkers go to

telling stories; which is very good entertainment in moderation, but is not to be mistaken for that unwearying

flow of argument, quaint remark, humorous color, and sprightly interchange of sentiments and opinions,

The reader will perceive that all hope is gone here of deciding whether Herbert could have written

Tennyson's poems, or whether Tennyson could have dug as much money out of the Heliogabalus Lode as

Herbert did. The more one sees of life, I think the impression deepens that men, after all, play about the parts

assigned them, according to their mental and moral gifts, which are limited and preordained, and that their

entrances and exits are governed by a law no less certain because it is hidden. Perhaps nobody ever

accomplishes all that he feels lies in him to do; but nearly every one who tries his powers touches the walls of

his being occasionally, and learns about how far to attempt to spring. There are no impossibilities to youth

and inexperience; but when a person has tried several times to reach high C and been coughed down, he is

quite content to go down among the chorus. It is only the fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.

Mandeville here began to say that that reminded him of something that happened when he was on the

But Herbert cut in with the observation that no matter what a man's single and several capacities and talents

might be, he is controlled by his own mysterious individuality, which is what metaphysicians call the

substance, all else being the mere accidents of the man. And this is the reason that we cannot with any

certainty tell what any person will do or amount to, for, while we know his talents and abilities, we do not

know the resulting whole, which is he himself. THE FIRETENDER. So if you could take all the firstclass

qualities that we admire in men and women, and put them together into one being, you wouldn't be sure of

HERBERT. Certainly not. You would probably have a monster. It takes a cook of long experience, with the

best materials, to make a dish " taste good;" and the "taste good" is the indefinable essence, the resulting

balance or harmony which makes man or woman agreeable or beautiful or effective in the world.

THE YOUNG LADY. That must be the reason why novelists fail so lamentably in almost all cases in

creating good characters. They put in real traits, talents, dispositions, but the result of the synthesis is

THE FIRETENDER. Oh, a good character in fiction is an inspiration. We admit this in poetry. It is as true

of such creations as Colonel Newcome, and Ethel, and Beatrix Esmond. There is no patchwork about them.

THE FIRETENDER. That is the standing conundrum with all the women. They will not accept Ethel

Newcome even. Perhaps we shall have to admit that Thackeray was a writer for men.

HERBERT. Scott and the rest had drawn so many perfect women that Thackeray thought it was time for a

THE MISTRESS. That's illnatured. Thackeray did, however, make ladies. If he had depicted, with his

searching pen, any of us just as we are, I doubt if we should have liked it much.

MANDEVILLE. That's just it. Thackeray never pretended to make ideals, and if the best novel is an

idealization of human nature, then he was not the best novelist. When I was crossing the Channel

THE MISTRESS. Oh dear, if we are to go to sea again, Mandeville, I move we have in the nuts and apples,

There is this advantage in getting back to a woodfire on the hearth, that you return to a kind of simplicity;

you can scarcely imagine any one being stiffly conventional in front of it. It thaws out formality, and puts the

company who sit around it into easy attitudes of mind and body,lounging attitudes,Herbert said.

And this brought up the subject of culture in America, especially as to manner. The backlog period having

passed, we are beginning to have in society people of the cultured manner, as it is called, or polished bearing,

in which the polish is the most noticeable thing about the man. Not the courtliness, the easy simplicity of the

oldschool gentleman, in whose presence the milkmaid was as much at her ease as the countess, but

something far finer than this. These are the people of unruffled demeanor, who never forget it for a moment,

and never let you forget it. Their presence is a constant rebuke to society. They are never "jolly;" their laugh

is never anything more than a wellbred smile; they are never betrayed into any enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a

sign of inexperience, of ignorance, of want of culture. They never lose themselves in any cause; they never

heartily praise any man or woman or book; they are superior to all tides of feeling and all outbursts of

passion. They are not even shocked at vulgarity. They are simply indifferent. They are calm, visibly calm,

painfully calm; and it is not the eternal, majestic calmness of the Sphinx either, but a rigid, selfconscious

repression. You would like to put a bent pin in their chair when they are about calmly to sit down.

A sitting hen on her nest is calm, but hopeful; she has faith that her eggs are not china. These people appear

to be sitting on china eggs. Perfect culture has refined all blood, warmth, flavor, out of them. We admire them

without envy. They are too beautiful in their manners to be either prigs or snobs. They are at once our models

and our despair. They are properly careful of themselves as models, for they know that if they should break,

MANDEVILLE. That's where I saw them. There is no nonsense about a cultivated English man or woman.

They express themselves sturdily and naturally, and with no subservience to the opinions of others. There's a

sort of hearty sincerity about them that I like. Ages of culture on the island have gone deeper than the surface,

and they have simpler and more natural manners than we. There is something good in the full, round tones of

HERBERT. Did you ever get into a diligence with a growling English man who had n't secured the place he

[Mandeville once spent a week in London, riding about on the tops of omnibuses.]

THE MISTRESS. Did you ever see an English exquisite at the San Carlo, and hear him cry "Bwavo"?

THE FIRETENDER. I think Mandeville is right, for once. The men of the best culture in England, in the

middle and higher social classes, are what you would call good fellows,easy and simple in manner,

enthusiastic on occasion, and decidedly not cultivated into the smooth calmness of indifference which some

Americans seem to regard as the sine qua non of good breeding. Their position is so assured that they do not

THE YOUNG LADY. Which is different from the manner acquired by those who live a great deal in

THE FIRETENDER. Not exactly. You think you can always tell if a man has learned his society carriage of

a dancingmaster. Well, you cannot always tell by a person's manner whether he is a habitui of hotels or of

Washington. But these are distinct from the perfect polish and politeness of indifferentism.

Daylight disenchants. It draws one from the fireside, and dissipates the idle illusions of conversation, except

under certain conditions. Let us say that the conditions are: a house in the country, with some forest trees

near, and a few evergreens, which are Christmastrees all winter long, fringed with snow, glistening with

icependants, cheerful by day and grotesque by night; a snowstorm beginning out of a dark sky, falling in a

soft profusion that fills all the air, its dazzling whiteness making a light near at hand, which is quite lost in the

If one begins to watch the swirling flakes and crystals, he soon gets an impression of infinity of resources that

he can have from nothing else so powerfully, except it be from Adirondack gnats. Nothing makes one feel at

home like a great snowstorm. Our intelligent cat will quit the fire and sit for hours in the low window,

watching the falling snow with a serious and contented air. His thoughts are his own, but he is in accord with

the subtlest agencies of Nature; on such a day he is charged with enough electricity to run a telegraphic

battery, if it could be utilized. The connection between thought and electricity has not been exactly

determined, but the cat is mentally very alert in certain conditions of the atmosphere. Feasting his eyes on the

beautiful outdoors does not prevent his attention to the slightest noise in the wainscot. And the snowstorm

I can see Mandeville now, rising from his armchair and swinging his long arms as he strides to the window,

and looks out and up, with, "Well, I declare!" Herbert is pretending to read Herbert Spencer's tract on the

philosophy of style but he loses much time in looking at the Young Lady, who is writing a letter, holding her

portfolio in her lap,one of her everlasting letters to one of her fifty everlasting friends. She is one of the

female patriots who save the postoffice department from being a disastrous loss to the treasury. Herbert is

thinking of the great radical difference in the two sexes, which legislation will probably never change; that

leads a woman always, to write letters on her lap and a man on a table,a distinction which is commended

The Mistress, in a pretty little breakfastcap, is moving about the room with a featherduster, whisking

invisible dust from the picture frames, and talking with the Parson, who has just come in, and is thawing the

snow from his boots on the hearth. The Parson says the thermometer is 15deg., and going down; that there is

a snowdrift across the main church entrance three feet high, and that the house looks as if it had gone into

winter quarters, religion and all. There were only ten persons at the conference meeting last night, and seven

of those were women; he wonders how many weatherproof Christians there are in the parish, anyhow.

The FireTender is in the adjoining library, pretending to write; but it is a poor day for ideas. He has written

his wife's name about eleven hundred times, and cannot get any farther. He hears the Mistress tell the Parson

that she believes he is trying to write a lecture on the Celtic Influence in Literature. The Parson says that it is

a firstrate subject, if there were any such influence, and asks why he does n't take a shovel and make a path

to the gate. Mandeville says that, by George! he himself should like no better fun, but it wouldn't look well

for a visitor to do it. The FireTender, not to be disturbed by this sort of chaff, keeps on writing his wife's

Then the Parson and the Mistress fall to talking about the souprelief, and about old Mrs. Grumples in Pig

Alley, who had a present of one of Stowe's Illustrated SelfActing Bibles on Christmas, when she had n't

coal enough in the house to heat her gruel; and about a family behind the church, a widow and six little

children and three dogs; and he did n't believe that any of them had known what it was to be warm in three

weeks, and as to food, the woman said, she could hardly beg cold victuals enough to keep the dogs alive.

The Mistress slipped out into the kitchen to fill a basket with provisions and send it somewhere; and when the

FireTender brought in a new forestick, Mandeville, who always wants to talk, and had been sitting

MANDEVILLE. Speaking about culture and manners, did you ever notice how extremes meet, and that the

savage bears himself very much like the sort of cultured persons we were talking of last night?

MANDEVILLE. Well, you take the North American Indian. He is never interested in anything, never

surprised at anything. He has by nature that calmness and indifference which your people of culture have

acquired. If he should go into literature as a critic, he would scalp and tomahawk with the same emotionless

THE FIRETENDER. Then you think the red man is a born gentleman of the highest breeding?

MANDEVILLE. Oh, these studiously calm and cultured people may have malice underneath. It takes them to

give the most effective "little digs;" they know how to stick in the pinesplinters and set fire to them.

HERBERT. But there is more in Mandeville's idea. You bring a red man into a picturegallery, or a city full

of fine architecture, or into a drawingroom crowded with objects of art and beauty, and he is apparently

insensible to them all. Now I have seen country people, and by country people I don't mean people

necessarily who live in the country, for everything is mixed in these days,some of the best people in the

THE MISTRESS. Herbert, if I did n't know you were cynical, I should say you were snobbish.

HERBERT. Such people think it a point of breeding never to speak of anything in your house, nor to appear

to notice it, however beautiful it may be; even to slyly glance around strains their notion of etiquette. They

are like the countryman who confessed afterwards that he could hardly keep from laughing at one of Yankee

THE YOUNG LADY. Do you remember those English people at our house in Flushing last summer, who

pleased us all so much with their apparent delight in everything that was artistic or tasteful, who explored the

rooms and looked at everything, and were so interested? I suppose that Herbert's country relations, many of

MANDEVILLE. It's just as I said. The English, the best of them, have become so civilized that they express

themselves, in speech and action, naturally, and are not afraid of their emotions.

THE PARSON. I wish Mandeville would travel more, or that he had stayed at home. It's wonderful what a fit

of Atlantic seasickness will do for a man's judgment and cultivation. He is prepared to pronounce on art,

manners, all kinds of culture. There is more nonsense talked about culture than about anything else.

HERBERT. The Parson reminds me of an American country minister I once met walking through the

Vatican. You could n't impose upon him with any rubbish; he tested everything by the standards of his native

place, and there was little that could bear the test. He had the sly air of a man who could not be deceived, and

he went about with his mouth in a pucker of incredulity. There is nothing so placid as rustic conceit. There

was something very enjoyable about his calm superiority to all the treasures of art.

MANDEVILLE. And the Parson reminds me of another American minister, a consul in an Italian city, who

said he was going up to Rome to have a thorough talk with the Pope, and give him a piece of his mind.

Ministers seem to think that is their business. They serve it in such small pieces in order to make it go round.

THE PARSON. Mandeville is an infidel. Come, let's have some music; nothing else will keep him in good

The Young Lady puts aside her portfolio. Herbert looks at the young lady. The Parson composes himself for

critical purposes. Mandeville settles himself in a chair and stretches his long legs nearly into the fire,

It is difficult to explain the attraction which the uncanny and even the horrible have for most minds. I have

seen a delicate woman half fascinated, but wholly disgusted, by one of the most unseemly of reptiles,

vulgarly known as the "blowing viper" of the Alleghanies. She would look at it, and turn away with

irresistible shuddering and the utmost loathing, and yet turn to look at it again and again, only to experience

the same spasm of disgust. In spite of her aversion, she must have relished the sort of electric mental shock

I can no more account for the fascination for us of the stories of ghosts and "appearances," and those weird

tales in which the dead are the chief characters; nor tell why we should fall into converse about them when

the winter evenings are far spent, the embers are glazing over on the hearth, and the listener begins to hear the

eerie noises in the house. At such times one's dreams become of importance, and people like to tell them and

dwell upon them, as if they were a link between the known and unknown, and could give us a clew to that

ghostly region which in certain states of the mind we feel to be more real than that we see.

Recently, when we were, so to say, sitting around the borders of the supernatural late at night,

MANDEVILLE related a dream of his which he assured us was true in every particular, and it interested us

so much that we asked him to write it out. In doing so he has curtailed it, and to my mind shorn it of some of

its more vivid and picturesque features. He might have worked it up with more art, and given it a finish which

the narration now lacks, but I think best to insert it in its simplicity. It seems to me that it may properly be

In the winter of 1850 I was a member of one of the leading colleges of this country. I was in moderate

circumstances pecuniarily, though I was perhaps better furnished with less fleeting riches than many others. I

was an incessant and indiscriminate reader of books. For the solid sciences I had no particular fancy, but with

mental modes and habits, and especially with the eccentric and fantastic in the intellectual and spiritual

operations, I was tolerably familiar. All the literature of the supernatural was as real to me as the laboratory of

the chemist, where I saw the continual struggle of material substances to evolve themselves into more

volatile, less palpable and coarse forms. My imagination, naturally vivid, stimulated by such repasts, nearly

mastered me. At times I could scarcely tell where the material ceased and the immaterial began (if I may so

express it); so that once and again I walked, as it seemed, from the solid earth onward upon an impalpable

plain, where I heard the same voices, I think, that Joan of Arc heard call to her in the garden at Domremy.

She was inspired, however, while I only lacked exercise. I do not mean this in any literal sense; I only

describe a state of mind. I was at this time of spare habit, and nervous, excitable temperament. I was

ambitious, proud, and extremely sensitive. I cannot deny that I had seen something of the world, and had

contracted about the average bad habits of young men who have the sole care of themselves, and rather

bungle the matter. It is necessary to this relation to admit that I had seen a trifle more of what is called life

than a young man ought to see, but at this period I was not only sick of my experience, but my habits were as

correct as those of any Pharisee in our college, and we had some very favorable specimens of that ancient

Nor can I deny that at this period of my life I was in a peculiar mental condition. I well remember an

illustration of it. I sat writing late one night, copying a prize essay,a merely manual task, leaving my

thoughts free. It was in June, a sultry night, and about midnight a wind arose, pouring in through the open

windows, full of mournful reminiscence, not of this, but of other summers, the same wind that De Quincey

heard at noonday in midsummer blowing through the room where he stood, a mere boy, by the side of his

dead sister, a wind centuries old. As I wrote on mechanically, I became conscious of a presence in the

room, though I did not lift my eyes from the paper on which I wrote. Gradually I came to know that my

grandmotherdead so long ago that I laughed at the ideawas in the room. She stood beside her

oldfashioned spinningwheel, and quite near me. She wore a plain muslin cap with a high puff in the crown,

a short woolen gown, a white and blue checked apron, and shoes with heels. She did not regard me, but stood

facing the wheel, with the left hand near the spindle, holding lightly between the thumb and forefinger the

white roll of wool which was being spun and twisted on it. In her right hand she held a small stick. I heard the

sharp click of this against the spokes of the wheel, then the hum of the wheel, the buzz of the spindles as the

twisting yarn was teased by the whirl of its point, then a step backwards, a pause, a step forward and the

running of the yarn upon the spindle, and again a backward step, the drawing out of the roll and the droning

and hum of the wheel, most mournfully hopeless sound that ever fell on mortal ear. Since childhood it has

haunted me. All this time I wrote, and I could hear distinctly the scratching of the pen upon the paper. But she

stood behind me (why I did not turn my head I never knew), pacing backward and forward by the

spinningwheel, just as I had a hundred times seen her in childhood in the old kitchen on drowsy summer

afternoons. And I heard the step, the buzz and whirl of the spindle, and the monotonous and dreary hum of

the mournful wheel. Whether her face was ashy pale and looked as if it might crumble at the touch, and the

border of her white cap trembled in the June wind that blew, I cannot say, for I tell you I did NOT see her.

But I know she was there, spinning yarn that had been knit into hose years and years ago by our fireside. For

I was in full possession of my faculties, and never copied more neatly and legibly any manuscript than I did

the one that night. And there the phantom (I use the word out of deference to a public prejudice on this

subject) most persistently remained until my task was finished, and, closing the portfolio, I abruptly rose. Did

I see anything? That is a silly and ignorant question. Could I see the wind which had now risen stronger, and

drove a few cloudscuds across the sky, filling the night, somehow, with a longing that was not altogether

In the winter following, in January, I made an effort to give up the use of tobacco,a habit in which I was

confirmed, and of which I have nothing more to say than this: that I should attribute to it almost all the sin

and misery in the world, did I not remember that the old Romans attained a very considerable state of

On the night of the third day of my abstinence, rendered more nervous and excitable than usual by the

privation, I retired late, and later still I fell into an uneasy sleep, and thus into a dream, vivid, illuminated,

more real than any event of my life. I was at home, and fell sick. The illness developed into a fever, and then

a delirium set in, not an intellectual blank, but a misty and most delicious wandering in places of

incomparable beauty. I learned subsequently that our regular physician was not certain to finish me, when a

consultation was called, which did the business. I have the satisfaction of knowing that they were of the

On the morning of the fourth, at sunrise, I died. The sensation was not unpleasant. It was not a sudden shock.

I passed out of my body as one would walk from the door of his house. There the body lay,a blank, so far

as I was concerned, and only interesting to me as I was rather entertained with watching the respect paid to it.

My friends stood about the bedside, regarding me (as they seemed to suppose), while I, in a different part of

the room, could hardly repress a smile at their mistake, solemnized as they were, and I too, for that matter, by

my recent demise. A sensation (the word you see is material and inappropriate) of etherealization and

imponderability pervaded me, and I was not sorry to get rid of such a dull, slow mass as I now perceived

myself to be, lying there on the bed. When I speak of my death, let me be understood to say that there was no

change, except that I passed out of my body and floated to the top of a bookcase in the corner of the room,

from which I looked down. For a moment I was interested to see my person from the outside, but thereafter I

was quite indifferent to the body. I was now simply soul. I seemed to be a globe, impalpable, transparent,

about six inches in diameter. I saw and heard everything as before. Of course, matter was no obstacle to me,

and I went easily and quickly wherever I willed to go. There was none of that tedious process of

communicating my wishes to the nerves, and from them to the muscles. I simply resolved to be at a particular

It seemed to have been intimated to me at my death (birth I half incline to call it) that I could remain on this

earth for four weeks after my decease, during which time I could amuse myself as I chose.

I chose, in the first place, to see myself decently buried, to stay by myself to the last, and attend my own

funeral for once. As most of those referred to in this true narrative are still living, I am forbidden to indulge in

personalities, nor shall I dare to say exactly how my death affected my friends, even the home circle.

Whatever others did, I sat up with myself and kept awake. I saw the "pennies" used instead of the "quarters"

which I should have preferred. I saw myself "laid out," a phrase that has come to have such a slang meaning

that I smile as I write it. When the body was put into the coffin, I took my place on the lid.

I cannot recall all the details, and they are commonplace besides. The funeral took place at the church. We all

rode thither in carriages, and I, not fancying my place in mine, rode on the outside with the undertaker, whom

I found to be a good deal more jolly than he looked to be. The coffin was placed in front of the pulpit when

we arrived. I took my station on the pulpit cushion, from which elevation I had an admirable view of all the

ceremonies, and could hear the sermon. How distinctly I remember the services. I think I could even at this

distance write out the sermon. The tune sung was ofthe usual country selection,Mount Vernon. I recall

the text. I was rather flattered by the tribute paid to me, and my future was spoken of gravely and as kindly as

possible,indeed, with remarkable charity, considering that the minister was not aware of my presence. I

used to beat him at chess, and I thought, even then, of the last game; for, however solemn the occasion might

be to others, it was not so to me. With what interest I watched my kinsfolks, and neighbors as they filed past

for the last look! I saw, and I remember, who pulled a long face for the occasion and who exhibited genuine

sadness. I learned with the most dreadful certainty what people really thought of me. It was a revelation never

Several particular acquaintances of mine were talking on the steps as we passed out.

"Yes, queer about some things; but he had some mighty good streaks," said another. And so they ran on.

Streaks! So that is the reputation one gets during twenty years of life in this world. Streaks!

After the funeral I rode home with the family. It was pleasanter than the ride down, though it seemed sad to

my relations. They did not mention me, however, and I may remark, that although I stayed about home for a

week, I never heard my name mentioned by any of the family. Arrived at home, the teakettle was put on and

supper got ready. This seemed to lift the gloom a little, and under the influence of the tea they brightened up

and gradually got more cheerful. They discussed the sermon and the singing, and the mistake of the sexton in

digging the grave in the wrong place, and the large congregation. From the mantelpiece I watched the

group. They had waffles for supper,of which I had been exceedingly fond, but now I saw them disappear

For the first day or two of my sojourn at home I was here and there at all the neighbors, and heard a good deal

about my life and character, some of which was not very pleasant, but very wholesome, doubtless, for me to

hear. At the expiration of a week this amusement ceased to be such for I ceased to be talked of. I realized the

By an act of volition I found myself back at college. I floated into my own room, which was empty. I went to

the room of my two warmest friends, whose friendship I was and am yet assured of. As usual, half a dozen of

our set were lounging there. A game of whist was just commencing. I perched on a bust of Dante on the top

of the bookshelves, where I could see two of the hands and give a good guess at a third. My particular friend

"Be hanged if it is n't lonesome without old Starr. Did you cut? I should like to see him lounge in now with

his pipe, and with feet on the mantelpiece proceed to expound on the duplex functions of the soul."

"Theremisdeal," said his vis,avis. "Hope there's been no misdeal for old Starr."

"No more was he; stouter than you are, and as brave and plucky as he was strong. By George, fellows,how

we do get cut down! Last term little Stubbs, and now one of the best fellows in the class."

"How suddenly he did pop off,one for game, honors easy,he was good for the Spouts' Medal this year,

"Remember he borrowed ten dollars of me about that time," said Timmins's partner, gathering the cards for a

And so the talk went on, mingled with whisttalk, reminiscent of me, not all exactly what I would have

chosen to go into my biography, but on the whole kind and tender, after the fashion of the boys. At least I was

in their thoughts, and I could see was a good deal regretted,so I passed a very pleasant evening. Most of

those present were of my society, and wore crape on their badges, and all wore the usual crape on the left

arm. I learned that the following afternoon a eulogy would be delivered on me in the chapel.

The eulogy was delivered before members of our society and others, the next afternoon, in the chapel. I need

not say that I was present. Indeed, I was perched on the desk within reach of the speaker's hand. The

apotheosis was pronounced by my most intimate friend, Timmins, and I must say he did me ample justice. He

never was accustomed to "draw it very mild" (to use a vulgarism which I dislike) when he had his head, and

on this occasion he entered into the matter with the zeal of a true friend, and a young man who never

expected to have another occasion to sing a public "In Memoriam." It made my hair stand on

end,metaphorically, of course. From my childhood I had been extremely precocious. There were anecdotes

of preternatural brightness, picked up, Heaven knows where, of my eagerness to learn, of my adventurous,

chivalrous young soul, and of my arduous struggles with chill penury, which was not able (as it appeared) to

repress my rage, until I entered this institution, of which I had been ornament, pride, cynosure, and fair

promising bud blasted while yet its fragrance was mingled with the dew of its youth. Once launched upon my

college days, Timmins went on with all sails spread. I had, as it were, to hold on to the pulpit cushion. Latin,

Greek, the old literatures, I was perfect master of; all history was merely a light repast to me; mathematics I

glanced at, and it disappeared; in the clouds of modern philosophy I was wrapped but not obscured; over the

field of light literature I familiarly roamed as the honeybee over the wide fields of clover which blossom

white in the Junes of this world! My life was pure, my character spotless, my name was inscribed among the

It was a noble eulogy, and I felt before he finished, though I had misgivings at the beginning, that I deserved

it all. The effect on the audience was a little different. They said it was a "strong" oration, and I think

Timmins got more credit by it than I did. After the performance they stood about the chapel, talking in a

subdued tone, and seemed to be a good deal impressed by what they had heard, or perhaps by thoughts of the

departed. At least they all soon went over to Austin's and called for beer. My particular friends called for it

twice. Then they all lit pipes. The old grocery keeper was good enough to say that I was no fool, if I did go

off owing him four dollars. To the credit of human nature, let me here record that the fellows were touched

by this remark reflecting upon my memory, and immediately made up a purse and paid the bill,that is, they

told the old man to charge it over to them. College boys are rich in credit and the possibilities of life.

It is needless to dwell upon the days I passed at college during this probation. So far as I could see,

everything went on as if I were there, or had never been there. I could not even see the place where I had

dropped out of the ranks. Occasionally I heard my name, but I must say that four weeks was quite long

enough to stay in a world that had pretty much forgotten me. There is no great satisfaction in being dragged

up to light now and then, like an old letter. The case was somewhat different with the people with whom I

had boarded. They were relations of mine, and I often saw them weep, and they talked of me a good deal at

twilight and Sunday nights, especially the youngest one, Carrie, who was handsomer than any one I knew,

and not much older than I. I never used to imagine that she cared particularly for me, nor would she have

done so, if I had lived, but death brought with it a sort of sentimental regret, which, with the help of a

daguerreotype, she nursed into quite a little passion. I spent most of my time there, for it was more congenial

But time hastened. The last sand of probation leaked out of the glass. One day, while Carrie played (for me,

though she knew it not) one of Mendelssohn's "songs without words," I suddenly, yet gently, without

selfeffort or volition, moved from the house, floated in the air, rose higher, higher, by an easy, delicious,

exultant, yet inconceivably rapid motion. The ecstasy of that triumphant flight! Groves, trees, houses, the

landscape, dimmed, faded, fled away beneath me. Upward mounting, as on angels' wings, with no effort, till

the earth hung beneath me a round black ball swinging, remote, in the universal ether. Upward mounting, till

the earth, no longer bathed in the sun's rays, went out to my sight, disappeared in the blank. Constellations,

before seen from afar, I sailed among. Stars, too remote for shining on earth, I neared, and found to be round

globes flying through space with a velocity only equaled by my own. New worlds continually opened on my

For days and daysit seemed a mortal foreverI mounted up the great heavens, whose everlasting doors

swung wide. How the worlds and systems, stars, constellations, neared me, blazed and flashed in splendor,

and fled away! At length,was it not a thousand years?I saw before me, yet afar off, a wall, the rocky

bourn of that country whence travelers come not back, a battlement wider than I could guess, the height of

which I could not see, the depth of which was infinite. As I approached, it shone with a splendor never yet

beheld on earth. Its solid substance was built of jewels the rarest, and stones of priceless value. It seemed like

one solid stone, and yet all the colors of the rainbow were contained in it. The ruby, the diamond, the

emerald, the carbuncle, the topaz, the amethyst, the sapphire; of them the wall was built up in harmonious

combination. So brilliant was it that all the space I floated in was full of the splendor. So mild was it and so

Rapidly nearing this heavenly battlement, an immense niche was disclosed in its solid face. The floor was one

large ruby. Its sloping sides were of pearl. Before I was aware I stood within the brilliant recess. I say I stood

there, for I was there bodily, in my habit as I lived; how, I cannot explain. Was it the resurrection of the

body? Before me rose, a thousand feet in height, a wonderful gate of flashing diamond. Beside it sat a

venerable man, with long white beard, a robe of light gray, ancient sandals, and a golden key hanging by a

cord from his waist. In the serene beauty of his noble features I saw justice and mercy had met and were

reconciled. I cannot describe the majesty of his bearing or the benignity of his appearance. It is needless to

I humbly approached, and begged admission. St. Peter arose, and regarded me kindly, yet inquiringly.

I answered, and, wishing to give a name well known, said I was from Washington, United States. He looked

I felt instantaneously that there was no concealment possible; all disguise fell away, and an unknown power

forced me to speak absolute and exact truth. I detailed the events of my life as well as I could, and the good

man was not a little affected by the recital of my early trials, poverty, and temptation. It did not seem a very

good life when spread out in that presence, and I trembled as I proceeded; but I plead youth, inexperience,

Have you been accustomed," he said, after a time, rather sadly, "to break the Sabbath?"

I told him frankly that I had been rather lax in that matter, especially at college. I often went to sleep in the

chapel on Sunday, when I was not reading some entertaining book. He then asked who the preacher was, and

when I told him, he remarked that I was not so much to blame as he had supposed.

I was able to say no, except admitting as to the first, usual college "conveyances," and as to the last, an

occasional "blinder" to the professors. He was gracious enough to say that these could be overlooked as

"Did you ever," he went on, "commit the crime of using intoxicating drinks as a beverage?"

I answered that I had never been a habitual drinker, that I had never been what was called a "moderate

drinker," that I had never gone to a bar and drank alone; but that I had been accustomed, in company with

other young men, on convivial occasions to taste the pleasures of the flowing bowl, sometimes to excess, but

that I had also tasted the pains of it, and for months before my demise had refrained from liquor altogether.

The holy man looked grave, but, after reflection, said this might also be overlooked in a young man.

"What," continued he, in tones still more serious, "has been your conduct with regard to the other sex?"

I fell upon my knees in a tremor of fear. I pulled from my bosom a little book like the one Leperello exhibits

in the opera of "Don Giovanni." There, I said, was a record of my flirtation and inconstancy. I waited long for

"Rise," he cried; "young men will be young men, I suppose. We shall forgive this also to your youth and

"Your examination is satisfactory, he informed me," after a pause; "you can now enter the abodes of the

Joy leaped within me. We approached the gate. The key turned in the lock. The gate swung noiselessly on its

hinges a little open. Out flashed upon me unknown splendors. What I saw in that momentary gleam I shall

"Stop! one moment," exclaimed St. Peter, laying his hand on my shoulder; "I have one more question to ask

Instantly the gate closed without noise, and I was flung, hurled, from the battlement, down! down! down!

Faster and faster I sank in a dizzy, sickening whirl into an unfathomable space of gloom. The light faded.

Dampness and darkness were round about me. As before, for days and days I rose exultant in the light, so

now forever I sank into thickening darkness,and yet not darkness, but a pale, ashy light more fearful.

In the dimness, I at length discovered a wall before me. It ran up and down and on either hand endlessly into

Straightway I alighted at the gate,a dismal crevice hewn into the dripping rock. The gate was wide open,

and there satI knew him at once; who does not?the Arch Enemy of mankind. He cocked his eye at me in

an impudent, low, familiar manner that disgusted me. I saw that I was not to be treated like a gentleman.

"Well, young man," said he, rising, with a queer grin on his face," what are you sent here for?

"Ho!" shouted he in a jolly manner, peculiar to devils, "that's what most of 'em are sent here for now."

Without more ado, he called four lesser imps, who ushered me within. What a dreadful plain lay before me!

There was a vast city laid out in regular streets, but there were no houses. Along the streets were places of

torment and torture exceedingly ingenious and disagreeable. For miles and miles, it seemed, I followed my

conductors through these horrors, Here was a deep vat of burning tar. Here were rows of fiery ovens. I

noticed several immense caldron kettles of boiling oil, upon the rims of which little devils sat, with pitchforks

in hand, and poked down the helpless victims who floundered in the liquid. But I forbear to go into unseemly

After an hour's walk my tormentors halted before the mouth of an oven,a furnace heated seven times, and

now roaring with flames. They grasped me, one hold of each hand and foot. Standing before the blazing

I again assure the reader that in this narrative I have set down nothing that was not actually dreamed, and

Haec fabula docet: It is dangerous for a young man to leave off the use of tobacco.

I wish I could fitly celebrate the joyousness of the New England winter. Perhaps I could if I more thoroughly

believed in it. But skepticism comes in with the south wind. When that begins to blow, one feels the

foundations of his belief breaking up. This is only another way of saying that it is more difficult, if it be not

impossible, to freeze out orthodoxy, or any fixed notion, than it is to thaw it out; though it is a mere fancy to

suppose that this is the reason why the martyrs, of all creeds, were burned at the stake. There is said to be a

great relaxation in New England of the ancient strictness in the direction of toleration of opinion, called by

some a lowering of the standard, and by others a raising of the banner of liberality; it might be an interesting

inquiry how much this change is due to another change,the softening of the New England winter and the

shifting of the Gulf Stream. It is the fashion nowadays to refer almost everything to physical causes, and this

The hindrance to entering fully into the joyousness of a New England winter, except far inland among the

mountains, is the south wind. It is a grateful wind, and has done more, I suspect, to demoralize society than

any other. It is not necessary to remember that it filled the silken sails of Cleopatra's galley. It blows over

New England every few days, and is in some portions of it the prevailing wind. That it brings the soft clouds,

and sometimes continues long enough to almost deceive the expectant buds of the fruit trees, and to tempt the

robin from the secluded evergreen copses, may be nothing; but it takes the tone out of the mind, and

engenders discontent, making one long for the tropics; it feeds the weakened imagination on palmleaves and

the lotus. Before we know it we become demoralized, and shrink from the tonic of the sudden change to

sharp weather, as the steamed hydropathic patient does from the plunge. It is the insidious temptation that

Perhaps the influence of the four great winds on character is only a fancied one; but it is evident on

temperament, which is not altogether a matter of temperature, although the good old deacon used to say, in

his humble, simple way, that his third wife was a very good woman, but her "temperature was very different

from that of the other two." The north wind is full of courage, and puts the stamina of endurance into a man,

and it probably would into a woman too if there were a series of resolutions passed to that effect. The west

wind is hopeful; it has promise and adventure in it, and is, except to Atlantic voyagers Americabound, the

best wind that ever blew. The east wind is peevishness; it is mental rheumatism and grumbling, and curls one

up in the chimneycorner like a cat. And if the chimney ever smokes, it smokes when the wind sits in that

quarter. The south wind is full of longing and unrest, of effeminate suggestions of luxurious ease, and

perhaps we might say of modern poetry,at any rate, modern poetry needs a change of air. I am not sure but

the south is the most powerful of the winds, because of its sweet persuasiveness. Nothing so stirs the blood in

spring, when it comes up out of the tropical latitude; it makes men "longen to gon on pilgrimages."

I did intend to insert here a little poem (as it is quite proper to do in an essay) on the south wind, composed

but it never got any farther than this. The Young Lady said it was exceedingly difficult to write the next two

lines, because not only rhyme but meaning had to be procured. And this is true; anybody can write first lines,

and that is probably the reason we have so many poems which seem to have been begun in just this way, that

is, with a southwindlonging without any thought in it, and it is very fortunate when there is not wind

enough to finish them. This emotional poem, if I may so call it, was begun after Herbert went away. I liked it,

and thought it was what is called "suggestive;" although I did not understand it, especially what the

nightbird was; and I am afraid I hurt the Young Lady's feelings by asking her if she meant Herbert by the

"nightbird,"a very absurd suggestion about two unsentimental people. She said, "Nonsense;" but she

afterwards told the Mistress that there were emotions that one could never put into words without the danger

of being ridiculous; a profound truth. And yet I should not like to say that there is not a tender lonesomeness

in love that can get comfort out of a nightbird in a cloud, if there be such a thing. Analysis is the death of

But to return to the winds. Certain people impress us as the winds do. Mandeville never comes in that I do

not feel a northwind vigor and healthfulness in his cordial, sincere, hearty manner, and in his wholesome

way of looking at things. The Parson, you would say, was the east wind, and only his intimates know that his

peevishness is only a querulous humor. In the fair west wind I know the Mistress herself, full of hope, and

always the first one to discover a bit of blue in a cloudy sky. It would not be just to apply what I have said of

the south wind to any of our visitors, but it did blow a little while Herbert was here.

In point of pure enjoyment, with an intellectual sparkle in it, I suppose that no luxurious lounging on tropical

isles set in tropical seas compares with the positive happiness one may have before a great woodfire (not two

sticks laid crossways in a grate), with a veritable New England winter raging outside. In order to get the

highest enjoyment, the faculties must be alert, and not be lulled into a mere recipient dullness. There are those

who prefer a warm bath to a brisk walk in the inspiring air, where ten thousand keen influences minister to

the sense of beauty and run along the excited nerves. There are, for instance, a sharpness of horizon outline

and a delicacy of color on distant hills which are wanting in summer, and which convey to one rightly

organized the keenest delight, and a refinement of enjoyment that is scarcely sensuous, not at all sentimental,

I was speaking to Mandeville about this, and he said that I was drawing it altogether too fine; that he

experienced sensations of pleasure in being out in almost all weathers; that he rather liked to breast a north

wind, and that there was a certain inspiration in sharp outlines and in a landscape in trim winterquarters,

with stripped trees, and, as it were, scudding through the season under bare poles; but that he must say that he

preferred the weather in which he could sit on the fence by the woodlot, with the spring sun on his back, and

A very pretty idea for Mandeville; and I fear he is getting to have private thoughts about the Young Lady.

Mandeville naturally likes the robustness and sparkle of winter, and it has been a little suspicious to hear him

I wonder how many people there are in New England who know the glory and inspiration of a winter walk

just before sunset, and that, too, not only on days of clear sky, when the west is aflame with a rosy color,

which has no suggestion of languor or unsatisfied longing in it, but on dull days, when the sullen clouds hang

about the horizon, full of threats of storm and the terrors of the gathering night. We are very busy with our

own affairs, but there is always something going on outdoors worth looking at; and there is seldom an hour

before sunset that has not some special attraction. And, besides, it puts one in the mood for the cheer and

Probably if the people of New England could have a plebiscitum on their weather, they would vote against it,

especially against winter. Almost no one speaks well of winter. And this suggests the idea that most people

here were either born in the wrong place, or do not know what is best for them. I doubt if these grumblers

would be any better satisfied, or would turn out as well, in the tropics. Everybody knows our virtues,at

least if they believe half we tell them,and for delicate beauty, that rare plant, I should look among the girls

of the New England hills as confidently as anywhere, and I have traveled as far south as New Jersey, and

west of the Genesee Valley. Indeed, it would be easy to show that the parents of the pretty girls in the West

emigrated from New England. And yetsuch is the mystery of Providenceno one would expect that one

of the sweetest and most delicate flowers that blooms, the trailing. arbutus, would blossom in this

It seems unaccountable to a superficial observer that the thousands of people who are dissatisfied with their

climate do not seek a more congenial oneor stop grumbling. The world is so small, and all parts of it are so

accessible, it has so many varieties of climate, that one could surely suit himself by searching; and, then, is it

worth while to waste our one short life in the midst of unpleasant surroundings and in a constant friction with

that which is disagreeable? One would suppose that people set down on this little globe would seek places on

it most agreeable to themselves. It must be that they are much more content with the climate and country

upon which they happen, by the accident of their birth, than they pretend to be.

Home sympathies and charities are most active in the winter. Coming in from my late walk,in fact driven

in by a hurrying north wind that would brook no delay,a wind that brought snow that did not seem to fall

out of a bounteous sky, but to be blown from polar fields,I find the Mistress returned from town, all in a

There has been a meeting of a woman's association for Ameliorating the Condition of somebody here at

home. Any one can belong to it by paying a dollar, and for twenty dollars one can become a life

Ameliorator,a sort of life assurance. The Mistress, at the meeting, I believe, "seconded the motion" several

times, and is one of the VicePresidents; and this family honor makes me feel almost as if I were a president

of something myself. These little distinctions are among the sweetest things in life, and to see one's name

officially printed stimulates his charity, and is almost as satisfactory as being the chairman of a committee or

the mover of a resolution. It is, I think, fortunate, and not at all discreditable, that our little vanity, which is

reckoned among our weaknesses, is thus made to contribute to the activity of our nobler powers. Whatever

we may say, we all of us like distinction; and probably there is no more subtle flattery than that conveyed in

There used to be a society for ameliorating the condition of the Jews; but they were found to be so much

more adept than other people in ameliorating their own condition that I suppose it was given up. Mandeville

says that to his knowledge there are a great many people who get up ameliorating enterprises merely to be

conspicuously busy in society, or to earn a little something in a good cause. They seem to think that the world

owes them a living because they are philanthropists. In this Mandeville does not speak with his usual charity.

It is evident that there are Jews, and some Gentiles, whose condition needs ameliorating, and if very little is

really accomplished in the effort for them, it always remains true that the charitable reap a benefit to

themselves. It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another

OUR NEXTDOOR NEIGHBOR. Why is it that almost all philanthropists and reformers are disagreeable?

I ought to explain who our nextdoor neighbor is. He is the person who comes in without knocking, drops in

in the most natural way, as his wife does also, and not seldom in time to take the afterdinner cup of tea

before the fire. Formal society begins as soon as you lock your doors, and only admit visitors through the

media of bells and servants. It is lucky for us that our nextdoor neighbor is honest.

THE PARSON. Why do you class reformers and philanthropists together? Those usually called reformers are

not philanthropists at all. They are agitators. Finding the world disagreeable to themselves, they wish to make

OUR NEXT DOOR. Well, granting the distinction, why are both apt to be unpleasant people to live with?

THE PARSON. As if the unpleasant people who won't mind their own business were confined to the classes

you mention! Some of the best people I know are philanthropists,I mean the genuine ones, and not the

THE FIRETENDER. It is not altogether the not minding their own business. Nobody does that. The usual

explanation is, that people with one idea are tedious. But that is not all of it. For few persons have more than

one idea,ministers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, manufacturers, merchants,they all think the world they

MANDEVILLE. And you might add authors. To them nearly all the life of the world is in letters, and I

suppose they would be astonished if they knew how little the thoughts of the majority of people are occupied

with books, and with all that vast thought circulation which is the vital current of the world to bookmen.

Newspapers have reached their present power by becoming unliterary, and reflecting all the interests of the

THE MISTRESS. I have noticed one thing, that the most popular persons in society are those who take the

world as it is, find the least fault, and have no hobbies. They are always wanted to dinner.

THE FIRETENDER. It seems to me that the real reason why reformers and some philanthropists are

unpopular is, that they disturb our serenity and make us conscious of our own shortcomings. It is only now

and then that a whole people get a spasm of reformatory fervor, of investigation and regeneration. At other

OUR NEXT DOOR. Professional reformers and philanthropists are insufferably conceited and intolerant.

THE MISTRESS. Everything depends upon the spirit in which a reform or a scheme of philanthropy is

MANDEVILLE. I attended a protracted convention of reformers of a certain evil, once, and had the pleasure

of taking dinner with a tableful of them. It was one of those country dinners accompanied with green tea.

Every one disagreed with every one else, and you would n't wonder at it, if you had seen them. They were

people with whom good food wouldn't agree. George Thompson was expected at the convention, and I

remember that there was almost a cordiality in the talk about him, until one sallow brother casually

mentioned that George took snuff,when a chorus of deprecatory groans went up from the table. One

longfaced maiden in spectacles, with purple ribbons in her hair, who drank five cups of tea by my count,

declared that she was perfectly disgusted, and did n't want to hear him speak. In the course of the meal the

talk ran upon the discipline of children, and how to administer punishment. I was quite taken by the remark of

a thin, dyspeptic man who summed up the matter by growling out in a harsh, deep bass voice, "Punish 'em in

THE PARSON. I supposed you would say that he was a minister. There is another thing about those people. I

think they are working against the course of nature. Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She

perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue. There's a split in my thumbnail that has been scrupulously

continued for many years, not withstanding all my efforts to make the nail resume its old regularity. You see

the same thing in trees whose bark is cut, and in melons that have had only one summer's intimacy with

squashes. The bad traits in character are passed down from generation to generation with as much care as the

MANDEVILLE. When I was a boy, I always associated Calvinism and calomel together. I thought that

I fear we are not getting on much with the joyousness of winter. In order to be exhilarating it must be real

winter. I have noticed that the lower the thermometer sinks the more fiercely the north wind rages, and the

deeper the snow is, the higher rise the spirits of the community. The activity of the "elements" has a great

effect upon country folk especially; and it is a more wholesome excitement than that caused by a great

conflagration. The abatement of a snowstorm that grows to exceptional magnitude is regretted, for there is

always the halfhope that this will be, since it has gone so far, the largest fall of snow ever known in the

region, burying out of sight the great fall of 1808, the account of which is circumstantially and aggravatingly

thrown in our way annually upon the least provocation. We all know how it reads: "Some said it began at

daylight, others that it set in after sunrise; but all agree that by eight o'clock Friday morning it was snowing in

The morning after we settled the fiveor is it seven?points of Calvinism, there began a very hopeful

snowstorm, one of those widesweeping, careering storms that may not much affect the city, but which

strongly impress the country imagination with a sense of the personal qualities of the weather,power,

persistency, fierceness, and roaring exultation. Outdoors was terrible to those who looked out of windows,

and heard the raging wind, and saw the commotion in all the high treetops and the writhing of the low

evergreens, and could not summon resolution to go forth and breast and conquer the bluster. The sky was

dark with snow, which was not permitted to fall peacefully like a blessed mantle, as it sometimes does, but

was blown and rent and tossed like the split canvas of a ship in a gale. The world was taken possession of by

the demons of the air, who had their will of it. There is a sort of fascination in such a scene, equal to that of a

tempest at sea, and without its attendant haunting sense of peril; there is no fear that the house will founder or

dash against your neighbor's cottage, which is dimly seen anchored across the field; at every thundering onset

there is no fear that the cook's galley will upset, or the screw break loose and smash through the side, and we

are not in momently expectation of the tinkling of the little bell to "stop her." The snow rises in drifting

waves, and the naked trees bend like strained masts; but so long as the windowblinds remain fast, and the

chimneytops do not go, we preserve an equal mind. Nothing more serious can happen than the failure of the

butcher's and the grocer's carts, unless, indeed, the little newscarrier should fail to board us with the world's

daily bulletin, or our nextdoor neighbor should be deterred from coming to sit by the blazing, excited fire,

and interchange the trifling, harmless gossip of the day. The feeling of seclusion on such a day is sweet, but

the true friend who does brave the storm and come is welcomed with a sort of enthusiasm that his arrival in

pleasant weather would never excite. The snowbound in their Arctic hulk are glad to see even a wandering

On such a day I recall the great snowstorms on the northern New England hills, which lasted for a week

with no cessation, with no sunrise or sunset, and no observation at noon; and the sky all the while dark with

the driving snow, and the whole world full of the noise of the rioting Boreal forces; until the roads were

obliterated, the fences covered, and the snow was piled solidly above the first story windows of the

farmhouse on one side, and drifted before the front door so high that egress could only be had by tunneling

After such a battle and siege, when the wind fell and the sun struggled out again, the pallid world lay subdued

and tranquil, and the scattered dwellings were not unlike wrecks stranded by the tempest and half buried in

sand. But when the blue sky again bent over all, the wide expanse of snow sparkled like diamondfields, and

the chimney signalsmokes could be seen, how beautiful was the picture! Then began the stir abroad, and the

efforts to open up communication through roads, or fields, or wherever paths could be broken, and the ways

to the meetinghouse first of all. Then from every house and hamlet the men turned out with shovels, with

the patient, lumbering oxen yoked to the sleds, to break the roads, driving into the deepest drifts, shoveling

and shouting as if the severe labor were a holiday frolic, the courage and the hilarity rising with the

difficulties encountered; and relief parties, meeting at length in the midst of the wide white desolation, hailed

each other as chance explorers in new lands, and made the whole countryside ring with the noise of their

congratulations. There was as much excitement and healthy stirring of the blood in it as in the Fourth of July,

and perhaps as much patriotism. The boy saw it in dumb show from the distant, low farmhouse window, and

wished he were a man. At night there were great stories of achievement told by the cavernous fireplace; great

latitude was permitted in the estimation of the size of particular drifts, but never any agreement was reached

as to the "depth on a level." I have observed since that people are quite as apt to agree upon the marvelous

By the firelight and the twilight, the Young Lady is finishing a letter to Herbert,writing it, literally, on her

knees, transforming thus the simple deed into an act of devotion. Mandeville says that it is bad for her eyes,

but the sight of it is worse for his eyes. He begins to doubt the wisdom of reliance upon that worn apothegm

Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that

I did intend to insert here a letter of Herbert's to the Young Lady, obtained, I need not say, honorably, as

private letters which get into print always are,not to gratify a vulgar curiosity, but

to show how the most unsentimental and cynical people are affected by the master passion. But I cannot bring

myself to do it. Even in the interests of science one has no right to make an autopsy of two loving hearts,

especially when they are suffering under a late attack of the one agreeable epidemic.

All the world loves a lover, but it laughs at him none the less in his extravagances. He loses his accustomed

reticence; he has something of the martyr's willingness for publicity; he would even like to show the sincerity

of his devotion by some piece of open heroism. Why should he conceal a discovery which has transformed

the world to him, a secret which explains all the mysteries of nature and humanity? He is in that ecstasy of

mind which prompts those who were never orators before to rise in an experiencemeeting and pour out a

flood of feeling in the tritest language and the most conventional terms. I am not sure that Herbert, while in

this glow, would be ashamed of his letter in print, but this is one of the cases where chancery would step in

and protect one from himself by his next friend. This is really a delicate matter, and perhaps it is brutal to

In truth, the letter would hardly be interesting in print. Love has a marvelous power of vivifying language and

charging the simplest words with the most tender meaning, of restoring to them the power they had when first

coined. They are words of fire to those two who know their secret, but not to others. It is generally admitted

that the best loveletters would not make very good literature. "Dearest," begins Herbert, in a burst of

originality, felicitously selecting a word whose exclusiveness shuts out all the world but one, and which is a

whole letter, poem, confession, and creed in one breath. What a weight of meaning it has to carry! There may

be beauty and wit and grace and naturalness and even the splendor of fortune elsewhere, but there is one

woman in the world whose sweet presence would be compensation for the loss of all else. It is not to be

reasoned about; he wants that one; it is her plume dancing down the sunny street that sets his heart beating;

he knows her form among a thousand, and follows her; he longs to run after her carriage, which the cruel

coachman whirls out of his sight. It is marvelous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is in a

panic when he thinks of it. And what exquisite flattery is in that little word addressed to her, and with what

sweet and meek triumph she repeats it to herself, with a feeling that is not altogether pity for those who still

stand and wait. To be chosen out of all the available worldit is almost as much bliss as it is to choose. "All

that long, long stageride from Blim's to Portage I thought of you every moment, and wondered what you

were doing and how you were looking just that moment, and I found the occupation so charming that I was

almost sorry when the journey was ended." Not much in that! But I have no doubt the Young Lady read it

over and over, and dwelt also upon every moment, and found in it new proof of unshaken constancy, and had

in that and the like things in the letter a sense of the sweetest communion. There is nothing in this letter that

we need dwell on it, but I am convinced that the mail does not carry any other letters so valuable as this sort.

I suppose that the appearance of Herbert in this new light unconsciously gave tone a little to the evening's

talk; not that anybody mentioned him, but Mandeville was evidently generalizing from the qualities that

MANDEVILLE. There seems to be something in some persons that wins them liking, special or general,

MANDEVILLE. I'm not sure of that. There are those who are friendless, and would be if they had endless

acquaintances. But, to take the case away from ordinary examples, in which habit and a thousand

circumstances influence liking, what is it that determines the world upon a personal regard for authors whom

THE MISTRESS. More likely it is a sort of tradition; I don't believe that the world has a feeling of personal

THE FIRETENDFR. Which comes to the same thing. The qualities, the spirit, that got him the love of his

MANDEVILLE. That does n't seem to me sufficient. Shakespeare has put everything into his plays and

poems, swept the whole range of human sympathies and passions, and at times is inspired by the sweetest

MANDEVILLE. Yet I apprehend that no person living has any personal regard for Shakespeare, or that his

personality affects many,except they stand in Stratford church and feel a sort of awe at the thought that the

THE PARSON. I don't think the world cares personally for any mere man or woman dead for centuries.

MANDEVILLE. But there is a difference. I think there is still rather a warm feeling for Socrates the man,

independent of what he said, which is little known. Homer's works are certainly better known, but no one

OUR NEXT DOOR. Why not go back to Moses? We've got the evening before us for digging up people.

MANDEVILLE. Moses is a very good illustration. No name of antiquity is better known, and yet I fancy he

OUR NEXT DOOR. Fudge! You just get up in any lecture assembly and propose three cheers for Socrates,

and see where you'll be. Mandeville ought to be a missionary, and read Robert Browning to the Fijis.

THE FIRETENDER. How do you account for the alleged personal regard for Socrates?

MANDEVILLE. He was a plain man; his sympathies were with the people; he had what is roughly known as

"horsesense," and he was homely. Franklin and Abraham Lincoln belong to his class. They were all

philosophers of the shrewd sort, and they all had humor. It was fortunate for Lincoln that, with his other

qualities, he was homely. That was the last touching recommendation to the popular heart.

THE MISTRESS. Do you remember that ugly brownstone statue of St. Antonio by the bridge in Sorrento?

He must have been a coarse saint, patron of pigs as he was, but I don't know any one anywhere, or the

OUR NEXT DOOR. Ugliness being trump, I wonder more people don't win. Mandeville, why don't you get

up a "centenary" of Socrates, and put up his statue in the Central Park? It would make that one of Lincoln in

THE PARSON. Oh, you'll see that some day, when they have a museum there illustrating the "Science of

THE FIRETENDER. Doubtless, to go back to what we were talking of, the world has a fondness for some

authors, and thinks of them with an affectionate and halfpitying familiarity; and it may be that this grows

out of something in their lives quite as much as anything in their writings. There seems to be more disposition

of personal liking to Thackeray than to Dickens, now both are dead,a result that would hardly have been

predicted when the world was crying over Little Nell, or agreeing to hate Becky Sharp.

THE YOUNG LADY. What was that you were telling about Charles Lamb, the other day, Mandeville? Is not

MANDEVILLE. He is a striking example of an author who is loved. Very likely the remembrance of his

tribulations has still something to do with the tenderness felt for him. He supported no dignity and permitted

a familiarity which indicated no selfappreciation of his real rank in the world of letters. I have heard that his

OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a relief to know that! Do you happen to know what Socrates was called?

MANDEVILLE. I have seen people who knew Lamb very well. One of them told me, as illustrating his want

of dignity, that as he was going home late one night through the nearly empty streets, he was met by a

roystering party who were making a night of it from tavern to tavern. They fell upon Lamb, attracted by his

odd figure and hesitating manner, and, hoisting him on their shoulders, carried him off, singing as they went.

Lamb enjoyed the lark, and did not tell them who he was. When they were tired of lugging him, they lifted

him, with much effort and difficulty, to the top of a high wall, and left him there amid the broken bottles,

utterly unable to get down. Lamb remained there philosophically in the enjoyment of his novel adventure,

MANDEVILLE. Oh, Lamb told all about it next morning; and when asked afterwards why he did so, he

The King sat in the winterhouse in the ninth month, and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him . .

That seems to be a pleasant and homelike picture from a not very remote period,less than twentyfive

hundred years ago, and many centuries after the fall of Troy. And that was not so very long ago, for Thebes,

in the splendid streets of which Homer wandered and sang to the kings when Memphis, whose ruins are older

than history, was its younger rival, was twelve centuries old when Paris ran away with Helen.

I am sorry that the originaland you can usually do anything with the "original"does not bear me out in

saying that it was a pleasant picture. I should like to believe that Jehoiakiinfor that was the singular name

of the gentleman who sat by his hearthstonehad just received the Memphis "Palimpsest," fifteen days in

advance of the date of its publication, and that his secretary was reading to him that monthly, and cutting its

leaves as he read. I should like to have seen it in that year when Thales was learning astronomy in Memphis,

and Necho was organizing his campaign against Carchemish. If Jehoiakim took the "Attic Quarterly," he

might have read its comments on the banishment of the Alcmaeonida:, and its gibes at Solon for his

prohibitory laws, forbidding the sale of unguents, limiting the luxury of dress, and interfering with the sacred

rights of mourners to passionately bewail the dead in the Asiatic manner; the same number being enriched

with contributions from two rising poets,a lyric of love by Sappho, and an ode sent by Anacreon from

Teos, with an editorial note explaining that the Maces was not responsible for the sentiments of the poem.

But, in fact, the gentleman who sat before the backlog in his winterhouse had other things to think of. For

Nebuchadnezzar was coming that way with the chariots and horses of Babylon and a great crowd of

marauders; and the king had not even the poor choice whether he would be the vassal of the Chaldean or of

the Egyptian. To us, this is only a ghostly show of monarchs and conquerors stalking across vast historic

spaces. It was no doubt a vulgar enough scene of war and plunder. The great captains of that age went about

to harry each other's territories and spoil each other's cities very much as we do nowadays, and for similar

reasons;Napoleon the Great in Moscow, Napoleon the Small in Italy, Kaiser William in Paris, Great Scott

The FireTender sat in his wintergarden in the third month; there was a fire on the hearth burning before

him. He cut the leaves of "Scribner's Monthly" with his penknife, and thought of Jehoiakim.

That seems as real as the other. In the garden, which is a room of the house, the tall callas, rooted in the

ground, stand about the fountain; the sun, streaming through the glass, illumines the manyhued flowers. I

wonder what Jehoiakim did with the mealybug on his passionvine, and if he had any way of removing the

scalebug from his African acacia? One would like to know, too, how he treated the red spider on the Le

Marque rose. The record is silent. I do not doubt he had all these insects in his wintergarden, and the

aphidae besides; and he could not smoke them out with tobacco, for the world had not yet fallen into its

second stage of the knowledge of good and evil by eating the forbidden tobaccoplant.

I confess that this little picture of a fire on the hearth so many centuries ago helps to make real and interesting

to me that somewhat misty past. No doubt the lotus and the acanthus from the Nile grew in that

winterhouse, and perhaps Jehoiakim attemptedthe most difficult thing in the world the cultivation of the

wild flowers from Lebanon. Perhaps Jehoiakim was interested also, as I am through this ancient

fireplace,which is a sort of domestic window into the ancient world,in the loves of Bernice and Abaces

at the court of the Pharaohs. I see that it is the same thing as the sentiment perhaps it is the shrinking which

every soul that is a soul has, sooner or later, from isolationwhich grew up between Herbert and the Young

Lady Staying With Us. Jeremiah used to come in to that fireside very much as the Parson does to ours. The

Parson, to be sure, never prophesies, but he grumbles, and is the chorus in the play that sings the everlasting

ai ai of "I told you so!" Yet we like the Parson. He is the sprig of bitter herb that makes the pottage

wholesome. I should rather, ten times over, dispense with the flatterers and the smoothsayers than the

grumblers. But the grumblers are of two sorts,the healthfultoned and the whiners. There are makers of

beer who substitute for the clean bitter of the hops some deleterious drug, and then seek to hide the fraud by

some cloying sweet. There is nothing of this sickish drug in the Parson's talk, nor was there in that of

Jeremiah, I sometimes think there is scarcely enough of this wholesome tonic in modern society. The Parson

says he never would give a child sugarcoated pills. Mandeville says he never would give them any. After

We were talking of this late news from Jerusalem. The FireTender was saying that it is astonishing how

much is telegraphed us from the East that is not half so interesting. He was at a loss philosophically to

account for the fact that the world is so eager to know the news of yesterday which is unimportant, and so

MANDEVILLE. I suspect that it arises from the want of imagination. People need to touch the facts, and

nearness in time is contiguity. It would excite no interest to bulletin the last siege of Jerusalem in a village

where the event was unknown, if the date was appended; and yet the account of it is incomparably more

OUR NEXT DOOR. The daily news is a necessity. I cannot get along without my morning paper. The other

morning I took it up, and was absorbed in the telegraphic columns for an hour nearly. I thoroughly enjoyed

the feeling of immediate contact with all the world of yesterday, until I read among the minor items that

Patrick Donahue, of the city of New York, died of a sunstroke. If he had frozen to death, I should have

enjoyed that; but to die of sunstroke in February seemed inappropriate, and I turned to the date of the paper.

When I found it was printed in July, I need not say that I lost all interest in it, though why the trivialities and

crimes and accidents, relating to people I never knew, were not as good six months after date as twelve hours,

THE FIRETENDER. You know that in Concord the latest news, except a remark or two by Thoreau or

Emerson, is the Vedas. I believe the RigVeda is read at the breakfasttable instead of the Boston journals.

MANDEVILLE. That is only because it is supposed to be older. I have understood that the Bible is very well

OUR NEXT DOOR. There was a project on foot to put it into the circulating library, but the title New in the

HERBERT. Well, I have a good deal of sympathy with Concord as to the news. We are fed on a daily diet of

trivial events and gossip, of the unfruitful sayings of thoughtless men and women, until our mental digestion

is seriously impaired; the day will come when no one will be able to sit down to a thoughtful, wellwrought

THE MISTRESS. I doubt if a daily newspaper is a necessity, in the higher sense of the word.

THE MISTRESS. Don't interrupt, unless you have something to say; though I should like to know how much

gossip there is afloat that the minister does not know. The newspaper may be needed in society, but how

quickly it drops out of mind when one goes beyond the bounds of what is called civilization. You remember

when we were in the depths of the woods last summer how difficult it was to get up any interest in the files of

late papers that reached us, and how unreal all the struggle and turmoil of the world seemed. We stood apart,

THE YOUNG LADY. Yes, that was real life. I never tired of the guide's stories; there was some interest in

the intelligence that a deer had been down to eat the lilypads at the foot of the lake the night before; that a

bear's track was seen on the trail we crossed that day; even Mandeville's fishstories had a certain air of

probability; and how to roast a trout in the ashes and serve him hot and juicy and clean, and how to cook soup

THE PARSON. You would have had no such problems at home. Why will people go so far to put themselves

to such inconvenience? I hate the woods. Isolation breeds conceit; there are no people so conceited as those

THE YOUNG LADY. For my part, I feel humble in the presence of mountains, and in the vast stretches of

THE PARSON. I'll be bound a woman would feel just as nobody would expect her to feel, under given

MANDEVILLE. I think the reason why the newspaper and the world it carries take no hold of us in the

wilderness is that we become a kind of vegetable ourselves when we go there. I have often attempted to

improve my mind in the woods with good solid books. You might as well offer a bunch of celery to an

oyster. The mind goes to sleep: the senses and the instincts wake up. The best I can do when it rains, or the

trout won't bite, is to read Dumas's novels. Their ingenuity will almost keep a man awake after supper, by the

campfire. And there is a kind of unity about them that I like; the history is as good as the morality.

THE MISTRESS. Mandeville misrepresents himself in the woods. I heard him one night repeat "The Vision

of Sir Launfal"(THE FIRETENDER. Which comes very near being our best poem.)as we were

crossing the lake, and the guides became so absorbed in it that they forgot to paddle, and sat listening with

THE PARSON. Mandeville likes to show off well enough. I heard that he related to a woods' boy up there the

whole of the Siege of Troy. The boy was very much interested, and said "there'd been a man up there that

spring from Troy, looking up timber." Mandeville always carries the news when he goes into the country.

MANDEVILLE. I'm going to take the Parson's sermon on Jonah next summer; it's the nearest to anything

like news we've had from his pulpit in ten years. But, seriously, the boy was very well informed. He'd heard

of Albany; his father took in the "Weekly Tribune," and he had a partial conception of Horace Greeley.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I never went so far out of the world in America yet that the name of Horace Greeley did

n't rise up before me. One of the first questions asked by any campfire is, "Did ye ever see Horace?"

HERBERT. Which shows the power of the press again. But I have often remarked how little real conception

of the moving world, as it is, people in remote regions get from the newspaper. It needs to be read in the

midst of events. A chip cast ashore in a refluent eddy tells no tale of the force and swiftness of the current.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I don't exactly get the drift of that last remark; but I rather like a remark that I can't

HERBERT. I see that I must talk in words of one syllable. The newspaper has little effect upon the remote

country mind, because the remote country mind is interested in a very limited number of things. Besides, as

the Parson says, it is conceited. The most accomplished scholar will be the butt of all the guides in the woods,

because he cannot follow a trail that would puzzle a sable (saple the trappers call it).

THE PARSON. It's enough to read the summer letters that people write to the newspapers from the country

and the woods. Isolated from the activity of the world, they come to think that the little adventures of their

stupid days and nights are important. Talk about that being real life! Compare the letters such people write

with the other contents of the newspaper, and you will see which life is real. That's one reason I hate to have

THE MISTRESS. I should like to see something the Parson does n't hate to have come.

THE FIRETENDER. I don't see that we are getting any nearer the solution of the original question. The

OUR NEXT DOOR. I have a theory that a newspaper might be published at little cost, merely by reprinting

the numbers of years before, only altering the dates; just as the Parson preaches over his sermons.

THE FIRETENDER. It's evident we must have a higher order of newsgatherers. It has come to this, that

the newspaper furnishes thoughtmaterial for all the world, actually prescribes from day to day the themes

the world shall think on and talk about. The occupation of newsgathering becomes, therefore, the most

important. When you think of it, it is astonishing that this department should not be in the hands of the ablest

men, accomplished scholars, philosophical observers, discriminating selectors of the news of the world that is

worth thinking over and talking about. The editorial comments frequently are able enough, but is it worth

while keeping an expensive mill going to grind chaff? I sometimes wonder, as I open my morning paper, if

nothing did happen in the twentyfour hours except crimes, accidents, defalcations, deaths of unknown

OUR NEXT DOOR. I have even noticed that murders have deteriorated; they are not so hightoned and

THE FIRETENDER. It is true that the newspapers have improved vastly within the last decade.

HERBERT. I think, for one, that they are very much above the level of the ordinary gossip of the country.

THE FIRETENDER. But I am tired of having the underworld still occupy so much room in the

newspapers. The reporters are rather more alert for a dogfight than a philological convention. It must be that

the good deeds of the world outnumber the bad in any given day; and what a good reflex action it would have

on society if they could be more fully reported than the bad! I suppose the Parson would call this the

HERBERT. I wonder what influence on the quality (I say nothing of quantity) of news the coming of women

THE MISTRESS. All of them got up by speculating men, who impose upon the vanity of weak women.

HERBERT. I think women reporters are more given to personal details and gossip than the men. When I read

the Washington correspondence I am proud of my country, to see how many Apollo Belvederes, Adonises,

how much marble brow and piercing eye and hyacinthine locks, we have in the two houses of Congress.

THE YOUNG LADY. That's simply because women understand the personal weakness of men; they have a

MANDEVILLE. I think women will bring in elements of brightness, picturesqueness, and purity very much

needed. Women have a power of investing simple ordinary things with a charm; men are bungling narrators

THE PARSON. The mistake they make is in trying to write, and especially to "stumpspeak," like men; next

HERBERT. I heard one once address a legislative committee. The knowing air, the familiar, jocular, smart

manner, the nodding and winking innuendoes, supposed to be those of a man "up to snuff," and au fait in

political wiles, were inexpressibly comical. And yet the exhibition was pathetic, for it had the suggestive

vulgarity of a woman in man's clothes. The imitation is always a dreary failure.

THE MISTRESS. Such women are the rare exceptions. I am ready to defend my sex; but I won't attempt to

THE FIRETENDER. I have great hope that women will bring into the newspaper an elevating influence;

the common and sweet life of society is much better fitted to entertain and instruct us than the exceptional

and extravagant. I confess (saving the Mistress's presence) that the evening talk over the dessert at dinner is

much more entertaining and piquant than the morning paper, and often as important.

MANDEVILLE. The person, not the subject. There is no entertainment so full of quiet pleasure as the

hearing a lady of cultivation and refinement relate her day's experience in her daily rounds of calls, charitable

visits, shopping, errands of relief and condolence. The evening budget is better than the finance minister's.

OUR NEXT DOOR. That's even so. My wife will pick up more news in six hours than I can get in a week,

MANDEVILLE. I don't mean gossip, by any means, or scandal. A woman of culture skims over that like a

bird, never touching it with the tip of a wing. What she brings home is the freshness and brightness of life.

She touches everything so daintily, she hits off a character in a sentence, she gives the pith of a dialogue

without tediousness, she mimics without vulgarity; her narration sparkles, but it does n't sting. The picture of

her day is full of vivacity, and it gives new value and freshness to common things. If we could only have on

THE FIRETENDER. We want something more of this grace, sprightliness, and harmless play of the finer

OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder Mandeville does n't marry, and become a permanent subscriber to his

THE YOUNG LADY. Perhaps he does not relish the idea of being unable to stop his subscription.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Parson, won't you please punch that fire, and give us more blaze? we are getting into the

Herbert returned to us in March. The Young Lady was spending the winter with us, and March, in spite of the

calendar, turned out to be a winter month. It usually is in New England, and April too, for that matter. And I

cannot say it is unfortunate for us. There are so many topics to be turned over and settled at our fireside that a

winter of ordinary length would make little impression on the list. The fireside is, after all, a sort of private

court of chancery, where nothing ever does come to a final decision. The chief effect of talk on any subject is

to strengthen one's own opinions, and, in fact, one never knows exactly what he does believe until he is

warmed into conviction by the heat of attack and defence. A man left to himself drifts about like a boat on a

Herbert said he had been dipping into the recent novels written by women, here and there, with a view to

noting the effect upon literature of this sudden and rather overwhelming accession to it. There was a good

deal of talk about it evening after evening, off and on, and I can only undertake to set down fragments of it.

HERBERT. I should say that the distinguishing feature of the literature of this day is the prominence women

have in its production. They figure in most of the magazines, though very rarely in the scholarly and critical

reviews, and in thousands of newspapers; to them we are indebted for the oceans of Sundayschool books,

and they write the majority of the novels, the serial stories, and they mainly pour out the watery flood of tales

in the weekly papers. Whether this is to result in more good than evil it is impossible yet to say, and perhaps

it would be unjust to say, until this generation has worked off its froth, and women settle down to artistic,

THE MISTRESS. You don't mean to say that George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell, and George Sand, and Mrs.

Browning, before her marriage and severe attack of spiritism, are less true to art than contemporary men

HERBERT. You name some exceptions that show the bright side of the picture, not only for the present, but

for the future. Perhaps genius has no sex; but ordinary talent has. I refer to the great body of novels, which

you would know by internal evidence were written by women. They are of two sorts: the domestic story,

entirely unidealized, and as flavorless as watergruel; and the spiced novel, generally immoral in tendency, in

which the social problems are handled, unhappy marriages, affinity and passional attraction, bigamy, and the

violation of the seventh commandment. These subjects are treated in the rawest manner, without any settled

ethics, with little discrimination of eternal right and wrong, and with very little sense of responsibility for

what is set forth. Many of these novels are merely the blind outbursts of a nature impatient of restraint and the

conventionalities of society, and are as chaotic as the untrained minds that produce them.

MANDEVILLE. Don't you think these novels fairly represent a social condition of unrest and upheaval?

HERBERT. Very likely; and they help to create and spread abroad the discontent they describe. Stories of

bigamy (sometimes disguised by divorce), of unhappy marriages, where the injured wife, through an entire

volume, is on the brink of falling into the arms of a sneaking lover, until death kindly removes the obstacle,

and the two souls, who were born for each other, but got separated in the cradle, melt and mingle into one in

THE FIRETENDER. The most disagreeable object to me in modern literature is the man the women

novelists have introduced as the leading character; the women who come in contact with him seem to be

fascinated by his disdainful mien, his giant strength, and his brutal manner. He is broad across the shoulders,

heavily moulded, yet as lithe as a cat; has an ugly scar across his right cheek; has been in the four quarters of

the globe; knows seventeen languages; had a harem in Turkey and a Fayaway in the Marquesas; can be as

polished as Bayard in the drawingroom, but is as gloomy as Conrad in the library; has a terrible eye and a

withering glance, but can be instantly subdued by a woman's hand, if it is not his wife's; and through all his

THE MISTRESS. Don't you think the Count of Monte Cristo is the elder brother of Rochester?

THE FIRETENDER. One is a mere hero of romance; the other is meant for a real man.

HERBERT. That's not the question; but what are women who write so large a proportion of the current

stories bringing into literature? Aside from the question of morals, and the absolutely demoralizing manner of

treating social questions, most of their stories are vapid and weak beyond expression, and are slovenly in

THE MISTRESS. Considering that women have been shut out from the training of the universities, and have

few opportunities for the wide observation that men enjoy, isn't it pretty well that the foremost living writers

HERBERT. You can say that for the moment, since Thackeray and Dickens have just died. But it does not

affect the general estimate. We are inundated with a flood of weak writing. Take the Sunday school

literature, largely the product of women; it has n't as much character as a dried apple pie. I don't know what

OUR NEXT DOOR. We are living, we are dwelling, in a grand and awful time; I'm glad I don't write novels.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I tried a Sundayschool book once; but I made the good boy end in the poorhouse, and

the bad boy go to Congress; and the publisher said it wouldn't do, the public wouldn't stand that sort of thing.

HERBERT. Well, I think they are in a tentative state as to literature, and we cannot yet tell what they will do.

Some of our most brilliant books of travel, correspondence, and writing on topics in which their sympathies

have warmly interested them, are by women. Some of them are also strong writers in the daily journals.

MANDEVILLE. I 'm not sure there's anything a woman cannot do as well as a man, if she sets her heart on it.

THE PARSON. Well, it does n't trouble her, if she wants to do anything. She looks at the end, not the means.

A woman, set on anything, will walk right through the moral crockery without wincing. She'd be a great deal

more unscrupulous in politics than the average man. Did you ever see a female lobbyist? Or a criminal? It is

Lady Macbeth who does not falter. Don't raise your hands at me! The sweetest angel or the coolest devil is a

woman. I see in some of the modern novels we have been talking of the same unscrupulous daring, a

blindness to moral distinctions, a constant exaltation of a passion into a virtue, an entire disregard of the

immutable laws on which the family and society rest. And you ask lawyers and trustees how scrupulous

THE FIRETENDER. Women are often ignorant of affairs, and, besides, they may have a notion often that a

woman ought to be privileged more than a man in business matters; but I tell you, as a rule, that if men would

consult their wives, they would go a deal straighter in business operations than they do go.

THE PARSON. We are all poor sinners. But I've another indictment against the women writers. We get no

good oldfashioned lovestories from them. It's either a quarrel of discordant natures one a panther, and the

other a polar bearfor courtship, until one of them is crippled by a railway accident; or a long wrangle of

married life between two unpleasant people, who can neither live comfortably together nor apart. I suppose,

by what I see, that sweet wooing, with all its torturing and delightful uncertainty, still goes on in the world;

and I have no doubt that the majority of married people live more happily than the unmarried. But it's easier

MANDEVILLE. I suppose the old style of plot is exhausted. Everything in man and outside of him has been

turned over so often that I should think the novelists would cease simply from want of material.

THE PARSON. Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new creation, and combinations

are simply endless. Even if we did not have new material in the daily change of society, and there were only a

fixed number of incidents and characters in life, invention could not be exhausted on them. I amuse myself

sometimes with my kaleidoscope, but I can never reproduce a figure. No, no. I cannot say that you may not

exhaust everything else: we may get all the secrets of a nature into a book by and by, but the novel is

The Parson's vehemence came very near carrying him into a sermon; and as nobody has the privilege of

Our Next Door mumbled something about his hair standing on end, to hear a minister defending the novel;

but it did not interrupt the general silence. Silence is unnoticed when people sit before a fire; it would be

The wind had risen during the evening, and Mandeville remarked, as they rose to go, that it had a spring

sound in it, but it was as cold as winter. The Mistress said she heard a bird that morning singing in the sun a

We have been much interested in what is called the Gothic revival. We have spent I don't know how many

evenings in looking over Herbert's plans for a cottage, and have been amused with his vain efforts to cover

with Gothic roofs the vast number of large rooms which the Young Lady draws in her sketch of a small

I have no doubt that the Gothic, which is capable of infinite modification, so that every house built in that

style may be as different from every other house as one tree is from every other, can be adapted to our

modern uses, and will be, when artists catch its spirit instead of merely copying its old forms. But just now

we are taking the Gothic very literally, as we took the Greek at one time, or as we should probably have taken

the Saracenic, if the Moors had not been colored. Not even the cholera is so contagious in this country as a

style of architecture which we happen to catch; the country is just now broken out all over with the

And in secular architecture we do not study what is adapted to our climate any more than in ecclesiastic

We are building a great many costly churches here and there, we Protestants, and as the most of them are ill

adapted to our forms of worship, it may be necessary and best for us to change our religion in order to save

our investments. I am aware that this would be a grave step, and we should not hasten to throw overboard

Luther and the right of private judgment without reflection. And yet, if it is necessary to revive the

ecclesiastical Gothic architecture, not in its spirit (that we nowhere do), but in the form which served another

age and another faith, and if, as it appears, we have already a great deal of money invested in this

reproduction, it may be more prudent to go forward than to go back. The question is, "Cannot one easier

I occupy a seat in church which is an admirable one for reflection, but I cannot see or hear much that is going

on in what we like to call the apse. There is a splendid stone pillar, a clustered column, right in front of me,

and I am as much protected from the minister as Old Put's troops were from the British, behind the stone wall

at Bunker's Hill. I can hear his voice occasionally wandering round in the arches overhead, and I recognize

the tone, because he is a friend of mine and an excellent man, but what he is saying I can very seldom make

out. If there was any incense burning, I could smell it, and that would be something. I rather like the smell of

incense, and it has its holy associations. But there is no smell in our church, except of bad air,for there is

no provision for ventilation in the splendid and costly edifice. The reproduction of the old Gothic is so

complete that the builders even seem to have brought over the ancient air from one of the churches of the

I am expected to fix my attention during the service upon one man, who stands in the centre of the apse and

has a soundingboard behind him in order to throw his voice out of the sacred semicircular space (where the

aitar used to stand, but now the soundingboard takes the place of the altar) and scatter it over the

congregation at large, and send it echoing up in the groined roof I always like to hear a minister who is

unfamiliar with the house, and who has a loud voice, try to fill the edifice. The more he roars and gives

himself with vehemence to the effort, the more the building roars in indistinguishable noise and hubbub. By

the time he has said (to suppose a case), "The Lord is in his holy temple," and has passed on to say, "let all

the earth keep silence," the building is repeating "The Lord is in his holy temple" from half a dozen different

angles and altitudes, rolling it and growling it, and is not keeping silence at all. A man who understands it

waits until the house has had its say, and has digested one passage, before he launches another into the vast,

echoing spaces. I am expected, as I said, to fix my eye and mind on the minister, the central point of the

service. But the pillar hides him. Now if there were several ministers in the church, dressed in such gorgeous

colors that I could see them at the distance from the apse at which my limited income compels me to sit, and

candles were burning, and censers were swinging, and the platform was full of the sacred bustle of a

gorgeous ritual worship, and a bell rang to tell me the holy moments, I should not mind the pillar at all. I

should sit there, like any other Goth, and enjoy it. But, as I have said, the pastor is a friend of mine, and I like

to look at him on Sunday, and hear what he says, for he always says something worth hearing. I am on such

terms with him, indeed we all are, that it would be pleasant to have the service of a little more social nature,

and more human. When we put him away off in the apse, and set him up for a Goth, and then seat ourselves

at a distance, scattered about among the pillars, the whole thing seems to me a trifle unnatural. Though I do

not mean to say that the congregations do not "enjoy their religion " in their splendid edifices which cost so

A good many people have the idea, so it seems, that Gothic architecture and Christianity are essentially one

and the same thing. Just as many regard it as an act of piety to work an altar cloth or to cushion a pulpit. It

Our Gothic church is likely to prove to us a valuable religious experience, bringing out many of the Christian

virtues. It may have had its origin in pride, but it is all being overruled for our good. Of course I need n't

explain that it is the thirteenth century ecclesiastic Gothic that is epidemic in this country; and I think it has

attacked the Congregational and the other nonritual churches more violently than any others. We have had it

here in its most beautiful and dangerous forms. I believe we are pretty much all of us supplied with a Gothic

church now. Such has been the enthusiasm in this devout direction, that I should not be surprised to see our

rich private citizens putting up Gothic churches for their individual amusement and sanctification. As the day

will probably come when every man in Hartford will live in his own mammoth, fivestory granite insurance

building, it may not be unreasonable to expect that every man will sport his own Gothic church. It is

beginning to be discovered that the Gothic sort of church edifice is fatal to the Congregational style of

worship that has been prevalent here in New England; but it will do nicely (as they say in Boston) for private

There isn't a finer or purer church than ours any where, inside and outside Gothic to the last. The elevation of

the nave gives it even that "highshouldered" appearance which seemed more than anything else to impress

Mr. Hawthorne in the cathedral at Amiens. I fancy that for genuine highshoulderness we are not exceeded

by any church in the city. Our chapel in the rear is as Gothic as the rest of it, a beautiful little edifice. The

committee forgot to make any more provision for ventilating that than the church, and it takes a pretty

wellseasoned Christian to stay in it long at a time. The Sunday school is held there, and it is thought to be

best to accustom the children to bad air before they go into the church. The poor little dears shouldn't have

the wickedness and impurity of this world break on them too suddenly. If the stranger noticed any lack about

our church, it would be that of a spire. There is a place for one; indeed, it was begun, and then the builders

seem to have stopped, with the notion that it would grow itself from such a good root. It is a mistake

however, to suppose that we do not know that the church has what the profane here call a "stumptail"

appearance. But the profane are as ignorant of history as they are of true Gothic. All the Old World cathedrals

were the work of centuries. That at Milan is scarcely finished yet; the unfinished spires of the Cologne

cathedral are one of the bestknown features of it. I doubt if it would be in the Gothic spirit to finish a church

at once. We can tell cavilers that we shall have a spire at the proper time, and not a minute before. It may

depend a little upon what the Baptists do, who are to build near us. I, for one, think we had better wait and see

how high the Baptist spire is before we run ours up. The church is everything that could be desired inside.

There is the nave, with its lofty and beautiful arched ceiling; there are the side aisles, and two elegant rows of

stone pillars, stained so as to be a perfect imitation of stucco; there is the apse, with its stained glass and

exquisite lines; and there is an organloft over the front entrance, with a rose window. Nothing was wanting,

so far as we could see, except that we should adapt ourselves to the circumstances; and that we have been

trying to do ever since. It may be well to relate how we do it, for the benefit of other inchoate Goths.

It was found that if we put up the organ in the loft, it would hide the beautiful rose window. Besides, we

wanted congregational sing ing, and if we hired a choir, and hung it up there under the roof, like a cage of

birds, we should not have congregational singing. We therefore left the organloft vacant, making no further

use of it than to satisfy our Gothic cravings. As for choir,several of the singers of the church volunteered to

sit together in the front sideseats, and as there was no place for an organ, they gallantly rallied round a

melodeon,or perhaps it is a cabinet organ,a charming instrument, and, as everybody knows, entirely in

keeping with the pillars, arches, and great spaces of a real Gothic edifice. It is the union of simplicity with

grandeur, for which we have all been looking. I need not say to those who have ever heard a melodeon, that

there is nothing like it. It is rare, even in the finest churches on the Continent. And we had congregational

singing. And it went very well indeed. One of the advantages of pure congregational singing, is that you can

join in the singing whether you have a voice or not. The disadvantage is, that your neighbor can do the same.

It is strange what an uncommonly poor lot of voices there is, even among good people. But we enjoy it. If

So far, everything went well. But it was next discovered that it was difficult to hear the minister, who had a

very handsome little desk in the apse, somewhat distant from the bulk of the congregation; still, we could

most of us see him on a clear day. The church was admirably built for echoes, and the centre of the house was

very favorable to them. When you sat in the centre of the house, it sometimes seemed as if three or four

It is usually so in cathedrals; the Right Reverend SoandSo is assisted by the very Reverend

SuchandSuch, and the good deal Reverend ThusandThus, and so on. But a good deal of the minister's

voice appeared to go up into the groined arches, and, as there was no one up there, some of his best things

were lost. We also had a notion that some of it went into the cavernous organloft. It would have been all

right if there had been a choir there, for choirs usually need more preaching, and pay less heed to it, than any

other part of the congregation. Well, we drew a sort of screen over the organloft; but the result was not as

marked as we had hoped. We next devised a soundingboard,a sort of mammoth clamshell, painted

white,and erected it behind the minister. It had a good effect on the minister. It kept him up straight to his

work. So long as he kept his head exactly in the focus, his voice went out and did not return to him; but if he

moved either way, he was assailed by a Babel of clamoring echoes. There was no opportunity for him to

splurge about from side to side of the pulpit, as some do. And if he raised his voice much, or attempted any

extra flights, he was liable to be drowned in a refluent sea of his own eloquence. And he could hear the

congregation as well as they could hear him. All the coughs, whispers, noises, were gathered in the wooden

But the soundingboard was an improvement, and we advanced to bolder measures; having heard a little, we

wanted to hear more. Besides, those who sat in front began to be discontented with the melodeon. There are

depths in music which the melodeon, even when it is called a cabinet organ, with a colored boy at the

bellows, cannot sound. The melodeon was not, originally, designed for the Gothic worship. We determined to

have an organ, and we speculated whether, by erecting it in the apse, we could not fill up that elegant portion

of the church, and compel the preacher's voice to leave it, and go out over the pews. It would of course do

something to efface the main beauty of a Gothic church; but something must be done, and we began a series

of experiments to test the probable effects of putting the organ and choir behind the minister. We moved the

desk to the very front of the platform, and erected behind it a high, square board screen, like a section of tight

fence round the fairgrounds. This did help matters. The minister spoke with more ease, and we could hear

him better. If the screen had been intended to stay there, we should have agitated the subject of painting it.

Our next move was to shove the screen back and mount the volunteer singers, melodeon and all, upon the

platform,some twenty of them crowded together behind the minister. The,effect was beautiful. It seemed

as if we had taken care to select the finestlooking people in the congregation,much to the injury of the

congregation, of course, as seen from the platform. There are few congregations that can stand this sort of

culling, though ours can endure it as well as any; yet it devolves upon those of us who remain the

The experiment was a success, so far as appearances went, but when the screen went back, the minister's

voice went back with it. We could not hear him very well, though we could hear the choir as plain as day. We

have thought of remedying this last defect by putting the high screen in front of the singers, and close to the

minister, as it was before. This would make the singers invisible,"though lost to sight, to memory

dear,"what is sometimes called an "angel choir," when the singers (and the melodeon) are concealed, with

This plan would have another advantage. The singers on the platform, all handsome and well dressed, distract

our attention from the minister, and what he is saying. We cannot help looking at them, studying all the faces

and all the dresses. If one of them sits up very straight, he is a rebuke to us; if he "lops" over, we wonder why

he does n't sit up; if his hair is white, we wonder whether it is age or family peculiarity; if he yawns, we want

to yawn; if he takes up a hymnbook, we wonder if he is uninterested in the sermon; we look at the bonnets,

and query if that is the latest spring style, or whether we are to look for another; if he shaves close, we

wonder why he doesn't let his beard grow; if he has long whiskers, we wonder why he does n't trim 'em; if

she sighs, we feel sorry; if she smiles, we would like to know what it is about. And, then, suppose any of the

singers should ever want to eat fennel, or peppermints, or Brown's troches, and pass them round! Suppose the

Suppose one or two of them, as the handsomest people sometimes will, should go to sleep! In short, the

singers there take away all our attention from the minister, and would do so if they were the homeliest people

Perhaps the clothes question is exhausted, philosophically. I cannot but regret that the Poet of the

BreakfastTable, who appears to have an uncontrollable penchant for saying the things you would like to say

yourself, has alluded to the anachronism of "Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the muttonchop whiskers and

A great many scribblers have felt the disadvantage of writing after Montaigne; and it is impossible to tell how

much originality in others Dr. Holmes has destroyed in this country. In whist there are some men you always

prefer to have on your left hand, and I take it that this intuitive essayist, who is so alert to seize the few

No doubt if the Plantagenets of this day were required to dress in a suit of chainarmor and wear iron pots on

their heads, they would be as ridiculous as most tragedy actors on the stage. The pit which recognizes Snooks

in his tin breastplate and helmet laughs at him, and Snooks himself feels like a sheep; and when the great

tragedian comes on, shining in mail, dragging a twohanded sword, and mouths the grandiloquence which

poets have put into the speech of heroes, the dresscircle requires all its goodbreeding and its feigned love

If this sort of acting, which is supposed to have come down to us from the Elizabethan age, and which

culminated in the school of the Keans, Kembles, and Siddonses, ever had any fidelity to life, it must have

been in a society as artificial as the prose of Sir Philip Sidney. That anybody ever believed in it is difficult to

think, especially when we read what privileges the fine beaux and gallants of the town took behind the scenes

and on the stage in the golden days of the drama. When a part of the audience sat on the stage, and gentlemen

lounged or reeled across it in the midst of a play, to speak to acquaintances in the audience, the illusion could

Now and then a genius, like Rachel as Horatia, or Hackett as Falstaff, may actually seem to be the character

assumed by virtue of a transforming imagination, but I suppose the fact to be that getting into a costume,

absurdly antiquated and remote from all the habits and associations of the actor, largely accounts for the

incongruity and ridiculousness of most of our modern acting. Whether what is called the "legitimate drama"

ever was legitimate we do not know, but the advocates of it appear to think that the theatre was some time

cast in a mould, once for all, and is good for all times and peoples, like the propositions of Euclid. To our

eyes the legitimate drama of today is the one in which the day is reflected, both in costume and speech, and

which touches the affections, the passions, the humor, of the present time. The brilliant success of the few

good plays that have been written out of the rich life which we now livethe most varied, fruitful, and

dramatically suggestiveought to rid us forever of the buskinfustian, except as a pantomimic or

We have no objection to Julius Caesar or Richard III. stalking about in impossible clothes) and stepping four

feet at a stride, if they want to, but let them not claim to be more "legitimate" than "Ours" or "Rip Van

Winkle." There will probably be some orator for years and years to come, at every Fourth of July, who will

go on asking, Where is Thebes? but he does not care anything about it, and he does not really expect an

answer. I have sometimes wished I knew the exact site of Thebes, so that I could rise in the audience, and

If we went to the bottom of this subject, I think we should find that the putting upon actors clothes to which

they are unaccustomed makes them act and talk artificially, and often in a manner intolerable.

An actor who has not the habits or instincts of a gentleman cannot be made to appear like one on the stage by

dress; he only caricatures and discredits what he tries to represent; and the unaccustomed clothes and

situation make him much more unnatural and insufferable than he would otherwise be. Dressed appropriately

for parts for which he is fitted, he will act well enough, probably. What I mean is, that the clothes

inappropriate to the man make the incongruity of him and his part more apparent. Vulgarity is never so

conspicuous as in fine apparel, on or off the stage, and never so selfconscious. Shall we have, then, no

refined characters on the stage? Yes; but let them be taken by men and women of taste and refinement and let

us have done with this masquerading in false raiment, ancient and modern, which makes nearly every stage a

travesty of nature and the whole theatre a painful pretension. We do not expect the modern theatre to be a

place of instruction (that business is now turned over to the telegraphic operator, who is making a new

language), but it may give amusement instead of torture, and do a little in satirizing folly and kindling love of

This is a sort of summary of what we all said, and no one in particular is responsible for it; and in this it is

like public opinion. The Parson, however, whose only experience of the theatre was the endurance of an

MANDEVILLE. Yet, acting itself is delightful; nothing so entertains us as mimicry, the personation of

character. We enjoy it in private. I confess that I am always pleased with the Parson in the character of

grumbler. He would be an immense success on the stage. I don't know but the theatre will have to go back

MANDEVILLE. I can imagine how enjoyable the stage might be, cleared of all its traditionary nonsense,

stilted language, stilted behavior, all the rubbish of false sentiment, false dress, and the manners of times that

were both artificial and immoral, and filled with living characters, who speak the thought of today, with the

wit and culture that are current today. I've seen private theatricals, where all the performers were persons of

OUR NEXT DOOR. So have I. For something particularly cheerful, commend me to amateur theatricals. I

MANDEVILLE. That's because the performers acted the worn stage plays, and attempted to do them in the

THE FIRETENDER. I suppose Mandeville would say that acting has got into a mannerism which is well

described as stagey, and is supposed to be natural to the stage; just as half the modern poets write in a

recognized form of literary manufacture, without the least impulse from within, and not with the purpose of

saying anything, but of turning out a piece of literary work. That's the reason we have so much poetry that

THE PARSON. But you need n't talk of nature or naturalness in acting or in anything. I tell you nature is

poor stuff. It can't go alone. Amateur actingthey get it up at church sociables nowadaysis apt to be as

THE PARSON. What's the use of objecting? It's the fashion of the day to amuse people into the kingdom of

HERBERT. The Parson has got us off the track. My notion about the stage is, that it keeps along pretty

evenly with the rest of the world; the stage is usually quite up to the level of the audience. Assumed dress on

the stage, since you were speaking of that, makes people no more constrained and selfconscious than it does

HERBERT. Well, you may laugh, but the world has n't got used to good clothes yet. The majority do not

wear them with ease. People who only put on their best on rare and stated occasions step into an artificial

OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder if that's the reason the Parson finds it so difficult to get hold of his

HERBERT. I don't know how else to account for the formality and vapidity of a set "party," where all the

guests are clothed in a manner to which they are unaccustomed, dressed into a condition of vivid

selfconsciousness. The same people, who know each other perfectly well, will enjoy themselves together

without restraint in their ordinary apparel. But nothing can be more artificial than the behavior of people

together who rarely "dress up." It seems impossible to make the conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it

dies in a kind of inane helplessness. Especially is this true in the country, where people have not obtained the

mastery of their clothes that those who live in the city have. It is really absurd, at this stage of our civilization,

that we should be so affected by such an insignificant accident as dress. Perhaps Mandeville can tell us

THE PARSON. Don't. We've heard it; about its being one of the Englishman's thirtynine articles that he

THE MISTRESS. I wish, for my part, that everybody who has time to eat a dinner would dress for that, the

THE YOUNG LADY. It has always seemed singular to me that men who work so hard to build elegant

MANDEVILLE. If the Parson will permit me, I should say that the chief clothes question abroad just now is,

It is quite unnecessary to say that the talk about clothes ran into the question of dressreform, and ran out, of

course. You cannot converse on anything nowadays that you do not run into some reform. The Parson says

that everybody is intent on reforming everything but himself. We are all trying to associate ourselves to make

OUR NEXT DOOR. Dress reform! As if people couldn't change their clothes without concert of action.

Resolved, that nobody should put on a clean collar oftener than his neighbor does. I'm sick of every sort of

reform. I should like to retrograde awhile. Let a dyspeptic ascertain that he can eat porridge three times a day

and live, and straightway he insists that everybody ought to eat porridge and nothing else. I mean to get up a

THE PARSON. That would be the most radical reform of the day. That would be independence. If people

dressed according to their means, acted according to their convictions, and avowed their opinions, it would

OUR NEXT DOOR. I should like to walk into your church some Sunday and see the changes under such

THE PARSON. It might give you a novel sensation to walk in at any time. And I'm not sure but the church

would suit your retrograde ideas. It's so Gothic that a Christian of the Middle Ages, if he were alive, couldn't

HERBERT. I don't know whether these reformers who carry the world on their shoulders in such serious

fashion, especially the little fussy fellows, who are themselves the standard of the regeneration they seek, are

THE FIRETENDER. Pathetic, by all means. But I don't know that they would be pathetic if they were not

ludicrous. There are those reform singers who have been piping away so sweetly now for thirty years, with

never any diminution of cheerful, patient enthusiasm; their hair growing longer and longer, their eyes brighter

and brighter, and their faces, I do believe, sweeter and sweeter; singing always with the same constancy for

the slave, for the drunkard, for the snufftaker, for the suffragist,"There'sagoodtimecomingboys

(nothing offensive is intended by "boys," it is put in for euphony, and sung pianissimo, not to offend the

suffragists), it's almosthere." And what a brightening up of their faces there is when they say,

"it'salmosthere," not doubting for a moment that "it's" coming tomorrow; and the accompanying

melodeon also wails its wheezy suggestion that "it'salmosthere," that "goodtime" (delayed so long,

waiting perhaps for the invention of the melodeon) when we shall all sing and all play that cheerful

instrument, and all vote, and none shall smoke, or drink, or eat meat, "boys." I declare it almost makes me cry

HERBERT. I suspect that no one can be a genuine reformer and not be ridiculous. I mean those who give

THE FIRETENDER. I should say rather that the reforms attracted to them all the ridiculous people, who

almost always manage to become the most conspicuous. I suppose that nobody dare write out all that was

ludicrous in the great abolition movement. But it was not at all comical to those most zealous in it; they never

could seemore's the pity, for thereby they lose muchthe humorous side of their per formances, and that

THE YOUNG LADY. It is lucky for the world that so many are willing to be absurd.

HERBERT. Well, I think that, in the main, the reformers manage to look out for themselves tolerably well. I

knew once a lean and faithful agent of a great philanthropic scheme, who contrived to collect every year for

MANDEVILLE. You remember the great freesoil convention at Buffalo, in 1848, when Van Buren was

nominated. All the world of hope and discontent went there, with its projects of reform. There seemed to be

no doubt, among hundreds that attended it, that if they could get a resolution passed that bread should be

buttered on both sides, it would be so buttered. The platform provided for every want and every woe.

THE FIRETENDER. I remember. If you could get the millennium by political action, we should have had it

MANDEVILLE. We went there on the Erie Canal, the exciting and fashionable mode of travel in those days.

I was a boy when we began the voyage. The boat was full of conventionists; all the talk was of what must be

done there. I got the impression that as that boatload went so would go the convention; and I was not alone

in that feeling. I can never be grateful enough for one little scrubby fanatic who was on board, who spent

most of his time in drafting resolutions and reading them privately to the passengers. He was a very

enthusiastic, nervous, and somewhat dirty little man, who wore a woolen muffler about his throat, although it

was summer; he had nearly lost his voice, and could only speak in a hoarse, disagreeable whisper, and he

always carried a teacup about, containing some sticky compound which he stirred frequently with a spoon,

and took, whenever he talked, in order to improve his voice. If he was separated from his cup for ten minutes,

his whisper became inaudible. I greatly delighted in him, for I never saw any one who had so much

enjoyment of his own importance. He was fond of telling what he would do if the convention rejected such

and such resolutions. He'd make it hot for them. I did n't know but he'd make them take his mixture. The

convention had got to take a stand on tobacco, for one thing. He'd heard Giddings took snuff; he'd see.

When we at length reached Buffalo he took his teacup and carpetbag of resolutions and went ashore in a

great hurry. I saw him once again in a cheap restaurant, whispering a resolution to another delegate, but he

THE FIRETENDER. After all, it's the easiest thing in the world to sit and sneer at eccentricities. But what a

dead and uninteresting world it would be if we were all proper, and kept within the lines! Affairs would soon

be reduced to mere machinery. There are moments, even days, when all interests and movements appear to be

settled upon some universal plan of equilibrium; but just then some restless and absurd person is inspired to

throw the machine out of gear. These individual eccentricities seem to be the special providences in the

HERBERT. They make it very hard work for the rest of us, who are disposed to go along peaceably and

MANDEVILLE. And stagnate. I 'm not sure but the natural condition of this planet is war, and that when it is

finally towed to its anchorageif the universe has any harbor for worlds out of commissionit will look

HERBERT. There is another thing I should like to understand: the tendency of people who take up one

reform, perhaps a personal regeneration in regard to some bad habit, to run into a dozen other isms, and get

MANDEVILLE. Herbert seems to think there is safety in a man's being anchored, even if it is to a bad habit.

HERBERT. Thank you. But what is it in human nature that is apt to carry a man who may take a step in

HERBERT. Why, for instance, should a reformed drunkard (one of the noblest examples of victory over self)

incline, as I have known the reformed to do, to spiritism, or a woman suffragist to "pantarchism" (whatever

that is), and want to pull up all the roots of society, and expect them to grow in the air, like orchids; or a

MANDEVILLE. I know an excellent Conservative who would, I think, suit you; he says that he does not see

how a man who indulges in the theory and practice of total abstinence can be a consistent believer in the

HERBERT. Well, I can understand what he means: that a person is bound to hold himself in conditions of

moderation and control, using and not abusing the things of this world, practicing temperance, not retiring

into a convent of artificial restrictions in order to escape the full responsibility of selfcontrol. And yet his

THE PARSON. That the world is going crazy on the notion of individual ability. Whenever a man attempts

to reform himself, or anybody else, without the aid of the Christian religion, he is sure to go adrift, and is

pretty certain to be blown about by absurd theories, and shipwrecked on some pernicious ism.

I never felt so much the value of a house with a backlog in it as during the late spring; for its lateness was its

main feature. Everybody was grumbling about it, as if it were something ordered from the tailor, and not

ready on the day. Day after day it snowed, night after night it blew a gale from the northwest; the frost sunk

deeper and deeper into the ground; there was a popular longing for spring that was almost a prayer; the

weather bureau was active; Easter was set a week earlier than the year before, but nothing seemed to do any

good. The robins sat under the evergreens, and piped in a disconsolate mood, and at last the bluejays came

and scolded in the midst of the snowstorm, as they always do scold in any weather. The crocuses could n't

be coaxed to come up, even with a pickaxe. I'm almost ashamed now to recall what we said of the weather

only I think that people are no more accountable for what they say of the weather than for their remarks when

We agreed, however, that, but for disappointed expectations and the prospect of late lettuce and peas, we

were gaining by the fire as much as we were losing by the frost. And the Mistress fell to chanting the

THE FIRETENDER said he should like to know, by the way, if our civilization differed essentially from

THE FIRETENDER. We are quarreling as to whether we are in fact radically different from the brutes.

HERBERT. Scarcely two people think alike about the proper kind of human government.

THE PARSON. Our poetry is made out of words, for the most part, and not drawn from the living sources.

OUR NEXT DOOR. And Mr. Cumming is uncorking his seventh phial. I never felt before what barbarians

THE MISTRESS. Yet you won't deny that the life of the average man is safer and every way more

THE FIRETENDER. But what I want to know is, whether what we call our civilization has done any thing

more for mankind at large than to increase the ease and pleasure of living? Science has multiplied wealth, and

facilitated intercourse, and the result is refinement of manners and a diffusion of education and information.

Are men and women essentially changed, however? I suppose the Parson would say we have lost faith, for

THE FIRETENDER. It's easy enough to make a brilliant catalogue of external achievements, but I take it

that real progress ought to be in man himself. It is not a question of what a man enjoys, but what he can

produce. The best sculpture was executed two thousand years ago. The best paintings are several centuries

old. We study the finest architecture in its ruins. The standards of poetry are Shakespeare, Homer, Isaiah, and

David. The latest of the arts, music, culminated in composition, though not in execution, a century ago.

THE MISTRESS. Yet culture in music certainly distinguishes the civilization of this age. It has taken

eighteen hundred years for the principles of the Christian religion to begin to be practically incorporated in

government and in ordinary business, and it will take a long time for Beethoven to be popularly recognized;

but there is growth toward him, and not away from him, and when the average culture has reached his height,

some other genius will still more profoundly and delicately express the highest thoughts.

HERBERT. I wish I could believe it. The spirit of this age is expressed by the Calliope.

THE PARSON. Yes, it remained for us to add churchbells and cannon to the orchestra.

OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a melancholy thought to me that we can no longer express ourselves with the

bassdrum; there used to be the whole of the Fourth of July in its patriotic throbs.

THE FIRETENDER. The most discouraging symptom to me in our undoubted advance in the comforts and

refinements of society is the facility with which men slip back into barbarism, if the artificial and external

accidents of their lives are changed. We have always kept a fringe of barbarism on our shifting western

frontier; and I think there never was a worse society than that in California and Nevada in their early days.

THE FIRETENDER. But women are not absent in London and New York, and they are conspicuous in the

most exceptionable demonstrations of social anarchy. Certainly they were not wanting in Paris. Yes, there

was a city widely accepted as the summit of our material civilization. No city was so beautiful, so luxurious,

so safe, so well ordered for the comfort of living, and yet it needed only a month or two to make it a kind of

pandemonium of savagery. Its citizens were the barbarians who destroyed its own monuments of civilization.

I don't mean to say that there was no apology for what was done there in the deceit and fraud that preceded it,

but I simply notice how ready the tiger was to appear, and how little restraint all the material civilization was

THE MISTRESS. I can't deny your instances, and yet I somehow feel that pretty much all you have been

saying is in effect untrue. Not one of you would be willing to change our civilization for any other. In your

THE MISTRESS. I don't believe there was ever before diffused everywhere such an element of goodwill,

THE PARSON. It must be confessed that one of the best signs of the times is woman's charity for woman.

MANDEVILLE. And there is another thing that distinguishes us, or is beginning to. That is, the notion that

you can do something more with a criminal than punish him; and that society has not done its duty when it

has built a sufficient number of schools for one class, or of decent jails for another.

MANDEVILLE. But when we do they will begin to be places of education and training as much as of

punishment and disgrace. The public will provide teachers in the prisons as it now does in the common

THE FIRETENDER. The imperfections of our methods and means of selecting those in the community who

ought to be in prison are so great, that extra care in dealing with them becomes us. We are beginning to learn

that we cannot draw arbitrary lines with infal lible justice. Perhaps half those who are convicted of crimes

are as capable of reformation as half those transgressors who are not convicted, or who keep inside the

THE FIRETENDER. No; but I would have criminals believe, and society believe, that in going to prison a

THE PARSON. That is, you would not have judgment and retribution begin in this world.

OUR NEXT DOOR. Don't switch us off into theology. I hate to go up in a balloon, or see any one else go.

HERBERT. Don't you think there is too much leniency toward crime and criminals, taking the place of

THE FIRETENDER. There may be too much disposition to condone the crimes of those who have been

MANDEVILLE. I think a large part of the bitterness of the condemned arises from a sense of the inequality

with which justice is administered. I am surprised, in visiting jails, to find so few respectablelooking

THE FIRETENDER. When society seriously takes hold of the reformation of criminals (say with as much

determination as it does to carry an election) this false leniency will disappear; for it partly springs from a

feeling that punishment is unequal, and does not discriminate enough in individuals, and that society itself

has no right to turn a man over to the Devil, simply because he shows a strong leaning that way. A part of the

scheme of those who work for the reformation of criminals is to render punishment more certain, and to let its

extent depend upon reformation. There is no reason why a professional criminal, who won't change his trade

for an honest one, should have intervals of freedom in his prison life in which he is let loose to prey upon

society. Criminals ought to be discharged, like insane patients, when they are cured.

OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a wonder to me, what with our multitudes of statutes and hosts of detectives, that we

are any of us out of jail. I never come away from a visit to a Stateprison without a new spasm of fear and

virtue. The faculties for getting into jail seem to be ample. We want more organizations for keeping people

MANDEVILLE. That is the sort of enterprise the women are engaged in, the frustration of the criminal

tendencies of those born in vice. I believe women have it in their power to regenerate the world morally.

THE MISTRESS. The reason they have not made more progress is that they have usually confined their

THE FIRETENDER. I'm not sure but here is where the ameliorations of the conditions of life, which are

called the comforts of this civilization, come in, after all, and distinguish the age above all others. They have

enabled the finer powers of women to have play as they could not in a ruder age. I should like to live a

HERBERT. Not much but change the fashions, unless they submit them selves to the same training and

I have no doubt that Herbert had to apologize for this remark afterwards in private, as men are quite willing to

do in particular cases; it is only in general they are unjust. The talk drifted off into general and particular

depreciation of other times. Mandeville described a picture, in which he appeared to have confidence, of a

fight between an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus, where these huge ironclad brutes were represented

chewing up different portions of each other's bodies in a forest of the lower cretaceous period. So far as he

could learn, that sort of thing went on unchecked for hundreds of thousands of years, and was typical of the

intercourse of the races of man till a comparatively recent period. There was also that gigantic swan, the

Plesiosaurus; in fact, all the early brutes were disgusting. He delighted to think that even the lower animals

The conversation ended, therefore, in a very amicable manner, having been taken to a ground that nobody

In northern New England it is considered a sign of summer when the housewives fill the fireplaces with

branches of mountain laurel, and, later, with the feathery stalks of the asparagus. This is often, too, the timid

expression of a tender feeling, under Puritanic repression, which has not sufficient vent in the sweetwilliam

and hollyhock at the front door. This is a yearning after beauty and ornamentation which has no other means

In the most rigid circumstances, the graceful nature of woman thus discloses itself in these mute expressions

of an undeveloped taste. You may never doubt what the common flowers growing along the pathway to the

front door mean to the maiden of many summers who tends them; love and religion, and the weariness of

an uneventful life. The sacredness of the Sabbath, the hidden memory of an unrevealed and unrequited

affection, the slow years of gathering and wasting sweetness, are in the smell of the pink and the

sweetclover. These sentimental plants breathe something of the longing of the maiden who sits in the

Sunday evenings of summer on the lonesome front doorstone, singing the hymns of the saints, and perennial

Yet not always in summer, even with the aid of unrequited love and devotional feeling, is it safe to let the fire

go out on the hearth, in our latitude. I remember when the last almost total eclipse of the sun happened in

August, what a bonepiercing chill came over the world. Perhaps the imagination had something to do with

causing the chill from that temporary hiding of the sun to feel so much more penetrating than that from the

coming on of night, which shortly followed. It was impossible not to experience a shudder as of the approach

of the Judgment Day, when the shadows were flung upon the green lawn, and we all stood in the wan light,

looking unfamiliar to each other. The birds in the trees felt the spell. We could in fancy see those spectral

campfires which men would build on the earth, if the sun should slow its fires down to about the brilliancy

of the moon. It was a great relief to all of us to go into the house, and, before a blazing woodfire, talk of the

In New England it is scarcely ever safe to let the fire go out; it is best to bank it, for it needs but the turn of a

Atlantic rains over us, or to bring down the chill of Hudson's Bay. There are days when the steam ship on the

Atlantic glides calmly along under a full canvas, but its central fires must always be ready to make steam

against headwinds and antagonistic waves. Even in our most smiling summer days one needs to have the

materials of a cheerful fire at hand. It is only by this readiness for a change that one can preserve an equal

mind. We are made provident and sagacious by the fickleness of our climate. We should be another sort of

people if we could have that serene, unclouded trust in nature which the Egyptian has. The gravity and repose

of the Eastern peoples is due to the unchanging aspect of the sky, and the deliberation and regularity of the

great climatic processes. Our literature, politics, religion, show the effect of unsettled weather. But they

You cannot know, the Young Lady wrote, with what longing I look back to those winter days by the fire;

though all the windows are open to this May morning, and the brown thrush is singing in the chestnut tree,

and I see everywhere that first delicate flush of spring, which seems too evanescent to be color even, and

amounts to little more than a suffusion of the atmosphere. I doubt, indeed, if the spring is exactly what it used

to be, or if, as we get on in years [no one ever speaks of "getting on in years" till she is virtually settled in

life], its promises and suggestions do not seem empty in comparison with the sympathies and responses of

human friendship, and the stimulation of society. Sometimes nothing is so tiresome as a perfect day in a

I only imperfectly understand this. The Parson says that woman is always most restless under the most

favorable conditions, and that there is no state in which she is really happy except that of change. I suppose

this is the truth taught in what has been called the "Myth of the Garden." Woman is perpetual revolution, and

is that element in the world which continually destroys and recreates. She is the experimenter and the

suggester of new combinations. She has no belief in any law of eternal fitness of things. She is never even

content with any arrangement of her own house. The only reason the Mistress could give, when she

rearranged her apartment, for hanging a picture in what seemed the most inappropriate place, was that it had

never been there before. Woman has no respect for tradition, and because a thing is as it is is sufficient reason

for changing it. When she gets into law, as she has come into literature, we shall gain something in the

destruction of all our vast and musty libraries of precedents, which now fetter our administration of individual

justice. It is Mandeville's opinion that women are not so sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched

with the unspoken poetry of nature; being less poetical, and having less imagination, they are more fitted for

practical affairs, and would make less failures in business. I have noticed the almost selfish passion for their

flowers which old gardeners have, and their reluctance to part with a leaf or a blossom from their family.

They love the flowers for themselves. A woman raises flowers for their use. She is destruction in a

conservatory. She wants the flowers for her lover, for the sick, for the poor, for the Lord on Easter day, for

the ornamentation of her house. She delights in the costly pleasure of sacrificing them. She never sees a

It has been so from the first, though from the first she has been thwarted by the accidental superior strength of

man. Whatever she has obtained has been by craft, and by the same coaxing which the sun uses to draw the

blossoms out of the appletrees. I am not surprised to learn that she has become tired of indulgences, and

wants some of the original rights. We are just beginning to find out the extent to which she has been denied

and subjected, and especially her condition among the primitive and barbarous races. I have never seen it in a

platform of grievances, but it is true that among the Fijians she is not, unless a better civilization has wrought

a change in her behalf, permitted to eat people, even her own sex, at the feasts of the men; the dainty enjoyed

by the men being considered too good to be wasted on women. Is anything wanting to this picture of the

degradation of woman? By a refinement of cruelty she receives no benefit whatever from the missionaries

who are sent out bywhat to her must seem a new name for Tantalusthe American Board.

I suppose the Young Lady expressed a nearly universal feeling in her regret at the breaking up of the

winterfireside company. Society needs a certain seclusion and the sense of security. Spring opens the doors

and the windows, and the noise and unrest of the world are let in. Even a winter thaw begets a desire to travel,

and summer brings longings innumerable, and disturbs the most tranquil souls. Nature is, in fact, a suggester

of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages and of excursions of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory

haven. The summer in these latitudes is a campaign of sentiment and a season, for the most part, of

restlessness and discontent. We grow now in hothouses roses which, in form and color, are magnificent, and

appear to be full of passion; yet one simple June rose of the open air has for the Young Lady, I doubt not,

more sentiment and suggestion of love than a conservatory full of them in January. And this suggestion,

leavened as it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which are so often like the

peachblossom of the Judastree, unsatisfying by reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from

the more limited and attainable and homelike emotion born of quiet intercourse by the winter fireside, that I

do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if some spell had been broken by the transition of her life from

indoors to outdoors. Her secret, if secret she has, which I do not at all know, is shared by the birds and the

new leaves and the blossoms on the fruit trees. If we lived elsewhere, in that zone where the poets pretend

always to dwell, we might be content, perhaps I should say drugged, by the sweet influences of an

unchanging summer; but not living elsewhere, we can understand why the Young Lady probably now looks

If it should ever become the sad duty of this biographer to write of disappointed love, I am sure he would not

have any sensational story to tell of the Young Lady. She is one of those women whose unostentatious lives

are the chief blessing of humanity; who, with a sigh heard only by herself and no change in her sunny face,

would put behind her all the memories of winter evenings and the promises of May mornings, and give her

life to some ministration of human kindness with an assiduity that would make her occupation appear like an

election and a first choice. The disappointed man scowls, and hates his race, and threatens selfdestruction,

choosing oftener the flowing bowl than the dagger, and becoming a reeling nuisance in the world. It would be

I suppose it is true that women work for others with less expectation of reward than men, and give themselves

to labors of selfsacrifice with much less thought of self. At least, this is true unless woman goes into some

public performance, where notoriety has its attractions, and mounts some cause, to ride it manfashion, when

I think she becomes just as eager for applause and just as willing that selfsacrifice should result in

selfelevation as man. For her, usually, are not those unboughtpresentations which are forced upon

firemen, philanthropists, legislators, railroadmen, and the superintendents of the moral instruction of the

young. These are almost always pleasing and unexpected tributes to worth and modesty, and must be

received with satisfaction when the public service rendered has not been with a view to procuring them. We

should say that one ought to be most liable to receive a "testimonial" who, being a superintendent of any sort,

did not superintend with a view to getting it. But "testimonials" have become so common that a modest man

ought really to be afraid to do his simple duty, for fear his motives will be misconstrued. Yet there are

instances of very worthy men who have had things publicly presented to them. It is the blessed age of gifts

and the reward of private virtue. And the presentations have become so frequent that we wish there were a

little more variety in them. There never was much sense in giving a gallant fellow a big speakingtrumpet to

carry home to aid him in his intercourse with his family; and the festive icepitcher has become a too

universal sign of absolute devotion to the public interest. The lack of one will soon be proof that a man is a

knave. The legislative cane with the gold head, also, is getting to be recognized as the sign of the immaculate

public servant, as the inscription on it testifies, and the steps of suspicion must erelong dog him who does

not carry one. The "testimonial" business is, in truth, a little demoralizing, almost as much so as the

"donation;" and the demoralization has extended even to our language, so that a perfectly respectable man is

often obliged to see himself "made the recipient of" this and that. It would be much better, if testimonials

must be, to give a man a barrel of flour or a keg of oysters, and let him eat himself at once back into the ranks

We may have a testimonial class in time, a sort of nobility here in America, made so by popular gift, the

members of which will all be able to show some stick or piece of plated ware or massive chain, "of which

they have been the recipients." In time it may be a distinction not to belong to it, and it may come to be

thought more blessed to give than to receive. For it must have been remarked that it is not always to the

cleverest and the most amiable and modest man that the deputation comes with the inevitable icepitcher

(and "salver to match"), which has in it the magic and subtle quality of making the hour in which it is

received the proudest of one's life. There has not been discovered any method of rewarding all the deserving

people and bringing their virtues into the prominence of notoriety. And, indeed, it would be an unreasonable

world if there had, for its chief charm and sweetness lie in the excellences in it which are reluctantly

disclosed; one of the chief pleasures of living is in the daily discovery of good traits, nobilities, and kindliness

both in those we have long known and in the chance passenger whose way happens for a day to lie with ours.

The longer I live the more I am impressed with the excess of human kindness over human hatred, and the

greater willingness to oblige than to disoblige that one meets at every turn. The selfishness in politics, the

jealousy in letters, the bickering in art, the bitterness in theology, are all as nothing compared to the sweet

charities, sacrifices, and deferences of private life. The people are few whom to know intimately is to dislike.

Of course you want to hate somebody, if you can, just to keep your powers of discrimination bright, and to

save yourself from becoming a mere mush of goodnature; but perhaps it is well to hate some historical

person who has been dead so long as to be indifferent to it. It is more comfortable to hate people we have

never seen. I cannot but think that Judas Iscariot has been of great service to the world as a sort of buffer for

moral indignation which might have made a collision nearer home but for his utilized treachery. I used to

know a venerable and most amiable gentleman and scholar, whose hospitable house was always overrun with

wayside ministers, agents, and philanthropists, who loved their fellowmen better than they loved to work for

their living; and he, I suspect, kept his moral balance even by indulgence in violent but most distant dislikes.

When I met him casually in the street, his first salutation was likely to be such as this: "What a liar that

Alison was! Don't you hate him?" And then would follow specifications of historical inveracity enough to

make one's blood run cold. When he was thus discharged of his hatred by such a conductor, I presume he had

not a spark left for those whose mission was partly to live upon him and other generous souls.

Mandeville and I were talking of the unknown people, one rainy night by the fire, while the Mistress was

fitfully and interjectionally playing with the pianokeys in an improvising mood. Mandeville has a good deal

of sentiment about him, and without any effort talks so beautifully sometimes that I constantly regret I cannot

report his language. He has, besides, that sympathy of presenceI believe it is called magnetism by those

who regard the brain as only a sort of galvanic batterywhich makes it a greater pleasure to see him think, if

It makes one homesick in this world to think that there are so many rare people he can never know; and so

many excellent people that scarcely any one will know, in fact. One discovers a friend by chance, and cannot

but feel regret that twenty or thirty years of life maybe have been spent without the least knowledge of him.

When he is once known, through him opening is made into another little world, into a circle of culture and

loving hearts and enthusiasm in a dozen congenial pursuits, and prejudices perhaps. How instantly and easily

the bachelor doubles his world when he marries, and enters into the unknown fellowship of the to him

continually increasing company which is known in popular language as "all his wife's relations."

Near at hand daily, no doubt, are those worth knowing intimately, if one had the time and the opportunity.

And when one travels he sees what a vast material there is for society and friendship, of which he can never

avail himself. Carload after carload of summer travel goes by one at any railwaystation, out of which he

is sure he could choose a score of lifelong friends, if the conductor would introduce him. There are faces of

refinement, of quick wit, of sympathetic kindness,interesting people, traveled people, entertaining people,

as you would say in Boston, "nice people you would admire to know," whom you constantly meet and

pass without a sign of recognition, many of whom are no doubt your longlost brothers and sisters. You can

see that they also have their worlds and their interests, and they probably know a great many "nice" people.

The matter of personal liking and attachment is a good deal due to the mere fortune of association. More fast

friendships and pleasant acquaintanceships are formed on the Atlantic steamships between those who would

have been only indifferent acquaintances elsewhere, than one would think possible on a voyage which

naturally makes one as selfish as he is indifferent to his personal appearance. The Atlantic is the only power

Mandeville remembers, and I think without detriment to himself, the glimpses he had in the White Mountains

once of a young lady of whom his utmost efforts could give him no further information than her name.

Chance sight of her on a passing stage or amid a group on some mountain lookout was all he ever had, and he

did not even know certainly whether she was the perfect beauty and the lovely character he thought her. He

said he would have known her, however, at a great distance; there was to her form that command of which

we hear so much and which turns out to be nearly all command after the "ceremony;" or perhaps it was

something in the glance of her eye or the turn of her head, or very likely it was a sweet inherited reserve or

hauteur that captivated him, that filled his days with the expectation of seeing her, and made him hasten to the

hotelregisters in the hope that her name was there recorded. Whatever it was, she interested him as one of

the people he would like to know; and it piqued him that there was a life, rich in friendships, no doubt, in

tastes, in many noblenesses, one of thousands of such, that must be absolutely nothing to him,nothing but a

window into heaven momentarily opened and then closed. I have myself no idea that she was a countess

incognito, or that she had descended from any greater heights than those where Mandeville saw her, but I

have always regretted that she went her way so mysteriously and left no glow, and that we shall wear out the

remainder of our days without her society. I have looked for her name, but always in vain, among the

attendants at the rights conventions, in the list of those good Americans presented at court, among those

skeleton names that appear as the remains of beauty in the morning journals after a ball to the wandering

prince, in the reports of railway collisions and steamboat explosions. No news comes of her. And so

imperfect are our means of communication in this world that, for anything we know, she may have left it long

The lasting regret that we cannot know more of the bright, sincere, and genuine people of the world is

increased by the fact that they are all different from each other. Was it not Madame de Sevigne who said she

had loved several different women for several different qualities? Every real personfor there are persons as

there are fruits that have no distinguishing flavor, mere gooseberrieshas a distinct quality, and the finding

it is always like the discovery of a new island to the voyager. The physical world we shall exhaust some day,

having a written description of every foot of it to which we can turn; but we shall never get the different

qualities of people into a biographical dictionary, and the making acquaintance with a human being will never

cease to be an exciting experiment. We cannot even classify men so as to aid us much in our estimate of

them. The efforts in this direction are ingenious, but unsatisfactory. If I hear that a man is lymphatic or

nervoussanguine, I cannot tell therefrom whether I shall like and trust him. He may produce a phrenological

chart showing that his knobby head is the home of all the virtues, and that the vicious tendencies are

represented by holes in his cranium, and yet I cannot be sure that he will not be as disagreeable as if

phrenology had not been invented. I feel sometimes that phrenology is the refuge of mediocrity. Its charts are

almost as misleading concerning character as photographs. And photography may be described as the art

which enables commonplace mediocrity to look like genius. The heavyjowled man with shallow cerebrum

has only to incline his head so that the lying instrument can select a favorable focus, to appear in the picture

with the brow of a sage and the chin of a poet. Of all the arts for ministering to human vanity the

photographic is the most useful, but it is a poor aid in the revelation of character. You shall learn more of a

man's real nature by seeing him walk once up the broad aisle of his church to his pew on Sunday, than by

No, we do not get any certain standard of men by a chart of their temperaments; it will hardly answer to

select a wife by the color of her hair; though it be by nature as red as a cardinal's hat, she may be no more

constant than if it were dyed. The farmer who shuns all the lymphatic beauties in his neighborhood, and

selects to wife the most nervoussanguine, may find that she is unwilling to get up in the winter mornings

and make the kitchen fire. Many a man, even in this scientific age which professes to label us all, has been

cruelly deceived in this way. Neither the blondes nor the brunettes act according to the advertisement of their

temperaments. The truth is that men refuse to come under the classifications of the pseudo scientists, and all

our new nomenclatures do not add much to our knowledge. You know what to expectif the comparison

will be pardonedof a horse with certain points; but you wouldn't dare go on a journey with a man merely

upon the strength of knowing that his temperament was the proper mixture of the sanguine and the

phlegmatic. Science is not able to teach us concerning men as it teaches us of horses, though I am very far

from saying that there are not traits of nobleness and of meanness that run through families and can be

calculated to appear in individuals with absolute certainty; one family will be trusty and another tricky

through all its members for generations; noble strains and ignoble strains are perpetuated. When we hear that

she has eloped with the stableboy and married him, we are apt to remark, "Well, she was a Bogardus." And

when we read that she has gone on a mission and has died, distinguishing herself by some extraordinary

devotion to the heathen at Ujiji, we think it sufficient to say, "Yes, her mother married into the Smiths." But

this knowledge comes of our experience of special families, and stands us in stead no further.

If we cannot classify men scientifically and reduce them under a kind of botanical order, as if they had a

calculable vegetable development, neither can we gain much knowledge of them by comparison. It does not

help me at all in my estimate of their characters to compare Mandeville with the Young Lady, or Our Next

Door with the Parson. The wise man does not permit himself to set up even in his own mind any comparison

of his friends. His friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by many

qualities. When Mandeville goes into my garden in June I can usually find him in a particular bed of

strawberries, but he does not speak disrespectfully of the others. When Nature, says Mandeville, consents to

put herself into any sort of strawberry, I have no criticisms to make, I am only glad that I have been created

into the same world with such a delicious manifestation of the Divine favor. If I left Mandeville alone in the

garden long enough, I have no doubt he would impartially make an end of the fruit of all the beds, for his

capacity in this direction is as allembracing as it is in the matter of friendships. The Young Lady has also

her favorite patch of berries. And the Parson, I am sorry to say, prefers to have them picked for him the elect

of the gardenand served in an orthodox manner. The strawberry has a sort of poetical precedence, and I

presume that no fruit is jealous of it any more than any flower is jealous of the rose; but I remark the facility

with which liking for it is transferred to the raspberry, and from the raspberry (not to make a tedious

enumeration) to the melon, and from the melon to the grape, and the grape to the pear, and the pear to the

Of course it would be a dull world if we could not criticise our friends, but the most unprofitable and

unsatisfactory criticism is that by comparison. Criticism is not necessarily uncharitableness, but a wholesome

exercise of our powers of analysis and discrimination. It is, however, a very idle exercise, leading to no

results when we set the qualities of one over against the qualities of another, and disparage by contrast and

not by independent judgment. And this method of procedure creates jealousies and heart burnings

Criticism by comparison is the refuge of incapables, and especially is this true in literature. It is a lazy way of

disposing of a young poet to bluntly declare, without any sort of discrimination of his defects or his

excellences, that he equals Tennyson, and that Scott never wrote anything finer. What is the justice of

damning a meritorious novelist by comparing him with Dickens, and smothering him with thoughtless and

goodnatured eulogy? The poet and the novelist may be well enough, and probably have qualities and gifts of

their own which are worth the critic's attention, if he has any time to bestow on them; and it is certainly unjust

to subject them to a comparison with somebody else, merely because the critic will not take the trouble to

ascertain what they are. If, indeed, the poet and novelist are mere imitators of a model and copyists of a style,

they may be dismissed with such commendation as we bestow upon the machines who pass their lives in

making bad copies of the pictures of the great painters. But the critics of whom we speak do not intend

depreciation, but eulogy, when they say that the author they have in hand has the wit of Sydney Smith and the

brilliancy of Macaulay. Probably he is not like either of them, and may have a genuine though modest virtue

of his own; but these names will certainly kill him, and he will never be anybody in the popular estimation.

The public finds out speedily that he is not Sydney Smith, and it resents the extravagant claim for him as if he

were an impudent pretender. How many authors of fair ability to interest the world have we known in our

own day who have been thus skyrocketed into notoriety by the lazy indiscrimination of the

criticbycomparison, and then have sunk into a popular contempt as undeserved! I never see a young

aspirant injudiciously compared to a great and resplendent name in literature, but I feel like saying, My poor

fellow, your days are few and full of trouble; you begin life handicapped, and you cannot possibly run a

I think this sort of critical eulogy is more damaging even than that which kills by a different assumption, and

one which is equally common, namely, that the author has not done what he probably never intended to do. It

is well known that most of the trouble in life comes from our inability to compel other people to do what we

think they ought, and it is true in criticism that we are unwilling to take a book for what it is, and credit the

author with that. When the solemn critic, like a mastiff with a ladies' bonnet in his mouth, gets hold of a light

piece of verse, or a graceful sketch which catches the humor of an hour for the entertainment of an hour, he

tears it into a thousand shreds. It adds nothing to human knowledge, it solves none of the problems of life, it

touches none of the questions of social science, it is not a philosophical treatise, and it is not a dozen things

that it might have been. The critic cannot forgive the author for this disrespect to him. This isn't a rose, says

the critic, taking up a pansy and rending it; it is not at all like a rose, and the author is either a pretentious

idiot or an idiotic pretender. What business, indeed, has the author to send the critic a bunch of sweetpeas,

when he knows that a cabbage would be preferred,something not showy, but useful?

A good deal of this is what Mandeville said and I am not sure that it is devoid of personal feeling. He

published, some years ago, a little volume giving an account of a trip through the Great West, and a very

entertaining book it was. But one of the heavy critics got hold of it, and made Mandeville appear, even to

himself, he confessed, like an ass, because there was nothing in the volume about geology or mining

prospects, and very little to instruct the student of physical geography. With alternate sarcasm and ridicule, he

literally basted the author, till Mandeville said that he felt almost like a depraved scoundrel, and thought he

should be held up to less execration if he had committed a neat and scientific murder.

But I confess that I have a good deal of sympathy with the critics. Consider what these public tasters have to

endure! None of us, I fancy, would like to be compelled to read all that they read, or to take into our mouths,

even with the privilege of speedily ejecting it with a grimace, all that they sip. The critics of the vintage, who

pursue their calling in the dark vaults and amid mouldy casks, give their opinion, for the most part, only upon

wine, upon juice that has matured and ripened into development of quality. But what crude, unrestrained,

unfermentedeven raw and drugged liquor, must the literary taster put to his unwilling lips day after day!

It was my good fortune once to visit a man who remembered the rebellion of 1745. Lest this confession

should make me seem very aged, I will add that the visit took place in 1851, and that the man was then one

hundred and thirteen years old. He was quite a lad before Dr. Johnson drank Mrs. Thrale's tea. That he was as

old as he had the credit of being, I have the evidence of my own senses (and I am seldom mistaken in a

person's age), of his own family, and his own word; and it is incredible that so old a person, and one so

The testimony of the very aged is always to be received without question, as Alexander Hamilton once

learned. He was trying a landtitle with Aaron Burr, and two of the witnesses upon whom Burr relied were

venerable Dutchmen, who had, in their youth, carried the surveying chains over the land in dispute, and who

were now aged respectively one hundred and four years and one hundred and six years. Hamilton gently

attempted to undervalue their testimony, but he was instantly put down by the Dutch justice, who suggested

My old man (the expression seems familiar and inelegant) had indeed an exaggerated idea of his own age,

and sometimes said that he supposed he was going on four hundred, which was true enough, in fact; but for

the exact date, he referred to his youngest son,a frisky and humorsome lad of eighty years, who had

received us at the gate, and whom we had at first mistaken for the veteran, his father. But when we beheld the

old man, we saw the difference between age and age. The latter had settled into a grizzliness and grimness

which belong to a very aged and stunted but sturdy oaktree, upon the bark of which the gray moss is thick

and heavy. The old man appeared hale enough, he could walk about, his sight and hearing were not seriously

impaired, he ate with relish) and his teeth were so sound that he would not need a dentist for at least another

century; but the moss was growing on him. His boy of eighty seemed a green sapling beside him.

He remembered absolutely nothing that had taken place within thirty years, but otherwise his mind was

perhaps as good as it ever was, for he must always have been an ignoramus, and would never know anything

if he lived to be as old as he said he was going on to be. Why he was interested in the rebellion of 1745 I

could not discover, for he of course did not go over to Scotland to carry a pike in it, and he only remembered

to have heard it talked about as a great event in the Irish markettown near which he lived, and to which he

had ridden when a boy. And he knew much more about the horse that drew him, and the cart in which he

I hope I do not appear to speak harshly of this amiable old man, and if he is still living I wish him well,

although his example was bad in some respects. He had used tobacco for nearly a century, and the habit has

very likely been the death of him. If so, it is to be regretted. For it would have been interesting to watch the

process of his gradual disintegration and return to the ground: the loss of sense after sense, as decaying limbs

fall from the oak; the failure of discrimination, of the power of choice, and finally of memory itself; the

peaceful wearing out and passing away of body and mind without disease, the natural running down of a

man. The interesting fact about him at that time was that his bodily powers seemed in sufficient vigor, but

that the mind had not force enough to manifest itself through his organs. The complete battery was there, the

appetite was there, the acid was eating the zinc; but the electric current was too weak to flash from the brain.

And yet he appeared so sound throughout, that it was difficult to say that his mind was not as good as it ever

had been. He had stored in it very little to feed on, and any mind would get enfeebled by a century's

It was possible with this man to fully test one's respect for age, which is in all civilized nations a duty. And I

found that my feelings were mixed about him. I discovered in him a conceit in regard to his long sojourn on

this earth, as if it were somehow a credit to him. In the presence of his good opinion of himself, I could but

question the real value of his continued life) to himself or to others. If he ever had any friends he had outlived

them, except his boy; his wivesa century of themwere all dead; the world had actually passed away for

him. He hung on the tree like a frostnipped apple, which the farmer has neglected to gather. The world

I was delighted to find that this old man had never voted for George Washington. I do not know that he had

ever heard of him. Washington may be said to have played his part since his time. I am not sure that he

perfectly remembered anything so recent as the American Revolution. He was living quietly in Ireland during

our French and Indian wars, and he did not emigrate to this country till long after our revolutionary and our

constitutional struggles were over. The Rebellion Of '45 was the great event of the world for him, and of that

I intend no disrespect to this man,a cheerful and pleasant enough old person,but he had evidently lived

himself out of the world, as completely as people usually die out of it. His only remaining value was to the

moralist, who might perchance make something out of him. I suppose if he had died young, he would have

been regretted, and his friends would have lamented that he did not fill out his days in the world, and would

very likely have called him back, if tears and prayers could have done so. They can see now what his

prolonged life amounted to, and how the world has closed up the gap he once filled while he still lives in it.

A great part of the unhappiness of this world consists in regret for those who depart, as it seems to us,

prematurely. We imagine that if they would return, the old conditions would be restored. But would it be so?

If they, in any case, came back, would there be any place for them? The world so quickly readjusts itself after

any loss, that the return of the departed would nearly always throw it, even the circle most interested, into

A popular notion akin to this, that the world would have any room for the departed if they should now and

then return, is the constant regret that people will not learn by the experience of others, that one generation

learns little from the preceding, and that youth never will adopt the experience of age. But if experience went

for anything, we should all come to a standstill; for there is nothing so discouraging to effort. Disbelief in

Ecclesiastes is the mainspring of action. In that lies the freshness and the interest of life, and it is the source of

If the boy believed that the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of power were what the old man says

they are, the world would very soon be stagnant. If he believed that his chances of obtaining either were as

poor as the majority of men find them to be, ambition would die within him. It is because he rejects the

experience of those who have preceded him, that the world is kept in the topsyturvy condition which we all

And yet I confess I have a soft place in my heart for that rare character in our New England life who is

content with the world as he finds it, and who does not attempt to appropriate any more of it to himself than

he absolutely needs from day to day. He knows from the beginning that the world could get on without him,

and he has never had any anxiety to leave any result behind him, any legacy for the world to quarrel over.

He is really an exotic in our New England climate and society, and his life is perpetually misunderstood by

his neighbors, because he shares none of their uneasiness about getting on in life. He is even called lazy,

goodfornothing, and "shiftless,"the final stigma that we put upon a person who has learned to wait

I made his acquaintance last summer in the country, and I have not in a long time been so well pleased with

any of our species. He was a man past middle life, with a large family. He had always been from boyhood of

a contented and placid mind, slow in his movements, slow in his speech. I think he never cherished a hard

feeling toward anybody, nor envied any one, least of all the rich and prosperous about whom he liked to talk.

Indeed, his talk was a good deal about wealth, especially about his cousin who had been down South and "got

forehanded" within a few years. He was genuinely pleased at his relation's good luck, and pointed him out

to me with some pride. But he had no envy of him, and he evinced no desire to imitate him. I inferred from

all his conversation about "piling it up" (of which he spoke with a gleam of enthusiasm in his eye), that there

were moments when he would like to be rich himself; but it was evident that he would never make the least

effort to be so, and I doubt if he could even overcome that delicious inertia of mind and body called laziness,

Wealth seemed to have a far and peculiar fascination for him, and I suspect he was a visionary in the midst of

his poverty. Yet I suppose he hadhardly the personal property which the law exempts from execution. He

had lived in a great many towns, moving from one to another with his growing family, by easy stages, and

was always the poorest man in the town, and lived on the most niggardly of its rocky and bramblegrown

farms, the productiveness of which he reduced to zero in a couple of seasons by his careful neglect of culture.

The fences of his hired domain always fell into ruins under him, perhaps because he sat on them so much,

and the hovels he occupied rotted down during his placid residence in them. He moved from desolation to

desolation, but carried always with him the equal mind of a philosopher. Not even the occasional tart remarks

of his wife, about their nomadic life and his serenity in the midst of discomfort, could ruffle his smooth spirit.

He was, in every respect, a most worthy man, truthful, honest, temperate, and, I need not say, frugal; and he

had no bad habits, perhaps he never had energy enough to acquire any. Nor did he lack the knack of the

Yankee race. He could make a shoe, or build a house, or doctor a cow; but it never seemed to him, in this

brief existence, worth while to do any of these things. He was an excellent angler, but he rarely fished; partly

because of the shortness of days, partly on account of the uncertainty of bites, but principally because the

trout brooks were all arranged lengthwise and ran over so much ground. But no man liked to look at a string

of trout better than he did, and he was willing to sit down in a sunny place and talk about troutfishing half a

day at a time, and he would talk pleasantly and well too, though his wife might be continually interrupting

I should not do justice to his own idea of himself if I did not add that he was most respectably connected, and

that he had a justifiable though feeble pride in his family. It helped his selfrespect, which no ignoble

circumstances could destroy. He was, as must appear by this time, a most intelligent man, and he was a

wellinformed man; that is to say, he read the weekly newspapers when he could get them, and he had the

average country information about Beecher and Greeley and the Prussian war (" Napoleon is gettin' on't, ain't

he?"), and the general prospect of the election campaigns. Indeed, he was warmly, or rather lukewarmly,

interested in politics. He liked to talk about the inflated currency, and it seemed plain to him that his

condition would somehow be improved if we could get to a specie basis. He was, in fact, a little troubled by

the national debt; it seemed to press on him somehow, while his own never did. He exhibited more animation

over the affairs of the government than he did over his own,an evidence at once of his disinterestedness

and his patriotism. He had been an old abolitionist, and was strong on the rights of free labor, though he did

not care to exercise his privilege much. Of course he had the proper contempt for the poor whites down

South. I never saw a person with more correct notions on such a variety of subjects. He was perfectly willing

that churches (being himself a member), and Sundayschools, and missionary enterprises should go on; in

fact, I do not believe he ever opposed anything in his life. No one was more willing to vote town taxes and

roadrepairs and schoolhouses than he. If you could call him spirited at all, he was publicspirited.

And with all this he was never very well; he had, from boyhood, "enjoyed poor health." You would say he

was not a man who would ever catch anything, not even an epidemic; but he was a person whom diseases

would be likely to overtake, even the slowest of slow fevers. And he was n't a man to shake off anything. And

yet sickness seemed to trouble him no more than poverty. He was not discontented; he never grumbled. I am

An admirably balanced man, who accepts the world as it is, and evidently lives on the experience of others. I

have never seen a man with less envy, or more cheerfulness, or so contented with as little reason for being so.

The only drawback to his future is that rest beyond the grave will not be much change for him, and he has no

This Yankee philosopher, who, without being a Brahmin, had, in an uncongenial atmosphere, reached the

perfect condition of Nirvina, reminded us all of the ancient sages; and we queried whether a world that could

produce such as he, and could, beside, lengthen a man's years to one hundred and thirteen, could fairly be

called an old and wornout world, having long passed the stage of its primeval poetry and simplicity. Many

an Eastern dervish has, I think, got immortality upon less laziness and resignation than this temporary

sojourner in Massachusetts. It is a common notion that the world (meaning the people in it) has become tame

and commonplace, lost its primeval freshness and epigrammatic point. Mandeville, in his argumentative way,

dissents from this entirely. He says that the world is more complex, varied, and a thousand times as

interesting as it was in what we call its youth, and that it is as fresh, as individual and capable of producing

odd and eccentric characters as ever. He thought the creative vim had not in any degree abated, that both the

types of men and of nations are as sharply stamped and defined as ever they were.

Was there ever, he said, in the past, any figure more clearly cut and freshly minted than the Yankee? Had the

Old World anything to show more positive and uncompromising in all the elements of character than the

Englishman? And if the edges of these were being rounded off, was there not developing in the extreme West

a type of men different from all preceding, which the world could not yet define? He believed that the

Herbert urged that he must at least admit that there was a freshness of legend and poetry in what we call the

Mandeville could not say about the myths. We couldn't tell what interpretation succeeding ages would put

upon our lives and history and literature when they have become remote and shadowy. But we need not go to

antiquity for epigrammatic wisdom, or for characters as racy of the fresh earth as those handed down to us

from the dawn of history. He would put Benjamin Franklin against any of the sages of the mythic or the

classic period. He would have been perfectly at home in ancient Athens, as Socrates would have been in

modern Boston. There might have been more heroic characters at the siege of Troy than Abraham Lincoln,

but there was not one more strongly marked individually; not one his superior in what we call primeval craft

and humor. He was just the man, if he could not have dislodged Priam by a writ of ejectment, to have

invented the wooden horse, and then to have made Paris the hero of some ridiculous story that would have set

Mandeville said further, that as to poetry, he did not know much about that, and there was not much he cared

to read except parts of Shakespeare and Homer, and passages of Milton. But it did seem to him that we had

men nowadays, who could, if they would give their minds to it, manufacture in quantity the same sort of

epigrammatic sayings and legends that our scholars were digging out of the Orient. He did not know why

Emerson in antique setting was not as good as Saadi. Take for instance, said Mandeville, such a legend as

The son of an Emir had red hair, of which he was ashamed, and wished to dye it. But his father said: "Nay,

my son, rather behave in such a manner that all fathers shall wish their sons had red hair."

This was too absurd. Mandeville had gone too far, except in the opinion of Our Next Door, who declared that

an imitation was just as good as an original, if you could not detect it. But Herbert said that the closer an

imitation is to an original, the more unendurable it is. But nobody could tell exactly why.

The FireTender said that we are imposed on by forms. The nuggets of wisdom that are dug out of the

Oriental and remote literatures would often prove to be only commonplace if stripped of their quaint setting.

If you gave an Oriental twist to some of our modern thought, its value would be greatly enhanced for many

I have seen those, said the Mistress, who seem to prefer dried fruit to fresh; but I like the strawberry and the

Even the Parson admitted that there were no signs of fatigue or decay in the creative energy of the world; and

It happened, or rather, to tell the truth, it was contrived,for I have waited too long for things to turn up to

have much faith in "happen," that we who have sat by this hearthstone before should all be together on

Christmas eve. There was a splendid backlog of hickory just beginning to burn with a glow that promised to

grow more fiery till long past midnight, which would have needed no apology in a loggers' camp,not so

much as the religion of which a lady (in a city which shall be nameless) said, "If you must have a religion,

There was not much conversation, as is apt to be the case when people come together who have a great deal

to say, and are intimate enough to permit the freedom of silence. It was Mandeville who suggested that we

read something, and the Young Lady, who was in a mood to enjoy her own thoughts, said, "Do." And finally

it came about that the Fire Tender, without more resistance to the urging than was becoming, went to his

Not that it is my uncle, let me explain. It is Polly's uncle, as I very well know, from the many times she has

thrown him up to me, and is liable so to do at any moment. Having small expectations myself, and having

wedded Polly when they were smaller, I have come to feel the full force, the crushing weight, of her lightest

remark about "My Uncle in India." The words as I write them convey no idea of the tone in which they fall

upon my ears. I think it is the only fault of that estimable woman, that she has an "uncle in India" and does

not let him quietly remain there. I feel quite sure that if I had an uncle in Botany Bay, I should never, never

throw him up to Polly in the way mentioned. If there is any jar in our quiet life, he is the cause of it; all along

of possible "expectations" on the one side calculated to overawe the other side not having expectations. And

yet I know that if her uncle in India were this night to roll a barrel of "India's golden sands," as I feel that he

any moment may do, into our sittingroom, at Polly's feet, that charming wife, who is more generous than the

month of May, and who has no thought but for my comfort in two worlds, would straightway make it over to

me, to have and to hold, if I could lift it, forever and forever. And that makes it more inexplicable that she,

In a large and general way I regard uncles as not out of place in this transitory state of existence. They stand

for a great many possible advantages. They are liable to "tip" you at school, they are resources in vacation,

they come grandly in play about the holidays, at which season mv heart always did warm towards them with

lively expectations, which were often turned into golden solidities; and then there is always the prospect, sad

to a sensitive mind, that uncles are mortal, and, in their timely taking off, may prove as generous in the will

as they were in the deed. And there is always this redeeming possibility in a niggardly uncle. Still there must

be something wrong in the character of the uncle per se, or all history would not agree that nepotism is such a

But, to return from this unnecessary digression, I am reminded that the charioteer of the patient year has

brought round the holiday time. It has been a growing year, as most years are. It is very pleasant to see how

the shrubs in our little patch of ground widen and thicken and bloom at the right time, and to know that the

great trees have added a laver to their trunks. To be sure, our garden, which I planted under Polly's

directions, with seeds that must have been patented, and I forgot to buy the right of, for they are mostly still

waiting the final resurrection,gave evidence that it shared in the misfortune of the Fall, and was never an

Eden from which one would have required to have been driven. It was the easiest garden to keep the

neighbor's pigs and hens out of I ever saw. If its increase was small its temptations were smaller, and that is

no little recommendation in this world of temptations. But, as a general thing, everything has grown, except

our house. That little cottage, over which Polly presides with grace enough to adorn a palace, is still small

outside and smaller inside; and if it has an air of comfort and of neatness, and its rooms are cozy and sunny

by day and cheerful by night, and it is bursting with books, and not unattractive with modest pictures on the

walls, which we think do well enough until my uncle(but never mind my uncle, now),and if, in the long

winter evenings, when the largest lamp is lit, and the chestnuts glow in embers, and the kid turns on the spit,

and the houseplants are green and flowering, and the ivy glistens in the firelight, and Polly sits with that

contented, faraway look in her eyes that I like to see, her fingers busy upon one of those cruel mysteries

which have delighted the sex since Penelope, and I read in one of my fascinating lawbooks, or perhaps

regale ourselves with a taste of Montaigne,if all this is true, there are times when the cottage seems small;

though I can never find that Polly thinks so, except when she sometimes says that she does not know where

There it is, again. I sometimes think that my wife believes her uncle in India to be as large as two ordinary

men; and if her ideas of him are any gauge of the reality, there is no place in the town large enough for him

except the Town Hall. She probably expects him to come with his bungalow, and his sedan, and his

palanquin, and his elephants, and his retinue of servants, and his principalities, and his powers, and his

Christmas eve was a shiny cold night, a creaking cold night, a placid, calm, swingeing cold night.

Outdoors had gone into a general state of crystallization. The snowfields were like the vast Arctic

icefields that Kane looked on, and lay sparkling under the moonlight, crisp and Christmasy, and all the

crystals on the trees and bushes hung glistening, as if ready, at a breath of air, to break out into metallic

ringing, like a million silver joybells. I mentioned the conceit to Polly, as we stood at the window, and she

said it reminded her of Jean Paul. She is a woman of most remarkable discernment.

Christmas is a great festival at our house in a small way. Among the many delightful customs we did not

inherit from our Pilgrim Fathers, there is none so pleasant as that of giving presents at this season. It is the

most exciting time of the year. No one is too rich to receive something, and no one too poor to give a trifle.

And in the act of giving and receiving these tokens of regard, all the world is kin for once, and brighter for

this transient glow of generosity. Delightful custom! Hard is the lot of childhood that knows nothing of the

visits of Kriss Kringle, or the stockings hung by the chimney at night; and cheerless is any age that is not

brightened by some Christmas gift, however humble. What a mystery of preparation there is in the preceding

days, what planning and plottings of surprises! Polly and I keep up the custom in our simple way, and great is

the perplexity to express the greatest amount of affection with a limited outlay. For the excellence of a gift

lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value. As we stood by the window that night, we wondered what

we should receive this year, and indulged in I know not what little hypocrisies and deceptions.

I wish, said Polly, "that my uncle in India would send me a camel'shair shawl, or a string of pearls, each as

"Or a white cow, which would give golden milk, that would make butter worth seventyfive cents a pound," I

It is our custom on every Christmas eveas I believe I have somewhere said, or if I have not, I say it again,

as the member from Erin might remarkto read one of Dickens's Christmas stories. And this night, after

punching the fire until it sent showers of sparks up the chimney, I read the opening chapter of "Mrs. Lirriper's

Lodgings," in my best manner, and handed the book to Polly to continue; for I do not so much relish reading

aloud the succeeding stories of Mr. Dickens's annual budget, since he wrote them, as men go to war in these

days, by substitute. And Polly read on, in her melodious voice, which is almost as pleasant to me as the

Wasser fluth of Schubert, which she often plays at twilight; and I looked into the fire, unconsciously

constructing stories of my own out of the embers. And her voice still went on, in a sort of running

"Sleep?" said Polly, stopping, with what seemed to me a sort of crash, in which all the castles tumbled into

"Not in the least," I answered brightly never heard anything more agreeable." And the reading flowed on and

Suddenly the door opened, and into our cozy parlor walked the most venerable personage I ever laid eyes on,

who saluted me with great dignity. Summer seemed to have burst into the room, and I was conscious of a

puff of Oriental airs, and a delightful, languid tranquillity. I was not surprised that the figure before me was

clad in full turban, baggy drawers, and a long loose robe, girt about the middle with a rich shawl. Followed

him a swart attendant, who hastened to spread a rug upon which my visitor sat down, with great gravity, as I

am informed they do in farthest Ind. The slave then filled the bowl of a longstemmed chibouk, and, handing

it to his master, retired behind him and began to fan him with the most prodigious palmleaf I ever saw. Soon

the fumes of the delicate tobacco of Persia pervaded the room, like some costly aroma which you cannot buy,

Looking through the window I saw, if I saw anything, a palanquin at our door, and attendant on it four dusky,

halfnaked bearers, who did not seem to fancy the splendor of the night, for they jumped about on the snow

crust, and I could see them shiver and shake in the keen air. Oho! thought!, this, then, is my uncle from India!

"I think I have heard Polly speak of you," I rejoined, in an attempt to be civil, for I did n't like his face any

"Yes I've come over to O Lord,quick, Jamsetzee, lift up that foot, take care. There, Mr. Trimings, if

I got him our little apothecarylabeled bottle and poured out enough to preserve a whole can of peaches. My

uncle took it down without a wink, as if it had been water, and seemed relieved. It was a very pleasant uncle

At a motion from my uncle, Jamsetzee handed me a parcel which I saw was directed to Polly, which I untied,

and lo! the most wonderful camel'shair shawl that ever was, so fine that I immediately drew it through my

fingerring, and so large that I saw it would entirely cover our little room if I spread it out; a dingy red color,

but splendid in appearance from the little white hieroglyphic worked in one corner, which is always worn

"A Christmas trifle for Polly. I have come homeas I was saying when that confounded twinge took meto

settle down; and I intend to make Polly my heir, and live at my ease and enjoy life. Move that leg a little,

I meekly replied that I had no doubt Polly would be delighted to see her dear uncle, and as for inheriting, if it

"That depends," said the gruff old smoker, "how I like ye. A fortune, scraped up in forty years in Ingy, ain't to

be thrown away in a minute. But what a house this is to live in!"; the uncomfortable old relative went on,

"In the winter it is all of it," I said, flushing up; but in the summer, when the doors and windows are open, it

is as large as anybody's house. And," I went on, with some warmth, "it was large enough just before you

came in, and pleasant enough. And besides, I said, rising into indignation, "you can not get anything much

better in this city short of eight hundred dollars a year, payable first days of January, April, July, and October,

"Hang your salary, and confound your impudence and your sevenbynine hovel! Do you think you have

anything to say about the use of my money, scraped up in forty years in Ingy? THINGS HAVE GOT TO BE

I should think they were. Even as I looked into the little fireplace it enlarged, and there was an enormous

grate, level with the floor, glowing with seacoal; and a magnificent mantel carved in oak, old and brown; and

over it hung a landscape, wide, deep, summer in the foreground with all the gorgeous coloring of the tropics,

and beyond hills of blue and far mountains lying in rosy light. I held my breath as I looked down the

marvelous perspective. Looking round for a second, I caught a glimpse of a Hindoo at each window, who

vanished as if they had been whisked off by enchantment; and the close walls that shut us in fled away. Had

cohesion and gravitation given out? Was it the "Great Consummation" of the year 18? It was all like the

swift transformation of a dream, and I pinched my arm to make sure that I was not the subject of some

The little house was gone; but that I scarcely minded, for I had suddenly come into possession of my wife's

castle in Spain. I sat in a spacious, lofty apartment, furnished with a princely magnificence. Rare pictures

adorned the walls, statues looked down from deep niches, and over both the dark ivy of England ran and

drooped in graceful luxuriance. Upon the heavy tables were costly, illuminated volumes; luxurious chairs and

ottomans invited to easy rest; and upon the ceiling Aurora led forth all the flowerstrewing daughters of the

dawn in brilliant frescoes. Through the open doors my eyes wandered into magnificent apartment after

apartment. There to the south, through foldingdoors, was the splendid library, with groined roof, colored

light streaming in through painted windows, high shelves stowed with books, old armor hanging on the walls,

great carved oaken chairs about a solid oaken table, and beyond a conservatory of flowers and plants with a

fountain springing in the center, the splashing of whose waters I could hear. Through the open windows I

looked upon a lawn, green with closeshaven turf, set with ancient trees, and variegated with parterres of

summer plants in bloom. It was the month of June, and the smell of roses was in the air.

I might have thought it only a freak of my fancy, but there by the fireplace sat a stout, redfaced,

puffylooking man, in the ordinary dress of an English gentleman, whom I had no difficulty in recognizing

"One wants a fire every day in the year in this confounded climate," remarked that amiable old person,

I had it on my lips to suggest that I trusted the day would come when he would have heat enough to satisfy

I think things had changed. For now into this apartment, full of the morning sunshine, came sweeping with

the air of a countess born, and a maid of honor bred, and a queen in expectancy, my Polly, stepping with that

lofty grace which I always knew she possessed, but which she never had space to exhibit in our little cottage,

dressed with that elegance and richness that I should not have deemed possible to the most Dutch duchess

that ever lived, and, giving me a complacent nod of recognition, approached her uncle, and said in her

smiling, cheery way, "How is the dear uncle this morning?" And, as she spoke, she actually bent down and

kissed his horrid old cheek, redhot with currie and brandy and all the biting pickles I can neither eat nor

"Comfortable as the weather will permit, my darling!"and again I did not turn into stone.

Uncle finally grunted out his willingness, and Polly swept away again to prepare for the drive, taking no more

notice of me than if I had been a poor assistant office lawyer on a salary. And soon the carriage was at the

door, and my uncle, bundled up like a mummy, and the charming Polly drove gayly away.

How pleasant it is to be married rich, I thought, as I arose and strolled into the library, where everything was

elegant and prim and neat, with no scraps of paper and piles of newspapers or evidences of literary

slovenness on the table, and no books in attractive disorder, and where I seemed to see the legend staring at

me from all the walls, "No smoking." So I uneasily lounged out of the house. And a magnificent house it was,

a palace, rather, that seemed to frown upon and bully insignificant me with its splendor, as I walked away

And why town? There was no use of doing anything at the dingy office. Eight hundred dollars a year! It

wouldn't keep Polly in gloves, let alone dressing her for one of those fashionable entertainments to which we

went night after night. And so, after a weary day with nothing in it, I went home to dinner, to find my uncle

quite chirruped up with his drive, and Polly regnant, sublimely engrossed in her new world of splendor, a

dazzling object of admiration to me, but attentive and even tender to that hypochondriacal, gouty old subject

Yes, a magnificent dinner, with no end of servants, who seemed to know that I couldn't have paid the wages

of one of them, and plate and courses endless. I say, a miserable dinner, on the edge of which seemed to sit

by permission of somebody, like an invited poor relation, who wishes he had sent a regret, and longing for

some of those nice little dishes that Polly used to set before me with beaming face, in the dear old days.

And after dinner, and proper attention to the comfort for the night of our benefactor, there was the Blibgims's

party. No long, confidential interviews, as heretofore, as to what she should wear and what I should wear, and

whether it would do to wear it again. And Polly went in one coach, and I in another. No crowding into the

hired hack, with all the delightful care about tumbling dresses, and getting there in good order; and no

coming home together to our little cozy cottage, in a pleasant, excited state of "flutteration," and sitting down

to talk it all over, and "Was n't it nice?" and "Did I look as well as anybody?" and "Of course you did to me,"

and all that nonsense. We lived in a grand way now, and had our separate establishments and separate plans,

and I used to think that a real separation couldn't make matters much different. Not that Polly meant to be any

different, or was, at heart; but, you know, she was so much absorbed in her new life of splendor, and perhaps

I don't wonder at it now, as I look back. There was an army of dressmakers to see, and a world of shopping to

do, and a houseful of servants to manage, and all the afternoon for calls, and her dear, dear friend, with the

artless manners and merry heart of a girl, and the dignity and grace of a noble woman, the dear friend who

lived in the house of the Seven Gables, to consult about all manner of im portant things. I could not, upon

my honor, see that there was any place for me, and I went my own way, not that there was much comfort in

And then I would rather have had charge of a hospital ward than take care of that uncle. Such coddling as he

needed, such humoring of whims. And I am bound to say that Polly could n't have been more dutiful to him if

he had been a Hindoo idol. She read to him and talked to him, and sat by him with her embroidery, and was

patient with his crossness, and wearied herself, that I could see, with her devoted ministrations.

I fancied sometimes she was tired of it, and longed for the old homely simplicity. I was. Nepotism had no

charms for me. There was nothing that I could get Polly that she had not. I could surprise her with no little

delicacies or trifles, delightedly bought with money saved for the purpose. There was no more coming home

weary with office work and being met at the door with that warm, loving welcome which the King of

England could not buy. There was no long evening when we read alternately from some favorite book, or laid

our deep housekeeping plans, rejoiced in a good bargain or made light of a poor one, and were contented and

merry with little. I recalled with longing my little den, where in the midst of the literary disorder I love, I

wrote those stories for the "Antarctic" which Polly, if nobody else, liked to read. There was no comfort for

me in my magnificent library. We were all rich and in splendor, and our uncle had come from India. I wished,

saving his soul, that the ship that brought him over had foundered off Barnegat Light. It would always have

been a tender and regretful memory to both of us. And how sacred is the memory of such a loss!

Christmas? What delight could I have in long solicitude and ingenious devices touching a gift for Polly

within my means, and hitting the border line between her necessities and her extravagant fancy? A drove of

white elephants would n't have been good enough for her now, if each one carried a castle on his back.

"and so they were married, and in their snug cottage lived happy ever after."It was Polly's voice, as she

"There, I don't believe you have heard a word of it," she said half complaininglv.

"Oh, yes, I have," I cried, starting up and giving the fire a jab with the poker; "I heard every word of it, except

And, sure enough, there was n't anv camel'shair shawl there, nor any uncle, nor were there any Hindoos at

And then I told Polly all about it; how her uncle came back, and we were rich and lived in a palace and had

no end of money, but she didn't seem to have time to love me in it all, and all the comfort of the little house

was blown away as by the winter wind. And Polly vowed, half in tears, that she hoped her uncle never would

come back, and she wanted nothing that we had not, and she wouldn't exchange our independent comfort and

snug house, no, not for anybody's mansion. And then and there we made it all up, in a manner too particular

for me to mention; and I never, to this day, heard Polly allude to My Uncle in India.

And then, as the clock struck eleven, we each produced from the place where we had hidden them the modest

Christmas gifts we had prepared for each other, and what surprise there was! "Just the thing I needed." And,

"It's perfectly lovely." And, "You should n't have done it." And, then, a question I never will answer, "Ten?

fifteen? five? twelve?" "My dear, it cost eight hundred dollars, for I have put my whole year into it, and I

And so, when the great iron tongue of the city bell swept over the snow the twelve strokes that announced