[Illustration: "She lighted a potent pipe. "]

SUBURBAN SKETCHES

BY W. D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN LIFE, " "ITALIAN JOURNEYS" ETC. 

CONTENTS

MRS. JOHNSON

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON

A DAY'S PLEASURE

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

SCENE

JUBILEE DAYS

SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS

FLITTING

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

SHE LIGHTED A POTENT PIPE

"BUT I SUPPOSE THIS WINE IS NOT MADE OF GRAPES, SIGNOR?"

LOOKING ABOUT, I SAW TWO WOMEN

THE YOUNG LADY IN BLACK, WHO ALIGHTED AT A MOST ORDINARY LITTLE STREET

THAT SWEET YOUNG BLONDE, WHO ARRIVES BY MOST TRAINS

FRANK AND LUCY STALKED AHEAD, WITH SHAWLS DRAGGING FROM THEIR ARMS

THEY SKIRMISH ABOUT HIM WITH EVERY SORT OF QUERY. 

A GAUNT FIGURE OF FORLORN AND CURIOUS SMARTNESS. 

THE SPECTACLE AS WE BEHELD IT

VACANT AND CEREMONIOUS ZEAL

MRS. JOHNSON

It was on a morning of the lovely New England May that we left the horse-car, and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our new homein Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely blent by theinfluences of this fortunate climate, that no flake knew itself from itssister drop, or could be better identified by the people against whom theybeat in unison. A vernal gale from the east fanned our cheeks and piercedour marrow and chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of theadventurous grass on the borders of the sopping sidewalks gave, as itpeered through its veil of melting snow and freezing rain, a peculiarcheerfulness to the landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots abandonedhoop-skirts defied decay; and near the half-finished wooden houses, emptymortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn over the scarred andmutilated ground, added their interest to the scene. A shaggy drift hungupon the trees before our own house (which had been built some yearsearlier), while its swollen eaves wept silently and incessantly upon theembankments lifting its base several feet above the common level. 

This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers, with the idea of turningtheir thoughts effectually from earthly pleasures, came so far todiscover, continued with slight amelioration throughout the month of Mayand far into June; and it was a matter of constant amazement with one whohad known less austere climates, to behold how vegetable life struggledwith the hostile skies, and, in an atmosphere as chill and damp as that ofa cellar, shot forth the buds and blossoms upon the pear-trees, called outthe sour Puritan courage of the currant-bushes, taught a reckless nativegrape-vine to wander and wanton over the southern side of the fence, anddecked the banks with violets as fearless and as fragile as New Englandgirls; so that about the end of June, when the heavens relented and thesun blazed out at last, there was little for him to do but to redden anddarken the daring fruits that had attained almost their full growthwithout his countenance. 

Then, indeed, Charlesbridge appeared to us a kind of Paradise. The windblew all day from the southwest, and all day in the grove across the waythe orioles sang to their nestlings. The butcher's wagon rattled merrilyup to our gate every morning; and if we had kept no other reckoning, weshould have known it was Thursday by the grocer. We were living in thecountry with the conveniences and luxuries of the city about us. The housewas almost new and in perfect repair; and, better than all, the kitchenhad as yet given no signs of unrest in those volcanic agencies which areconstantly at work there, and which, with sudden explosion, makeHerculaneums and Pompeiis of so many smiling households. Breakfast, dinner, and tea came up with illusive regularity, and were all the mostperfect of their kind; and we laughed and feasted in our vain security. Wehad out from the city to banquet with us the friends we loved, and we wereinexpressibly proud before them of the Help, who first wrought miracles ofcookery in our honor, and then appeared in a clean white apron, and theglossiest black hair, to wait upon the table. She was young, and certainlyvery pretty; she was as gay as a lark, and was courted by a young manwhose clothes would have been a credit, if they had not been a reproach, to our lowly basement. She joyfully assented to the idea of staying withus till she married. 

In fact, there was much that was extremely pleasant about the little placewhen the warm weather came, and it was not wonderful to us that Jenny waswilling to remain. It was very quiet; we called one another to the windowif a large dog went by our door; and whole days passed without themovement of any wheels but the butcher's upon our street, which flourishedin ragweed and butter-cups and daisies, and in the autumn burned, like theborders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge, with the pallid azureflame of the succory. The neighborhood was in all things a frontierbetween city and country. The horse-cars, the type of such civilization--full of imposture, discomfort, and sublime possibility--as we yet possess, went by the head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available to oneskilled in calculating the movements of comets; while two minutes' walkwould take us into a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visiblethrough the trees. We learned, like innocent pastoral people of the goldenage, to know the several voices of the cows pastured in the vacant lots, and, like engine-drivers of the iron age, to distinguish the differentwhistles of the locomotives passing on the neighboring railroad. Thetrains shook the house as they thundered along, and at night were a kindof company, while by day we had the society of the innumerable birds. Nowand then, also, the little ragged boys in charge of the cows--which, tiedby long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight up against thetrunks, and had to be unwound with great ado of hooting and hammering--came and peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening pears. Allround us carpenters were at work building new houses; but so far fromtroubling us, the strokes of their hammers fell softly upon the sense, like one's heart-beats upon one's own consciousness in the lapse from allfear of pain under the blessed charm of an anaesthetic. 

We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes, whichthe chickens seemed to like, for they ate them up as fast as they ripened;and we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton blackberries, which, after attaining the most stalwart proportions, were still as bitter as thescrubbiest of their savage brethren, and which, when by advice left on thevines for a week after they turned black, were silently gorged by secretand gluttonous flocks of robins and orioles. As for our grapes, the frostcut them off in the hour of their triumph. 

So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that Jenny should be willingto remain with us, and were as little prepared for her desertion as forany other change of our moral state. But one day in September she came toher nominal mistress with tears in her beautiful eyes and protestations ofunexampled devotion upon her tongue, and said that she was afraid she mustleave us. She liked the place, and she never had worked for any one thatwas more of a lady, but she had made up her mind to go into the city. Allthis, so far, was quite in the manner of domestics who, in ghost stories, give warning to the occupants of haunted houses; and Jenny's mistresslistened in suspense for the motive of her desertion, expecting to hear noless than that it was something which walked up and down the stairs anddragged iron links after it, or something that came and groaned at thefront door, like populace dissatisfied with a political candidate. But itwas in fact nothing of this kind; simply, there were no lamps upon ourstreet, and Jenny, after spending Sunday evening with friends in EastCharlesbridge, was always alarmed, on her return, in walking from thehorse-car to our door. The case was hopeless, and Jenny and our householdparted with respect and regret. 

We had not before this thought it a grave disadvantage that our street wasunlighted. Our street was not drained nor graded; no municipal cart evercame to carry away our ashes; there was not a water-butt within half amile to save us from fire, nor more than the one thousandth part of apoliceman to protect us from theft. Yet, as I paid a heavy tax, I somehowfelt that we enjoyed the benefits of city government, and never lookedupon Charlesbridge as in any way undesirable for residence. But when itbecame necessary to find help in Jenny's place, the frosty welcome givento application at the intelligence offices renewed a painful doubtawakened by her departure. To be sure, the heads of the offices werepolite enough; but when the young housekeeper had stated her case at thefirst to which she applied, and the Intelligencer had called out to theinvisible expectants in the adjoining room, "Anny wan wants to do giner'lhousewark in Charlsbrudge?" there came from the maids invoked so loud, sofierce, so full a "No!" as shook the lady's heart with an indescribableshame and dread. The name that, with an innocent pride in its literary andhistorical associations, she had written at the heads of her letters, wassuddenly become a matter of reproach to her; and she was almost tempted toconceal thereafter that she lived in Charlesbridge, and to pretend thatshe dwelt upon some wretched little street in Boston. "You see, " said thehead of the office, "the gairls doesn't like to live so far away from thecity. Now if it was on'y in the Port. .. . "

This pen is not graphic enough to give the remote reader an idea of theaffront offered to an inhabitant of Old Charlesbridge in these closingwords. Neither am I of sufficiently tragic mood to report here all thesufferings undergone by an unhappy family in finding servants, or to tellhow the winter was passed with miserable makeshifts. Alas! is it not thehistory of a thousand experiences? Any one who looks upon this page couldmatch it with a tale as full of heartbreak and disaster, while I conceivethat, in hastening to speak of Mrs. Johnson, I approach a subject ofunique interest. 

The winter that ensued after Jenny's departure was the true sister of thebitter and shrewish spring of the same year. But indeed it is always witha secret shiver that one must think of winter in our regrettable climate. It is a terrible potency, robbing us of half our lives, and threatening ordesolating the moiety left us with rheumatisms and catarrhs. There is amuch vaster sum of enjoyment possible to man in the more generouslatitudes; and I have sometimes doubted whether even the energycharacteristic of ours is altogether to be praised, seeing that it has itsspring not so much in pure aspiration as in the instinct of self-preservation. Egyptian, Greek, Roman energy was an inner impulse; but oursis too often the sting of cold, the spur of famine. We must endure ourwinter, but let us not be guilty of the hypocrisy of pretending that welike it. Let us caress it with no more vain compliments, but use it withsomething of its own rude and savage sincerity. 

I say, our last Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of thosemidsummer-like days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleakand desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyanlonging took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strandof grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them forsome sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling from the captivetrain beside the desert, we should make to do our general houseworkforever, through the right of lawful purchase. But we knew that this wasimpossible, and that, if we desired colored help, we must seek it at theintelligence office, which is in one of those streets chiefly inhabited bythe orphaned children and grandchildren of slavery. To tell the truththese orphans do not seem to grieve much for their bereavement, but lead alife of joyous and rather indolent oblivion in their quarter of the city. They are often to be seen sauntering up and down the street by which theCharlesbridge cars arrive, --the young with a harmless swagger, and the oldwith the generic limp which our Autocrat has already noted as attendingadvanced years in their race. They seem the natural human interest of astreet so largely devoted to old clothes; and the thoughtful may see afelicity in their presence where the pawnbrokers' windows display theforfeited pledges of improvidence, and subtly remind us that we have yetto redeem a whole race, pawned in our needy and reckless national youth, and still held against us by the Uncle of Injustice, who is also theFather of Lies. How gayly are the young ladies of this race attired, asthey trip up and down the side walks, and in and out through the pendentgarments at the shop doors! They are the black pansies and marigolds anddark-blooded dahlias among womankind. They try to assume something of ourcolder race's demeanor, but even the passer on the horse-car can see thatit is not native with them, and is better pleased when they forget us, andungenteelly laugh in encountering friends, letting their white teethglitter through the generous lips that open to their ears. In the streetsbranching upwards from this avenue, very little colored men and maids playwith broken or enfeebled toys, or sport on the wooden pavements of theentrances to the inner courts. Now and then a colored soldier or sailor--looking strange in his uniform, even after the custom of several years--emerges from those passages; or, more rarely, a black gentleman, strickenin years, and cased in shining broadcloth, walks solidly down the bricksidewalk, cane in hand, --a vision of serene self-complacency, and soplainly the expression of virtuous public sentiment that the great coloredlouts, innocent enough till then in their idleness, are taken with asudden sense of depravity, and loaf guiltily up against the house-walls. At the same moment, perhaps, a young damsel, amorously scuffling with anadmirer through one of the low open windows, suspends the strife, and bidshim, "Go along now, do!" More rarely yet than the gentleman described, onemay see a white girl among the dark neighbors, whose frowzy head isuncovered, and whose sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and who, thoughno doubt quite at home, looks as strange there as that pale anomaly whichmay sometimes be seen among a crew of blackbirds. 

An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and yet hardly of unthrift, seems to prevail in the neighborhood, which has none of the aggressive andimpudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the surly wickedness ofa low American street. A gayety not born of the things that bring itsserious joy to the true New England heart--a ragged gayety, which comes ofsummer in the blood, and not in the pocket or the conscience, and whichaffects the countenance and the whole demeanor, setting the feet to someinward music, and at times bursting into a line of song or a child-likeand irresponsible laugh--gives tone to the visible life, and wakens a veryfriendly spirit in the passer, who somehow thinks there of a milderclimate, and is half persuaded that the orange-peel on the sidewalks camefrom fruit grown in the soft atmosphere of those back courts. 

It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it wasfrom a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge tolook at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her. She was amatron of mature age and portly figure, with a complexion like coffeesoothed with the richest cream; and her manners were so full of a certaintranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all out will to ask forreferences. It was only her barbaric laughter and her lawless eye thatbetrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered herancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilizationthat lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estrangedby descent; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wildness mixed with that ofthe desert in her veins: her grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestorson this side had probably sold their lands for the same value in trinketsthat bought the original African pair on the other side. 

The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into our kitchen, she conjuredfrom the malicious disorder in which it had been left by the flittingIrish kobold a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius, and wasquite different from a dinner of mere routine and laborious talent. Something original and authentic mingled with the accustomed flavors; and, though vague reminiscences of canal-boat travel and woodland camps arosefrom the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the assurance ofsuch power in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to be merelyrunning over the chords of our appetite with preliminary savors, as amusician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano beforebreaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she hadmastered her instrument; and thereafter there was no faltering in herperformances, which she varied constantly, through inspiration or fromsuggestion. She was so quick to receive new ideas in her art, that, whenthe Roman statuary who stayed a few weeks with us explained the mystery ofvarious purely Latin dishes, she caught their principle at once; andvisions of the great white cathedral, the Coliseum, and the "dome ofBrunelleschi" floated before us in the exhalations of the Milanese_risotto_, Roman _stufadino_, and Florentine _stracotto_ that smokedupon our board. But, after all, it was in puddings that Mrs. Johnsonchiefly excelled. She was one of those cooks--rare as men of geniusin literature--who love their own dishes; and she had, in her personallychild-like simplicity of taste, and the inherited appetites of hersavage forefathers, a dominant passion for sweets. So far as we couldlearn, she subsisted principally upon puddings and tea. Through the sameprimitive instincts, no doubt, she loved praise. She openly exulted in ourartless flatteries of her skill; she waited jealously at the head of thekitchen stairs to hear what was said of her work, especially if there wereguests; and she was never too weary to attempt emprises of cookery. 

While engaged in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like aturban upon her head and about her person those mystical swathings inwhich old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured oursense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed andthe last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her standat the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air with its pungent odors. Ifwe surprised her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe from herlips, and put it behind her, with a low mellow chuckle, and a look ofhalf-defiant consciousness; never guessing that none of her merits took ushalf so much as the cheerful vice which she only feigned to conceal. 

Some things she could not do so perfectly as cooking, because of herfailing eyesight; and we persuaded her that spectacles would both becomeand befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a pair of steel-bowedglasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at first, but had clearlyno pride in them. Before long she laid them aside altogether, and they hadpassed from our thoughts, when one day we heard her mellow note oflaughter and her daughter's harsher cackle outside our door, and, openingit, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spectacles of massive frame. We thenlearned that their purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made long ago, inthe life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore glasses, they shouldbe gold-bowed; and I hope the manes of the dead were half as happy inthese votive spectacles as the simple soul that offered them. 

She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of whomwere dead, and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. During hislife-time she had kept a little shop in her native town; and it was onlywithin a few years that she had gone into service. She cherished a naturalhaughtiness of spirit, and resented control, although disposed to do allshe could of her own motion. Being told to say when she wanted anafternoon, she explained that when she wanted an afternoon she always tookit without asking, but always planned so as not to discommode the ladieswith whom she lived. These, she said, had numbered twenty-seven withinthree years, which made us doubt the success of her system in all cases, though she merely held out the fact as an assurance of her faith in thefuture, and a proof of the ease with which places were to be found. Shecontended, moreover, that a lady who had for thirty years had a house ofher own, was in nowise bound to ask permission to receive visits fromfriends where she might be living, but that they ought freely to come andgo like other guests. In this spirit she once invited her son-in-law, Professor Jones of Providence, to dine with her; and her defied mistress, on entering the dining-room, found the Professor at pudding and teathere, --an impressively respectable figure in black clothes, with a blackface rendered yet more effective by a pair of green goggles. It appearedthat this dark professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island, andthat he was believed to have uncommon virtue in his science by reason ofbeing blind as well as black. 

I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a flattering opinion ofthe Caucasian race in all respects. In fact, she had very goodphilosophical and Scriptural reasons for looking upon us as an upstartpeople of new blood, who had come into their whiteness by no creditable orpleasant process. The late Mr. Johnson, who had died in the West Indies, whither he voyaged for his health in quality of cook upon a Down-Eastschooner, was a man of letters, and had written a book to show thesuperiority of the black over the white branches of the human family. Inthis he held that, as all islands have been at their discovery foundpeopled by blacks, we must needs believe that humanity was first createdof that color. Mrs. Johnson could not show us her husband's work (a solecopy in the library of an English gentleman at Port au Prince is not to bebought for money), but she often developed its arguments to the lady ofthe house; and one day, with a great show of reluctance, and many proteststhat no personal slight was meant, let fall the fact that Mr. Johnsonbelieved the white race descended from Gehazi the leper, upon whom theleprosy of Naaman fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to hisoriginal blackness. "And he went out from his presence a leper as white assnow, " said Mrs. Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture. "Leprosy, leprosy, " she added thoughtfully, --"nothing but leprosy bleached you out. "

It seems to me much in her praise that she did not exult in our taint anddegradation, as some white philosophers used to do in the opposite ideathat a part of the human family were cursed to lasting blackness andslavery in Ham and his children, but even told us of a remarkable approachto whiteness in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit of charity, no doubt, she refused ever to attend church with people of her elder andwholesomer blood. When she went to church, she said, she always went to awhite church, though while with us I am bound to say she never went toany. She professed to read her Bible in her bedroom on Sundays; but wesuspected, from certain sounds and odors which used to steal out of thissanctuary, that her piety more commonly found expression in dozing andsmoking. 

I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson's anxiety to claimhonor for the African color, while denying this color in many of her ownfamily. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all her people mustendure, however proudly they hide it or light-heartedly forget it, fromthe despite and contumely to which they are guiltlessly born; and when Ithought how irreparable was this disgrace and calamity of a black skin, and how irreparable it must be for ages yet, in this world where everyother shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope forcovert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so patheticto hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try, inspite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own arrogant generalizations, to establish their whiteness, that we must have been very cruel and sillypeople to turn her sacred fables even into matter of question. I have nodoubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce--it is impossible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of thebaptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's family--have as light skins and asgolden hair in heaven as her reverend maternal fancy painted for them inour world. There, certainly, they would not be subject to tanning, whichhad ruined the delicate complexion, and had knotted into black woollytangles the once wavy blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi; and Iwould fain believe that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to seaso many years ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skinkeep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes ininfancy. But I have no means of knowing this, or of telling whether he wasthe prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no morebe taken in proof, of the one assertion than of the other. When she cameto us, it was agreed that she should go to school; but she overruled hermother in this as in everything else, and never went. Except Sunday-schoollessons, she had no other instruction than that her mistress gave her inthe evenings, when a heavy day's play and the natural influences of thehour conspired with original causes to render her powerless before wordsof one syllable. 

The first week of her service she was obedient and faithful to her duties;but, relaxing in the atmosphere of a house which seems to demoralize allmenials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying in wait forcallers out of doors, and, when people rang, of running up the frontsteps, and letting them in from the outside. As the season expanded, andthe fine weather became confirmed, she modified even this form of service, and spent her time in the fields, appearing at the house only when natureimportunately craved molasses. She had a parrot-like quickness, so far asmusic was concerned, and learned from the Roman statuary to make thegroves and half-finished houses resound, "Camicia rossa, Ove t' ascondi? T' appella Italia, -- Tu non respondi!"

She taught the Garibaldi song, moreover, to all the neighboring children, so that I sometimes wondered if our street were not about to march uponRome in a body. 

In her untamable disobedience, Naomi alone betrayed her sylvan blood, forshe was in all other respects negro and not Indian. But it was of heraboriginal ancestry that Mrs. Johnson chiefly boasted, --when not engagedin argument to maintain the superiority of the African race. She loved todescant upon it as the cause and explanation of her own arrogant habit offeeling; and she seemed indeed to have inherited something of the Indian'shauteur along with the Ethiop's supple cunning and abundant amiability. She gave many instances in which her pride had met and overcome theinsolence of employers, and the kindly old creature was by no meanssingular in her pride of being reputed proud. 

She could never have been a woman of strong logical faculties, but she hadin some things a very surprising and awful astuteness. She seldomintroduced any purpose directly, but bore all about it and then suddenlysprung it upon her unprepared antagonist. At other times she obscurelyhinted a reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred; as when she wardedoff reproach for some delinquency by saying in a general way that she hadlived with ladies who used to come scolding into the kitchen after theyhad taken their bitters. "Quality ladies took their bitters regular, " sheadded, to remove any sting of personality from her remark; for, from manythings she had let fall, we knew that she did not regard us as quality. Onthe contrary, she often tried to overbear us with the gentility of herformer places; and would tell the lady over whom she reigned, that she hadlived with folks worth their three and four hundred thousand dollars, whonever complained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had a sufficientregard for the literary occupations of the family, Mr. Johnson having beenan author. She even professed to have herself written a book, which wasstill in manuscript, and preserved somewhere among her best clothes. 

It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact with a mind so originaland suggestive as Mrs. Johnson's. We loved to trace its intricate yetoften transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond of explaining itspeculiarities by facts of ancestry, --of finding hints of the Powwow or theGrand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious of somethingwarmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and wechose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest. She had scarcelyany being apart from her affection; she had no morality, but was goodbecause she neither hated nor envied; and she might have been a saint farmore easily than far more civilized people. 

There was that also in her sinuous yet malleable nature, so full of guileand so full of goodness, that reminded us pleasantly of lowly folk inelder lands, where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints of fearbetween master and servant, without disturbing the familiarity of theirrelation. She advised freely with us upon all household matters, and tooka motherly interest in whatever concerned us. She could be flattered orcaressed into almost any service, but no threat or command could move her. When she erred, she never acknowledged her wrong in words, but handsomelyexpressed her regrets in a pudding, or sent up her apologies in a favoritedish secretly prepared. We grew so well used to this form of exculpation, that, whenever Mrs. Johnson took an afternoon at an inconvenient season, we knew that for a week afterwards we should be feasted like princes. Sheowned frankly that she loved us, that she never had done half so much forpeople before, and that she never had been nearly so well suited in anyother place; and for a brief and happy time we thought that we nevershould part. 

One day, however, our dividing destiny appeared in the basement, and waspresented to us as Hippolyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson, who hadjust arrived on a visit to his mother from the State of New Hampshire. Hewas a heavy and loutish youth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, andlooking forward to the future with a vacant and listless eye. I mean thatthis was his figurative attitude; his actual manner, as he lolled upon achair beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric, that we felt a littleuncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. Johnson openly described him aspeculiar. He was so deeply tanned by the fervid suns of the New Hampshirewinter, and his hair had so far suffered from the example of the sheeplately under his charge, that he could not be classed by any stretch ofcompassion with the blonde and straight-haired members of Mrs. Johnson'sfamily. 

He remained with us all the first day until late in the afternoon, whenhis mother took him out to get him a boarding-house. Then he departed inthe van of her and Naomi, pausing at the gate to collect his spirits, and, after he had sufficiently animated himself by clapping his palms together, starting off down the street at a hand-gallop, to the manifest terror ofthe cows in the pastures, and the confusion of the less demonstrativepeople of our household. Other characteristic traits appeared in HippolytoThucydides within no very long period of time, and he ran away from hislodgings so often during the summer that he might be said to board roundamong the outlying corn-fields and turnip-patches of Charlesbridge. As acheck upon this habit, Mrs. Johnson seemed to have invited him to spendhis whole time in our basement; for whenever we went below we found himthere, balanced--perhaps in homage to us, and perhaps as a token ofextreme sensibility in himself--upon the low window-sill, the bottoms ofhis boots touching the floor inside, and his face buried in the grasswithout. 

We could formulate no very tenable objection to all this, and yet thepresence of Thucydides in our kitchen unaccountably oppressed ourimaginations. We beheld him all over the house, a monstrous eidolon, balanced upon every window-sill; and he certainly attracted unpleasantnotice to our place, no less by his furtive and hang-dog manner of arrivalthan by the bold displays with which he celebrated his departures. Wehinted this to Mrs. Johnson, but she could not enter into our feeling. Indeed, all the wild poetry of her maternal and primitive nature seemed tocast itself about this hapless boy; and if we had listened to her weshould have believed there was no one so agreeable in society, or soquick-witted in affairs, as Hippolyto, when he chose. She used to rehearseus long epics concerning his industry, his courage, and his talent; andshe put fine speeches in his mouth with no more regard to the truth thanif she had been a historian, and not a poet. Perhaps she believed that hereally said and did the things she attributed to him: it is the destiny ofthose who repeatedly tell great things either of themselves or others; andI think we may readily forgive the illusion to her zeal and fondness. Infact, she was not a wise woman, and she spoiled her children as if she hadbeen a rich one. 

At last, when we said positively that Thucydides should come to us nomore, and then qualified the prohibition by allowing him to come everySunday, she answered that she never would hurt the child's feelings bytelling him not to come where his mother was; that people who did not loveher children did not love her; and that, if Hippy went, she went. Wethought it a master-stroke of firmness to rejoin that Hippolyto must go inany event; but I am bound to own that he did not go, and that his motherstayed, and so fed us with every cunning propitiatory dainty, that we musthave been Pagans to renew our threat. In fact, we begged Mrs. Johnson togo into the country with us, and she, after long reluctation on Hippy'saccount, consented, agreeing to send him away to friends during herabsence. 

We made every preparation, and on the eve of our departure Mrs. Johnsonwent into the city to engage her son's passage to Bangor, while we awaitedher return in untroubled security. 

But she did not appear till midnight, and then responded with but a sad"Well, sah!" to the cheerful "Well, Mrs. Johnson!" that greeted her. 

"All right, Mrs. Johnson?"

Mrs. Johnson made a strange noise, half chuckle and half death-rattle, inher throat. "All wrong, sah. Hippy's off again; and I've been all over thecity after him. "

"Then you can't go with us in the morning?"

"How _can_ I, sah?"

Mrs. Johnson went sadly out of the room. Then she came back to the dooragain, and, opening it, uttered, for the first time in our service, wordsof apology and regret: "I hope I ha'n't put you out any. I _wanted_to go with you, but I ought to _knowed_ I couldn't. All is, I lovedyou too much. "

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE

Vagabonds the world would no doubt call many of my doorstep acquaintance, and I do not attempt to defend them altogether against the world, whichpaints but black and white and in general terms. Yet I would fain veilwhat is only half-truth under another name, for I know that the service oftheir Gay Science is not one of such disgraceful ease as we associate withideas of vagrancy, though I must own that they lead the life they dobecause they love it. They always protest that nothing but their ignoranceof our tongue prevents them from practicing some mechanical trade. "Whatwork could be harder, " they ask, "than carrying this organ about all day?"but while I answer with honesty that nothing can be more irksome, I feelthat they only pretend a disgust with it, and that they really like organ-grinding, if for no other reason than that they are the children of thesummer, and it takes them into the beloved open weather. One of myfriends, at least, who in the warmer months is to all appearance ablithesome troubadour, living

 "A merry life in sun and shade, "

as a coal-heaver in winter; and though this more honorable and usefuloccupation is doubtless open to him the whole year round, yet he does notdevote himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring to lay asidehis grimy basket, and, shouldering his organ, to quit the dismal wharvesand carts and cellars, and to wander forth into the suburbs, with hislazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing with his tambourine buttake up a collection, and who, meeting me the other day in a chancepassage of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of his father'spersonal history. 

It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which so many Italians livethat one might think to find it under a softer sky and in a gentler air, and which I had always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other streetsin Boston, --with houses stuccoed outside, and with gratings at theirground-floor windows; with mouldering archways between the buildings, andat the corners feeble lamps glimmering before pictures of the Madonna;with weather-beaten shutters flapping overhead, and many balconies fromwhich hung the linen swathings of young infants, and love-making maidensfurtively lured the velvet-jacketed, leisurely youth below: a placehaunted by windy voices of blessing and cursing, with the perpetual clackof wooden-heeled shoes upon the stones, and what perfume from the blossomof vines and almond-trees, mingling with less delicate smells, thetravelled reader pleases to imagine. I do not say that I found FerryStreet actually different from this vision in most respects; but as forthe vines and almond-trees, they were not in bloom at the moment of myencounter with the little tambourine-boy. As we stood and talked, the snowfell as heavily and thickly around us as elsewhere in Boston. With a vaguepain, --the envy of a race toward another born to a happier clime, --I heardfrom him that his whole family was going back to Italy in a month. Thefather had at last got together money enough, and the mother, who had longbeen an invalid, must be taken home; and, so far as I know, the populationof Ferry Street exists but in the hope of a return, soon or late, to thenative or the ancestral land. 

More than one of my doorstep acquaintance, in fact, seemed to have noother stock in trade than this fond desire, and to thrive with it in oursympathetic community. It is scarcely possible but the reader has met thewidow of Giovanni Cascamatto, a Vesuvian lunatic who has long set fire totheir home on the slopes of the volcano, and perished in the flames. Shewas our first Italian acquaintance in Charlesbridge, presenting herselfwith a little subscription-book which she sent in for inspection, with aprinted certificate to the facts of her history signed with the somewhatconventionally Saxon names of William Tompkins and John Johnson. Thesegentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can be reproduced, that herobject in coming to America was to get money to go back to Italy; and thewhole document had so fictitious an air that it made us doubt even thenationality of the bearer; but we were put to shame by the decent joy shemanifested in an Italian salutation. There was no longer a question ofimposture in anybody's mind; we gladly paid tribute to her poetic fiction, and she thanked us with a tranquil courtesy that placed the obligationwhere it belonged. As she turned to go with many good wishes, we pressedher to have some dinner, but she answered with a compliment insurpassablyflattering, she had just dined--in another palace. The truth is, there isnot a single palace on Benicia Street, and our little box of pine andpaper would hardly have passed for a palace on the stage, where thesethings are often contrived with great simplicity; but as we had made alittle Italy together, she touched it with the exquisite politeness of herrace, and it became for the instant a lordly mansion, standing on theChiaja, or the Via Nuovissima, or the Canalazzo. 

I say this woman seemed glad to be greeted in Italian, but not, so far asI could see, surprised; and altogether the most amazing thing about mydoorstep acquaintance of her nation is, that they are never surprised tobe spoken to in their own tongue, or, if they are, never show it. Achestnut-roaster, who has sold me twice the chestnuts the same money wouldhave bought of him in English, has not otherwise recognized the fact thatTuscan is not the dialect of Charlesbridge, and the mortifying nonchalancewith which my advances have always been received has long since persuadedme that to the grinder at the gate it is not remarkable that a man shouldopen the door of his wooden house on Benicia Street, and welcome him inhis native language. After the first shock of this indifference is past, it is not to be questioned but it flatters with an illusion, which a stareof amazement would forbid, reducing the encounter to a vulgar reality atonce, and I could almost believe it in those wily and amiable folk tointend the sweeter effect of their unconcern, which tacitly implies thatthere is no other tongue in the world but Italian, and which makes all theearth and air Italian for the time. Nothing else could have been thepurpose of that image-dealer whom I saw on a summer's day lying at thefoot of one of our meeting-houses, and doing his best to make it acathedral, and really giving a sentiment of medieval art to the noblesculptures of the facade which the carpenters had just nailed up, freshlypainted and newly repaired. This poet was stretched upon his back, eating, in that convenient posture, his dinner out of an earthen pot, plucking theviand from it, whatever it was, with his thumb and fore-finger, anddropping it piecemeal into his mouth. When the passer asked him "Where areyou from?" he held a morsel in air long enough to answer "Da Lucca, signore, " and then let it fall into his throat, and sank deeper into areverie in which that crude accent even must have sounded like a gossip'sor a kinsman's voice, but never otherwise moved muscle, nor looked to seewho passed or lingered. There could have been little else in hiscircumstances to remind him of home, and if he was really in the sort ofday-dream attributed to him, he was wise not to look about him. I have notmyself been in Lucca, but I conceive that its piazza is not like oursquare, with a pump and horse-trough in the midst; but that it hasprobably a fountain and statuary, though not possibly so magnificent anelm towering above the bronze or marble groups as spreads its boughs ofbenison over our pump and the horse-car switchman, loitering near it toset the switch for the arriving cars, or lift the brimming buckets to thesmoking nostrils of the horses, while out from the stable comes clangingand banging with a fresh team that famous African who has turned white, or, if he is off duty, one of his brethren who has not yet begun to turn. Figure, besides, an expressman watering his horse at the trough, aprovision-cart backed up against the curb in front of one of the stores, various people looking from the car-office windows, and a conductorappearing at the door long enough to call out, "Ready for Boston!"--andyou have a scene of such gayety as Lucca could never have witnessed in herpiazza at high noon on a summer's day. Even our Campo Santo, if theLucchese had cared to look round the corner of the meeting-house at itsmoss-grown head stones, could have had little to remind him of home, though it has antiquity and a proper quaintness. But not for him, not forthem of his clime and faith, is the pathos of those simple memorial slateswith their winged skulls, changing upon many later stones, as if by thesoftening of creeds and customs, to cherub's heads, --not for him is thepang I feel because of those who died, in our country's youth exiles orexiles' children, heirs of the wilderness and toil and hardship. Couldthey rise from their restful beds, and look on this wandering Italian withhis plaster statuettes of Apollo, and Canovan dancers and deities, theywould hold his wares little better than Romish saints and idolatries, andwould scarcely have the sentimental interest in him felt by the moderncitizen of Charlesbridge; but I think that even they must have respectedthat Lombard scissors-grinder who used to come to us, and put an edge toall the cutlery in the house. 

He has since gone back to Milan, whence he came eighteen years ago, andwhither he has returned, --as he told me one acute day in the fall, whenall the winter hinted itself, and the painted leaves shuddered earthwardin the grove across the way, --to enjoy a little climate before he died(_per goder un po' di dima prima di morire_). Our climate was theonly thing he had against us; in every other respect he was a New-Englander, even to the early stages of consumption. He told me the storyof his whole life, and of how in his adventurous youth he had left Milanand sojourned some years in Naples, vainly seeking his fortune there. Afterwards he went to Greece, and set up his ancestral business ofgreengrocer in Athens, faring there no better, but rather worse than inNaples, because of the deeper wickedness of the Athenians, who cheated himright and left, and whose laws gave him no redress. The Neapolitans werebad enough, he said, making a wry face, but the Greeks!--and he spat theGreeks out in the grass. At last, after much misfortune in Europe, hebethought him of coming to America, and he had never regretted it, but forthe climate. You spent a good deal here, --nearly all you earned, --but thena poor man was a man, and the people were honest. It was wonderful to himthat they all knew how to read and write, and he viewed with inexpressiblescorn those Irish who came to this country, and were so little sensible ofthe benefits it conferred upon them. Boston he believed the best city inAmerica, and "Tell me, " said he, "is there such a thing anywhere else inthe world as that Public Library?" He, a poor man, and almost unknown, hadtaken books from it to his own room, and was master to do so whenever heliked. He had thus been enabled to read Botta's history of the UnitedStates, an enormous compliment both to the country and the work which Idoubt ever to have been paid before; and he knew more about Washingtonthan I did, and desired to know more than I could tell him of thefinancial question among us. So we came to national politics, and then toEuropean affairs. "It appears that Garibaldi will not go to Rome thisyear, " remarks my scissors-grinder, who is very red in his sympathies. "The Emperor forbids! Well, patience! And that blessed Pope, what does hewant, that Pope? He will be king find priest both, he will wear two pairsof shoes at once!" I must confess that no other of my door-stepacquaintance had so clear an idea as this one of the difference betweenthings here and at home. To the minds of most we seemed divided here asthere into rich and poor, --_signori, persone eivili_, and _poveragente_, --and their thoughts about us did not go beyond a speculationas to our individual willingness or ability to pay for organ-grinding. But this Lombard was worthy of his adopted country, and I forgive himthe frank expression of a doubt that one day occurred to him, whenoffered a glass of Italian wine. He held it daintily between him andthe sun for a smiling moment, and then said, as if our wine must needs beas ungenuine as our Italian, --was perhaps some expression from thesurrounding currant-bushes, harsh as that from the Northern tongues whichcould never give his language the true life and tonic charm, --"But Isuppose this wine is not made of grapes, signor?" Yet he was a verycourteous old man, elaborate in greeting and leave-taking, and with aquicker sense than usual. It was accounted delicacy in him, that, when hehad bidden us a final adieu, he should never come near us again, thoughthe date of his departure was postponed some weeks, and we heard himtinkling down the street, and stopping at the neighbors' houses. He was akeen-faced, thoughtful-looking man; and he wore a blouse of blue cotton, from the pocket of which always dangled the leaves of some wild saladculled from our wasteful vacant lots or prodigal waysides. 

[Illustration: "But I suppose this wine is not made of grapes, signor?"]

Altogether different in character was that Triestine, who came one eveningto be helped home at the close of a very disastrous career in Mexico. HeWas a person of innumerable bows, and fluttered his bright-coloredcompliments about, till it appeared that never before had such amiablepeople been asked charity by such a worthy and generous sufferer. InTrieste he had been a journalist, and it was evident enough from hisspeech that he was of a good education. He was vain of his Italian accent, which was peculiarly good for his heterogeneously peopled native city; andhe made a show of that marvelous facility of the Triestines in languages, by taking me down French books, Spanish books, German books, and readingfrom them all with the properest accent. Yet with this boyish pride andself-satisfaction there was mixed a tone of bitter and worldly cynicism, abelief in fortune as the sole providence. As nearly as I could make out, he was a Johnson man in American politics; upon the Mexican question hewas independent, disdaining French and Mexicans alike. He was with theformer from the first, and had continued in the service of Maximilianafter their withdrawal, till the execution of that prince made Mexico noplace for adventurous merit. He was now going back to his native country, an ungrateful land enough, which had ill treated him long ago, but towhich he nevertheless returned in a perfect gayety of temper. What alight-hearted rogue he was, --with such merry eyes, and such a pleasantsmile shaping his neatly trimmed beard and mustache! After he had supped, and he Stood with us at the door taking leave, something happened to besaid of Italian songs, whereupon this blithe exile, whom the compassion ofstrangers was enabling to go home after many years of unprofitable toiland danger to a country that had loved him not, fell to caroling aVenetian barcarole, and went sweetly away in its cadence. I bore himcompany as far as the gate of another Italian-speaking signor, and wasthere bidden adieu with great effusion, so that I forgot till he had leftme to charge him not to be in fear of the house-dog, which barked but didnot bite. In calling this after him, I had the misfortune to blunder in myverb. A man of another nation--perhaps another man of his own nation--would have cared rather for what I said than how I said it; but he, as iftoo zealous for the honor of his beautiful language to endure a hurt to iteven in that moment of grief, lifting his hat, and bowing for the lasttime, responded with a "Morde, non morsica, signore!" and passed in underthe pines, and next day to Italy. 

There is a little old Genoese lady comes to sell us pins, needles, thread, tape, and the like _roba_, whom I regard as leading quite an ideallife in some respects. Her traffic is limited to a certain number offamilies who speak more or less Italian; and her days, so far as they areconcerned, must be passed in an atmosphere of sympathy and kindliness. Thetruth is, we Northern and New World folk cannot help but cast a littleromance about whoever comes to us from Italy, whether we have actuallyknown the beauty and charm of that land or not. Then this old lady is inherself a very gentle and lovable kind of person, with a tender mother-face, which is also the face of a child. A smile plays always upon herwrinkled visage, and her quick and restless eyes are full of friendliness. There is never much stuff in her basket, however, and it is something of amystery how she manages to live from it. None but an Italian could, I amsure; and her experience must test the full virtue of the national geniusfor cheap salads and much-extenuated soup-meat. I do not know whether itis native in her, or whether it is a grace acquired from long dealing withthose kindly-hearted customers of hers in Charlesbridge, but she is of amost munificent spirit, and returns every smallest benefit with somepresent from her basket. She makes me ashamed of things I have writtenabout the sordidness of her race, but I shall vainly seek to atone forthem by open-handedness to her. She will give favor for favor; she willnot even count the money she receives; our bargaining is a contest of thecourtliest civilities, ending in many an "Adieu!" "To meet again!" "Remainwell!" and "Finally!" not surpassed if rivaled in any Italian street. Inher ineffectual way, she brings us news of her different customers, breaking up their stout Saxon names into tinkling polysyllables whichsuggest them only to the practiced sense, and is perfectly patient andcontented if we mistake one for another. She loves them all, but shepities them as living in a terrible climate; and doubtless in her heartshe purposes one day to go back to Italy, there to die. In the mean timeshe is very cheerful; she, too, has had her troubles, --what troubles I donot remember, but those that come by sickness and by death, and thatreally seem no sorrows until they come to us, --yet she never complains. Itis hard to make a living, and the house-rent alone is six dollars a month;but still one lives, and does not fare so ill either. As it does not seemto be in her to dislike any one, it must be out of a harmless guile, feltto be comforting to servant-ridden householders, that she always speaks of"those Irish, " her neighbors, with a bated breath, a shaken head, a handlifted to the cheek, and an averted countenance. 

Swarthiest of the organ-grinding tribe is he who peers up at my window outof infinitesimal black eyes, perceives me, louts low, and for form's sakegrinds me out a tune before he begins to talk. As we parley together, sayit is eleven o'clock in the forenoon, and a sober tranquillity reigns uponthe dust and nodding weeds of Benicia Street. At that hour the organ-grinder and I are the only persons of our sex in the whole suburbanpopulation; all other husbands and fathers having eaten their breakfastsat seven o'clock, and stood up in the early horse-cars to Boston, whencethey will return, with aching backs and quivering calves, half-pendant byleathern straps from the roofs of the same luxurious conveyances, in theevening. The Italian might go and grind his organ upon the front stoop ofany one of a hundred French-roof houses around, and there would be no armwithin strong enough to thrust him thence; but he is a gentleman in hisway, and, as he prettily explains, he never stops to play except where thewindow smiles on him: a frowning lattice he will pass in silence. I beholdin him a disappointed man, --a man broken in health, and of a liver bakedby long sojourn in a tropical clime. In large and dim outline, made allthe dimmer by his dialect, he sketches me the story of his life; how inhis youth he ran away from the Milanese for love of a girl in France, who, dying, left him with so little purpose in the world that, after working athis trade of plasterer for some years in Lyons, he listened to a certaingentleman going out upon government service to a French colony in SouthAmerica. This gentleman wanted a man-servant, and he said to my organ-grinder, "Go with me and I make your fortune. " So he, who cared notwhither he went, went, and found himself in the tropics. It was a hardlife he led there; and of the wages that had seemed so great in France, hepaid nearly half to his laundress alone, being forced to be neat in hismaster's house. The service was not so irksome in-doors, but it was thehunting beasts in the forest all day that broke his patience at last. 

"Beasts in the forest?" I ask, forgetful of the familiar sense of_bestie_, and figuring cougars at least by the word. 

"Yes, those little beasts for the naturalists, --flies, bugs, beetles, --Heaven knows what. "

"But this brought you money?"

"It brought my master money, but me aches and pains as many as you will, and at last the fever. When that was burnt out, I made up my mind to askfor more pay, and, not getting it, to quit that service. I think thesignor would have given it, --but the signora! So I left, empty as I came, and was cook on a vessel to New York. "

This was the black and white of the man's story. I lose the color andatmosphere which his manner as well as his words bestowed upon it. He toldit in a cheerful, impersonal kind of way as the romance of a poor devilwhich had interested him, and might possibly amuse me, leaving out notouch of character in his portrait of the fat, selfish master, --yieldingenough, however, but for his grasping wife, who, with all her avarice andgreed, he yet confessed to be very handsome. By the wave of a hand hehoused them in a tropic residence, dim, cool, close shut, kept by servantsin white linen moving with mute slippered feet over stone floors; and byanother gesture he indicated the fierce thorny growths of the forest inwhich he hunted those vivid insects, --the luxuriant savannas, the giganticferns and palms, the hush and shining desolation, the presence of theinvisible fever and death. There was a touch, too, of inexpressiblesadness in his half-ignorant mention of the exiles at Cayenne, who wereforbidden the wide ocean of escape about them by those swift gunboatskeeping their coasts and swooping down upon every craft that left theshore. He himself had seen one such capture, and he made me see it, andthe mortal despair of the fugitives, standing upright in their boat withthe idle oars in their unconscious hands, while the corvette swept towardthem. 

For all his misfortunes, he was not cast down. He had that lightness oftemper which seems proper to most northern Italians, whereas those fromthe south are usually dark-mooded, sad-faced men. Nothing surpasses forunstudied misanthropy of expression the visages of different Neapolitanharpers who have visited us; but they have some right to their dejectedcountenances as being of a yet half-civilized stock, and as real artistsand men of genius. Nearly all wandering violinists, as well as harpers, are of their race, and they are of every age, from that of mere childrento men in their prime. They are very rarely old, as many of the organ-grinders are; they are not so handsome as the Italians of the north, though they have invariably fine eyes. They arrive in twos and threes; theviolinist briefly tunes his fiddle, and the harper unslings hisinstrument, and, with faces of profound gloom, they go through theirrepertory, --pieces from the great composers, airs from the opera, notunmingled with such efforts of Anglo-Saxon genius as Champagne Charley andCaptain Jenks of the Horse Marines, which, like the language ofShakespeare and Milton, hold us and our English cousins in tender bonds ofmutual affection. Beyond the fact that they come "dal Basilicat', " or "dalPrincipat', " one gets very little out of these Neapolitans, though I daresay they are not so surly at heart as they look. Money does not brightenthem to the eye, but yet it touches them, and they are good in playing orleaving off to him that pays. Long time two of them stood between thegateway firs on a pleasant summer's afternoon and twanged and scrapedtheir harmonious strings, till all the idle boys of the neighborhoodgathered about them, listening with a grave and still delight. It was amost serious company: the Neapolitans, with their cloudy brows, rapt intheir music; and the Yankee children, with their impassive faces, warilyguarding against the faintest expression of enjoyment; and when at lastthe minstrels played a brisk measure, and the music began to work in theblood of the boys, and one of them shuffling his reluctant feet upon thegravel, broke into a sudden and resistless dance, the spectacle became toosad for contemplation. The boy danced only from the hips down; noexpression of his face gave the levity sanction, nor did any of hiscomrades: they beheld him with a silent fascination, but none was infectedby the solemn indecorum; and when the legs and music ceased their playtogether, no comment was made, and the dancer turned unheated away. Achance passer asked for what he called the Gearybaldeye Hymn, but theNeapolitans apparently did not know what this was. 

My doorstep acquaintance were not all of one race; now and then an aliento the common Italian tribe appeared, --an Irish soldier, on his way toSalem, and willing to show me more of his mutilation than I cared to buythe sight of for twenty-five cents; and more rarely yet an American, alsoformerly of the army, but with something besides his wretchedness to sell. On the hottest day of last summer such a one rang the bell, and wasdiscovered on the threshold wiping with his poor sole hand the sweat thatstood upon his forehead. There was still enough of the independent citizenin his maimed and emaciated person to inspire him with deliberation and ashow of that indifference with which we Americans like to encounter eachother; but his voice was rather faint when he asked if I supposed wewanted any starch to-day. 

"Yes, certainly, " answered what heart there was within, taking notewillfully, but I hope not wantonly, what an absurdly limp figure he wasfor a peddler of starch, --"certainly from you, brave fellow;" and thepackage being taken from his basket, the man turned to go away, so verywearily, that a cheap philanthropy protested: "For shame! ask him to sitdown in-doors and drink a glass of water. "

"No, " answered the poor fellow, when this indignant voice had been obeyed, and he had been taken at a disadvantage, and as it were surprised into theconfession, "my family hadn't any breakfast this morning, and I've got tohurry back to them. "

"Haven't _you_ had any breakfast?"

"Well, I wa'n't rightly hungry when I left the house. "

"Here, now, " popped in the virtue before named, "is an opportunity todischarge the debt we all owe to the brave fellows who gave us back ourcountry. Make it beer. "

So it was made beer and bread and cold meat, and, after a little pressing, the honest soul consented to the refreshment. He sat down in a cooldoorway and began to eat and to tell of the fight before Vicksburg. And ifyou have never seen a one-armed soldier making a meal, I can assure youthe sight is a pathetic one, and is rendered none the cheerfuller by hismemories of the fights that mutilated him. This man had no verysusceptible audience, but before he was carried off the field, shotthrough the body, and in the arm and foot, he had sold every package ofstarch in his basket. I am ashamed to say this now, for I suspect that aman with one arm, who indulged himself in going about under that broilingsun of July, peddling starch, was very probably an impostor. He computed agood day's profits of seventy-five cents, and when asked if that was notvery little for the support of a sick wife and three children, he answeredwith a quaint effort at impressiveness, and with a trick, as I imagined, from the manner of the regimental chaplain, "You've done your duty, myfriend, and more'n your duty. If every one did their duty like that, weshould get along. " So he took leave, and shambled out into the furnace-heat, the sun beating upon his pale face, and his linen coat hugging himclose, but with his basket lighter, and I hope his heart also. At anyrate, this was the sentiment which cheap philanthropy offered in self-gratulation, as he passed out of sight: "There! you are quits with thosemaimed soldiers at last, and you have a country which you have paid forwith cold victuals as they with blood. "

We have been a good deal visited by one disbanded volunteer, not to thenaked eye maimed, nor apparently suffering from any lingering illness, yetwho bears, as he tells me, a secret disabling wound in his side from aspent shell, and who is certainly a prey to the most acute form ofshiftlessness. I do not recall with exactness the date of ouracquaintance, but it was one of those pleasant August afternoons when adinner eaten in peace fills the digester with a millennial tenderness forthe race too rarely felt in the nineteenth century. At such a moment it isa more natural action to loosen than to tighten the purse-strings, andwhen a very neatly dressed young man presented himself at the gate, and, in a note of indescribable plaintiveness, asked if I had any little jobfor him to do that he might pay for a night's lodging, I looked about thesmall domain with a vague longing to find some part of it in disrepair, and experienced a moment's absurd relief when he hinted that he would bewilling to accept fifty cents in pledge of future service. Yet this wasnot the right principle: some work, real or apparent, must be done for themoney, and the veteran was told that he might weed the strawberry bed, though, as matters then stood, it was clean enough for a strawberry bedthat never bore anything. The veteran was neatly dressed, as I have said:his coat, which was good, was buttoned to the throat for reasons thatshall be sacred against curiosity, and he had on a perfectly clean papercollar; he was a handsome young fellow, with regular features, and asolicitously kept imperial and mustache; his hair, when he lifted his hat, appeared elegantly oiled and brushed. I did not hope from this figure thatthe work done would be worth the money paid, and, as nearly as I cancompute, the weeds he took from that bed cost me a cent apiece, to saynothing of a cup of tea given him in grace at the end of his labors. 

My acquaintance was, as the reader will be glad to learn, a nativeAmerican, though it is to be regretted, for the sake of facts which hiscase went far to establish, that he was not a New-Englander by birth. Themost that could be claimed was, that he came to Boston from Delaware whenvery young, and that there on that brine-washed granite he had grown asperfect a flower of helplessness and indolence, as fine a fruit ofmaturing civilization, as ever expanded or ripened in Latin lands. Helived, not only a protest in flesh and blood against the tendency ofdemocracy to exclude mere beauty from our system, but a refutation ofthose Old World observers, who deny to our vulgar and bustling communitiesthe refining and elevating grace of Repose. There was something verycurious and original in his character, from which the sentiment of shamewas absent, but which was not lacking in the fine instincts of personalcleanliness, of dress, of style. There was nothing of the rowdy in him; hewas gentle as an Italian noble in his manners: what other traits they mayhave had in common, I do not know; perhaps an amiable habit of illusion. He was always going to bring me his discharge papers, but he never did, though he came often and had many a pleasant night's sleep at my cost. Ifsometimes he did a little work, he spent great part of the time contractedto me in the kitchen, where it was understood, quite upon his own agency, that his wages included board. At other times, he called for money toolate in the evening to work it out that day, and it has happened that anew second girl, deceived by his genteel appearance in the uncertainlight, has shown him into the parlor, where I have found him to his and myown great amusement, as the gentleman who wanted to see me. Nothing elseseemed to raise his ordinarily dejected spirits so much. We all know howpleasant it is to laugh at people behind their backs; but this veteranafforded me at a very low rate the luxury of a fellow-being whom one mightlaugh at to his face as much as one liked. 

Yet with all his shamelessness, his pensiveness, his elegance, I felt thatsomehow our national triumph was not complete in him, --that there were yetmore finished forms of self-abasement in the Old World, till one day Ilooked out of the window and saw at a little distance my veteran digging acellar for an Irishman. I own that the spectacle gave me a shock ofpleasure, and that I ran down to have a nearer view of what human eyeshave seldom, if ever, beheld, --an American, pure blood, handling the pick, the shovel, and the wheelbarrow, while an Irishman directed his labors. Upon inspection, it appeared that none of the trees grew with their rootsin the air, in recognition of this great reversal of the natural law; allthe French-roof houses stood right side up. The phenomenon may become morecommon in future, unless the American race accomplishes its destiny ofdying out before the more populatory foreigner, but as yet it graced theveteran with an exquisite and signal distinction. He, however, seemed tofeel unpleasantly the anomaly of his case, and opened the conversation bysaying that he should not work at that job to-morrow, it hurt his side;and went on to complain of the inhumanity of Americans to Americans. "Why, " said he, "they'd rather give out their jobs to a nigger than to oneof their own kind. I was beatin' carpets for a gentleman on the Avenue, and the first thing I know he give most of 'em to a nigger. I beat sevenof 'em in one day, and got two dollars; and the nigger beat 'em by thepiece, and he got a dollar an' a half apiece. My luck!"

Here the Irishman glanced at his hireling, and the rueful veteran hastenedto pile up another wheelbarrow with earth. If ever we come to reversepositions generally with our Irish brethren, there is no doubt but theywill get more work out of us than we do from them at present. 

It was shortly after this that the veteran offered to do second girl'swork in my house if I would take him. The place was not vacant; and as thesummer was now drawing to a close, and I feared to be left with him on myhands for the winter, it seemed well to speak to him upon the subject ofeconomy. The next time he called, I had not about me the exact sum for anight's lodging, --fifty cents, namely--and asked him if he thought adollar would do He smiled sadly, as if he did not like jesting upon such avery serious subject, but said he allowed to work it out, and took it. 

"Now, I hope you won't think I am interfering with your affairs, " said hisbenefactor, "but I really think you are a very poor financier. Accordingto your own account, you have been going on from year to year for a longtime, trusting to luck for a night's lodging. Sometimes I suppose you haveto sleep out-of-doors. "

"No, never!" answered the veteran, with something like scorn. "I neversleep out-doors. I wouldn't do it. "

"Well, at any rate, some one has to pay for your lodging. Don't you thinkyou'd come cheaper to your friends, if, instead of going to a hotel everynight, you'd take a room somewhere, and pay for it by the month?"

"I've thought of that. If I could get a good bed, I'd try it awhileanyhow. You see the hotels have raised. I used to get a lodgin' and a nicebreakfast for a half a dollar, but now it is as much as you can do to geta lodgin' for the money, and it's just as dear in the Port as it is in thecity. I've tried hotels pretty much everywhere, and one's about as bad asanother. "

If he had been a travelled Englishman writing a book, he could not havespoken of hotels with greater disdain. 

"You see, the trouble with me is, I ain't got any relations around here. Now, " he added, with the life and eagerness of an inspiration, "if I had amother and sister livin' down at the Port, say, I wouldn't go huntingabout for these mean little jobs everywheres. I'd just lay round home, andwait till something come up big. What I want is a home. "

At the instigation of a malignant spirit I asked the homeless orphan, "Whydon't you get married, then?"

He gave me another smile, sadder, fainter, sweeter than before, and said:"When would you like to see me again, so I could work out this dollar?"

A sudden and unreasonable disgust for the character which had given me somuch entertainment succeeded to my past delight. I felt, moreover, that Ihad bought the right to use some frankness with the veteran, and I said tohim: "Do you know now, I shouldn't care if I _never_ saw you again?"

I can only conjecture that he took the confidence in good part, for he didnot appear again after that. 

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR. 

Walking for walking's sake I do not like. The diversion appears to me oneof the most factitious of modern enjoyments; and I cannot help lookingupon those who pace their five miles in the teeth of a north wind, andprofess to come home all the livelier and better for it, as guilty of avenial hypocrisy. It is in nature that after such an exercise the bonesshould ache and the flesh tremble; and I suspect that these harmlesspretenders are all the while paying a secret penalty for their bravado. With a pleasant end in view, or with cheerful companionship, walking isfar from being the worst thing in life; though doubtless a truly candidperson must confess that he would rather ride under the samecircumstances. Yet it is certain that some sort of recreation is necessaryafter a day spent within doors; and one is really obliged nowadays to takea little walk instead of medicine; for one's doctor is sure to have amania on the subject, and there is no more getting pills or powders out ofhim for a slight indigestion than if they had all been shot away at therebels during the war. For this reason I sometimes go upon a pedestriantour, which is of no great extent in itself, and which I moreover modifyby keeping always within sound of the horse-car bells, or easy reach ofsome steam-car station. 

I fear that I should find these rambles dull, but that their utter lack ofinterest amuses me. I will be honest with the reader, though, and anyMaster Pliable is free to forsake me at this point; for I cannot promiseto be really livelier than my walk. There is a Slough of Despond in fullview, and not a Delectable Mountain to be seen, unless you choose so tocall the high lands about Waltham, which we shall behold dark blue againstthe western sky presently. As I sally forth upon Benicia Street, the wholesuburb of Charlesbridge stretches about me, --a vast space upon which I canembroider any fancy I like as I saunter along. I have no associations withit, or memories of it, and, at some seasons, I might wander for days inthe most frequented parts of it, and meet hardly any one I know. It isnot, however, to these parts that I commonly turn, but northward, up astreet upon which a flight of French-roof houses suddenly settled a yearor two since, with families in them, and many outward signs of permanence, though their precipitate arrival might cast some doubt upon this. I haveto admire their uniform neatness and prettiness, and I look at theirdormer-windows with the envy of one to whose weak sentimentality dormer-windows long appeared the supreme architectural happiness. But, for all myadmiration of the houses, I find a variety that is pleasanter in thelandscape, when I reach, beyond them, a little bridge which appears tospan a small stream. It unites banks lined with a growth of trees andbriers nodding their heads above the neighboring levels, and suggesting aquiet water-course, though in fact it is the Fitchburg Railroad that purlsbetween them, with rippling freight and passenger trains and ever-gurglinglocomotives. The banks take the earliest green of spring upon theirsouthward slope, and on a Sunday morning of May, when the bells arelamenting the Sabbaths of the past, I find their sunny tranquillitysufficient to give me a slight heart-ache for I know not what. If Idescend them and follow the railroad westward half a mile, I come to vastbrick-yards, which are not in themselves exciting to the imagination, andwhich yet, from an irresistible association of ideas, remind me of Egypt, and are forever newly forsaken of those who made bricks without straw; sothat I have no trouble in erecting temples and dynastic tombs out of thekilns; while the mills for grinding the clay serve me very well for thosesad-voiced _sakias_ or wheel-pumps which the Howadji Curtis heardwailing at their work of drawing water from the Nile. A little farther onI come to the boarding-house built at the railroad side for the FrenchCanadians who have by this time succeeded the Hebrews in the toil of thebrick-yards, and who, as they loiter in windy-voiced, good-humored groupsabout the doors of their lodgings, insist upon bringing before me the townof St. Michel at the mouth of the great Mont Cenis tunnel, where so manypeasant folk like them are always amiably quarreling before the_cabarets_ when the diligence comes and goes. Somewhere, there mustbe a gendarme with a cocked hat and a sword on, standing with folded armsto represent the Empire and Peace among that rural population; if I lookedin-doors, I am sure I should see the neatest of landladies and landladies'daughters and nieces in high black silk caps, bearing hither and thithersmoking bowls of _bouillon_ and _café-au-lait_. Well, it takesas little to make one happy as miserable, thank Heaven! and I derive acheerfulness from this scene which quite atones to me for the fleetingdesolation suffered from the sunny verdure on the railroad bank. Withrepaired spirits I take my way up through the brick-yards towards theIrish settlement on the north, passing under the long sheds that shelterthe kilns. The ashes lie cold about the mouths of most, and the bricks areburnt to the proper complexion; in others these are freshly arranged overflues in which the fire has not been kindled; but in whatever state I seethem, I am reminded of brick-kilns of boyhood. They were then such palacesof enchantment as any architect should now vainly attempt to rival withbricks upon the most desirable corner lot of the Back Bay, and were thehomes of men truly to be envied: men privileged to stay up all night; tosleep, as it were, out of doors; to hear the wild geese as they flew overin the darkness; to be waking in time to shoot the early ducks thatvisited the neighboring ponds; to roast corn upon the ends of sticks; totell and to listen to stories that never ended, save in some suddenimpulse to rise and dance a happy hoe-down in the ruddy light of the kiln-fires. If by day they were seen to have the redness of eyes of men thatlooked upon the whiskey when it was yellow and gave its color in theflask; if now and then the fragments of a broken bottle strewed the sceneof their vigils, and a head broken to match appeared among those goodcomrades, the boyish imagination was not shocked by these things, butaccepted them merely as the symbols of a free virile life. Some such lifeno doubt is still to be found in the Dublin to which I am come by the timemy repertory of associations with brick-kilns is exhausted, but, oddlyenough, I no longer care to encounter it. 

It is perhaps in a pious recognition of our mortality that Dublin is builtaround the Irish grave-yard. Most of its windows look out upon thesepulchral monuments and the pretty constant arrival of the funeral trainswith their long lines of carriages bringing to the celebration of the sadultimate rites those gay companies of Irish mourners. I suppose that thespectacle of such obsequies is not at all depressing to the inhabitants ofDublin; but that, on the contrary, it must beget in them a feeling which, if not resignation to death, is, at least, a sort of sub-acutecheerfulness in his presence. None but a Dubliner, however, would havebeen greatly animated by a scene which I witnessed during a stroll throughthis cemetery one afternoon of early spring. The fact that a marble slabor shaft more or less sculptured, and inscribed with words more or lesshelpless, is the utmost that we can give to one whom once we could caresswith every tenderness of speech and touch, and that, after all, thememorial we raise is rather to our own grief, and is a decency, a mereconventionality, --this is a dreadful fact on which the heart breaks itselfwith such a pang, that it always seems a desolation never recognized, ananguish never felt before. Whilst I stood revolving this thought in mymind, and reading the Irish names upon the stones and the black head-boards, --the latter adorned with pictures of angels, once gilt, but nowweather-worn down to the yellow paint, --a wail of intolerable pathosfilled the air: "O my darling, O my darling! O--O--O!" with sobs andgroans and sighs; and, looking about, I saw two women, one standingupright beside another that had cast herself upon a grave, and layclasping it with her comfortless arms, uttering these cries. The grave wasa year old at least, but the grief seemed of yesterday or of that morning. At times the friend that stood beside the prostrate woman stooped andspoke a soothing word to her, while she wailed out her woe; and in themidst some little ribald Irish boys came scuffling and quarreling up thepathway, singing snatches of an obscene song; and when both the wailingand the singing had died away, an old woman, decently clad, and with hermany-wrinkled face softened by the old-fashioned frill running round theinside of her cap, dropped down upon her knees beside a very old grave, and clasped her hands in a silent prayer above it. 

[Illustration: "Looking about, I saw two women. "]

If I had beheld all this in some village _campo santo_ in Italy, Ishould have been much more vividly impressed by it, as an aestheticalobserver; whereas I was now merely touched as a human being, and hadlittle desire to turn the scene to literary account. I could not helpfeeling that it wanted the atmosphere of sentimental association, thewhole background was a blank or worse than a blank. Yet I have not beenable to hide from myself so much as I would like certain points ofresemblance between our Irish and the poorer classes of Italians. Thelikeness is one of the first things that strikes an American in Italy, andI am always reminded of it in Dublin. So much of the local life appearsupon the street; there is so much gossip from house to house, and the talkis always such a resonant clamoring; the women, bareheaded, or with ashawl folded over the head and caught beneath the chin with the hand, havesuch a contented down-at-heel aspect, shuffling from door to door, orlounging, arms akimbo, among the cats and poultry at their own thresholds, that one beholding it all might well fancy himself upon some Italian_calle_ or _vicolo_. Of course the illusion does not hold goodon a Sunday, when the Dubliners are coming home from church in theirbest, --their extraordinary best bonnets and their prodigious silk hats. Itdoes not hold good in any way or at any time, except upon the surface, forthere is beneath all this resemblance the difference that must existbetween a race immemorially civilized and one which has lately emergedfrom barbarism "after six centuries of oppression. " You are likely to finda polite pagan under the mask of the modern Italian you feel pretty surethat any of his race would with a little washing and skillfulmanipulation, _restore_, like a neglected painting, into somethinggenuinely graceful and pleasing; but if one of these Yankeefied Celts werescraped, it is but too possible that you might find a kern, a Whiteboy, ora Pikeman. The chance of discovering a scholar or a saint of the periodwhen Ireland was the centre of learning, and the favorite seat of theChurch, is scarcely one in three. 

Among the houses fronting on the main street of Dublin, every other one--Ispeak in all moderation--is a grocery, if I may judge by a tin case ofcorn-balls, a jar of candy, and a card of shirt-buttons, with an underlayer of primers and ballads, in the windows. You descend from the streetby several steps into these haunts, which are contrived to secure thegreatest possible dampness and darkness; and if you have made an errandinside, you doubtless find a lady before the counter in the act of puttingdown a guilty-looking tumbler with one hand, while she neatly wipes hermouth on the back of the other. She has that effect, observable in alltippling women of low degree, of having no upper garment on but a shawl, which hangs about her in statuesque folds and lines. She slinks outdirectly, but the lady behind the counter gives you good evening with

 "The affectation of a bright-eyed ease, "

intended to deceive if you chance to be a State constable in disguise, andto propitiate if you are a veritable customer: "Who was that woman, lamenting so, over in the grave-yard?" "O, I don't know, sir, " answeredthe lady, making change for the price of a ballad. "Some Irish folks. Theyginerally cries that way. "

In yet earlier spring walks through Dublin, I found a depth of mudappalling even to one who had lived three years in Charlesbridge. Thestreets were passable only to pedestrians skilled in shifting themselvesalong the sides of fences and alert to take advantage of every projectingdoorstep. There were no dry places, except in front of the groceries, where the ground was beaten hard by the broad feet of loafing geese andthe coming and going of admirably small children making purchases there. The number of the little ones was quite as remarkable as their size, andought to have been even more interesting, if, as sometimes appearsprobable, such increase shall--together with the well-known ambition ofDubliners to rule the land--one day make an end of us poor Yankees as adominant plurality. 

The town was somewhat tainted with our architectural respectability, unless the newness of some of the buildings gave illusion of this; and, though the streets of Dublin were not at all cared for, and though everyhouse on the main thoroughfare stood upon the brink of a slough, withoutyard, or any attempt at garden or shrubbery, there were many cottages inthe less aristocratic quarters inclosed in palings, and embowered in theusual suburban pear-trees and currant-bushes. These, indeed, weredwellings of an elder sort, and had clearly been inherited from apopulation now as extinct in that region as the Pequots, and they were notalways carefully cherished. On the border of the hamlet is to be seen anold farm-house of the poorer sort, built about the beginning of thiscentury, and now thickly peopled by Dubliners. Its gate is thrown down, and the great wild-grown lilac hedge, no longer protected by a fence, shows skirts bedabbled by the familiarity of lawless poultry, as littlelike the steady-habited poultry of other times, as the people of the houseare like the former inmates, long since dead or gone West. I offer thepoor place a sentiment of regret as I pass, thinking of its better days. Ithink of its decorous, hard-working, cleanly, school-going, church-attending life, which was full of the pleasure of duty done, and was notwithout its own quaint beauty and grace. What long Sabbaths were kept inthat old house, what scanty holidays! Yet from this and such as this camethe dominion of the whole wild continent, the freedom of a race, thegreatness of the greatest people. It may be that I regretted a little tooexultantly, and that out of this particular house came only peddling ofinnumerable clocks and multitudinous tin-ware. But as yet, it is prettycertain that the general character of the population has not gained by thechange. What is in the future, let the prophets say; any one can see thatsomething not quite agreeable is in the present; something that takes thewrong side, as by instinct, in politics; something that mainly helps toprop up tottering priestcraft among us; something that one thinks of withdismay as destined to control so largely the civil and religious interestsof the country. This, however, is only the aggregate aspect. Mrs. Clannahan's kitchen, as it may be seen by the desperate philosopher whenhe goes to engage her for the spring house-cleaning, is a strong argumentagainst his fears. If Mrs. Clannahan, lately of an Irish cabin, can show akitchen so capably appointed and so neatly kept as that, the country mayyet be an inch or two from the brink of ruin, and the race which we trustas little as we love may turn out no more spendthrift than most heirs. Itis encouraging, moreover, when any people can flatter themselves upon asuperior prosperity and virtue, and we may take heart from the fact thatthe French Canadians, many of whom have lodgings in Dublin, are not wellseen by the higher classes of the citizens there. Mrs. Clannahan, whosehouse stands over against the main gate of the grave-yard, and who may, therefore, be considered as moving in the best Dublin society, hints, thatthough good Catholics, the French are not thought perfectly honest, --"things have been missed" since they came to blight with their crimes andvices the once happy seat of integrity. It is amusing to find Dublinfearful of the encroachment of the French, as we, in our turn, dread theadvance of the Irish. We must make a jest of our own alarms, and evensmile--since we cannot help ourselves--at the spiritual desolationoccasioned by the settlement of an Irish family in one of our suburbanneighborhoods. The householders view with fear and jealousy the erectionof any dwelling of less than a stated cost, as portending a possibleadvent of Irish; and when the calamitous race actually appears, a mortalpang strikes to the bottom of every pocket. Values tremble throughout thatneighborhood, to which the new-comers communicate a species of moral dry-rot. None but the Irish will build near the Irish; and the infection offear spreads to the elder Yankee homes about, and the owners prepare toabandon them, --not always, however, let us hope, without turning, at theexpense of the invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my walk fromDublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw more than one token of theencroachment of the Celtic army, which had here and there invested aYankee house with besieging shanties on every side, and thus given to itsessential and otherwise quite hopeless ugliness a touch of the poetry thatattends failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of however poor asort originally. The fortunes of such a house are, of course, not to beretrieved. Where the Celt sets his foot, there the Yankee (and it isperhaps wholesome if not agreeable to know that the Irish citizen whom wedo not always honor as our equal in civilization loves to speak of usscornfully as Yankees) rarely, if ever, returns. The place remains to theintruder and his heirs forever. We gracefully retire before him even inpolitics, as the metropolis--if it is the metropolis--can witness; and wewait with an anxious curiosity the encounter of the Irish and the Chinese, now rapidly approaching each other from opposite shores of the continent. Shall we be crushed in the collision of these superior races? Everyintelligence-office will soon be ringing with the cries of combat, and allour kitchens strewn with pig-tails and bark chignons. As yet we have gayhopes of our Buddhistic brethren; but how will it be when they begin toquarter the Dragon upon the Stars and Stripes, and buy up all the bestsites for temples, and burn their joss-sticks, as it were, under our verynoses? Our grasp upon the great problem grows a little lax, perhaps? Is ittrue that, when we look so anxiously for help from others, the virtue hasgone out of ourselves? I should hope not. 

As I leave Dublin, the houses grow larger and handsomer; and as I drawnear the Avenue, the Mansard-roofs look down upon me with their dormer-windows, and welcome me back to the American community. There are fencesabout all the houses, inclosing ampler and ampler dooryards; the children, which had swarmed in the thriftless and unenlightened purlieus of Dublin, diminish in number and finally disappear; the chickens have vanished; andI hear--I hear the pensive music of the horse-car bells, which in somealien land, I am sure, would be as pathetic to me as the Ranz des Vachesto the Swiss or the bagpipes to the Highlander: in the desert, where thetraveller seems to hear the familiar bells of his far-off church, thistinkle would haunt the absolute silence, and recall the exile's fancy toCharlesbridge; and perhaps in the mocking mirage he would behold an airyhorse-car track, and a phantasmagoric horse-car moving slowly along theedge of the horizon, with spectral passengers closely packed inside andoverflowing either platform. 

But before I reach the Avenue, Dublin calls to me yet again, in the figureof an old, old man, wearing the clothes of other times, and a sort ofancestral round hat. In the act of striking a match he asks me the time ofday, and, applying the fire to his pipe, he returns me his thanks in avolume of words and smoke. What a wrinkled and unshorn old man! Can ageand neglect do so much for any of us? This ruinous person was associatedwith a hand-cart as decrepit as himself, but not nearly so cheerful; forthough he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered from far within thewrinkles and the stubble, the cart had preceded him with a very lugubriouscreak. It groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans, and I was to learnfrom the old man that there was, and had been, in his person, for thirteenyears, such a thing in the world as a peddler of buttermilk, and thatthese cans were now filled with that pleasant drink. They did not inviteme to prove their contents, being cans that apparently passed their vacantmoments in stables and even manure-heaps, and that looked somehow emulousof that old man's stubble and wrinkles. I bought nothing, but I left theold peddler well content, seated upon a thill of his cart, smokingtranquilly, and filling the keen spring evening air with fumes which itdispersed abroad, and made to itself a pleasant incense of. 

I left him a whole epoch behind, as I entered the Avenue and loungedhomeward along the stately street. Above the station it is far morepicturesque than it is below, and the magnificent elms that shadow itmight well have looked, in their saplinghood, upon the British stragglingdown the country road from the Concord fight; and there are some ancienthouses yet standing that must have been filled with exultation at the samespectacle. Poor old revolutionaries! they would never have believed thattheir descendants would come to love the English as we do. 

The season has advanced rapidly during my progress from Dublin to theAvenue; and by the time I reach the famous old tavern, not far from thestation, it is a Sunday morning of early summer, and the yellow sunlightfalls upon a body of good comrades who are grooming a marvelous number ofpiebald steeds about the stable-doors. By token of these beasts--whichalways look so much more like works of art than of nature--I know thatthere is to be a circus somewhere very soon; and the gay bills pasted allover the stable-front tell me that there are to be two performances at thePort on the morrow. The grooms talk nothing and joke nothing but horse attheir labor; and their life seems such a low, ignorant, happy life, thatthe secret nomad lurking in every respectable and stationary personalitystirs within me and struggles to strike hands of fellowship with them. They lead a sort of pastoral existence in our age of railroads; theywander over the continent with their great caravan, and everywhere pursuethe summer from South to North and from North to South again; in the mildforenoons they groom their herds, and in the afternoons they doze undertheir wagons, indifferent to the tumult of the crowd within and withoutthe mighty canvas near them, --doze face downwards on the bruised, sweet-smelling grass; and in the starry midnight rise and strike their tents, and set forth again over the still country roads, to take the next villageon the morrow with the blaze and splendor of their "Grand Entree. " Thetriumphal chariot in which the musicians are borne at the head of theprocession is composed, as I perceive by the bills, of four colossal giltswans, set tail to tail, with lifted wings and curving necks; but thechariot, as I behold it beside the stable, is mysteriously draped in whitecanvas, through which its gilding glitters only here and there. And doesit move thus shrouded in the company's wanderings from place to place, andis the precious spottiness of the piebalds then hidden under enviousdrapery? O happy grooms, --not clean as to shirts, nor especially neat inyour conversation, but displaying a Wealth of art in India-ink upon yourmanly chests and the swelling muscles of your arms, and speaking in everymovement your freedom from all conventional gyves and shackles, _"seidumschlungen!"_--in spirit; for the rest, you are rather too damp, andseem to have applied your sudsy sponges too impartially to your owntrousers and the horses' legs to receive an actual embrace from a_dilettante_ vagabond. 

The old tavern is old only comparatively; but in our new and changefullife it is already quaint. It is very long, and low-studded in eitherstory, with a row of windows in the roof, and a great porch, furnishedwith benches, running the whole length of the ground-floor. Perhapsbecause they take the dust of the street too freely, or because the guestsfind it more social and comfortable to gather in-doors in the wide, low-ceiled office, the benches are not worn, nor particularly whittled. Theroom has the desolate air characteristic of offices which have once beenbar-rooms; but no doubt, on a winter's night, there is talk worthlistening to there, of flocks, and herds and horse-trades, from thedrovers and cattle-market men who patronize the tavern; and the artistictemperament, at least, could feel no regret if that sepulchrally penitentbar-room then developed a secret capacity for the wickedness that onceboldly glittered behind the counter in rows of decanters. 

The house was formerly renowned for its suppers, of which all that waslearned or gifted in the old college town of Charlesbridge used topartake; and I have heard lips which breathe the loftiest song and thesweetest humor--let alone being "dewy with the Greek of Plato"--smackedregretfully over the memory of those suppers' roast and broiled. No suchsuppers, they say, are cooked in the world any more; and I am somehow madeto feel that their passing away is connected with the decay of goodliterature. 

I hope it may be very long before the predestined French-roof villaoccupies the tavern's site, and turns into lawns and gardens its wide-spreading cattle-pens, and removes the great barn that now shows itsbroad, low gable to the street. This is yet older and quainter-lookingthan the tavern itself; it is mighty capacious, and gives a stillprofounder impression of vastness with its shed, of which the roof slopessouthward down almost to a man's height from the ground, and shelters arow of mangers, running back half the length of the stable, and serving informer times for the baiting of such beasts as could not be provided forwithin. But the halcyon days of the cattle-market are past (though you maystill see the white horns tossing above the fences of the pens, when anewly arrived herd lands from the train to be driven afoot to Brighton), and the place looks now so empty and forsaken, spite of the circusbaggage-wagons, that it were hard to believe these mangers could ever havebeen in request, but for the fact that they are all gnawed, down to thequick as it were, by generations of horses--vanished forever on thedeserted highways of the past--impatient for their oats or hungering formore. 

The day must come, of course, when the mangers will all be taken from thestable-shed, and exposed for sale at that wonderful second-hand shop whichstands over against the tavern. I am no more surprised than one in adream, to find it a week-day afternoon by the time I have crossed thitherfrom the circus-men grooming their piebalds. It is an enchanted place tome, and I am a frequent and unprofitable customer there, buying only justenough to make good my footing with the custodian of its marvels, who is, of course, too true an American to show any desire to sell. Without, oneither side of the doorway, I am pretty sure to find, among other articlesof furniture, a mahogany and hair-cloth sofa, a family portrait, alandscape painting, a bath-tub, and a flower-stand, with now and then thevariety of a boat and a dog-house; while under an adjoining shed is heapeda mass of miscellaneous movables, of a heavier sort, and fearlessly leftthere night and day, being on all accounts undesirable to steal. The doorof the shop rings a bell in opening, and ushers the customer into a roomwhich Chaos herself might have planned in one of her happier moments. Carpets, blankets, shawls, pictures, mirrors, rocking-chairs, and blueoveralls hang from the ceiling, and devious pathways wind amidst piles ofready-made clothing, show-cases filled with every sort of knick-knack andhalf hidden under heaps of hats and boots and shoes, bookcases, secretaries, chests of drawers, mattresses, lounges, and bedsteads, to thestairway of a loft similarly appointed, and to a back room overflowingwith glassware and crockery. These things are not all second-hand, butthey are all old and equally pathetic. The melancholy of ruinous auctionsales, of changing tastes or changing fashions, clings to them, whetherthey are things that have never had a home and have been on sale eversince they were made, or things that have been associated with every phaseof human life. 

Among other objects, certain large glass vases, ornamented by the politeart of potichomanie, have long appealed to my fancy, wherein theycapriciously allied themselves to the history of aging single women inlonely New England village houses, --pathetic sisters lingering upon theneutral ground between the faded hopes of marriage and the yet unrisenprospects of consumption. The work implies an imperfect yet real love ofbeauty, the leisure for it a degree of pecuniary ease: the thoughts of thesisters rise above the pickling and preserving that occupied theirheartier and happier mother; they are in fact in that aesthetic, social, and intellectual mean, in which single women are thought soonest to witherand decline. With a little more power, and in our later era, they would bewriting stories full of ambitious, unintelligible, self-devoted and suddencollapsing young girls and amazing doctors; but as they are, and in theirtime, they must do what they can. A sentimentalist may discern on thesevases not only the gay designs with which they ornamented them, but theirown dim faces looking wan from the windows of some huge old homestead, aworld too wide for the shrunken family. All April long the door-yard treescrouch and shudder in the sour east, all June they rain canker-worms uponthe roof, and then in autumn choke the eaves with a fall of tattered andhectic foliage. From the window the fading sisters gaze upon the unnaturalliveliness of the summer streets through which the summer boarders aredriving, or upon the death-white drifts of the intolerable winter. Theirfather, the captain, is dead; he died with the Calcutta trade, havingsurvived their mother, and left them a hopeless competency and yonderbamboo chairs; their only brother is in California; one, though she loved, had never a lover; her sister's betrothed married West, whither he went tomake a home for her, --and ah! is it vases for the desolate parlor mantelthey decorate, or funeral urns? And when in time, they being gone, theCalifornian brother sends to sell out at auction the old place with thehousehold and kitchen furniture, is it withered rose-leaves or ashes thatthe purchaser finds in these jars?

They are empty now; and I wonder how came they here? How came the show-case of Dr. Merrifield, Surgeon-Chiropodist here? How came here yonItalian painting?--a poor, silly, little affected Madonna, simpering at mefrom her dingy gilt frame till I buy her, a great bargain, at a dollar. From what country church or family oratory, in what revolution, or stressof private fortunes, --then from what various cabinets of antiquities, inwhat dear Vicenza, or Ferrara, or Mantua, earnest thou, O Madonna? Whoselikeness are you, poor girl, with your everyday prettiness of brows andchin, and your Raphaelesque crick in the neck? I think I know a part ofyour story. You were once the property of that ruined advocate, whosesensibilities would sometimes consent that a _valet de place_ ofuncommon delicacy should bring to his ancestral palace some singularlymeritorious foreigner desirous of purchasing from his rare collection, --acollection of rubbish scarcely to be equaled elsewhere in Italy. You hungin that family-room, reached after passage through stately vestibules andgrand stairways; and O, I would be cheated to the bone, if only I mightlook out again from some such windows as were there, upon some such damp, mouldy, broken-statued, ruinous, enchanted garden as lay below! In thatroom sat the advocate's mother and hunchback sister, with their smoky_scaldini_ and their snuffy priest; and there the wife of theforeigner, self-elected the taste of his party, inflicted the pang courtedby the advocate, and asked if you were for sale. And then the ruinedadvocate clasped his hands, rubbed them, set his head heart-brokenly onone side, took you down, heaved a sigh, shrugged his shoulders, and soldyou--you! a family heirloom! Well, at least you are old, and you representto me acres of dim, religious canvas in that beloved land; and here is thedollar now asked for you: I could not have bought you for so little athome. 

The Madonna is neighbored by several paintings, if the kind called Grecianfor a reason never revealed by the inventor of an art as old aspotichomanie itself. It was an art by which ordinary lithographs weregiven a ghastly transparency, and a tone as disagreeable as chromos; and Idoubt if it could have been known to the Greeks in their best age. But Iremember very well when it passed over whole neighborhoods in some partsof this country, wasting the time of many young women, and disfiguringparlor walls with the fruit of their accomplishment. It was always taughtby Professors, a class of learned young men who acquired their title byabandoning the plough and anvil, and, in a suit of ready-made clothing, travelling about the country with portfolios under their arms. It was anexperience to make loafers for life of them: and I fancy the girls wholearnt their art never afterwards made so good butter and cheese. 

 "Non-ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa. "

Besides the Grecian paintings there are some mezzotints; full lengthpictures of presidents and statesmen, chiefly General Jackson, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, which have hung their day in the offices or parlors ofcountry politicians. They are all statesmanlike and presidential inattitude; and I know that if the mighty Webster's lips had language, hewould take his hand out of his waistcoat front, and say to his fellowmezzotints: "Venerable men! you have come down to us from a formergeneration, bringing your household furniture and miscellaneous trumperyof all kinds with you. "

Some old-fashioned entry lanterns divide my interest with certain oldwillow chairs of an hour-glass pattern, which never stood upright, probably, and have now all a confirmed droop to one side, as from havingbeen fallen heavily asleep in, upon breezy porches, of hot summerafternoons. In the windows are small vases of alabaster, fly-speckedParian and plaster figures, and dolls with stiff wooden limbs and papier-maché heads, a sort of dolls no longer to be bought in these days ofmodish, blue-eyed blondes of biscuit and sturdy india-rubber brunettes. The show-case is full of an incredible variety, as photograph albums, fishing-hooks, socks, suspenders, steel pens, cutlery of all sorts, andcurious old colored prints of Adelaide, and Kate, and Ellen. A rocking-horse is stabled near amid pendent lengths of second-hand carpeting, hat-racks, and mirrors; and standing cheek-by-jowl with painted washstands andbureaus are some plaster statues, aptly colored and varnished to representbronze. 

There is nothing here but has a marked character of its own, some distinctyet intangible trait acquired from former circumstances; and doubtless allthese things have that lurking likeness to former owners which clothes andfurniture are apt to take on from long association, and which we shouldinstantly recognize could they be confronted with their late proprietors. It seems, in very imaginative moments, as if the strange assemblage ofincongruities must have a consciousness of these latent resemblances, which the individual pieces betray when their present keeper turns the keyupon them, and abandons them to themselves at night; and I have sometimesfancied such an effect in the late twilight, when I have wandered intotheir resting-place, and have beheld them in the unnatural glare of akerosene lamp burning before a brightly polished reflector, and castingevery manner of grotesque shadow upon the floor and walls. But this mayhave been an illusion; at any rate I am satisfied that the bargain-drivingcapacity of the storekeeper is not in the least affected by a weirdquality in his wares; though they have not failed to impart to himsomething of their own desultory character. He sometimes leaves a neighborin charge when he goes to meals, and then, if I enter, I am watchfullyfollowed about from corner to corner, and from room to room, lest I pocketa mattress or slip a book-case under my coat. The storekeeper himselfnever watches me; perhaps he knows that it is a purely professionalinterest I take in the collection; that I am in the trade and have asecondhand shop of my own, full of poetical rubbish, and every sort ofliterary odds and ends, picked up at random, and all cast higgledy-piggledy into the same chaotic receptacle. His customers are as littlelike ordinary shoppers as he is like common tradesmen. They are in partthe Canadians who work in the brickyards, and it is surprising to find howmuch business can be transacted, and how many sharp bargains struckwithout the help of a common language. I am in the belief, which may beerroneous, that nobody is wronged in these trades. The taciturnstorekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement asCritturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of alanguage that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffershis philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; hedrops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom;he knows very well when they mean to buy and when they do not; and theyequally wary and equally silent, unswayed by the glib allurements of asalesman, judge of price and quality for themselves, make their solitaryoffer, and stand or fall by it. 

I am seldom able to conclude a pedestrian tour without a glance at thewonderful interior of this cheap store, and I know all its contentsfamiliarly. I recognize wares that have now been on sale there for years;I miss at first glance such accustomed objects as have been parted withbetween my frequent visits, and hail with pleasure the additions to thatextraordinary variety. I can hardly, I suppose, expect the reader tosympathize with the joy I felt the other night, in discovering among thelatter an adventurous and universally applicable sign-board advertisingThis House and Lot for Sale, and, intertwined with the cast-off suspenderswhich long garlanded a coffee-mill pendent from the roof, a newly addedsecond-hand india-rubber ear-trumpet. Here and there, however, I hope afiner soul will relish, as I do, the poetry of thus buying and offeringfor sale the very most recondite, as well as the commonest articles ofcommerce, in the faith that one day the predestined purchaser will appearand carry off the article appointed him from the beginning of time. Thisfaith is all the more touching, because the collector cannot expect tolive until the whole stock is disposed of, and because, in the order ofnature, much must at last fall to rein unbought, unless the reporter'sDevouring Element appears and gives a sudden tragical turn to the poem. 

It is the whistle of a train drawing up at the neighboring station thatcalls me away from the second-hand store; for I never find myself able toresist the hackneyed prodigy of such an arrival. It cannot cease to beimpressive. I stand beside the track while the familiar monster writhes upto the station and disgorges its passengers, --suburbanly packaged, andbundled, and bagged, and even when empty-handed somehow proclaiming thejaded character of men that hurry their work all day to catch the eveningtrain out, and their dreams all night to catch the morning train in, --andthen I climb the station-stairs, and "hang with grooms and porters on thebridge, " that I may not lose my ever-repeated sensation of having thetrain pass under my feet, and of seeing it rush away westward to thepretty blue hills beyond, --hills not too big for a man born in a plain-country to love. Twisting and trembling along the track, it dwindlesrapidly in the perspective, and is presently out of sight. It has left thecity and the suburbs behind, and has sought the woods and meadows; butNature never in the least accepts it, and rarely makes its path a part ofher landscape's loveliness. The train passes alien through all her moodsand aspects; the wounds made in her face by the road's sharp cuts andexcavations are slowest of all wounds to heal, and the iron rails remainto the last as shackles upon her. Yet when the rails are removed, as hashappened with a non-paying track in Charlesbridge, the road inspires areal tenderness in her. Then she bids it take or the grace that belongs toall ruin; the grass creeps stealthily over the scarified sides of theembankments; the golden-rod, and the purple-topped iron-weed, and thelady's-slipper, spring up in the hollows on either side, and--I am stillthinking of that deserted railroad which runs through Charlesbridge--hidewith their leafage the empty tomato-cans and broken bottles and old bootson the ash-heaps dumped there; Nature sets her velvety willows a wavingnear, and lower than their airy tops plans a vista of trees arching abovethe track, which is as wild and pretty and illusive a vista as the sunsetever cared to look through and gild a board fence beyond. 

Most of our people come from Boston on the horse-cars, and it is only thedwellers on the Avenue and the neighboring streets whom hurrying homewardI follow away from the steam-car station. The Avenue is our handsomeststreet; and if it were in the cosmopolitan citizen of Charlesbridge tofeel any local interest, I should be proud of it. As matters are, Iperceive its beauty, and I often reflect, with a pardonable satisfaction, that it is not only handsome, but probably the very dullest street in theworld. It is magnificently long and broad, and is flanked nearly the wholeway from the station to the colleges by pine palaces rising from spaciouslawns, or from the green of trees or the brightness of gardens. Thesplendor is all very new, but newness is not a fault that much affectsarchitectural beauty, while it is the only one that time is certain torepair: and I find an honest and unceasing pleasure in the graceful linesof those palaces, which is not surpassed even by my appreciation of thevast quiet and monotony of the street itself. Commonly, when I emerge uponit from the grassy-bordered, succory-blossomed walks of Benicia Street, Ibehold, looking northward, a monumental horse-car standing--it appears forages, if I wish to take it for Boston--at the head of Pliny Street; andlooking southward I see that other emblem of suburban life, an express-wagon, fading rapidly in the distance. Haply the top of a buggy nods roundthe bend under the elms near the station; and, if fortune is so lavish, alady appears from a side street, and, while tarrying for the car, thruststhe point of her sun-umbrella into the sandy sidewalk. This is the mid-afternoon effect of the Avenue; but later in the day, and well into thedusk, it remembers its former gayety as a trotting-course, --with here andthere a spider-wagon, a twinkling-footed mare, and a guttural driver. Onmarket-days its superb breadth is taken up by flocks of bleating sheep, and a pastoral tone is thus given to its tranquillity; anon a herd ofbeef-cattle appears under the elms; or a drove of pigs, many pausing, inquisitive of the gutters, and quarrelsome as if they were the heirs ofprosperity instead of doom, is slowly urged on toward the shambles. In thespring or the autumn, the Avenue is exceptionally enlivened by theprogress of a brace or so of students who, in training for one of theUniversity Courses of base-ball or boating, trot slowly and earnestlyalong the sidewalk, fists up, elbows down, mouths shut, and a sense ofimmense responsibility visible in their faces. 

The summer is waning with the day as I turn from the Avenue into BeniciaStreet. This is the hour when the fly cedes to the mosquito, as the Tuscanpoet says, and, as one may add, the frying grasshopper yields to theshrilly cricket in noisiness. The embrowning air rings with the sad musicmade by these innumerable little violinists, hid in all the gardens round, and the pedestrian feels a sinking of the spirits not to be accounted forupon the theory that the street is duller than the Avenue, for it reallyis not so. 

Quick now, the cheerful lamps of kerosene!--without their light, the cryof those crickets, dominated for an instant, but not stilled, by thebellowing of a near-passing locomotive, and the baying of a distant dog, were too much. If it were the last autumn that ever was to be, it couldnot be heralded with notes of dismaller effect. This is in fact the hourof supreme trial everywhere, and doubtless no one but a newly-acceptedlover can be happy at twilight. In the city, even, it is oppressive; inthe country it is desolate; in the suburbs it is a miracle that it is everlived through. The night-winds have not risen yet to stir the languidfoliage of the sidewalk maples; the lamps are not yet lighted, to takeaway the gloom from the blank, staring windows of the houses near; it istoo late for letters, too early for a book. In town your fancy would turnto the theatres; in the country you would occupy yourself with cares ofpoultry or of stock: in the suburbs you can but sit upon your threshold, and fight the predatory mosquito. 

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON

At a former period the writer of this had the fortune to serve his countryin an Italian city whose great claim upon the world's sentimental interestis the fact that--

 "The sea is in her broad, her narrow streets Ebbing and flowing, "

and that she has no ways whatever for hoofs or wheels. In his quality ofUnited States official, he was naturally called upon for informationconcerning the estates of Italians believed to have emigrated early in thecentury to Buenos Ayres, and was commissioned to learn why certain personsin Mexico and Brazil, and the parts of Peru, had not, if they were stillliving, written home to their friends. On the other hand, he was intrustedwith business nearly as pertinent and hopeful by some of his owncountrymen, and it was not quite with surprise that he one day received aneatly lithographed circular with his name and address written in it, signed by a famous projector of such enterprises, asking him to cooperatefor the introduction of horse-railroads in Venice. The obstacles to thescheme were of such a nature that it seemed hardly worth while even toreply to the circular; but the proposal was one of those bold flights ofimagination which forever lift objects out of vulgar association. It hascast an enduring, poetic charm even about the horse-car in my mind, and Inaturally look for many unprosaic aspects of humanity there. I have anacquaintance who insists that it is the place above all others suited tosee life in every striking phase. He pretends to have witnessed there thereunion of friends who had not met in many years, the embrace, figurativeof course, of long lost brothers, the reconciliation of lovers; I do notknow but also some scenes of love-making, and acceptance or rejection. Butmy friend is an imaginative man, and may make himself romances. I myselfprofess to have beheld for the most part only mysteries; and I think itnot the least of these that, riding on the same cars day after day, onefinds so many strange faces with so little variety. Whether or not thatdull, jarring motion shakes inward and settles about the centres of mentallife the sprightliness that should inform the visage, I do not know; butit is certain that the emptiness of the average passenger's countenance issomething wonderful, considered with reference to Nature's abhorrence of avacuum, and the intellectual repute which Boston enjoys among envious New-Yorkers. It is seldom that a journey out of our cold metropolis isenlivened by a mystery so positive in character as the young lady inblack, who alighted at a most ordinary little street in Old Charlesbridge, and heightened her effect by going into a French-roof house there that hadno more right than a dry goods box to receive a mystery. She was tall, and her lovely arms showed through the black gauze of her dress withan exquisite roundness and _morbidezza_. Upon her beautiful wristsshe had heavy bracelets of dead gold, fashioned after some Etruscandevice; and from her dainty ears hung great hoops of the same metaland design, which had the singular privilege of touching, now and then, her white columnar neck. A massive chain or necklace, also Etruscan, and also gold, rose and fell at her throat, and on one little unglovedhand glittered a multitude of rings. This hand was very expressive, and took a principal part in the talk which the lady held with hercompanion, and was as alert and quick as if trained in the gesticulationof Southern or Latin life somewhere. Her features, on the contrary, were rather insipid, being too small and fine; but they were redeemedby the liquid splendor of her beautiful eyes, and the mortal pallorof her complexion. She was altogether so startling an apparition, thatall of us jaded, commonplace spectres turned and fastened our weary, lack-lustre eyes upon her looks, with an utter inability to remove them. There was one fat, unctuous person seated opposite, to whom his interestwas a torture, for he would have gone to sleep except for her remarkablepresence: as it was, his heavy eyelids fell half-way shut, and droopedthere at an agonizing angle, while his eyes remained immovably fixed uponthat strange, death-white face. How it could have come of thatcolorlessness, --whether through long sickness or long residence in atropical climate, --was a question that perplexed another of thepassengers, who would have expected to hear the lady speak any language inthe world rather than English; and to whom her companion or attendant washardly less than herself a mystery, --being a dragon-like, elderish female, clearly a Yankee by birth, but apparently of many years' absence fromhome. The propriety of extracting these people from the horse-cars andtransferring them bodily to the first chapter of a romance was a thingabout which there could be no manner of doubt, and nothing prevented theabduction but the unexpected voluntary exit of the pale lady. As shepassed out everybody else awoke as from a dream, or as if freed from apotent fascination. It is part of the mystery that this lady should neverhave reappeared in that theatre of life, the horse-car; but I cannotregret having never seen her more; she was so inestimably precious towonder that it would have been a kind of loss to learn anything about her. 

[Illustration: "The young lady in black, who alighted at a most ordinarylittle street. "]

On the other hand, I should be glad if two young men who once presentedthemselves as mysteries upon the same stage could be so distinctly andsharply identified that all mankind should recognize them at the day ofjudgment. They were not so remarkable in the nature as in the degree oftheir offense; for the mystery that any man should keep his seat in ahorse-car and let a woman stand is but too sadly common. They say thatthis, public unkindness to the sex has come about through the ingratitudeof women, who have failed to return thanks for places offered them, andthat it is a just and noble revenge we take upon them. There might besomething advanced in favor of the idea that we law-making men, who do notoblige the companies to provide seats for every one, deserve no thanksfrom voteless, helpless women when we offer them places; nay, that weought to be glad if they do not reproach us for making that a personalfavor which ought to be a common right. I would prefer, on the whole, tobelieve that this selfishness is not a concerted act on our part, but aflower of advanced civilization; it is a ripe fruit in European countries, and it is more noticeable in Boston than anywhere else in America. It is, in fact, one of the points of our high polish which people from theinterior say first strikes them on coming among us; for they declare--nodoubt too modestly--that in their Boeotian wilds our Athenian habit isalmost unknown. Yet it would not be fair to credit our whole populationwith it. I have seen a laborer or artisan rise from his place, and offerit to a lady, while a dozen well-dressed men kept theirs; and I knowseveral conservative young gentlemen, who are still so old-fashioned asalways to respect the weakness and weariness of women. One of them, Ihear, has settled it in his own mind that if the family cook appears in acar where he is seated, he must rise and give her his place. This, perhaps, is a trifle idealistic; but it is magnificent, it is princely. From his difficult height, we decline--through ranks that sacrificethemselves for women with bundles or children in arms, for old ladies, orfor very young and pretty ones--to the men who give no odds to the mosthelpless creature alive. These are the men who do not act upon thepromptings of human nature like the laborer, and who do not refine upontheir duty like my young gentlemen, and make it their privilege tobefriend the idea of womanhood; they are men who have paid for their seatsand are going to keep them. They have been at work, very probably, allday, and no doubt they are tired; they look so, and try hard not to lookashamed of publicly considering themselves before a sex which is borntired, and from which our climate and customs have drained so much healththat society sometimes seems little better than a hospital for invalidwoman, where every courtesy is likely to be a mercy done to a sufferer. Yet the two young men of whom I began to speak were not apparently of thisclass, and let us hope they were foreigners, --say Englishmen, since wehate Englishmen the most. They were the only men seated, in a car full ofpeople; and when four or five ladies came in and occupied the aisle beforethem, they might have been puzzled which to offer their places to, if oneof the ladies had not plainly been infirm. They settled the question--ifthere was any in their minds--by remaining seated, while the lady in frontof them swung uneasily to and fro with the car, and appeared ready to sinkat their feet. In another moment she had actually done so; and, too wearyto rise, she continued to crouch upon the floor of the car for the courseof a mile, the young men resolutely keeping their places, and not risingtill they were ready to leave the car. It was a horrible scene, andincredible, --that well-dressed woman sitting on the floor, and those twowell-dressed men keeping their places; it was as much out of keeping withour smug respectabilities as a hanging, and was a spectacle so paralyzingthat public opinion took no action concerning it. A shabby person, standing upon the platform outside, swore about it, betweenexpectorations: even the conductor's heart was touched; and he said he hadseen a good many hard things aboard horse-cars, but that was a little thehardest; he had never expected to come to that. These were simple peopleenough, and could not interest me a great deal, but I should have liked tohave a glimpse of the complex minds of those young men, and I should stilllike to know something of the previous life that could have made theirbehavior possible to them. They ought to make public the philosophicmethods by which they reached that pass of unshamable selfishness. Theinformation would be useful to a race which knows the sweetness of self-indulgence, and would fain know the art of so drugging or besotting thesensibilities that it shall no feel disgraced by any sort of meanness. They might really have much to say for themselves; as, that the lady, being conscious she could no longer keep her feet, had no right to crouchat theirs, and put them to so severe a test; or that, having suffered herto sink there, they fell no further in the ignorant public opinion bysuffering her to continue there. 

But I doubt if that other young man could say anything for himself, who, when a pale, trembling woman was about to drop into the vacant place athis side, stretched his arm across it with, "This seat's engaged, " till arobust young fellow, his friend, appeared, and took it and kept it all theway out from Boston. The commission of such a tragical wrong, involving aviolation of common usage as well as the infliction of a positive cruelty, would embitter the life of an ordinary man, if any ordinary man werecapable of it; but let us trust that nature has provided fortitude ofevery kind for the offender, and that he is not wrung by keener remorsethan most would feel for a petty larceny. I dare say he would be eager atthe first opportunity to rebuke the ingratitude of women who do not thanktheir benefactors for giving them seats. It seems a little odd, by theway, and perhaps it is through the peculiar blessing of Providence, that, since men have determined by a savage egotism to teach the offending sexmanners, their own comfort should be in the infliction of the penalty, andthat it should be as much a pleasure as a duty to keep one's place. 

Perhaps when the ladies come to vote, they will abate, with othernuisances, the whole business of overloaded public conveyances. In themean time the kindness of women to each other is a notable feature of allhorse-car journeys. It is touching to see the smiling eagerness with whichthe poor things gather close their volumed skirts and make room for aweary sister, the tender looks of compassion which they bend upon thesufferers obliged to stand, the sweetness with which they rise, if theyare young and strong, to offer their place to any infirm or heavilyburdened person of their sex. 

But a journey to Boston is not entirely an experience of bitterness. Onthe contrary, there are many things besides the mutual amiability of thesebeautiful martyrs which relieve its tedium and horrors. A whole car-fullof people, brought into the closest contact with one another, yet in theabsence of introductions never exchanging a word, each being so sufficientto himself as to need no social stimulus whatever, is certainly animpressive and stately spectacle. It is a beautiful day, say; but far beit from me to intimate as much to my neighbor, who plainly would ratherdie than thus commit himself with me, and who, in fact, would well-nighstrike me speechless with surprise if he did so. If there is any necessityfor communication, as with the conductor, we essay first to expressourselves by gesture, and then utter our desires with a certain hollow andremote effect, which is not otherwise to be described. I have sometimestried to speak above my breath, when, being about to leave the car, I havemade a virtue of offering my place to the prettiest young woman standing, but I have found it impossible; the _genius loci_, whatever it was, suppressed me, and I have gasped out my sham politeness as in a courteousnightmare. The silencing influence is quite successfully resisted by nonebut the tipsy people who occasionally ride out with us, and call up asmile, sad as a gleam of winter sunshine, to our faces by their artlessprattle. I remember one eventful afternoon that we were all but moved tolaughter by the gayeties of such a one, who, even after he had ceased totalk, continued to amuse us by falling asleep, and reposing himselfagainst the shoulder of the lady next him. Perhaps it is in acknowledgmentof the agreeable variety they contribute to horse-car life, that theconductor treats his inebriate passengers with such unfailing tendernessand forbearance. I have never seen them molested, though I have noticedthem in the indulgence of many eccentricities, and happened once even tosee one of them sit down in a lady's lap. But that was on the night ofSaint Patrick's day. Generally all avoidable indecorums are rare in thehorse-cars, though during the late forenoon and early afternoon, in theperiod of lighter travel, I have found curious figures there:--amongothers, two old women, in the old-clothes business, one of whom wasdressed, not very fortunately, in a gown with short sleeves, andinferentially a low neck; a mender of umbrellas, with many unwholesomewhity-brown wrecks of umbrellas about him; a peddler of soap, who offeredcakes of it to his fellow-passengers at a discount, apparently forfriendship's sake; and a certain gentleman with a pock-marked face, and abeard dyed an unscrupulous purple, who sang himself a hymn all the way toBoston, and who gave me no sufficient reason for thinking him a sea-captain. Not far from the end of the Long Bridge, there is apt to be anumber of colored ladies waiting to get into the car, or to get out ofit, --usually one solemn mother in Ethiopia, and two or three mirthfuldaughters, who find it hard to suppress a sense of adventure, and to keepin the laughter that struggles out through their glittering teeth andeyes, and who place each other at a disadvantage by divers accidental andintentional bumps and blows. If they are to get out, the old lady is notcertain of the place where, and, after making the car stop, and parleyingwith the conductor, returns to her seat, and is mutely held up to publicscorn by one taciturn wink of the conductor's eye. 

Among horse-car types, I am almost ashamed to note one so common andobservable as that middle-aged lady who gets aboard and will not see theone vacant seat left, but stands tottering at the door, blind and deaf toall the modest beckonings and benevolent gasps of her fellow-passengers. An air as of better days clings about her; she seems a person who hasknown sickness and sorrow; but so far from pitying her, you view her withinexpressible rancor, for it is plain that she ought to sit down, and thatshe will not. But for a point of honor the conductor would show her thevacant place; this forbidding, however, how can he? There she stands andsniffs drearily when you glance at her, as you must from time to time, andno wild turkey caught in a trap was ever more incapable of looking downthan this middle-aged (shall I say also unmarried?) lady. 

Of course every one knows the ladies and gentlemen who sit cater-cornered, and who will not move up; and equally familiar is that large andponderous person, who, feigning to sit down beside you, practically sitsdown upon you, and is not incommoded by having your knee under him. Heimplies by this brutal conduct that you are taking up more space thanbelongs to you, and that you are justly made an example of. 

I had the pleasure one day to meet on the horse-car an advocate of one ofthe great reforms of the day. He held a green bag upon his knees, andwithout any notice passed from a question of crops to a discussion ofsuffrage for the negro, and so to womanhood suffrage. "Let the womenvote, " said he, --"let 'em vote if they want to. _I_ don't care. Factis, I should like to see 'em do it the first time. They're excitable, youknow; they're excitable;" and he enforced his analysis of female characterby thrusting his elbow sharply into my side. "Now, there's my wife; I'dlike to see her vote. Be fun, I tell you. And the girls, --Lord, the girls!Circus wouldn't be anywhere. " Enchanted with the picture which he appearedto have conjured up for himself, he laughed with the utmost relish, andthen patting the green bag in his lap, which plainly contained a violin, "You see, " he went on, "I go out playing for dancing-parties. Work all dayat my trade, --I'm a carpenter, --and play in the evening. Take my littleold ten dollars a night. And _I_ notice the women a good deal; and_I_ tell you they're _all_ excitable, and _I sh'd_ like to see 'em vote. Vote right and vote often, --that's the ticket, eh?" This friend ofwomanhood suffrage--whose attitude of curiosity and expectation seemedto me representative of that of a great many thinkers on the subject--nodoubt was otherwise a reformer, and held that the coming man wouldnot drink wine--if he could find whiskey. At least I should have saidso, guessing from the odors he breathed along with his liberal sentiments. 

Something of the character of a college-town is observable nearly alwaysin the presence of the students, who confound certain traditional ideas ofstudents by their quietude of costume and manner, and whom Padua orHeidelberg would hardly know, but who nevertheless betray that they arebanded to--

 "Scorn delights and live laborious days, "

by a uniformity in the cut of their trousers, or a clannishness of cane orscarf, or a talk of boats and base-ball held among themselves. One cannotsee them without pleasure and kindness; and it is no wonder that theiryoung-lady acquaintances brighten so to recognize them on the horse-cars. There is much good fortune in the world, but none better than being anundergraduate twenty years old, hale, handsome, fashionably dressed, withthe whole promise of life before: it's a state of things to disarm evenenvy. With so much youth forever in her heart, it must be hard for ourCharlesbridge to grow old: the generations arise and pass away but in herveins is still this tide of warm blood, century in and century out, somuch the same from one age to another that it would be hardy to say it wasnot still one youthfulness. There is a print of the village as it was acycle since, showing the oldest of the college buildings and upon thestreet in front a scholar in his scholar's-cap and gown, giving his arm toa very stylish girl of that period, who is dressed wonderfully like thegirl of ours, so that but for the student's antique formality of costume, one might believe that he was handing her out to take the horse-car. Thereis no horse-car in the picture, --that is the only real difference betweenthen and now in our Charlesbridge, perennially young and gay. Have therenot ever been here the same grand ambitions, the same high hopes, --and isnot the unbroken succession of youth in these?

As for other life on the horse-car, it shows to little or no effect, as Ihave said. You can, of course, detect certain classes; as, in the morningthe business-men going in, to their counters or their desks, and in theafternoon the shoppers coming out, laden with paper parcels. But I thinkno one can truly claim to know the regular from the occasional passengersby any greater cheerfulness in the faces of the latter. The horse-car willsuffer no such inequality as this, but reduces us all to the same level ofmelancholy. It would be but a very unworthy kind of art which should seekto describe people by such merely external traits as a habit of carryingbaskets or large travelling-bags in the car; and the present muse scornsit, but is not above speaking of the frequent presence of those lovelyyoung girls in which Boston and the suburban towns abound, and who, whether they appear with rolls of music in their hands, or books from thecirculating-libraries, or pretty parcels or hand-bags, would brighten eventhe horse-car if fresh young looks and gay and brilliant costumes could doso much. But they only add perplexity to the anomaly, which was alreadysufficiently trying with its contrasts of splendor and shabbiness, andsuch intimate association of velvets and patches as you see in thechurches of Catholic countries, but nowhere else in the world except inour "coaches of the sovereign people. "

In winter, the journey to or from Boston cannot appear otherwise than verydreary to the fondest imagination. Coming out, nothing can look morearctic and forlorn than the river, double-shrouded in ice and snow, orsadder than the contrast offered to the same prospect in summer. Then allis laughing, and it is a joy in every nerve to ride out over the LongBridge at high tide, and, looking southward, to see the wide crinkle andglitter of that beautiful expanse of water, which laps on one hand thegranite quays of the city, and on the other washes among the reeds andwild grasses of the salt-meadows. A ship coming slowly up the channel, ora dingy tug violently darting athwart it, gives an additional pleasure tothe eye, and adds something dreamy or vivid to the beauty of the scene. Itis hard to say at what hour of the summer's-day the prospect is loveliest;and I am certainly not going to speak of the sunset as the least of itsdelights. When this exquisite spectacle is presented, the horse-carpassenger, happy to cling with one foot to the rear platform-steps, looksout over the shoulder next him into fairy-land. Crimson and purple the baystretches westward till its waves darken into the grassy levels, where, here and there, a hay-rick shows perfectly black against the light. Afaroff, southeastward and westward, the uplands wear a tinge of tenderestblue; and in the nearer distance, on the low shores of the river, hoverthe white plumes of arriving and departing trains. The windows of thestately houses that overlook the water take the sunset from itevanescently, and begin to chill and darken before the crimson burns outof the sky. The windows are, in fact, best after nightfall, when they arebrilliantly lighted from within; and when, if it is a dark, warm night, and the briny fragrance comes up strong from the falling tide, the lightsreflected far down in the still water, bring a dream, as I have heardtravelled Bostonians say, of Venice and her magical effects in the samekind. But for me the beauty of the scene needs the help of no suchassociation; I am content with it for what it is. I enjoy also the hintsof spring which one gets in riding over the Long Bridge at low tide in thefirst open days. Then there is not only a vernal beating of carpets on thepiers of the drawbridge, but the piles and walls left bare by the recedingwater show green patches of sea-weeds and mosses, and flatter the willingeye with a dim hint of summer. This reeking and saturated herbage--whichalways seems to me, in contrast with dry land growths, what the water-logged life of seafaring folk is to that which we happier men lead onshore, --taking so kindly the deceitful warmth and brightness of the sun, has then a charm which it loses when summer really comes; nor does one, later, have so keen an interest in the men wading about in the shallowsbelow the bridge, who, as in the distance they stoop over to gatherwhatever shell-fish they seek, make a very fair show of being someungainlier sort of storks, and are as near as we can hope to come to thespring-prophesying storks of song and story. A sentiment of the drowsinessthat goes before the awakening of the year, and is so different from thedrowsiness that precedes the great autumnal slumber, is in the air, but isgone when we leave the river behind, and strike into the stragglingvillage beyond. 

I maintain that Boston, as one approaches it and passingly takes in theline of Bunker Hill Monument, soaring preëminent among the emulousfoundry-chimneys of the sister city, is fine enough to need no comparisonwith other fine sights. Thanks to the mansard curves and dormer-windows ofthe newer houses, there is a singularly picturesque variety among theroofs that stretch along the bay, and rise one above another on the city'sthree hills, grouping themselves about the State House, and surmounted byits India-rubber dome. But, after all, does human weakness crave somelegendary charm, some grace of uncertain antiquity, in the picturesquenessit sees? I own that the future, to which we are often referred for the"stuff that dreams are made of, " is more difficult for the fancy than thepast, that the airy amplitude of its possibilities is somewhat chilly, andthat we naturally long for the snug quarters of old, made warm by manygenerations of life. Besides, Europe spoils us ingenuous Americans, andflatters our sentimentality into ruinous extravagances. Looking at hermany-storied former times, we forget our own past, neat, compact, andconvenient for the poorest memory to dwell in. Yet an American notinfected with the discontent of travel could hardly approach this superbcity without feeling something of the coveted pleasure in her, without areverie of her Puritan and Revolutionary times, and the great names anddeeds of her heroic annals. I think, however, we were well to be rid ofthis yearning for a native American antiquity; for in its indulgence onecannot but regard himself and his contemporaries as cumberers of theground, delaying the consummation of that hoary past which will be sofascinating to a semi-Chinese posterity, and will be, ages hence, theinspiration of Pigeon-English poetry and romance. Let us make much of ourtwo hundred and fifty years, and cherish the present as our golden age. Wehealthy-minded people in the horse-cars are loath to lose a moment of it, and are aggrieved that the draw of the bridge should be up, naturallylooking on what is constantly liable to happen as an especial malice ofthe fates. All the drivers of the vehicles that clog the draw on eitherside have a like sense of personal injury; and apparently it would go hardwith the captain of that leisurely vessel below if he were delivered intoour hands. But this impatience and anger are entirely illusive. 

We are really the most patient people in the world, especially as regardsany incorporated, non-political oppressions. A lively Gaul, who travelledamong us some thirty years ago, found that, in the absence of politicalcontrol, we gratified the human instinct of obedience by submitting tosmall tyrannies unknown abroad, and were subject to the steamboat-captain, the hotel-clerk, the stage-driver, and the waiter, who all bullied usfearlessly; but though some vestiges of this bondage remain, it isprobably passing away. The abusive Frenchman's assertion would not atleast hold good concerning the horse-car conductors, who, in spite of alingering preference for touching or punching passengers for their fareinstead of asking for it, are commonly mild-mannered and good-tempered, and disposed to molest us as little as possible. I have even received fromone of them a mark of such kindly familiarity as the offer of a checkwhich he held between his lips, and thrust out his face to give me, bothhis hands being otherwise occupied; and their lives are in nowise suchluxurious careers as we should expect in public despots. The oppression ofthe horse-car passenger is not from them, and the passenger himself isfinally to blame for it. When the draw closes at last, and we rumbleforward into the city street, a certain stir of expectation is felt amongus. The long and eventful journey is nearly ended, and now we who are toget out of the cars can philosophically amuse ourselves with the passionsand sufferings of those who are to return in our places. You must choosethe time between five and six o'clock in the afternoon, if you would makethis grand study of the national character in its perfection. Then thespectacle offered in any arriving horse-car will serve your purpose. Atnearly every corner of the street up which it climbs stands an experiencedsuburban, who darts out upon the car, and seizes a vacant place in it. Presently all the places are taken, and before we reach Temple Street, where helpless groups of women are gathered to avail themselves of thefirst seats vacated, an alert citizen is stationed before each passengerwho is to retire at the summons, "Please pass out forrad. " When this isheard in Bowdoin Square, we rise and push forward, knuckling one another'sbacks in our eagerness, and perhaps glancing behind us at the tumultwithin. Not only are all our places occupied, but the aisle is left fullof passengers precariously supporting themselves by the straps in theroof. The rear platform is stormed and carried by a party with bundles;the driver is instantly surrounded by another detachment; and as the carmoves away from the office, the platform steps are filled. 

"Is it possible, " I asked myself, when I had written as far as this in thepresent noble history, "that I am not exaggerating? It can't be that thisand the other enormities I have been describing are of daily occurrence inBoston. Let me go verify, at least, my picture of the evening horse-car. "So I take my way to Bowdoin Square, and in the conscientious spirit ofmodern inquiry, I get aboard the first car that comes up. Like every othercar, it is meant to seat twenty passengers. It does this, and besides itcarries in the aisle and on the platform forty passengers standing. Theair is what you may imagine, if you know that not only is the place soindecently crowded, but that in the centre of the car are two adoptedcitizens, far gone in drink, who have the aspect and the smell of havingpassed the day in an ash-heap. These citizens being quite helplessthemselves, are supported by the public, and repose in singular comfortupon all the passengers near them; I, myself, contribute an aching back tothe common charity, and a genteelly dressed young lady takes one of themfrom time to time on her knee. But they are comparatively an ornament tosociety till the conductor objects to the amount they offer him for fare;for after that they wish to fight him during the journey, and invite himat short intervals to step out and be shown what manner of men they are. The conductor passes it off for a joke, and so it is, and a very good one. 

In that unhappy mass it would be an audacious spirit who should say of anyparticular arm or leg, "It is mine, " and all the breath is in common. Nothing, it would seem, could add to our misery; but we discover our errorwhen the conductor squeezes a tortuous path through us, and collects themoney for our transportation. I never can tell, during the performance ofthis feat, whether he or the passengers are more to be pitied. 

The people who are thus indecorously huddled and jammed together, withoutregard to age or sex, otherwise lead lives of at least comfort, and a goodhalf of them cherish themselves in every physical way with unparalleledzeal. They are handsomely clothed; they are delicately neat in linen; theyeat well, or, if not well, as well as their cooks will let them, and atall events expensively; they house in dwellings appointed in a mannerundreamt of elsewhere in the world, --dwellings wherein furnaces make asummer-heat, where fountains of hot and cold water flow at a touch, wherelight is created or quenched by the turning of a key, where all isluxurious upholstery, and magical ministry to real or fancied needs. Theycarry the same tastes with them to their places of business; and when they"attend divine service, " it is with the understanding that God is toreceive them in a richly carpeted house, deliciously warmed and perfectlyventilated, where they may adore Him at their ease upon cushioned seats, --secured seats. Yet these spoiled children of comfort, when they ride to orfrom business or church, fail to assert rights that the benighted Cockney, who never heard of our plumbing and registers, or even the oppressedParisian, who is believed not to change his linen from one revolution toanother, having paid for, enjoys. When they enter the "full" horse-car, they find themselves in a place inexorable as the grave to theirgreenbacks, where not only is their adventitious consequence stripped fromthem, but the courtesies of life are impossible, the inherent dignity ofthe person is denied, and they are reduced below the level of the mostuncomfortable nations of the Old World. The philosopher accustomed to drawconsolation from the sufferings of his richer fellow-men, and to infer anoverruling Providence from their disgraces, might well bless Heaven forthe spectacle of such degradation, if his thanksgiving were not preventedby his knowledge that this is quite voluntary. And now consider that onevery car leaving the city at this time the scene is much the same;reflect that the horror is enacting, not only in Boston, but in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, --wherever thehorse-car, that tinkles well-nigh round the Continent, is known; rememberthat the same victims are thus daily sacrificed, without an effort toright themselves: and then you will begin to realize--dimly andimperfectly, of course--the unfathomable meekness of the Americancharacter. The "full" horse-car is a prodigy whose likeness is absolutelyunknown elsewhere, since the Neapolitan gig went out; and I suppose itwill be incredible to the future in our own country. When I see such ahorse-car as I have sketched move away from its station, I feel that it issomething not only emblematic and interpretative, but monumental; and Iknow that when art becomes truly national, the overloaded horse-car willbe celebrated in painting and sculpture. And in after ages, when theoblique-eyed, swarthy American of that time, pausing before somecommemorative bronze or historical picture of our epoch, contemplates thisstupendous spectacle of human endurance, I hope he will be able tophilosophize more satisfactorily than we can now, concerning the mysteryof our strength as a nation and our weakness as a public. 

A DAY'S PLEASURE

I. --THE MORNING. 

They were not a large family, and their pursuits and habits were verysimple; yet the summer was lapsing toward the first pathos of autumnbefore they found themselves all in such case as to be able to take theday's pleasure they had planned so long. They had agreed often and oftenthat nothing could be more charming than an excursion down the Harbor, either to Gloucester, or to Nahant, or to Nantasket Beach, or to Hull andHingham, or to any point within the fatal bound beyond which isseasickness. They had studied the steamboat advertisements, day after day, for a long time, without making up their minds which of these charmingexcursions would be the most delightful; and when they had at last fixedupon one and chosen some day for it, that day was sure to be heralded by along train of obstacles, or it dawned upon weather that was simplyimpossible. Besides, in the suburbs, you are apt to sleep late, unless thesolitary ice-wagon of the neighborhood makes a very uncommon rumbling ingoing by; and I believe that the excursion was several times postponed bythe tardy return of the pleasurers from dreamland, which, after all, isnot the worst resort, or the least interesting--or profitable, for thematter of that. But at last the great day came, --a blameless Thursdayalike removed from the cares of washing and ironing days, and from thefatigues with which every week closes. One of the family chosedeliberately to stay at home; but the severest scrutiny could not detect ahindrance in the health or circumstances of any of the rest, and theweather was delicious. Everything, in fact, was so fair and so full ofpromise, that they could almost fancy a calamity of some sort hanging overits perfection, and possibly bred of it; for I suppose that we never haveanything made perfectly easy for us without a certain reluctance andforeboding. That morning they all got up so early that they had time towaste over breakfast before taking the 7. 30 train for Boston; and theynaturally wasted so much of it that they reached the station only inseason for the 8. 00. But there is a difference between reaching thestation and quietly taking the cars, especially if one of your company hasbeen left at home, hoping to cut across and take the cars at a stationwhich they reach some minutes later, and you, the head of the party, areobliged, at a loss of breath and personal comfort and dignity, to run downto that station and see that the belated member has arrived there, andthen hurry back to your own, and embody the rest, with their accompanyinghand-bags and wraps and sun-umbrellas, into some compact shape for removalinto the cars, during the very scant minute that the train stops atCharlesbridge. Then when you are all aboard, and the tardy member has beenduly taken up at the next station, and you would be glad to spend the timein looking about on the familiar variety of life which every car presentsin every train on every road in this vast American world, you areoppressed and distracted by the cares which must attend the pleasure-seeker, and which the more thickly beset him the more deeply he plungesinto enjoyment. 

I can learn very little from the note-book of the friend whose adventuresI am relating in regard to the scenery of Somerville, and the regiongenerally through which the railroad passes between Charlesbridge andBoston; but so much knowledge of it may be safely assumed on the part ofthe reader as to relieve me of the grave responsibility of describing it. Still, I may say that it is not unpicturesque, and that I have a pleasure, which I hope the reader shares, in anything like salt meadows and allspaces subject to the tide, whether flooded by it or left bare with theirsaturated grasses by its going down. I think, also, there is somethingfine in the many-roofed, many-chimneyed highlands of Chelsea (if it isChelsea), as you draw near the railroad bridge, and there is a prettystone church on a hill-side there which has the good fortune, so rare withmodern architecture and so common with the old, of seeming a naturaloutgrowth of the spot where it stands, and which is as purely an object ofaesthetic interest to me, who know nothing of its sect or doctrine, as anychurch in a picture could be; and there is, also, the Marine Hospital onthe heights (if it is the Marine Hospital), from which I hope the inmatescan behold the ocean, and exult in whatever misery keeps them ashore. 

But let me not so hasten over this part of my friend's journey as to omitall mention of the amphibious Irish houses which stand about on the lowlands along the railroad-sides, and which you half expect to see plungeinto the tidal mud of the neighborhood, with a series of hoarse croaks, asthe train approaches. Perhaps twenty-four trains pass those houses everytwenty-four hours, and it is a wonder that the inhabitants keep theirinterest in them, or have leisure to bestow upon any of them. Yet, as youdash along so bravely, you can see that you arrest the occupations of allthese villagers as by a kind of enchantment; the children pause and turntheir heads toward you from their mud-pies (to the production of whichthere is literally no limit in that region); the matron rests oneparboiled hand on her hip, letting the other still linger listlessly uponthe wash-board, while she lifts her eyes from the suds to look at you; theboys, who all summer long are forever just going into the water or justcoming out of it, cease their buttoning or unbuttoning; the baby, whichhas been run after and caught and suitably posed, turns its anguished eyesupon you, where also falls the mother's gaze, while her descending palm isarrested in mid air. I forbear to comment upon the surprising populousnessof these villages, where, in obedience to all the laws of health, theinhabitants ought to be wasting miserably away, but where they flourishin spite of them. Even Accident here seems to be robbed of half hermalevolence; and that baby (who will presently be chastised with terrificuproar) passes an infancy of intrepid enjoyment amidst the local perils, and is no more affected by the engines and the cars than by so manyfretful hens with their attendant broods of chickens. 

[Illustration: "That sweet young blonde, who arrives by most trains. "]

When sometimes I long for the excitement and variety of travel, which, forno merit of mine, I knew in other days, I reproach myself, and silence allmy repinings with some such question as, Where could you find more varietyor greater excitement than abounds in and near the Fitchburg Depot when atrain arrives? And to tell the truth, there is something very inspiring inthe fine eagerness with which all the passengers rise as soon as thelocomotive begins to slow, and huddle forward to the door, in theirimpatience to get out; while the suppressed vehemence of the hackmen isalso thrilling in its way, not to mention the instant clamor of thebaggage-men as they read and repeat the numbers of the checks in stridenttones. It would be ever so interesting to depict all these people, but itwould require volumes for the work, and I reluctantly let them all passout without a word, --all but that sweet young blonde who arrives by mosttrains, and who, putting up her eye-glass with a ravishing air, bewitchingly peers round among the bearded faces, with little tender looksof hope and trepidation, for the face which she wants, and which presentlybursts through the circle of strange visages. The owner of the face thenhurries forward to meet that sweet blonde, who gives him a little droopinghand as if it were a delicate flower she laid in his; there is a briefmutual hesitation long enough merely for an electrical thrill to run fromheart to heart through the clasping hands, and then he stoops toward her, and distractingly kisses her. And I say that there is no law of conscienceor propriety worthy the name of law--barbarity, absurdity, call it rather--to prevent any one from availing himself of that providential near-sightedness, and beatifying himself upon those lips, --nothing to preventit but that young fellow, whom one might not, of course, care to provoke. 

Among the people who now rush forward and heap themselves into the twohorse-cars and one omnibus, placed before the depot by a wise forethoughtfor the public comfort to accommodate the train-load of two hundredpassengers, I always note a type that is both pleasing and interesting tome. It is a lady just passing middle life; from her kindly eyes theenvious crow, whose footprints are just traceable at their corners, hasnot yet drunk the brightness, but she looks just a thought sadly, if veryserenely, from them. I know nothing in the world of her; I may have seenher twice or a hundred times, but I must always be making bits of romancesabout her. That is she in faultless gray, with the neat leather bag in herlap, and a bouquet of the first autumnal blooms perched in her shapelyhands which are prettily yet substantially gloved in some sort ofgauntlets. She can be easy and dignified, my dear middle-aged heroine, even in one of our horse-cars, where people are for the most part packedlike cattle in a pen. She shows no trace of dust or fatigue from thethirty or forty miles which I choose to fancy she has ridden from thehandsome elm-shaded New England town of five or ten thousand people, whereI choose to think she lives. From a vague horticultural association withthose gauntlets, as well as from the autumnal blooms, I take it she lovesflowers, and gardens a good deal with her own hands, and keeps house-plants in the winter, and of course a canary. Her dress, neither rich norvulgar, makes me believe her fortunes modest and not recent; her gentleface has just so much intellectual character as it is good to see in awoman's face; I suspect that she reads pretty regularly the new poems andhistories, and I know that she is the life and soul of the local book-club. Is she married, or widowed, or one of the superfluous fortythousand? That is what I never can tell. But I think that most probablyshe is married, and that her husband is very much in business, and doesnot share so much as he respects her tastes. I have no particular reasonfor thinking that she has no children now, and that the sorrow for the oneshe lost so long ago has become only a pensive silence, which, however, along summer twilight can yet deepen to tears. .. . Upon my word! Am I thenone to give way to this sort of thing? Madam, I ask pardon. I have noright to be sentimentalizing you. Yet your face is one to make peopledream kind things of you, and I cannot keep my reveries away from it. 

But in the mean time I neglect the momentous history which I have proposedto write, and leave my day's pleasurers to fade into the background of afantastic portrait. The truth is, I cannot look without pain upon thediscomforts which they suffer at this stage of their joyous enterprise. Atthe best, the portables of such a party are apt to be grievousembarrassments: a package of shawls and parasols and umbrellas and India-rubbers, however neatly made up at first, quickly degenerates into ashapeless mass, which has finally to be carried with as great tendernessas an ailing child; and the lunch is pretty sure to overflow the hand-bagsand to eddy about you in paper parcels; while the bottle of claret, thatbulges the side of one of the bags, and

 "That will show itself without, "

defying your attempts to look as it were cold tea, gives a crushing touchof disreputability to the whole affair. Add to this the fact that but halfthe party have seats, and that the others have to sway and totter aboutthe car in that sudden contact with all varieties of fellow-men, to whichwe are accustomed in the cars, and you must allow that these poormerrymakers have reasons enough to rejoice when this part of their day'spleasure is over. They are so plainly bent upon a sail down the Harbor, that before they leave the car they become objects of public interest, andare at last made to give some account of themselves. 

"Going for a sail, I presume?" says a person hitherto in conversation withthe conductor. "Well, I wouldn't mind a sail myself to-day. "

"Yes, " answers the head of the party, "going to Gloucester. "

"Guess not, " says, very coldly and decidedly, one of the passengers, whois reading that morning's "Advertiser;" and when the subject of thissurmise looks at him for explanations, he adds, "The City Council haschartered the boat for to-day. "

Upon this the excursionists fall into great dismay and bitterness, andupbraid the City Council, and wonder why last night's "Transcript" saidnothing about its oppressive action, and generally bewail their fate. Butat last they resolve to go somewhere, and, being set down, they make uptheir warring minds upon Nahant, for the Nahant boat leaves the wharfnearest them; and so they hurry away to India Wharf, amidst barrels andbales and boxes and hacks and trucks, with interminable string-teamspassing before them at every crossing. 

"At any rate, " says the leader of the expedition, "we shall see theGardens of Maolis, --those enchanted gardens which have fairly beenadvertised into my dreams, and where I've been told, " he continues, withan effort to make the prospect an attractive one, yet not without a senseof the meagreness of the materials, "they have a grotto and a woodenbull. "

Of course, there is no reason in nature why a wooden bull should be morepleasing than a flesh-and-blood bull, but it seems to encourage thecompany, and they set off again with renewed speed, and at last reachIndia Wharf in time to see the Nahant steamer packed full ofexcursionists, with a crowd of people still waiting to go aboard. It doesnot look inviting, and they hesitate. In a minute or two their spiritssink so low, that if they should see the wooden bull step out of a grottoon the deck of the steamer the spectacle could not revive them. At thatinstant they think, with a surprising singleness, of Nantasket Beach, andthe bright colors in which the Gardens of Maolis but now appeared fadeaway, and they seem to see themselves sauntering along the beautifulshore, while the white-crested breakers crash upon the sand, and run up

 "In tender-curving lines of creamy spray, "

quite to the feet of that lotus-eating party. 

"Nahant is all rocks, " says the leader to Aunt Melissa, who hears him witha sweet and tranquil patience, and who would enjoy or suffer anything withthe same expression; "and as you've never yet seen the open sea, it'sfortunate that we go to Nantasket, for, of course, a beach is morecharacteristic. But now the object is to get there. The boat will bestarting in a few moments, and I doubt whether we can walk it. How far isit, " he asks, turning toward a respectable-looking man, "to LiverpoolWharf?"

"Well, it's consid'able ways, " says the man, smiling. 

"Then we must take a hack, " says the pleasurer to his party. "Come on. "

"I've got a hack, " observes the man, in a casual way, as if the fact mightpossibly interest. 

"O, you have, have you? Well, then, put us into it, and drive to LiverpoolWharf; and hurry. "

Either the distance was less than the hackman fancied, or else he drovethither with unheard-of speed, for two minutes later he set them down onLiverpool Wharf. But swiftly as they had come the steamer had been evenmore prompt, and she now turned toward them a beautiful wake, as shepushed farther and farther out into the harbor. 

The hackman took his two dollars for his four passengers, and was rapidlymounting his box, --probably to avoid idle reproaches. "Wait!" said thechief pleasurer. Then, "When does the next boat leave?" he asked of theagent, who had emerged with a compassionate face from the waiting-rooms onthe wharf. 

"At half past two. "

"And it's now five minutes past nine, " moaned the merrymakers. 

"Why, I'll tell you what you can do, " said the agent; "you can go toHingham by the Old Colony cars, and so come back by the Hull and Hinghamboat. "

"That's it!" chorused his listeners, "we'll go;" and "Now, " said theirspokesman to the driver, "I dare say you didn't know that Liverpool Wharfwas so near; but I don't think you've earned your money, and you ought totake us on to the Old Colony Depot for half-fares at the most. "

The driver looked pained, as if some small tatters and shreds ofconscience were flapping uncomfortably about his otherwise dismantledspirit. Then he seemed to think of his wife and family, for he put on theair of a man who had already made great sacrifices, and "I couldn't, really, I couldn't afford it, " said he; and as the victims turned from himin disgust, he chirruped to his horses and drove off. 

"Well, " said the pleasurers, "we won't give it up. We will have our day'spleasure after all. But what _can_ we do to kill five hours and ahalf? It's miles away from everything, and, besides, there's nothing evenif we were there. " At this image of their remoteness and the inherentdesolation of Boston they could not suppress some sighs, and in the meantime Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting-room, which opened on thefarther side upon the water, and sat contentedly down on one of thebenches; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolution, followed, andthus, without debate, it was settled that they should wait there till theboat left. The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could to alleviatethe situation: he gave them each the advertisement of his line of boats, neatly printed upon a card, and then he went away. 

All this prospect of waiting would do well enough for the ladies of theparty, but there is an impatience in the masculine fibre which does notbrook the notion of such prolonged repose; and the leader of the excursionpresently pretended an important errand up town, --nothing less, in fact, than to buy a tumbler out of which to drink their claret on the beach. Aholiday is never like any other day to the man who takes it, and a festivehalo seemed to enwrap the excursionist as he pushed on through the busystreets in the cool shadow of the vast granite palaces wherein the geniusof business loves to house itself in this money-making land, and inhaledthe odors of great heaps of leather and spices and dry goods as he passedthe open doorways, --odors that mixed pleasantly with the smell of thefreshly watered streets. When he stepped into a crockery store to make hispurchase a sense of pleasure-taking did not fail him, and he fellnaturally into talk with the clerk about the weather and such pastoraltopics. Even when he reached the establishment where his own business dayswere passed some glamour seemed to be cast upon familiar objects. To thedisenchanted eye all things were as they were on all other dullish days ofsummer, even to the accustomed bore leaning up against his favorite deskand transfixing his habitual victim with his usual theme. Yet to the gazeof this pleasure-taker all was subtly changed, and he shook hands rightand left as he entered, to the marked surprise of the objects of hiseffusion. He had merely come to get some newspapers to help pass away thelong moments on the wharf, and when he had found these, he hurried backthither to hear what had happened during his absence. 

It seemed that there had hardly ever been such an eventful period in thelives of the family before, and he listened to a minute account of it fromCousin Lucy. "You know, Frank, " says she, "that Sallie's one idea in lifeis to keep the baby from getting the whooping-cough, and I declare thatthese premises have done nothing but reëcho with the most dolorous whoopsever since you've been gone, so that at times, in my fear that Salliewould think I'd been careless about the boy, I've been ready to throwmyself into the water, and nothing's prevented me but the doubt whether itwouldn't be better to throw in the whoopers instead. "

At this moment a pale little girl, with a face wan and sad through all itsdirt, came and stood in the doorway nearest the baby, and in anotherinstant she had burst into a whoop so terrific that, if she had meant tohave his scalp next it could not have been more dreadful. Then shesubsided into a deep and pathetic quiet, with that air peculiar to thevictims of her disorder of having done nothing noticeable. But heroutburst had set at work the mysterious machinery of half a dozen otherwhooping-coughers lurking about the building, and all unseen they woundthemselves up with appalling rapidity, and in the utter silence whichfollowed left one to think they had died at the climax. 

"Why, it's a perfect whooping-cough factory, this place, " cries CousinLucy in a desperation. "Go away, do, please, from the baby, you poorlittle dreadful object you, " she continues, turning upon the only visibleoperative in the establishment. "Here, take this, " and she bribes her witha bit of sponge-cake, on which the child runs lightly off along the edgeof the wharf. "That's been another of their projects for driving me wild, "says Cousin Lucy, --"trying to take their own lives in a hundred waysbefore my face and eyes. Why _will_ their mothers let them come hereto play?"

Really, they were very melancholy little figures, and might have gone nearto make one sad, even if they had not been constantly imperilling theirlives. Thanks to its being summer-time, it did not much matter about thescantiness of their clothing, but their squalor was depressing, it seemed, even to themselves, for they were a mournful-looking set of children, andin their dangerous sports trifled silently and almost gloomily with death. There were none of them above eight or nine years of age, and most of themhad the care of smaller brothers, or even babes in arms, whom they werethus early inuring to the perils of the situation. The boys were dressedin pantaloons and shirts which no excess of rolling up in the legs andarms could make small enough, and the incorrigible too-bigness of whichrendered the favorite amusements still more hazardous from their liabilityto trip and entangle the wearers. The little girls had on each a solitarygarment, which hung about her gaunt person with antique severity ofoutline; while the babies were multitudinously swathed in whateverfragments of dress could be tied or pinned or plastered on. Their faceswere strikingly and almost ingeniously dirty, and their distractions amongthe coal-heaps and cord-wood constantly added to the variety and advantageof these effects. 

"Why do their mothers let them come here?" muses Frank aloud. "Why, because it's so safe, Cousin Lucy. At home, you know, they'd have to beplaying upon the sills of fourth-floor windows, and here they're out ofthe way and can't hurt themselves. Why, Cousin Lucy, this is their park, --their Public Garden, their Bois de Boulogne, their Cascine. And look attheir gloomy little faces! Aren't they taking their pleasure in the spiritof the very highest fashion? I was at Newport last summer, and saw thefamous driving on the Avenue in those pony phaetons, dog-carts, and tubs, and three-story carriages with a pair of footmen perching like storks uponeach gable, and I assure you that all those ornate and costly phantasms(it seems to me now like a sad, sweet vision) had just the expression ofthese poor children. We're taking a day's pleasure ourselves, cousin, butnobody would know it from our looks. And has nothing but whooping-coughhappened since I've been gone?"

"Yes, we seem to be so cut off from every-day associations that I'veimagined myself a sort of tourist, and I've been to that Catholic churchover yonder, in hopes of seeing the Murillos and Raphaels--but I found itlocked up, and so I trudged back without a sight of the masterpieces. Butwhat's the reason that all the shops hereabouts have nothing but luxuriesfor sale? The windows are perfect tropics of oranges, and lemons, andbelated bananas, and tobacco, and peanuts. "

"Well, the poor really seem to use more of those luxuries than anybodyelse. I don't blame them. I shouldn't care for the necessaries of lifemyself, if I found them so hard to get. "

"When I came back here, " says Cousin Lucy, without heeding these flippantand heartless words, "I found an old gentleman who has something to dowith the boats, and he sat down, as if it were a part of his business, andtold me nearly the whole history of his life. Isn't it nice of them, keeping an Autobiographer? It makes the time pass so swiftly when you'rewaiting. This old gentleman was born--who'd ever think it?--up there inPearl Street, where those pitiless big granite stores are now; and, Idon't know why, but the idea of any human baby being born in Pearl Streetseemed to me one of the saddest things I'd ever heard of. "

Here Cousin Lucy went to the rescue of the nurse and the baby, who had gotinto one of their periodical difficulties, and her interlocutor turned toAunt Melissa. 

"I think, Franklin, " says Aunt Melissa, "that it was wrong to let thatnurse come and bring the baby. "

"Yes, I know, Aunty, you have those old-established ideas, and they'revery right, " answers her nephew; "but just consider how much she enjoysit, and how vastly the baby adds to the pleasure of this charmingexcursion!"

Aunt Melissa made no reply, but sat thoughtfully out upon the bay. "Ipresume you think the excursion is a failure, " she said, after a while;"but I've been enjoying every minute of the time here. Of course, I'venever seen the open sea, and I don't know about it, but I feel here justas if I were spending a day at the seaside. "

"Well, " said her nephew, "I shouldn't call this exactly a watering-place. It lacks the splendor and gayety of Newport, in a certain degree, and ithasn't the illustrious seclusion of Nahant. The surf isn't very fine, northe beach particularly adapted to bathing; and yet, I must confess, theoutlook from here is as lovely as anything one need have. "

And to tell the truth, it was very pretty and interesting. The landwardenvironment was as commonplace and mean as it could be: a yardful ofdismal sheds for coal and lumber, and shanties for offices, with eachoffice its safe and its desk, its whittled arm-chair and its spittoon, itsfly that shooed not, but buzzed desperately against the grimy pane, which, if it had really had that boasted microscopic eye, it never would havemistaken for the unblemished daylight. Outside of this yard was the usualwharfish neighborhood, with its turmoil of trucks and carts and fleetexpress-wagons, its building up and pulling down, its discomfort andclamor of every sort, and its shops for the sale, not only of thoseluxuries which Lucy had mentioned, but of such domestic refreshments aslemon-pie and hulled-corn. 

When, however, you turned your thoughts and eyes away from this aspect ofit, and looked out upon the water, the neighborhood gloriously retrieveditself. There its poverty and vulgarity ceased; there its beauty and graceabounded. A light breeze ruffled the face of the bay, and the innumerablelittle sail-boats that dotted it took the sun and wind upon their wings, which they dipped almost into the sparkle of the water, and flew lightlyhither and thither like gulls that loved the brine too well to rise whollyfrom it; larger ships, farther or nearer, puffed or shrank their sails asthey came and went on the errands of commerce, but always moved as if bentupon some dreamy affair of pleasure; the steamboats that shot vehementlyacross their tranquil courses seemed only gayer and vivider visions, butnot more substantial; yonder, a black sea-going steamer passed out betweenthe far-off islands, and at last left in the sky above those reveries offortification, a whiff of sombre smoke, dark and unreal as a memory ofbattle; to the right, on some line of railroad, long-plumed trains arrivedand departed like pictures passed through the slide of a magic-lantern;even a pile-driver, at work in the same direction, seemed to have nomalice in the blows which, after a loud clucking, it dealt the pile, andone understood that it was mere conventional violence like that of a Punchto his baby. 

"Why, what a lotus-eating life this is!" said Frank, at last. "AuntMelissa, I don't wonder you think it's like the seaside. It's a great dealbetter than the seaside. And now, just as we've entered into the spirit ofit, the time's up for the 'Rose Standish' to come and bear us from itsdelights. When will the boat be in?" he asked of the Autobiographer, whomLucy had pointed out to him. 

"Well, she's _ben_ in half an hour, now. There she lays, just outsidethe 'John Romer. '"

There, to be sure, she lay, and those pleasure-takers had been so lost inthe rapture of waiting and the beauty of the scene as never to havenoticed her arrival. 

II--THE AFTERNOON

It is noticeable how many people there are in the world that seem bentalways upon the same purpose of amusement or business as one's self. Ifyou keep quietly about your accustomed affairs, there are all yourneighbors and acquaintance hard at it too; if you go on a journey, choosewhat train you will, the cars are filled with travellers in yourdirection. You take a day's pleasure, and everybody abandons his usualoccupation to crowd upon your boat, whether it is to Gloucester, orNahant, or to Nantasket Beach you go. It is very hard to believe that, from whatever channel of life you abstract yourself, still the great sumof it presses forward as before: that business is carried on though youare idle, that men amuse themselves though you toil, that every train isas crowded as that you travel on, that the theatre or the church fills itsboxes or pews without you perfectly well. I suppose it would not be quiteagreeable to believe all this; the opposite illusion is far moreflattering; for if each one of us did not take the world with him now atevery turn, should he not have to leave it behind him when he died? Andthat, it must be owned, would not be agreeable, nor is the fact quiteconceivable, though ever so many myriads in so many million years haveproved it. 

When our friends first went aboard the "Rose Standish" that day they werealmost the sole passengers, and they had a feeling of ownership andprivacy which was pleasant enough in its way, but which they lostafterwards; though to lose it was also pleasant, for enjoyment no morelikes to be solitary than sin does, which is notoriously gregarious, and Idare say would hardly exist if it could not be committed in company. Thepreacher, indeed, little knows the comfortable sensation we have in beingcalled fellow-sinners, and what an effective shield for his guilt eachmakes of his neighbor's hard-heartedness. 

Cousin Frank never felt how strange was a lonely transgression till thatday, when in the silence of the little cabin he took the bottle of claretfrom the handbag, and prepared to moisten the family lunch with it. "Ithink, Aunt Melissa, " he said, "we had better lunch now, for it's aquarter past two, and we shall not get to the beach before four. Let'simprovise a beach of these chairs, and that water-urn yonder can stand forthe breakers. Now, this is truly like Newport and Nahant, " he added, afterthe little arrangement was complete; and he was about to strip away thebottle's jacket of brown paper, when a lady much wrapped up came in, and, reclining upon one of the opposite seats, began to take them all in with asevere serenity of gaze that made them feel for a moment like a party oflow foreigners, --like a set of German atheists, say. Frank kept on thebottle's paper jacket, and as the single tumbler of the party circled frommouth to mouth, each of them tried to give the honest drink the false airof a medicinal potion of some sort; and to see Aunt Melissa sipping it, noone could have put his hand on his heart and sworn it was not elderberrywine, at the worst. In spite of these efforts, they all knew that they hadsuffered a hopeless loss of repute; yet after the loss was confessed, I amnot sure that they were not the gayer and happier through this "freedom ofa broken law. " At any rate, the lunch passed off very merrily, and whenthey had put back the fragments of the feast into the bags, they wentforward to the bow of the boat, to get good places for seeing the variouspeople as they came aboard, and for an outlook upon the bay when the boatshould start. 

I suppose that these were not very remarkable people, and that nothing butthe indomitable interest our friends took in the human race could haveenabled them to feel any concern in their companions. It was, no doubt, just such a company as goes down to Nantasket Beach every pleasant day insummer. Certain ones among them were distinguishable as sojourners at thebeach, by an air of familiarity with the business of getting there, anindifference to the prospect, and an indefinable touch of superiority. These read their newspapers in quiet corners, or, if they were not of thenewspaper sex, made themselves comfortable in the cabins, and looked aboutthem at the other passengers with looks of lazy surprise, and just a hintof scorn for their interest in the boat's departure. Our day's pleasurerstook it that the lady whose steady gaze had reduced them, when at lunch, to such a low ebb of shabbiness, was a regular boarder, at the least, inone of the beach hotels. A few other passengers were, like themselves, mere idlers for a day, and were eager to see all that the boat or thevoyage offered of novelty. There were clerks and men who had book-keepingwritten in a neat mercantile hand upon their faces, and who had evidentlybeen given that afternoon for a breathing-time; and there were strangerswho were going down to the beach for the sake of the charming view of theharbor which the trip afforded. Here and there were people who were not tobe classed with any certainty, --as a pale young man, handsome in hisundesirable way, who looked like a steamboat pantry boy not yet risen tobe bar-tender, but rapidly rising, and who sat carefully balanced upon therailing of the boat, chatting with two young girls, who heard his broadsallies with continual snickers, and interchanged saucy comments with thatprompt up-and-coming manner which is so large a part of non-humoroushumor, as Mr. Lowell calls it, and now and then pulled and pushed eachother. It was a scene worth study, for in no other country could anythingso bad have been without being vastly worse; but here it was evident thatthere was nothing worse than you saw; and, indeed, these persons formed asort of relief to the other passengers, who were nearly all monotonouslywell-behaved. Amongst a few there seemed to be acquaintance, but the fargreater part were unknown to one another, and there were no words wastedby any one. I believe the English traveller who has taxed our nation withinquisitiveness for half a century is at last beginning to find out thatwe do not ask questions because we have the still more vicious custom ofnot opening our mouths at all when with strangers. 

It was a good hour after our friends got aboard before the boat left hermoorings, and then it was not without some secret dreads of sea-sicknessthat Aunt Melissa saw the seething brine widen between her and thefamiliar wharf-house, where she now seemed to have spent so large a partof her life. But the multitude of really charming and interesting objectsthat presently fell under her eye soon distracted her from those gloomythoughts. 

There is always a shabbiness about the wharves of seaports; but I must ownthat as soon as you get a reasonable distance from them in Boston, theyturn wholly beautiful. They no longer present that imposing array ofmighty ships which they could show in the days of Consul Plancus, when thecommerce of the world sought chiefly our port, yet the docks are stillfilled with the modester kinds of shipping, and if there is not thatwilderness of spars and rigging which you see at New York, let us believethat there is an aspect of selection and refinement in the scene, so thatone should describe it, not as a forest, but, less conventionally, as agentleman's park of masts. The steamships of many coastwise freight linesgloom, with their black, capacious hulks, among the lighter sailing-craft, and among the white, green-shuttered passenger-boats; and behind themthose desperate and grimy sheds assume a picturesqueness, their saggingroofs and crooked gables harmonizing agreeably with the shipping; and thengrowing up from all, rises the mellow-tinted brick-built city, roof, andspire, and dome, --a fair and noble sight, indeed, and one not surpassedfor a certain quiet and cleanly beauty by any that I know. 

Our friends lingered long upon this pretty prospect, and, as inland peopleof light heart and easy fancy will, the ladies made imagined voyages ineach of the more notable vessels they passed, --all cheap and safe trips, occupying half a second apiece. Then they came forward to the bow, thatthey might not lose any part of the harbor's beauty and variety, andinformed themselves of the names of each of the fortressed islands as theypassed, and forgot them, being passed, so that to this day Aunt Melissahas the Fort Warren rebel prisoners languishing in Fort Independence. Butthey made sure of the air of soft repose that hung about each, of thatexquisite military neatness which distinguishes them, and which went toAunt Melissa's housekeeping heart, of the green, thick turf covering theescarpments, of the great guns loafing on the crests of the ramparts andlooking out over the water sleepily, of the sentries pacing slowly up anddown with their gleaming muskets. 

"I never see one of those fellows, " says Cousin Frank, "without settinghim to the music of that saddest and subtlest of Heine's poems. You knowit, Lucy;" and he repeats:--

 "Mein Herz, mein Herz is traurig, Doch lustig leuchtet der Mai; Ich stehe gelehnt an der Linde, Hoch auf der alten Bastei. 

 * * * * *

 "Am alten grauen Thurme Ein Schilderhäuschen steht; Ein rothgeröckter Bursche Dort auf und nieder geht. 

 "Er spielt mit seiner Flinte, Sie funkelt im Sonnenroth, Er präsentirt, und schultert, -- Ich wollt', er schösse mich todt. "

"O!" says Cousin Lucy, either because the poignant melancholy of thesentiment has suddenly pierced her, or because she does not quiteunderstand the German, --you never can tell about women. While Frank smilesdown upon her in this amiable doubt, their party is approached by thetipsy man who has been making the excursion so merry for the otherpassengers, in spite of the fact that there is very much to make one sadin him. He is an old man, sweltering in rusty black, a two days' graybeard, and a narrow-brimmed, livid silk hat, set well back upon the napeof his neck. He explains to our friends, as he does to every one whoseacquaintance he makes, that he was in former days a seafaring man, andthat he has brought his two little grandsons here to show them somethingabout a ship; and the poor old soul helplessly saturates his phrase withthe rankest profanity. The boys are somewhat amused by their grandsire'sstate, being no doubt familiar with it, but a very grim-looking old ladywho sits against the pilot-house, and keeps a sharp eye upon all three, and who is also doubtless familiar with the unhappy spectacle, seems notto find it a joke. Her stout matronly umbrella trembles in her hand whenher husband draws near, and her eye flashes; but he gives her as wide aberth as he can, returning her glare with a propitiatory drunken smile anda wink to the passengers to let them into the fun. In fact, he is full ofhumor in his tipsy way, and one after another falls the prey of his freesarcasm, which does not spare the boat or any feature of the excursion. Heholds for a long time, by swiftly successive stories of his seafaringdays, a very quiet gentleman, who dares neither laugh too loudly nor showindifference for fear of rousing that terrible wit at his expense, andfinds his account in looking down at his boots. 

"Well, sir, " says the deplorable old sinner, "we was forty days out fromLiverpool, with a cargo of salt and iron, and we got caught on the Banksin a calm. 'Cap'n, ' says I, --I 'us sec'n' mate, --''s they any man aboardthis ship knows how to pray?' 'No, ' says the cap'n; 'blast yer prayers!''Well, ' says I, 'cap'n, I'm no hand at all to pray, but I'm goin' to seeif prayin' won't git us out 'n this. ' And I down on my knees, and I made afirst-class prayer; and a breeze sprung up in a minute and carried ussmack into Boston. "

At this bit of truculent burlesque the quiet man made a bold push, andwalked away with a somewhat sickened face, and as no one now intervenedbetween them, the inebriate laid a familiar hand upon Cousin Frank'scollar, and said with a wink at his late listener: "Looks like a lerigiousman, don't he? I guess I give him a good dose, if he _does_ thinkhimself the head-deacon of this boat. " And he went on to state his ideasof religion, from which it seemed that he was a person of the mostadvanced thinking, and believed in nothing worth mentioning. 

It is perhaps no worse for an Infidel to be drunk than a Christian, but myfriend found this tipsy blasphemer's case so revolting, that he went tothe hand-bag, took out the empty claret-bottle, and seeking a solitarycorner of the boat, cast the bottle into the water, and felt a thrill ofuncommon self-approval as this scapegoat of all the wine at his grocer'sbobbed off upon the little waves. "Besides, it saves carrying the bottlehome, " he thought, not without a half-conscious reserve, that if hispenitence were ever too much for him, he could easily abandon it. Andwithout the reflection that the gate is always open behind him, who couldconsent to enter upon any course of perfect behavior? If good resolutionscould not be broken, who would ever have the courage to form them? Wouldit not be intolerable to be made as good as we ought to be? Then, admirable reader, thank Heaven even for your lapses, since it is sowholesome and saving to be well ashamed of yourself, from time to time. 

"What an outrage, " said Cousin Frank, in the glow of virtue, as herejoined the ladies, "that that tipsy rascal should be allowed to go onwith his ribaldry. He seems to pervade the whole boat, and to subjecteverybody to his sway. He's a perfect despot to us helpless sober people, --I wouldn't openly disagree with him on any account. We ought to send aRound Robin to the captain, and ask him to put that religious liberal inirons during the rest of the voyage. "

In the mean time, however, the object of his indignation had used up allthe conversible material in that part of the boat, and had deviouslystarted for the other end. The elderly woman with the umbrella rose andfollowed him, somewhat wearily, and with a sadness that appeared more inher movement than in her face; and as the two went down the cabin, did thecomical affair look, after all, something like tragedy? My reader, whoexpects a little novelty in tragedy, and not these stale and commoneffects, will never think so. 

"You'll not pretend, Frank, " says Lucy, "that in such an intellectualplace as Boston a crowd as large as this can be got together, and nodistinguished literary people in it. I know there are some notablesaboard: do point them out to me. Pretty near everybody has a literarylook. "

"Why, that's what we call our Boston look, Cousin Lucy. You needn't havewritten anything to have it, --it's as general as tubercular consumption, and is the effect of our universal culture and habits of reading. I hearda New-Yorker say once that if you went into a corner grocery in Boston tobuy a codfish, the man would ask you how you liked 'Lucille, ' whilst hewas tying it up. No, no; you mustn't be taken in by that literary look;I'm afraid the real literary men don't always have it. But I _do_ seea literary man aboard yonder, " he added, craning his neck to one side, andthen furtively pointing, --"the most literary man I ever knew, one of themost literary men that ever lived. His whole existence is really bound upin books; he never talks of anything else, and never thinks of anythingelse, I believe. Look at him, --what kind and pleasant eyes he's got!There, he sees me!" cries Cousin Frank, with a pleasurable excitement. "How d'ye do?" he calls out. 

"O Cousin Frank, introduce us, " sighs Lucy. 

"Not I! He wouldn't thank me. He doesn't care for pretty girls outside ofbooks; he'd be afraid of 'em; he's the bashfullest man alive, and all hisheroines are fifty years old, at the least. But before I go any further, tell me solemnly, Lucy, you're not interviewing me? You're not going towrite it to a New York newspaper? No? Well, I think it's best to ask, always. Our friend there--he's everybody's friend, if you mean nobody'senemy, by that, not even his own--is really what I say, --the most literaryman I ever knew. He loves all epochs and phases of literature, but hispassion is the Charles Lamb period and all Lamb's friends. He loves themas if they were living men; and Lamb would have loved him if he could haveknown him. He speaks rapidly, and rather indistinctly, and when you meethim and say Good day, and you suppose he answers with something about theweather, ten to one he's asking you what you think of Hazlitt's essays onShakespeare, or Leigh Hunt's Italian Poets, or Lamb's roast pig, or BarryCornwall's songs. He couldn't get by a bookstall without stopping--forhalf an hour, at any rate. He knows just when all the new books in townare to be published, and when each bookseller is to get his invoice of oldEnglish books. He has no particular address, but if you leave your cardfor him at any bookstore in Boston, he's sure to get it within two days;and in the summer-time you're apt to meet him on these excursions. Ofcourse, he writes about books, and very tastefully and modestly; there'shardly any of the brand-new immortal English poets, who die off sorapidly, but has had a good word from him; but his heart is with the olderfellows, from Chaucer down; and, after the Charles Lamb epoch, I don'tknow whether he loves better the Elizabethan age or that of Queen Anne. Think of him making me stop the other day at a bookstall, and read throughan essay out of the "Spectator!" I did it all for love of him, thoughmoney couldn't have persuaded me that I had time; and I'm always tellinghim lies, and pretending to be as well acquainted as he is with authors Ihardly know by name, --he seems so fondly to expect it. He's really almosta disembodied spirit as concerns most mundane interests--his soul is inliterature, as a lover's in his mistress's beauty; and in the next world, where, as the Swedenborgians believe, spirits seen at a distance appearlike the things they most resemble in disposition, as doves, hawks, goats, lambs, swine, and so on, I'm sure that I shall see his true and kindlysoul in the guise of a noble old Folio, quaintly lettered across his backin old English text, _Tom. I. _"

While our friends talked and looked about them, a sudden change had comeover the brightness and warmth of the day; the blue heaven had turned achilly gray, and the water looked harsh and cold. Now, too, they notedthat they were drawing near a wooden pier built into the water, and thatthey had been winding about in a crooked channel between muddy shallows, and that their course was overrun with long, disheveled sea-weed. Theshawls had been unstrapped, and the ladies made comfortable in them. 

"Ho for the beach!" cried Cousin Frank, with a vehement show ofenthusiasm. "Now, then, Aunt Melissa, prepare for the great enjoyment ofthe day. In a few moments we shall be of the elves

 'That on the sand with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back. '

Come! we shall have three hours on the beach, and that will bring us wellinto the cool of the evening, and we can return by the last boat. "

"As to the cool of the evening, " said Aunt Melissa, "I don't know. It'squite cool enough for comfort at present, and I'm sure that anything morewouldn't be wholesome. What's become of our beautiful weather?" she asked, deeply plotting to gain time. 

"It's one of our Boston peculiarities, not to say merits, " answered Frank, "which you must have noticed already, that we can get rid of a fine daysooner than any other region. While you're saying how lovely it is, asubtle change is wrought, and under skies still blue and a sun still warmthe keen spirit of the east wind pierces every nerve, and all the fineweather within you is chilled and extinguished. The gray atmospherefollows, but the day first languishes in yourself. But for this, life inBoston would be insupportably perfect, if this is indeed a drawback. You'dfind Bostonians to defend it, I dare say. But this isn't a regular eastwind to-day; it's merely our nearness to the sea. "

"I think, Franklin, " said Aunt Melissa, "that we won't go down to thebeach this afternoon, " as if she had been there yesterday, and would goto-morrow. "It's too late in the day; and it wouldn't be good for thechild, I'm sure. "

"Well, aunty, it was you determined us to wait for the boat, and it's yourright to say whether we shall leave it or not. I'm very willing not to goashore. I always find that, after working up to an object with greateffort, it's surpassingly sweet to leave it unaccomplished at last. Thenit remains forever in the region of the ideal, amongst the songs thatnever were sung, the pictures that never were painted. Why, in fact, should we force this pleasure? We've eaten our lunch, we've lost the warmheart of the day; why should we poorly drag over to that damp and sullenbeach, where we should find three hours very long, when by going back nowwe can keep intact that glorious image of a day by the sea which we'vebeen cherishing all summer? You're right, Aunt Melissa; we won't goashore; we will stay here, and respect our illusions. "

At heart, perhaps, Lucy did not quite like this retreat; it was not inharmony with the youthful spirit of her sex, but she reflected that shecould come again, --O beneficent cheat of Another Time, how much thousparest us in our over-worked, over-enjoyed world!--she was verycomfortable where she was, in a seat commanding a perfect view for thereturn trip; and she submitted without a murmur. Besides, now that theboat had drawn up to the pier, and discharged part of her passengers, andwas waiting to take on others, Lucy was interested in a mass of flutteringdresses and wide-rimmed straw hats that drew down toward the "RoseStandish, " and gracefully thronged the pier, and prettily hesitated about, and finally came aboard with laughter and little false cries of terror, attended through all by the New England disproportion of that sex which isso foolish when it is silly. It was a large picnic party which had beenspending the day upon the beach, as each of the ladies showed in her face, where, if the roses upon her cheeks were somewhat obscured by theimbrowning seaside sun, a bright pink had been compensatingly bestowedupon the point of her nose. A mysterious quiet fell upon them all whenthey were got aboard and had taken conspicuous places, which was accountedfor presently when a loud shout was heard from the shore, and a man besidean ambulant photographic machine was seen wildly waving his hat. It isimpossible to resist a temptation of this kind, and our party all yielded, and posed themselves in striking and characteristic attitudes, --even AuntMelissa sharing the ambition to appear in a picture which she should neversee, and the nurse coming out strong from the abeyance in which she hadbeen held, and lifting the baby high into the air for a good likeness. Thefrantic gesticulator on the shore gave an impressive wave with both hands, took the cap from the instrument, turned his back, as photographers alwaysdo, with that air of hiding their tears, for the brief space that seems solong, and then clapped on the cap again, while a great sigh of relief wentup from the whole boat-load of passengers. They were taken. 

But the interval had been a luckless one for the "Rose Standish, " and whenshe stirred her wheels, clouds of mud rose to the top of the water, andthere was no responsive movement of the boat. She was aground in thefalling tide. 

"There seems a pretty fair prospect of our spending some time here, afterall, " said Frank, while the ladies, who had reluctantly given up the ideaof staying, were now in a quiver of impatience to be off. The picnic wasshifted from side to side; the engine groaned and tugged, Captain MilesStandish and his crew bestirred themselves vigorously, and at last theboat swung loose, and strode down the sea-weedy channels; while ourfriends, who had already done the great sights of the harbor, now settledthemselves to the enjoyment of its minor traits and beauties. Here andthere they passed small parties on the shore, which, with their yachtsanchored near, or their boats drawn up from the water, were cooking anout-door meal by a fire that burned bright red upon the sands in the lateafternoon air. In such cases, people willingly indulge themselves insaluting whatever craft goes by, and the ladies of these small picnics, asthey sat round the fires, kept up a great waving of handkerchiefs, andsometimes cheered the "Rose Standish, " though I believe the Bostonians areordinarily not a demonstrative race. Of course the large picnic on boardfluttered multitudinous handkerchiefs in response, both to these peopleashore and to those who hailed them from vessels which they met. They didnot refuse the politeness even to the passengers on a rival boat when shepassed them, though at heart they must have felt some natural pangs atbeing passed. The water was peopled everywhere by all sorts of saillagging slowly homeward in the light evening breeze; and on some of thelarger vessels there were family groups to be seen, and a graceful smoke, suggestive of supper, curled from the cook's galley. I suppose these shipswere chiefly coasting craft, of one kind or another, come from theProvinces at farthest; but to the ignorance and the fancy of our friends, they arrived from all remote and romantic parts of the world, --from India, from China, and from the South Seas, with cargoes of spices and gums andtropical fruits; and I see no reason why one should ever deny himself theeasy pleasure they felt in painting the unknown in such lively hues. Thetruth is, a strange ship, if you will let her, always brings you preciousfreight, always arrives from Wonderland under the command of CaptainSinbad. How like a beautiful sprite she looks afar off, as if she camefrom some finer and fairer world than ours! Nay, we will not go out tomeet her; we will not go on board; Captain Sinbad shall bring us theinvoice of gold-dust, slaves, and rocs' eggs to-night, and we will havesome of the eggs for breakfast; or if he never comes, are we not just asrich? But I think these friends of ours got a yet keener pleasure out ofthe spectacle of a large and stately ship, that with all sails spreadmoved silently and steadily out toward the open sea. It is yet grander andsweeter to sail toward the unknown than to come from it; and every vesselthat leaves port has this destination, and will bear you thither if youwill. 

 "It may be that the gulf shall wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew, "

absently murmured Lucy, looking on this beautiful apparition. 

"But I can't help thinking of Ulysses' cabin-boy, yonder, " said CousinFrank, after a pause; "can you, Aunt Melissa?"

"I don't understand what you're talking about Franklin, " answered AuntMelissa, somewhat severely. 

"Why, I mean that there is a poor wretch of a boy on board there, who'srun away, and whose heart must be aching just now at the thought of thehome he has left. I hope Ulysses will be good to him, and not swear at himfor a day or two, or knock him about with a belaying-pin. Just about thistime his mother, up in the country, is getting ready his supper, andwondering what's become of him, and torturing herself with hopes thatbreak one by one; and to-night when she goes up to his empty room, havingtried to persuade herself that the truant's come back and climbed in atthe window"--

"Why, Franklin, this isn't true, is it?" asks Aunt Melissa. 

"Well, no, let's pray Heaven it isn't, in this case. It's been true oftenenough to be false for once. "

"What a great, ugly, black object a ship is!" said Cousin Lucy. 

Slowly the city rose up against the distance, sharpening all its outlines, and filling in all its familiar details, --like a fact which one dreams isa dream, and which, as the mists of sleep break away, shows itself forreality. 

The air grows closer and warmer, --it is the breath of the hot and toil-worn land. 

The boat makes her way up through the shipping, seeks her landing, andpresently rubs herself affectionately against the wharf. The passengersquickly disperse themselves upon shore, dismissed each with an appropriatesarcasm by the tipsy man, who has had the means of keeping himself drunkthroughout, and who now looks to the discharge of the boat's cargo. 

As our friends leave the wharf-house behind them, and straggle uneasily, and very conscious of sunburn, up the now silent length of Pearl Street toseek the nearest horse-cars, they are aware of a curious fidgeting of thenurse, who flies from one side of the pavement to the other and violentlyshifts the baby from one arm to the other. 

"What's the matter?" asks Frank; but before the nurse can answer, "Thimlittle divils, " he perceives that the whooping-coughers of the morninghave taken the occasion to renew a pleasant acquaintance, and aresurrounding the baby and nurse with an atmosphere of whooping-cough. 

"I say, friends! we can't stand this, you know, " says the anxious father. "We must part some time, and this is a favorable moment. Now I'll give youall this, if you don't come another step!" and he empties out to them, from the hand-bags he carries, the fragments of lunch which the frugalmind of Aunt Melissa had caused her to store there. Upon these thewhooping-coughers hurl themselves in a body, and are soon left round thecorner. Yet they would have been no disgrace to our party, whoseappearance was now most disreputable: Frank and Lucy stalked ahead, withshawls dragging from their arms, the former loaded down with hand-bags andthe latter with India-rubbers; Aunt Melissa came next under a burden ofbloated umbrellas; the nurse last, with her hat awry, and the baby acaricature of its morning trimness, in her embrace. A day's pleasure is sodemoralizing, that no party can stand it, and come out neat and orderly. 

[Illustration: "Frank and Lucy stalked ahead, with shawls dragging fromtheir arms. "]

"Cousin Frank, " asked Lucy, awfully, "what if we should meet theMayflowers now?"--the Mayflowers being a very ancient and noble Bostonfamily whose acquaintance was the great pride and terror of our friends'lives. 

"I should cut them dead, " said Frank, and scarcely spoke again till hisparty dragged slowly up the steps of their minute suburban villa. 

At the door his wife met them with a troubled and anxious face. 

"Calamities?" asked Frank, desperately. 

"O, calamities upon calamities! We've got a lost child in the kitchen, "answered Mrs. Sallie. 

"O good heavens!" cried her husband. "Adieu, my dreams of repose, sodesirable after the quantity of active enjoyment I've had! Well, where isthe lost child?"

III. --THE EVENING

"Where is the lost child?" repeats Frank, desperately. "Where have you gothim?"

"In the kitchen. "

"Why in the kitchen?"

"How's baby?" demands Mrs. Sallie, with the incoherent suddenness of hersex, and running halfway down the steps to meet the nurse. "Um, um, um-m-m-m, " sounds, which may stand for smothered kisses of rapture andthanksgiving that baby is not a lost child. "Has he been good, Lucy? Takehim off and give him some cocoa, Mrs. O'Gonegal, " she adds in herbusiness-like way, and with a little push to the combined nurse and baby, while Lucy answers, "O beautiful!" and from that moment, being warnedthrough all her being by something in the other's tone, casts aside thematronly manner which she has worn during the day, and lapses into thecomfortable irresponsibility of young-ladyhood. 

"What kind of a time did you have?"

"Splendid!" answers Lucy. "Delightful, _I_ think, " she adds, as ifshe thought others might not think so. 

"I suppose you found Gloucester a quaint old place. "

"O, " says Frank, "we didn't go to Gloucester; we found that the CityFathers had chartered the boat for the day, so we thought we'd go toNahant. "

"Then you've seen your favorite Gardens of Maolis! What in the world_are_ they like?"

"Well; we didn't see the Gardens of Maolis; the Nahant boat was so crowdedthat we couldn't think of going on her, and so we decided we'd drive overto the Liverpool Wharf and go down to Nantasket Beach. "

"That was nice. I'm so glad on Aunt Melissa's account. It's much better tosee the ocean from a long beach than from those Nahant rocks. "

"That's what _I_ said. But, you know, when we got to the wharf theboat had just left. "

"You _don't_ mean it! Well, then, what under the canopy _did_you do?"

"Why, we sat down in the wharf-house, and waited from nine o'clock tillhalf-past two for the next boat. "

"Well, I'm glad you didn't back out, at any rate. You did show pluck, youpoor things! I hope you enjoyed the beach after you _did_ get there. "

"Why, " says Frank, looking down, "we never got there. "

"Never got there!" gasps Mrs. Sallie. "Didn't you go down on the afternoonboat?"

"Yes. "

"Why didn't you get to the beach, then?"

"We didn't go ashore. "

"Well, that's _like_ you, Frank. "

"It's a great deal more like Aunt Melissa, " answers Frank. "The air feltso raw and chilly by the time we reached the pier, that she declared thebaby would perish if it was taken to the beach. Besides, nothing wouldpersuade her that Nantasket Beach was at all different from LiverpoolWharf. "

"Never mind, never mind!" says Mrs. Sallie. "I don't wish to hear anythingmore. That's your idea of a day's pleasure, is it? I call it a day'sdisgrace, a day's miserable giving-up. There, go in, go in; I'm ashamed ofyou all. Don't let the neighbors see you, for pity's sake. --We keep him inthe kitchen, " she continues, recurring to Frank's long-unanswered questionconcerning the lost child, "because he prefers it as being the roomnearest to the closet where the cookies are. He's taken advantage of oursympathies to refuse everything but cookies. "

"I suppose that's one of the rights of lost childhood, " comments Frank, languidly; "there's no law that can compel him to touch even cracker. "

"Well, you'd better go down and see what _you_ can make of him. He'sdriven _us_ all wild. "

So Frank descends to the region now redolent of the preparing tea, andfinds upon a chair, in the middle of the kitchen floor, a very forlornlittle figure of a boy, mutely munching a sweet-cake, while now and then atear steals down his cheeks and moistens the grimy traces of former tears. He and baby are, in the mean time regarding each other with a steadfastglare, the cook and the nurse supporting baby in this rite of hospitality. 

"Well, my little man, " says his host, "how did you get here?"

The little man, perhaps because he is heartily sick of the question, issomewhat slow to answer that there was a fire; and that he ran after thesteamer; and a girl found him and brought him up here. 

"And that's all the blessed thing you can get out of him, " says cook; andthe lost boy looks as if he felt cook to be perfectly right. 

In spite of the well-meant endeavors of the household to wash him andbrush him, he is still a dreadfully travel-stained little boy, and he ispowdered in every secret crease and wrinkle by that dust of oldCharlesbridge, of which we always speak with an air of affected disgust, and a feeling of ill-concealed pride in an abomination so strikingly andpeculiarly our own. He looks very much as if he had been following fire-engines about the streets of our learned and pulverous suburb ever sincehe could walk, and he certainly seems to feel himself in trouble to acertain degree; but there is easily imaginable in his bearing a convictionthat after all the chief care is with others, and that, though unhappy, heis not responsible. The principal victim of his sorrows is also penetratedby this opinion, and after gazing forlornly upon him for a while, asksmechanically, "What's your name?"

"Freddy, " is the laconic answer. 

"Freddy--?" trying with an artful inflection to lead him on to hissurname. 

"Freddy, " decidedly and conclusively. 

"O, bless me! What's the name of the street your papa lives on?"

This problem is far too deep for Freddy, and he takes a bite of sweet-cakein sign that he does not think of solving it. Frank looks at him gloomilyfor a moment, and then determines that he can grapple with the difficultymore successfully after he has had tea. "Send up the supper, Bridget. Ithink, my dear, " he says, after they have sat down, "we'd better allquestion our lost child when we've finished. "

So, when they have finished, they have him up in the sitting-room, and theinquisition begins. 

"Now, Freddy, " his host says, with a cheerful air of lifelong friendshipand confidence, "you know that everybody has got two names. Of course yourfirst name is Freddy, and it's a very pretty name. Well, I want you tothink real hard, and then tell me what your other name is, so I can takeyou back to your mamma. "

At this allusion the child looks round on the circle of eager andcompassionate faces, and begins to shed tears and to wring all hearts. 

"What's your name?" asks Frank, cheerfully, --"your _other_ name, youknow?"

"Freddy, " sobbed the forlorn creature. 

"O good heaven! this'll never do, " groaned the chief inquisitor. "Now, Freddy, try not to cry. What is your papa's name, --Mr. --?" with theleading inflection as before. 

"Papa, " says Freddy. 

[Illustration: "They skirmish about him with every sort of query. "]

"O, that'll never do! Not Mr. Papa?"

"Yes, " persists Freddy. 

"But, Freddy, " interposes Mrs. Sallie, as her husband falls back baffled, "when ladies come to see your mamma, what do they call her? Mrs. --?"adopting Frank's alluring inflection. 

"Mrs. Mamma, " answers Freddy, confirmed in his error by this course; and asecret dismay possesses his questioners. They skirmish about him withevery sort of query; they try to entrap him into some kind of revelationby apparently irrelevant remarks; they plan ambuscades and surprises; butFreddy looks vigilantly round upon them, and guards his personal historyfrom every approach, and seems in every way so to have the best of it, that it is almost exasperating. 

"Kindness has proved futile, " observes Frank, "and I think we ought as alast resort, before yielding ourselves to despair, to use intimidation. Now, Fred, " he says, with sudden and terrible severity, "what's yourfather's name?"

The hapless little soul is really moved to an effort of memory by this, and blubbers out something that proves in the end to resemble the familyname, though for the present it is merely a puzzle of unintelligiblesounds. "

"Blackman?" cries Aunt Melissa, catching desperately at these sounds. 

On this, all the man and brother is roused in Freddy's bosom, and he roarsfiercely, "No! he ain't a black man! He's white!"

"I give it up, " says Frank, who has been looking for his hat. "I'm afraidwe can't make anything out of him; and I'll have to go and report the caseto the police. But, put him to bed, do, Sallie; he's dropping with sleep. "

So he went out, of course supported morally by a sense of duty, but I amafraid also by a sense of adventure in some degree. It is not every daythat, in so quiet a place as Charlesbridge, you can have a lost child castupon your sympathies; and I believe that when an appeal is not reallyagonizing, we like so well to have our sympathies touched, we favorites ofthe prosperous commonplace, that most of us would enter eagerly into apathetic case of this kind, even after a day's pleasure. Such wascertainly the mood of my friend, and he unconsciously prepared himself foran equal interest on the part of the police; but this was an error. Thepolice heard his statement with all proper attention, and wrote it in fullupon the station-slate, but they showed no feeling whatever, and behavedas if they valued a lost child no more than a child snug at home in hisown crib. They said that no doubt his parents would be asking at thepolice-stations for him during the night, and, as if my friend wouldotherwise have thought of putting him into the street, they suggested thathe should just keep the lost child till he was sent for. Modestly enoughFrank proposed that they should make some inquiry for his parents, and wasanswered by the question whether they could take a man off his beat forthat purpose; and remembering that beats in Charlesbridge were of suchvastness that during his whole residence there he had never yet seen apoliceman on his street, he was obliged to own to himself that hisproposal was absurd. He felt the need of reinstating himself by somethingmore sensible, and so he said he thought he would go down to the Port andleave word at the station there; and the police tacitly assenting to thishe went. 

I who have sometimes hinted that the Square is not a centre of gayety, ora scene of the greatest activity by day, feel it right to say that it hassome modest charms of its own on a summer's night, about the hour whenFrank passed through it, when the post-office has just been shut, and whenthe different groups that haunt the place in front of the closing shopshave dwindled to the loungers fit though few who will keep it well intothe night, and may there be found, by the passenger on the last horse-carout from Boston, wrapt in a kind of social silence, and honorably attendedby the policeman whose favored beat is in that neighborhood. They seem afeature of the bygone village life of Charlesbridge, and accord pleasantlywith the town-pump and the public horse-trough, and the noble elm that bynight droops its boughs so pensively, and probably dreams of its happyyounger days when there were no canker-worms in the world. Sometimes thischoice company sits on the curbing that goes round the terrace at the elm-tree's foot, and then I envy every soul in it, --so tranquil it seems, socool, so careless, so morrowless. I cannot see the faces of that luxurioussociety, but there I imagine is the local albino, and a certain blind man, who resorts thither much by day, and makes a strange kind of jest of hisown, with a flicker of humor upon his sightless face, and a faith thatothers less unkindly treated by nature will be able to see the pointapparently not always discernible to himself. Late at night I have a fancythat the darkness puts him on an equality with other wits, and that heenjoys his own brilliancy as well as any one. 

At the Port station Frank was pleased and soothed by the tranquil air ofthe policeman, who sat in his shirt-sleeves outside the door, and seemedto announce, by his attitude of final disoccupation, that crimes andmisdemeanors were no more. This officer at once showed a desirableinterest in the case. He put on his blue coat that he might listen to thewhole story in a proper figure, and then he took down the main points onthe slate, and said that they would send word round to the other stationsin the city, and the boy's parents could hardly help hearing of him thatnight. 

Returned home, Frank gave his news, and then he and Mrs. Sallie went up tolook at the lost child as he slept. The sumptuous diet to which he hadconfined himself from the first seemed to agree with him perfectly, for heslept unbrokenly, and apparently without a consciousness of his woes. On achair lay his clothes, in a dusty little pathetic heap; they were well-kept clothes, except for the wrong his wanderings had done them, and theyshowed a motherly care here and there, which it was not easy to look atwith composure. The spectators of his sleep both thought of the curiouschance that had thrown this little one into their charge, and consideredthat he was almost as completely a gift of the Unknown as if he had beenfollowing a steamer in another planet, and had thence dropped into theiryard. His helplessness in accounting for himself was as affecting as thatof the sublimest metaphysician; and no learned man, no superior intellect, no subtle inquirer among us lost children of the divine, forgotten home, could have been less able to say how or whence he came to be just where hefound himself. We wander away and away; the dust of the road-side gathersupon us; and when some strange shelter receives us, we lie down to oursleep, inarticulate, and haunted with dreams of memory, or the memory ofdreams, knowing scarcely more of the past than of the future. 

"What a strange world!" sighed Mrs. Sallie; and then, as this was a moodfar too speculative for her, she recalled herself to practical lifesuddenly. "If we should have to adopt this child, Frank"--

"Why, bless my soul, we're not obliged to adopt him! Even a lost childcan't demand that. "

"We shall adopt him, if they don't come for him. And now, I want to know"(Mrs. Sallie spoke as if the adoption had been effected) "whether we shallgive him our name, or some other?"

"Well, I don't know. It's the first child I've ever adopted, " said Frank"and upon my word, I can't say whether you have to give him a new name ornot. In fact, if I'd thought of this affair of a name, I'd never haveadopted him. It's the greatest part of the burden, and if his father willonly come for him, I'll give him up without a murmur. "

In the interval that followed the proposal of this alarming difficulty, and while he sat and waited vaguely for whatever should be going to happennext, Frank was not able to repress a sense of personal resentment towardsthe little vagrant sleeping so carelessly there, though at the bottom ofhis heart there was all imaginable tenderness for him. In the fantasticcharacter which, to his weariness, the day's pleasure took on, it seemedan extraordinary unkindness of fate that this lost child should have beenkept in reserve for him after all the rest; and he had so smallconsciousness of bestowing shelter and charity, and so profound a feelingof having himself been turned out of house and home by some surprising andpotent agency, that if the lost child had been a regiment of Feniansbilleted upon him, it could not have oppressed him more. While he remainedperplexed in this perverse sentiment of invasion and dispossession, "Hark!" said Mrs. Sallie, "what's that?"

It was a noise of dragging and shuffling on the walk in front of thehouse, and a low, hoarse whispering. 

"I don't know, " said Frank, "but from the kind of pleasure I've got out ofit so far, I should say that this holiday was capable of an earthquakebefore midnight. "

"Listen!"

They listened, as they must, and heard the outer darkness rehearse araucous dialogue between an unseen Bill and Jim, who were the moreterrible to the imagination from being so realistically named, and whoseemed to have in charge some nameless third person, a mute actor in theinvisible scene. There was doubt, which he uttered, in the mind of Jim, whether they could get this silent comrade along much farther withoutcarrying him; and there was a growling assent from Bill that he _was_pretty far gone, that was a fact, and that maybe Jim _had_ better gofor the wagon; then there were quick, retreating steps; and then there wasa profound silence, in which the audience of this strange drama satthrilled and speechless. The effect was not less dreadful when there rosea dull sound, as of a helpless body rubbing against the fence, and at lastlowered heavily to the ground. 

"O!" cried Mrs. Sallie. "Do go out and help. He's dying!"

But even as she spoke the noise of wheels was heard. A wagon stoppedbefore the door; there came a tugging and lifting, with a sound as ofcrunching gravel, and then a "There!" of great relief. 

"Frank!" said Mrs. Sallie very solemnly, "if you don't go out and helpthose men, I'll never forgive you. "

Really, the drama had grown very impressive; it was a mystery, to say theleast; and so it must remain forever, for when Frank, infected at last byMrs. Sallie's faith in tragedy, opened the door and offered his tardyservices, the wagon was driven rapidly away without reply. They neverlearned what it had all been; and I think that if one actually honorsmysteries, it is best not to look into them. How much finer, after all, ifyou have such a thing as this happen before your door at midnight, not tothrow any light upon it! Then your probable tipsy man cannot be provedother than a tragical presence, which you can match with any inscrutablecreation of fiction; and if you should ever come to write a romance, asone is very liable to do in this age, there is your unknown, a figure ofstrange and fearful interest, made to your hand, and capable of beingused, in or out of the body, with a very gloomy effect. 

While our friends yet trembled with this sensation, quick steps ascendedto their door, and then followed a sharp, anxious tug at the bell. 

"Ah!" cried Frank, prophetically, "here's the father of our adopted son;"and he opened the door. 

The gentleman who appeared there could scarcely frame the question towhich Frank replied so cheerfully: "O yes; he's here, and snug in bed, andfast asleep. Come up-stairs and look at him. Better let him be tillmorning, and then come after him, " he added, as they looked down a momenton the little sleeper. 

"O no, I couldn't, " said the father, _con expressione_; and then hetold how he had heard of this child's whereabouts at the Port station, andhad hurried to get him, and how his mother did not know he was found yet, and was almost wild about him. They had no idea how he had got lost, andhis own blind story was the only tale of his adventure that ever becameknown. 

By this time his father had got the child partly awake, and the two menwere dressing him in men's clumsy fashion; and finally they gave it up, and rolled him in a shawl. The father lifted the slight burden, and twosmall arms fell about his neck. The weary child slept again. 

"How has he behaved?" asked the father. 

"Like a little hero, " said Frank, "but he's been a cormorant for cookies. I think it right to tell you, in case he shouldn't be very brilliant to-morrow, that he wouldn't eat a bit of anything else. "

The father said he was the life of their house; and Frank said he knew howthat was, --that he had a life of the house of his own; and then the fatherthanked him very simply and touchingly, and with the decent New Englandself-restraint, which is doubtless so much better than any sort ofeffusion. "Say good-night to the gentleman, Freddy, " he said at the door;and Freddy with closed eyes murmured a good-night from far within the landof dreams, and then was borne away to the house out of which the life hadwandered with his little feet. 

"I don't know, Sallie, " said Frank, when he had given all the eagerlydemanded particulars about the child's father, --"I don't know whether Ishould want many such holidays as this, in the course of the summer. Onthe whole, I think I'd better overwork myself and not take any relaxation, if I mean to live long. And yet I'm not sure that the day's beenaltogether a failure, though all our purposes of enjoyment havemiscarried. I didn't plan to find a lost child here, when I got home, andI'm afraid I haven't had always the most Christian feeling towards him;but he's really the saving grace of the affair; and if this were a littlecomedy I had been playing, I should turn him to account with the jadedaudience, and advancing to the foot-lights, should say, with my hand on mywaistcoat, and a neat bow, that although every hope of the day had beendisappointed, and nothing I had meant to do had been done, yet the man whohad ended at midnight by restoring a lost child to the arms of its father, must own that, in spite of adverse fortune, he had enjoyed A Day'sPleasure. "

[Illustration: "A gaunt figure of forlorn and curioussmartness. "]

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

It was long past the twilight hour, which has been already mentioned as sooppressive in suburban places, and it was even too late for visitors, whena resident, whom I shall briefly describe as a Contributor to themagazines, was startled by a ring at his door. As any thoughtful personwould have done upon the like occasion, he ran over his acquaintance inhis mind, speculating whether it were such or such a one, and dismissingthe whole list of improbabilities, before he laid down the book he wasreading, and answered the bell. When at last he did this, he was rewardedby the apparition of an utter stranger on his threshold, --a gaunt figureof forlorn and curious smartness towering far above him, that jerked him anod of the head, and asked if Mr. Hapford lived there. The face which thelamp-light revealed was remarkable for a harsh two days' growth of beard, and a single bloodshot eye; yet it was not otherwise a sinistercountenance, and there was something in the strange presence that appealedand touched. The contributor, revolving the facts vaguely in his mind, wasnot sure, after all, that it was not the man's clothes rather than hisexpression that softened him toward the rugged visage: they were sotragically cheap, and the misery of helpless needlewomen, and thepoverty and ignorance of the purchaser, were so apparent in their shabbynewness, of which they appeared still conscious enough to have led the wayto the very window, in the Semitic quarter of the city, where they hadlain ticketed, "This nobby suit for $15. "

But the stranger's manner put both his face and his clothes out of mind, and claimed a deeper interest when, being answered that the person forwhom he asked did not live there, he set his bristling lips hard together, and sighed heavily. 

"They told me, " he said, in a hopeless way, "that he lived on this street, and I've been to every other house. I'm very anxious to find him, Cap'n, "--the contributor, of course, had no claim to the title with which he wasthus decorated, --"for I've a daughter living with him, and I want to seeher; I've just got home from a two years' voyage, and"--there was astruggle of the Adam's-apple in the man's gaunt throat--"I find she'sabout all there is left of my family. "

How complex is every human motive! This contributor had been latelythinking, whenever he turned the pages of some foolish traveller, --someempty prattler of Southern or Eastern lands, where all sensation was longago exhausted, and the oxygen has perished from every sentiment, so has itbeen breathed and breathed again, --that nowadays the wise adventurer satdown beside his own register and waited for incidents to seek him out. Itseemed to him that the cultivation of a patient and receptive spirit wasthe sole condition needed to insure the occurrence of all manner ofsurprising facts within the range of one's own personal knowledge; thatnot only the Greeks were at our doors, but the fairies and the genii, andall the people of romance, who had but to be hospitably treated in orderto develop the deepest interest of fiction, and to become the charactersof plots so ingenious that the most cunning invention were poor besidethem. I myself am not so confident of this, and would rather trust Mr. Charles Reade, say, for my amusement than any chance combination ofevents. But I should be afraid to say how much his pride in the characterof the stranger's sorrows, as proof of the correctness of his theory, prevailed with the contributor to ask him to come in and sit down; thoughI hope that some abstract impulse of humanity, some compassionate andunselfish care for the man's misfortunes as misfortunes, was not whollywanting. Indeed, the helpless simplicity with which he had confided hiscase might have touched a harder heart. "Thank you, " said the poor fellow, after a moment's hesitation. "I believe I will come in. I've been on footall day, and after such a long voyage it makes a man dreadfully sore towalk about so much. Perhaps you can think of a Mr. Hapford livingsomewhere in the neighborhood. "

He sat down, and, after a pondering silence, in which he had remained withhis head fallen upon his breast, "My name is Jonathan Tinker, " he said, with the unaffected air which had already impressed the contributor, andas if he felt that some form of introduction was necessary, "and the girlthat I want to find is Julia Tinker. " Then he added, resuming the eventfulpersonal history which the listener exulted, while he regretted, to hear:"You see, I shipped first to Liverpool, and there I heard from my family;and then I shipped again for Hong-Kong, and after that I never heard aword: I seemed to miss the letters everywhere. This morning, at fouro'clock, I left my ship as soon as she had hauled into the dock, andhurried up home. The house was shut, and not a soul in it; and I didn'tknow what to do, and I sat down on the doorstep to wait till the neighborswoke up, to ask them what had become of my family. And the first one comeout he told me my wife had been dead a year and a half, and the baby I'dnever seen, with her; and one of my boys was dead; and he didn't knowwhere the rest of the children was, but he'd heard two of the little oneswas with a family in the city. "

The man mentioned these things with the half-apologetic air observable ina certain kind of Americans when some accident obliges them to confess theinfirmity of the natural feelings. They do not ask your sympathy, and youoffer it quite at your own risk, with a chance of having it thrown backupon your hands. The contributor assumed the risk so far as to say, "Pretty rough!" when the stranger caused; and perhaps these homely wordswere best suited to reach the homely heart. The man's quavering lipsclosed hard again, a kind of spasm passed over his dark face, and then twovery small drops of brine shone upon his weather-worn cheeks. Thisdemonstration, into which he had been surprised, seemed to stand for thepassion of tears into which the emotional races fall at such times. Heopened his lips with a kind of dry click, and went on:--

"I hunted about the whole forenoon in the city, and at last I found thechildren. I'd been gone so long they didn't know me, and somehow I thoughtthe people they were with weren't over-glad I'd turned up. Finally theoldest child told me that Julia was living with a Mr. Hapford on thisstreet, and I started out here to-night to look her up. If I can find her, I'm all right. I can get the family together, then, and start new. "

"It seems rather odd, " mused the listener aloud, "that the neighbors letthem break up so, and that they should all scatter as they did. "

"Well, it ain't so curious as it seems, Cap'n. There was money for them atthe owners', all the time; I'd left part of my wages when I sailed; butthey didn't know how to get at it, and what could a parcel of children do?Julia's a good girl, and when I find her I'm all right. "

The writer could only repeat that there was no Mr. Hapford living on thatstreet, and never had been, so far as he knew. Yet there might be such aperson in the neighborhood; and they would go out together, and ask atsome of the houses about. But the stranger must first take a glass ofwine; for he looked used up. 

The sailor awkwardly but civilly enough protested that he did not want togive so much trouble, but took the glass, and, as he put it to his lips, said formally, as if it were a toast or a kind of grace, "I hope I mayhave the opportunity of returning the compliment. " The contributor thankedhim; though, as he thought of all the circumstances of the case, andconsidered the cost at which the stranger had come to enjoy hispoliteness, he felt little eagerness to secure the return of thecompliment at the same price, and added, with the consequence of anotherset phrase, "Not at all. " But the thought had made him the more anxious tobefriend the luckless soul fortune had cast in his way; and so the twosallied out together, and rang door-bells wherever lights were still seenburning in the windows, and asked the astonished people who answered theirsummons whether any Mr. Hapford were known to live in the neighborhood. 

And although the search for this gentleman proved vain, the contributorcould not feel that an expedition which set familiar objects in such novellight? was altogether a failure. He entered so intimately into the caresand anxieties of his _protege, _ that at times he felt himself in someinexplicable sort a shipmate of Jonathan Tinker, and almost personally apartner of his calamities. The estrangement of all things which takesplace, within doors and without, about midnight may have helped to castthis doubt upon his identity;--he seemed to be visiting now for the firsttime the streets and neighborhoods nearest his own, and his feet stumbledover the accustomed walks. In his quality of houseless wanderer, and--sofar as appeared to others--possibly worthless vagabond, he also got a newand instructive effect upon the faces which, in his real character, heknew so well by their looks of neighborly greeting; and it is his beliefthat the first hospitable prompting of the human heart is to shut the doorin the eyes of homeless strangers who present themselves after eleveno'clock. By that time the servants are all abed, and the gentleman of thehouse answers the bell, and looks out with a loath and bewildered face, which gradually changes to one of suspicion, and of wonder as to whatthose fellows can possibly want of _him, _ till at last the prevailingexpression is one of contrite desire to atone for the first reluctance byany sort of service. The contributor professes to have observed thesechanging phases in the visages of those whom he that night called fromtheir dreams, or arrested in the act of going to bed; and he drew theconclusion--very proper for his imaginable connection with the garrotingand other adventurous brotherhoods--that the most flattering moment forknocking on the head people who answer a late ring at night is either intheir first selfish bewilderment, or their final self-abandonment to theirbetter impulses. It does not seem to have occurred to him that he wouldhimself have been a much more favorable subject for the predatory artsthat any of his neighbors, if his shipmate, the unknown companion of hisresearches for Mr. Hapford, had been at all so minded. But the faith ofthe gaunt giant upon which he reposed was good, and the contributorcontinued to wander about with him in perfect safety. Not a soul amongthose they asked had ever heard of a Mr. Hapford, --far less of a JuliaTinker living with him. But they all listened to the contributor'sexplanation with interest and eventual sympathy; and in truth, --brieflytold, with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan Tinker, who kept atthe bottom of the steps, showing like a gloomy spectre in the night, or, in his grotesque length and gauntness, like the other's shadow cast thereby the lamplight, --it was a story which could hardly fail to awaken pity. 

At last, after ringing several bells where there were no lights, in themere wantonness of good-will, and going away before they could be answered(it would be entertaining to know what dreams they caused the sleeperswithin), there seemed to be nothing for it but to give up the search tillmorning, and go to the main street and wait for the last horse-car to thecity. 

There, seated upon the curbstone, Jonathan Tinker, being plied with a fewleading questions, told in hints and scraps the story of his hard life, which was at present that of a second mate, and had been that of a cabin-boy and of a seaman before the mast. The second mate's place he held to bethe hardest aboard ship. You got only a few dollars more than the men, andyou did not rank with the officers; you took your meals alone, and inevery thing you belonged by yourself. The men did not respect you, andsometimes the captain abused you awfully before the passengers. Thehardest captain that Jonathan Tinker ever sailed with was Captain Goodingof the Cape. It had got to be so that no man would ship second mate underCaptain Gooding; and Jonathan Tinker was with him only one voyage. When hehad been home awhile, he saw an advertisement for a second mate, and hewent round to the owners'. They had kept it secret who the captain was;but there was Captain Gooding in the owners' office. "Why, here's the man, now, that I want for a second mate, " said he, when Jonathan Tinkerentered; "he knows me. "--"Captain Gooding, I know you 'most too well towant to sail under you, " answered Jonathan. "I might go if I hadn't beenwith you one voyage too many already. "

"And then the men!" said Jonathan, "the men coming aboard drunk, andhaving to be pounded sober! And the hardest of the fight falls on thesecond mate! Why, there isn't an inch of me that hasn't been cut over orsmashed into a jell. I've had three ribs broken; I've got a scar from aknife on my cheek; and I've been stabbed bad enough, half a dozen times, to lay me up. "

Here he gave a sort of desperate laugh, as if the notion of so much miseryand such various mutilation were too grotesque not to be amusing. "Well, what can you do?" he went on. "If you don't strike, the men think you'reafraid of them; and so you have to begin hard and go on hard. I alwaystell a man, 'Now, my man, I always begin with a man the way I mean to keepon. You do your duty and you're all right. But if you don't'--Well, themen ain't Americans any more, --Dutch, Spaniards, Chinese, Portuguee, --andit ain't like abusing a white man. "

Jonathan Tinker was plainly part of the horrible tyranny which we all knowexists on shipboard; and his listener respected him the more that, thoughhe had heart enough to be ashamed of it, he was too honest not to own it. 

Why did he still follow the sea? Because he did not know what else to do. When he was younger, he used to love it, but now he hated it. Yet therewas not a prettier life in the world if you got to be captain. He used tohope for that once, but not now; though he _thought_ he couldnavigate a ship. Only let him get his family together again, and he would--yes, he would--try to do something ashore. 

No car had yet come in sight, and so the contributor suggested that theyshould walk to the car-office, and look in the "Directory, " which is keptthere, for the name of Hapford, in search of whom it had already beenarranged that they should renew their acquaintance on the morrow. JonathanTinker, when they had reached the office, heard with constitutional phlegmthat the name of the Hapford, for whom he inquired was not in the"Directory. " "Never mind, " said the other; "come round to my house in themorning. We'll find him yet. " So they parted with a shake of the hand, thesecond mate saying that he believed he should go down to the vessel andsleep aboard, --if he could sleep, --and murmuring at the last moment thehope of returning the compliment, while the other walked homeward, wearyas to the flesh, but, in spite of his sympathy for Jonathan Tinker, veryelate in spirit. The truth is, --and however disgraceful to human nature, let the truth still be told, --he had recurred to his primal satisfactionin the man as calamity capable of being used for such and such literaryends, and, while he pitied him, rejoiced in him as an episode of real lifequite as striking and complete as anything in fiction. It was literaturemade to his hand. Nothing could be better, he mused; and once more hepassed the details of the story in review, and beheld all those pictureswhich the poor fellow's artless words had so vividly conjured up: he sawhim leaping ashore in the gray summer dawn as soon as the ship hauled intothe dock, and making his way, with his vague sea-legs unaccustomed to thepavements, up through the silent and empty city streets; he imagined thetumult of fear and hope which the sight of the man's home must have causedin him, and the benumbing shock of finding it blind and deaf to all hisappeals; he saw him sitting down upon what had been his own threshold, andwaiting in a sort of bewildered patience till the neighbors should beawake, while the noises of the streets gradually arose, and the wheelsbegan to rattle over the stones, and the milk-man and the ice-man came andwent, and the waiting figure began to be stared at, and to challenge thecuriosity of the passing policeman; he fancied the opening of theneighbor's door, and the slow, cold understanding of the case; the manner, whatever it was, in which the sailor was told that one year before hiswife had died, with her babe, and that his children were scattered, noneknew where. As the contributor dwelt pityingly upon these things, but atthe same time estimated their aesthetic value one by one, he drew near thehead of his street, and found himself a few paces behind a boy slouchingonward through the night, to whom he called out, adventurously, and withno real hope of information, --

"Do you happen to know anybody on this street by the name of Hapford?"

"Why no, not in this town, " said the boy; but he added that there was astreet of the same name in a neighboring suburb, and that there was aHapford living on it. 

"By Jove!" thought the contributor, "this is more like literature thanever;" and he hardly knew whether to be more provoked at his own stupidityin not thinking of a street of the same name in the next village, ordelighted at the element of fatality which the fact introduced into thestory; for Tinker, according to his own account, must have landed from thecars a few rods from the very door he was seeking, and so walked fartherand farther from it every moment. He thought the case so curious, that helaid it briefly before the boy, who, however he might have been inwardlyaffected, was sufficiently true to the national traditions not to make thesmallest conceivable outward sign of concern in it. 

At home, however, the contributor related his adventures and the story ofTinker's life, adding the fact that he had just found out where Mr. Hapford lived. "It was the only touch wanting, " said he; "the whole thingis now perfect. "

"It's _too_ perfect, " was answered from a sad enthusiasm. "Don'tspeak of it! I can't take it in. "

"But the question is, " said the contributor, penitently taking himself totask for forgetting the hero of these excellent misfortunes in his delightat their perfection, "how am I to sleep to-night, thinking of that poorsoul's suspense and uncertainty? Never mind, --I'll be up early, and runover and make sure that it is Tinker's Hapford, before he gets out here, and have a pleasant surprise for him. Would it not be a justifiable_coup de théâtre_ to fetch his daughter here, and let her answer hisring at the door when he comes in the morning?"

This plan was discouraged. "No, no; let them meet in their own way. Justtake him to Hapford's house and leave him. "

"Very well. But he's too good a character to lose sight of. He's got tocome back here and tell us what he intends to do. "

The birds, next morning, not having had the second mate on their mindseither as an unhappy man or a most fortunate episode, but having sleptlong and soundly, were singing in a very sprightly way in the way-sidetrees; and the sweetness of their notes made the contributor's heart lightas he climbed the hill and rang at Mr. Hapford's door. 

The door was opened by a young girl of fifteen or sixteen, whom he knew ata glance for the second mate's daughter, but of whom, for form's sake, heasked if there were a girl named Julia Tinker living there. 

"My name's Julia Tinker, " answered the maid, who had rather adisappointing face. 

"Well, " said the contributor, "your father's got back from his Hong-Kongvoyage. "

"Hong-Kong voyage?" echoed the girl, with a stare of helpless inquiry, butno other visible emotion. 

"Yes. He had never heard of your mother's death. He came home yesterdaymorning, and was looking for you all day. "

Julia Tinker remained open-mouthed but mute; and the other was puzzled atthe want of feeling shown, which he could not account for even as anational trait. "Perhaps there's some mistake, " he said. 

"There must be, " answered Julia: "my father hasn't been to sea for a goodmany years. _My_ father, " she added, with a diffidence indescribablymingled with a sense of distinction, --"_my_ father's in State'sPrison. What kind of looking man was this?"

The contributor mechanically described him. 

Julia Tinker broke into a loud, hoarse laugh. "Yes, it's him, sureenough. " And then, as if the joke were too good to keep: "Miss Hapford, Miss Hapford, father's got out. Do come here!" she called into a backroom. 

When Mrs. Hapford appeared, Julia fell back, and, having deftly caught afly on the door-post, occupied herself in plucking it to pieces, while shelistened to the conversation of the others. 

"It's all true enough, " said Mrs. Hapford, when the writer had recountedthe moving story of Jonathan Tinker, "so far as the death of his wife andbaby goes. But he hasn't been to sea for a good many years, and he musthave just come out of State's Prison, where he was put for bigamy. There'salways two sides to a story, you know; but they say it broke his firstwife's heart, and she died. His friends don't want him to find hischildren, and this girl especially. "

"He's found his children in the city, " said the contributor, gloomily, being at a loss what to do or say, in view of the wreck of his romance. 

"O, he's found 'em has he?" cried Julia, with heightened amusement. "Thenhe'll have me next, if I don't pack and go. "

"I'm very, very sorry, " said the contributor, secretly resolved never todo another good deed, no matter how temptingly the opportunity presenteditself. "But you may depend he won't find out from _me_ where youare. Of course I had no earthly reason for supposing his story was nottrue. "

"Of course, " said kind-hearted Mrs. Hapford, mingling a drop of honey withthe gall in the contributor's soul, "you only did your duty. "

And indeed, as he turned away he did not feel altogether withoutcompensation. However Jonathan Tinker had fallen in his esteem as a man, he had even risen as literature. The episode which had appeared so perfectin its pathetic phases did not seem less finished as a farce; and thisperson, to whom all things of every-day life presented themselves inperiods more or less rounded, and capable of use as facts orillustrations, could not but rejoice in these new incidents, asdramatically fashioned as the rest. It occurred to him that, wrought intoa story, even better use might be made of the facts now than before, forthey had developed questions of character and of human nature which couldnot fail to interest. The more he pondered upon his acquaintance withJonathan Tinker, the more fascinating the erring mariner became, in hiscomplex truth and falsehood, his delicately blending shades of artificeand _naïveté. _ He must, it was felt, have believed to a certain pointin his own inventions: nay, starting with that groundwork of truth, --thefact that his wife was really dead, and that he had not seen his familyfor two years, --why should he not place implicit faith in all the fictionsreared upon it? It was probable that he felt a real sorrow for her loss, and that he found a fantastic consolation in depicting the circumstancesof her death so that they should look like his inevitable misfortunesrather than his faults. He might well have repented his offense duringthose two years of prison; and why should he not now cast their drearinessand shame out of his memory, and replace them with the freedom andadventure of a two years' voyage to China, --so probable, in all respects, that the fact should appear an impossible nightmare? In the experiences ofhis life he had abundant material to furnish forth the facts of such avoyage, and in the weariness and lassitude that should follow a day'swalking equally after a two years' voyage and two years' imprisonment, hehad as much physical proof in favor of one hypothesis as the other. It wasdoubtless true, also, as he said, that he had gone to his house at dawn, and sat down on the threshold of his ruined home; and perhaps he felt thedesire he had expressed to see his daughter, with a purpose of beginninglife anew; and it may have cost him a veritable pang when he found thathis little ones did not know him. All the sentiments of the situation weresuch as might persuade a lively fancy of the truth of its own inventions;and as he heard these continually repeated by the contributor in theirsearch for Mr. Hapford, they must have acquired an objective force andrepute scarcely to be resisted. At the same time, there were touches ofnature throughout Jonathan Tinker's narrative which could not fail to takethe faith of another. The contributor, in reviewing it, thought itparticularly charming that his mariner had not overdrawn himself, orattempted to paint his character otherwise than as it probably was; thathe had shown his ideas and practices of life to be those of a second mate, nor more nor less, without the gloss of regret or the pretenses torefinement that might be pleasing to the supposed philanthropist with whomhe had fallen in. Captain Gooding was of course a true portrait; and therewas nothing in Jonathan Tinker's statement of the relations of a secondmate to his superiors and his inferiors which did not agree perfectly withwhat the contributor had just read in "Two Years before the Mast, "--a bookwhich had possibly cast its glamour upon the adventure. He admired alsothe just and perfectly characteristic air of grief in the bereaved husbandand father, --those occasional escapes from the sense of loss into a briefhilarity and forgetfulness, and those relapses into the hovering gloom, which every one has observed in this poor, crazy human nature whenoppressed by sorrow, and which it would have been hard to simulate. But, above all, he exulted in that supreme stroke of the imagination given bythe second mate when, at parting, he said he believed he would go down andsleep on board the vessel. In view of this, the State's Prison theoryalmost appeared a malign and foolish scandal. 

Yet even if this theory were correct, was the second mate whollyanswerable for beginning his life again with the imposture he hadpracticed? The contributor had either so fallen in love with the literaryadvantages of his forlorn deceiver that he would see no moral obliquity inhim, or he had touched a subtler verity at last in pondering the affair. It seemed now no longer a farce, but had a pathos which, though verydifferent from that of its first aspect, was hardly less tragical. Knowingwith what coldness, or, at the best, uncandor, he (representing Society inits attitude toward convicted Error) would have met the fact had it beenowned to him at first, he had not virtue enough to condemn the illusorystranger, who must have been helpless to make at once evident anyrepentance he felt or good purpose he cherished. Was it not one of thesaddest consequences of the man's past, --a dark necessity of misdoing, --that, even with the best will in the world to retrieve himself, his firstendeavor must involve a wrong? Might he not, indeed, be considered amartyr, in some sort, to his own admirable impulses? I can see clearlyenough where the contributor was astray in this reasoning, but I can alsounderstand how one accustomed to value realities only as they resembledfables should be won with such pensive sophistry; and I can certainlysympathize with his feeling that the mariner's failure to reappearaccording to appointment added its final and most agreeable charm to thewhole affair, and completed the mystery from which the man emerged andwhich swallowed him up again. 

SCENE

On that loveliest autumn morning, the swollen tide had spread over all therusset levels, and gleamed in the sunlight a mile away. As the contributormoved onward down the street, luminous on either hand with crimsoning andyellowing maples, he was so filled with the tender serenity of the scene, as not to be troubled by the spectacle of small Irish houses standingmiserably about on the flats ankle deep, as it were, in little pools ofthe tide, or to be aware at first, of a strange stir of people upon thestreets: a fluttering to and fro and lively encounter and separation ofgroups of bareheaded women, a flying of children through the broken fencesof the neighborhood, and across the vacant lots on which the insultedsign-boards forbade them to trespass; a sluggish movement of men throughall, and a pause of different vehicles along the sidewalks. When a senseof these facts had penetrated his enjoyment, he asked a matron whose snowyarms, freshly taken from the wash-tub, were folded across a mighty chest, "What is the matter?"

"A girl drowned herself, sir-r-r, over there on the flats, last Saturday, and they're looking for her. "

"It was the best thing she could do, " said another matron grimly. 

Upon this answer that literary soul fell at once to patching himself up aromantic story for the suicide, after the pitiful fashion of this fiction-ridden age, when we must relate everything we see to something we haveread. He was the less to blame for it, because he could not help it; butcertainly he is not to be praised for his associations with the tragicfact brought to his notice. Nothing could have been more trite or obvious, and he felt his intellectual poverty so keenly that he might almost havebelieved his discomfort a sympathy for the girl who had drowned herselflast Saturday. But of course, this could not be, for he had but latelybeen thinking what a very tiresome figure to the imagination the FallenWoman had become. As a fact of Christian civilization, she was a spectacleto wring one's heart, he owned; but he wished she were well out of theromances, and it really seemed a fatality that she should be the principalpersonage of this little scene. The preparation for it, whatever it was tobe, was so deliberate, and the reality had so slight relation to theFrench roofs and modern improvements of the comfortable Charlesbridgewhich he knew, that he could not consider himself other than as aspectator awaiting some entertainment, with a faint inclination to becritical. 

In the mean time there passed through the motley crowd, not so much a cryas a sensation of "They've found her, they've found her!" and then the oneterrible picturesque fact, "She was standing upright!"

Upon this there was wilder and wilder clamor among the people, dropping bydegrees and almost dying away, before a flight of boys came down thestreet with the tidings, "They are bringing her--bringing her in a wagon. "

The contributor knew that she whom they were bringing in the wagon, hadhad the poetry of love to her dismal and otherwise squalid death; but thehistory was of fancy, not of fact in his mind. Of course, he reflected, her lot must have been obscure and hard; the aspect of those concernedabout her death implied that. But of her hopes and her fears, who couldtell him anything? To be sure he could imagine the lovers, and how theyfirst met, and where, and who he was that was doomed to work her shame anddeath; but here his fancy came upon something coarse and common: a man ofher own race and grade, handsome after that manner of beauty which is somuch more hateful than ugliness is; or, worse still, another kind of manwhose deceit must have been subtler and wickeder; but whatever the person, a presence defiant of sympathy or even interest, and simply horrible. Thenthere were the details of the affair, in great degree common to all loveaffairs, and not varying so widely in any condition of life; for thepassion which is so rich and infinite to those within its charm, is apt toseem a little tedious and monotonous in its character, and poor inresources to the cold looker-on. 

Then, finally, there was the crazy purpose and its fulfillment: theheadlong plunge from bank or bridge; the eddy, and the bubbles on thecurrent that calmed itself above the suicide; the tide that rose andstretched itself abroad in the sunshine, carrying hither and thither theburden with which it knew not what to do; the arrest, as by some ghastlycaprice of fate, of the dead girl, in that upright posture, in which sheshould meet the quest for her, as it were defiantly. 

And now they were bringing her in a wagon. 

Involuntarily all stood aside, and waited till the funeral car, which theysaw, should come up toward them through the long vista of the maple-shadedstreet, a noiseless riot stirring the legs and arms of the boys intofrantic demonstration, while the women remained quiet with arms folded orakimbo. Before and behind the wagon, driven slowly, went a guard of raggedurchins, while on the raised seat above sat two Americans, unperturbed byanything, and concerned merely with the business of the affair. 

The vehicle was a grocer's cart which had perhaps been pressed into theservice; and inevitably the contributor thought of Zenobia, and of MilesCoverdale's belief that if she could have foreboded all the _post-mortem_ ugliness and grotesqueness of suicide, she never would havedrowned herself. This girl, too, had doubtless had her own ideas of theeffect that her death was to make, her conviction that it was to wring oneheart, at least, and to strike awe and pity to every other; and herwoman's soul must have been shocked from death could she have known inwhat a ghastly comedy the body she put off was to play a part. 

In the bottom of the cart lay something long and straight and terrible, covered with a red shawl that drooped over the end of the wagon; and onthis thing were piled the baskets in which the grocers had delivered theirorders for sugar and flour, and coffee and tea. As the cart jolted throughtheir lines, the boys could no longer be restrained; they broke out withwild yells, and danced madly about it, while the red shawl hanging fromthe rigid feet nodded to their frantic mirth; and the sun dropped itslight through the maples and shone bright upon the flooded date. 

JUBILEE DAYS

I believe I have no good reason for including among these suburbansketches my recollections of the Peace Jubilee, celebrated by a monstermusical entertainment at Boston, in June, 1869; and I do not know if itwill serve as excuse for their intrusion to say that the exhibition wasnot urban in character, and that I attended it in a feeling of curiosityand amusement which the Bostonians did not seem to feel, and which Isuspect was a strictly suburban if not rural sentiment. 

I thought, on that Tuesday morning, as our horse-car drew near the LongBridge, and we saw the Coliseum spectral through the rain, that Boston wasgoing to show people representing other parts of the country her Notion ofweather. I looked forward to a forenoon of clammy warmth, and an afternoonof clammy cold and of east wind, with a misty nightfall soaking men to thebones. But the day really turned out well enough; it was showery, but notshrewish, and it smiled pleasantly at sunset, as if content with theopening ceremonies of the Great Peace Jubilee. 

The city, as we entered it, gave due token of excitement, and we felt thecelebration even in the air, which had a holiday quality very differentfrom that of ordinary workday air. The crowds filled the decorous streets, and the trim pathways of the Common and the Public Garden, and flowed inan orderly course towards the vast edifice on the Back Bay, presenting theinteresting points which always distinguish a crowd come to town from acity crowd. You get so used to the Boston face and the Boston dress, thata coat from New York or a visage from Chicago is at once conspicuous toyou; and in these people there was not only this strangeness, but thedifferent oddities that lurk in out-of-way corners of society everywherehad started suddenly into notice. Long-haired men, popularly supposed tohave perished with the institution of slavery, appeared before me, and menwith various causes and manias looking from their wild eyes confrontedeach other, let alone such charlatans as had clothed themselves quaintlyor grotesquely to add a charm to the virtue of whatever nostrum theypeddled. It was, however, for the most part, a remarkably well-dressedcrowd; and therein it probably differed more than in any other respectfrom the crowd which a holiday would have assembled in former times. Therewas little rusticity to be noted anywhere, and the uncouthness which hasalready disappeared from the national face seemed to be passing from thenational wardrobe. Nearly all the visitors seemed to be Americans, butneither the Yankee type nor the Hoosier was to be found. They wereapparently very happy, too; the ancestral solemnity of the race thatamuses itself sadly was not to be seen in them, and, if they were notmaking it a duty to be gay, they were really taking their pleasure in acheerful spirit. 

There was, in fact, something in the sight of the Coliseum, as weapproached it, which was a sufficient cause of elation to whoever isbuoyed up by the flutter of bright flags, and the movement in and aboutholiday booths, as I think we all are apt to be. One may not have thestomach of happier days for the swing or the whirligig; he may not drinksoda-water intemperately; pop-corn may not tempt him, nor tropical fruitsallure; but he beholds them without gloom, --nay, a grin inevitably lightsup his countenance at the sight of a great show of these amusements andrefreshments. And any Bostonian might have felt proud that morning thathis city did not hide the light of her mercantile merit under a bushel, but blazoned it about on the booths and walls in every variety of printedand painted advertisement. To the mere aesthetic observer, these vastplacards gave the delight of brilliant color, and blended prettily enoughin effect with the flags; and at first glance I received quite as muchpleasure from the frescoes that advised me where to buy my summerclothing, as from any bunting I saw. 

I had the good fortune on the morning of this first Jubilee day to viewthe interior of the Coliseum when there was scarcely anybody there, --atrifle of ten thousand singers at one end, and a few thousand other peoplescattered about over the wide expanses of parquet and galleries. Thedecorations within, as without, were a pleasure to the eyes that lovegayety of color; and the interior was certainly magnificent, with thoselong lines of white and blue drapery roofing the balconies, the slim, lofty columns festooned with flags and drooping banners, the arms of theStates decking the fronts of the galleries, and the arabesques of paintedmuslin everywhere. I do not know that my taste concerned itself with thedecorations, or that I have any taste in such things; but I testify thatthese tints and draperies gave no small part of the comfort of being whereall things conspired for one's pleasure. The airy amplitude of thebuilding, the perfect order and the perfect freedom of movement, the easeof access and exit, the completeness of the arrangements that in theafternoon gave all of us thirty thousand spectators a chance to behold thegreat spectacle as well as to hear the music, were felt, I am sure, aspersonal favors by every one. These minor particulars, in fact, servedgreatly to assist you in identifying yourself, when the vast hive swarmedwith humanity, and you became a mere sentient atom of the mass. 

It was rumored in the morning that the ceremonies were to begin withprayer by a hundred ministers, but I missed this striking feature of theexhibition, for I did not arrive in the afternoon till the last speech wasbeing made by a gentleman whom I saw gesticulating effectively, and whom Isuppose to have been intelligible to a matter of twenty thousand people inhis vicinity, but who was to me, of the remote, outlying thirty thousand, a voice merely. One word only I caught, and I report it here that posteritymay know as much as we thirty thousand contemporaries did of

THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH. 

. . . . . . . (_sensation_. ) . . . . . . . . . . (_cheers_. ). . . . Refinement . . . . . . . . . . (_great applause_. )

I do not know if I shall be able to give an idea of the immensity of thisscene; but if such a reader as has the dimensions of the Coliseumaccurately fixed in his mind will, in imagination, densely hide all thatinterminable array of benching in the parquet and the galleries and theslopes at either end of the edifice with human heads, showing here crowns, there occiputs, and yonder faces, he will perhaps have some notion of thespectacle as we beheld it from the northern hill-side. Some thousands ofheads nearest were recognizable as attached by the usual neck to thecustomary human body, but for the rest, we seemed to have entered a worldof cherubim. Especially did the multitudinous singers seated far oppositeencourage this illusion; and their fluttering fans and handkerchiefswonderfully mocked the movement of those cravat-like pinions which thefancy attributed to them. They rose or sank at the wave of the director'sbaton; and still looked like an innumerable flock of cherubs drifting oversome slope of Paradise, or settling upon it, --if cherubs _can_settle. 

[Illustration: "The spectacle as we beheld it. "]

The immensity was quite as striking to the mind as to the eye, and anabsolute democracy was appreciable in it. Not only did all artificialdistinctions cease, but those of nature were practically obliterated, andyou felt for once the full meaning of unanimity. No one was at adisadvantage; one was as wise, as good, as handsome as another. In mostpublic assemblages, the foolish eye roves in search of the vanity offemale beauty, and rests upon some lovely visage, or pretty figure; buthere it seemed to matter nothing whether ladies were well or ill-looking;and one might have been perfectly ascetic without self-denial. A blue eyeor a black, --what of it? A mass of blonde or chestnut hair, this sort ofwalking-dress or that, --you might note the difference casually in a fewhundred around you; but a sense of those myriads of other eyes andchignons and walking-dresses absorbed the impression in an instant, andleft a dim, strange sense of loss, as if all women had suddenly becomeWoman. For the time, one would have been preposterously conceited to havefelt his littleness in that crowd; you never thought of yourself in anindividual capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an army, ora very ordinary billow of the sea, feeling the battle or the storm, in acollective sort of way, but unable to distinguish your sensations fromthose of the mass. If a rafter had fallen and crushed you and yourunimportant row of people, you could scarcely have regarded it as apersonal calamity, but might have found it disagreeable as a shock to thatgreat body of humanity. Recall, then, how astonished you were to berecognized by some one, and to have your hand shaken in your individualcharacter of Smith. "Smith? My dear What's-your-name, I am for the presentthe fifty-thousandth part of an enormous emotion!"

It was as difficult to distribute the various facts of the whole effect, as to identify one's self. I had only a public and general consciousnessof the delight given by the harmony of hues in the parquet below; andconcerning the orchestra I had at first no distinct impression save of thethree hundred and thirty violin-bows held erect like standing wheat at onemotion of the director's wand, and then falling as if with the next heswept them down. Afterwards files of men with horns, and other files ofmen with drums and cymbals, discovered themselves; while far above all, certain laborious figures pumped or ground with incessant obeisance at theapparatus supplying the organ with wind. 

What helped, more than anything else, to restore you your dispersed andwandering individuality was the singing of Parepa-Rosa, as she triumphedover the harmonious rivalry of the orchestra. There was something in thegenerous amplitude and robust cheerfulness of this great artist thataccorded well with the ideal of the occasion; she was in herself a greatmusical festival; and one felt, as she floated down the stage with herfar-spreading white draperies, and swept the audience a colossal courtesy, that here was the embodied genius of the Jubilee. I do not trust myself tospeak particularly of her singing, for I have the natural modesty ofpeople who know nothing about music, and I have not at command thephraseology of those who pretend to understand it; but I say that hervoice filled the whole edifice with delicious melody, that it soothed andcomposed and utterly enchanted, that, though two hundred violinsaccompanied her, the greater sweetness of her note prevailed over all, like a mighty will commanding many. What a sublime ovation for her when ahundred thousand hands thundered their acclaim! A victorious general, anaccepted lover, a successful young author, --these know a measure of bliss, I dare say; but in one throb, the singer's heart, as it leaps inexultation at the loud delight of her applausive thousands, must out-enjoythem all. Let me lay these poor little artificial flowers of rhetoric atthe feet of the divine singer, as a faint token of gratitude and eloquentintention. 

When Parepa (or Prepper, as I have heard her name popularly pronounced)had sung, the revived consciousness of an individual life rose inrebellion against the oppression of that dominant vastness. In fact, humannature can stand only so much of any one thing. To a certain degree youaccept and conceive of facts truthfully, but beyond this a merefantasticality rules; and having got enough of grandeur, the senses playedthemselves false. That array of fluttering and tuning people on thesouthern slope began to look minute, like the myriad heads assembled inthe infinitesimal photograph which you view through one of those littlehalf-inch lorgnettes; and you had the satisfaction of knowing that to anylovely infinitesimality yonder you showed no bigger than a carpet-tack. The whole performance now seemed to be worked by those tireless figurespumping at the organ, in obedience to signals from a very alert figure onthe platform below. The choral and orchestral thousands sang and piped andplayed; and at a given point in the _scena_ from Verdi, a hundredfairies in red shirts marched down through the sombre mass of puppets andbeat upon as many invisible anvils. 

This was the stroke of anti-climax; and the droll sound of those anvils, so far above all the voices and instruments in its pitch, thoroughlydisillusioned you and restored you finally to your proper entity andproportions. It was the great error of the great Jubilee, and where almosteverything else was noble and impressive, --where the direction wasfaultless, and the singing and instrumentation as perfectly controlled asif they were the result of one volition, --this anvil-beating was aloneignoble and discordant, --trivial and huge merely. Not even the artilleryaccompaniment, in which the cannon were made to pronounce words of twosyllables, was so bad. 

The dimensions of this sketch bear so little proportion to those of theJubilee, that I must perforce leave most of its features unnoticed; but Iwish to express the sense of enjoyment which prevailed (whenever theanvils were not beaten) over every other feeling, even over wonder. To theear as to the eye it was a delight, and it was an assured success in thepopular affections from the performance of the first piece. For my ownpart, if one pleasurable sensation, besides that received from Parepa'ssinging, distinguished itself from the rest, it was that given by theperformance of the exquisite Coronation March from Meyerbeer's "Prophet;"but I say this under protest of the pleasure taken in the choral renderingof the "Star-Spangled Banner. " Closely allying themselves to these greatraptures were the minor joys of wandering freely about from point topoint, of receiving fresh sensations from the varying lights and aspectsin which the novel scene presented itself with its strange fascinations, and of noting, half consciously, the incessant movement of the crowd as itrevealed itself in changing effects of color. Then the gay tumult of thefifteen minutes of intermission between the parts, when all rose with a_susurrus_ of innumerable silks, and the thousands of pretty singersfluttered about, and gossiped tremulously and delightedly over the gloryof the performance, revealing themselves as charming femininepersonalities, each with her share in the difficulty and the achievement, each with her pique or pride, and each her something to tell her friend ofthe conduct, agreeable or displeasing, of some particular him! Even thequick dispersion of the mass at the close was a marvel of orderliness andgrace, as the melting and separating parts, falling asunder, radiated fromthe centre, and flowed and rippled rapidly away, and left the great hallempty and bare at last. 

And as you emerged from the building, what bizarre and perverse feelingwas that you knew? Something as if all-out-doors were cramped and small, and it were better to return to the freedom and amplitude of the interior?

On the second day, much that was wonderful in a first experience of thefestival was gone; but though the novelty had passed away, the cause forwonder was even greater. If on the first day the crowd was immense, it wasnow something which the imperfect state of the language will not permit meto describe; perhaps _awful_ will serve the purpose as well as anyother word now in use. As you looked round, from the centre of thebuilding, on that restless, fanning, fluttering multitude, to right andleft and north and south, all comparisons and similitudes abandoned you. If you were to write of the scene, you felt that your effort, at the best, must be a meagre sketch, suggesting something to those who had seen thefact, but conveying no intelligible impression of it to any one else. Thegalleries swarmed, the vast slopes were packed, in the pampa-like parqueteven the aisles were half filled with chairs, while a cloud of placelesswanderers moved ceaselessly on the borders of the mass under thebalconies. 

When that common-looking, uncommon little man whom we have called to ruleover us entered the house, and walked quietly down to his seat in thecentre of it, a wild, inarticulate clamor, like no other noise in theworld, swelled from every side, till General Grant rose and showedhimself, when it grew louder than ever, and then gradully subsided intosilence. Then a voice, which might be uttering some mortal alarm, brokerepeatedly across the stillness from one of the balconies, and a thousandglasses were leveled in that direction, while everywhere else the masshushed itself with a mute sense of peril. The capacity of such anassemblage for self-destruction was, in fact, but too evident. From fire, in an edifice of which the sides could be knocked out in a moment, therecould have been little danger; the fabric's strength had been perfectlytested the day before, and its fall was not to be apprehended; but we hadourselves greatly to dread. A panic could have been caused by any mad orwanton person, in which thousands might have been instantly trampled todeath; and it seemed long till that foolish voice was stilled, and thehouse lapsed back into tranquillity, and the enjoyment of the music. Inthe performance I recall nothing disagreeable, nothing that to myignorance seemed imperfect, though I leave it to the wise in music to sayhow far the great concert was a success. I saw a flourish of thedirector's wand, and I heard the voices or the instruments, or both, respond, and I knew by my programme that I was enjoying an unprecedentedquantity of Haydn or Handel or Meyerbeer or Rossini or Mozart, affordedwith an unquestionable precision and promptness; but I own that I likedbetter to stroll about the three-acre house, and that for me the musicwas, at best, only one of the joys of the festival. 

There was good hearing outside for those that desired to listen to themusic, with seats to let in the surrounding tents and booths; and therewas unlimited seeing for the mere looker-on. At least fifty thousandpeople seemed to have come to the Jubilee with no other purpose than togaze upon the outside of the building. The crowd was incomparably greaterthan that of the day before; all the main thoroughfares of the city roaredwith a tide of feet that swept through the side streets, and swelledaimlessly up the places, and eddied there, and poured out again over thepavements. The carriage-ways were packed with every sort of vehicle, withfoot-passengers crowded from the sidewalks, and with the fragments of themilitary parade in honor of the President, with infantry, with stragglingcavalrymen, with artillery. All the paths of the Common and the Gardenwere filled, and near the Coliseum the throngs densified on every sideinto an almost impenetrable mass, that made the doors of the buildingdifficult to approach and at times inaccessible. 

The crowd differed from that of the first day chiefly in size. There weremore country faces and country garbs to be seen, though it was still, onthe whole, a regular-featured and well-dressed crowd, with still very fewbut American visages. It seemed to be also a very frugal-minded crowd, andto spend little upon the refreshments and amusements provided for it. Inthese, oddly enough, there was nothing of the march of mind to beobserved; they Were the refreshments and amusements of a formergeneration. I think it would not be extravagant to say that there weretons of pie for sale in a multitude of booths, with lemonade, soda-water, and ice-cream in proportion; but I doubt if there was a ton of pie sold, and towards the last the venerable pastry was quite covered with dust. Neither did people seem to care much for oranges or bananas or peanuts, oreven pop-corn, --five cents a package and a prize in each package. Manybooths stood unlet, and in others the pulverous ladies and gentlemen, their proprietors, were in the enjoyment of a leisure which would havebeen elegant if it had not been forced. There was one shanty, nototherwise distinguished from the rest, in which French soups were declaredto be for sale; but these alien pottages seemed to be no more favored thanthe most poisonous of our national viands. But perhaps they were notFrench soups, or perhaps the vicinage of the shanty was not such as toimpress a belief in their genuineness upon people who like French soups. Let us not be too easily disheartened by the popular neglect of them. Ifthe daring reformer who inscribed French soups upon his sign will reappearten years hence, we shall all flock to his standard. Slavery is abolished;pie must follow. Doubtless in the year 1900, the managers of a Jubileewould even let the refreshment-rooms within their Coliseum to a cook whowould offer the public something not so much worse than the worst thatcould be found in the vilest shanty restaurant on the ground. At theJubilee, of which I am writing, the unhappy person who went into theColiseum rooms to refresh himself was offered for coffee a salty andunctuous wash, in one of those thick cups which are supposed to be proofagainst the hard usage of "guests" and scullions in humble eating-houses, and which are always so indescribably nicked and cracked, and had pushedtowards him a bowl of veteran sugar, and a tin spoon that had never beencleaned in the world, while a young person stood by, and watched him, asking, "Have you paid for that coffee?"

The side-shows and the other amusements seemed to have addressedthemselves to the crowd with the same mistaken notion of its character andrequirements; though I confess that I witnessed their neglect with regret, whether from a feeling that they were at least harmless, or an unconscioussympathy with any quite idle and unprofitable thing. Those rotary, leglesshorses, on which children love to ride in a perpetual sickening circle, --the type of all our effort, --were nearly always mounted; but those otherwhirligigs, or whatever the dreadful circles with their swinging seats arecalled, were often so empty that they must have been distressing, fromtheir want of balance, to the muscles as well as the spirits of theirproprietors. The society of monsters was also generally shunned, and a cowwith five legs gave milk from the top of her back to an audience of notmore than six persons. The public apathy had visibly wrought upon thetemper of the gentleman who lectured upon this gifted animal, and he tookinquiries in an ironical manner that contrasted disadvantageously with thephilosophical serenity of the person who had a weighing-machine outside, and whom I saw sitting in the chair and weighing himself by the hour, withan expression of profound enjoyment. Perhaps a man of less bulk could nothave entered so keenly into that simple pleasure. 

There was a large tent on the grounds for dramatical entertainments, withsix performances a day, into which I was lured by a profusion of high-colored posters, and some such announcement, as that the beautiful serio-comic danseuse and world-renowned cloggist, Mile. Brown, would appear. About a dozen people were assembled within, and we waited a half-hourbeyond the time announced for the curtain to rise, during which thespectacle of a young man in black broadcloth, eating a cocoa-nut with hispen-knife, had a strange and painful fascination. At the end of this half-hour, our number was increased to eighteen, when the orchestra appeared, --a snare-drummer and two buglers. These took their place at the back of thetent; the buglers, who were Germans, blew seriously and industriously attheir horns; but the native-born citizen, who played the drum, beat itvery much at random, and in the mean time smoked a cigar, while hishumorous friend kept time upon his shoulders by striking him there with acane. How long this might have lasted, I cannot tell; but, after anotherdelay, I suddenly bethought me whether it were not better not to see Mile. Brown, after all? I rose, and stole softly out behind the rhythmic back ofthe drummer; and the world-renowned cloggist is to me at this moment onlya beautiful dream, --an airy shape fashioned upon a hint supplied by theengraver of the posters. 

What, then, did the public desire, if it would not smile upon the swings, or monsters, or dramatic amusements that had pleased so long? Was themusic, as it floated out from the Coliseum, a sufficient delight? Or didthe crowd, averse to the shows provided for it, crave something higher andmore intellectual, --like, for example, a course of the Lowell Lectures?Its general expression had changed: it had no longer that entire gayety ofthe first day, but had taken on something of the sarcastic pathos withwhich we Americans bear most oppressive and fatiguing things as a goodjoke. The dust was blown about in clouds; and here and there, sitting uponthe vacant steps that led up and down among the booths, were dejected andmotionless men and women, passively gathering dust, and apparentlyawaiting burial under the accumulating sand, --the mute, melancholysphinxes of the Jubilee, with their unsolved riddle, "Why did we come?" Atintervals, the heavens shook out fierce, sudden showers of rain, thatscattered the surging masses, and sent them flying impotently hither andthither for shelter where no shelter was, only to gather again, and moveaimlessly and comfortlessly to and fro, like a lost child. 

So the multitude roared within and without the Coliseum as I turnedhomeward; and yet I found it wandering with weary feet through the Garden, and the Common, and all the streets, and it dragged its innumerable achinglegs with me to the railroad station, and, entering the train, stood up onthem, --having paid for the tickets with which the companies professed tosell seats. 

How still and cool and fresh it was at our suburban station, when thetrain, speeding away with a sardonic yell over the misery of thepassengers yet standing up in it, left us to walk across the quiet fieldsand pleasant lanes to Benicia Street, through groups of little idyllicIrish boys playing base-ball, with milch-goats here and there pastorallycropping the herbage!

In this pleasant seclusion I let all Bunker Hill Day thunder by, with itscannons, and processions, and speeches, and patriotic musical uproar, hearing only through my open window the note of the birds singing in aleafy coliseum across the street, and making very fair music without ananvil among them. "Ah, signer!" said one of my doorstep acquaintance, whocame next morning and played me Captain Jenks, --the new air he has hadadded to his instrument, --"never in my life, neither at Torino, nor atMilano, nor even at Genoa, never did I see such a crowd or hear such anoise, as at that Colosseo yesterday. The carriages, the horses, the feet!And the dust, O Dio mio! All those millions of people were as white as somany millers!"

On the afternoon of the fourth day the city looked quite like the mill inwhich these millers had been grinding; and even those unpromisinglyelegant streets of the Back Bay showed mansions powdered with dust enoughfor sentiment to strike root in, and so soften them with its tender greenagainst the time when they shall be ruinous and sentiment shall swallowthem up. The crowd had perceptibly diminished, but it was still great, andon the Common it was allured by a greater variety of recreations andbargains than I had yet seen there. There were, of course, all sorts ofuseful and instructive amusements, --at least a half-dozen telescopes, andas many galvanic batteries, with numerous patented inventions; and Ifancied that most of the peddlers and charlatans addressed themselves to autilitarian spirit supposed to exist in us. A man that sold whistlescapable of reproducing exactly the notes of the mocking-bird and theguinea-pig set forth the durability of the invention. "Now, you see thiswhistle, gentlemen. It is rubber, all rubber; and rubber, you know, entersinto the composition of a great many valuable articles. This whistle, then, is entirely of rubber, --no worthless or flimsy material that dropsto pieces the moment you put it to your lips, "--as if it were not utterlydesirable that it should. "Now, I'll give you the mocking-bird, gentlemen, and then I'll give you the guinea-pig, upon this pure _India_-rubberwhistle. " And he did so with a great animation, --this young man with aperfectly intelligent and very handsome face. "Try your strength, andrenovate your system!" cried the proprietor of a piston padded at one endand working into a cylinder when you struck it a blow with your fist; andthe owners of lung-testing machines called upon you from every side to trytheir consumption cure; while the galvanic-battery men sat still andmutely appealed with inscriptions attached to their cap-visors declaringthat electricity taken from their batteries would rid you of every acheand pain known to suffering humanity. Yet they were themselves as a classin a state of sad physical disrepair, and one of them was the visible preyof rheumatism which he might have sent flying from his joints with asingle shock. The only person whom I saw improving his health with thebattery was a rosy-faced school-boy, who was taking ten cents' worth ofelectricity; and I hope it did not disagree with his pop-corn and soda-water. 

Farther on was a picturesque group of street-musicians, --violinists andharpers; a brother and four sisters, by their looks, --who afforded almostthe only unpractical amusement to be enjoyed on the Common, though not farfrom them was a blind old negro, playing upon an accordion, and singing toit in the faintest and thinnest of black voices, who could hardly haveprofited any listener. No one appeared to mind him, till a jolly Jack-tarwith both arms cut off, but dressed in full sailor's togs, lurched heavilytowards him. This mariner had got quite a good effect of sea-legs by somemeans, and looked rather drunker than a man with both arms ought to be;but he was very affectionate, and, putting his face close to the other's, at once entered into talk with the blind man, forming with him a picturecuriously pathetic and grotesque. He was the only tipsy person I sawduring the Jubilee days, --if he was tipsy, for after all they may havebeen real sea-legs he had on. 

If the throng upon the streets was thinner, it was greater in the Coliseumthan on the second day; and matters had settled there into regular workingorder. The limits of individual liberty had been better ascertained; therewas no longer any movement in the aisles, but a constant passing to andfro, between the pieces, in the promenades. The house presented, asbefore, that appearance in which reality forsook it, and it became merelyan amazing picture. The audience supported the notion of its unreality byhaving exactly the character of the former audiences, and impressed you, despite its restlessness and incessant agitation, with the feeling that ithad remained there from the first day, and would always continue there;and it was only in wandering upon its borders through the promenades, thatyou regained possession of facts concerning it. In no other way was itsvastness more observable than in the perfect indifference of persons oneto another. Each found himself, as it were, in a solitude; and, sequestered in that wilderness of strangers, each was freed of hisbashfulness and trepidation. Young people lounged at ease upon the floors, about the windows, on the upper promenades; and in this seclusion I sawsuch betrayals of tenderness as melt the heart of the traveller on ourdesolate railway trains, --Fellows moving to and fro or standing, carelessof other eyes, with their arms around the waists of their Girls. Thesewere, of course, people who had only attained a certain grade ofcivilization, and were not characteristic of the crowd, or, indeed, worthyof notice except as expressions of its unconsciousness. I fancied that Isaw a number of their class outside listening to the address of the agentof a patent liniment, proclaimed to be an unfailing specific for neuralgiaand headache, --if used in the right spirit. "For, " said the orator, "welike to cure people who treat us and our medicine with respect. Folks say, 'What is there about that man?--some magnetism or electricity. ' And theother day at New Britain, Connecticut, a young man he come up to thecarriage, sneering like, and he tried the cure, and it didn't have theleast effect upon him. " There seemed reason in this, and it produced avisible sensation in the Fellows and Girls, who grinned sheepishly at eachother. 

Why will the young man with long hair force himself at this point into ahistory, which is striving to devote itself to graver interests? There hestood with the other people, gazing up at the gay line of streamers on thesummit of the Coliseum, and taking in the Anvil Chorus with the rest, --ayoung man well-enough dressed, and of a pretty sensible face, with hislong black locks falling from under his cylinder hat, and covering hisshoulders. What awful spell was on him, obliging him to make that figurebefore his fellow-creatures? He had nothing to sell; he was not, apparently, an advertisement of any kind. Was he in the performance of avow? Was he in his right mind? For shame! a person may wear his hair longif he will. But why not, then, in a top-knot? This young man's long hairwas not in keeping with his frock-coat and his cylinder hat, and he hadnot at all the excuse of the old gentleman who sold salve in the costumeof Washington's time; one could not take pleasure in him as in the negroadvertiser, who paraded the grounds in a costume compounded of a consular_chapeau bras_ and a fox-hunter's top-boots--the American diplomaticuniform of the future--and offered every one a printed billet; he had noteven the attraction of the cabalistic herald of Hunkidori. Who was he?what was he? why was he? The mind played forever around these questions ina maze of hopeless conjecture. 

Had all those quacks and peddlers been bawling ever since Tuesday to thesame listeners? Had all those swings and whirligigs incessantly performedtheir rounds? The cow that gave milk from the top of her back, had shenever changed her small circle of admirers, or ceased her flow? And thegentleman who sat in the chair of his own balance, how much did he weighby this time? One could scarcely rid one's self of the illusion ofperpetuity concerning these things, and I could not believe that, if Iwent back to the Coliseum grounds at any future time, I should not beholdall that vast machinery in motion. 

It was curious to see, amid this holiday turmoil men pursuing the ordinarybusiness of their lives, and one was strangely rescued and consoled by thespectacle of the Irish hod-carriers, and the bricklayers at work on afirst-class swell-front residence in the very heart of the city of tentsand booths. Even the locomotive, being associated with quieter days andscenes, appealed, as it whistled to and fro upon the Providence Railroad, to some soft bucolic sentiment in the listener, and sending its note, ordinarily so discordant, across that human uproar, seemed to "babble ofgreen fields. " And at last it wooed us away, and the Jubilee was againswallowed up by night. 

There was yet another Jubilee Day, on the morning of which the thousandsof public-school children clustered in gauzy pink and white in the placeof the mighty chorus, while the Coliseum swarmed once more with people wholistened to those shrill, sweet pipes blending in unison; but I leave thereader to imagine what he will about it. A week later, after all was over, I was minded to walk down towards the Coliseum, and behold it in itsdesertion. The city streets were restored to their wonted summer-afternoontranquillity; the Public Garden presented its customary phases of twopeople sitting under a tree and talking intimately together on some themeof common interest, --

 "Bees, bees, was it your hydromel?"--

of the swans sailing in full view upon the little lake of half a dozenidlers hanging upon the bridge to look at them; of children gayly dottingthe paths here and there; and, to heighten the peacefulness of the effect, a pretty, pale invalid lady sat, half in shade and half in sun, reading inan easy-chair. Far down the broad avenue a single horse-car tinkledslowly; on the steps of one of the mansions charming little girls stood ina picturesque group full of the bright color which abounds in the lovelydresses of this time. As I drew near the Coliseum, I could perceive thedesolation which had fallen upon the festival scene; the white tents weregone; the place where the world-renowned cloggist gave her serio-comicdances was as lonely and silent as the site of Carthage; in the middledistance two men were dismantling a motionless whirligig; the hut for thesale of French soups was closed; farther away, a solitary policeman movedgloomily across the deserted spaces, showing his dark-blue figure againstthe sky. The vast fabric of the Coliseum reared itself, hushed anddeserted within and without; and a boy in his shirt-sleeves pressed hisnose against one of the painted window-panes in the vain effort to beholdthe nothing inside. But sadder than this loneliness surrounding theColiseum, sadder than the festooned and knotted banners that droopedfunereally upon its facade, was the fact that some of those lucklessrefreshment-saloons were still open, displaying viands as little ediblenow as carnival _confetti_. It was as if the proprietors, in anunavailing remorse, had condemned themselves to spend the rest of theirdays there, and, slowly consuming their own cake and pop-corn, washed downwith their own soda-water and lemonade, to perish of dyspepsia anddespair. 

SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS. 

Any study of suburban life would be very imperfect without some glance atthat larger part of it which is spent in the painful pursuit of pleasuressuch as are offered at the ordinary places of public amusement; and forthis reason I excuse myself for rehearsing certain impressions here whichare not more directly suburban, to say the least, than those recounted inthe foregoing chapter. 

It became, shortly after life in Charlesbridge began, a question whetherany entertainment that Boston could offer were worth the trouble of goingto it, or, still worse, coming from it; for if it was misery to hurry fromtea to catch the inward horse-car at the head of the street, what sullenlexicon will afford a name for the experience of getting home again by thelast car out from the city? You have watched the clock much more closelythan the stage during the last act, and have left your play incomplete byits final marriage or death, and have rushed up to Bowdoin Square, whereyou achieve a standing place in the car, and, utterly spent as you arewith the enjoyment of the evening, you endure for the next hour all thatis horrible in riding or walking. At the end of this time you declare thatyou will never go to the theatre again; and after years of suffering youcome at last to keep your word. 

While yet, however, in the state of formation as regards this resolution, I went frequently to the theatre--or school of morals, as its friends havehumorously called it. I will not say whether any desired amelioration tookplace or not in my own morals through the agency of the stage; but if notenlightened and refined by everything I saw there, I sometimes wascertainly very much surprised. Now that I go no more, or very, veryrarely, I avail myself of the resulting leisure to set down, for theinstruction of posterity, some account of performances I witnessed in theyears 1868-69, which I am persuaded will grow all the more curious, if notincredible, with the lapse of time. 

There is this satisfaction in living, namely, that whatever we do will oneday wear an air of picturesqueness and romance, and will win the fancy ofpeople coming after us. This stupid and commonplace present shall yetappear the fascinating past; and is it not a pleasure to think how ourrogues of descendants--who are to enjoy us aesthetically--will be taken inwith us, when they read, in the files of old newspapers, of the quantityof entertainment offered us at the theatres during the years mentioned, and judge us by it? I imagine them two hundred years hence looking back atus, and sighing, "Ah! there was a touch of the old Greek life in thoseAthenians! How they loved the drama in the jolly Boston of that day! Thatwas the golden age of the theatre: in the winter of 1868-69, they haddramatic performances in seven places, of every degree of excellence, andthe managers coined money. " As we always figure our ancestors going to andfrom church, they will probably figure us thronging the doors of theatres, and no doubt there will be some historical gossiper among them to sketch aBoston audience in 1869, with all our famous poets and politicians groupedtogether in the orchestra seats, and several now dead introduced with thepleasant inaccuracy and uncertainty of historical gossipers. "On thisnight, when the beautiful Tostée reappeared, the whole house rose to greether. If Mr. Alcott was on one of his winter visits to Boston, no doubt hestepped in from the Marlborough House, --it was a famous temperance hotel, then in the height of its repute, --not only to welcome back the greatactress, but to enjoy a chat between the acts with his many friends. Here, doubtless, was seen the broad forehead of Webster; there the courtlyEverett, conversing in studied tones with the gifted So-and-so. Did notthe lovely Such-a-one grace the evening with her presence? The brilliantand versatile Edmund Kirke was dead; but the humorous Artemas Ward and hisfriend Nasby may have attracted many eyes, having come hither at the closeof their lectures, to testify their love of the beautiful in nature andart; while, perhaps, Mr. Sumner, in the intervals of state cares, relaxedinto the enjoyment, " etc. "Vous voyez bien le tableau!"

That far-off posterity, learning that all our theatres are filled everynight, will never understand but we were a theatre-going people in thesense that it is the highest fashion to be seen at the play; and yet weare sensible that it is not so, and that the Boston which makes itselfknown in civilization--in letters, politics, reform--goes as little to thetheatre as fashionable Boston. 

The stage is not an Institution with us, I should say; yet it affordsrecreation to a very large and increasing number of persons, and while itwould be easy to over-estimate its influence for good or evil even withthese, there is no doubt that the stage, if not the drama, is popular. Fortunately an inquiry like this into a now waning taste in theatricalsconcerns the fact rather than the effect of the taste otherwise the taskmight become indefinitely hard alike for writer and for reader. No one canlay his hand on his heart, and declare that he is the worse for havingseen "La Belle Hélène, " for example, or say more than that it is a thingwhich ought not to be seen by any one else; yet I suppose there is no oneready to deny that "La Belle Hélène" was the motive of those performancesthat have most pleased the most people during recent years. There wassomething fascinating in the circumstances and auspices under which theunited Irma and Tostée troupes appeared in Boston--_opéra bouffe_ ledgayly forward by _finance bouffe_, and suggesting Erie shares by itswatered music and morals; but there is no doubt that Tostée's grandreception was owing mainly to the personal favor which she enjoyed hereand which we do not vouchsafe to every one. Ristori did not win it; we didour duty by her, following her carefully with the libretto, and in hermost intense effects turning the leaves of a thousand pamphlets with arustle that must have shattered every delicate nerve in her; but we werealways cold to her greatness. It was not for Tosteés singing, which wasbut a little thing in itself; it was not for her beauty, for that was nomore than a reminiscence, if it was not always an illusion; was it becauseshe rendered the spirit of M. Offenbach's operas so perfectly, that weliked her so much? "Ah, that movement!" cried an enthusiast, "that swing, that--that--wriggle!" She was undoubtedly a great actress, full of subtlesurprises, and with an audacious appearance of unconsciousness in thoseexigencies where consciousness would summon the police--or should; she wasso near, yet so far from, the worst that could be intended; in tones, ingestures, in attitudes, she was to the libretto just as the music was, nowmaking it appear insolently and unjustly coarse, now feebly inadequate inits explicit immodesty. 

To see this famous lady in "La Grande Duchesse" or "La Belle Hélène" wasan experience never to be forgotten, and certainly not to be described. The former opera has undoubtedly its proper and blameless charm. There issomething pretty and arch in the notion of the Duchess's falling in lovewith the impregnably faithful and innocent Fritz; and the extravagance ofthe whole, with the satire upon the typical little German court, isdelightful. But "La Belle Helene" is a wittier play than "La GrandeDuchesse, " and it is the vividest expression of the spirit of _opérabouffe_. It is full of such lively mockeries as that of Helen when shegazes upon the picture of Leda and the Swan: "J'aime á me recueillerdevant ce tableau de famille! Mon père, ma mère, les voici tous les deux!O mon père, tourne vers ton enfant un bec favorable!"--or of Paris when herepresses the zeal of Calchas, who desires to present him at once toHelen: "Soit! mais sans lui dire qui je suis;--je désire garder le plusstrict incognito, jusq'au moment où la situation sera favorable á un coupde théâtre. " But it must be owned that our audiences seemed not to takemuch pleasure in these and other witticisms, though they obligedMademoiselle Tostée to sing "Un Mari sage" three times, with all thoseactions and postures which seem incredible the moment they have ceased. They possibly understood this song no better than the strokes of wit, andencored it merely for the music's sake. The effect was, nevertheless, unfortunate, and calculated to give those French ladies but a bad opinionof our morals. How could they comprehend that the taste was, likethemselves, imported, and that its indulgence here did not characterizeus? It was only in appearance that, while we did not enjoy the wit wedelighted in the coarseness. And how coarse this travesty of the old fablemainly is! That priest Calchas, with his unspeakable snicker his avarice, his infidelity, his hypocrisy, is alone infamy enough to provoke thedestruction of a city. Then that scene interrupted by Menelaus! It isindisputably witty, and since all those people are so purely creatures offable, and dwell so entirely in an unmoral atmosphere, it appears asabsurd to blame it as the murders in a pantomime. To be sure there issomething about murder, some inherent grace or refinement perhaps, thatmakes its actual representation upon the stage more tolerable than themost diffident suggestion of adultery. Not that "La Belle Hélène" is opento the reproach of over-delicacy in this scene, or any other, for thematter of that, though there is a strain of real poetry in the conceptionof this whole episode of Helen's intention to pass all Paris's love-makingoff upon herself for a dream, --poetry such as might have been inspired bya muse that had taken too much nectar. There is excellent character, also, as well as caricature in the drama; not only Calchas is admirably done, but Agamemnon, and Achilles, and Helen, and Menelaus, "pas un mariordinaire . .. Un mari épique, "--and the burlesque is good of its kind. Itis artistic, as it seems French dramatic effort must almost necessarilybe. It could scarcely be called the fault of the _opéra bouffe_ thatthe English burlesque should have come of its success; nor could thepublic blame it for the great favor the burlesque won in those far-offwinters, if indeed the public wishes to bestow blame for this. No one, however, could see one of these curious travesties without being reminded, in an awkward way, of the _morale_ of the _opéra bouffe_, and ofthe _personnel_--as I may say--of "The Black Crook, " "The WhiteFawn, " and the "Devil's Auction. " There was the same intention ofmerriment at the cost of what may be called the marital prejudices, thoughit cannot be claimed that the wit was the same as in "La Belle Hélène;"there was the same physical unreserve as in the ballets of a formerseason; while in its dramatic form the burlesque discovered very markedparental traits. 

This English burlesque, this child of M. Offenbach's genius, and the nowsomewhat faded spectacular muse, flourished at the time of which I writein three of our seven theatres for months, --five, from the highest to thelowest being in turn open to it, --and had begun, in a tentative way, toinvade the deserted stage even so long ago as the previous summer; and Ihave sometimes flattered myself that it was my fortune to witness thefirst exhibition of its most characteristic feature in a theatre intowhich I wandered one sultry night because it was the nearest theatre. Theywere giving a play called "The Three Fast Men, " which had a moral of suchpowerful virtue that it ought to have reformed everybody in theneighborhood. Three ladies being in love with the three fast men, andresolved to win them back to regular hours and the paths of sobriety byevery device of the female heart, dress themselves in men's clothes, --suchis the subtlety of the female heart in the bosoms of modern young ladiesof fashion, --and follow their lovers about from one haunt of dissipationto another and become themselves exemplarily vicious, --drunkards, gamblers, and the like. The first lady, who was a star in her lowly orbit, was very great in all her different _rôles_, appearing now as asailor with the hornpipe of his calling, now as an organ-grinder, and nowas a dissolute young gentleman, --whatever was the exigency of good morals. The dramatist seemed to have had an eye to her peculiar capabilities, andto have expressly invented edifying characters and situations that hertalents might enforce them. The second young lady had also a personaldidactic gift, rivaling, and even surpassing in some respects, that of thestar; and was very rowdy indeed. In due time the devoted conduct of theyoung ladies has its just effect: the three fast men begin to reflect uponthe folly of their wild courses; and at this point the dramatist delivershis great stroke. The first lady gives a _soirée dansante etchantante_, and the three fast men have invitations. The guests seatthemselves, as at a fashionable party, in a semicircle, and the gayety ofthe evening begins with conundrums and playing upon the banjo; thegentlemen are in their morning-coats, and the ladies in a display ofhosiery which is now no longer surprising, and which need not have beenmentioned at all except for the fact that, in the case of the first lady, it seemed not to have been freshly put on for that party. In this instancean element comical beyond intention was present, in three young gentlemen, an amateur musical trio, who had kindly consented to sing their favoritesong of "The Rolling Zuyder Zee, " as they now kindly did, with flushedfaces, unmanageable hands, and much repetition of

 The ro-o-o-o- The ro-o-o-o- The ro-o-o-o-ll- Ing Zuyder Zee, Zuyder Zee, Zuyder Zee-e-e!

Then the turn of the three guardian angels of the fast men being comeagain they get up and dance each one a breakdown which seems to establishtheir lovers (now at last in the secret of the generous ruse played uponthem) firmly in their resolution to lead a better life. They are in nowiseshaken from it by the displeasure which soon shows itself in the manner ofthe first and second ladies. The former is greatest in the so-calledProtean parts of the play, and is obscured somewhat by the dancing of thelatter; but she has a daughter who now comes on and sings a song. Thepensive occasion, the favorable mood of the audience, the sympatheticattitude of the players, invite her to sing "The Maiden's Prayer, " and sowe have "The Maiden's Prayer. " We may be a low set, and the song may beaffected and insipid enough, but the purity of its intention touches, andthe little girl is vehemently applauded. She is such a pretty child withher innocent face, and her artless white dress, and blue ribbons to herwaist and hair, that we will have her back again; whereupon she runs outupon the stage, strikes up a rowdy, rowdy air, dances a shocking littledance, and vanishes from the dismayed vision, leaving us a considerablylower set than we were at first, and glad of our lowness. This is thesecond lady's own ground, however, and now she comes out--in a way thatbanishes far from our fickle minds all thoughts of the first lady and hermistaken child--with a medley of singing and dancing, a bit of breakdown, of cancan, of jig, a bit of "Le Sabre de mon Père, " and of all memorableslang songs, given with the most grotesque and clownish spirit that everinspired a woman. Each member of the company follows in his or her _passeul_, and then they all dance together to the plain confusion of theamateur trio, whose eyes roll like so many Zuyder Zees, as they sit lonelyand motionless in the midst. All stiffness and formality are overcome. Theevening party in fact disappears entirely, and we are suffered to see theartists in their moments of social relaxation sitting as it were aroundthe theatrical fireside. They appear to forget us altogether; theyexchange winks, and nods, and jests of quite personal application; theycall each other by name, by their Christian names, their nicknames. It isnot an evening party, it is a family party, and the suggestion of homeenjoyment completes the reformation of the three fast men. We see themmarry the three fast women before we leave the house. 

On another occasion, two suburban friends of the drama beheld a moreexplicit precursor of the coming burlesque at one of the minor theatreslast summer. The great actress whom they had come to see on another scenewas ill, and in their disappointment they embraced the hope ofentertainment offered them at the smaller playhouse. The drama itself wasneither here nor there as to intent, but the public appetite or themanager's conception of it--for I am by no means sure that this wholebusiness was not a misunderstanding--had exacted that the actresses shouldappear in so much stocking, and so little else, that it was a horror tolook upon them. There was no such exigency of dialogue, situation, orcharacter as asked the indecorum, and the effect upon the unpreparedspectator was all the more stupefying from the fact that most of theladies were not dancers, and had not countenances that consorted withimpropriety. Their faces had merely the conventional Yankee sharpness andwanness of feature, and such difference of air and character as should sayfor one and another, shop-girl, shoe-binder, seamstress; and it seemed anabsurdity and an injustice to refer to them in any way the disclosures ofthe ruthlessly scant drapery. A grotesque fancy would sport with theiridentity: "Did not this or that one write poetry for her local newspaper?"so much she looked the average culture and crudeness, and when such a one, coldly yielding to the manager's ideas of the public taste, stretchedherself on a green baize bank with her feet towards us, or did a similargrossness, it was hard to keep from crying aloud in protest, that she neednot do it; that nobody really expected or wanted it of her. Nobody? Alas!there were people there--poor souls who had the appearance of coming everynight--who plainly did expect it, and who were loud in their applauses ofthe chief actress. This was a young person of a powerful physicalexpression, quite unlike the rest, --who were dyspeptic and consumptive inthe range of their charms, --and she triumphed and wantoned through thescenes with a fierce excess of animal vigor. She was all stocking, as onemay say, being habited to represent a prince; she had a raucous voice, aninsolent twist of the mouth, and a terrible trick of defying her enemiesby standing erect, chin up, hand on hip, and right foot advanced, pattingthe floor. It was impossible, even in the orchestra seats, to look at herin this attitude and not shrink before her; and on the stage she visiblytyrannized over the invalid sisterhood with her full-blown fascinations. These unhappy girls personated, with a pathetic effect not to bedescribed, such arch and fantastic creations of the poet's mind asBewitchingcreature and Exquisitelittlepet, and the play was a kind offairy burlesque in rhyme, of the most melancholy stupidity that ever was. Yet there was something very comical in the conditions of its performance, and in the possibility that public and manager were playing at cross-purposes. There we were in the pit, an assemblage of hard-working Yankeesof decently moral lives and simple traditions, country-bred many of us andof plebeian stock and training, vulgar enough perhaps, but probably notdepraved, and, excepting the first lady's friends, certainly not educatedto the critical enjoyment of such spectacles; and there on the stage werethose mistaken women, in such sad variety of boniness and flabbiness as Ihave tried to hint, addressing their pitiable exposure to a supposedvileness in us, and wrenching from all original intent the innocentdullness of the drama, which for the most part could have been as wellplayed in walking-dresses, to say the least. 

The scene was not less amusing, as regarded the audiences, the ensuingwinter, when the English burlesque troupes which London sent us, arrived;but it was not quite so pathetic as regarded the performers. Of theirbeauty and their abandon, the historical gossiper, whom I descry far downthe future, waiting to refer to me as "A scandalous writer of the period, "shall learn very little to his purpose of warming his sketch with a colorfrom mine. But I hope I may describe these ladies as very pretty, veryblonde, and very unscrupulously clever, and still disappoint thehistorical gossiper. They seemed in all cases to be English; no Yankeefaces, voices, or accents were to be detected among them. Where they wereassociated with people of another race, as happened with one troupe, theadvantage of beauty was upon the Anglo-Saxon side, while that of somesmall shreds of propriety was with the Latins. These appeared at timesalmost modest, perhaps because they were the conventional_ballerine_, and wore the old-fashioned ballet-skirt with its volumedgauze, --a coyness which the Englishry had greatly modified, through anexigency of the burlesque, --perhaps because indecorum seems, likeblasphemy and untruth, somehow more graceful and becoming in southern thanin northern races. 

As for the burlesques themselves, they were nothing, the performerspersonally everything. M. Offenbach had opened Lemprière's Dictionary tothe authors with "La Belle Hélène, " and there, was commonly a flimsyraveling of parodied myth, that held together the different dances andsongs, though sometimes it was a novel or an opera burlesqued; but therewas always a song and always a dance for each lady, song and dance beingequally slangy, and depending for their effect mainly upon the natural orsimulated personal charms of the performer. 

It was also an indispensable condition of the burlesque's success, thatthe characters should be reversed in their representation, --that the men's_rôles_ should be played by women, and that at least one female partshould be done by a man. It must be owned that the fun all came from thischaracter, the ladies being too much occupied with the more seriousbusiness of bewitching us with their pretty figures to be very amusing;whereas this wholesome man and brother, with his blonde wig, his_panier_, his dainty feminine simperings and languishings, hisfalsetto tones, and his general air of extreme fashion, was alwaysexceedingly droll. He was the saving grace of these stupid plays; and Icannot help thinking that the _cancan_, as danced, in "Ivanhoe, " byIsaac of York and the masculine Rebecca, was a moral spectacle; it was the_cancan_ made forever absurd and harmless. But otherwise, theburlesques were as little cheerful as profitable. The playwrights who hadadapted them to the American stage--for they were all of Englishauthorship--had been good enough to throw in some political allusionswhich were supposed to be effective with us, but which it was sad to seereceived with apathy. It was conceivable from a certain air with which theactors delivered these, that they were in the habit of stirring Londonaudiences greatly with like strokes of satire; but except where Rebeccaoffered a bottle of Medford rum to Cedric the Saxon, who appeared in thefigure of ex-President Johnson, they had no effect upon us. We were cold, very cold, to suggestions of Mr. Reverdy Johnson's now historical speech-making and dining; General Butler's spoons moved us just a little; at thename of Grant we roared and stamped, of course, though in a perfectlymechanical fashion, and without thought of any meaning offered us; thoselovely women might have coupled the hero's name with whatever insult theychose, and still his name would have made us cheer them. We seemed not tocare for points that were intended to flatter us nationally. I am notaware that anybody signified consciousness when the burlesque supportedour side of the Alabama controversy, or acknowledged the self-devotionwith which a threat that England should be made to pay was delivered bythese English performers. With an equal impassiveness we greeted allusionsto Erie shares and to the late Mr. Fiske. 

The burlesque chiefly betrayed its descent from the spectacular ballet inits undressing; but that ballet, while it demanded personal exposure, hadsomething very observable in its scenic splendors, and all that marchingand processioning in it was rather pretty; while in the burlesque thereseemed nothing of innocent intent. No matter what the plot, it led alwaysto a final great scene of breakdown, --which was doubtless most impressivein that particular burlesque where this scene represented the infernalworld, and the ladies gave the dances of the country with a happyconception of the deportment of lost souls. There, after some vague andinconsequent dialogue, the wit springing from a perennial source of humor(not to specify the violation of the seventh commandment), the dancingcommenced, each performer beginning with the Walk-round of the negrominstrels, rendering its grotesqueness with a wonderful frankness ofmovement, and then plunging into the mysteries of her dance with a kind ofinfuriate grace and a fierce delight very curious to look upon. I am awareof the historical gossiper still on the alert for me, and I dare not sayhow sketchily these ladies were dressed or indeed, more than that theywere dressed to resemble circus-riders of the other sex, but as to theirown deceived nobody, --possibly did not intend deceit. One of them was sogood a player that it seemed needless for her to go so far as she did inthe dance; but she spared herself nothing, and it remained for her merelystalwart friends to surpass her, if possible. This inspired each whosucceeded her to wantoner excesses, to wilder insolences of hose, tofiercer bravadoes of corsage; while those not dancing responded to thesentiment of the music by singing shrill glees in tune with it, clappingtheir hands, and patting Juba, as the act is called, --a peculiarlygraceful and modest thing in woman. The frenzy grew with every moment, and, as in another Vision of Sin, --

 "Then they started from their places, Moved with violence, changed in hue, Caught each other with wild grimaces, Half-invisible to the view, Wheeling with precipitate paces To the melody, till they flew, Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces Twisted hard in fierce embraces, Like to Furies, like to Graces, "--

with an occasional exchange of cuffs and kicks perfectly human. Thespectator found now himself and now the scene incredible, and indeed theywere hardly conceivable in relation to each other. A melancholy sense ofthe absurdity, of the incongruity, of the whole absorbed at last even asense of the indecency. The audience was much the same in appearance asother audiences, witnessing like displays at the other theatres, and didnot differ greatly from the usual theatrical house. Not so much fashionsmiled upon the efforts of these young ladies, as upon the _cancan_of the Signorina Morlacchi a winter earlier; but there was a most fairappearance of honest-looking, handsomely dressed men and women; and youcould pick out, all over the parquet, faces of one descent from thedeaconship, which you wondered were not afraid to behold one anotherthere. The truth is, we spectators, like the performers themselves, lackedthat tradition of error, of transgression, which casts its romance aboutthe people of a lighter race. We had not yet set off one corner of theCommon for a Jardin Mabille; we had not even the concert-cellars of thegay and elegant New Yorker; and nothing, really, had happened in Boston toeducate us to this new taste in theatricals, since the fair Quakers feltmoved to testify in the streets and churches against our spiritualnakedness. Yet it was to be noted with regret that our innocence, ourrespectability, had no restraining influence upon the performance; and thefatuity of the hope cherished by some courageous people, that the presenceof virtuous persons would reform the stage, was but too painfully evident. The doubt whether they were not nearer right who have denounced thetheatre as essentially and incorrigibly bad would force itself upon themind, though there was a little comfort in the thought that, if virtue hadbeen actually allowed to frown upon these burlesques, the burlesques mighthave been abashed into propriety. The caressing arm of the law was castvery tenderly about the performers, and in the only case where a spectatorpresumed to hiss, --it was at a _pas seul_ of the indescribable, --apoliceman descended upon him, and with the succor of two friends of thefree ballet, rent him from his place, and triumphed forth with him. Herewas an end of ungenial criticism; we all applauded zealously after that. 

The peculiar character of the drama to which they devoted themselves hadproduced, in these ladies, some effects doubtless more interesting thanprofitable to observe. One of them, whose unhappiness it was to take thepart of _soubrette_ in the Laughable Commedietta preceding theburlesque, was so ill at ease in drapery, so full of awkward jerks andtwitches, that she seemed quite another being when she came on later as aradiant young gentleman in pink silk hose, and nothing of feminine modestyin her dress excepting the very low corsage. A strange and compassionablesatisfaction beamed from her face; it was evident that this sad businesswas the poor thing's _forte_. In another company was a lady who hadconquered all the easy attitudes of young men of the second or thirdfashion, and who must have been at something of a loss to identify herselfwhen personating a woman off the stage. But Nature asserted herself in away that gave a curious and scarcely explicable shock in the case of thatdancer whose impudent song required the action of fondling a child, andwho rendered the passage with an instinctive tenderness and grace, all themore pathetic for the profaning boldness of her super masculine dress orundress. Commonly, however, the members of these burlesque troupes, thoughthey were not like men, were in most things as unlike women, and seemedcreatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly ashocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, theirarchness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame. Yetwhoever beheld these burlesque sisters, must have fallen into perplexingquestion in his own mind as to whose was the wrong involved. It was notthe fault of the public--all of us felt that: was it the fault of thehard-working sisterhood, bred to this as to any other business, and notnecessarily conscious of the indecorum which pains my reader, --obliged toplease somehow, and aiming, doubtless, at nothing but applause? "La BelleHélène" suggests the only reasonable explanation: _"C'est lafatalité_. "

FLITTING

I would not willingly repose upon the friendship of a man whose localattachments are weak. I should not demand of my intimate that he have ayearning for the homes of his ancestors, or even the scenes of his ownboyhood; that is not in American nature; on the contrary, he is but a poorcreature who does not hate the village where he was born; yet a sentimentfor the place where one has lived two or three years, the hotel where onehas spent a week, the sleeping car in which one has ridden from Albany toBuffalo, --so much I should think it well to exact from my friend in proofof that sensibility and constancy without which true friendship does notexist. So much I am ready to yield on my own part to a friend's demand, and I profess to have all the possible regrets for Benicia Street, now Ihave left it. Over its deficiencies I cast a veil of decent oblivion, andshall always try to look upon its worthy and consoling aspects, which werefar the more numerous. It was never otherwise, I imagine, than an idealregion in very great measure; and if the reader whom I have sometimesseemed to direct thither, should seek it out, he would hardly find myBenicia Street by the city sign-board. Yet this is not wholly because itwas an ideal locality, but because much of its reality has now becomemerely historical, a portion of the tragical poetry of the past. Many ofthe vacant lots abutting upon Benicia and the intersecting streetsflourished up, during the four years we knew it, into fresh-painted woodenhouses, and the time came to be when one might have looked in vain for theabandoned hoop-skirts which used to decorate the desirable building-sites. The lessening pasturage also reduced the herds which formerly fed in thevicinity, and at last we caught the tinkle of the cow-bells only as thecattle were driven past to remoter meadows. And one autumn afternoon twolaborers, hired by the city, came and threw up an earthwork on theopposite side of the street, which they said was a sidewalk, and would addto the value of property in the neighborhood. Not being dressed with coal-ashes, however, during the winter, the sidewalk vanished next summer undera growth of rag-weed, and hid the increased values with it, and it is nowan even question whether this monument of municipal grandeur will finallybe held by Art or resumed by Nature, --who indeed has a perpetual motherlylonging for her own, and may be seen in all outlying and suburban places, pathetically striving to steal back any neglected bits of ground andconceal them under her skirts of tattered and shabby verdure. But whateveris the event of this contest, and whatever the other changes wrought inthe locality, it has not yet been quite stripped of the characteristiccharms which first took our hearts, and which have been duly celebrated inthese pages. 

When the new house was chosen, we made preparations to leave the old one, but preparations so gradual, that, if we had cared much more than we did, we might have suffered greatly by the prolongation of the agony. Weproposed to ourselves to escape the miseries of moving by transferring thecontents of one room at a time, and if we did not laugh incredulously atpeople who said we had better have it over at once and be done with it, itwas because we respected their feelings, and not because we believed them. We took up one carpet after another; one wall after another we stripped ofits pictures; we sent away all the books to begin with; and by this subtleand ingenious process, we reduced ourselves to the discomfort of living inno house at all, as it were, and of being at home in neither one place northe other. Yet the logic of our scheme remained perfect; and I do notregret its failure in practice, for if we had been ever so loath to quitthe old house, its inhospitable barrenness would finally have hurried usforth. In fact, does not life itself in some such fashion dismantle itstenement until it is at last forced out of the uninhabitable place? Arenot the poor little comforts and pleasures and ornaments removed one byone, till life, if it would be saved, must go too? We took a lesson fromthe teachings of mortality, which are so rarely heeded, and we lingeredover our moving. We made the process so gradual, indeed, that I do notfeel myself all gone yet from the familiar work-room, and for aught I cansay, I still write there; and as to the guest-chamber, it is so denselypeopled by those it has lodged that it will never quite be emptied ofthem. Friends also are yet in the habit of calling in the parlor, andtalking with us; and will the children never come off the stairs? Doeslife, our high exemplar, leave so much behind as we did? Is this whatfills the world with ghosts?

In the getting ready to go, nothing hurt half so much as the sight of thelittle girl packing her doll's things for removal. The trousseaux of allthose elegant creatures, the wooden, the waxen, the biscuit, the india-rubber, were carefully assorted, and arranged in various small drawers andboxes; their house was thoughtfully put in order and locked fortransportation; their innumerable broken sets of dishes were packed inpaper and set out upon the floor, a heart-breaking little basketful. Nothing real in this world is so affecting as some image of reality, andthis travesty of our own flitting was almost intolerable. I will notpretend to sentiment about anything else, for everything else had in itthe element of self-support belonging to all actual afflictions. When theday of moving finally came, and the furniture wagon, which ought to havebeen only a shade less dreadful to us than a hearse, drew up at our door, our hearts were of a Neronian hardness. 

"Were I Diogenes, " says wrathful Charles Lamb in one of his letters, "Iwould not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first hadnothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret. " I fancy thisloathing of the transitionary state came in great part from the rude andelemental nature of the means of moving in Lamb's day. In our own time, inCharlesbridge at least, everything is so perfectly contrived, that it isin some ways a pleasant excitement to move; though I do not commend thediversion to any but people of entire leisure, for it cannot be deniedthat it is, at any rate, an interruption to work. But little is broken, little is defaced, nothing is heedlessly outraged or put to shame. Ofcourse there are in every house certain objects of comfort and evenornament which in a state of repose derive a sort of dignity from beingcracked, or scratched, or organically debilitated, and give an idea ofancestral possession and of long descent to the actual owner; and you mustnot hope that this venerable quality will survive their public exposureupon the furniture wagon. There it instantly perishes, like theconsequence of some country notable huddled and hustled about in thegraceless and ignorant tumult of a great city. To tell the truth, thenumber of things that turn shabby under the ordeal of moving strikes apang of unaccustomed poverty to the heart which, loving all manner ofmakeshifts, is rich even in its dilapidations. For the time you feeldegraded by the spectacle of that forlornness, and if you are a man ofspirit, you try to sneak out of association with it in the mind of thepasser-by; you keep scrupulously in-doors, or if a fancied exigencyobliges you to go back and forth between the old house and the new, youseek obscure by-ways remote from the great street down which the wagonflaunts your ruin and decay, and time your arrivals and departures so asto have the air of merely dropping in at either place. This consoles you;but it deceives no one; for the man who is moving is unmistakably stampedwith transition. 

Yet the momentary eclipse of these things is not the worst. It _is_momentary; for if you will but plant them in kindly corners and favorableexposures of the new house, a mould of respectability will graduallyoverspread them again, and they will once more account for their presenceby the air of having been a long time in the family; but there is dangerthat in the first moments of mortification you will be tempted to replacethem with new and costly articles. Even the best of the old things arenothing to boast of in the hard, unpitying light to which they areexposed, and a difficult and indocile spirit of extravagance is evoked inthe least profuse. Because of this fact alone I should not commend thediversion of moving save to people of very ample means as well as perfectleisure; there are more reasons than the misery of flitting why thedweller in the kilderkin should not covet the hogshead reeking of claret. 

But the grosser misery of moving is, as I have hinted, vastly mitigated bymodern science, and what remains of it one may use himself to with notremendous effort. I have found that in the dentist's chair, --thatironically luxurious seat, cushioned in satirical suggestion of impossiblerepose, --after a certain initial period of clawing, filing, scraping, andpunching, one's nerves accommodate themselves to the torment, and onetakes almost an objective interest in the operation of tooth-filling; andin like manner after two or three wagon-loads of your household stuff havepassed down the public street, and all your morbid associations with themhave been desecrated, you begin almost to like it. Yet I cannot regardthis abandon as a perfectly healthy emotion, and I do not counsel myreader to mount himself upon the wagon and ride to and fro even once, forafterwards the remembrance of such an excess will grieve him. 

Of course, I meant to imply by this that moving sometimes comes to an end, though it is not easy to believe so while moving. The time really arriveswhen you sit down in your new house, and amid whatever disorder take yourfirst meal there. This meal is pretty sure to be that gloomy tea, thatloathly repast of butter and toast, and some kind of cake, with which thesoul of the early-dining American is daily cast down between the hours ofsix and seven in the evening; and instinctively you compare it with thelast meal you took in your old house, seeking in vain to decide whetherthis is more dispiriting than that. At any rate that was not at all themeal which the last meal in any house which has been a home ought to be infact, and is in books. It was hurriedly cooked; it was served uponfugitive and irregular crockery; and it was eaten in deplorable disorder, with the professional movers waiting for the table outside the dining-room. It ought to have been an act of serious devotion; it was nothing butan expiation. It should have been a solemn commemoration of all pastdinners in the place, an invocation to their pleasant apparitions. But I, for my part, could not recall these at all, though now I think of themwith the requisite pathos, and I know they were perfectly worthy ofremembrance. I salute mournfully the companies that have sat down atdinner there, for they are sadly scattered now; some beyond seas, somebeyond the narrow gulf, so impassably deeper to our longing and tendernessthan the seas. But more sadly still I hail the host himself, and desire toknow of him if literature was not somehow a gayer science in those days, and if his peculiar kind of drolling had not rather more heart in it then. In an odd, not quite expressible fashion, something of him seems dispersedabroad and perished in the guests he loved. I trust, of course, that allwill be restored to him when he turns--as every man past thirty feels hemay when he likes, and has the time--and resumes his youth. Or if thisfeeling is only a part of the great tacit promise of eternity, I am allthe more certain of his getting back his losses. 

I say that now these apposite reflections occur to me with a sufficientease, but that upon the true occasion for them they were absent. So, too, at the first meal in the new house, there was none of that desirable senseof setting up a family altar, but a calamitous impression of irretrievableupheaval, in honor of which sackcloth and ashes seemed the only wear. Yeteven the next day the Lares and Penates had regained something of theirwonted cheerfulness, and life had begun again with the first breakfast. Infact, I found myself already so firmly established that, meeting thefurniture cart which had moved me the day before, I had the face to askthe driver whom they were turning out of house and home, as if my ownflitting were a memory of the far-off past. 

Not that I think the professional mover expects to be addressed in ajoking mood. I have a fancy that he cultivates a serious spirit himself, in which he finds it easy to sympathize with any melancholy on the part ofthe moving family. There is a slight flavor of undertaking in his manner, which is nevertheless full of a subdued firmness very consoling andsupporting; though the life that he leads must be a troubled anduncheerful one, trying alike to the muscles and the nerves. How often musthe have been charged by anxious and fluttered ladies to be very careful ofthat basket of china, and those vases! How often must he have been vexedby the ignorant terrors of gentlemen asking if he thinks that the library-table, poised upon the top of his load, will hold! His planning is notinfallible, and when he breaks something uncommonly precious, what does aman of his sensibility do? Is the demolition of old homes reallydistressing to him, or is he inwardly buoyed up by hopes of other andbetter homes for the people he moves? Can there be any ideal of moving?Does he, perhaps, feel a pride in an artfully constructed load, and has hesomething like an artist's pang in unloading it? Is there a choice infamilies to be moved, and are some worse or better than others? Next tothe lawyer and the doctor, it appears to me that the professional moverholds the most confidential relations towards his fellow-men. He is letinto all manner of little domestic secrets and subterfuges; I dare say heknows where half the people in town keep their skeleton, and what mannerof skeleton it is. As for me, when I saw him making towards a certaincloset door, I planted myself firmly against it. He smiled intelligence;he knew the skeleton was there, and that it would be carried to the newhouse after dark. 

I began by saying that I should wish my friend to have some sort of localattachment; but I suppose it must be owned that this sentiment, like pity, and the modern love-passion, is a thing so largely produced by culturethat nature seems to have little or nothing to do with it. The first menwere homeless wanderers; the patriarchs dwelt in tents, and shifted theirplace to follow the pasturage, without a sigh; and for children--the pre-historic, the antique people, of our day--moving is a rapture. The lastdinner in the old house, the first tea in the new, so doleful to theirelders, are partaken of by them with joyous riot. Their shrill treblesecho gleefully from the naked walls and floors; they race up and down thecarpetless stairs; they menace the dislocated mirrors and crockery;through all the chambers of desolation they frolic with a gayetyindomitable save by bodily exhaustion. If the reader is of a movingfamily, --and so he is as he is an American, --he can recall the zest hefound during childhood in the moving which had for his elders--poorvictims of a factitious and conventional sentiment!--only the salt andbitterness of tears. His spirits never fell till the carpets were down; nosorrow touched him till order returned; if Heaven so blessed him that hisbed was made upon the floor for one night, the angels visited his dreams. Why, then, is the mature soul, however sincere and humble, not onlygrieved but mortified by flitting? Why cannot one move without feeling thegreat public eye fixed in pitying contempt upon him? This sense ofabasement seems to be something quite inseparable from the act, which isoften laudable, and in every way wise and desirable; and he whom it hasafflicted is the first to turn, after his own establishment, and look withscornful compassion upon the overflowing furniture wagon as it passes. ButI imagine that Abraham's neighbors, when he struck his tent, and packedhis parlor and kitchen furniture upon his camels, and started off withMrs. Sarah to seek a new camping-ground, did not smile at the procession, or find it worthy of ridicule or lament. Nor did Abraham, once settled, and reposing in the cool of the evening at the door of his tent, gazesarcastically upon the moving of any of his brother patriarchs. 

To some such philosophical serenity we shall also return, I suppose, whenwe have wisely theorized life in our climate, and shall all have becomenomads once more, following June and October up and down and across thecontinent, and not suffering the full malice of the winter and summeranywhere. But as yet, the derision that attaches to moving attends eventhe goer-out of town, and the man of many trunks and a retinue of linen-suited womankind is a pitiable and despicable object to all the otherpassengers at the railroad station and on the steamboat wharf. 

This is but one of many ways in which mere tradition oppresses us. Iprotest that as moving is now managed in Charlesbridge, there is hardlyany reason why the master or mistress of the household should put hand toanything; but it is a tradition that they shall dress themselves in theirworst, as for heavy work, and shall go about very shabby for at least aday before and a day after the transition. It is a kind of sacrifice, Isuppose, to a venerable ideal; and I would never be the first to omit it. In others I observe that this vacant and ceremonious zeal is in proportionto an incapacity to do anything that happens really to be required; and Ibelieve that the truly sage person would devote moving-day to payingvisits of ceremony in his finest clothes. 

[Illustration: "Vacant and ceremonious zeal. "]

As to the house which one has left, I think it would be preferable to haveit occupied as soon as possible after one's flitting. Pilgrimages to thedismantled shrine are certainly to be avoided by the friend ofcheerfulness. A day's absence and emptiness wholly change its character, though the familiarity continues, with a ghastly difference, as in thebeloved face that the life has left. It is not at all the vacant house itwas when you came first to look at it: for then hopes peopled it, and nowmemories. In that golden prime you had long been boarding, and any place inwhich you could keep house seemed utterly desirable. How distinctly yourecall that wet day, or that fair day, on which you went through it anddecided that this should be the guest chamber and that the family room, andwhat could be done with the little back attic in a pinch! The childrencould play in the dining-room; and to be sure the parlor was rather smallif you wanted to have company; but then, who would ever want to give aparty? and besides, the pump in the kitchen was a compensation foranything. How lightly the dumb waiter ran up and down, --

 "Qual piuma al vento!"

you sang, in very glad-heartedness. Then estimates of the number of yardsof carpeting; and how you could easily save the cost from the differencebetween boarding and house-keeping. Adieu, Mrs. Brown! henceforth let your"desirable apartments, _en suite_ or single, furnished orunfurnished, to gentlemen only!"--this married pair is about to escapeforever from your extortions. 

Well, if the years passed without making us sadder, should we be much thewiser for their going? Now you know, little couple, that there areextortions in this wicked world beside Mrs. Brown's; and some otherthings. But if you go into the empty house that was lately your home, youwill not, I believe, be haunted by these sordid disappointments, for theplace should evoke other regrets and meditations. Truly, though the greatfear has not come upon you here, in this room you may have known momentswhen it seemed very near, and when the quick, fevered breathings of thelittle one timed your own heart-beats. To that door, with many othermissives of joy and pain, came haply the dispatch which hurried you off toface your greatest sorrow--came by night, like a voice of God, speakingand warning, and making all your work idle and your aims foolish. Thesewalls have answered, how many times, to your laughter; they have hadfriendly ears for the trouble that seemed to grow by utterance. You havesat upon the threshold so many summer days; so many winter mornings youhave seen the snows drifted high about it; so often your step has beenlight and heavy upon it. There is the study, where your magnificentperformances were planned, and your exceeding small performances wereachieved; hither you hurried with the first criticism of your first book, and read it with the rapture that nothing but a love-letter and afavorable review can awaken. Out there is the well-known humble prospect, that was commonly but a vista into dreamland; on the other hand is thepretty grove, --its leaves now a little painted with the autumn, andfaltering to their fall. 

Yes, the place must always be sacred, but painfully sacred; and I sayagain one should not go near it unless as a penance. If the reader willsuffer me the confidence, I will own that there is always a pang in thepast which is more than any pleasure it can give, and I believe that he, if he were perfectly honest, --as Heaven forbid I or any one should be, --would also confess as much. There is no house to which one would return, having left it, though it were the hogshead out of which one had movedinto a kilderkin; for those associations whose perishing leaves us free, and preserves to us what little youth we have, were otherwise perpetuatedto our burden and bondage. Let some one else, who has also escaped fromhis past, have your old house; he will find it new and untroubled bymemories, while you, under another roof, enjoy a present that borders onlyupon the future.