Margaret, by Sylvester Judd. (Boston: Jordan and Wiley, 1845)

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“It is the vernal season; for the heart is very moment longing to walk in the garden, and every bird of the grove is melodious in its carols as the nightingale: thou wilt fancy it a dawning zephyr of early spring, or new year’s day morning; but it is the breath of Jesus, for in that fresh breath and verdure the dead earth is reviving.”—Saadi.

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CHAPTER I.

Phantasmagorical.—Introductory.

We behold a child eight or ten months old; it has brown, curly hair, dark eyes, fair conditioned features, a health-glowing cheek, and well-shaped limbs. Who is it? Whose is it? what is it? where is it? It is in the centre of fantastic light, and only a dimly-revealed form appears. It may be Queen Victoria’s or Sally Twig’s. It is God’s own child, as all children are. The blood of Adam and Eve, through how many soever channels diverging, runs in its veins, and the spirit of the Eternal, that blows everywhere, has animated its soul. It opens its eyes upon us, stretches out his hands to us, as all children do. Can you love it? It may be the heir of a throne, does it interest you; or of a milking stool, do not despise it. It is a miracle of the All-working, it is endowed by the All-gifted. Smile upon it, and it will smile you back again; prick it, and it will cry. Where does it belong? in what zone or climate? on what hill? in what plain? It may have been born on the Thames or the Amazon, the Hoan Ho or the Mississippi.

The vision deepens. Green grass appears beneath the child. It may, after all, be Queen Victoria’s in Windsor Park, or Sally Twig’s on Little Pucker Island. The sun now shines upon it, a blue sky breaks over it, and the wind rustles its hair. Sun, sky, and wind are common to Arctic and Antartic [sic] regions, and belong to each of the three hundred and sixty terrestrial divisions. A black-cap is seen to fly over it; and this bird is said by naturalists to be found in

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every part of the globe. A dog, or a whelp of a dog, a young pup, crouches near it, makes a caracol backwards, frisks away, and returns again. The child is pleased, throws out its arms, and laughs right merrily.

As we now look at the child, we can hardly tell to which of the five races it belongs; whether it be a Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Ethiopian, or Malay. Each child on this terraqueous ball, whether its nose be aquiline, its eyes black and small, its cheek-bones prominent, its lips large, or its head narrow; whether its hue be white, olive, or jet, is of God’s creating, and is delighted with the bright summer light, a bed of grass, the wind, birds, and puppies; and smiles in the eyes of all beholders. It is God’s child still, and its mother’s. It is curiously and wonderfully made; the inspiration of the Almighty hath given it understanding. It will look after God, its Maker, by how many soever names he may be called; it will aspire to the Infinite, whether that Infinite be expressed in Bengalee or Arabic, English or Chinese; it will seek to know truth; it will long to be loved; it will sin and be miserable, if it has none to care for it; it will die. Let us give it to Queen Victoria. “No,” says Sally Twig, “it is mine.” “No,” says the Empress Isabella, “it is destined to the crown of Castile.” “Not so shure of that, me hearty, it is Teddy O’Rourke’s own Phelim.” “Nay,” says a Tahitian, “I left it playing under the palm-trees.” “What presumption!” exclaims Mrs. Morris, “it is our Frances Maria, whom the servant has taken to the Common.” “I just bore it in my own arms through the cypresses,” says Osceola.

It seems to be in pain. “Mein Gott! gehet eilend hin.” “Poor Frances Maria!” “Paneeweh htouwenaunuh neenmaumtehkeh!” “Per amor del Cielo!” “Jesus mind Teddy’s Phelim.” “O Nhaw nddg erm devishd!” “Wæsucks! my wee bonny wean, she’ll die while ye are bletherin here.” “Bismillahi!” “Ma chere enfante!” “Alohi, Alohi!” “Ora pro nobis!” “None of your whidds, dub the giggle, and take the bantling up.” “Eatooaa!” What a babel of exclamations! What manifold articulations of affection! But hold, good friends, may be the child does not belong to you.

The scene advances. Two hands are seen thrust down towards it, and now it smiles again. Near by discovers itself a peach tree. Where does that belong? Not like the black-cap everywhere. In the grass shows the yellow disk of a

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dandelion; the skin of the child settles into a Caucasian whiteness, and its fat fingers are making for the flower. Be not disappointed, my friends, your children still live and smile; let this one live and smile too. Go, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, or Malay, and take your child in your arms, and it will remind you of this, since they are all so much alike.

Now the child crawls toward the peach tree. Those two hands, that may belong to its brother, set the child on its feet by the side of the tree, as it were measuring their heights, which are found to be the same. Yellow and brown chickens appear on the grass, and run under the low mallows and smart-weed. A sheet of water is seen in the distance, spotted with green islands. Forest trees burst forth in the rim of the picture—butternuts, beeches, maples, pines. A sober-faced boy, seven or eight years old, to whom the two hands are seen to belong, sits down, and with a fife pipes to the child, who manifests strong joy at the sound. A man in a three-cornered hat and wig, with nankeen small-clothes, and paste buckles, takes the child in his arms. Where is the child? A log cabin appears; a woman in a blue striped long-short and yellow skirt, comes to the door. An Anglo-Saxon voice is heard. If you were to look into the cabin or house, you would discover a loom and spinning-wheels, and behind it, a larger boy making shingles, and somewhere about a jolly-faced man drinking rum. The woman, addressing the first boy as Chilion, tells him to bring the child into the house.

This child we will inform you is Margaret, of whom we have many things to say, and hope to reveal more perfectly to you. She is in the town of Livingston, in that section of the United States of America known as New England. And yet, so far as this book is concerned, she is for you all as much as if she were your own child, and if you cared anything about her when you did not know her, we desire that your regards may not abate, when you do know her, even if she be not your own child; and we dedicate this memoir of her to ALL who are interested in her, and care to read about her. In the meantime, if you are willing, we will lose sight of her for seven or eight years, and present her in a more tangible form, as she appeared at the end of that period.

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CHAPTER II.

Work and Beauty.—An Impression of the Real.

The child Margaret sits in the door of her house, on a low stool, with a small wheel, winding spools, in our vernacular, “quilling,” for her mother, who, in a room near by, is mounted in a loom, weaving and smoking, the fumes of her pipe mingling with the whizz of the shuttle, the jarring of the lathe, and the clattering of treadles. From a windle the thread is conducted to the quills, and buzz, buzz goes Margaret’s wheel, while a grey squirrel, squatted on her shoulder, inspects the operation with a most profound gravity.

“Look up the chimney, child,” says the mother, “and see what time it is.”

“I don’t know how,” replies Margaret.

“I suppose we must get the Master to learn you your a b c’s in this matter,” rejoined the mother. “When the sun gets in one inch, it is ten o’clock, when it reaches the stone that bouges out there, it is dinner time. How many quills have you done?”

“The basket is full, and the box besides. Chilion said I might go and sail with him.”

“We have a great deal to do. Miss Gisborne’s flannel is promised the last of the week, and it must be drawn in to-morrow. I want you to clean the skans; there is a bunch of lucks down cellar, bring them up; get some plantain and dandelion on the smooth for greens; you must pick over some beans; put some kindlers under the pot; then you may go.”

“I had a dream last night.”

“You are always dreaming. I am afraid you will come to a bad end.”

“It was a pretty dream.”

“I can’t help your dreams; here pick up this.”

The woman had broken a thread in the chain, and while Margaret helped her out of the trouble, she looked into her mother’s face, and, as if following out her thoughts, said, “A woman came near to me, she dropped tears upon me, she stood in the clouds.”

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“I can’t stop to hear you now,” replied her mother. “Run and do what I have told you.”

When Margaret had finished the several chores, she went to the Pond. She was barefoot and barearmed. She wore a brown linen gown or tunic, open in front, a crimson skirt, a blue checked apron, and on her head was a green rush hat. By a narrow foot-path, winding through shrubbery and brambles, and defiling along the foot of a steep hill that rose near the house, she came to the margin of the water. Chilion, her brother, who was at work with a piece of glass, smoothing a snow-white bass-wood paddle, for a little bark canoe he had made her, saw Margaret approach with evident pleasure, yet received her in the quietest possible manner, as she leaped and laughed towards him. He asked her if she remembered the names of the flowers, and while he was finishing the paddle, she went along the shore to gather them. The Pond covered several hundreds of acres, its greatest diameter measured about a mile and a half; its outline was irregular, here divided by sharp rocks, there retreating into shaded coves; and on its face appeared three or four small islands, bearing trees and low bushes. Its banks, if not really asleep, had a bluff and precipitous aspect from the tall forest that girdled it about. The region was evidently primitive, and the child, as she went along, trod on round smooth pebbles of white and rose quartz, dark hornblende, greenstone, and an occasional fragment of trap, the results of the diluvial ocean, if any body can tell when or what that was. In piles, among the stones, lay quivering and ever accumulating masses of fleece-like, and fox-colored foam; there were also the empty shells of various kinds of mollusks. She clomb over the while peeled trunks of hemlock trees, that had fallen into the water, or drifted to the shore; she trod through beds of fine silver-grey sand, and in the shallow edge of the Pond, she waded on a hard, even bottom of the same, which the action of the waves had beaten into a smooth shining floor. She discovered flowers which her brother told her were hore-hound, skull-caps, and indian tobacco; she picked small green apples that disease had formed on the leaves of the willows; and beautiful velvety crimson berries from the black alder.

When all was ready, she got into her canoe, while her brother led the way in a boat of his own. With due instructions in the management of the paddle, she succeeded tolerably well. Chilion had often taken her on the water, and she

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was not much afraid. It was commonly reported that the Pond had no bottom, and an indefinable awe possessed the minds of people regarding it; but this Margaret was too young to feel; she took manifest delight in skimming across the top of that deep dark mystery. She toppled somewhat, her canoe shook and tilted, but on it went; there was a thin wake, a slight rustle of the water; her brother kept near her, and she enjoyed the fearful pastime. Reaching the opposite shore, Chilion drew up his boat, and went to a rock, where he set himself to catch fish with a long pole. Margaret played awhile with her canoe, and turned into a recess where the trees and rocks darkened the water, the surface of which lay calm and clear. The coolness of the spot was inviting, and birds were merry-making in the underwood, and deep in the water she saw the blue sky and the white clouds. “That looks like her,” she said, calling to mind her dream. She urged her canoe up a flat rock on the shore, where she took off her hat and apron; and, simply dressed as she was, the process of disrobing being speedily done, she waded into the water. She said, “I will go down to the bottom, I will tread on the clouds;” she sunk to her neck, she plunged her head under; she could discover nothing but the rocky or smooth sandy bed of the Pond. Was she disappointed? A sand-piper glided weet weeting along the shore; she ran after it, but could not catch it; she sat down and sozzled her feet in the foam; she saw a blue-jay washing itself, ducking its crest, and hustling the water with its wings, and she did the same. She got running mosses, twin-flower vines, and mountain laurel blossoms, and wound them about her neck and waist, and pushing off in her canoe, looked into the water as a mirror. Her dark clear hazle [sic] eyes, her fair white skin, the leaves and flowers, made a pretty vision. She smiled and was smiled on in turn; she held out her hand, which was reciprocated by the fair spirit below; she called her own name, the rocks and woods answered; she looked about her, but saw nothing. Had she fears or hopes? It may have been only childish sport. “I will jump to that girl,” she said, “I will tumble the clouds.” She sprang from her canoe, and dropped quietly, softly on the bottom; she had driven her companion away, and as she came up, her garlands broke and floated off in the ripples. Wiping herself on a coarse towel her mother wove for her, she dressed, and went back to her brother. A horn rang through the woods. “Dinner is ready,” he said, “we must go.”

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Returning, they came to the greensward in front of the house, where was a peach tree.

“I remember,” said her brother, “when you and that were of the same size, now it shades you. It is just as old as you are. How full of fruit it is.”

“Beautiful peaches they are too,” said Margaret, “when they are ripe. How did it grow?”

“I put a peach-stone in the ground one winter,” replied her brother, “and it sprouted in the spring.”

“I was an acorn once,” rejoined she, “so Obed says, and why did’nt I grow up an oak-tree?”

A dog bounding towards them interrupted the conversation. This animal had enormous proportions, and looked like a cross of wolf and mastiff; his color was a brindled black, his head was like the ideas we have of Cerberus, his legs were thick and strong, and he was called Bull. Following the dog, approached the jolly-faced father of Margaret from the barn, where he had been swingling flax; his hat, face, and clothes were covered and strung with tow and whitish down, but you could see him laugh through the veil; and the glow of his red face would make you laugh. He caught Margaret and set her on the dog, who galloped away with his load. They encountered her older brother coming in from the woods, where he had been burning a piece; his frock crusted with ashes, his face smirched with coals. He spoke tartly to Margaret, and contrived to trip the dog as he ran by, and throw his sister to the ground.

“Oh, don’t do so,” said she.

“Let Bull alone,” he replied, speaking in a blubbering washy manner, which we cannot imitate. “You’ll spile him; would you make a goslin of him? Here’s your sticks right in the track;” saying which he scattered with his foot a little paling she had constructed about a dandelion. She must needs cry; the dog went to her, looked in her eyes, lapped her tears, and she put her arms about his neck. Her brother, who seemed to be a kind of major domo in the family, whistled the dog away, and ordered his sister into the house to help her mother. Her father and older brother wore checked shirts, and a sort of brown tow trowsers known at the time—these things happened some years ago—as skilts; they were short, reaching just below the knee, and very large, being a full half yard broad at the bottom; supported by no braces or gallows, and resting on the hips. Neither wore any coat, vest, or neckcloth. Her father had on what was once a

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three-cornered hat, but the corners were now reduced to loose ragged flaps; and he wore in addition a leather apron. Her brother had a cap made of wood-chuck skin, steeple-shaped, from which the hair was pretty well rubbed off. They went to the cistern on the back side of the house, washed and rinsed themselves for dinner. The father discovered a gamesome expression of face, shining scirrous skin, and plump ruby head; his eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks whealed and puffed, and through his red lips his laughter exposed a suite of fair white teeth; his head was nearly bald, and the crown showed smooth and glairy; and under the thin flossy wreath of hair, that invested the lower part of his head, you could not fail to see that one of his ears was gone. Her brother had a more catonian look, and thick locks of coarse black hair kept well with his dark russet, sunburnt face, and his lips, if by nothing else, were swollen with large quids of tobacco.

The dinner-table, appropriate to the place in which it was set, consisted of boards laid on a movable cross-frame without a cloth. A large wooden dish or trencher, contained, flummery-like, in one mass, the entire substance of the meal—pork, potatoes, greens, beans. There were no suits of knives and forks, and the family helped themselves on wooden plates, with cuttoes. A large silver tankard curiously embossed, and bearing some armorial signets, formed an exception to the general aspect of things, and looked quite baronially down on its serf-like companions. This filled with cider constituted their drink. They were seated on blocks of wood and rag-bottom chairs. Margaret occupied a corner of the table near her younger brother Chilion, and had a cherry plate with a wolf’s bone knife and fork he made for her. They all ate heartily and enjoyed their meal. After dinner, Chilion went with his gun into the woods, the father and elder brother returned to their respective employments, her mother resumed her smoking and weaving, and Margaret had a new stint at quilling.

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CHAPTER III.

Localities Described.—The Family More Particularly Enumerated.—Obed Introduced.

The house where Margaret lived, of a type common in the early history of New England, and still seen in the regions of the West, was constructed of round logs sealed with mud and clay; the roof was a thatch composed of white-birch twigs, sweet-flag and straw wattled together, and overlaid with a slight battening of boards; from the ridge sprang a low stack of stones indicating the chimney-top. Glass-windows there were none, and in place thereof swung wooden shutters fastened on the inside by strings. The house was divided by the chimney into two principal apartments, one being the kitchen or commons, the other a work-shop. In the former, were prominently a turn-up bed used by the heads of the family, and a fireplace; this last, built of slabs of rough granite, was colossal in height, width, and depth; for dogs or andirons were splinters of stone. A handle of wood thrust into the socket of a broken spade supplied the place of a shovel. The room was neither boarded nor plastered; a varnish of smoke from tobacco pipes and pine-knots possibly answering in stead; and the naked stones of the chimney were blackened and polished by occasional effusions of steam and smoke from the fire. The room also contained the table-board, block, and rag-bottom chairs, and little stool for Margaret before mentioned. In one corner stood a broom made of hemlock twigs. On pegs driven into the logs, hung sundry articles of wearing apparel; sustained by crotched sticks nailed to the sleepers above, were a rifle and one or two muskets; a swing shelf was loaded with shot-pouches, bullet-moulds, powder-horns, fishing tackle, &c.; on the projecting stones of the chimney were sundry culinary articles, and conspicuously a one-gallon wooden rum-keg, and the silver tankard, as likewise pipes and tobacco. In the room, which we should say was quite capacious, hung two cages, one for a Robin, the other with a revolving apartment for a grey squirrel, called Dick. You would not also forget to notice a violin in a green baize bag, suspended on the walls, which belonged to Chilion, and was an important household article. On a

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post, near the chimney, were fastened some leaves of a book, which in examining you would find taken from the Bible, and consisting chiefly of statistical portions of the Old Testament. There were two windows or wall-openings in the kitchen, on the south and west sides. The floor of the room was warped in every direction, slivered and gaping at the joints; and, being made of knotty boards, the softer portions of which were worn down, these knots stood in ridges and hillocks all over the apartment. The workshop, of smaller dimensions, was similar, in its general outline, to the kitchen; it contained a loom, a kit where the father of Margaret sometimes made shoes, a common reel, hand reel, a pair of swifts, blades, or windle, a large, small, and quilling wheel, a dye tub, while yarn of all colors hung on the walls. The garret was divided by the chimney in a manner similar to the rooms below; on one side Margaret slept, and her brothers on the other; her bed consisted simply of a mattrass [sic] of beech leaves spread on the floor, with tow and wool coverlids, and coarse linen sheets. At each end of the garret was a window, like those in the kitchen. The ascent to this upper story was by a ladder. From the back side of the kitchen, a door opened into the shed, a rough frame of slabs and poles. Here were a draw-shave, a cross-cut saw, an axe, beetle and wedges, an ox-yoke, hog and geese yokes, barking irons, a scythe, rakes, a brush-bill, fox-traps, frows, sap-buckets, a leach-but, a small pile of wood and bark; here also hens roosted. At one corner of the shed was a half-barrel cistern, into which the water was brought by bark troughs from the hill near by, forming an ever flowing, ever musical, cool bright stream, passing off in a runnel, shaded by weeds and grasses. On all sides of the house, at some seasons of the year, might be seen the skins of various animals drying; the flesh side out, and fastened at the extremities; silver-grey and red foxes, wood-chucks, squirrels, martins, minks, musquashes, weazles, raccoons, and sometimes even bears and wolves; the many-colored tails of which, pendant, had an ornamental appearance. The house was on the west side of the road, and fronted the south. Opposite the house to the south, across what might have been a yard, saving that there were no fences, was a butternut tree,—the Butternut par excellence—having great extension of limb, and beautiful drooping willow-like foliage; near this was the Peach tree which has been noticed. Beyond lay the eastern extremity of the Pond. On the north was a small garden enclosed by a rude brush hedge. On the east side of the road was a log-

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barn, covered with thatch, and supported in part by the trunks of two trees.

The name of the family whose residence we have explored was Hart, and it consisted essentially of six members; Mr. and Mrs. Hart, their three sons, Nimrod, Hash and Chilion, and Margaret. We should remark that the heads of this house were never or rarely known by their proper names. Mr. Hart at some period had received the soubriquet of Head and Pluck, by the latter part of which he was generally designated; his first-born he called Nimrod; his second, Maharshalalhashbaz, abbreviated into Hash; and for his next son he chose that of Chilion. It must not be thought he had any reverence for the Bible; his conduct would belie any such supposition. He may have been superstitious; if it were so, that certainly was the extent of his devotion. The subject of this Memoir was sometimes called after her mother, Mary or Molly, and from regard to one long since deceased she had received the name of Margaret. Her father and mother were fond of contradicting each other, especially in matters of small moment, and while the latter called her Margaret or Peggy, the former was wont to address her as Molly. Her brothers gave her, one, one name, another, another.

Nimrod, the oldest son, was absent from home most of the year; how employed we shall have occasion hereafter to notice. Hash worked the farm, if farm it might be called, burnt coal in the fall, made sugar in the spring, drank, smoke, and teazed Margaret the rest of the time. Chilion fished, hunted, laid traps for foxes, drowned out woodchucks, &c.; he was also the artizan of the family, and with such instruments as he could command, constructed sap-buckets and spouts, chairs, a cart, cages, hencoops, sleds, yokes, traps, trellises, &c. He was very fond of music, and played on the violin and fife; in this also he instructed Margaret, whom he found a ready pupil; taught her the language of music, sang songs with her; he also told her the common names of many birds and flowers. He was somewhat diffident, reserved, or whatever it might be; and while he had manifestly a deep affection for his sister he never expressed himself very freely to her. Mr. Hart, or Pluck, if we give him the name by which he was universally recognized, helped Hash on the farm, broke flax, made shoes, a trade he prosecuted in an itinerating manner from house to house, “whipping the cat,”

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as it was termed, and drank excessively. Mrs. Hart, or Brown Moll, carded, spun, colored and wove, for herself and more for others, nipped and beaked her husband, drank and smokes. At the present time she was ab out forty-five or fifty; she had seen care and trouble, and seemed almost broken down alike by her habits and her misfortunes. She was wrinkled, faded and grey; her complexion was sallow, dark and dry; her expression, if it were not positively stern, was far from being amiable; she was a patient weaver, impatient with everything else. Her dress was a blue-striped linen short-gown, wrapper, or long-short, a coarse yellow petticoat and checked apron; short grizzly hairs bristled in all directions over her head. If in this family you could detect some trace of refinement, it would not be easy to discriminate its origin or to say how far removed it might be from unmixed vulgarity.

The term Pond, applied to the spot where this family dwelt, comprised not only the sheet of water therein situated but also the entire neighborhood. In the records of the town the place was denominated the West District. Sometimes it was called the Head, or Indian’s Head, from a hill thereon to which we shall presently refer, and the inhabitants were called Indians from this circumstance. An almost unbroken forest bounded the vision and skirted the abode of this family. They had only one neighbor, a widow lady, who resided at the north about half a mile. A road extending across the place from north to south terminated in the latter direction, about the same distance below Mr. Hart’s, at a hamlet known as No. 4. In the other course, directly or divergingly, this road led to sections called Snakehill, Five-mile-lot, and the Ledge. On the south-west was a plantation that had been christened Breakneck. The village of Livingston, or Settlement, as it was sometimes termed, lay to the east about two miles in a straight line. If a stranger should approach the Pond from the village he would receive the impression that it was singularly situated up among high hills, or even on a mountain, since his route would be one of continual and perhaps tedious ascent. But those who abode there had no idea their locality was more raised than that of the rest of the wo”, so sensibly are our notions of height and depression affected by residence. From the village you could descry the top of the Head, like a tower upon a mountain, elevated far into the heavens. To this hill, it being a striking characteristic of the Pond, we ask attention. Directly to the west of Mr. Hart’s house and not more than six rods distance its ascent commenced. It rose

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with an abrupt acclivity to the height of nearly one hundred feet. Its surface was ragged and rocky, and interspersed with various kinds of shrubs. From the edge of the water its south front sprang straight and sheer like a castle-wall. The top was flat and nearly bare of vegetation save the dead and barkless trunk of a hemlock, which, solitary and alone, shot up therefrom, and was sometimes called the Indian’s Feather. This hill derived its specific name, Indian’s Head, from a rude resemblance to a man’s face that could be traced on the south front. This particular eminence was not, however, a detached pinnacle,; it seemed rather to form the abrupt and crowned terminus of a mountainous range that swept far to the north and ultimately merged in those eternal hills that in-wall every horizon. Behind the hill, at the northern extremity of the Pond proper, where its waters were gathered to a head by a dam, and a saw-mill had been erected, was the Outlet; which became the source of a stream, that, proceeding circuitously to No. 4, and turning towards the village where it was again employed for milling purposes, had been denominated Mill Brook.

Mr. Hart had cleared a few acres in the vicinity of his house, for corn, potatoes and flax, and burnt over more for grain. He enjoyed also the liberty of brooks, rivulets and swamps, whence he gathered grass, brakes and whatever he could find to store his barn. Beyond the barn was a lot of five or six acres, known as the Mowing or Chesnuts. It was cleared, and partially cultivated with clover and herdsgrass. This consisted originally of a grove of chesnut trees, which not being felled, but killed by girdling, had become entirely divested of bark even to the tips of the limbs, and now stood, in number two or three score, in height fifty or seventy-five feet, denuded, blanched, a resort for crows, where woodpeckers hammered and blue-linnets sung. The otherwise sombre aspect of this lot was agreeably relieved, though we cannot say its solid advantages were enhanced, by a variety of shrubs, small green chesnuts starting from the roots of the old ones, white birches, choke cherries and others.

When Margaret had done her task, she was at liberty to repair the effect of Hash’s spleen and attend to her other own little affairs. Obed Wright, the son and only child of their only neighbor, was at hand to assist her. She had beans, hops and virgin’s bower trained up the side of the house, and even shading her chamber window. To prevent the ravages of hogs and geese, Chilion had fenced in a little spot for her

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near the house. Obed brought her new flowers from the woods and instructed her how to plant them. He was thirteen or fifteen years of age, homely but clever, as we say, a tall knuckle-jointed, shad-faced youth; his hair was red, his cheeks freckled; his hands and feet were immense, his arms long and stout. He suffered from near-sightedness. He was dressed like his neighbors, in a shirt and skilts, excepting that his collar and waist-bands were fastened by silver buttons; and he wore a cocked hat. It seemed to please him to help Margaret, and he stayed till almost sunset, when Hash came in from his work. Hash hated or spited Obed partly on Margaret’s account, partly because of misunderstandings with his mother, and partly from the perverseness of his own nature; and he annoyed him with the dog, Bull, who always growled and glared when he saw the boy. Margaret stood between him and the dog and saved him from serious harm. In the present instance, she held Bull by the neck, till Obed had time to run round the corner of the house and make his escape.

Margaret seated herself on the door-step to eat her supper, consisting of toasted brown bread and watered cider, served in a curiously wrought cherry-bowl and spoon. The family were taking their meal of bread, potatoes and cold port in the kitchen. The sun had gone down. The whippoorwill came and sat on the Butternut, and sang his evening note, always plaintive, always welcome. The night-hawk dashed and hissed through the woods and the air on long, slim, quivering wings. A solitary robin chanted sweetly a long time from the hill. Myriads of insects swarmed and murmured over her head. Crickets chirped in the grass and under the decaying sills of the house. She heard the voice of the waterfall at the Outlet, and the croaking of a thousand frogs on the Pond. She saw the stars come out, Lyra, the Northern Crown, the Serpent. She looked into the heavens, she opened her ears to the dim evening melodies of the universe; yet as a child[.] She was interrupted by the sharp voice of her mother, “Go to your roost, Peggy!”

“Yes, Molly dear,” said her father, very softly, “Dick and Robin are asleep; see who will be up first, you or the silver rooster; who will open your eyes first, you or the dandelion?”

“Kiss me, Margery,” said Chilion, as she went through the room,—she climbed into her chamber, she sank on her pallet, she closed her eyes, she fell into dreams of beauty and heaven,

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of other forms than those daily about her, of sweeter voices than either father or mother.

We conclude this chapter by remarking, that the scenes and events of this Memoir belong to what may be termed the mediæval or transition period of New England history, that lying between the close of the war of our Revolution, and the commencement of the present century.

CHAPTER IV.

The Widow Wright.

Margaret was up early in the morning, before the sun. She washed at the cistern and wiped herself on a coarse crash towel, rough, but invigorating, beautifying and healthy. She did her few chores, and, as she had promised, started for the Widow Wright’s. Hash was getting ready his team, a yoke of starveling steers, in a tumbril-cart, the axle fast in the wheels, which were cut from a solid block of wood. He set her in the cart, he desired to show his skill in driving, perhaps he wished to tease her on the way. “Haw! Buck, hish! Bright, gee up!”; vigorously plied he his whip of wood-chuck skin on a walnut stock. The cart reeled and rattled. It jolted over stones, canted on knolls, sidled into gutters. The way was rough, broken, unfinished. Margaret held fast by the stakes. “Good to settle your breakfast, Peggy. Going to see Obed, hey? and the widder? ask her if she can cure the yallers in Bright.” Margaret was victimized and amused by her brother. She half cried, half laughed. Her brother came at last to the lot he was engaged in clearing. He lifted Margaret from the cart. She went on, and Bull followed her. Hash called the dog back, and in great wrath gave him a blow with his whip. The animal leaped and skulked away, and joined again with Margaret, who patted his head, and he ran along by her side. She entered woods; the path was narrow, grass-grown. She picked flowers, and followed the cow-tracks through the thickets of sweet fern almost as high as her head. She descended a pitch in the road to a brook,

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which was crossed by a bridge of poles. The dog stopped to drink, she to look into the water. Minnows and pinheads were flashing and skirting through the clear, bright stream. There were hair-worms fabled to spring from horse-hair, in black lines writhing on the surface; caddice-worms clothed with shells and leaves, crawling on the bottom; and boat-flies swimming on their backs. The water made music with the stones. She waded in, and sported fare-feet on the smooth, shiny round pebbles. She looked under the bridge, and that shaded spot had a mystery to the child’s mind, such perhaps as is more remembered in future years, than commented on at the time. She pursued a trout, that had shown its black eye and golden spotted back and vanished. She could not find it. On she went towards Mrs. Wright’s.

This lady had lost her husband a few years before. He left her in possession of a small farm, and a larger reversion in the medicinal riches of the whole district. It had been a part of Dr. Wright’s occupation to gather and prepare herbs for the sick. His materia medica was large, various and productive. He learnt as he could the nature of diseases, and was sometimes called to prescribe as well as to sell his drugs. When he died, his wife came in full possession of his secrets and his practice. She gathered plants from all the woods, sands and swamps. She knew the quality of every root, stalk, leaf, flower and berry. Her son Obed she was instructing to be her servitor and aid, as well as the successor of his father. The lady’s habits were careful, saving, thriving. She cultivated, in addition, a few acres of land. Her house was neat and comfortable. It was a small frame building, clap-boarded on the sides and roof. It had a warm, sunny position, on a southern slope, with rocks and woods behind. It stood in the centre of a large yard, surrounded on all sides by a stump-fence, those of hemlock-trees, with their large, spreading, tangled roots, like the feet of giants, turned towards the street, making an impenetrable and very durable barrier. You entered the yard by a stile formed of the branches of these roots. Within the enclosure were beds of cultivated herbs, caraway, rue, savory, thyme, tansy, parsley and other aromatic and medicinal plants. Obed was at work among the beds. Margaret climbed the stile. Butll leaped up after her. When Obed saw Margaret his dull face gave a recognition of joy which was succeeded by an expression of dismay.

“Bull won’t hurt you, Obed. He’s a good dog,” said Margaret. “Put your hand on his head.”

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“He’s a great dog,” said Obed. “He’s got dreadful big teeth. Hash’s allers makin’ him bite me.”

The dog went and laid down in the sun under the eaves of the house. Margaret helped Obed pull the weeds from his beds, while with a hoe he loosened and aired the roots of the plants. The atmosphere was charged with the perfume of the flowers. Margaret shook the thyme-bed, and a shadowy motion, like the waving of a cloud, floated over it. Bees, flies, beetles, butterflies, were bustling upon it, diving into every flower, and searching every cup.

“Whad d ’ye think of the yarbs, Moll?” said the widow, who stood in the door of her house.

“They look pretty,” replied Margaret.

“Not looks, child, ’tis use. We ’ll get a hundred bunches, this year. The saffron we ’ll cut to-morrow, and the balm ’ll be ready soon.”

“You are not going to cut all these pretty flowers, are you?”

“Yes. Them ’s for medicine. Wait till the flowers is gone, they wouldn ’t be worth more ’n your toad-flax and bean vines. They wouldn ’t fetch a bungtown copper. See here, that ’s sage, good for tea. That ’s goat’s rue, good for women as has little babies. Guess you was a little baby once. I ’ve known ye ever sen ye warn’t more’n so high.”

“Was I so little?” asked Margaret.

“Yes, and pimpin enough. An I fed yer marm with rue, and comfrey-root, or ye never ’d come teu this. Ye was thin and poor as a late chicken. Now sow some sand.”

Margaret took the dish, and began to sprinkle the floor.

“Well done,” said the woman. “Ye ’ll make a smart gal. Here ’s some honey and bread.”

The Widow Wright was dressed in the costume of the times, a white linen short-gown, checked apron, black petticoat. She wore on her head a large brown turban. Her eye was black and piercing, and she possessed a singular power of laughter which was employed to express every variety of emotion, whether pleasure or pain, anger or complacence.

There was a bee-hive in front of the house, a close, well built shed, open to the south. The little workers were streaming through the air like a shower, dropping at the mouth of the hive, their legs laden and yellow with the dust of flowers. Margaret stood in front of the range. The bees shot by her from side to side, multitudes wheeled round her, some lit on her hat, some crawled over her neck. She watched the con-

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fusion; she listened to the hum within the hive. Not one offered her harm; she was not stung.

“A marvellous wonderful gal,” uttered the widow to herself, as she surveyed the scene from the door. “Pity ’tis she ’s Brown Moll’s child.”

Margaret had an errand at the place, to get some honey for a bee-hunt Chilion had proposed for the next day, and stated her desire to the widow. There was an old feud between the two families, not affecting intercourse and acquaintance, so much as matters of interest. The widow received the message rather coldly, and beginning in unwillingness, ended with invective.

“He ’s a lazy, good for nothin feller, Chil is. He ’s no better than a peaking mud-sucker. He lives on us all here like house-leek. He’s no more use than yer prigged up creepers. He is worse than the witches, vervain nor dill don ’t keep him away. I tell ye, Chil shan ’t have no honey.”

Margaret was abashed, silenced. She could understand that her brother would feel disappointed; that he was not so bad. Beyond this she did not discriminate[.]

“Chilion is good,” she stammered out at last.

“Good! what ’s he good for?” rejoined the woman. “Does he get any money? Can he find yarbs? He don’t know the difference between snake-root and lavender.”

“He ’s good to me,” said Margaret. This was an appeal that struck the woman with some force. She seemed to soften.

“Ye are a good child; ye help Obed.”

“Yes,” said Margaret, as if watching her cue, “I will help Obed. I ’ll mind the beds when the birds are about. I’ll go into the woods and get plants. I ’ll keep Bull off rom him.”

“Bein ye ’ll help Obed, I ’ll give ye the honey. But don’t come agin.”

Margaret, taking the article in question on some green leaves, went merrily home.

We cannot dismiss this chapter without remarking that the Widow Wright revered the memory of her husband. It was certainly of some use for her to do so, as his reputation had been considerable in the line of his practice. The representation of the deceased, which she herself bore, she designed by degrees to transfer to her son. The silver buttons, which shone on Obed, as well as other articles of dress he occasionally wore, belonged to his late father. With all

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her thrift and care, the lady liked our Margaret very well. “She was so feat and spry, and knowing, and good-natered,” she said, “she could be made of some use to somebody.”

CHAPTER V.

The Bee-Hunt.—Margaret Goes Farther Into Nature.—She Sins and Repents.—The Master.

The next morning, Chilion and Margaret, joined by Obed, started on a bee-hunt. Obed was to remain with them till they should have been successful in this enterprise, then Margaret agreed to help him gather such plants and roots, growing wild in the woods, as could be of use to his mother. They took with them the honey, an axe, leather-mittens for the hands, and screens for the face, some brimstone and a tinder-box, a basket, spade, &c., for their several purposes. They entered the woods lying to the south of the Pond, an unlimited range, extending in some directions many miles. The honey was placed on a stump, and several bees, springing up as it were from vacuity, lading themselves with it, darted off. Our hunters pursued, watching the course of their flight, and were conducted by the unconscious guides to their own abode. This was a chesnut tree, hollow at the root and partially decayed in the top. Not many strokes were requisite to bring it crashing to the ground. It was a more difficult job to possess themselves of the honey. The angry bees seemed to spurt out of their nest like fire; their simultaneous start, their mixed and deepened buzz, their thousand wings beating as for life, made a noise not unlike a distant waterfall, or the hidden roar of an abyss. Their persecutors speedily covered their faces and hands and waited for the alarm to subside. Margaret said she thought they would not hurt her, as those at the widow’s did not. It is said there are some persons whom bees never sting. She kindled the brimstone each side of the tree. The bees within, called out by a rap on the trunk, and those without, flying and crawling about their nest, fell dead in the smoke. Chilion cut about the cavity where the comb was deposited. Margaret, looking in, and seeing

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the beautiful well-constructed house of the bees, seemed struck with remorse. She had eaten honey and honey-comb. She had seen bees, but she never had associated the two together in such a touching, domestic and artistical sense. She saw the bees lying dead in heaps. She had killed them. She had seen them aroused by a relentless hand from the repose and security of their house, and sink in the blue flame. Some were not quite dead, some lay on their backs, their feet convulsed and arms quivering. Others were endeavoring to stretch their wings. She could give back no life; she could set not a muscle in motion; she could re-form not a filament of a wing. They would visit her flowers no more; their hum would blend never again with the sounds she loved to hear. Whether the reflections of the child were just of this sort, order and proportion, we are not told. The bees were dead and she was sad. She had seen dead squirrels, raccoons, partridges, pigeons. But they were brought in dead; she had not killed them. What is the child’s first sense of death? She would have given all her little heart was worth, could she render back that life she had so thoughtlessly taken, could she see them again busy, blithe, happy about their house. Tears ran down her cheeks, the unconscious expiation of Nature to the Infinite Life. Chilion and Obed were apparently too much occupied to notice her agitation, nor would she have dared to speak to them of what she felt.

The tall, gawky form of Obed went before through the woods. The lad’s skilts, through which were thrust his lean dry shanks, gave him a semblance to a peasant of Gascony on stilts. His shovel hat dodged to and fro, bobbed up and down among the branches. It was, as we might say, a new scene to Margaret. She had never gone so far into the forest before. She was susceptible in her feelings, and fresh as susceptible. The impression of the bees somewhat abated, though its remembrance could never be stifled. The woods,—where Adam and Eve enjoyed their pastime and sought their repose; where the Amorites and Assyrians learned to pray, and the Israelites to rebel; where all ancient nations found materials for sacrifice and offering; where Hertha, the Goddess of the Angles, had her lovely residence; where the Druids “thought everything sent from heaven that grew on the oak;” the religion and worship of the old Germans, Italians, and Gauls; where Pan piped, the Satyrs danced, the Fauns browsed, Sylvanus loved, Diana hunted, and Feronia watched; whence Greek and Saracen, Pagan and Christian derived architecture, order, grace, capi-

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tals, groins, arches; whence came enchantment and power to Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Scott, Cooper, Bryant, Titian, Rosa, Poussin, Claude, Meyer, Allston; where “the stately castle of the feudal lord reared its head, the lonely anchorite sang his evening hyn, and the sound of the convent bell was heard,” and the fox and stag-hunter pursued their game; where Robin Hood and his merry men did their exploits, and king Rufus was slain; the enlivenment and decoration of the Feast of Tabernacles, May-day, Whitsuntide, Christmas; the ward of dryads, the scene of fairy revels, and Puck’s pranks, the haunt of bul-beggars, witches, spirits, urchins, elves, hags, dwarfs, giants, the spoorn, the puckle, the man in the oak, will-o’-the-wisp; the opera-house of birds, the shelter of beasts, the retreat of mosquitoes and flies; where sugar was made, and coal burnt; where the report of the rifle was heard, and the stroke of the axe resounded; the home, manor, church, country, kingdom, hunting-ground and burial place of the Indian; the woods, green, sweet-smelling, imparadisaical, inspiring, suggestive, wild, musical, sombre, superstitious, devotional, mystic, tranquillizing;—these were about the child and over her.

That we must know in order to know, that we must feel in order to feel, was a truth Margaret but little realized. She was beginning to know and to feel. Could the Immortal Spirit of the Woods have spoken to her? but she was not prepared for it; she was too young; she only felt an exhilarating sensation of variety, beauty, grandeur, awe. She leaped over roots, she caught at branches above her head, she hid herself in thickets, she chased the birds. Yet with all that was new about her, and fitted to engross her vision, and supplant her recent sorrowful impressions, there seemed a new sense aroused, or active within her, an unconscious instinct, a hidden prompting of duty; she trod with more care than usual; a fly, or beetle, or snail, she turned aside for, or stepped protectingly over; she would not jostle or tear a spider’s web—the wood-spider that strings his lines across from bush to bush.

“It won’t hurt ye,” said Obed. “It brings good weather.”

“I know that,” replied Margaret, “but I don’t want to kill it.”

Obed was homely and clever, as we have said, simple and trusting. He never argued a point with Margaret; he was glad to have her help him, and glad to help her. He held back the low wiry branches of the hemlocks where she passed,

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he assisted her over the round slippery trunk of a fallen tree, he lifted her across the narrow deep stream of Mill Brook, running in green spongy banks. He brandished his spade, and said he would keep off the snakes; Margaret replied that she was not afraid of them. They came to a sunny glade in the woods, tufted with black and white moss, shaded by huckle-berry shrubs, and sown with checker-berries, whose fruit hung in round crimson drops, and little waxen flowers bloomed under the dark shining leaves. Margaret sat down and ate the sweet berries and their spicy leaves. The shadows of the forest vibrated and flickered on the yellow leaf-strewed earth and through the green underwood; the trunks of the trees shot up, in straight, rough, tapering stems clear through the branches into the sky.

The particular patch of woods where Margaret now sat was of great age, and the trees were very large, and the effect on her mind was like that of a child going into St. Peter’s church at Rome. But there were no bronze saints here to look down on her; a red squirrel, as she came in sight, raised a loud shrill chattering, a singular mixture of contempt, welcome and alarm. She made some familiar demonstrations towards the little fellow, and he, like a jilt, dropped a nut into her face. She saw a brown cat-headed owl asleep, muffled in his dark feathers and darker dreams, and called Obed’s attention to it.

“That ’s an owl,” cried the startled lad; “it’s a bad sign; Marm says it will hurt ye.”

“No,” replied Margaret; “I ’ve seen them on the Butternut a good many times.” Knowing that as Obed never reasoned so he could never be persuaded, Margaret joined him in leaving the ominous vicinage.

“That ’s saxifax,” said her companion, striking his spade into the roots of a well-known shrub. “It ’s good teu chaw; the Settlers eats it—take it down, and they ’ll give ye ribbons and beads for it.” Wisping the top together, and bending it over, he bade Margaret hold on, while he proceeded with the digging. The light black mould was removed, and the reddish damp roots disclosed. “Taste on ’t,” he said, “it ’s as good as nutcakes.” He gave her a fibre—fleshy it was, moist, soft and of agreeable flavor, and rubbing the earth from the mass, cut it into short bits and laid it in his basket. Margaret loitered, wandered, attracted by the flowers she stopped to pick. “Marm won’t let us,” siad Obed, “them ant yarbs, they won’t doctor, the Settlers won’t give anything for them.” Margaret, whether convinced

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or not, yielded, and ran on before, apparently the most anxious to discover the plants desired.

“That’s um!” cried Obed.

Margaret was bounding through a wet bog, springing from one tussock of sedge to another. She, too, had espied it, and in sight of its beauty and novelty forgot everything else. It was a wake-robin, commonly known as dragon-root, devil’s ear, or Indian turnip. Margaret broke off the flower, which she would have carried to her nose.

“Don’t ye taste on’t!” exclaimed Obed, “it’s orful burnin; put it in the basket.” So the plant, flower and all, was deposited with the rest of their collection.

It was time to go home. They had reached the edge of the woods whence they started.

“That’s him!” cried Margaret.

“It’s the Master!” echoed Obed, evidently a little flustered.

There appeared before them a man, the shadow of whom they had seen moving among the leaves, about fifty or sixty years of age, and dressed in the full style of the times, or we should say of his own time, which dated perhaps a little earlier than that of Margaret. He wore a three-cornered hat, with a very broad brim tied with a black ribbon over the top. His coat, of drab kerseymere, descended in long, broad, square skirts, quite to the calves of his legs. It had no buttons in front, but in lieu thereof, slashes, like long button holes, and laced with silk embroidery. He had on nankeen small-clothes, white ribbed silk stockings, paste knee and shoe buckles, and white silk knee-bands. His waistcoat, or vest, was of yellow embossed silk, with long skirts or lappels, rounded and open at the bottom, and bordered with white silk fringe. The sleeves and skirts of his coat were garnished with rows of silver buttons. He wore ruffle cuffs that turned back over his wrists and reached almost to his elbows; on his neck wa a snow-white linen plaited stock, fastened behind with a large paste buckle, that glistened above the low collar of his coat. Under his hat appeared his grey wig, falling in rolls over his shoulders, and gathered behind with a black ribbon. From his side depended a large gold watch-seal and key, on a long gold chain. He had on a pair of tortoise-shell bridge spectacles. A golden-headed cane was thrust under his arm. This was Mr. Bartholomew Elliman, the Schoolmaster, or the Master, as he was called. He was tall in person, had an aquiline nose, and a thin face.

“Ha, my Hamadryad!” said he, addressing Margaret, salu-

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tem et pacem, in other words, how do you do, my girl of the woods?”

“Pretty well, thankee,” replied Margaret.

“I thank you, Sir,” said he, amending her style of expression.

“I forgot,” she added, “pretty well, I thank you, Sir.”

He nodded to Obed, who stood aloof in awkward firmness; besides there were signs of uneasiness or displeasure on the faces of both.

“How came the Pond Lily in the woods?” said he.

“I came out after herbs,” replied Margaret, “and I have some flowers too,” added she, taking off her hat.

“Flowers, have you? You are a noble specimen of foliacious amfractuosity—A hortus siccus of your hat! Would I could send you and your flowers across the waters to my friend, Mr. Knight, the great botanist, nox semperlucens.”

“He shan’t hurt Molly,” interrupted Obed. “He ’ll drown her, he ’ll pull her teu pieces. Marm says he spiles everything. He wants to pitch Molly into the Pond.”

“Don’t be alarmed, by glandulous champion, no harm shall come to this fair flower.”

“He ’ll git um all, Molly; don’t ye let him have any.”

“I tell you,” responded the Master, “Margaret is a flower; she is my flower.”

“No, she an’t a flower,” rejoined Obed, “she’s Pluck’s Molly.”

Obed became quite excited, and spake with more than his customary freedom. It needs perhaps to be explained, that Master Elliman and the Widow Wright were somewhat at odds. He was in pursuit of science, she of gain. They took a common track, herbs and flowers; their ends essentially diverged. They frequently encountered, but they could never agree. Margaret herself became another point of issue between them, and the Widow was jealous of the child’s attachment to the Master. The impression that Obed derived on the whole was, that he was an evil disposed person, and one whose presence boded no good to Margaret.

The Master proceeded in the examination of the flowers Margaret gave him.

“I have another one,” said she, and thrusting her hand into Obed’s basket, drew out the wake-robin.

“An Arum!” said the Master, “the very thing I have been written to upon.”

“Tan’t yourn, Molly; it ’s Marm’s,” said Obed, seizing the flower and replacing it in the basket.

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Here was, indeed, a mistake. Margaret had unreflectingly given the flower to Obed to carry, at the same time thinking it was her own property. She did not know the value attached to it by Obed, whose mother had enjoined him to get one if possible, for some particular purpose of her own. At last she said,

“I can get more, I know where they grow.”

“Can you, can you?” said the Master, “their habitat is sphagnous places, what you call swamps. It is impossible for me to reach them—stultiloquent yarb-monger!” he broke out, speaking of or to Obed; “son of ahelminthic android! You ought to be capistrated.”

“That’s hocuspocus, Molly,” said the lad; “Marm says ’tis. He ’ll hurt ye, he ’ll hurt ye.”

“I will get some for both of you,” said Margaret; “I will go to-morrow.”

“You don’t know the way,” rejoined Obed, “snakes ’ll bite ye; there’s painters in the woods, and wild-cats, and owls.”

“I ’ll take Bull with me,” answered Margaret.

This allusion to the dog gave Obed more trouble. He feared his mother, who he thought would not wish the Master should have the flower; he dreaded the dog, he disliked the Master, he loved Margaret; he was in a quandary. He stammered, he tried to laugh, he put his hand on Margaret’s head, he yerked up his trowsers, he looked into his basket. He leaned against a tree, and dropped his face upon his arm. Margaret ran to him, she took hold of his hand. “Don’t cry[,] Obed,” she said; “poor Obed, Don’t cry.”

The Master, seeing the extremity of affairs, told Margaret not to care, that he presumed she would be able to get the flower for him, and took her hand to lead her away. She clung to Obed, or he to her, wholly enveloping her little hand, wrist and all, in his great knuckles. Thus linked, sidling, skewing, filing as they could through the trees and brush, they soon emerged in the road. The Master went on with them to the house, and Obed continued his course homeward. Master Elliman was evidently not a stranger to the family. His visit seemed welcome. Even the hard, ragged, muddy features of Hash brightened with a smile as he entered. The dry, pursed mouth of the mother opened with a pleasant salutation. Chilion offered him the best chair. Pluck was always merry. Margaret alone for the moment, contrary to her general manner, appeared sorrowful.

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CHAPTER VI.

Why Margaret Was Sorrowful.—Dreams.—Livingston.—A Glimpse at “The Wo”.”—Isabel.—Night and Other Shadows.

After dinner, hospitable as it was rude, of which the Master partook with sensible relish, Pluck proposed that Chilion should play.

“The rosin, Margery,” said her brother.

“I have some rosin in my pocket,” said the Master, at the same time producing a pint flask, which he set upon the table. “A bibilous accompaniment,” he added, “I thought would not be out of place.”

“Good enough for any of their High Mightenesses!” ejaculated Pluck, drinking, and returning the bottle to the Master.

“Nay, friend,” replied the latter; “Femina et vinum maketh glad the heart of man. Let her ladyship gladden her own.”

Mistress Hart also drank.

“Now, he who maketh speed to the spoil, Maharshalalhashbaz,” said the Master.

“Not so good as pupelo,” replied Hash.

“A rightly named youth,” said Pluck, who receiving the bottle to return it to the Master, perceived its contents nearly exhausted.

“Mi discipula,” said the Master, addressing himself to Margaret, “you must be primarum artium princeps.”

“No thankee,—thank you, sir,” replied she.

“Well done, well done!” exclaimed her.

“What! would you not have the child exhilarate and spruce up a little?” cried the father.

“You mistake me, friend,” said the Master, “I approbated the girl, not that she did not receive this very genial beverage, but that she manifests such improvement in speech.”

“Let her drink, and she will speak well enough,” rejoined the father. “She won’t touch it! She mopes, she nuzzles about in the grass and chips. She is certainly growing weakling. Only she sings round after dark, like a thrasher, and picks up spiders, pismires, beetles, like a frog.”

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“this is none of your snow-broth, Meggy,” said the mother, “it’s warming, it’s as good as the Widow’s bitter-bags.”

“Don’t you touch it,” said Chilion, who had been screwing and snapping the strings of his violin.

“Yes, drink, Peggy,” said Hash, thrusting his slavery lips close to her ear. “He’ll bring some more, he likes ye. He wants you to.”

Margaret started from him[.] “I can’t,” she said[.] “It won’t let me.”

“What won’t let you, dear?” asked her father, drawing her between his knees, and patting her head.

“She’s always a dreaming,” said her mother, “she is a born bat, and flies off every night nobody knows where. And in the day time I can’t get her to quilling, but she’s up and away to the Widow’s, or to the Pond, or on the Head, or somewheres. She gets all my threads to string up her poses; she’s as bad as a hang-bird that steals my yarn on the grass.”

“Did’nt I do all the spools?” enquired the child.

“Yes, you did,” responded the father, “you are a nice gal. Hush! Let us hear our son Chilion; he speaks well.”

Chilion played, and they were silent.

“Now it’s your turn my daughter,” said Pluck, “you will play if you won’t drink.”

Chilion held the instrument, while Margaret taking the bow executed some popular airs with considerable spirit and precision. “Now for the cat, child;” so she imitated the cat, then the song-sparrow, then Obed crying.

At this, and especially the last, there was a general shout. The Master seemed highly surprised and pleased. “A megalopsical child!” he exclaimed. Margaret, with blushes and tremors, glad to have succeeded, more glad to escape her tormentors, ran away and amused herself with Dick her squirrel, whom she was teaching to ride on Bull the dog’s back. The flask having been drained, the keg was brought forward from the chimney wall.

“Here’s to Miss Amy,” said Pluck, ogling the Master.

“Mehercule!” exclaimed the latter, “you forget the propitiatory oblation. We must first propose his Majesty the King of Puppetdom, defender by the grace of God of England, France, and America; the most serene, serene, most puissant, puissant, high, illustrious, noble, honorable, venerable, wise, and prudent Princes, Burgomasters, counsellors, Governors, Committees of the said realm, whether ecclesiastical

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or secular; and the most celebrated Punch and Judy of our worthy town of Livingston, Parson Welles and Deacon Hadlock, to whom be all reverence.”

“Pluck. “amen. I stroke my beard, and crook my hamstrings as low as any one.”

The Master. “Your promising daughter, Mistress Hart.”

Mistress Hart. “Long life to you, and many visits from you.”

Hash. “I say yes to that; and here’s for Peggy to Obed.”

The Master. “Miss Sibyl Radney.”

“How you color, Hash!” exclaimed his mother. “Hang your nose under your chin, and it would equal old Gobbler’s wattles. Put you into the dyetub, and Meg won’t have to get any more log-wood. There now, Meggy must go down for some copperas this very afternoon.”

“Odzbodkins! You won’t spoil our sport,” cried her husband. “Your crotchets are always coming in like a fox into a hen-roost.”

“I have work in hand that must be done,” replied his wife. “Pangus!” she exclaimed, raising her voice and her fist at the same time,”what do you do? lazying about here like a mud-turtle nine days after it’s killed. You may whip the cat ten years, and you won’t earn enough to stitch your own rags with.—I have to tie up your vines, or you would have been blown from the poles long since.”

“Dearest Maria,” began Pluck.

“Don’t deary me with your dish-cloth tongue,” said Brown Moll; “you had better go to trencher-scraping, and I’ll take care of the family.”

While Mistress Hart was entertaining her spouse, in this manner, for it seemed to be entertainment to him, the Master called Margaret, and asked her to spell some words he named to her, which she did very correctly. “You must certainly have a new spelling-book,” said he. “And now I want you to repeat the Laplander’s Ode.” She began as follows:

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“I think I must go,” said the Master.

“And I will go with you,” said Margaret.

“Here are the eggs,” added her mother[.] “Deacon Penrose must give a shilling a dozen. One pound of copperas, six skeins of No. nine, half a pound of snuff, the rest in tobacco.”

Margaret, wearing in addition to her usual dress, a pair of moccasins, which an Indian who came sometimes to the Pond gave her, called Bull and started off. Hash, in no unusual fit, ordered the dog back.

“Woman! woman!” cried Pluck, “the keg is out, it is all gone.”

“Let the yarn go,” said her mother, “and get it in rum.”

“She will bring home some of the good book,” said Pluck to Hash, “the real white-eye, you know. Let her take the dog.”

her brother yielded and she went on with Bull and the Master; the latter, having grown a little wavering and muddled by liquor, taking the child’s hand.

There were two ways to the village, one around by No 4, the other directly across through the woods; the distance by the former course was nearly four miles, that by the latter, as we have said, about two; and at the present season of the year, the most eligible. This they took; they went through the Mowing, traversed a beautiful grove of walnuts, black-birches, and beeches, and came to the bridge so called, a large tree lying across the small brook Margaret encountered on her way to the widow’s. This stream, having its rise among the hills on the north of the Pond, and descending to the village, at the present point, flowed through a deep fissure in the rocks. The branches of the tree rose perpendicularly, and a hand rail was fastened from one to another.

“Danger menaces us, my child,” sighed the Master.

“Give me one of your hands,” said Margaret, “hold on by the rail with the other, shut your eyes, that is the way pa does.”

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“How it shakes!” exclaimed the Master. “It would be dreadful to fall here! How deep it is! My head swims, my brain giddies, I am getting old, Margaret. Tempora mutantur et nos—. When I was young as you I could go anywhere. Facilis descensus—.”

“You can hold on by Bull, he’ll keep you steady. Here Bull.”

The well trained dog came forward, and the Master leaning on this tri-fold support, the child’s arm, the rail, and the animal’s head, accomplished the pass. They descended abruptly into a broad ravine, and came up on the higher banks of the stream. Their course was downward, yet with alternate pitches and elevations, now by a sheep’s track, now across a rocky ledge, now through the unbroken forest. The fumes of the liquor subsiding, and the path becoming more smooth and easy, the Master spake to Margaret of her dreams.

Master. “Dreams come of a multitude of business, says Solomon.”

Margaret. “What, Solomon Smith? He says that great folks come of dreams, that children will die, and some be rich; and people lose their cows, and have new gowns, and such things. I dream about a great many things, sometimes about a pretty woman.”

Mas. “A pretty woman! Whom does she look like?”

Mar. “I don’t know, I can’t tell him.”

Mas. “You; always say you to me. The juveniles and younkers in the town say him. How does she seem to you?”

Mar. “She looks somehow as I feel when Ma is good to me, and she looks pale and sorry as Bull does when Hash strikes him.”

Mas. “Where do you see her?”

Mar. “Sometimes among the clouds, and sometimes at the foot of the rainbow.”

Mas. “That is where money grows.”

Mar. “Not money, it is flowers, buttercups, yellow columbine, liverleaf, devil’s ears, and such as I never saw before.”

Mas. “Arum, the Arum! Your covetous friend Obed won’t like it if you get those flowers.”

Mar. “His mother wants to know what the woman does; if she makes plasters out of the flowers, and if they will cure worms.”

Mas. “Caustics of aures diaboli! The Devil is no vermifuge, tell the widow. Ha! ha!”

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Mar. “But she don’t speak to me; she stands in the flowers, and breaks them off, and they fly away like little birds; she pricks them into the rainbow, and they grow on it.”

Mas. “Are you not afraid of her?”

Mar. “She tells me not to be.”

Mas. “You said she did not speak to you.”

Mar. “She don’t speak, but she tells me things, just as Bull does. He don’t speak, but he tells me when he is hungry, and when there is anything coming in the woods. Sometimes she kisses me, but I don’t feel her. She goes up on the rainbow, and I follow here. I see things like people’s faces in the sky, but they look like shadows, and there is music like what you hear in the pines, but there are no trees, or violins. She steps off into the clouds. I try to go too, and there comes along what you call the egret of a thistle, that I get on to, and it floats with me right into my bed, and I wake up.” So they discoursed until they issued from the woods, in what was known as “Deacon Hadlock’s Pasture,” an extensive enclosure reaching to the village, which it overlooked.

The village of Livingston lay at the junction of four streets, or what had originally been the intersection of two roads, which widening at the centre, and having their angles trimmed off, formed an extensive common known as the Green. In some points of view, the place had an aspect of freshness and nature; extensive forests meeting the eye in every direction; farm-houses partially hidden in orchards of apple trees; the roads rough, ungraded, and divided by parallel lines of green grass. Yet to one who should be carried back from the present time, many objects would wear an old, antiquated and obsolete appearance; the high-pitched roofs of some of the houses, and jutting upper stories; others with a long sloping back roof; chimneys like castles, large, arched, corniced. Here and there was a house in the then new style, three-storied, with gambrel roof, and dormar [sic] windows. There were Lombardy poplars on the Green, now so unfashionable, waving like martial plumes; and interspersed as they were among the spreading willow-like elms, they formed, on the whole, not a disagreeable picture. South of the Green was the “Mill,” on the Mill Brook, a stream before adverted to; this was a small distinct cluster of houses. Beyond the village on the east you could see the River, and

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its grassy meadows. Livingston was the shire town of the county of Stafford. The Court-house was a square yellow edifice, with a small bell in an open frame set on the top of the roof; the Jail was a wooden building constructed of hewn timber. The Green contained in addition, a pair of Stocks, a Pillory, and a Whipping Post; also one store, a school-house, one tavern, known as the “Crown and Bowl,” one joiner’s, blacksmith’s, shoemaker’s, and barber’s shop. The four streets diverging from the centre were commonly called the North, East, South, and West Streets. A new one had been opened on the west side of the Green, and received the name of Grove Street. Let us observe the situation of the principal buildings. The Meeting-house stood at the north-west ccorner of the Green; in the rear of this were the Horse-sheds, a long and conspicuous row of black, ricketty stalls, having the initials of the owner’s name painted in a ccircle over each apartment; at the east end of the sheds was the School-house; and behind them terminated an old forest that extended indefinitely to the north. The Tavern stood at the corner formed by the junction of the West street with the Green, a few rods from the church. Below the tavern, flanking the west side of the Green, in succession, were the Court-house, Jail, and Jail-house, the jail-fence being close upon the highway. The Pillory with its companions stood under the trees in the open common fronting the Court-house; the store was on the east side of the Green. The West street, that into which Margaret and the Master entered from the “Pasture,” ascending in a straight line about one hundred rods, curved to the north, thereby avoiding the hills on which the Pond lay, and became the main-road to Dunwich, a neighboring town.

Master Elliman lodged with the Widow Small, who lived on the South Street. Across this street, and not far from the widow’s ran the small brook, over which lay the Tree-bridge above-mentioned. To this stream, we may add, the Master, from some fancy of his own, gave the name of Kedron; and the path by which they came through the woods he called Via Dolorosa.

Children were playing on the Green, the boys dressed in “tongs,” a name for pantaloons or over-alls that had come into use, and round-a-bouts; some in skirt coats and breeches; some of them six or eight years of age were still in petticoats. The girls wore checked linen frocks, with short sleeves, and pinafores. All were bare-footed, and most of them bare-

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headed. “He’s coming!” “The Master!” was a cry that echoed from one to another. They dropped their sports, and drew up in lines on either side as the object of their attention passed; the boys folding their arms and making short quick bows; the girls dove-tailing their fingers and squatting in low courtesies. Margaret, with Bull at her heels, came on at a respectful distance behind. “Moll Hart,” exclaimed one of the boys. “A Pond Gal.” “An Injin, an Injin.” “Where did ye git so much hat?” “Did your daddy make them are clogs?” So she was saluted by one and another; but the dog, whose qualities were obvious in his face, if they had not been rendered familiar in any other way, saved her from all but verbal insolence.

The Master’s was a ground room in an old house. It was large, with small windows; the walls were wainscotted, the ceiling boarded, and darkened by age into a reddish mahogany hue. The chairs were high-top, fan-back, heavy mahogany. A bureau-desk occupied one side, with its slanting leaf, pigeon-holes, and escutcheons bearing the head of King George. On the walls hung pictures in small black frames, comprising all the kings and queens of England, from William the Conqueror to the present time. Margaret’s attention was drawn to his books, which consisted of editions of the Latin and Greek classics, and such school books as from time to time he had occasion to use; and miscellanies, made up of works on Free-Masonry, a craft of which he was a devoted member; books of secular and profane music, a science to which he was much attached; various histories and travels; the works of Bolingbroke, Swift and Sterne; the Spectator and Rambler; Milton, Spenser, Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, darwin, Pope, and other poets; Wolstoncraft’s Rights of Women, Paine’s Age of Reason, Lord Monhoddo’s works; Tooke’s Pantheon; Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; the Echo, by the Hartford Wits, the American Museum, and the Massachusetts Magazine; Trumbull’s McFingal, The Devil on Two Sticks, Peregrine Pickle; Quincy’s Dispensatory; Nurse Freelove’s New Year’s Gift, the Puzzling Cap, the “World turned upside down.” He gave Margaret, as he had promised, “The New Universal Spelling Book,” by Daniel Fenning, late School-master of the Bures in Suffolk, in England.

The Store, to which Margaret next directed her steps, was a long old two-story building, bearing some vestiges of having once been painted red. The large window-shutters and door

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constituted advertising boards for the merchant himself, and the public generally. Intermixed with articles of trade, were notices of calves found, hogs astray, sales on execution; bees-wax, flax, skins, bristles and old pewter, you were informed would be taken in exchange for goods, and that “cash and the highest price would be given for the Hon. Robert Morris’s notes.” One paper read as follows: “You Josiah Penrose, of &c., are hereby permitted to sell 400 gallons W. I. Rum, do. Brandy, 140 Gin, and 260 pounds of brown Sugar, on all of which the excise has been duly paid, pursuant to an Act of the Legislature.

(Signed) William Kingsland,} Collector of excise for the County of Stafford.”

There was also on the door a staring programme of a lottery scheme. Lotteries, at this period common in all New England, had become a favorite resort for raising money to support government, carry on wars, build churches, construct roads, endow colleges, &c. There was one other sign, that of the Post-office. Entering the store you beheld a motley array of dry and fancy goods, crockery, hardware, and groceries, drugs and medicines. On the right were rolls of kerseymeres, callimancoes, thicksets, durants, fustians, shaloons, antiloons, ratteens, dduffils and serges of all colors; Manchester checks, purple and blue calicoes; silks, ribbons, oznaburgs, ticklenbergs, buckram. On the left were cuttoes, Barlow knives, iron candlesticks, jewsharps, blackball, bladders of snuff; in the left corner was the apothecary’s apartment, and on boxes and bottles were written in fading gilt letters, “Arg. Viv.” “Rad. Sup. Virg.” “Ens Veneris,” “Oculi Cancrorum,” “Aqua æris fixi,” “Lapis Infernalis,” “Ext. Saturn.” “Pulvis Regal.” “Sal Martis,” &c. On naked beams above were suspended weavers’ skans, wheel-heads, &c., and on a high shelf running quite around the walls was cotton warp of all numbers. The back portion of the building was devoted to a traffic more fashionable and universal in New England than it ever will be again; and a row of pipes, hogsheads and barrels, indicated an article the nature of which could not be mistaken. Above these hung proof-glasses, tap-borers, a measuring rod, a decanting pump; and interspersed on the walls, were bunches of chalk-scores in perpendicular and transverse lines. Near by was a small counter covered with tumblers and toddy sticks; and when Margaret entered, one or two ragged will-gill looking men

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stood there mixing and bolting down liquors. Had she looked into the counting-room, she would have seen a large fire-place in one corner, a high desk, round-back arm-chairs and several hampers of wine.

Margaret sat waiting for two young ladies, who appeared to have some business with the clerk. These were Bethia Weeks, the daughter of one of the village squires, and Martha Madeline Bisborne, the daughter of the joiner. The clerk’s name was Abel Wilcox.

“For my part,” said Miss Bethia, “I don’t believe a word of it.”

“He has kept steady company with her every time he has been in town,” responded Miss Martha Madeline.

“As if every upstart of a lawyer was to Captain Grand it over all the girls here,” added the clerk.

“I don’t think the Judge’s folk are better than some other people’s folk,” said Martha Madeline.

“Susan is a nice girl,” rejoined Bethia.

“I should not be surprised if they were cried next Sabbath,” said Martha Madeline.

“I guess there will be more than one to cry then,” added Bethia.

“Now don’t; you are really too bad,” rejoined Abel.

This conversation continuing some time, was unintelligible to Margaret, as we presume it is to our readers, and it were idle to report it.

“How much shall I measure you of this tiffany, Matty?” at length asked Abel.

“Oh dear me suz! I don’t know,” she replied. “Perhaps I shall not take any now. You give three shillings for cotton cloth, and this is nine and six a yard, I declare for’t I shall have to put to; and I must get some warp at any rate. We have been waiting for some we sent up to Brown Moll’s to be colored, and I don’t think it will ever be done.”

“there’s young Moll now,” said Abel, pointing to Margaret, who was seated behind the ladies.

“Has your Marm got that done?” asked Martha Madeline.

“No, she has not,” replied Margaret.

“A book, a book!” exclaimed Martha Madeline, “The Ingin has got a book. She will be as wise as the Parson.”

“Can you say your letters?” asked Bethia.

“Yes,” replied Margaret.

“Who is teaching you?”

“The Master.”

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“Pshaw!” ejaculated Martha Madeline, “I never was at school in my life. Now all the gals is going; such as can’t tell treadles from treacle have got books. And here the Master goes up to that low, vile, dirty place, the Pond, to larn the brats.”

Margaret came forward and stated her errand to the clerk.

“Yes, I dare say, she wants rum,” added Martha Madeline. “Daddy says there is no sense in it; they will all come to ruin; he says Pluck and his boys drink five or six times a day, and that nobody should think of drinking more than three times. Parson Welles says it’s a sin for any family to have more than a gallon a week. There’s Hopestill Cutts, he has been kept out of the church this ten months, because he won’t come down to half a pint a day.”

“Never mind,” interposed the clerk, “I guess they will find their allowance cut short this time, ha! ha! Here ain’t eggs enough, gal.”

“Marm says you must give a shilling a dozen,” replied Margaret.

“Perhaps your Marm will say that again before we do,” rejoined the clerk. “Eggs don’t go for but nine-pence in Livingston or anywhere else.”

Margaret was in a dilemma;—the rum must be had, the other articles were equally necessary.

“Pa will pay you,” she bethought herself.

“No he won’t,” answered the clerk.

“Chilion will bring you down skins, axe-helves, and ship-stocks.”

“I tell you, we can’t and won’t trust you. Your drunken dad has run up a long chalk already. Look there, I guess you know enough to count twelve, twelve gallons he owes now. You are all a haggling, gulching, good-for-nothing crew.”

“I will bring you some chesnuts and thistle down in the fall,” replied Margaret.

“Can’t trust any of you. What will you take for your book?”

“I can’t sell it; the Master gave it to me.”

“If he would teach you to pay your debts he would do well.”

A little girl came in about the age of Margaret, and stood looking attentively at her a moment, as one stranger child is wont to do with another, then lifting Margaret’s hat as it were inspecting her face, said; “she is not an Injin; they said she

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was; her face is white as mine.” This little girl was Isabel Weeks, sister of Bethia.

“Ha, Belle!” said the latter, “what are you here for?”

“I came to see the Injin. Have you got a book too?” she said, addressing herself to Margaret. “Can you say your letters?”

“Yes,” replied Margaret, “but they want it for rum.”

“That’s wicked; I know it is. Ma wouldn’t let me give my spelling-book for rum. I have threepence in my pocket—you may have them.”

“Save a thief from hanging and he will cut your throat,” said Martha Madeline.

“Can’t bore an auger hole with a gimlet,” interjected Abel; “two threepences won’t be enough, Miss Belle.”

“Judah has got tenpence I’ll go and get them,” answered Isabel.

The dot at this moment seeing the trouble of his mistress began to growl, and the young ladies to scream.

“Out with your dog, young wench, and go home,” cried the clerk.

“Lie down, Bull!” said Margaret. “Here, sir, you may have the book.”

The bargain being completed, Margaret, taking her articles, left the store; and Isabel followed her.

“The lower classes are very troublesome,” said Abel, “we have to take odds and ends, and everything from them. If we didn’t favor them a little, I believe they would take the store by storm. Deacon Penrose says it is a mercy to ourselves and the town that we have liquors to sell. The other day when I had been drawing a keg for Parson Welles, Ike Tapley, because I wouldn’t let him have the lick of the tap, was as mad as a March hare. Precious little profit do we get out of these folks.”

Isabel walked on with Margaret across the Green in silence. She said nothing, but with her pinafore wiped the tears from Margaret’s eyes. She was too young, perhaps, to tell all she felt, and could only alleviate the grief she beheld by endeavoring to efface its effects.

Margaret, happy, unhappy, fagged up the hill; she had lost her book, she had got the rum; herself was miserable, she knew her family would be pleased, yet she was wholly sad when she thought of the Master and then of her book. She left the highway and crossed the Pasture. The sun had gone down when she reached the wood, she feared not; her

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dreams, her own fresh heart, and Bull, were with her. The shadow of God was about her, but she knew Him or It not; she was ignorant as a Hottentot. She came to the bridge; the water ran deep and dark below her. Who will look into her soul as she looked into the water? Who will thread the Via Dolorosa of her spirit. For the music, the murmurs of that book there were no ears, as there were none for hers. Yet she looked into the water, which seemed to hiss and race more merrily over the stones, as she looked. She heard owls, frogs, tree-toads; and she might almost have heard the tread of the saturnine wood-spider, at work in his loom with his warp-tail and shuttle-feet, working a weft which the dews were even then embroidering, to shine out when the sun rose in silver spangles and ruby buds; and her own soul, woven as silently in God’s quilt, was taking on impressions from those dark woods, that invisible universe, to shine out when her morning dawns. Alas! when shall that be; in this world, in the next? Is there any place here for a pure beautiful soul? If none, then let Margaret die. Or shall we let her murmur on forever, like the brook, in hopes that some one will look into her waters and be gladdened by her sound. She ran on through the Chesnuts, the strange old bald trees seeming to move as she moved, those more distant shooting by the others in rapid lines, performing a kind of spectral pantomime. Run on Margaret! and let the world dance round her as it may. When she reached home, she found the family all a bed, excepting Chilion, who sat in the dark, patiently, perhaps doggedly, waiting for her.

“Is she come?” cried the father, waking from his sleep. “Give us a nip.”

“None of your sneaking here, old bruiser!” brokt out the mother, rising in bed. “You are a real coon that would suck the biggest cock dry.”

They both drank, and Margaret, having eaten a morsel Chilion kept for her, went to her bed. She had not been long asleep, when she was awakened by a noise below. Her father was calling her name, “Molly! Molly!” She started immediately to go down.

“Never mind, Margery,” spoke Chilion, from his own chamber, as she descended the ladder. “He will come out of it soon.”

Her father, overcome by his liquor, had fallen into a sort of delirium. “Bite, will ye? spit fire, ram lighting down a babe’s throat, Molly! Molly!” She seized the convulsed

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arm of the old man, and rubbed it. “There, there,” she said, “it will be over soon.” Her mother lay trussed and frozen in sleep.

“Sweet angel,” said the father; “hold on, put their tails in the stocks and let them squirm,—Ha! ha! ha!” he laughed out, changing his tone. “there’s pitch-forks, and swingling stands, and two bibles dancing a hornpipe, and Deacon Penrose playing on a rum-hogshead.”

“I shwum,” cried Hash, swaggering down the ladder, “if they an’t a toping the whole. Why didn’t you tell me you had got back, Peggy?” He took the keg to make sure of what remained.

“Hash! Hash!” cried Margaret, “he thinks he’s falling off the bridge, I can’t hole him.”

“Let him fall and be —— and you too,” was the reply. The paroxysm began to subside, the old man’s arm relaxed, his breathing became easier. Margaret reascended the stairs, whither Hash had already preceded her, and returned to that forgetfulness of all things which God vouchsafes even to the most miserable.

CHAPTER VII.

Retrospective and Explanatory.

At this day of comparative abstinence and general sobriety, one is hardly prepared to receive the accounts that might be given of the consumption of intoxicating liquors in former times. In the Old World, drinking was cultivated as an Art; it was patronized by courtiers, it fellowshipped with rustics; it belonged to the establishment, and favored dissent; it followed in the wake of colonial migration, and erected its institutions in the New World. Contemporary with the foundation, it flourished with the growth and dilated with the extension of this Western Empire. Herein comes to pass a singular historical inversion; what we rigorously denounce as “distilled damnation,” the Puritans cheerily quaffed under the names of “strong Water,” and “Aqua Vitæ,” Water of Life. While

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we expel rum from our houses, as a pestilence, an earlier age was wont to display it with picturesque effect, and render it attractive by environments of mahogany and silver.

In Livingston there were five distilleries for the manufacture of cider-brandy, or what was familiarly known as pupelo. There was also consumed a proportionate quantity of alcoholic liquors of other kinds. The entire amount annually ddrank among a population of about twelve hundred, could not have been less than six thousand gallons. It found its way into every family, loaded many side-boards, filled innumerable jugs; all denominations of men were alike under its influence. In the account kept with parson Welles at deacon Penrose’s, rum composed at least one half the items. Master Elliman, as we have seen, was not exept from the habits of his age. He drank constantly and at times excessively. To the cheer prevailing at the Pond he was no stranger; but, on the other hand, it afforded him no small satisfaction to become a sharer in their potations. His botanical excursions were enlivened and relieved by the humor of Pluck and the liberality of his entertainment. In addition to this there were other causes operating to bring together these two persons of qualities and manners in some respects so apparently opposed. On these we must beg the patience of the reader, while we briefly delay. The first permanent settlement in Livingston was effected in the year 1677, at the close of the war of King Philip or Pometacom, the chief of the Wampanoags. The original inhabitants came partly from the old colonies; and were reinforced by migrations direct from Europe. A one-story log-house, with thatched roof, was the original church, and stood on the same spot with that to which the attention of the reader has been called, a tin horn, in place of a bell, summoning the people to worship. What is now known as the Green early became the centre of the town, and on the four streets before-mentioned many of the planters established themselves. The town underwent and survived the various incidents and vicissitudes that belong to our national history; Queen Anne’s war, Lovell’s war, the Seven Years’ war, incursions from the Indians, drafts of men for the frontiers, small-pox, throat-distemper, Antinomianism, Newlightism, Scotch Presbyterianism, an attempted “visit from Whitfield,” settling ministers, the stamp-act, succession of sovereigns, kings in England, governors at home, earthquakes, tornadoes, depreciation of currency, taxes, etc. etc. A period of more exciting interest approached. The question of a final separation from the mother country engaged

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all minds. An organic system was instituted throughout the country, embracing the states, counties and towns. Committees of Safety, Inspection, Vigilance or correspondence, whatever they might be called, were formed in every village; these co-operated with the County Committees, which in their turn became auxiliary to those of the State. “The towns,” say our historians, “assumed, in some respects the authority of an individual community, an independent republic. The Committee met daily and acted in a legislative, executive and judicial capacity. All suspicious persons were brought before them, and if found guilty were condemned.” “Numerous arrests, imprisonments and banishments were made.” “The Committee was impowered to use military force. Many tories and their families were expelled the State, and others required to give security to reside in prescribed limits; and occasionally the jails, and even the churches, were crowded with prisoners, and many were sent for safe-keeping to the jails of neighboring States.” An “Association,” as it was termed, covenant, or oath, was prepared and offered for the signatures of the people of Livingston. The sessions of the court, which had been interrupted elsewhere, received little or no disturbance in this town. Judge Morgridge, a resident of the place, who received his commission under the king, and faithfully administered the old laws of the State, was equally devoted to the interests of the people. News of the battle of Lexington had arrived; Tony, the negro barber, fiddler and drummer, had gone through the streets at midnight, sounding alarms from time to time. Court week came, and in addition to such scenes as for many years had characterized that occasion, trading, huckstering, wrestling, fighting, horse-racing, multitudes thronging the streets; at the present moment there assembled greater quantities of people, from Livingston itself, and the neighboring towns, who were animated by unusual topics. There was little business for the functionaries of law, and more for the officers of the people. The County Committee was in session. Numbers of delinquents were brought from various parts, and lodged in the jail. The Crown and Bowl was filled with people, among whom was Pluck. While others were drinking to the Continental Congress, he toasted the king; when rebuked, he replied in some wanton language. This, in addition to other conduct of a suspicious nature, exposed him to the action of the Committee, before which he was taken; that body consisting in part of his fellow-townsmen, Deacon Hadlock and Mr. Gisborne the joiner. The proceed-

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ings in his case may be known by the subjoined extract from the records.

“Livingston, August 28th, 1775.

“Didymus Hart being summoned to this Committee, on the information of sundry witnesses, that the said Hart on the 27th day of this month, had violated the laws of the Continental and Provincial congress, and done other acts contrary to the liberties of the country, appeared, and after due proof being made of said charge, the said Hart was pleased to make a full confession thereof, and in the most equivocal and insulting manner attempted to vindicate said conduct, to wit:

1st “Working on the Public Fast recommended by the association of ministers.

2d. “Speaking diminutively of the County Congress, in which they recommended to the people not to take Hick’s and Mill’s paper.

3d. “Not sufficiently encouraging people to sign the Covenant.

4th. “Saying that his wife had bought tea, and should by it again, if she had a chance.

5th. “At the Ordinary of Mr. Abraham Stillwater, with a bowl of grog in his hand, drinking to the success of the king’s arms.

6th. “Saying, ‘by G—d if this people is to be governed in this manner, it is time for us to look out; and ’tis all owing to the Committee of Safety, a pack of supple-headed fellows, I know two of them myself.’

“these charges being proved and the Committee having admonished said Hart, but he continuing his perverse course, it was voted that said Hart is an enemy to his country, and that every friend to humanity ought to forsake said Hart, until he shall give evidence of sincere repentance by actions worthy of a man and a Christian.

(Signed) “JAMES GISBORNE, Clerk.”

The next day an event occurred that aroused the people still more against Pluck. Another individual in town had rendered himself obnoxious to public sentiment. This was Col. Welch, a brother-in-law of Judge Morgridge, who had derived his title for services against the French in the Seven Years’ war. He occupied a large house at the head of the West Street, near “Deacon Hadlock’s Pasture.” He refused to sign the Association, and used language which gave the people cause to doubt his patriotism. He declined also accepting a command in the

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Continental armies, and intimated that his present commission could not be supplanted or displaced. He had already been summoned before the Town Committee, where his replies were not satisfactory. Further measures were proposed. At this crisis of affairs, late in the evening, Judge Morgridge, with some of his family, visited his brother-in-law, and informing him of what was in progress, suggested that he had no other alternative but recantation or flight. The Colonel replied that the former he would not do, and if it came to the latter, that should be done; and with his family made hasty preparations for departure. In the middle of the night, he left Livingston, went to New York, whence he ultimately sailed for Nova-Scotia. When the two families had indulged those tokens of regret, speedily finished, which were natural to the occasion, and the Colonel was on the point of starting, it was discovered that one horse delayed, and the cause was as soon obvious. Cæsar, a servant of Judge Morgridge, was found clinging passionately to Phillis, the servant of the Colonel. Such a moment for the expression of what they might feel, was certainly most inopportune, and the two lovers were unceremoniously separated. The next morning Pluck understanding from Cæsar what had happened, and withal as we say now-a-days, endeavoring to make capital out of the fellow’s distress, appeared again on the Green, and more than half in liquor, made boast of toryism, applauded the conduct of Col. Welch, and declaimed on the cruelty practised towards the negro. Already sufficiently odious, he would have done better not to trifle with an indignant populace. He was declared not only inimical but dangerous, and by order of the Committee was confined in jail. Among a multitude of fellow-prisoners he found one of whom till that moment he had known but little; this was his townsman and subsequent acquaintance, Master Elliman. This gentleman, inveterately attached to olden time, without reverence for the people, and, as his subsequent conduct would indicate, with no other regard for kings than consisted in a preference for an old and long-established state of things over any new projects that might be proposed, possibly unwilling to have his quiet disturbed, perhaps averse to receiving dictation from those whose children he had flogged, or who themselves may have been under his thumb; certainly not, we have reason to believe, from any conscientious scruples; this gentleman, we say, received the Committee, who waited upon him, with an irritating indifference, and refused to sign the Association. It was considered unsafe to have him at large,

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and he was thrown into prison. Here commenced an intimacy that in the result proved not unfavorable to one as yet unborn, Margaret. Whatever points of resemblance might exist between Pluck and the Master, became strengthened by their confinement together, and their contrarieties were forgotten in a sense of common calamity. The cells of the jail were crowded, comforts were not abundant, and whatever relief could be had from an exchange of sympathies, the convicts would naturally betake themselves to; and in the result it appeared that Pluck and the Master became very good friends, and the visits of the latter to the Pond, originating in the double cause which has now been related, were in after years not infrequent. Add to this a deep and ingenuous interest in Margaret, and we shall understand why he came so often to her house, and exerted himself so readily for her instruction. The durance of these two recusants lasted no more than two or three months. Pluck, as being of less consequence, was released almost on his own terms. In the Kidderminster Chronicle appeared the following which relates to the Master:

“Whereas I, the subscriber, have from the perverseness of my wicked heart maliciously and scandalously abused the character and proceedings of the Continental and Provincial Congress, Selectmen of this town, and the Committees of Safety in general, I do hereby declare, that at the time of my doing it, I knew the said abuses to be the most scandalous falsehoods, and that I did it for the sole purpose of abusing those bodies of men, and affronting my townsmen, and all the friends of liberty throughout the Continent. Being now fully sensible of my wickedness, and notorious falsehoods, I humbly beg pardon of those worthy characters I have so scandalously abused, and voluntarily renouncing my former principles, do promise for the future to render my conduct unexceptionable to my countrymen, by strictly adhering to the measures of Congress, and desire this my confession may be printed in the Kidderminster Chronicle for three weeks successively.

“BARTHOLOMEW ELLIMAN.”

“Test,

“Livingston, Nov. 23d, 1775.”

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CHAPTER VIII.

Margaret’S Oldest Brother, Nimrod, Comes Home.—He Proposes a Variety of Diversions.

Nimrod made his annual visit to his father’s. Where he had been, or what he did, none asked, none knew. His appearance would indicate the sailor and the horse-jockey; he wore a tarpaulin and blue jacket, a pair of high-top boots with spurs and leather trousers; he flourished a riding stick, commonly known as a cow-hide, a pair of large gold rings dangled in his ears. He rode a horse, a cast-iron looking animal, thin and bony, of a deep grey color, called Streaker. He seemed also to have money in his pocket, as he evidently had brandy in his saddle-bags and humor in his soul. He brought one or two books for Margaret, to whom he showed great attachment, and whose general management seemed surrendered to him, while he was at home. These books were Mother Goose’s Melodies, National Songs and Bewick’s Birds with plates. He gave her, in additon, a white muslin tunic with pink silk skirt. Nimrod was tall in person; he had bluish, lively eyes, light hair and a playful expression of face. All the family seemed delighted with his return; Pluck, because his son’s temper was congenial with his own; his mother, for some presents; Hash, because of the brandy; Chilion was happy to see his brother; and Margaret for obvious reasons. He leaped from his horse, as he rode up to the door, and ran to Margaret whom he saw working on her flower-bed; raised her in his arms, kissed her, set her down, took her up again, made her leap on his horse, caught her off and kissed her a second time. “Can you spell Streaker?” said he, which she did. “Ah, you little rogue!” he added, “you are as spruce as a blue-jay.”

“Has the Indian come yet?”

“Yes, he was here last week.”

“An’t you afraid of him?”

“No. The little girl that was with him gave me some apples.”

“That’s you, for a broad joe! Never be afraid of any body, or anything, two-legged or four-legged, black, white, blue or

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grey, streaked or speckled, on the earth or in the air. I have learned that lesson. How is our other Margaret, the Peach tree?”

“Don’t you see what beautiful red peaches there are on it?”

“Yea, verily,” as the Master says, “this is like a wood-chuck in clover. These are sweet and luscious as your cheek, Margaret.”

Nimrod ran into the house, and out to the cistern, and towards the Pond, and up the Head. He shook his father’s hand heartily; to his mother hee made a low bow; Hash chuckled and grinned at sight of him, and Nimrod laughed harder in response. Chilion greeted him cordially, but said little. Bull he held up by his paws, made sundry bows and grimaces to the dog, and talked to him like an old friend, so that Margaret declared the animal laughed.

If Nimrod were enjoying a furlough or vacation, or anything of the kind, it seemed to be his purpose to make the most of it. He talked of the meeting in the woods, a turkey-hunt the next moon, a husking bee, thanksgiving ball, racing and a variety of things. In whatever he undertook Margaret was made his constant attendant; and at some risk even, he carried her into all scenes of wildness, exposure and novelty; nor can it be said she was loth to go with her brother.

The meeting in the woods was the first in order of time. This practice, imported from England, began to flourish incipiently in our country. From the suburbs of old cities, from church-yards, court-yards, gardens, the scene was transferred to pine forests, shady mountains and a maiden green-sward. Heptenstall Bank was revived in Snake Hill. The scoffing Kentishmen appeared in the “Injins,” No. 4’s and Breaknecks. What lived in Europe must needs luxuriate in America. The jumpers of Wales were outdone by the jerkers of Kentucky.

The meeting was to be held in the district we have before spoken of as Snake Hill, lying four or five miles north of the Pond. Nimrod started off horseback, with Margaret behind him on a pillion. Hash and Bull went afoot. At the Widow Wright’s, they found that lady with her son mounting their horse,—a small black animal resembling the Canada breed, called Tim,—and just ready to proceed on the same excursion. The Widow was solemn and collected, and she greeted Nimrod, for whom she had no strong affection, with a smile that a susceptible eye might have construed into coldness. Tim, the horse, had a propensity for dropping his ears, biting and kicking, when a stranger approached. He began some demonstra-

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tions of this sort as Nimrod came up. Whether Nimrod regarded this as an insult on Streaker, or was nettled at the manner of the woman, or to gratify his own evil taste, he dealt the horse a smart blow with his cowhide. Tim darted off at a full jump; insomuch that Obed and his mother, with all their use to his back and manners, had much ado to keep their seats. Nimrod ambled forward, about a mile, crossed the intersecting west road from the village, and came to a house known as Sybil Radney’s, where he overtook the Widow and her son, breathing their horse. Sibyl lived alone with her mother in the woods, cultivated a small farm, kept a horse and cow, mowed, cut wood, and did all her work without aid. Her face and neck were deeply browned, her arm was like that of a blacksmith. She was also getting ready for Snake Hill. Nimrod contrived to stimulate the three horses into a race, which was executed in a manner a fox-hunter might have envied, through brambles, over stumps, across ditches.

The spot to which these riders directed their way was in a forest on the crown of a hill. A circular opening had been cut among the trees for the purposes of the meeting. At one end of this amphitheatre was the pulpit, constructed of rough boards; about the sides were arranged the tents or camps, made for the most part of hemlock boughs. Seats of slabs, logs and stumps were strown in front of the pulpit. In the centre of the whole was a huge pile of wood to be kindled in the evening for warmth, if need be, or for light. There were also booths on the outside for the sale of cider, rum, ginger-bread, and the practice of various games. Here were assembled people from twenty different towns. Nimrod fastened his horse to the trees amongst scores of others. The Widow reminded Nimrod of the circumstances of the place, admonished him of his recklessness. “I kalkilate God is here,” said she, “and you had better not be pokin your fun about.” Compassionating the dangerous situation of Margaret, she requested that she might be delivered to her care. Nimrod, who thought he should find entertainment in a manner that might not possibly be agreeable to the child, consented to yield her to the woman. He and Sibyl went towards the booths, and Mistress Wright, leaning on the arm of her son, leading Margaret, entered the encampment. Three men in black occupied the pulpit, their heads powdered, with white stocks and bands, and straight square-cut collars. One of them, a tall bronze-complexioned man, was addressing the people, hundreds of whom filled the seats. The Preacher was pro-

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ceeding in the way of narration. “The sacred flame,” said he, “has spread in Virginia. Brother Enfield, the assistant in the Brumswick Circuit, conjectures that from eighteen hundred to two thousand souls have been converted since the middle of May. Twelve hundred experienced the work of grace is Sussex; in Amelia half as many more. Many christians had severe exercises of mind respecting the great noise that attended this work of God. Some thought it was not divine; yet from its effects they dare not ascribe it to Satan; but when the Lord broke in upon their own families, they saw it at once, and began to bemoan their own hardness of heart. Many gospel-hardened, old, orthodox sinners, have, as mighty oaks, been felled; and many high-towering sinners, as the tall cedars of Lebanon, bowed down to the dust. As many as fifteen or twenty commonly gave up in a day under Brother Staffin’s preaching, who is indeed a Samson among the Philistines. It is no strange thing now for children down to seven years of age to give in.”

The Preacher then digressed in a strain of exhortation designed to reproduce effects similar to those he had recounted. A thunder cloud gathered in the sky, and buried the woods in darkness. “That,” said he, “is the shadow of hell. It is the smoke of torments that ascendeth up forever and ever.” The thunder burst upon the camp, its hollow roar reverberated among the hills. “Behold!” he exclaimed, “God proclaims his law in fire and smoke!” It began to rain, “What!” continued he, “can you not endure a little wetting, when you will so soon call for a drop of water to cool your parched tongues?” The lightning flashed upon them, it blazed through the trees. “The great day of the Lord is coming,” he went on, “when the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the heavens also shall pass away with a great noise, the earth also shall be burned up.” There was a movement in the congregation; some shrieked out, some fell upon their faces, some flung their arms wildly in the air. “Oh my soul!” “Lord have mercy!” “Jesus save!” ‘Glory! glory!” rang from seat to seat. “It is the Lord’s doings and marvellous in our eyes,” exclaimed one of the men in the pulpit. Nimrod and his confreres from the booths ran in to see what had befallen. There sat Obed waving to and fro on his seat, groaning, and calling upon his mother. “Yes, my son,” exclaimed the latter convulsively, “its an orful time. God has come, we are great sinners. I han’t done my duty by ye. Parson Welles would let us all go teu hell to-

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gether.” “What a mercy,” exclaimed another, “we can come where the gospel is preached!” “O Lord, forgive me,” cried a third, “for going to the Universalist up tp Dunwich; I do believe there is a hell, I do believe there is a hell.” “I have been down among the Socinians,” echoed a fourth. “God be praised I have found where there is some religion at last. Glory, glory!”

The Preacher, the storm and the effect increased. Some fell away, some foamed at the mouth, some lay on the ground in spasms, the faces of several grew white, others purple and black, one appeared to be strangling and gasping for life, another became stiff, rigid, and sat up like a dead man on his seat; there were groans, sobs, shrieks, prayers and ejaculations. There came a terrific crash of thunder, as if the heavens had split and the earth would give way. There was a stifled groan, a retreating shudder among the people; the Preacher himself seemed for a moment stunned. Margaret shrieked and cried to the top of her voice, which sounded for the instant like a clarion over an earthquake. Nimrod impulsively rushed among the people, dashed Obed from his seat, seized Margaret and drew her out. The Preacher recovering himself as he observed this movement. “Son of Belial!” he broke forth, “thinkest thou to stop the mighty power of God? Will he deliver that child into thy hand as he did the children of Israel into the hand of Chusham-rishathaim? Stop, on thy soul, and repent, lest ye die.”

“I guess I shan’t die before my time,” retorted Nimrod, “nor any sooner for your croaking, old Canorum. The child is gittin wet, and she is sca’t. I han’t lived in the woods to be skeered at owls, I snore.”

“A scoffer!” “A scoffer!” one or another exclaimed. The people began to look up, and about them. The tide of feeling was somewhat diverted. “Oh! there will be mourning, mourning, mourning,” &c., was pealed forth from the pulpit, and a full chorus of voices chimed in. The Preacher renewed his exhortations, and the attention of the assembly was restored to the subjects that had occupied them. The groans and sobs were renewed. “This beats the Great Earthquake all hollow,” exclaimed one of the congregation. “Yes,” echoed the Preacher, “what a rattling among the dry bones.” “Oh Lord!” cried one of his assistants, “send an earthquake, shake these sinners, send it quick, send it now. There were near four hundred converted at the last earthquake in Boston.” “Oh! what a harvest of

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souls we should have, brother!” rejoined the Preacher. “Help me with your prayers brethren, as Aaron and Hur did Moses.”

In due time these exercises closed. After supper, in the evening, the pile of wood was kindled, pine knots were lighted at the corners of the pulpit; the horn blew and the people reassembled. Margaret ran off into the woods with Bull and laid down under a tree, her head resting on the flanks of the dog, and her feet nestling in the soft moss. Nimrod waqs drinking and roistering at the booths. Hash was beyond the reach of influences spiritual or temporal. After the evening service was over the people dispersed to their tents. A middle aged man, Mr. Palmer, from the Ledge, happening in the woods, saw Margaret asleep under the trees, and gave her in charge of his wife. The good woman with one hand patted Margaret on her head, while with the other she tended her own with a pinch of snuff, and asked her if she didn’t want to be saved. Margaret replied that she didn’t know.

“The spirit is here mightily,” said the woman, taking a fresh pinch, “won’t you come in for a share?”

“It won’t let me,” replied Margaret.

“You may lose your soul.”

“I havn’t got any.”

“Mercy on me!” exclaimed the woman[.] “Don’t you know the devil will git you if you don’t come in?”

“No it won’t,” replied Margaret, “Bull won’t let it.”

“What will you do when all the little boys and gals goes up a singing?”

“I’ll stay at home and hear Chilion play on the fiddle, and read my new books.”

“Luddy mussy! can you read? Where do you live?”

“Down to the Pond.”

“Han’t they got any of the religin at your house?”

“No, Marm, they drink pupelo and rum.”

“A born fool!” ejaculated the woman with herself.—“But she can read, she must be knowing. Wonder if the power an’t in her? She will certainly die, and she an’t no more ready than our Rufus.”

The people began to crowd into the tent, among whom was Mistress Wright and her son Obed. The Widow made immediately for Margaret, who with Mistress Palmer, was sitting on the straw in a corner apart. She heard the latter lady’s soliloquy, and added, “Oh no, I’m afeered she an’t.”

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“What’s the matter of the child?” asked Mistress Palmer.

“Don’t know, Marm,” replied the Widow. “I wish sutthin could be done for her, she’s bred in orful wicked ways. Any sick up your way, Miss Palmer? I’ve brought a few yarbs with me. If we could only keep the poor sinners alive long enough for um teu save their souls it would be a great marcy.”

The speakers were interrupted by noises in the tent into which a large number of people had found their way, who began to sing, exhort and pray. They had Obed down flat on his back. His mouth was open, his eyes shut; he shook spasmodically, he groaned with a deep guttural guffaw. Men and women were over and about him; some looking on, some praying, some uttering “Glory!” The Preacher came in, a bland smile on his face, rubbing his hands; “Good!” he ejaculated with a short, quick snap of the voice. “The Lord is here, Miss Palmer,” said he.

“Yes in truth, you told us we should have a great time,” rejoined the woman. “But see this gal, I wonder if anything can be done with her.”

“Ah my little lamb,” said the Preacher, taking Margaret’s hand and drawing her gently towards him. “Hope you have found the Saviour, you are old enough to repent.” Margaret wrested herself from him. “Why what’s the matter, dear?” enquired the man. “You are not one of the wicked children that reviled the prophet, and the bears came out of the woods and tare them in pieces?”

“I an’t afraid of the bears,” replied Margaret, pettishly.

“A mazed child! a mazed child!” exclaimed Mistress Palmer.

“Don’t you want to be converted?” asked the Preacher.

“I don’t like you, I don’t like you,” replied Margaret. “You hollered so and scared Obed, he’s scared now. They are hurting him,” she said, pointing where the youth lay. Darting from her company, she penetrated the crowd and knelt down by the side of Obed. “Poor Obed!” she said, “don’t make such a noise, Molly is here.”

“I am going to hell,” hoarsely and mournfully replied the boy.

“The arrows of the Almighty are thick upon him,” ejaculated the Preacher, approaching the scene.

“If the Lord would only grant him deliverance!” said his mother, looking through the crowd.

“Pray, brother, pray, sister,” said the Preacher, addressing

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one and another. “Jacob wrestled all night in prayer with God. The Ark is now going by. Three have already closed with the offers of mercy in Dunwich tent.”

“Don’t cry so, Obed,” said Margaret. “They shan’t hurt you.”

“The devil is in that child, take her away,” said the Preacher.

Some one endeavored to pull her off. “Let me alone,” she exclaimed, “I can’t go, I won’t go,” and she adhered to the boy, whose arm had become closed about her neck as a man in a fit.

There was a jarring hubbub of voices; men and women reeking with excitement, and vieing one with another who should pray the most importunately.

“what the devil are ye doing here?” shouted a still louder voice over the heads of the crowd. It was Nimrod, who half-intoxicated thrust himself among them. “Bite um Bull, bite um,” he rubbed the dog’s ears and holding him between his legs, teazed him into a piercing yelp and howl that startled the people.

“Bull! Bull!” shrieked Obed. “He’s comin, he’ll bite me.” The lad sprang to his feet and stared wildly about.

“Satan has come in great wrath,” cried the Preacher.

“Yes, and I guess you know as much about him as anybody, old cackletub!” rejoined Nimrod. “You set them all a going, and then snap them up like a hawk.”

“Hoora!” shouted another of the scoffers from the other side of the tent. “I hearn him coming down from a tree jest now; look out or he’ll be in your hair, white-top.”

“I’ve cotched him by the tail,” said another of the fry, twitching the dog, who thereupon renewed his roar.

“Pray, brethren, pray!” said the Preacher, and the people began to pray more lustily. “As with the sound of rams’ horns the walls of Jericho fell down, so shall these sinners tremble before God.”

“Where’s Sibyl Radney?” cried one of the opposers. “She’s got the bellows pipe for ye, and will let ye have some of the broomstick too, if you want.”

“Oh! oh!” screamed Margaret, “you hurt me. They are treading on my toes. Nimrod! Nimrod1 I can’t get out.”

“Margaret, are you in there, like a mouse among cats?” hallooed her brother.

“Yes, and Obed is here too.”

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“Let Obed go to Ballyhack. Come along out.”

“Cast him out of the synagogue,” cried the Preacher.

“Back with ye,” said a man making up to Nimrod. “The lord is here.”

“Guess you will find somebody else is here too. Take yourself back,” replied Nimrod, at the same time rendering the man a blow that nearly levelled him with the ground.

“I can’t stay here,” said Mistress Palmer.

“Hope the Lord won’t leave us yet,” responded a woman at her side.

“I fear the spirit will be grieved to depart,” said another of the company.

“How many souls will perish for this man’s wickedness!” sighed the Preacher.

Sibyl Radney rushing forward, seized Margaret, whom she held like a pup, under one arm, and with the other cleaved her way through the people. The lights were smothered; there was a surging to and fro; the props of the tent broke asunder; some ran one way, some another; others were trodden under foot. Margaret found herself in the woods supported by Sibyl. Nimrod presently appearing, said they must go home. Sibyl helped him mount his horse, and Margaret contriving to keep her brother in equipoise, they returned to the Pond.

CHAPTER IX.

Margaret Successful in a Novel Adventure.

A few days afterwards, there came to the Widow Wright’s Mr. Palmer from the Ledge, the man who found Margaret in the woods and delivered her to his wife. He purchased of the Widow a prescription for his daughter Rhody, who he said was not in strong health, and then stated that his family had been troubled for want ot water, and intimated a conjecture of his wife that Margaret was one in whom resided the faculty of discovering it, and asked the Widow if she would accompany him to Pluck’s, and aid in procuring the

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services of the child for the purpose indicated. They went to Margaret’s house, where Mr. Palmer gained the consent of the family to his object, and especially that of Nimrod, who evinced a positive delight in the project, and even volunteered to be Margaret’s gallant on the occasion. They all proceeded together, accompanied by the Widow, who suggested that her personal attention might be of some benefit to Rhody. The Ledge was six or seven miles from the pond; it was properly speaking a marble quarry, and belonged to Mr. Palmer, who with his sons, in addition to a large farm they cultivated, sometimes worked at gravestones and hearths.

Mr. Palmer was in popular phrase a forehanded man, his house and barns were large, and his grounds indicated thrift. He had three sons, Roderick, Alexander and Rufus, stout, vigorous boys; and one daughter Rhody about eighteen, who evinced a sickly temperament, but was otherwise a fair-looking, black-haired girl. This family were obliged to bring their water from a considerable distance, not having been able to find a spring nea the house. Agreeably to the doctrines of rhabdeomancy, formerly in vogue, and at the present moment not entirely discarded, a twig, usually of the witchhazle, borne over the surface of the ground, indicates the presence of water, by immediately moving in the hand. The number of persons would seem to be small in whom this power is lodged, or through whom the phenomenon exhibits itself. It appeared that the neighborhood had been canvassed for an operator, but none succeeded. It occurred to Mistress Palmer, at the Camp, that Margaret might be endowed with this rare gift, and the child was accordingly sent for. The family at the Ledge showed great joy on the arrival of the party from the pond. Mistress Palmer took a pinch of snuff, and helped Margaret from the horse, and even received Nimrod kindly, although his pranks at the meeting might have operated to his prejudice. The large pewter tankard of cider was passed round, but Margaret refused to taste, saying she should prefer water. “Dear me! we han’t got a drop of decent water in the house,” exclaimed Mistress Palmer. “The gal shall have some milk, the best we have; Rhody get some of the morning’s; pour it out cream and all.” Of this Margaret drank freely. “Poor thing!” ejaculated the lady, “she don’t know as she has got a soul, and our Rufus is nigh as bad, for he won’t do nothing to save his.”

“I tell you what it is, Marm,” rejoined Rufus, her youngest son, about twelve or fourteen years of age; “I an’t a going

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to have that old preacher whining and poking about me. I believe I can get to heaven without his help; if I can’t, then I am willing to stay away.”

“Well, well, child,” replied the mother, “I shall not care how, if you get there at all, only I want you to be a good boy.” She took a large pinch of snuff. These preliminaries being settled, and Margaret having received her instructions to hold the stick firmly and tell when it moved, proceeded on her duty. She made sundry gyrations, she traversed the grounds about the house, she tried the garden, but effected nothing. “It is too wet,” said one; “it is too cold,” said a second; “it is too dry,” said a third; “it is too warm,” said a fourth. Mistress Palmer took a pinch of snuff. Another trial was proposed. The child went farther from the house, she perambulated the orchard. All looked on with a breathless interest; she moved about slowly and carefully, the stick held horizontally forward in her two fists—a little diviner, in a green rush hat and Indian moccasins; the wind shook her brown curls, her blue checked pinafore streamed off like a pennon. Did they do wrong to use a little creature so? Yet is not God useful? Is not Utility the sister of Beauty? At last she cried out that it moved. Mr. Palmer hastened forward and struck his spade into the spot; Margaret ran off. The boys came up with hoes, crows and shovels, and began to dig. Presently there were signs of water, then it bubbled up, then it gushed forth a clear limpid stream. Mr. Palmer praised God. The boys hooraed. Mistress Palmer took a pinch of snuff.

“Taste on’t, Alek,” said Rufus.

“No,” replied the father. “It belongs to the finder to be the first taster. The gal, where is she?”

Rufus was despatched for Margaret. He found her at the quarry trying to get a hare-bell that grew far above her head. The boy crouched under her, and she stepping on his shoulders succeeded in reaching the flower. When she would have descended Rufus fastened his arms about her, and bore her off on his back, papoose-like. Approaching the spot where the water was found, she leaped down and scudded around the house, Rufus pursued, she laughed, he laughed, and full of frolic, he brought her to the spring. She said she was not dry and would not drink, and would have run away again; when Nimrod prevailed with her to the end desired. Then they all drank, and pronounced it excellent water. Mistress Palmer said it was soft and would wash well; Mistress

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Wright declared it was nice to boil mint in; Alexander didn’t care if he hadn’t to lug any more from the brook. All were satisfied, and Margaret became a wonder.

A sumptuous home-made dinner, with a suet Indian-pudding and molasses for dessert, was served on bright pewter plates with stag-horn knives and forks. After this, Rufus brought Margaret a marble flower-pot he had made, also a kitten very well executed, which he had cut from the same material. Rhody gave her a root of the Guelder rose. Mr. Palmer paid the Widow handsomely for her visit to his daughter, whose case she elaborately investigated. He offered money to Nimrod, who refused it. Mistress Palmer made Margaret a present of linen cloth of her own weaving, enough for two or three entire under dresses.

“Thank Miss Palmer,” said Nimrod to his sister.

“Oh no!” exclaimed the lady. “Take it and welcome, and anything we have got. But do, my young friend,” she added as he was mounting his horse, “do think on your ways, strive, strive, who knows but you may find the good thing at last. And the little gal—she is a good child as ever was. It was very kind of her to come all the way up here, and do us a service. She is worth her weight in gold. I hope she will have a new heart soon. Here,” she continued, “let me help you on.” Margaret scarcely touching the woman’s hand sprang to the pillion. “Why, how she jumps! She is as spry as a cricket. How pretty she does look up there behind you; I must have a kiss out of her,—there,—remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth—and don’t you forget, my young friend—good day.”

“I want Rhody to kiss me,” said Margaret.

“Run Rhody,” said her mother. So Rhody went forward and kissed Margaret.

“did Rhody kiss you?” asked Nimrod, when they had rode on awhile without saying anything.

“Yes,” was the reply.

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CHAPTER X.

Thanksgiving, Or New England’s Holiday.—Margaret Has Her Diversion.

It is a noticeable fact, that we of the present age have fewer holidays than our puritanical ancestors. “the King’s Birth Day,” was formerly celebrated with great pomp; in addition there were enjoyed “Coronation Days,” the “Birth of a Prince,” Accessions and Burials of Governors, Victories in War, Masonic Festivals, to say nothing of Military Reviews, Election Days, Ordination of Ministers, Executions for Murder; and at a still later period Washington’s Birth Day, now almost forgotten, The Fourth of July, at present diverted to a Sunday-school or Temperance Festival. But of Thanksgiving; a day devoted to mirth, gratefulness, hospitality, family love, eating, drinking; a day sometimes externally snowy, rainy, benumbing, drenching; internally so elastic, smiling, lark-like, verdant, blithe; it is not sanctified or squandered like Merry Christmas in the Old World; it has no gooding, candles, clog, carol, box, or hobby-horse; it has no poetry or song; it does not come in the calendar, only by the Governor’s proclamation; New Englanders can sing with Old Englanders, mutatis mutandis:

they cannot add,

Our houses and churches are brown and sear as the gardens and orchards about them. The cedar may be green in the

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wood, the box-tree, the fir and the pine together, we never use them. In both cases, there is, or was, an abundance of wassailing, dancing, gaming, shooting, and if one pleases to say, “Heathenrie, Divelrie, Dronkennesse, Pride.” We have no budding oak or holy-thorn, which sprang from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, and bears milk-white blossoms every Christmas day, in the forests of Glastonbury; although we have no doubt such trees might be found in our woods. Unlike Christmas, bread baked Thanksgiving Eve moulds never the slower. Yet, bating ecclesiastical days and a few calendar superstitions, which the dissenting Colonists left behind, how much did they not bring with them from their native soil! “We owe,” says the Democratic Review, “our political institutions, and nearly all the arrangements of our public, social and domestic life, to our English ancestors.” In addition to religion, language, habits, costume, fashions, science, art, architecture, agriculture, the military and naval art, horses, carriages, cows, sheep, grasses, bells, knives and forks, crockery and glass ware, apples, pears, peaches, etc. etc., there floated across the sea, and has descended the stream of time, idiosyncrasies of temper, idioms of speech, rhetorical figures, colloquial metaphors, an entire dialect of vulgarisms, ballads, madrigals, maxims, apologues, saws, witticisms, jokes, snibs, witchcraft, bigotry, omens, signs, a thousand and one fanciful calculations on the moon, the weather, beasts, birds, persons,—a whole argosy. Some of these may be traced to the Saxons and Britons, in unbroken succession. They still exist in England, Germany, Sweden, nay, everywhere. We must look perhaps for some great Oriental centre, some fountain head beyond the Indus. The fathers of the Sanscrit, the authors of the Vedas, the original Brahmins, whoever they may have been, possibly the step-sons of Noah, seem to have given population, language, law, philosophy, superstition, and, saving Christ, religion to the world.

John Bull and Brother Jonathan, a North Briton and a yankee, have the same flesh and blood, the same corpuscular ingredients, the same inspiration of the Almighty. The latter differs from the former chiefly in this, breadth; his legs are longer and his feet larger, because he has higher fences and steeper hills to climb, and longer roads to travel; he is more lank because he has not time to laugh so much, since it takes him so long to go to mill, to pasture, to his neighbors; he is less succulent and cozy because he gets dry and hardened in the extensive tracts of open air he has to traverse; he is

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more suspicious because in his circuits he meets with more strangers; he is more curious for the same reason; he is more inventive and calculating for this same breadth, that he has not aids at hand, and must depend on himself; his eye is keener because he sees his objects at a greater distance; he is more religious because he has farther to go for his religion, that is to say, to meeting; men valuing what costs them much;—the whole difference is breadth, interminable forests, rivers, mountains, platitudinous farms, families reaching from the Madawaska to the Yazoo. The same cause operates to distinguish the Kentucky hunter from the Yankee, cypress swamps, alligators, catamounts, the Indians, the Mississippi. Sam Slick is an elongated and skinny John Browdie, and David Crockett is the same “critter,” knobbed and gnarled.

Thanksgiving was an anti-Christmas festival, established as a kind of off-set to that. Yet both are a fealty paid to the universal gala-sentiment. We cannot always work, we cannot always pray. So say young and old, grave and gay. Hence, Hindoo Doorga, Celtic Juul, Jewish Succoth, Japanese Majira, the Panathenæa, Fête des Fous, Volks-fest, Carnival, Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving.

Thanksgivings have been observed—what do we say? The first Thanksgiving must have been of God’s own ordaining about the beginning of the new year 1621, that is to say, the 25th of March, at New Plymouth, after a dismal winter of destitution, disease and alarm, when the snows were melting, and “brooks of sweet fresh water” broke loose, the children found a new May-flower peeping from the dead leaves, the buds of the dog-wood began to swell, and the birds to sing, the “sick and lame recovered apace,” and the Colonists saw something that looked like living and home. The first Thanksgiving “by authority,” was, if we are agreed, June 13, 1632. We can hardly call this a New England Thanksgiving, inasmuch as it embraced but a handful of the people. The Indians must have kept it as a Fast.

Thanksgivings were appointed for “the removal of sickness,” “the precious life of our Sovereign;” “success of the king of Prussia,” “the conquest of Martinico,” that “God had been pleased to support our most gracious Queen in the perils of childbirth,” “for success against the Indians, so that scarce a name or family remain in their former habitation,” “the suppression of rebellion in Great Britain,” “the near view of peace.” Fasts, the antipodal holiday, were proclaimed by reason of “the small-pox,” “earthquakes, inunda-

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tions, and other calamities in Europe,” “distressing Indian wars,” “that we may be preserved against the rage of the heathen,” “the great number of insects,” “drought,” “unseasonable rains,” “divisions in our churches,” “the Ranters and Quakers,” “the low estate of the people of God,” “some heathen yet in hostility,” “the great distresses of Ministers, their salaries being paid in depreciated paper.”

Thanksgiving was at hand for Livingston, the Pond, Nimrod, Margaret. Its succedanea, as respects the latter, were a turkey shoot the next day, and a ball the following night, at No. 4. If Margaret had lived in the village, or almost any where else than at the pond, she might have enjoyed the meeting of families, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, uncles and aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins; she might have partaken in the consumption of pigs, turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, plum-pudding and plum-cake, pumpkin, mince and apple pies, beer, cider, flip; she might have gone to church and heard a discourse from Parson Welles on the distressing state of the times, and the imminent danger from French influence, and learned what a Philistine Napoleon Bonaparte was; she might have gone to a party of boys and girls at Esq. Weeks’s, and played “blind-man’s buff,” “run round the chimney,” and “button, button, who’s got the button;” but she did not. Yet she was quite busy at home. Two or three of the preceding days she spent riding about with Nimrod to invite company and arouse interest for the ball. They went to Mr. Pottle’s at Snake Hill, and Dr. Dunlap’s at Five-mile-lot, where they also encountered the camp Preacher sedulously disputing the field with them. They went also to the Ledge, where the Preacher followed. But Mistress Palmer decided the question by saying that Roderick, her oldest son, had professed a hope and would not think of going, but that Rhody had not come forward at all, and she thought it would do her good to have the exercise, and that Rufus, if he had been serious, had lost his impressions, and it would not do him any harm to go. They went into the various districts, and left some invitations in the edge of Dunwich and Brandon. The party was designed to be select, and all people of a certain caste and character were carefully omitted. Thanksgiving Eve was kept at the Pond in this wise; their candles were pine torches, which they flourished about the premises, under trees, in the shed, in pursuit of hens and turkeys; their clogs were large clumps of wood, stumps, twigs, &c. crowded into the immense fire-place; their carol consisted of oaths, smirks, songs; for ale they had an abundance of pupelo. No St.

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Nicholas watched about the chimney during the night, or filled Margaret’s stocking in the morning. Who is the patron saint of Thanksgiving?

Only Chilion made her a present of a beautiful blue-painted sled to coast with when the snows came. It was framed of the best materials, put together in the form most fitted for speed, shod with highly polished steel, and named Humming Bird. They had stewed chicken and crust coffee for breakfast, and for dinner chickens roasted by strings suspended before the fire, potatoes, brown bread and cider. Pies and cakes were wanting. The remainder of the time was occupied in preparing for the events of the next day, scouring guns, brushing shoes and coats, polishing buckles, &c. Nimrod took occasion to renew his instructions to Margaret in the dancing art, and Chilion intimated some of his best tunes. No. 4, to which the attention of the family was now directed, lay in a valley below the pond, formed by the passage of Mill Brook, and was enriched by nature with fine intervals and excellent drainages. The approach to the place was by a narrow, woody, rocky road or lane. Opposite you, on the south, rose a gradually ascending eminence and range of hills that jointed the horizon. Through No. 4 ran the highway from the village of Livingston to Brandon, a town on the south-west. Here was a large tavern, known as Smith’s, and a distillery owned by the same gentleman. In the language of a writer of the times, this hamlet presented a spectacle of “houses without windows, barns without roofs, gardens without enclosures, fields without fences, hogs without yokes, sheep without wool, meagre cattle, feeble horses, and half clad, dirty children, without manners, principles or morals.” The people were loungers about the tavern, which seemed to have exhausted the life of the place, and to have diffused over it instead, dearth, indolence, dreariness and sterility. This was a large two-story house, having a long stoop in front. Between it and the Brook was the Still, a long black building, surrounded by barrels and hogsheads of cider. Near the tavern was held the turkey shoot, the day after Thanksgiving, to which Nimrod took Margaret, and Hash carried one or two turkeys. It was chilly and drizzling, and Margaret was deposited in the kitchen of the tavern, where she had a chance to become acquainted with Mr. Smith’s daughters, the Gubtail’s, Hatch’s, Tapley’s from the neighborhood, Paulina Shiston, Grace Joy and Beulah Ann Orff from Breakneck. The bar-room was filled with men and boys, fumes of rum and tobacco, and a jargon of voices;

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the air about was charged with the smoke of powder; the turkeys were perched on a stump and tied by the leg; there were the report of rifles, the running to and fro of men and boys; disputes about the shots; wrangling, wrestling; in all which Margaret had no share. Thus passed the fore part of the day.

In the evening, Nimrod, as one of the masters of arrangements, with Margaret, came early to the tavern. Soon the ladies and gentlemen began to assemble. Of the number were Pluck and his wife, the Widow Wright and Obed, and Sibyl Radney; among the spectators were several elderly men and women from the neighborhood; among the loafers were Abel Wilcox, the clerk, Hancock Welles, grandson of the Parson, from the village. The hall was a long unfinished upper room; the naked timbers, joists and sleepers, were garnished with branches of pine and hemlock, laced with wreaths of ground laurel. Tallow candles were supported in wooden blocks on the walls, and rude benches were fixed to the sides of the room. The ladies’ dresses presented considerable variety; some had made requisition on the wardrobes of their grandmothers, some had borrowed from their neighbors, servants from their mistresses; in some appeared the latest style of the cities; several wore gowns of their own manufacture, striped or checked linen, with flowers elaborately wrought with the needle. There were sacques, trails and one or two hoops. There were corsages long and pointed, round and medium, high and narrow. Sleeves were tight, short and bordered with ruffles. All had necklaces of gold, glass, or waxen beads. The coiffures were equally diversified, ringlets, crockets, twists, tye-tops, crape cushions, toupees, sustained and enriched with brass and gilt clasps, pins, silk and velvet fillets, feathers and flowers. The shoes were striped with a white welt. There was an agreeable intermixture of old and faded brocades and damasks, rustling padusoys, shining lutestrings, changeables, embossed linens, and plain white muslins. Many wore ear-hoops of pinch-beck, as large as a dollar. On the side of the gentlemen was a similar blending of old and new patterns. If Joseph’s coat of many colors had been miraculously enlarged, and cut up into separate garments, it would form the appropriate suit of this assemblage, in which red, blue, yellow, chocolate, butternut, green and all hues but black, were represented. Some wore a costume resembling that of the Master’s, we have before described. The hair of most of the gentlemen was powdered, and some had it done in

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tyes, queues, frizzes. Of buckles there were silver, plated, brass, iron, steel, pewter and paste. Most of them sported ruffle cuffs. Margaret wore the new dress Nimrod bought her, and her moccasins. Pluck retained his leather apron, his wife had donned a clean long-short. Chilion, the chief musician, wore a pearl-colored coat, buff swansdown vest, white worsted breeches and ribbed stockings. Tony Washington, the negro barber from the village, and assistant violinist, had his head powdered, wore a crimson silk faded coat with long skirts, ruffle cuffs and white smalls. It was a singularly freaked and speckled group. There were burly, weather-beaten faces under powder and curls; broad, hard hands in kid gloves; thewy, red elbows that had plied brooms, shuttles, cards, frisking lace ruffles; there were bright eyes, smiling faces and many pleasant words. Chilion, whose general manner was reserved and obscure, grew animated when the dance began. Margaret, omitted at first, was presently called up by Rufus palmer. None were so young and small as she; but she enacted her part with vigor and precision. Her father asked her for a partner, and it gave her new life when she saw she pleased him. She was, for the most part, among strangers, in a strange place and strangely occupied. The lights, the open fantastically shadowed garret above, the evergreens, the windows shining with the dew of so many breaths, the mystic motion, steps which one takes and comprehends not, balancing, gallopading, confusion harmonized, oiled intricacies, plough-boys graceful and boors mannerly, earnestness of participation, so earnest that even in the height of the game no one smiles; and then above all and in all, the clear, exhilarating, penetrating notes of the violin, and Chilion’s violin, that she always loved to hear, played in its best way; the life of all this life, the motion of this motion, the inspirer and regulator of this maze,—she felt grateful to her brother, and for the rest, she seemed to enjoy it with a deep unconsciousness of joy. One might have noticed her brother Chilion peculiarly employed. He not only controlled the action, but seemed to gratify himself in varying and modifying it. He evidently fantasied with the company. He made them move faster or slower as he pleased. He might have been seen watching the effect of his viol, or his own effect through it. Whatever power he possessed he exerted to the utmost. He seemed to be playing more upon the dancers than upon his instrument. In the midst of a figure he would accelerate the parties, drive them from point to point with the wildest rapidity. In a contra-

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dance, to the “Campbells are Coming,” never did plaided Highlander leap down his native rocks with a more headlong step than those same pied bumpkins sprang over that hall floor. He slackened the motion at the close, and dismissed them quietly to their seats. In one of the intermissions, might have been seen entering the place the indefatigable preacher. He stole through the crowd, erected his tall dark form on a bench, and taking advantage of the pause, broke upon them like a thunder gust. His loud, guttural, solemn voice, rang through the room.

“Thus saieth the Lord God, thy pomp shall be brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols!”

“A sermon! A sermon!” cried Abel Wilcox.

Preacher. “You look fair and seemly, but you are stench in the nostrils of the Almighty.”

Crowd. “another set, who’ll lead off?”

Preacher. “The Lord will take awy the bravery of your tinkling ornaments, your cauls and round tires like the moon, your chains and bracelets and mufflers.”

Pluck. “Let us praise God in the dance, praise him with the stringed instruments. Let us, as David did, dance before the Lord.”

Preacher. “This place shall be as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah; owls shall dwell here, and satyrs shall dance here.”

Crowd. “Peggy and Molly!” “The Haymakers,” “Here’s Zenas Joy and Delinda Hoag want “Come haste to the Wedding!’ ”

Preacher. “You stand on slippery places, your feet shall stumble on the dark mountains.”

Crowd. “Chorus Jig! Hoa! Chilion, where are you?”

Chilion. “Take your partners.”

Preacher. “Rhody Palmer! Sylvina Pottle! Myra Dunlap! Are you in this scene of noise and confusion? Didn’t you come forward to be prayed for? Myra, didn’t you profess to have submitted? Oh! oh! god has been at Snake Hill, Five-mile-lot and the Ledge, and he would have gone clear through Breakneck and No. 4, but for this dance! And here I espy the arch-adversary of souls, the contriver of your eternal ruin, the very devil himself in your midst.”

Nimrod. “The devil you do.”

Preacher. “Young man, you will have your portion in hell-fire.”

Nimrod. “I go to hell if I do.”

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Preacher. “The deep damnation of God is prepared for you.”

Nimrod. “I be damned if it is.”

Preacher. “What profanity! what blasphemy to add to the catalogue of your sins.”

Chilion. “All ready.”

The words of the Preacher, as not unusually happens, were disregarded. He pitched his voice still higher. They danced the faster, Chilion played with the greater energy. The Preacher himself exhausted, or discouraged, became at length a listener, and finally his eye was rivetted to the scene before him. Chilion played on almost wildly. Tony seconded the purposes of his master to the best of his endeavors, his teeth and eyes shone with a terrified whiteness, and the powder from his hair sprinkled his face. Chilion was unmoved in the storm he raised. Curls uncurled, ruffles were ruffled, trains trailed; but the dance went on. Margaret revelled in the movement; she danced as to the winds; she knew her brother, she loved his power, she leaped out his spirit and tones. She sprang through the figure like a shuttle, she spun round and round like a top. Chilion, in his own time, softened the measure, and suffered the piece to glide away in the gentlest pulsations. The night waxed and waned. The Preacher, the elderly people and children, and other spectators had gone; most of the dancers left.

Here we must recede a moment to relate that in the forenoon, Hash the brother of Margaret, and Zenas Joy, a resident of the place called Breakneck, had a serious misunderstanding about a shot the latter made at a turkey set up by the former. Numbers came forward to the arbitration, and in the result it happened that the interests and jealousies of all parties became joined in issue, and the strength and prowess of the several neighborhoods were arranged under the respective standards of the Pond and Breakneck. It was proposed to adjust the difficulty by a champion from each side in a wrestling match. A rain, however, separated the combatants, and broke up the ring. At the supper-table in the evening, the subject was renewed. Again at this late hour of the night, there were not wanting causes to stimulate the feud in such as remained. Mr. Smith, the tavern-keeper, brought forward a fresh supply of liquors, of which both gentlemen and ladies freely drank; and the two young men from the village had no other business than to foment and egg on the rivalships of the several districts. A final dance was called

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for; but there appeared little self-possession, either in respect of temper or limb. Chilion played a while, and then relinquished his instrument. Zenas Joy seized Hash by the collar; Joseph Whiston tripped Obed, who, poor youth, was already nearly down with liquor; Abel Wilcox spurred Rufus Palmer to tread on Beulah Ann Orff’s trail; Grace Joy taunted Nimrod with a false step Margaret had taken; Sibyl Radney rushed into the fray, pounced upon Zenas Joy, and sent him whirling about the room, as she would a spinning wheel. So one and another were engaged. Margaret, who had left the floor, was standing by the side of Chilion. She looked at the quarrellers, and then at her brother. He snapped his viol strings, and was silent.

“Sing, Margery,” at length he said. He began a familiar tune, “Mary’s Dream”—he played and she sang. This twofold melody, sweet and plaintive, seemed to touch the hearts of those excited people. They stopped to hear, they heard to be won. They moved towards the music; they were hushed if not subdued, they parted in peace if not in harmony. Thus ended their Thanksgiving, and we must end ours, and turn to other times and scenes.

CHAPTER XI.

A Revised Account of Nimrod and His Doings.

We shall omit the wild-turkey hunt of the bright autumnal moon-light night in the woods, exciting and engaging though it was, and the race with Streaker, in which Margaret bore no part, while we proceed to enumerate some particulars of her eldest brother, that have a relation to herself. Nimrod evinced a volative, roving, adventure-seeking habit from his boyhood. The severe waspish temper of his mother he could not abide, the coarse, dogged despotism of Hash he resented; Chilion was only a boy, and one not sufficiently social and free; with his father he had more in common. At the age of fourteen he became an indented apprentice to Mr. Hatch the blacksmith at No. 4. But of the different kind of blows of which he was capable, he relished those best that had the least to do with the anvil. He liked horses well enough, but preferred

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their hides to their hoofs; and became more skilful with the fleam than the buttress. He left his master in a rage, himself in good humor. He next let himself at the Crown and Bowl in the village, where one might fancy he would find his element. He was hostler, bar-tender, wood-bringer, errand-boy, chore-doer, farrier, mistress’-man, waiting-maid’s man and everybody’s man by turn. He entertained travellers at the door, girls in the kitchen and boys in the stoop. He was quick but he always loitered, he was ingenious yet nothing was well done. It would not seem strange that he should prove a better auxiliary to every one’s taste and fancy, than to Mr. Stillwater his employer’s interest. He hung a flint stone on the barn-door to keep the devil from riding the horses in the night; but this did not prevent indications of their having been used at unlawful times and in unlawful ways, which their owner was disposed to charge upon Nimrod. He was dismissed. While he served others at the bar he must needs help himself, and he became at an early age an adept in what an old writer denominates the eighth liberal art. At the close of the revolutionary war, it became more difficult to fill vacancies in the army, than it had been originally to form companies. There were “Classes” in Livingston, as everywhere else, whose duty it was to furnish a certain number of soldiers, as exigency required. By one of these, Nimrod, not yet fifteen years of age, but of due physical proportion and compliance, was hired. He joined a detachment ordered on the defence of our northern frontier.

But even military discipline was insufficient to correct his propensities, or reform his habits. He deserted, and crossed the Canada lines. He connected himself with a band of smugglers that swarmed in those quarters, and during the spring of the year 1784, we find him in New York in a sloop from up river. The vessel was anchored in the stream not far from the Albany Basin. She had a deck-load of lumber, and wheat in her hold, the ordinary supply of the country at the time; her contraband goods were stowed in proper places. Government, both state and national, was pressed for means; the war, taxes, suspension of productive labor, had heightened necessity, and diminished resource. Duties were great, but legislation was irregular. The city held in its bosom many who had suffered during the late contest. The general amnesty while it retained the disaffected, failed in some cases to reconcile them. Hence smuggling, while it grew to be a most vexatious practice, was one of tolerably easy accomplish-

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ment. Laws were severe, but there was wanting the force to execute; the police was more numerous than energetic. Still the business demanded skill, caution and prudence.

Late in the evening, the cabin of the sloop was visited by an elderly gentleman in buff coat and breeches, having an eagle holding an olive branch wrought on his left breast. He was addressed by the Captain as Mr. Girardeau. He complained bitterly of the times, the rise of taxes, financial depressions, the decline of real estate and sundry misfortunes. He said that his clerk, meaning thereby his daughter, had eloped, and that his old servant Simon was dead. He had evident connection with the private objects of the vessel, and under his supervision preparations were made for carrying the contraband articles to his own store in the city. These, consisting of silks, ribbons, laces, &c. were laid in coffin-shaped boxes, and Nimrod with another of the crew was detached as porters. They rowed, in a small boat, as far as the beach in Hudson Square, threaded a lane along the woods and hills of Grand Street, came down through the marshes and fields of Broadway, till they reached a small wooden house lying under a hill back of the City Hall, which was the residence of Mr. Girardeau whom they found waiting to receive them. They encountered several of the police stationed on the skirts of the city, one of whom they frightened by intimations of the small-pox; another they avoided by slinking into the shadows of trees; another they succeeded in stupifying by the drafts of rum, a supply of which they carried in their pockets. Nimrod recounted his adroit passages to Mr. Girardeau, who seemed pleased with the success if not with the character of the youth; and, in fine, hearing him highly recommended by the Captain, he the next day engaged him, under the assumed name of Foxly, to fill the place recently held by his deceased servant Simon. Nimrod was nothing loth to exchange masters, and enter upon new scenes. Mr. Girardeau’s quarters comprised both his store and dwelling-house. The building was one of the old style, having its gable to the street. In the rear of the shop-room was a kitchen, and above were sleeping apartments. In the first instance, Mr. Girardeau intimated to Nimrod the necessity of a change of apparel, and that he must wear one of a color like his own. He himself had been a resident in the city during the war, while the British had possession, and at that time wore a scarlet coat, with the arms of the king. At the peace, he changed his hue and badge. In the next place, he undertook to indoctrinate

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his new servant in the secrets of his business, and to impress upon him a sense of the responsibleness of his vocation. “I—I should say we,—’tis all one concern, one interest,” so his employer unfolded himself, “we are poor, we are embarrassed. You, Mr. Foxly, perhaps know how awful a thing poverty is. You can understand me. We are opposed, we are maltreated, we are vilified. Enemies beset us night and day; even now they may be listening to us through the walls.”

Nimrod, who was not without a tincture of the superstition of his times, notwithstanding his ordinary display of fearlessness and daring, started. “They won’t take us off in the night, will they?” exclaimed he.

“Yes, in the night,” replied Mr. Girardeau.

“Then I may as well be a packing,” said Nimrod. “I can’t stay here. I thought you hadn’t any of them in the city.”

“Why the city is full of them,” rejoined Mr. Girardeau, “hence we see the necessity of care, confederation and secrecy.”

“But they come in anywhere,” answered Nimrod. “They’ll whisk you right out of your bed. Aunt Ravel had seven pins stuck into her in one night. Old uncle Kiah, that used to live at Snake Hill, was trundled down hill three nights agoing, and his skin all wore off, and he grew as lean as a gander’s leg.”

“Mr. Foxly!” interrupted Mr. Girardeau, “you misunderstand me,—I see you are from the country, a good place,—but you misunderstand me. It is men I mean, not spirits. We have no witches here, only hard-hearted, covetous, ignorant, griping, depraved, desperate men.”

“Sho! it[’]s humans you are speaking of,” replied Nimrod; “I an’t no more afraid of them than a cat is of a wren. I like them, I could live among them as well as a fish in water.”

“Mr. Foxly!” continued Mr. Girardeau, solemnly. “We have something to fear from men. Here likewise you mistake. I fear you are too rash, too head-strong.”

“Anything, Sir,” answered Nimrod, “I will do anything you wish,” he added, more soberly. “I will serve you, as they did the troops in the war, work for nothing and find myself.”

“you may well say so,” added Mr. Girardeau, [“]Simon was faithful, he spared himself to provide for me. We are in

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straits, we must live frugally. Persecution surrounds us. We have enemies who can do us a great injury. I can be made to injure you, and you to injure me. We need circumspection, we are, if I may so say, in one another’s power. There are those who might take advantage of my necessities, to compel me to surrender you to the rigor of unjust laws, and you might end your days in a prison. My whole life has been one of exposure and want, labor and toil.” Thus was Nimrod addressed. In the third place, added Mr. Girardeau, “I must admonish you, Mr. Foxly, and most rigidly enjoin, that on no account are you to have conference, or hold any relations with a certain young woman, that sometimes comes here, whom I will point out to you.” Nimrod found upon the premises a little black-eyed boy eight or nine years of age, whom he took for the grandson of his employer. This boy was sent to school, and when at home played on the hill back of the house, and slept in a room separate from Nimrod’s, with whom Mr. Girardeau did not seem anxious that he should have much intercourse. These three constituted the entire family. Nimrod became cook, washerman, porter, and performed with alacrity whatever duty was assigned him. How Nimrod relished his new service and new master for a while, we need not relate. He could not fail, however, to be sensible that his food was not quite as good as that to which he had been accustomed, and to find that his master did not prove exactly what he expected. He found Mr. Girardeau to be, to say the least, harsh, arbitrary, exacting; he began to suspect something worse than this; he believed he told him falsehoods; that he had money, and that in abundance. As he lay on the counter, where he usually slept at night, he was sure he heard the sound of coin in the room over head. Of the young woman, respecting whom he had been cautioned, he saw nothing, till one day, he heard voices in the chamber. He listened at the foot of the stairs, and distinguished a female’s voice. There were sharp words, severe epithets. Presently a woman came hurriedly down, and passed into the street.

“Did you see that girl?” asked Mr. Girardeau, descending immediately afterwards.

“Yes, Sir,” replied Nimrod.

“She is my daughter,” added Mr. Girardeau. “Yes, my own flesh and blood. You know not the feelings of a father. She has been guilty of the greatest of crimes, she has disobeyed me, she has violated my will, she has endangered my

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estate. She has married to her own shame, and my grief. I have borne with her, till forbearance becomes a sin. She would strip me of my possessions. The author of her degradation she would make the pander to her cruelty. I am doubly beset, they are in a conspiracy against me. Heed her not, listen not to her importunity, let her suffer. I have no feelings of a father; they have been wrenched and torn away; I cannot own a viper for a child.”

Nimrod thrust his fists in his waistcoat pockets, where he clenched them angrily. He was silent. He listened as to an unanswerable argument; he believed not a word. In the mean time let us refer to some events wherein his own interest began to be awakened; and which we shall embody in a new chapter, with a new title.

CHAPTER XII.

The Story Of Gottfried BrÜckmann And Jane Girardeau.

Among the Mercenaries, popularly known as Hessians, employed by England against America during the war of our Revolution, was Gottfried Brückmann. He was, properly speaking, a Waldecker, having been born in Pyrmont, an inconsiderable city of that principality. From what we know of his history, he seems to have shared largely in the passion for music, which distinguishes many of his countrymen. To this also he added a thirst for literary acquisition. But, being a peasant by caste, he encountered not a few obstacles in these higher pursuits. He became bellows-boy for the organ in the church of his native town, and availing himself of chance-opportunities, he attained some skill on that instrument. He played well on the harpsichord, flute and violin. In the French language, at that time so much in vogue among the Germans, he became a proficient. Nevertheless, he fretted under the governmental yoke that was laid so oppressively and haughtily upon the necks of that class of the people to which he belonged. His conduct exposing him to suspicion, he fled into the region of country described as the Hartz Mountains. Whatever of romance, literature, poetry,

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descended into the mass of the population; whatever of legendary tale or cabalistic observance was cherished by the common heart; whatever of imaginative temper, ideal aspiration, or mystic enthusiasm has ever characterized any portion of his countrymen; Brückmann possessed; and in the vicinity where he now found himself, there was a supply of objects fitted to animate the strongest sentiments of his being, and scenes and associations that were congenial with his inclinations;—forests of oak and beech, fir and pine; every kind and conformation of rock; birds of all descriptions; cloud-piercing hills, unfathomable chasms; lakes embosomed in mountains; waterfalls; mines and smelting-houses, with the weird and tartarean look of the workmen and their operations; gorgeous sunsets; dense and fantastic fogs; perennial snows: points of local and traditionary interest; the Altar and Sorcerer’s Chair, the seat of the festival of the old Saxon idol, Crotho; the grottoes Baumanshole and Bielshole; a cave rputed, at the time, to have no termination; wildness, irregularity, terror, grandeur, freedom and mystery, on every side. In addition, were little villages and clusters of houses in valleys embowered in forests, and overshadowed by mountains, into one of which Brückmann’s wanderings led him, that of Rubillaud, through which runs the Bode. Here in the midst of almost inaccessible rocks and cold elevations, he found fruit-trees in blossom, fields green with corn, a small stone-church surmounted with a crucifix, a May-pole hung with garlands, around which the villagers were having their Whitsun dances. In this place, he remained awhile, and was engaged as a school-teacher for children, the parents of whom were chiefly miners. Here, as we subsequently learn, he became warmly attached to one of his pupils, Margaret Bruneau, daughter of the Pastor of Rubillaud, who was a Lutheran. In her he found tastes and feelings like his own. With her he rambled among mountains, penetrated caves, sang from rocks; and had such an intercourse as tended to cement their affection, and prosecuted whatever plans were grateful to their natures. But in the midst of his repose, came that cruel and barbarous daft of the British Crown on the German States. Some of the inhabitants of Rubillaud, who were subjects of the King of Hanover, were enlisted in this foreign service. Requisition was made on several provinces then in alliance with England, Brunswick, Hesse Cassel, Hanau, Anhalt and Waldeck; and on Brückmann’s native town, Pyrmont. The general league formed among these

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princes against the peace and liberty of their people, would not suffer that Brückmann should escape. He was seized, as if he had been a felon, and forcibly taken to Rotterdam, the place of embarkation. The reluctance with which this body of levies contemplated the duty to which they were destined, will be understood when it is told, that they were obliged to be under guard on their march to the sea-coast; that many of them, bound hand and foot, were transported in wagons and carts; some succeeded in deserting; others making the attempt were shot. Brückmann, for some instance of insubordination, received a wound at the hand of his own Captain, from which he never entirely recovered. Swords ruled souls. Their avaricious and tyrannical lords let them out as slaves, and had them scourged to their tasks. Brückmann and Margaret parted in uttermost bitterness of spirit, and with the fondest expressions of love. They wafted their adieus and prayers to each other across the bridge of the Bode, over which he was rudely snatched, to see her in this world no more forever.

We shall not follow him through the fortunes of the war; but hasten to its close, when he was stricken and overwhelmed by the news of Margaret’s deaths. A strong bond, and perhaps the only one that attached him to his native country, was broken; and, in common with many of his countrymen, he chose to remain in America after the peace. These Germans, such as survived,—more than eleven thousand of their number having perished during the war,—scattered themselves; some joined the settlements of their brethren in Pennsylvania, some pushed beyond the Ohio, some were dispersed in the New England States. Brückmann took up his abode in New York. Those who returned to Germany he bade plant Margaret’s grave with narcissus, rosemary and thyme, and visit it every Whitsun Festival with fresh flowers; while he would hallow her memory with prayers and tears in his own heart. He was disappointed in purpose, forsaken in spirit, broken in feeling. Contrary to the usual maxim, he loved those whom he had injured, and was willing that whatever of life or energy remained to him should be given to the Americans, while he remembered the land of his birth with sorrow, upbraidings and despair.

Owing to our numerous and profitable relations with France at this time, the French language had arisen in the popular estimation, and was in great request. He would teach it, and so earn a livelihood, and serve the land of his adoption.

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Music too, the musical spirit of Margaret and of his native country, that which survives in the soul when everything else is prostrate, came over him. He would live again in song. He would recall the scenes of the past. Margaret would reappear in the tones of their love and their youth; her spirit would echo to the voice of his flute; in song, like night, they would meet again; by an invisible pathway of melody they would glide on to the grave. Poor Brückmann ! Poor America! What with his deficiency in our tongue, and his former services against our liberties, he obtained but few scholars. Superior and more agreeable Frenchmen were his rivals. Music! How could we pay for music, when we could not pay our debts? The crescendo and diminuendo were other than of sound our people had to learn. He grew sicker at heart, his hopes had all fled, and his spiritual visions seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer. He sat by the narrow window of the small unlighted room he rented, in the night, and played on his flute to the darkness, the air, the groups of idle passers by, to memory and to the remote future whither his visions were flying, and the fair spirit of his reveries had betaken herself. Yet he had one and not an unconcerned listener, and perhaps another. These were Jane Girardeau and her father. Mr. Girardeau had discovered the sound of the music proceeding from the hill behind his house, and his daughter listening to it. He called her in; she would go up to the chamber window, and repeat her curiosity. He ordered her to bed; she would creep from her room, and sly into the street that she might hear it. He detected her, rebuffed her, and locked her into her room. “Can you indulge such extravagance?” was the language of Mr. Giradeau to his daughter. “Can you yield to such weakness? Will you waste your time in this way? Shall I suffer in you a repetition of all your mother occasioned me? Will you hazard your reputation? Why will you so often break my commands, and thwart my wishes? Shall I be compelled to resort to harsh measures? Are you growing so perverse that moderation is of no avail? I will have none of this. You are impudent, beastly.”

His daughter ill brooked all this. To the mind of her father, she was rash, reckless, turbulent, obstinate, wasteful, inordinate, selfish, lavish, insensible. She was lavish, but only of her heart’s best affections; she was rash, not in head, so much as in impulse; she was insensible, but only to the demands of lucre; she was troubled, not turbulent; she was

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inordinate, for no want of her heart had ever been supplied; she was selfish in the sense of obeying her nature, while she disregarded the behests of stupidity and meanness.

Jane had rebelled under the iron jurisdiction of her father. Like the hidden fires of the earth she broke out wherever she could find vent. She was held down, not subdued. She was too elastic to flatten, too spiritual to stagnate. She rebounded with a wild recoil. Her fits of anger, or sallies of spirit, whatever they might be called, were frequent and energentic. As she grew older, she became more sensible of her degradation and wrongs, as well as more capable of redressing them.

She was the only child of an ill-assorted marriage. She became of some service to her father. Her personal beauty was an attraction to customers, and he valued her aid as shop-girl. She presided over the department of the store devoted to the sale of fancy goods, which, obtained in various ways, afforded enormous profits, and became an item of trade, that, notwithstanding her father’s extensive and multifarious business, he could not well forego. She was also a good accountant and book-keeper. Brückmann was straitened for means. His quarterly rent was due. He would make one effort more; and that perhaps the most dangerous for a poor man; he would borrow money. He knew of the broker near by, he knew his reputation for great wealth. He had no friend, no backer. He obtained a certificate from the parents of one of his scholars, to the effect that he was believed to be an honest man. He presented himself at the store of Mr. Girardeau. Jane was there; she recognized in him the flute-player, whom she had sometimes seen in the streets, or at his window. Brückmann was a Saxon throughout; his eyes were full blue, his complexion was light and fair, his hair was of a sandy brown, thick and bushy. Dejection and disappointment were evidently doing their work upon him. His face had grown thin, his eyes were sunk, and his look was that of a sick man. He addressed Mr. Girardeau in broken English. “Speak in your own language,” said the latter gentleman, “I can understand you.” He stated briefly his object. Mr. Girardeau looked at the note, and replied in German, “Hard times, Sir, hard times; securities scarce, liabilities uncertain, business dull, great losses abroad, foreigners do not appreciate our condition.” He then proceeded to interrogate Brückmann on his business, circumstances, prospects. There were two listeners to the answer, father and daughter, both intent, but in a different manner. The old gentleman ordered Jane away

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while he transacted a little private business. She retreated to the back part of the store where she persistingly stood; and it was obvious, although the stranger spoke in his own tongue, she comprehended what he said. From one thing to another Brückmann was led to recite his entire history; his birth, his retreat to Rubillaud, his interest in Margaret, his enlistment, his service in the war, Margaret’s death, his present method of support. Mr. Girardeau replied, in brief, that it was not in his power to accommodate him. The agitation of Brückmann was evidently intense at this repulse; and there seemed to be aroused a corresponding sympathy of distress in the heart of Jane. The story of the stranger interested her, it took strong possession of her imagination. As he left, her thoughts followed him with that most agonizing sense of powerless compassion. Could she but see him, could she but speak with him, she would bestow upon him her condolences, if she could offer him no more substantial aid.

Jane studied day and night how she might encounter the unhappy stranger, the enchanting musician. To perfect her for his purposes, her father allowed her to do a little business in her own name. These earnings, ordinarily devoted to some species of amusement or literary end, she now as sedulously hoarded as increased. She discovered where Brückmann had some pupils in a private family. Thither, taking her private purse, she went; sought her way to his room, and seated herself among the scholars. She heard the recitation, and the remarks that accompanied it. She discerned the originality of Brückmann’s mind, as she had formerly been interested in the character of his sensibilities. He spoke in a feeble tone, but with a suggestive emphasis. She knew well the causes of his depression. He sang also to his pupils one of his native hymns, she admired its beauty and force, and perhaps more the voice of the singer. She stayed behind when the scholars left. He spoke to her. She replied, to his surprise, in his own language, or something akin to it. She told him who she was, that she had heard his story, that she compassionated his wants, that her father was abundantly rich, and that from her own earnings she had saved him some money. She pressed upon him her purse, which neither delicacy demanded, nor would necessity allow that he should refuse. She told him how much she had been interested in his history; she desired him to repeat it. “Tell me,” said she, “more about Margaret Bruneau.” He related as much as the time would permit.

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She was reproached, she was maledicted by her father, on her return, although he knew not where she had been. An Idea had seized her, and for that she was willing to sacrifice everything. It had neither shape, nor color, nor definition, nor end. She thought of it when she went to bed, she dreamed of it, she awoke with it. She would see the stranger. She went again to his school-room. She walked with them on the Parade. “Tell me,” she would say, “more about Margaret. How old was she? How did she look? How did you love her? Why did you love her?” He would repeat all he had said before and discover new particulars each time.

“Were her parents rich or poor?” asked Jane.

“Poor,” replied Brückmann.

“Happy, happy Margaret! O if my father were poor as the sheerest mendicant I should be happy.”

“You may be able to do much good with your money, sometime or other.”

“I see nothing before me but darkness and gloom,” replied Jane. “My father,—you know what he is. My dear, dear mother, too fond of her child, too opposed to her husband, too indulgent, too kind,—she has gone from my love and my approach forever. I may be in the midst of affluence, I am cursed, blighted by a destitute such as you know nothing of. Gold may be my inheritance, my prospects are all worthless, fearful, sombre. You say you will meet Margaret in heaven!”

“Speak freely with me,” said Brückmann, “I love to hear, if I cannot answer. Margaret and I often talked of what we could not comprehend. We strove to lift each other up, even if we made no advance. She had a deep soul, an unbounded aspiration. We sang of heaven, and then we began to feel it. We were more Sphinxes than Œdipuses. Yet she became Heaven to me, when there was none in the skies. She was a transparent, articulate revelation of God.”

“How I should love Margaret!” said Jane to him one day. “What was the color of her hair? like yours?”

“No,” replied Brückmann; “as I have told you, she was not of German origin. Her ancestors came from Languedoc in the Religious Wars. She was more tropical in her features, and perhaps in her heart, than I. She had black hair and eyes, she resembled you, Miss Girardeau, I think.”

“How I wish I could see her!” replied Jane. “You say she does come to you sometimes?”

“Yes,” said Brückmann, [“]and since I have know you she

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comes more frequently, more clearly. My perishing heart had scarce power to evoke her. My song became too faint a medium. You have revived those visions, those refreshing communions.”

“Then I am happy,” said Jane; “I knew not that I had such a power. You, sir, know not the misery of being able to make no one happy. I torture my father, I plague Simon. I am of use to no one. And my poor self answers not for itself.”  *   *   *   *

“How could you, Mr. Brückmann—”

“Call me not that,” he said, interrupting her, “call me Gottfried, as Margaret always did.”

“Then you must do the same by me,” she replied, “you must call me Jane; though no one does but father and Simon. But if you will call me so, I shall forget that any one else ever has. I was going to ask how you came to fight against our poor country?”

“I never did,” he said, “my heart and soul were with the Americans. I was forced into the work. I was bayoneted to the lines. My musket shared the indisposition of its owner, and shot at random. Wounds that had been spared by those against whom I was arrayed, were anticipated by my own officers. Often staggering under the effects of a blow received in Germany, when I attempted to escape, have I been drawn out against those, so called, my enemies; and at this moment am I sensible of the pain.”

“Yet you might have been killed in battle,” said she, “and I, poor, ridiculous, selfish me! should never have seen you.”

“Nor I you,” he rejoined; “I know not which is the most indebted.”

It cannot be supposed these interviews were had without greatly provoking the indignation of Mr. Girardeau. He noticed the frequent, and sometimes protracted absences of his daughter; he traced them to the indigent German, whose application for money he denied, to the villanous musician that had given him so much annoyance. His passion had no bounds. He ceased to expostulate; he raved, he threatened; he shut Jane into her chamber, he barred the door, he declared he would starve her. As Jane had never learned filial obedience, so she had not disciplined herself to ordinary patience. Even in matters that concerned her interest and happiness most vitally, she was impetuous, inconsiderate. She could bear imprisonment, she could bear starvation, she could bear

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invective and violence; she could not endure separation from Brückmann. She had, in respect of him, new and joyous sensations, enchanting her whole existence. She looked on him as a superior being. She felt that he alone could understand her, appreciate her, sympathize with her. She felt that of the mass about her, he only seemed to have a common nature with her. She thought not of his poverty, or his dejection. She thought only of his soul into which she could pour her own. She was eager for him, as a child for its mother’s breast. His love for Margaret Bruneau only heightened his value in her eyes. He seemed for his devotion to Margaret Bruneau, purer, greater, diviner. He and Margaret constituted to her mind a delightful company. She entered a magic circle when she came into their communion. She became one of a glorious trio. Then she saw herself interpreted and resembled in Margaret; and she acted as a conjuration to bring that delightful vision from the shades. Brückmann she assisted, encouraged, enlivened; she rendered him more hopeful, more happy. And she herself had no life, except as he was able to explain that life. His soul seemed to respond to hers, and her own grew serener and stiller as it received that response. “He, too, will suffer,” she said to herself, “if he sees me not. His own heart will break again. Margaret will come to him no more;” and every thought of his uneasiness or suspense vibrated, like a fire, through her.

Mr. Girardeau waited to see some tokens of his daughter’s repentance and amendment, but none appeared. The more completely to secure his purposes, he instigated a prosecution against Brückmann, on the score of debt, and he was thrown into the City Jail. The old gentleman then approached his daughter, apprized her of what had befallen her friend, and announced his final decision. He told her if ever she saw Brückmann again, if ever she communicated with him by word or letter, she would turn her into the streets, he would close his doors upon her forever, he would disinherit her, and cast her off to utter shame, destitution and wretchedness. With whatever tone or spirit this sentence may have been distinguished, and there could be no mistake as to its general purport, its effect on Jane was scarcely perceptible. Her die was cast, her resolution taken. She undid the fastenings of her room, she escaped into the street. Going to the Jail, she obtained access to the cell and was locked in with Brückmann. Through his drooping heart and wasting frame he received her with a bland, welcome smile. She fell at his feet, and

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poured herself out in a torrent of tears, her swollen heart broke in sighs, sobs and convulsions. His kindness reassured her, and she told him what had transpired. “But,” she continued, “Gottfried, I must see you, I must be with you, I cannot live away from you, I die without you. Existence has not the faintest charm, not a solitary point of interest, if I am separated from you. You have awakened within me every dormant and benumbed faculty. You have spread over time the hues of a higher being. You have given back to my soul the only answer it ever received; with your eyes I have looked into myself and discovered some beauty there, where before was only a deep and frightful chaos. In a world of shallowness and stupidity you alone have anticipated, understood, valued me. I repose on you as on the breast of God. You have introduced me to an elevated communion; you have welcomed me to the participation of yourself and Margaret; you have inspired me with a desire to know more of the laws of the spirit’s life. For all this I have made you no return. I am little, how little, to you. You owe me nothing, I owe you everything.”

“Jane,—” said he.

“Do not interrupt me now,” she continued. “Let my poor soul have its say. It may be its last. I have now no home on earth but you. May I remain with you? May I hear your voice, look into your eyes, be blessed and illumined by your spirit?”

“Is it possible,” said Brückmann, “that your father will never relent? He needs you, his own sortune is under obligations to you.”

“You know not my father,” was the decisive reply. “He is fixed, inexorable, as the God he serves. I look to you, or to vacancy, to nought, to the sepulchral abyss of my own soul, to the interminable night of my own thoughts. To be poor is nothing, to be an outcast is nothing; to be away from you is worse than all calamities condensed in one blow. Do not be distressed, my good Gottfried. I will not embarrass you. Gottfried—I will marry you—I do embarrass you. I do distress you—I will not. No! I go away—I leave you— Farewell, Gottfried!”

“Stay!” replied he, “do not go away.”

“Speak to me,” she said. “Chide me, spurn me. I can bear anything. I will not stir, nor wince, nor weep. I can stiffen myself into insensibility. I will sit here unmoved as a curb-stone. Speak, Gottfried, speak, if you kill me.”

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“Jane,” said he, calmly but kindly, “you have nothing to fear from me, we have nothing to fear from each other. We know each other too well to be alarmed by surprises, or perplexed at disclosures. We have no secrets to keep or to reveal, no hopes to indulge or disappoint. Our natures are bared to each other; our several destinies too well understood; a word, the faintest expression of a wish is sufficient. You know Margaret, I need not—”

“No, Mr. Brückmann, you need not—”

Call me Gottfried. Margaret called me Gottfried. You must never call me anything else.”

“Oh,” said she, “if I could do Margaret’s least office for you, if I could ever remind you of her! And this assimilates me nearer to her. It gives me a prerogative, which, with all my rashness, I should hardly otherwise dare to claim. But you need not speak ot me of her. I know all about it, and you, and her. Yet, not as a beggar, not as a friend, not as one who has the slightest demand on your notice, yet, I say, obeying an impulse which I know how neither to control nor define, but which is deep as the central fires of my being, I ask for entrance, for a home, in that which you are, for fellowship with you and all your life. Tell me more of Margaret; I will grow up into her image; I will transmute myself to her nature. You shall have a double Margaret; no, not double, but one. Nay, if needs be, I will go out of myself; I will be the servant of you both. Call me your child, your and Margaret’s child, your spirit-child, and so love me. And when we get to Heaven, you may do what you will with me. Sure I am, I shall never get there if you do not take me. I cannot sing, as you say she could. But my soul sings. If my larynx be inelastic, I can describe with my sensations as many octaves and variations, as you on your flute; and with your nice ear perhaps you could hear some pleasant strains. Away from you, I am all discord, a harsh grating of turbulent passion.”

“Have you thought,” asked Gottfried, “how we should be situated. This prison is my home now, and I have no better prospect for the future.”

“I have enough in my purse,” said Jane, “to release you. You can teach as you have done. I perhaps could give instruction in the more popular branches.”

“Dear Jane!” said he, “you are dearer to me than all on earth beside. But how fade all earth-scenes from my thought! I feel myself vanishing into the spirit-world. Daily I perceive

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the hand of destiny lying more heavily upon me. Hourly invisible cords are drawing me away. The echoes of my song sound louder and louder from the shadowy shore.”

“Ah, dearest Gottfried!” said she; “if you die, I will die too. I cannot live without you; I cannot survive you; I perish with you. I will be absorbed with you into the Infinite. All your presentiments I share.”

“We will be married,” said Gottfried. “We yield to the Immortal Love. We rise to empyrean of pure souls. With you the past is nearer to me, the present more cheerful, the future more hopeful. We shall all of us live a trebled life. I have ever loved you; I will still love you; you deserve my love. Margaret too will love you; and the Heaven-crowned shall bestow her blessing on the Earth-worn.”

Jane procured his release from prison, by paying debts and costs of suit. They went to the house of the Rev. Dr. —— a very kind and benevolent old clergyman, by whom the marriage ceremony was performed, the wife and daughter of the Rector being present as witnesses. They knelt on a couch for an altar, her long black hair, gathered loosely about her temples, and descending down her clear marble neck, her dark eyes, a crimson flushing her face, contrasted with his light thick hair, deep blue eyes, and flickering pale face; both subdued, and somewhat saddened; yet the evening light of their souls, for such it seemed to be, came out at that hour and shed over them a soft, sweet glow. The old man blessed them, and they departed.

They sought lodgings in a quarter of the city, at some distance from their former abode. Brückmann was enabled to form a small class in French. If female education, or the employment of female instructors, had been as common in those days as at the present time, Jane might have directed those powers with which nature had enriched her, to some advantage. She secured, in fact, but a solitary pupil, and that one more anxious to be taught dancing and dressing, than to advance in any solid acquisition. She found a more satisfactory as well as promising task in perfecting Brückmann in the English language. This difficulty once surmounted, she fancied he would be able to pursue his practice to any desirable extent. So five or six months passed away.—Whether it was the seeds of disease constitutionally inherited, the effect of disappointment, want, heart-ache, he had been called to endure, the internal progress of his wound, or his own presentiments, acting upon an imagination sufficiently susceptible—Brückmann fell sick. He

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lay upon his bed week by week. Jane abandoned everything to take care of him.

“Jane,” said he, “I must die.”

“I know it,” said she, “you told me you should soon die. I believed it then, I am prepared for it now.”

“Voices,” he added, “are calling me away.”

“I know that too,” she replied; “I hear them.”

“An inward force propels my spirit from me.”

“Yes,” said she, “I feel it.”

She bent over him, not as over a sick and dying man, but a convalescing angel. He seemed to her not to be wasting to skin and bones, but to spirit and life. His eye brightened, his smile was sweeter, as he grew paler and thinner.

“I wish you would sing to me, Jane?”

“I am full of music and song,” she said, “can you not hear me? All that you have ever played, or sung, or spoken, leaps, trills, is joyous, within me. Do you not hear a soft chanting?”

“Yes,” he replied; “it sounds like the voice of Jesus and Margaret.”

“How glad I am our little Margaret is to have her birthplace in song!” said Jane. “She feeds on melodies.—Yet if I should die before her birth, will she die too? Tell me, Gottfried.”

“I think her spirit will go with ours,” he replied.

“Then we could train and nourish and mould the undeveloped, unformed spirit in Heaven. And our other Margaret will be there to help us bring up the little Margaret.—Will Jesus bless our child, as you say he blessed the children of olden time?”

“Yes,” replied Gottfried. “He died for all, and lives to give all life.”

“I shall not need to make her clothes?”

“You had better do that, Jane, we may both survive her birth.”

In this exigency, their private funds having become well night exhausted, she repaired to her father’s house to procure some articles of her own, out of which to prepare clothing for the expected child. By a back entrance she ascended to her old chamber, where, as the event should prove, Mr. Girardeau detected her, and drove her off. At this moment, as she retreated through the store, Nimrod, who in the mean time had succeeded to the place of the deceased Simon, sawher, as has been related in the previous chapter. Here also these two episodical branches of this memoir unite.

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When Nimrod learned from Mr. Girardeau who the woman was, how she stood related to him, and what were her fortune and condition, we may naturally imagine that his curiosity, always restive, always errant, would be more than usually aroused. A new object presented itself; he must pry into it. Having ascertained the place of Jane and Gottfried’s residence, being out of an errand, he made bold to enter the house, and knock at their door.

“Ax your pardon marm,” he said, shuffling into the room, as Jane opened the door, and the sick man lay on the bed before him; “I hope I don’t intrude. I sarve Master Girarders, since Simon’s dead. I am the fellow what see you running out of the store like a duck arter a tumble-bug. What was you so skeered for? I wouldn’t a hurt you any more than an old shoe. I guess the old gentleman an’t any better than he should be—”

“Young man!” said Jane breaking in upon him, “whoever you are, we have no connection with Mr. Girardeau.”

“Yes—marm,” said Nimrod, who nothing daunted, approached the bed. Gottfried rose a little, with his wan beautiful face. Jane, paler if possible, and more beautiful, held her arm under his head, and her dark, loving eyes brimmed with tears, the nature of which Nimrod could not understand.

“I vum,” said he, “I’m sorry. What is the matter? If the Widder was here she would cure him in a wink. Won’t your Dad let you go home? Won’t he give you a limb to roost on? I tell you what it is, he’s close as a mink in winter; he’s hard as grubbing bushes. I don’t guess he’s so poor.”

Jane, remembering her father’s servants in Simon, who was a perfect creature of his master, if at first she was annoyed by the familiarity of Nimrod, or was suspicious of his motives, soon perceived that his manner was undisguised and rusticity sincere. She was led to question him as to himself, who he was, &c. He gave her his real name, and that of his parents. In fact he became quite communicative, and rendered a full description of his family, their residence and mode of life. He was pleased with his visit, which he promised to repeat, and whenever he had a chance, he dropped in to see his new found friends. As our readers will have anticipated the result of this story of Gottfried Brückmann and Jane Girardeau, we shall hasten to its close. When Mr. Girardeau became apprised of the real situation of his daughter, he manifested deep disturbance of spirit. He addressed himself anew to Nimrod. “that girl,” said he, “is a runaway, a spendthrift, a wanton. She is

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about to have a child, the fruit of her reckless, ruinous misconduct. That child may do me an injury, a great injury. The offspring of that viper may turn upon me with the malignity of the mother. That child must be watched. You know, Mr. Foxly, we are identified in interest. You know if I let you go, or you me, we both fall. That child must be watched. Do you understand?”

“That wa’nt in the bargain when I came to live with ye,” replied Nimrod. “I must have a little more, a little of the ready.”

Nothing could be more opportune to Nimrod. He was now at liberty to prosecute his visits to Jane and Gottfried at his leisure. Whatever money he obtained from Mr. Girardeau, eked out by his own scant purse, he applied to their necessities. He felt himself to be of more consequence than he had ever been before, and although he exercised his function rather pragmatically, he made himself greatly useful. Brückmann grew more feeble; Jane approached the period of her child’s birth.

“Nimrod,” said she a few days before the event, “we are going to die.”

“No, no,” he rejoined. “He’ll give up the ghost as sure as wild geese in cold weather. But you will come out as bright as a yaller bird in Spring.”

“We must die—I shall die,” she continued, hardly noticing what he said, having become quite used to his manner. “We have loved, tenderly loved, if you know what that means.”

“Yes—marm,” replied Nimrod. “If I am a Ponder and you live in the city, you need’nt think we are as dull as millers that fly right into your links, and never know whether they are singed or not. When I have been by uncle Bill Palmer’s, that lives at the ledge, as you go up to Dunwich, and seen his Rhody out there, jolly! she has gone right through me like an ear-wig; it sticks to me like a bobolink to a saplin in a wind. I an’t afeered of the old Harry himself, but I vum! I never dare to speak to Rhody. But you great folks here don’t care anything about us, no more than Matty Gisborne, and Bet Weeks down among the Settlers.”

“Yes, I do care for you,” said Jane; “you have been very kind to us. I know not what we should have done without you. But we are really going to die. It has been foretold that we should.”

“Oh yes,” said Nimrod, relapsing into a more thoughtful

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mood, “I remember. I heard a dog howl in the streets the other night, and I dreamed of seeing monkeys, and that is sartin death.”

“You must bury us, Nimrod,” continued Jane. “And you must promise one thing, to take care of our child. Its name is Margaret, you must call it by no other. You will contrive means to take it to your own home, the Pond. You are poor, you say, that is the greatest of blessings. Your house is apart from the world. Your little brother Chilion, you say, would love it as his own sister. Now promsie us, imrod, that you will do all we desire.”

Nimrod not only promised, but volunteered a declaration having the full weight of an oath, that her wishes regarding the child should be studiously fulfilled. At this crisis they were also visited by a daughter of the clergyman who married them; she having become informed of their state, sought to minister to their needs. Brückmann died as he presaged. Farewell, Jane1” he said. “Yet not farewell, but, follow me. I kiss you for the night, and shall see you in the morning. The sun fades, the stars glow, brighter worlds await us. We go to those who love us.” Nimrod bend reverently over the dead form, that did perhaps what life itself could never have done, made of the strong man a child, and tears gushed from his eyes. Jane knelt calmly, hopefully by his side, kissed his lips, and smoothed the bright curling locks of his hair. Nimrod, assisted by the clergyman before mentioned, and some of Brückmann’s countrymen that remained in the city as servants, bakers, or scavengers, and could do little more for their old friend than bear him to his grave, saw him decently buried. The wife and daughter of the clergyman were with Jane at that period which she had anticipated with so much interest. Her hour came, and as she had predicted, a girl, the “little Margaret” was born. She lingered on a few days, without much apparent suffering or anxiety, blessed her child, and melted away at last in the clouds of mortal vision. The child was taken in charge by those ladies who had kindly assisted at its birth. Mr. Girardeau, who had exhibited ceaseless anxiety, as well as glimpses of some unnatural design, during these events, the progress of which he obliged Nimrod carefully to report, ordered the child to be brought to his house. His language was, that “it must be put out of the way.” It was a dark night; Mr. Girardeau, availing himself of a weakness of his servant, plentifully supplied him with liquor. He also threatened him, in case of disobedience, with a legal prosecu-

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tion on the score of his smuggling connections. Nimrod, sufficiently in drink to make a rash promise, started for the child. But apprehensions of some dark or bloody deed came over him; the recollection of his solemn vows to the mother of the child upbraided him; the spectral shadows cast by the street-lamps startled him. He remembered the smuggling vessel which had made another trip, and was about to return. The child was delivered to him, and in place of going back to his master, he made directly for the sloop, which was even then on the point of sailing. The captain and crew, however serviceable they might be to Mr. Girardeau’s interest, cherished little respect for his character, and Nimrod had no difficulty in enlisting their aid for his purposes. We need not follow him all the way to the Pond; or recite the methods he adopted to sustain and nourish the child. On his way up the river he found plenty of milk in the cabin. Leaving the vessel, he spent one night in the shanty of an Irishman, whose wife having a nurseling at her side, cheerfully relinquished to Margaret one half of her supply. In one instance he found a sheep which he made perform the maternal office. One night he slept with his charge in a barn. On the third evening he reached his home. The family were all abed; his father and mother, however, were soon ready to welcome their son. Surprise was of course their first emotion when they saw what he had with him. He recounted the history of the child, and his purpose to have it adopted in the family. The course of his observations on the subject was such, as to allay whatever repugnance either of his parents may have felt to the project, and they became as ready to receive the child as they might have been originally averse.

“Call up Hash and Chilion,” said Pluck. “The child must be baptized to-night.”

“Wait till to-morrow, do Dad,” said Nimrod. [“]I guess she needs something to wet her stomach more than her head.”

“Fix her something woman, can’t wait.”

His wife prepared a drink for the child, while Nimrod aroused his brothers. Chilion, then a boy, seven or eight years old, held a pine-torch that streamed and smoked through the room. Mistress Hart supported the child, while Nimrod and Hash stood sponsors. The old man called her Mary. “No, Dad,” interposed Nimrod, “it must be Margaret.”

“No! Mary,” replied his father, “in honor of my esteemed wife. Besides, that’s a Bible name, and we can’t liquor up on Margaret. Yours is a good name, and you never will see cause to repent it, and there is Maharshalalhashbaz; that I

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chose because it was the longest name in the bible; I wanted to show my reverence for the book by taking as much of it as I could; and Chilion’s is a good one too; all bible names in this family.”

“I tell you no, Dad, she must be called Margaret,” repeated Nimrod.

“Do call her Margaret,” said Chilion.

“Well, well,” replied Pluck, “we will put it to vote.—Three for Margaret, I shall call her Mary, and Hash goes for Peggy. We won’t break heads about it, if we do we shan’t the bottle. So here goes for Margaret and Mary.”

The family, severally and collectively, laid themselves under strict injunctions to keep the history of the child a secret, and to regard it as their own. Mr. Hart and his little son Chilion were glad enough to receive it on its own account; Mistress Hart, if for no other reason, in consideration of the money Nimrod represented he would get from its grandfather, a reflection that prevailed with Hash also. The secluded position of the family rendered it possible indeed for children to be born and die without exciting observation. Their neighbor, the widow Right, was the only person from whom they had cause of apprehension. It was presumed, however, to be an easy matter to bring her into the arrangement of secrecy, which was accordingly done by an oath sealed with a small douceur. In behalf of the child were enlisted both the Widow’s superstition, and her avarice. What might befal her son Obed, then six or seven years of age, she knew not. So Margaret was only spoken of as a child of the Pond. When Obed asked his mother where the little baby came from, she said it dropped from an acorn-tree.

Such is the origin of Margaret, who a few months later has been phantasmagorically introduced to our readers.

We might add, in conclusion of this chapter, that Nimrod, the next year, made a visit to New York, and sought an interview with his old Master. The disappointment, chagrin and displeasure of the latter were evidently great. Their conference was long and bitter. In the result, Nimrod declared in a cant phrase that he would “blow” on the old gentleman, not only as a smuggler, but as a murderer, unless he would settle on the child a small annual sum, to be delivered at sight. To such a bond Mr. Girardeau was obliged to give his signature. He asked where the child was, but on this point Nimrod kept a rigid silence.

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CHAPTER XIII.

Returns to Margaret, Who Advances in Childhood and Knowledge of the World.

Military Trainings we have alluded to as a sort of New England Holiday. Pluck, taking with him Margaret and Hash, Chilion and Bull, went down to the village at an early hour. The Green flowed with people, soldiers, men, woman and children. Portions of the horse-sheds were converted into booths for the sale of liquors, fruits and bread; wheelbarrows and carts were converted to the same use. An angle of the Meeting-house, Mr. Smith, the Tavern Keeper at No. 4, appropriated for his peculiar calling. Pluck engaged himself as tapster in one of the horse-sheds. Margaret, having orders not to go home, till her father returned at night, sat with Bull on the grass near the Meeting-house by the side of some other boys and girls, who all moved away when she approached. Tony’s beat of the troop was the signal for the soldiers to assemble. They were first marched to the south front of the church, when prayer, as usual, was offered by Parson Welles, standing on the steps. “O Lord god,” for thus he prayed, “we thank thee that thou hast raised up a defence to Israel, whereby thou hast cut off the mighty men of valor, and the leaders and captains in the camp of the king of Assyria. We humbly beseech that thou wouldst send prosperity, tht thou wouldst be an enemy to our enemies, and destroy all them that afflict our soul. Let the gates be lifted up, and the Lord, the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle, come in. And now O God, we fall down upon our knees before thee, for and in behalf of thy cause, name, people and interest, that in this day are so deeply designed against by the serpent and his seed, and from this black cloud of tumult and confusion among the nations, wilt thou bring forth the accomplishment of those promises thy people are so earnestly ooking after and waiting for.”

The old man was fervid and earnest. His massive white wig fluttered in the wind, his venerable form was bent over his ivory-headed cane. Some of the people were moved to tears.

The soldiers were then drawn into a line for inspection. The

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Captain was Jonas Hoag; 1st. Lieutenant, Eliashib Tuck, from the Mill; Corporal, Joseph Whiston, a Breakneck; Chilion Hart, fifer; and Tony Washington, drummer. Their equipments presented hardly so uniform and symmetrical an aspect as appears in the militia of our day. There had been, however, a gradual improvement from the primitive arrayof Colonial times; when the troops were made up of pikemen, bowmen, and musketeers with match-locks. Miles Standish, and his puritan coadjutors, was dressed in a coat of mail, on his left arm he bore a target, in his right a rapier or broadsword, iron gloves shielded his hands, an iron helmet with a visor covered his head and face, his breast was plated with iron. In this Livingston Company many wore three-cornered hats, shad-bellied coats, shoe and knee buckles. Some retained the identical dress of the late war. The children who may read this memoir, and we hope there are many such, do not fancy that our Revolution was fought in cocked-hats and small-clothes!

Among the spectators, seated on the grass under the eaves of the Meeting-house, were several, whose wounds and infirmities, contracted during the war, rendered them muster-free. There were six or eight of this description; one had lost a leg, another an arm, one had survived a shot through the groin, one had pined away on insults, blows, hunger and cold in the Jersey prison-ships, and bringing home his stark skeleton, became a town pauper. Another one, whose name was Alexis Robinson, having the side of his face shot away, and with one eye and ear, losing a moiety of his senses, and failing besides in his earnings, the certificates of which he always carried, by the depreciation of the currency, was also provided for by the town. These severally had hobbled out to see the training.

To these must be added certain soldiers of an earlier date. Prominent among thom, was lame Deacon Ramsdill, leaning with his left hand on a smooth crooked mountain-laurel cane, and having his right folded over his narrow wrinkled face, perpetually endeavoring to suppress a good-natured but somewhat undiaconal smile, a risible labitur et labetur, that spirted out like water between his fingers, and ran through the channels of his cheeks, all around his eyes, and even back to his ears. At the age of sixteen, in 1755, he was engaged in what is known as the expulsion of the Acadians, or French neutrals, from Nova Scotia; in 1757 he was at the surrender of Fort William Henry; and in 1759 was with Gen. Wolfe at the battle on the Plains of Abraham, where he received a wound in his leg. There was also his brother Deacon, Hadlock, of a more Pythagorean tem-

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per, who was engaged in the Spanish war, and served under General Wentworth in the a[tt]ack on Carthagena, 1740, and afterwards was in the defeat of General Braddock, 1755.

Nor would one forget to notice the children on this occasion whose chief business consisted in buying ginger-bread, pitching coppers, watching the exercises and following the steps of the soldiers; or to be reminded of a difference in their habits between this and “good old Colony times,” when the Legislature conceiving “that the training up of youth to the art and practice of arms will be of great use; do therefore order that all youths within this jurisdiction, from ten years old to the age of sixteen years, shall be instructed by some one of the officers of the band, upon the usual training days, in the exercise of arms, as small guns, half pikes, bows and arrows.”

Captain Hoag was an accomplished disciplinarian, esteemed such at least by his contemporaries. His hair was powdered, his coat faced with blue, on his hat appeared a large white cockade, his waist was ornamented with a scarlet sash, his shoulder rounded off with a silver epaulette, and silver lacings graced his yellow buck-skin breeches. But what more peculiarly distinguished him was the badge of the order of the Cincinnati, a gold medal with the spread eagle, and blue ribbon hanging from his coat buttons. “Attention! At this word,” said he, giving instructions designed for the younger members of the company, “you must be silent, moving neither hand nor foot. To the Left, Dress! You will turn your heads briskly to the left, so as to bring your right eye in the direction of your waistcoat buttons.” “Handle Cartridge!”—“Prime!”—“Shut Pan!”—“Draw Rammer!”—“Ram down Catridge!”—“Return Rammer!”—“Cock Fire-lock!”—“Take aim!”—“Fire!” “At this word, Fire,” continued he, “you will pull the trigger briskly, then return to the priming position, the muzzle of your fire-lock directly in front, the left hand just forward of the feather-spring, seize the cock with the thumb and forefinger of the right hand.” After the inspection and manual drill, the soldiers were marched and countermarched over the Green.

There came also to the training, Master Elliman, who exempt by his profession from arms, and had always ranked as a Troy, nevertheless made it a point to appear at these times, as it would seem to air his antipathies. If he encountered Pluck, well; but this morning he saw one whom he more fancied, Margaret, sitting with her dog.

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“How do you enjoy it?” said. he.

“Very well,” was the reply. “I love to see them.”

“Sævit toto Mars impius orbe.”

“I do not understand that.”

“I know you do not. You will by and by.”

“Chilion plays so on his fife, and Tony drums so well,—it is almost as good as dancing; only the girls and women don’t go with them. See how they follow Chilion round just like the dancers! Why don’t they dance? How slow they step!”

“It is not Chilion they follow,” replied the Master, “it is that little laced android with a long knife in his hand, and a lackered bunch on his shoulder. But here are Deacons Ramsdill and Hadlock, [Greek phrase] Livingston, and our broad-brimmed nay nay and yea yea android, Anthony Wharfield. Salvete, Deacons; God bless thee, Friend Anthony. Miss Margaret Hart, Friend Anthony.”

“How does thee do? sister Margaret;” said the latter.

“A Pond gal!” said Deacon Hadlock.

“What on arth are you doing with that little critter?” said Deacon Ramsdill. “Larning the young pup new tricks?”

“The dog that trots about will find a bone,” said Deacon Hadlock.

“Qui vult cædere canem, facile invenit fustem,” responded the Master.

Bull, whether that his name was used too freely, or from an old habit in the presence of strangers, began to growl.

“Lie still,” said Margaret.

“There, you see the Scripter fulfilled. Soft words turn away wratch,” said Deacon Ramsdill, with his right hand on his mouth striving in vain to curb his laughter.

“So friend Anthony gets rid of the wars, and trainings, by his soft answers, I suppose,” said the Master.

“Not of paying,” responded the Quaker. “Ruth and I were stripped of most we had, to support the troops.”

“See how God has blest you! What an army he is raising for our defence,” said Deacon Hadlock, pointing to the soldiers.

“What is that little man, with a long knife, doing to the men?” asked Margaret.

“He is preparing them for war; he will prove a Joshua to us,” said Deacon Hadlock, not so much, however, in reply to Margaret, as to illustrate sentiments which he feared did not sufficiently prevailed with his friends.

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“I rather guess he’s larnin them bagonets and hatchets to make pretty free work with our legs,” said Deacon Ramsdill, pressing down upon his cane.

“He is teaching the science of puppetry,” said the Master.

“He is teaching them to break the commandments of Christ,” said the Quaker.

“What is it for? what for!” exclaimed Margaret, starting up with some surprise.

“I can tell you all,” said Deacon Hadlock. “It is under God, the defence of our lives, liberties and fortunes.”

“How many of our people were killed in the French war, and in the last war!” said Deacon Ramsdill.

“How many of us were shut in the Jail yonder,” said the Master.

“How many farms in this town were ruined,” said the Quaker.

“What blunders are ye all making!” exclaimed Deacon Hadlock. “It is our enemies that we expect to kill.”

“Who?” asked Margaret.

“Our enemies, I say.”

“Who are our enemies?”

“Those who injure us.”

“What, kill them?” said Margaret. “Now I wish Chilion would bring his violin and make them dance. They wouldn’t kill one another then. Why don’t he play Chorus Jig, and set them to dancing.”

“Clear nater,” said Deacon Ramsdill; “I make no doubt the gal feels just so.”

“Oh, brother Ramsdill,” exclaimed Deacon Hadlock, “how can you! What are we coming to! I was informed you countenanced mixed dancing; that you told Bethia Weeks, a church-member, there was no harm in it if she didn’t carry it too far. Here you are encouraging that sinful amusement and opposing our military preparations! I do believe the Lord has forsaken us indeed.”

“Behold your defenders, pro aris et focis,” exclaimed the Master, directing attention to the soldiers. A difficulty had evidently arisen. The Captain was seen running towards the rear.

It will be remembered that Hash, the brother of Margaret, had a difference with Zenas Joy, a Breakneck, at the Turkey Shoot. We would also state that Zenas was engaged to Delinda Hoag, a daughter of the Captain. On the parade this morning, Hash’s conduct had been very unmannerly to-

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wards Zenas, so much so as to offend Captain Hoag, both officially and personally; and he changed Hash’s place, transferring him to a platoon under command of Corporal Joseph Whiston, also a Breakneck. Hash could not brook this, and carried his resentment so far, as to strike his Corporal on the march; an offence that Joseph sought to punish by a blow in return. Obed, also, who was that day doing his first military duty, became somehow involved in the affray. The music ceased; order was lost. Several voices called for Deacon Hadlock to interfere in his capacity as Justice of the Peace. The soldiers speedily resolved themselves into a civil tribunal, and Hash and Obed were equitably tried and sentenced, the former, to twenty-four hours imprisonment in the Jail, and to pay a fine of twenty shillings; the latter, to receive twenty-nine lashes at the whipping-post. The culprits were immediately taken to their respective dooms, followed by crowds of people. Margaret, probably not understanding exactly the nature of events, went slowly after. She heard the shrieks of Obed, she forced herself through the large ring that was formed about him. He was stripped to his skin, the blood was running in red lines down his back, four or five blows only had been inflicted; she ran forward and threw herself about the culprit. The constable tried to wrench her off, she clung with an almost preternatural grasp. He threatened to lay the lash upon her. She told him he should not whip Obed. Judah Weeks, brother of Isabel, set up a cry “For shame!” Isabel herself, who was playing near by, began to utter a loud lament, all the children raised piteous moans, the older people became confused; in fine Deacon Hadlock himself, hearing Obed’s entreaties, consented to remit the balance of the penalty. Margaret walked through the people, who drew off on either side as she passed, her face and clothes dabbled with blood. She went with Isabel to the brook and washed herself; Isabel going into her house, which was near by, fetched a towel to wipe her with, and asked her to walk in and see her mother. Margaret said she must go back to her brother Hash. The Jail-yard, constructed of high posts, was, as we have said, on a line with the street, and when Margaret returned she found boys and girls looking through the crevices; an example that she imitated. Deacon Ramsdill approaching, asked her if she wanted to go in; she replied that she did. After considerable parleying, the Deacon was able to obtain of the Jailer, Mr. Shooks, permission for her to enter, with Bull, whom it was not an easy matter to keep out.

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She found Hash in a small, dimly lighted cell, rolling and blubbering on the floor. She aroused him, and he took her in one arm, and held the head of the dog by the other, and seemed very much pleased to have them with him. She said she would stay all night, but he told her that would not be allowed. She saw another man in the cell, who, Hash whispered to her, was a murderer. She saw him sitting, muffled like an owl, in his long, black beard, long tangled hair, dark begrimed face, and ragged clothes. She went to him, he took her in his lap, pressed her hard to his breast, and stroked her hair. She called Bull, and he patted the dog’s head. He said he had a little boy about as old as she was, whom he had not seen for a long time, and never expected to see again. She gave him some gingerbread which she had in her pocket, and he munched it greedily. Hash offered him a quid of tobacco, whereat he seemed greatly delighted, and tears ran down his cheeks. Margaret said she would bring some flowers the next time she came to the village. He thanked her and said he should be glad to see them, that he had not seen a flower for two years. The door was opened, the Jail[e]r entered, and Margaret was ordered to leave. She crossed the Green to the Horse sheds, where her father was employed selling liquors. He seated her on a cider barrel, and gave her another piece of gingerbread and cheese, which she ate with a good appetite, as she had hardly eaten anything since morning. The day approached its close, and the soldiers drew up to ballot for officers, Captain Hoag’s term of service having expired. In the result, Lieutenant Eliashib Tuck was chosen Captain, and all the subaltern officers advanced their respective grades, excepting Corporal Joseph Whiston, whose name, for some reason, disappeared from the canvass. Captain Tuck replied as follows: “Fellow soldiers, I lack words to express my sense of the honor conferred upon me, as unexpected as it is undeserved. We live in a glorious era, one that eclipses all past time, and will be a model for future ages. The close of the eighteenth century is sublime as its meridian was grand. It were an honor for a man to be born in this period, how much more so to be honored by it! My brave compatriots! Military life is the path to distinction, and the means of usefulness. An immortal crown awaits the head of the hero! The Lion of Britain we have bound, and the Unicorn of France shall ere long bite the dust! Livingstonians! my blood is aroused, my ambition fired to be at the head of such a corps! Your fame has spread from Bunker Hill to Saratoga, from Genesee

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to King’s Mountain. I will lead wherever you will follow, I will dare all dangers with your support.”

Agreeably to custom, he then announced a treat. The company was marched to the Crown and Bowl, and dismissed. The citizens, old and young, thronged to the scene. Pluck, leaving Margaret and his tapstership, joined in the general exhilaration. Pails of toddy were brought from the bar-room. The men drank freely, gaze huzzas, and sang patriotic songs. Ex-Corporal Whiston, however, and his particular friends, dignifiedly indignant, withdrew, and went to the Store for their entertainment. The old men drank, and the young men; boys crept under the legs of the soldiers, and lifting the pails, tugged at the slops; little children on their bellies lapped the gutters, and sucked the grass, where the liquor fell.

The sun went down, clouds darkened the sky, and in swollen masses drifted over the town. Solomon Smith, son of the Tavern-keeper from No. 4, set a pine-torch in his stand, and with kanp-sack, shoulder-straps, and danging priming wire and brush, called around him as many as he could, while his father went after the little boys whose coppers he exchanged for rum. Lights broke out from the wheel-barrows and carts, all over the Green, which rung with shouts and song, and the tramping of feet. At the Store they drank and sung. But the excessive use of alcoholic stimulants aggravates the ordinary symptoms of good cheer, and produces effects which the most considerate do not always foresee. Intoxication supervenes, accompanied by a paralysis of the physical, or an inflammation of the nervous system. Captain Tuck was borne dead-drunk by his reeling soldiers, and laid on the floor of the bar-room. Ex-Corporal Wiston with his friends sallied from the Store; a brawl ensued between the two parties, and Deacon Hadlock, interposing to quell the fray, was knocked to the ground. Some were seized with nausea, and repaired for relief to the Horse-sheds. Margaret was driven from her seat by Delinda Hoag, who bore thither her espoused Zenas Joy. She went in pursuit of her father. She stumbled over a little boy that lay helpless on the grass. This was Aurelius Orff, whom his sister Beulah Ann, and Grace Joy, who had been making a visit to Hester, niece of Deacon Penrose, were looking after; whereupon Grace called her a hoddy-doddy guzzletail, and Beulah Ann gave her a smart push, as if to test her condition; whereby she was brought in involuntary contact with Paulina Whiston, who having grasped her brother, the ex-Corporal, by the collar, was punching and twitching him to the shed where

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their horse was tied. She had also slung over her shoulders a pair of saddle-bags, filled with articles for which she had been bartering at the Store. She helped her brother mount, but he was too weak to retain his sea, and before she gained the pillion, he fell to the ground. Margaret seized the horse’s bridle, and curbed the animal, while Paulina recovered her brother. Lights blinked and glowed from booth to booth. The black shadows of men showed unearthly, like demons in a pit. Boys yelled their excitement, Indian-like, across the Green. Horses breaking loose, plunged madly through the crowd. Corporal Whiston’s horse was frightened and tore away. It began to rain, the clouds emptied themselves in torrents, as it might seem to animate and refreshen the people, but really to superadd a burthen on such as already had more than they could carry, and bury those who were fallen deeper in the soil. Margaret hurried she knew not where; she slunk from the rain under a cart, but was thrust away by its drunken owner and his drunken customers. She ran towards the Tavern, that was full of men. A thick darkness had come on, the lights on the Green were extinguished. The faint glare from the Tavern discovered her standing out in the rain. Solomon Smith, leaving his own now deserted and useless stand, coming along, kindly took her with him into the house. Men in various stages of intoxication, stood, sat, and lay in the stoop, and in the bar-room. Through these Solomon led her into the kitchen. Here was a parcel of men and women, boys and girls, some drying themselves by the fire, some waiting for the rain to hold up, some singing, laughing and drinking. Here also was Tony with his fiddle playing to a company of dancers; and Pluck, sitting on his hams near the fire, with his full-orbed cabbage-head, swaying to and fro, beating time with his arms and legs, and balancing in one hand a mug of flip. “Ha! my little lady!” said he, catching Margaret with a bounce into his lap, and holding her near the fire, “won’t you drink a little, now do drink a little. See how it creams; don’t be snuffy, Molly, none of your mulligrubs. Here’s blood now, Obed’s blood on your pinafore. A brave deed that; you must have something to take. It’s training day, and they don’t come only four times a year. There’s Beulah Ann, she loves it as well as a calf likes to be licked. Sweet pinkey-posy, it is as good for your wet clothes, as the Widder’s horse-radish for dropsy, ha! ha!” Whereat as he was pressing the mug to Margaret’s lips, Tony, reaching over with his fiddle-bow, struck it from his hand into the fire. The

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blue blaze whirred up the chimney and darted into the room. There was a cry of fire, and Mr. Stillwater, summoning himself, lifted Pluck to his feet, and shoved him into the street. The old toper anticipating some such issue of the day, agreeably to custom, had taken Margaret with him to the village to be conducted home by her at night. Margaret leading the way, they ascended the hill, crossed the Pasture, and entered the woods. The clouds hung low, and their floating skirts seemed to be pierced and hetchelled by the trees. The rain had thinned into a fine close mist. The path, to inexperienced eyes, would have been absolutely indistinguishable. They had threaded it before in similar darkness. They came to the Brook, which, increased by the rain, flowed with a dismal sound. They entered the ravine, that brought them now on a level with the Brook, whose hissing waters rolled over their feet. They attained the summit above, where the Tree-Bridge lay. Pluck seemed terrified, and hesitated to cross. He sat down, then extended his length on the grass, and ere long fell asleep. Margaret would have been unwilling that her father should go over, and was not sorry to have him stop; though it was night, and rainy, and they were alone, and still a mile from home. The rain-drops from the trees showered on her head and lap, the grass was wet underneath her, and her clothes were drenched with water. But of this she hardly thought; what she more feared was the ways of her father in his drunken sleep, his mysterious sufferings, his frenzied utterance, his spasmodic agitation. This, and for this she feared; she looked for it, and it came. She tried to quiet him, and as she rubbed his arm he said she was a dove feeding him with milk; and then he scratched and tore at his breast, which she soothed with her hand, hot, rough, and hairy as it was; then he said he was boiling in the still, and Solomon Smith was holding the cap on; he shrieked and yelled till his roar exceeded that of the Brook. Then he began to laugh wildly. “Old Nick is turning the North Pole. There comes out of the sea a whale walking on his tail; Parson Welles has got astride of his gills with a riding stick, ha! ha! There comes a star rolling on its five points, and next comes old Suwarrow in his boots. Grind away, old fellow. Round, round they go over the mountains, splash, splash across rivers. Can’t you hear the pismires laugh? There’s St. Paul with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and Deacon Hadlock going to take me to the whipping post. I’ll be poxed, if you do. Hoa, Molly, Molly! help.” He leaped from the ground, Margaret clung to the skirt of his

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coat. He broke away. “The Bridge! the Bridge!” he exclaimed. “They can’t catch me then!”

“Father! father!” she screamed in uttermost agony, “you’ll fall, you’ll fall!” He slipped from the uncertain tree; he struck the sides of the chasm, and dashed into the stream. Aroused by the shock of the fall, and the stimulus of the water, he called aloud for aid, as he was borne on by the dark, invisible rush of the stream. Margaret then, for the first time in her life, felt the shuddering, appalling sense of danger. What could be done? She ran down the ravine, she seized the struggling arm of her father, and detained him till by his own efforts he was able to bring himself to his feet. In silence, and sickness, and weariness, she fagged homewards; in darkest dead of night she went to her bed as to her grave.

CHAPTER XIV.

The Sabbath.—Margaret Goes to Meeting for the First Time.—Her Dream of Jesus.

It was a Sabbath morning, a June Sabbath morning, a June Sabbath morning in New England. The sun rose over a hushed, calm world, wrapt like a Madonna in prayer. It was The Day, as the Bible is The Book. It was an intersection of the natural course of time, a break in the customary order of events, and lay between, with its walls of Saturday and Sunday night on either side, like a chasm, or a dyke, or a mystical apartment, whatever you would please liken it to. It was such a Sabbath to the people of Livingston as they used to have before steam, that arch Antinomian, “annihilated time and space,” and railroads bridged over all our vallies. Its light, its air, its warmth, its sound, its sun, the shimmer of the dawn on the brass Cock of the steeple, the look of the Meeting-house itself, all things were not as on other days. And now when those old Sabbaths are almost gone, some latent indefinable impression of what they were comes over us, and wrenches us into awe, stillness and regret.

Margaret had never been to Meeting; the family did not go. If there were no other indisposing causes, Pluck himself

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expressly forbade the practice, and trained his children to other habits. They did not work on the Sabbath, but idled and drank. Margaret had no quilling, or carding, or going after rum to do; she was wont to sally into the woods, clamber up the Head, tend her flowers; or Chilion played and she sang, he whittled trellises for her vines, mended her cages, sailed with her on the Pond. She heard the bell ring in the morning, she saw Obed and his mother go by to Meeting, and she had sometimes wished to go, but her father would never consent. From the private record of Deacon Hadlock we take the following:

“State vs. Didymus Hart.

“Stafford, ss. Be it remembered, that on the nineteenth day of Agusut, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-eight, Didymus Hart of Livingston, in the County of Stafford, shoemaker and laborer, is brought before me, Nathan Hadlock, Esq., a Justice of Peace for and within the aforesaid County, by Hopestill Cutts, Constable of Livingston aforesaid, by warrant issued by me, the said Justice on the day aforesaid, against the said Didymus, for that the said Didymus Hart, at Livingston aforesaid, on the twelfth day of May last, being the Lord’s day, did walk, recreate and disport himself on the south side of the Pond lying in the West District, so called, of Livingston aforesaid; which is contrary to the law of this State, made and provided in such cases, and against the peace of this State, all which is to the evil example of all others in like case offending.

“Wherefore,” witnesses being heard, &c., “it doth appear to me, the said Justice, that the said Didymus Hart sit in the stocks for two hours.”

Pluck was seated in the manner prescribed, very much to the entertainment of the boys, who spattered him with eggs, the disturbance and exasperation of his wife who preferred that all inflictions her husband received should come from herself, and resented any interference from others, and his own chagrin and vexation, especially as the informer in the case was Otis Joy, father of Zenas, a Breakneck, whose friendship he did not value, and Cutts, the executive officer, was the village shoemaker, and no agreeable rival, and the Justice was Deacon Hadlock. By way of redress, he chose to keep from Meeting entirely, and suffer none under his control to go. But Chilion and Nimrod both urged that Margaret might attend Church at least once in her life, and Pluck consented. This morning she heard the bell ring; she saw Obed and his mother

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riding by; the latter dressed in a small shining black satin bonnet, and gown of similar material, with a white inside handkerchief; the former in sky-blue coat and ruffled sleeves, white neck-stock, white worsted vest, yellow buck-skin breeches, white stockings, and silver-plated buckles, which had all belonged to his father, whose form was both shorter and thicker than his son’s, and whose garments it certainly showed great filial reverence in Obed to wear without essential alteration. Obed had an old look, his face was furrowed as well as freckled, and his mother, to remedy this disproportion, and graduate her son to that consideration which naturally attached to his appearance, had adopted the practice of powdering his hair, and gathering it in a sack behind; and for his nearsightedness, she provided him with a pair of broad horn-bowed bridge spectacles. The whole was surmounted by a large three-cornered hat. Whatever might have been the effect of his recent whipping, there was nothing apparent. His mother, unlike Pluck, would not suffer anything of that kind to disturb the good understanding she ever wished to retain with the people of Livingston.

But let us, if you are willing, anticipate these persons a little, and descend to the village. The people are assembling for meeting; they come on all the four roads, and by numerous foot-paths, across the lots, and through the woods. Many are on horses, more on foot, and a very few in wagons. The horses’ heads are garnished with branches of spruce and birch, to keep off the flies; most of the boys and some of the men are barefoot; divers of the latter are in their shirt-sleeves, carrying their coats on their arms, and their shirts are also visible between their vests and breeches; some of the young ladies have in their hands sprigs of roses, pinks, sweet-williams, and larkspurs; others both old and young have bunches of fennel, dill, caraway, peppermint, lad’s love; some of the ladies who ride, leap from their horses with the agility of cats, others make use of the horse-blocks, four or five of which are stationed about the Green. You would perhaps particularly notice old Mr. Ravel and his wife from the North Part of the town, on horseback, the former straight as an arrow, the latter a little crooked, and both more than eighty years of age. For sixty years they have come in that way, a distance of seven miles; for sixty years, every Sabbath morning, have they heated their oven, and put in an iron pot of beans, and an earthen dish of Indian pudding, to bake while they are gone, and be ready for their dinner when they return. To meet

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any exigencies of this sort in the mean time, you will observe that Mistress Ravel, in common with many other of the women, carries on her arm a large reddish calico bag filled with nutcakes and cheese. You will also see coming down the West Street Mr. Adolphus Hadlock, nephew of the Deacon’s, with his wife and six children, and Mr. Adolphus will contrive in some way or other to give you the names of all his children without our asking, even before he reaches the steps of the Meeting-house; Triandaphilda Ada, Cecilia Rebecca, Purintha Cappadocia, Aristophanes, Ethelbert, and a little boy he carries in his arms, Socrates; and you will hear the young men and boys that are lolloping on the steps repeat these names as the several parties to whom they belong arrive. Philip Davis the sexton, who has himself been watching the people, now strikes the second bell, and those who live immediately on the Green begin to turn out, and when he commences tolling, it is a sign Parson Welles has issued from his house, which lies about a quarter of a mile from the Meeting-house, on the South road. There are Mr. Stillwater, the tavern-keeper; Esq. Weeks with twelve of his children, Isabel and Judah among them; Judge Morgridge, his wife, his daughter susan, and her little brother Arthur; Mr. Cutts, the shoemaker; Mr. Gisborne, the joiner; Lawyer Beach, and his family; Dr. Spoor; Deacon Penrose, the merchant; Deacon Hadlock and his wife; Deacon Ramsdill with his lame leg and wife; Tony, the barber, with his powdered hair and scarlet coat; Old Dill, a negro servant of Parson Welles, and formerly a slave; The Widow Luce, a lady who lives near the Brook, leading her little hunchback son Job; then you see the Parson and his wife. This venerable couple have nearly attained the allotted age of man, and are verging towards that period which is described as one of labor and sorrow; yet on the whole they seem to be renewing their youth, their forms are but slightly bent, and the step of the old minister is firm and elastic. He is dressed in black, the only suit of the color in town—if we except that of the sexton, which is known to be an off-cast of the Parson’s—kerseymere coat, silk breeches and stockings, on his head is a three-cornered hat, and voluminous white wig, and under his chin are plain white bands; he wears black silk gloves, and leans on a tall ivory-headed cane. His wife’s dress is of black satin, like that of the Widow Wright’s. Next comes their maiden daughter, known as Miss Amy, and in near conjunction, the Master. And as if composing a part of the ministerial train, riding slowly and solemnly behind,

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appears the Widow Wright, who always contrives to arrive at the Parsonage just as the bell begins to toll. The Parson and his wife reverently, sedately ascend the steps, the crowd of men and boys who have been modestly waiting about the Porch, opens to let them pass, then all fall in behind, and enter the Church; the bell ceases tolling, and the Green is still as the grave. This morning considerable sensation was created—no more indeed than usual on such occasions—by Deacon Penrose, the clerk of the town, reading the banns of marriage between Zenas Joy and Delinda Hoag. Leaving these people, let us go back to the Pond.

Margaret’s mother, who took a secret satisfaction in the good appearance of her child, combed and dressed her hair—which in its tendency to curl resembled that of Gottfried Brückmann, while in color it took a shade between that of her dead and to her unknown parents—put on her white muslin tunic and pink skirt; she wore also her red beaded moccasins, and green rush hat. She started away with a dreamy sense of mystery attaching to the Meeting, like a snow-storm by moon-light, and a lively feeling of childish curiosity. On the smooth in front of the house, her little white and yellow chickens were peeping and dodging under the low mallows with its bluish rose-colored flowers, the star-tipped hedge-mustard, and pink-tufted smart-weed, and picking off the blue-and-green flies that were sunning on the leaves; and they did not seem to mind her. Hash had taken Bull into the woods, and Chilion told her she would not need him. Dick her squirrel, and Robin were disposed to follow, but her mother called them back. A little yellow-poll, perched in the Butternut, whistled after her, “Wooee whee whee whee whittiteetee—as soon as I get this green caterpillar, I will go too.” A rusty wren screamed out to her, “Os’s’s’ chipper w’ w’ w’ wow wow wow—O shame Molly, I am going to rob an oriole’s nest, I would’nt go to Meeting.” She entered the Mowing; a bobolink clung tiltering to the breezy tip of a white birch, and said, “Pee wuh’ wuh’ ch’ tut tut, tee tee whuh’ wuh’ wdle wdle pee wee a a wdle dee dee—now Molly here are red clover, yellow butter-cups, white daisies, and strawberries in the grass; ecod! how the wind blows! what a grand time we shall have, let us stay here to-day.” A grass-finch skippered to the top of a stump, and thrusting up its bill, cried out, “Chee chee chee up chip’ chip’ chipperway ouble wee—glad you are going, you’ll get good to-day, don’t stop, the bell is tolling.” She thought of the murderer, and she picked the clover, the buttercups and

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daisies, heads of timothy and fox-tail grass, and some strawberries; and hurried on; enveloped in the sweet perfume of the fields. She gathered the large bindweed, that lay on its back floating over the lot, like pond-lilies, with its red and white cups turned to the sun and air; and also the beautiful purple crane’s bill, and blue-eyed grass. She came to the shadows of the woods that skirted the Mowing, where she got box-berry flowers and fruit, bunch-berry and star-of-Bethlehem flowers. She entered a cool, grassy, shady close in the forest, where were beds of purple twin-flower, yellow star-grass, blue violets, and mosses growing together family-like, under the stately three-leaved ferns that overhung them like elm-trees, while above were the birches and walnuts. A black-cap k’ d’ chanked, k’ d’ chanked over her head, and a wood-thrush whoot whoot whooted, ting a ring tinged in earnest unison. “We are going to have a meeting here to-day, a little titmouse is coming to be christened, won’t you stop?” But a wood-pecker rapped and rattled over among the Chesnuts, and on she went. She crossed the bridge, she de[s]cended the ravine, the brook flowed on towards the village with a winsome glee, and while she looked at the flies and spiders dancing on the dark water, she heard a little yellow-throated fly-catcher, mournfully saying, “Preeo preea preeeeo preeeea—Pray, Margaret, you’ll lose you soul if you don’t;” and she saw a wood-pewee up among the branches, with her dark head bowed over plaintively singing, “P’ p’ ce ee ou wee, p’ p’ ee ee ou wee’—Jesus be true to you Margaret, I have lost my love, and my heart is sad, a blue angel come down from the skies, and fold us both in his soft feathers.” Here she got the white-clustering baneberry, and the little nodding buff cucumber root. She continued her way through the woods; she broke off white thorn blossoms with their red anthers, the beautifully variegated flowers of the calico bush, large gold-dusted cymes of the pear-leaved viburnum, and sheep’s laurel with its rich rose clusters. The olive-backed fly-catchers answered to one another up among the green sunny trees. “Whee whoo whee, wee woo woo wee, whee whoo, whoo whoo wee—God bless the little Margaret! How gload we are she is going to Meeting at last. She shall have berries, nutcakes and good preaching. The little Isabel and Job Luce are there. How do you think she will like Miss Amy?” The Via Dolorosa became this day to Margaret, a Via jueundissima. She came to the Pasture, where she again stopped a moment, and added to her stock of flowers red sorrel blossoms, beautiful pink azaleas, and sprigs of pennyroyal. Then

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she sorted her collection, tying the different parcels with spears of grass. The Town was before her silent and motionless, save the neighing and whinnying of the horses, and squads of dogs that trolloped to and fro on the Green. The sky was blue and tender; the clouds in white veils like nuns, worshipped in the sun-beams; the woods behind murmured their reverence; and the birds sang their psalms. All these sights, sounds, odors, suggestions, were not, possibly, distinguished by Margaret, in their sharp individuality, and full volume of shade, sense and character. She had not learned to criticise, she only knew how to feel. A new indefinable sensation of joy and hope was deepened within her, and a single concentration of all best influences swelled in her bosom. She took off her hat and pricked some grass-heads, and blue-bells in the band, and went on. The intangible presence of God was in her soul, the inaudible voice of Jesus called her forward. Besides she was about to penetrate the profoundly interesting mystery of the Meeting, that for which every seventh day she had heard the bell ring, that to which Obed and his mother went so studiously dressed, and that concerning which a whole life’s prohibition had been upon her. And, withal, she remembered the murderer, and directed her first steps to the Jail.

She tried to enter the Jail House, but Mr. Shooks drove her away. Then she crept along the fence till she came to a small hole, through which she saw, on the ground-floor of the Jail, the grim face of the murderer looking from the small dark gratings of his cell-window.

“I have brought you some flowers,” said she; “but they won’t let me carry them to you.”

“I know that,” the murderer replied.

“I will fasten a bunch in this hole,” she said, “so you can see them.”

“I should be glad if I could reach them,” he replied, thrusting his lean fingers through the bars. “I shall be glad to look at them. I haven’t seen the sun, or heard a pleasant voice these many months. I am so changed, I don’t know as I am a man. I expect to be hung in a few days, and shall love to see the flowers before I die. I remember I was a man once, and had a wife, and a child—I thank you—you are a good girl—I shall cry again if you stay there any longer.”

She heard the sound of other voices, and she could see the shadows of faces looking from other cells, and hear voices where she could see no faces, and the Jail seemed to her to be full of people, and they cried out to her to bring them flowers.

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Mr. Shooks also made himself apparent to her. “What are you about here, you little varmint?” exclaimed he, rushing from his house. “Encouraging rebellion, breaking the Sabbath, giving flowers to the prisoners!” He tore away the bunch she had inserted in the wall; she retreated into the street, and gaining a point where she could see the upper cell-windows, she displayed her flowers in sight of the prisoners, holding them up to the extent of her arm, and heard the prisoners shout with joy. “If words won’t do, I’ll try what vartue there is in stones,” said Mr. Shooks, who thereupon, suiting the action to the word, fairly pelted her away. She directed her steps to the Meeting-house, and entered the square buttress-like, mysterious porch; she stood at the foot of the broad-aisle, and looked in, she saw the Minister, in his great wig, and band, and black gloves, perched in what seemed to her a high box, and above him was the pyramidal sounding-board, and on a seat beneath she saw three persons, in powdered hair, whom she recognized as the Deacons Hadlock, Ramsdill and Penrose. Through the balustrade that surrounded the high pews, she could see the tops of men’s and women’s heads, and little boys and girls clutching the rounds with their hands, and looking out at her. The Minister had given out a hymn, and Deacon Hadlock rising, read the first line. Then in the gallery over head, she heard the toot of the Master, and his voice leading off, and she walked farther up the aisle to see what was going on. A little tiny girl called out to her from one of the pews, and Philip Davis, the sexton, hearing the noise, came forward and led her back into the porch. Philip was not by nature a stern man, he let the boys play on the steps during the week, and the young men stand about the doors on the Sabbath. He wore a shredded wig, and black clothes, as we have said, and was getting old, and had taken care of the Meeting-house ever since it was built, and although he was opposed to all disturbance of the worship, he still spoke kindly to Margaret.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I want to go to Meeting,” she replied.

“Why don’t you go?”

“I don’t know how,” she answered.

“But you musn’t bring all your posies here.”

“May’nt they go to Meeting too?”

“I see,” he added, “you are one of the Injins, and they don’t know how to behave Sabber days. But I’m glad you have come. You don’t know what a wicked thing it is to break the Sabbath.”

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“Mr. Shooks said I broke it when I went to give the murderer some flowers, and threw stones at me, and you say I break it now. Can’t it be mended again?”

“You should’nt bring these flowers here.”

“I saw the Widow and Obed bring some.”

“Not so many. You’ve got such a heap on um.”

“I got a bigger bunch one day.”

“Yes, yes, but these flowers are a dreadful wicked thing on the Lord’s day.”

“Then I guess I will go home. It an’t wicked there.”

“Wal, wal. You be a good gal, keep still, and you may sit in that first pew along with me.”

“I don’t want to be shut up there.”

“Then you may go softly up the stairs, and sit with the gals.”

She ascended the stairs, which were within the body of the house, and in a pew at the head, she saw Beulah Ann Orff, Grace Joy, Paulina Whiston, and others that she had seen before; the laughed and snubbed their handkerchiefs to their noses, and she turned away, and went round the other side, where the men sat. The boys began to look at her and laugh, and Zenas Joy, one of the tithing men, came forward, and seizing her by the arm, led her back to the girl’s side, and told her to go to her seat. She looked for the Master, but he was hemmed in by several men, and while she was hesitating what to do, Old Dill, who was sitting in one corner, with Tony Washington and Cæsar Morgridge, opened her pew door, and asked her in. So she went and sat down with the negroes. Parson Welles had commenced his sermon. She could not understand what he said, and told old Dill she wanted to go, and without further ceremony opened the door and slipped out. She descended the stairs, moving softly in her moccasins, and turning up the side-aisle, proceeded along under the high pews till she came to the corner where she could see the minister. Here she stood gazing steadfastly at him. Deacon Hadlock, observing her position, motioned her away. Deacon Ramsdill came directly forward, took her by the arm, opened the door of the pew where his wife was, and shut her in. Mistress Ramsdill gave her some caraway and dill, and received in return some of Margaret’s pennyroyal and lamb-kill, and other flowers. The old lady used her best endeavors to keep Margaret quiet, and she remained earnestly watching the Preacher till the end of the service. The congregation being dismissed, those who lived in the neighborhood went home; of the rest,

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some went to the stoop of the Crown and Bowl, some sat on the Meeting-house steps, some strolled into the woods in the rear; several elderly men and women went to what was called a “Noon house,” a small building near the Schoolhouse, where they ate their dinner and had a prayer; quite a number went to Deacon Penrose’s. Of the latter, was the Widow Wright. Mistress Ramsdill, who lived about a half mile from the Green, offered to take Margaret to her house, but the Widow interfered, saying it was too long a walk, and all that, and prevailed with Margaret to go with her. This going to Deacon Penrose’s consisted in having a seat in his kitchen Sunday noons, and drinking of his nice cool water. Seats were brought into the room, the floor was duly sanded, the pewter in the dresser was bright and glistening. His own family and their particular relations occupied the parlor. To this place came Mistress Whiston, and Old Mistress whiston, Mistresses Joy and Orff, Breaknecks; Mistresses hoag and Ravel, from the North Part of the town; Widows Brent and Tuck, from the Mill; also Grace Joy, Beulah Ann Orff, Paulina and Mercy Whiston, and others. They ate nutcakes and cheese, snuffed snuff, talked of the weather, births, deaths, health, sickness, engagements, marriages, of friends at the Ohio, of Zenas and Delinda’s publishment, and would have talked about Margaret, save that the Widow protected the child, assured them of her ignorance, and hoped she would learn better by and by. Mistress Whiston asked Margaret how she liked the Meeting. She replied that she liked to hear them sing. “Sing!” rejoined Paulina Whiston. “I wish we could have some decent singing. I was up to Brandon last Sunday, and their music is enough sight better than ours; they have introduced the new way almost every where but here. We must drag on forty years behind the whole world.”

“For my part,” said Mistress Orff, “I don’t want any change, our fathers got along in the good old way, and went to Heaven. The Quakers use notes and the Papists have their la sol mee’s, and Deacon Hadlock says it’s a contrivance to bring all those pests into the land. Then it make [sic] such a disturbance in the meetings; at Dunwich two of the best deacons could’nt stand it, and got up and went out; and Deacon Hadlock says he won’t stay to hear the heathenish sounds. It’s only your young upstarts, lewd and irregular people, and the like of that, that wants the new way.”

“If our hearts was only right,” said Mistress Tuck, “we should’nt want any books; and the next thing we shall know, they will have unconverted people singing.”

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“We have got some better leaders,” rejoined Paulina, “than Deacon Hadlock and Master Elliman; their voices are old and cracked, and they drawl on Sunday after Sunday, the same old tunes in the same old way.”

“If we once begin to let in new things, there is no knowing where they will stop,” replied Mistress Orff.

“It is just so,” said the Widow Tuck. “They begun with wagons and shays, and the horses wan’t used to the noise, and got frightened and run away; and our Eliashib came nigh spraining his ankle.”

“I remember,” said the elder Mistress Whiston, “when old parson Bristead down in Raleigh, used to sprinkle thirty bushels of sand on his floors every year, and I don’t believe Parson Welles uses five.”

“Yes, yes,” said her daughter-in-law, “great changes, and nobody can tell where it will end.”

“When I was a gal,” continued the senior lady, “they didn’t think of washing but once a month—”

“And now washing days come round every Monday,” added Paulina. “If you will let us have some respectable singing, I will agree to go back to the old plan of washing, Grandma, ha ha!”

“It’s holy time, child,” said her mother.

“I remember,” said the Widow Brent, who was a little deaf, “milking a cow a whole winter for a half a yard of ribbin.”

“I remember,” said Mistress Ravel, “the Great Hog up in Dunwich, that hefted nigh twenty score.”

“If you would go up to the Pond, to-day,” said Margaret, “I guess Chilion would play you a better tune on his fiddle than they sing at the Meeting.”

“Tush, Tush!” said the Widow Wright.

“There, there! You see what we are coming to[,]” said Mistress Orff. “Booly Ann where was the Parson’s text this forenoon?”

The Widow Wright assumed the charge of Margaret in the afternoon. She kept quiet, till the prayer, when the noise of the hinge-seats, or something else, seemed to disconcert her, and she told her protectress she wanted to go home. The Widow replied that there was to be a christening, and prevailed with her to stop, and lifted her on the seat, where she could witness the ceremony. The Minister descended from the pulpit, and Mr. Adolphus Hadlock carried forward the babe; which was enveloped in a long flowing blanket of white tabby

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silk, lined with white satin, and embroidered with ribbon of the same color. The Minister from a shining pewter basin sprinkled water in the face of the child, saying, “Urania Bathsheba, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost.” Margaret was not alone in the number of causes that disturbed the serenity of the Meeting that day; there was an amount of mirth in the minds of the people at large, respecting Mr. Adolphus Hadlock’s children, which as a matter of course must spend itself on their annual return to the altar. When the afternoon services were over, Mistress Ramsdill insisted on Margaret’s remaining to the catechising, an arrangement to which the Widow Wright, who intended to take the child home, consented. Margaret herself indeed at first demurred, but Deacon Ramsdill supported the request of his wife with one of his customary smiles, remarking that, “Catechising was as good arter the sermon to the children, as greasing arter shearing, it would keep the ticks off,” which he said, “were very apt to fly from the old sheep to the lambs.” The class, comprising most of the youths in town, was arranged in the broad-aisle, the boys on one side, and the girls on the other, with the Minister in the pulpit at the head. Mistress Ramsdill with Margaret, and several of the elderly people, occupied the neighboring pews.

“What is the chief end of man?” was the first question; to which a little boy promptly and swiftly gave the appropriate answer.—“How many persons are there in the Godhead?” “There are four persons in the Godhead”—replied a little boy in the same tone of confidence that characterized his predecessor. But before he could give the entire answer, there was a cry all about, “ ’Tan’t right, ’tan’t right.” The Minister, being a little deaf, did not perceive the error, or at least did not correct it. Deacon Hadlock at the instance of Miss Amy intimated to him that there was a mistake. The boy thus doubly challenged, seemed disposed to make good his position. “ ’Tis right,” said he in a whisper loud enough to be heard over the house, at the same time counting on his fingers, “Marm said ’twas just like her and Daddy and me that made three in one family, and now Grandad has come to live with us it makes four.” The inadvertence being adjusted, the questioning proceeded. “Wherein consists the sinfulness of that state wherein man fell?” “The sinfulness of that state wherein man fell, God having out of his mere good pleasure, elected some to everlasting life, all mankind by the Fall are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to the pains of

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Hell forever,” was the rapid and disjointed answer. The question stumbling from one to another, was at length righted by Job Luce, the little hunchback. His voice was low and plaintive, soft and clear. Margaret looked over the pew to see him. There were signs of dissatisfaction on the faces of others, but his own was unruffled as a pebble in a brook. He was shockingly deformed, his arms were long as an ape’s, and he seemed almost to rest on his hands, while his shoulders rose high and steep above his head. “that’s Job Luce,” whispered Mistress Ramsdill to Margaret; “and if there ever was a Christian, I believe he is one, if he is crooked. Don’t you see how he knows the Catechism; he has got the whole Bible eeny most by heart, and he is only three year old.” Margaret’s eye became riveted on the boy, and the whole Catechism, Effectual Calling, Justification, Adoption, and Sanctification, were disposed of, without further attention on her part. When the children were dismissed, she broke from her kind friend, the Deaconess, and took Job by the hand, while little Isabel Weeks joined him on the other side. She looked into his face, and he turned up his mild eye to her as much as to say, “Who are you that cares for me!” In truth, Job was, we will not say despised, but for the most part neglected. His mother was a poor widow, whose husband had been a shoemaker, and she supported herself and son binding shoes. The old people treated her kindly, but rather wondered at her boy; and what was wonder in the parents degenerated into slight, jest, and almost scorn, in the children; so that Job numbered but few friends. Then he got his lessons so well, that the more indolent and duller boys were tempted to envy him.

“You didn’t say the Catechism,” said he to Margaret.

“No,” she replied, “I don’t know it; and I guess it isn’t so good as my Bird Book and Mother Goose’s Songs.” Their conversation was suddenly interrupted by an exclamation and a sigh proceeding from Miss Amy and the Widow Luce, who were close behind them.

“Oh dear! My poor boy! Woe, woe to a sinful mother!” was the sigh of the latter.

“Child, child!” exclaimed the former, addressing herself to Margaret, “don’t you like the Catechism?”

“I don’t know it,” replied Margaret.

“She an’t bad, if they do call her an Injin,” said Isabel.

“I want to tell her about Whippoorwill,” said Job.

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“God’s hand lies heavily upon us!” mournfully ejaculated the Widow.

“Can anything be done in such a sad state of things?” anxiously asked Miss Amy.

The several parties stopped. Miss Amy took Margaret’s hand, Job’s was relinquished to that of his mother; and as Margaret’s course properly lay in a different direction, she turned up the West Street, and Miss Amy walked on with her.

“Did you never read the Primer?” asked the latter.

“No, Ma’am,” was the reply.

“Do you know what God is?”

“The little boy said God was a spreeit.”

“Have you never learned how many persons there are in the Godhead?”

“One of the little boys said there were four, but the others said there were three.”

“Three, my child, three.”

“How do they all get in? I should love to see it.”

“Oh! Don’t talk so, you amaze me. How dare you speak in that way of the Great Jehovah!”

“The great what?”

“The Great God, I mean.”

“Alas! Can it be there is such benighted heathenism in our very midst!” said the lady to herself. Her interest in the state of Margaret was quickened, and she pursued her enquiries with a most philanthropic assiduity.

“do you never say your prayers?” she asked.

“No, Ma’am,” replied Margaret. “But I can say the Laplander’s Ode and Mary’s Dream.”

“What do you do when you go to bed?”

“I go to sleep, Ma’am, and dream.”

“In what darkness you must be at the Pond!”

“O no, I see the Sun rise every morning, and the snow-drops don’t open till it’s light.”

“I mean, my poor child, that I am afraid you are very wicked there.”

“I try to be good, and Pa is good when he don’t get rum at Deacon Penrose’s, and Chilion is good, he was going to mend my flower bed to-day, to keep the hogs out.”

“What, break the Sabbath! Violate God’s holy day! Your father was once punished in the Stocks for breaking the Sabbath. God will punish us all if we do so.”

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“Will it put our feet in the Stocks the same as they did father?”

“No, my child. He will punish us all in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.”

“What, the same as Chilion and Obed and I burnt up the bees?”

“Alas! alas!” ejaculated the lady.

“We were so bad,” continued Margaret, “I thought I should cry.”

“Deacon Penrose and the rest of us have often spoken of you at the Pond; and we have thought sometimes of going up to see you. In what a dreadful condition your father is!”

“Yes, Ma’am, sometimes. He rolls his eyes so, and groans, and shakes, and screams, and nobody can help him. I wish Deacon Penrose would come and see him, and I think he would not sell him any more rum.”

“But, my child, don’t you know anything of the Great God who made you and me?”

“Did that make me? I am so glad to know. The little chickens come out of the shells, the beans grow in the pods, the dandelions spring up in the grass, and Obed said I came in an acorn, but the pigs and wild turkeys eat up the acorns, and I can’t find one that has a little girl in it like me.”

“Would you like to come down to Meeting again?”

“I don’t know as I like the Meeting. It don’t seem so good as the Turkey Shoot and Ball. Zenas Joy didn’t hurt my arm there, and Beulah Ann Orff and Grace Joy talked with me at the Ball. To-day they only made faces at me, and the man at the door told me to throw away my flowers.”

“How deceitful is the human heart, and desperately wicked!”

“Who is wicked?”

“We are all wicked.”

“Are you wicked? then you do not love me, and I don’t want you to go with me any farther.”

“Ah, my dear child, we go astray speaking lies as soon as we be born.”

“I never told a lie.”

“The Bible says so, child.”

“Then the bible is not true.”

“Do not run away. Let me talk with you a little more.”

“I don’t like wicked people.”

“Yes, but I want to speak to you about Jesus Christ, do you know him?”

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No, Ma’am—Yes Ma’am, I have heard Hash speak about it when he drinks rum.”

“But did you not hear the Minister speak about him in the pulpit to-day?”

“Yes, Ma’am,—does he drink rum too?”

“No, no, child, he only drinks brandy and wine.”

“I have heard Hash speak so when he only drank that.”

“The Minister is not wicked like Hash,—he does not get drunk.”

“Hash wouldn’t be wicked if he didn’t drink. I wish he could drink and not be wicked too.”

“O we are all wicked, Hash and the Minister, and you and I; we are all wicked, and I was going to tell you how Christ came to save wicked people.”

“What will he do to Hash?”

“He will burn him in hell-fire, my child.”

“Won’t he burn the Minister too? I guess I shan’t come to Meeting any more. You and the Minister, and all the people here are so wicked. Chilion is good, and I will stay at home with him.”

“The Minister is a holy man, a good man I mean, he is converted, he repents of his sins. I mean he is very sorry he is so wicked.”

“Don’t he keep a being wicked? You said he was wicked.”

“Why, yes, he is wicked. We are all totally depraved. You do not understand. I fear I cannot make you see it as it is. My dear child, the eyes of the carnal mind are blind, and they cannot see. I must tell you, though it may make you feel bad, that young as you are, you are a mournful instance of the truth of Scripture. But I dare not speak smooth things to you. If you would read your bible, and pray to God, your eyes would be opened so you could see. But I did want to tell you about Jesus Christ, who was both God and Man. He came and died for us. He suffered the cruel death of the cross. The Apostle John says, he came to take away the sins of the world. If you will believe in Christ he will save you. The Holy Spirit, that came once in the form of a dove, will again come, and cleanse your heart. You must have faith in the blood of Christ. You must take him as your Atoning Sacrifice. Are you willing to go to Christ, my child?”

“Yes, Ma’am, if he won’t burn up Hash, and I want to go and see that little crooked boy too.”

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“It’s wicked for children to see one another Sundays.”

“I did see him at Meeting.”

“I mean to meet and play and show picture-books, and that little boy is very apt to play; he catches grasshoppers, and goes down by the side of the brook, before sundown;—that is very bad.”

“Are his eyes sore, like Obed’s, sometimes, so that the light hurts him?”

“It is God’s day, and he won’t let children play.”

“He lets the grasshoppers play.”

“But he will punish children.”

“Won’t he punish the grasshoppers too?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess, I an’t afraid of God.”

Miss Amy whether that she thought she had done all she could for the child, or that Margaret seemed anxious to break company with her, or that she had reached a point in the road where she could conveniently leave her, at this instant turned off into Grove Street, and Margaret pursued her course homeward. She arrived at the Pond a little before sunset; she fed her chickens, her squirrel and robin; her own supper she made of strawberries and milk in her wooden bowl and spoon. She answered as she was best able to all the enquiries and banterings of the family relative to her new day’s adventure. She might have been tired, but the evening air and the voices of the birds were inviting, and her own heart was full of life; and she took a stroll up the Indian’s Head.

Along a tangled path, trod by sheep, more by herself, and somewhat by visiters to the Pond, she wound her way to the summit. This, as we have said, was nearly one hundred feet above the level of the Pond; on the top were the venerable trunk of the Hemlock before referred to, a small cluster of firs, a few spears of yellow orchard grass, and brown sorrel, sparse tufts of hare-bells and buttercups, bunches of sweet-fern, and mosses growing on the rocks. From the south front projected a smooth shelving rock directly over the water, forming the brown of the so called Head. This elevation commanded points of extensive and varied interest; the Pond below, its dark waters dotted with green island, its forest-skirted shore, the outlet, the dam, the deep and perpetual gurgle of the falling water. Beyond the dam was a broken congeries; the result of wild diluvial force; horrid gulfs, high rocky pinnacles, trees aslant, green dingles; to the west, the hills crept along by gentle acclivities, and swelling upwards,

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formed, to an untrained eye, the apparent boundaries of this nether world. On the north was a continuation of the ridge of mountains of which the Head itself seemed to be the close, proceeding indefinitely till they met and melted into the sky. On the north-west, buried like a cloud in the dimmest distance, appeared the round, bald, but soft and azure crown of Old Umkiddin. Beyond the Pond, on the south, extended a forest without visible break or limitation. Turning to the east one beheld the River, its meadows, the mountain beyond, and below you, were portions of the village; to the south, through the tops of the woods, some of the houses in No. 4 were seen; and on the south-west lay the hamlet, Breakneck. In every direction, here and there, on side hills, in glades of the forest, among orchard-groves, appeared the roofs of houses and barns, dappling the scene, and reflecting in the middle of the day, a grey silvery light, like mica in granite. To this place Margaret ascended; here had she often come before, and here in her future life she often came. She went up early in the morning to behold the sun rise from the eastern mountain, and be washed by the fogs that flowed up from the River; at noon, to like on the soft grass, under the firs, and sleep the midtide sleep of all nature; or ponder with a childish curiosity on the mystery of the blue sky and the blue hills; or with a childish dread, on that of the deep dark waters below her. She came up in the Fall to gather thimble, whortle and rasp-berries that grew on the sides of the hills, and get the leaves and crimson spires of the sumach for her mother to color with. She now came up to see the sun go down; she sat on the grass, with her hands folding her knees. Directly on the right of the sun-setting, was an apparent jog or break in the line of the woods and hills, having on one side something like a cliff or sharp promontory, jutting towards the heavens, and overlooking what seemed like a calm clear sea beyond; within this depression lay the top of Umkiddin, before spoken of; here also, after a storm, appeared the first clear sky, and here at mid-day the white clouds, in long ranges of piles, were wont to repose like ships at anchor, and Margaret loved to look at that point. Nearer at hand, she could see the roads leading to Dunwich and Brandon, winding, like unrolled ribbons, through the woods. There were also pastures covered with grey rocks, looking like sheep; the green woods in some places were intersected by fields of brown rye, or soft clover. On the whole, it was a verdant scene,—Greenness, like a hollow Ocean, spread itself out be-

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fore her; the hills were green, the depths were green, the trees, grass and weeds were green; and in the forest, on the south margin of the Pond, the darkness, as the sun went down, seemed to form itself into caverns, and grottoes, and strange fantastic shapes, in the solid Greenness. In some instances she could see the tips of the trees glancing and frolicking in the light, while the greedy shadows were crawling up from their roots, as it were out of the ground to devour them. Deep in those woods the black-cap and thrush still whooted and clang unweariedly; she heard also the cawing of crows, and the scream of the loon; the tinkle of bells, the lowing of cows, and the bleating of sheep were distinctly audible. Her own Robin, on the Butternut below, began his long, sweet, many-toned carol; the tree-toad chimed in with its loud trilling chirrup; and frogs, from the Pond and Mill Brook, crooled, chubbed and croaked. Swallows skimmered over her, and plunged into the depths below; swarms of flies in circular squadrons skirmished in the sunbeams before her eye; and at her side, in the grass, crickets sung their lullabies to the departing day; a rich, fresh smell from the water, the woods, the wild-flowers, the grass-lots, floating up over the hill, regaled her senses. The surface of the Pond, as the sun receded, broke into gold-ripples, deepening gradually into carmine and vermillion; suspended between her eye and the horizon was a table-like form of illuminated mist, a bridge of visible sun-beams shored on pointed shining piers reaching to the ground. Margaret sat, we say, attentive to all this; what were her feelings we know not now, we may know hereafter; and clouds that had spent the Sabbath in their own way, came with her to behold the sun-setting; some in long tapering bands, some in flocky rosettes, others in broad, many-folded collops. In that light they showed all colors, rose, pink, violet and crimson, and the sky in a large circumference about the sun weltered in ruddiness, while the opposite side of the heavens threw back a purple glow. There were clouds, to her eye, like fishes, the horned-pout, with its pearly iridine breast, and iron-brown back; floating after it was a shiner with its bright golden armory; she saw the blood-red fins of the yellow-perch, the long snout of the pickerel with its glancing black eye, and the gaudy tail of the trout. She saw the sun sink half below the horizon, then all his round red face go down; and the light on the Pond withdraw, the bridge of light disappear, and the hollows grow darker and darker. A stronger and better defined glow streamed for a

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moment from the depths of the sun, into the sky, and flashed through the atmosphere. The little rose-colored clouds melted away in their evening joy, and went to rest up in the dark unfathomable chambers of the heavens. The fishes swam away with the sun, and plunged down the cataract of light that falls over the other side of the earth; and the broad massive clouds grew darker and grimmer, and extended themselves, like the huge-breasted lions couchant which the Master had told her about, to watch all night near the gate of the sun. She sat there alone, with no eye but God’s to look upon her; he alone saw her face, her expression, in that still, warm, golden sun-setting; she sat as if for her the sun had gone down, and the sky unloosed its glory; she sat mute and undisturbed, as if she were the child-queen of this great pageant of Nature.

While at the Pond, the birds were closing their strains, and Margaret was taking her parting look of the sky, in the village at the same moment, broke forth the first song of the day, and was indulged the first unembarrassed vision. When the last shimmer of blue light vanished from the top of the mountain beyond the River, whither tenscore eyes were turned, there exploded the long twenty-four hours pent up, and swollen emotion of tenscore hearts and voices. “Sun’s down!” “sun’s down!” was the first unrestrained voice the children had uttered since the previous afternoon. This rang out in every family, was echoed from house to house. The spell was broken, the tether was cut, doors and gates flew open, and out the children broke into the streets, to breathe a fresh feeling, clutch at a tantalizing and fast receding enjoyment, and give a minute’s free play to hands, feet and tongues. An avalanche of exuberant life seemed to have fallen from the glacier summits of the Sabbath, and scattered itself over the Green. The boys leaped and whooped towards the Meeting-house, flung their hats into the air, chased one another in a sort of stampede, and called for games with all possible vociferation. Little Job Luce alone seems to have no share in the general revel. He has been sitting by the Brook under a willow, and as the boys come trooping by, he shrinks into the house; his mother holds him awhile in her lap at the window, when he, as the grasshoppers have already done, goes to bed. The villagers, Abel Wilcox and Martha Madeline Gisborne, Hancock Welles and Hester Penrose, Deacon Ramsdill and his wife, Deacon Hadlock, Dr. Spoor and his wife, Esq. Beach, his wife and children, appear in the streets, they walk up the different roads, and visit from house to house.

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The Indian’s Head, meanwhile, sinks into shadows and silence, and Margaret is hushed as the sky above her; the cool fresh evening wind blows upon her, trills through her brown curls and passes on. Her mother appeared on the top of the hill, and without words or noise sat down beside her. She folded her arm about Margaret’s neck, and with one hand grasped and fingered that of her child, and with the other dallied with the locks of her hair;—but abstractedly, and with her eye fixed on the darkening expanse. Her own grizzled hair was swept by the wind, and her bared swarthy bosom seemed to drink in life from the twilight world. In calm sternness, in mute brownness she sat, and apparently thoughtful, and as it were unconsciously she pressed Margaret hard to her breast. Was it an old memory, some old hope, some recollection of her own childhood, some revival of her own mother’s image—was it some feeling of despair, some selfish calculation, a dim glimpse into eternity, an impulse of repenting sin, a visitation of God’s spirit—was it a moment of unavowed tenderness? Presently Chilion came up with his viol, and going to the projecting rock, sat with his feet dangling over the precipice. Margaret leaving her mother went to her brother, stood leaning on his shoulder, and looked down into the mysterious depth below. Her brother began to play, and as if he had imbibed the dizziness, dread and profundity of that abyss, played according, and she shuddered and started, and then relieving the impression, he played the soft, starry, eternal repose of the heavens, and chased away that abyss-music from her soul. Then her father came up, his red face glistening even in the shadows, with a bottle of rum, which he drank, and laughed, and repeated over to her many passages of the Bible, and imitated the tones, expressions and manners of all the religious persons whom Margaret had seen in the village; and then making a papoose of her, he carried her down the hill.

That night Margaret dreamed a dream, and in this wise dreamed she. She was in a forest, and the sun was going down among the trees. Its round red disk changed to yellow, as she looked, and then to white; then it seemed to advance towards her, and the woods became magically luminous. She beheld her old familiar birds flying among the branches with a singularly lustrous plumage, the wild-flowers glowed under her feet, and the shrubbery glittered about her. The ball of light came forward to a knoll or rise of ground, about a dozen rods before her, and stopped. A gradual metamorphosis as seen

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to go on in it, till at last it came out in the form of a man, like a marble statue, dressed not as Margaret had been accustomed to see, but in a simple robe that descended to his feet, and he leaned upon a milk-white cross. Near this appeared another form of a man, clothed in a similar manner, but smaller in size, and perched on his hand was a milk-white dove. Margaret looked at these men, or forms of men, in silent wonder. Presently she saw a suffusion and outflowing of animal life in them. The face of the first was pale but very fair, and a hidden under-tinge of color seemed to show through an almost transparent skin, as she had seen the blush of the white goose-foot shining through a dew drop. In the preternatural light that filled the place, Margaret saw that his eyes were dark-blue, and his hair, parted on the crown, flowed in dark-brown curls down his neck. The appearance of the other was similar, only the glow on his cheeks seemed to be more superficial, and his look was more youthful. The cross on which the elder leaned, Margaret now saw set in the ground, where it grew like a tree, budded and bore green leaves and white flowers, and the milk-white dove, becoming also endowed with life, flew and lit upon the top of it. She then saw the younger of the two men pick flowers from the blooming cross-tree, and give them to the other, who seemed pleased with their beauty and fragrance. She found herself moving towards these two persons, who had so singularly appeared to her, and when she saw one of them pick off the flowers, she was secretly impelled to gather some. She proceeded to collect such as grew near her, calico bush, Solomon’s seal, lambkill and others similar to those she found in the woods on her way to the Meeting, which she tied with a grass string. Then she got a large bunch of checker, partridge and strawberries. She carried her flowers in one hand and her berries in the other. All at once the milk-white dove flew from the green cross-tree and alighted upon her shoulder, thus seeming to establish a communication between herself and these two persons, and as she moved on, all the birds in the woods, the same as she had heard in the morning, sung out right merrily. When she stopped, they ceased to sing, and when she started, they began again. As she was going on, suddenly issuing from behind a tree, appeared to her in her dream, the same lady who had talked with her after meeting, Miss Amy.

“Where are you going?” said the lady.

“I am going to see those men, and give that beautiful one these flowers and berries,” replied Margaret.

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“That is Jesus Christ that I told you about this afternoon, and the other is the Apostle John,” rejoined the lady.

“Is it?” said Margaret, “then I think he won’t want my flowers.”

“No,” added the lady. “He is God, the second person in the Godhead. He does not want flowers.”

“Is he?” asked Margaret. “One of those things you told me about in the Catechism? I am so sorry.”

“He is the same in substance with the Father, equal in power and glory. He does not want your flowers, he wants you to believe in him; you must have faith in that cross.”

“What shall I do?” responded Margaret. “I was going to carry him some flowers, I saw him smell of some. He looks as if he would love me.”

“Love you?” rejoined the lady. “What does the Primer say, that you deserve everlasting destruction in hell, that you have not prayed to God, and have broken his Holy Sabbaths.”

While they were talking, the birds ceased to sing, and the dove leaving Margaret’s shoulder, flew back to the cross. She started impulsively and said, “I will go.” As she proceeded slowly along, in the variegated phenomena of the dream, Deacon Hadlock stood before her, and asked her where she was going, to whom she made the same reply as before.

“You cannot go,” said he, “unless you are effectually called. You are wholly disabled by reason of sin.”

“It is only a little ways,” replied she, “and I went clear down to the village to-day alone. He looks as if he wanted me to come.”

“Yes,” rejoined the Deacon, “if you were in a right frame of mind, if you were duly humbled. You are vain, proud, deceitful, selfish and wholly deepraved.”

“No, I am not,” replied she.

“Even there you show the blindness of the carnal mind.”

“He is beckoning to me,” said Margaret.

“If he should appear to you as he truly is, a just God, who hates sin, and should gird on his sword, then your rebellious heart would show itself, then you would hate him.”

While Deacon Hadlock detained Margaret, the Widow Luce went by leading her crooked boy Job, Mistress Adolphus Hadlock and her son Socrates, Mistress Whiston and her youngest daughter Joan, Mistress Hatch and her little boy Isaiah, and Helen Weeks with her brother and sister Judah and Isabel, and several elderly people, men and women.

“He an’t a hanging on the cross as he is in the Primer,” said Isaiah Hatch.

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“Where is the tub, Ma?” asked Joan Whiston. “I thought you said we were going to be washed in his blood.”

“Blessed Saviour! by faith I behold thee!” exclaimed Mistress Palmer, coming through the woods.

“I guess he don’t want you,” said Judah Weeks to Job Luce.

“I shall have as many raisins as I can eat when I get to heaven,” said Socrates Hadlock.

“I thought he was coming to judgment, in clouds and flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God,” said the Camp-Preacher looking from behind a tree.

John the disciple and companion of Jesus was now seen approaching. “Welcome to Jesus!” he said, as he came near to the people. “The good shepherd welcomes his flock! As saith the old Prophet, ‘He will take the lambs in his bosom and gently lead those that are with young.’ He is the Eternal Life now manifested unto you; come to him that he may give you some of his life; he is the truth, he will impart to you that truth; approach him that his own divine image may be reflected in you; love him, and so become possessed of his spirit.” The crowd drew back, or rather within itself, as the holy Apostle approached speaking. Children snuggled to their parents, and the elderly people seemed disconcerted. “Christ bids me say,” continued the Apostle, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

“I know not how many of us may be included in this invitation,” said Deacon Hadlock, as the senior officer of the church, and more prominent man, speaking on behalf of the company.

“Whosoever thirsts,” replied the Apostle, “let him come. Whoever would have the true life, like a well of water springing up in his soul, let him come to the living source.”

“It is to be hoped that some of us have been made worthy partakers of the efficacy of Christ’s death,” said Deacon Penrose.

“Whosoever doeth not righteousness,” rejoined the Apostle, “is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother; every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.”

“I want he should take me in his arms and bless me, as he did the little children in the Bible,” said Isabel Weeks to her sister.

“He looks so beautiful and good,” said Helen. “I should rejoice to go near him. It seems as if my heart had for a great while longed to meet such gentleness and purity.”

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“Alas!” exclaimed Deacon Hadlock, “that you should apply again that unction to your lips! You think your natural amiability will commend you to Christ. You believe there is something good in your nature.—When,” added he turning to the Apostle, “when will this young gal see herself as she is, feel her own sinfulness, her utter helplessness by nature, and throw herself on the mere mercy of God?”

“Hold!” said the Apostle. “She is in the way of salvation. Her natural amiability is pleasing to Christ. He was amiable in his youth before God and man. No human being is sinful by nature. If she have deep love in her soul, that will remove all traces of the carnal mind. Her love, I see it now, flows out to Jesus, and his love ever flows out to her, and all the children of men, and in this union of feeling and spirit will she become perfect in holiness.”

By this time, little Job Luce, as it seemed in the dream, forgotten and neglected by the crowd, slipping away unobserved, and creeping through the bushes and trees, had gone round and come out near the cross, under which he stood, and began playing with the Dove, that offered itself very familiarly to him. When Margaret saw this, she said she would go too, and Helen and Isabel said they would go. “He’s God!” cried Isaiah Hatch, and run away. “He’s all bloody!” said Socrates Hadlock, and started back. Jesus, having taken Job by the hand, was now seen leading him towards them. The little crumpled boy appeared to have become cured of his defority, he walked erect, the hump had sunk from his back, and his hands no longer touched the ground.

“We read that the crooked shall be made straight,” said Deacon Ramsdill, with one of his very natural smiles.

“I don’t care who or what he is,” spake out Mistress Palmer, “I do love him, and if Rhody was here, she would love him, and give right up to him now.”

“Wal, for my part,” responded Mistress Hatch, “I’m greatly disappinted. It an’t what I expected. He an’t no more God than anything. I shan’t trust my soul to a man. Come Isaiah, we’ll go home.”

The cause of this large company, and these varied sensations now appeared distinctly approaching; Jesus himself drew near. The tree-cross, green and flowering, moved along with him; the birds in the woods renewed their song, and even the milk-white dove flew from tree to tree, as it were to give good cheer to some of the more timid little birds. Some of

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the people retreated and stood afar off behind the trees, others clustered about Deacon Hadlock.

“Behold him!” outspoke the Apostle John, “the fairest among the sons of men; our elder Brother; he took upon himself our nature, and is not ashamed to call us Brethren. He hath loved us, and given himself for us, as the good Paul said, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling savor.”

The voice of Jesus himself was heard at last sounding heavenly sweet and tenderly free among the bewildered people. “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart.” “The bruised reed he will not break,” added John, “nor quench the smoking flax.”

“I am not come to condemn you,” was still the voice of Jesus, “but that by me you may be saved. I give myself for your life. Through my holiness ye shall sin no more.”

“Yes,” exclaimed Helen Weeks earnestly, “we will go to him! Come Isabel, come Margaret.”

These three interlocked, Margaret still retaining her berries and flowers, the kind Apostle led forward, and Jesus smiled upon them as they approached, and took each of them by the hand, and spake some comforting and assuring words to them, and they looked with a reverential pleasure into his face. Margaret, who from her own ignorance of the person she addressed felt less fear of him than the others, was the first who spoke to him. “Do you love flowers?” said she, at the same time extending the bunch she had in her hand. Christ took them, and replied, “Yes, I do. God bless you, my dear child.” “Can he bless and love me?” said Helen, addressing herself directly to Jesus, but adopting the customary third person. “Yes,” replied he; “I love those that love me, keep your heart pure, for out of it are the issues of life, and I and the father will come and dwell with you.”

“Can he have mercy on a poor sinner like me?” asked Mistress Palmer. “I forgive you, Daughter,” he replied; “Go and sin no more.”

“Are you God?” asked Margaret. “No, child,” he answered, “I am not God. But love me, and you will love God.”

“Is he not the second Person in the Godhead?” enquired Miss Amy, in a humble voice. “No,” said Jesus.

“It an’t God!—The Primer is’nt right!” was whispered among the children.

“There is some mistake here,” said Deacon Hadlock, as if he was afraid Christ had not fully explained himself.

“There is no mistake,” replied St. John.

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“But are we not saved by the Atoning Sacrifice, and can that be made except by an infinite being, and is not that being God?” added the Deacon.

“We are only saved by a Divine Union with God and Christ. He that dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God and God in him. This Inter-dwelling is our salvation, and this is the Atonement.

“That’s nater,” said Deacon Ramsdill, “I understand that. I am afeered some of us are resting upon a sandy foundation.”

“I was a poor sinner,” continued the Apostle, “till I came into this oneness with Christ. I feel safe and happy now, my soul is elevated and purified. To be with him is like being with God; to possess his spirit, is to bear the virtues of heaven; to be formed in his image is the blessed privilege of humanity. To effect such a change is the object for which he came into the world, and that which I have seen and heard, and handled and enjoyed, I declare unto you, that you, beloved friends, may have fellowship with me; and truly my fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.”

“We are emptied of all self-righteousness,” said Deacon Hadlock, “we are altogether become filthy.”

“Have you no love, joy, peace, long-suffering, goodness, faith?” asked the Apostle.

“Alas, none,” replied the Deacon.

“Say not so,” rejoined the Apostle. “A single look of his will pierce you through and through.”

“What the gentleman says may be true,” interposed Deacon Penrose; “but I think it highly inexpedient to speak of these things. We might adjourn, a few of us, to my counting-room, or to the Parson’s study, and confer upon the matter; but to talk in this way before all the people is the worst policy that could have been adopted. It is an imprudence to which I shall not commit myself; nor can I sanction it any longer with my presence.” So saying he disappeared.

“Look at these children,” continued St. John, “the very flowers and berries they bring are the affectionate tribute of their hearts to the Infinite Goodness and Divine Beauty that appear in Christ; it is the out-flowing of a pure love; it is the earnest and fore-shadowing of the salvation that has already begun in their souls. That young lady’s yearning after the love of Jesus is a sign that the Regeneration has commenced within her, and by it a communication is opened between her soul and his, which is the Atonement, and so also she becomes united to God, who is manifested and resident in Christ.”

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“But what will become of her past sins?” asked Miss Amy anxiously.

“I forgive them,” said Christ. “All power, Daughter, is given unto me, and that of complete and eternal pardon.”

“What have we been about all our lives, that we know not so much of the Gospel as these children!” exclaimed Deacon Hadlock mournfully and yet resistingly. Whereupon it came to pass that the crowd withdrew or melted away like a mist, and Margaret with Helen Weeks, her sister Isabel, her brother Judah, and Job Luce were left alone with Jesus and John. Helen fell at the feet of Jesus and overpowered by her emotions, wept with a calm deep weeping; Margaret looked into his face, and tears came into her eyes also.

“Will you forgive me, Job,” said Judah to the little boy, “for all that I have done to you?”

“Yes;” replied Job.

“Be good children and love one another,” said Jesus to them, and the two boys disappeared.

“Weep not, child of my love,” said he to Helen, “confide in me, dwell near my heart, obey the Gospel; I will be the life of your life, the well-spring of your soul, and in purity shall Heaven be revealed in you. The little Isabel, she shall be blest too, I will carry the lamb in my bosom.” When he had said this, they two vanished from the dream.

“You ask me who is God, child,” said he turning to Margaret, who now alone remained; “God is Love. Be pure in heart, and you shall see God. Love much, and he shall be manifest to you. Your flowers are fair, your spirit is fairer; I am well pleased with their fragrance, the breath of your love is sweeter to me.—Margaret!” he continued, “to y9ou it shall be given to know the mysteries of Heaven. But the end is not yet. Man shall rise against his fellow and many shall perish. The Church has fallen. The Eve of Religion has again eaten the forbidden fruit. You shall be a co-worker with me in its second redemption. I speak to you in parables, you understand not. You shall understand at another day. You are young, but you may advance in knowledge and goodness. You must be tempted, blessed if you can endure temptation. Be patient, and earnest, hopeful and loving. I too was a child like you, and it is that you must be a child like me. Through the morning shadows of childhood you shall pass to the perfect day. I unconsciously grew in favor with God and man, so shall you. This Cross is the burden of life, which all must bear. Bear it well, and it shall bring forth flowers and

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fruit to you. This Dove stands for the innocency and virtue, strength and support, that flow from God to all. In a dream have all these things passed before you. Forget not your dream. There is much evil in the world, sin not. You must be afflicted, faint not. Let me kiss you, my sweet child.”

Thus spake Jesus, and the dream again changed. The two persons were seen to return to marble-like forms, and these forms became a round ball of light, which, receding through the forest, stood on the distant mountains like the setting sun, and Margaret awoke. The morning light appeared in her chamber, and as she looked from her window, she saw the golden sun coming up over the green woods, and the birds were pealing their songs through the air. Margaret went down with bright feelings, light-hearted and free; she brought water from the cistern for her mother to wash, spread the clothes on the bushes, and guarded some yarn from the birds.

CHAPTER XV.

Margaret Passes a Night at the Still, and Solomon Smith Makes Her Useful.

It will be remembered that Hash, the brother of Margaret, at the Spring training, was punished not only by imprisonment, but also with an inconsiderable fine, for disorderly behavior on that occasion. Not being himself possessed of the money, he had recourse to the Smiths at No. 4, to whom he pledged his oxen for the sum advanced. To acquit himself in that quarter, he engaged his services as night-warden at the Still. In addition—for this seemed to be a point especially insisted upon—he promised that Margaret should accompany him in that duty.

The “Still,” or Distillery, was a smutty, clouted, suspicious looking building, on the slope of ground between the Tavern and Mill brook. It rose a single story on one side and two on the other, into the former of which the barrels of cider were rolled, and emptied into the cauldron below. The latter was the chief scene of operation; here were the furnace; the boiler with its cap for collecting the vapor and conveying it into the worm-pipe or condenser; the refrigerator, an im-

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mense cask, holding the worm, and constantly supplied with fresh cool water, brought by a series of large troughs from the Brook above; and the receiver, a barrel, into which the condensed vapor of the cider, now having assumed the form called spirits, issuing from the worm, fell drop by drop. This was a large long room, dark from the absence of windows, and darker still from the accretions of smoke and dust about the walls, and filled with a strong alcoholic effluvium. There were barrels of spirits, and piles of wood lying about, and the bare earth served for a floor. Into this place at night-fall were wont to assemble the people of the neighborhood, men and boys, and sometimes girls. Here came Margaret with Hash and Bull. A pine torch was blazing on the top of the furnace. Two boys sat in the light of the fire on the ground playing mumble-the-peg. Old Isaac Tapley leaned on the furnace inhaling the fumes of the boiling cider that puffed from a leak in the cap; little Isaiah Hatch caught with his fingers the drops that fell from the worm, and conveyed them to his mouth; and the men vied with one another who should render themselves most acceptable to Solomon, helping him crowd wood into the fire. Damaris Smith politely offered to instruct Margaret in the game of Fox and Geese, which they played sitting on a bench having the requisite lines branded across it. At length the nine o’clock bell was heard from the village, a tone mellowed by the distance and the woods, and which breaking in upon many a scene of idleness, dissipation, domestic quiet, or friendly visit, admonished the gay of vanity, the devout of prayer, and all of bed-time. The people went away, and soon after Solomon, leaving Margaret and Hash to their hight’s work, that of tending the fire. It was not long before Hash, whom Solomon had been treating with singular generosity, exhibited signs of intoxication, and in a few minutes was extended senseless on the ground. Then was Margaret left alone, with a dead-drunk brother, a roaring furnace, a hot and hissing cauldron, barrels of detestable drink, grotesque and frightful shadows leaping on the beams; while through the aperture above, the reflected light seemed to grin at her like a demon of the Still. When the fire burnt low, she replenished it with dry hemlock wood, which snapped like the report of subterranean musketry, and the splinters of fire dashed out spray-like into the room, and fell upon her brother’s face, which she was obliged to shield with boards. The gurgling of the water, as it flowed in and out from the vat, would have been music to her ears, if she were free to enjoy it; but it was

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her own sweet Pond contributing to the wicked business of rum-making;—and so too was she. Would she finish her work, and flow away as uncontaminated! Her father had never troubled her with ghost-stories, and she was not disposed to conjure up alarms from that source. The night showed dark and chilly, as she looked from the door. She could see nothing but darkness, and hear nothing but the Brook as it rippled through the invisible air; but the pure coolness was refreshing after her hot and fetid furnace-work. Bull followed her to the door-sill, and crouching at her side, looked compassionatingly into her face. When she saw his gentle sympathizing expression, as she had done before, she put her arms about his neck, and wept. She did not complain, or fear, or feel any wrong or loss, but she wept irresistibly because her dog loved her; and then she continued to weep as it were mechanically because there was nothing to occupy her deep sensitive faculties, and her tears alone remained to flow out; and so too she fell to laughing, and laughed almost wildly and incoherently; then chills crept over her, partly from the increasing and overpowering coldness of the air, and partly from an irrepressible nature which must always feel cold if it be not deeply and warmly loved.

She again renewed the fire, and sat down on the bench before it, and Bull, who followed her steps silently from place to place, watched near her, and she began to try the movements of the fox and geese game, then she turned towards the fire, then she looked into the dog’s eyes; and as she looked his eyes seemed to grow larger and larger, and to run together, and to cover his face. They had a soft clear aspect like water. Then it seemed as if what she saw became a great sheet of water, like her Pond, and golden waves, such as the sunsetting gives, chased one another over it, and those golden appearances which the moonlight occasions, she saw deep in its bosom, like strings, or eels, or fishes, frisking and playing, elongating and breaking off, dilating and narrowing. Presently she found herself sinking in these waters, and down, down, down she went, till she came to an open, hollow place, into which the light shone as from a cloud. Here she saw a bright silver basin, or cauldron set, with a fire burning under it, and three beautiful girls busy about it. One kept renewing the fire with rose-bushes, bright frost-reddened autumnal leaves, aromatic dead ferns, and white cotton grass. One threw into the pot wild flowers, eye-brights, azaleas, blood-roots, rhodoras and others; then she caught in her hands the snake-like

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moonbeam appearances, and threw them in; then with a long rake she gathered a quantity of sunbeams which she put in; then turning a facet at the end of a silver pipe connecting with the blue sky, she set that running into the pot; then she threw in a handful of sweet-scented herbs, lavender, chamomile, balm, marjoram; at last cutting off a slice of the rainbow, she grated that over the whole. The third, with a long silver rod, stirred the contents of the pot. Then each one taking a silver ladle began to dip out the liquor and pour it in one place on the ground. As they poured it out, it became congealed, and the mass increasing, it assumed a human form; which was that of a female. As they continued to pour over it the contents of the pot, feet were formed, and legs, and breast, and arms, and the shape of a head. One poured on another ladle full, and beautiful eyes appeared; another another, and a delicate lovely color came out in the face; the third added her ladle, which covered the head and neck with long, dark, curling hair. When the Form was complete, they wove with their fingers out of the light, a sort of drapery which they threw over it. Then one began to sing, and another to play on a sort of harp; while the third led down from the skies the brilliant Planet Venus, by a bridle of blue taste tied about one of its rays, and as it hung floating near the ground, she fastened it to a spear of grass to keep it from going off. While the two first were singing and playing, the spirit of life came into the Form, it was animated with a soul, and stood before them a perfect human being. The three girls seemed greatly delighted with the beautiful lady they had created, and were even transported to such a degree as if they would worship her. Margaret, meanwhile, was unobserved, and without being able to have any connection with these persons, she quietly saw all that happened. The Beauty, for such the new-formed woman might worthily be called, did not, however, long consent to receive the adulation of the others, but took pains to demonstrate her equality with them in sundry pleasing ways, and the four disported together on the green grass; then they all went to bathe in a stream of clear water that opened near by. After this the Beauty was seated on the brilliant Planet Venus, which was unhitched, and holding by the blue taste as a snaffle, she sailed slowly away into the air, followed, and as it were guarded, by the others who were borne up by some invisible power in their own bodies. The growling of Bull startled Margaret, and she found she had been dreaming, and when she was fairly

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awake, she discovered Solomon Smith coming stealthily through the door of the Still. His manner showed great uneasiness as if he were on some dubious expedition, he thrust his head forward, like a turkey, into every part of the building, as if he suspected somebody was hidden there, and manifested great joy when he found Hash was so completely insensible. Bull drew nearer to Margaret, and Margaret pressed closer to Bull. But Solomon told her not to be afraid, said he would not hurt her, and seating himself on the end of the bench, edged himself towards her. What he said to her was that she had been a good girl in minding the fire so well, and asked her if she wouldn’t have some toddy, which she refused.

“You are a curis creetur,” he continued, “and an’t no moon-calf nuther. You know at the trainin’, guess as how, I found you out in the rain, and took you into the Tavern, and you might have staid there all night for all anybody else lookin’ arter you. Now you won’t begrutch me a favor will you, Peggy? Can you tell what makes the likker come out of that are pipe?”

“No, I can’t,” she replied. “I wish it didn’t.”

“What makes dogs howl when you die?”

“I don’t know. I think Bull would, if I should die.”

“Didn’t you know you could catch a thief by putting a rooster under a kittle? It’ll crow as soon as the rascal touches it, guess as how.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You found the water up to Mr. Palmer’s, didn’t you, Peggy?” he enquired in an increasingly low and earnest manner.

“No,” replied she. “The boys found it.”

“You carried the stick, and Nimrod said you found it, and so did Rhody and the Widder.”

“Did they say so?”

“Wal, now I want you should tell me if you ever found a four-leaf clover? Speak low; walls have ears.”

“Yes,” she answered, “twenty, in the Mowing.”

“Did you ever kill a cricket?”

“No, they sing so pretty, I couldn’t kill one.”

“That’s you. I wouldn’t kill one. It’s dum bad. Do you put a Bible under your pillow when you go to bed?”

“What, such as Miss Amy told me about? She says the Bible makes people all wicked; and Pa’s Bible makes us wicked too. I don’t like Bibles.”

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“Little coot! Don’t you know the Bible is the best book in the world. I always sleep with one, guess as how.—Let me see your finger nails. Is there any black spots on them?”

“When they are dirty, and I dig roots for Obed.”

“Now keep still, Peggy, I want to tell you something. I have had a dream.”

“I wonder if you dream too!”

“Yes, I have had a dream three nights a runnin’. I can’t tell you about it now. But look here, Peg, Hash owes us for money, and he’ll have to lose his oxen if it an’t paid dum soon. He drinks more than his work comes to, but if you are willing to do what I want you to, I’ll let him off.”

“What shall I do?” said Margaret, with some degree of uncertainty and distress. “Keep still, Bull, there, there, Bull; they won’t hurt me, Bull.”

“I want you to go up with me to-night to the Fortune-teller’s, Joyce Dooly’s.”

To this proposal, Solomon, after considerable coaxing and threatening, succeeded in gaining Margaret’s consent; promising that he would release Hash altogether from his obligations, if she would do as he wished.

Solomon, in a few minutes, brought a horse to the door, and taking Margaret behind him, with the dog in company, rode off. They crossed Mill brook, went up a half mile or so on the Brandon road, when they dismounted, and took a narrow path, on foot, into the woods. It was pitch dark, and Margaret had to hold by the skirt of Solomon’s coat, while he felt his way before. They espied at length a light, and entered a door. In a small, low, ragged room, in what sort of a house or place it was impossible for Margaret to tell, she found an old woman with a dish of coals and two tallow candles burning before her on a table, both of which she seemed to be intently watching. She was evidently prepared for the visit, and showed by her manner that she had been waiting their arrival. Joyce Dooly the Fortune-teller was old, her face was pinched and sharpened, her eye black and piercing; she was somewhat fantastically dressed, and began using sundry cabalistic and charmed words. Five cats darted from chairs and the chimney side, when Bull entered, hissing and spitting, and all raised their backs together in one corner of the room. This movement seemed to disturb her for a moment, but observing it more attentively she at length became quiet, as if all was right. Her immediate business was with Margaret, whom, after settling certain

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preliminaries with the coals of fire, the candle wicks, the cats, some cards and astrological tracts that lay on the table, but which we need not describe, she proceeded to examine.

“In what month were you born?” asked the Fortune-teller.

“I don’t know,” replied Margaret.

“What, how!” exclaimed the old woman, in a tone of mingled surprise and rebuke. “Why have you brought the gal here? Nativity is the most important. In what house, Aquarius, Cancer, or Mercury,—we know nothing about it. Was Jupiter in the ascendant? The Moon in aspect to what? How can we tell?”

“I don’t care for your riggledorums,” retorted Solomon, with suppressed impatience. “Will she answer my purpose? You have got your money to find out that, and that is all I want to know.”

“Hold, Solomon!” she said, with an overawing sternness. “The caqts are against you. Keep still. Here, child, let me look at you. Curled hair,” so she went on, “denoteth heat and drought; brown, fairness, justice, freedom and liberality. Your signs are contradictory, child. Venus must have been in square signs when you were born. Do you never have any trouble?”

“Sometimes,” she replied, “when Deacon Penrose and Mr. Smith sell rum to Pa and Hash.”

“Take note, Solomon,” continued the woman, “she refers her troubles to you. She prognosticates disaster, sorrow and death. You had better let her alone.”

Solomon became inwardly greatly excited, but he strove to control himself, and whispered something in the ears of the woman, who pursued her inspection of the child.

“Lips,” said she, “fairly set and well colored, argue fidelity, and a person given to all virtue; brow high and smooth, signifieth a sincere friend and liberal benefactress; small ears, a good understanding; neck comely and smooth, a good genius; brown eyes, clear and shining, ingenuity, nobility and probity. Let me see you laugh. Teeth white and even, argue sweetness and reverence; dimples, persuasion and command; hand, soft and clear, hath discretion, service, delight in learning, peace-loving; palm D in mount of the Moon,—ha! ha! do you want to know, child! many and dutiful and fair children,—would you like to have children?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” replied Margaret.

The Fortune-teller seemed to be wandering from her proper

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point, and becoming quite absorbed in the characteristics and tokens of the child gave renewed uneasiness to Solomon, who expressed his feelings in a loud and somewhat menacing tone.

“Rest you, young man!” she replied, “your fortune is wrapt in that of the child. The hour cometh. Your significator must apply to a sextile of Mercury and Venus. I see a coffin in the wick of this candle. Scare the cats, let me see them jump once more. Now is your moment, depart.”

Whatever might be the meaning of this visit and this singular mummery to Margaret, Solomon, it appeared, had now accomplished his object, and was ready to leave. They plunged from the light again into the darkness, and retracing their steps through the woods, returned to the Still. Margaret would have gone in to her brother, but Solomon declared he had something more for her to do, and insisted that she should ride a little farther with him. They went up the road leading to the Pond, and arriving at a growth of trees known as the Pines, lying on the west side of the way, Solomon hitched his horse, and led Margaret once more into the woods. Reaching a spot which he seemed previously to have in his mind, he put a hazle-twig into the child’s hand, and bade her go about among the trees in the same manner as she did at Mr. Palmer’s at the Ledge. She was not long in announcing the movement of the twig, and the young man secured himself of the place as well as he could in the darkness, by piling a heap of stones over it. She asked him what it was for, but he declined telling; and what he would not do, we must, since, in the sequel, the whole affair came out. This young Smith had a dream, three nights successively, of gold hid in the Pines. He could not identify the precise locality, and sundry private canvassings of the earth with a spade had hitherto been fruitless. Hence his anxiety to secure the services of Margaret, whose success on a former occasion with the divining rod he had been apprized of; hence also his visit to Joyce Dooly the fortune-teller, for the purpose of fortifying himself more completely in his undertaking. Once more in this night of wanderings and mystery was Margaret conducted to the Still. Morning had scarcely begun to dawn, and Solomon had time to dispose of his horse in the stable, and himself in bed, before the family were up. Margaret found Hash yet in his sleep, the fire decayed, and the Still dark, cold and dismal as the morning after a debauch. She rekindled the fire, sufficiently at least for her own comfort, and lying down before it, with hr head upon the breast of Bull, fell fast asleep.

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CHAPTER XVI.

Margaret Enquires After the Infinite; And Cannot Make Her Way Out of the Finite.—She Unwittingly Creates a Great Sensation in the Town of Livingston.

“What is God?” said Margaret one morning to the Master, who in his perambulations encountered her just as she was driving the cow to pasture, and helped her put up the bars.

“God, God—” replied he, drawing back a little, and thrusting his golden-headed cane under his arm, and blowing his nose with his red bandanna handkerchief. “You shut your cow in the pasture to eat grass, don’t you, mea discipula?” added he after returning his handkerchief to his pocket, and planting himself once more upon his cane.

“Yes,” she replied.

“What if she should try to get out?”

“We put pegs in the bars sometimes.”

“Pegs in the bars! ahem. Suppose she should stop eating, and leaning her neck across the bars, cry out, ‘O you, Mater hominum bovumque! who are you? Why do you wear a pinafore?’ In other words, should ask after you, her little mistress; what would you think of that, hey?”

“I don’t know what I should,” replied Margaret, “it would be so odd.”

“Cows,” rejoined the Master, “had better eat the grass, drink the water, lie in the shade, and stand quietly to be milked, asking no questions.”

“But do, sir,” she continued, “tell me what God is.”

The Master folded back both his ruffle cuffs, lifted his golden-headed cane into the air, and cleared at one bound the road-side ditch, whereby his large three-corned hat fell into the water. Margaret picked it up, and wiping it, handed it to him, which circumstance seemed to recall him to the thread of her feelings; and he replied to her by saying,

“Felix qui potuit cognoscere causas. God, child, is Tetragrammative, a Four-wordity; in the Hebrew [Hebrew word], the Assyrian Adad, the Egyptian amon, the Persian Syre, Greek

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[Greek word], Latin Deus, German Gott, French Dieu; [Greek phrase], says Aristotle; ‘God is the Divine Being,’ says Bailey; ‘Jupiter Divum Pater,’ says Virgil.”

“Christ the Beautiful One, I saw in my dream, said if I loved I should know God,” replied Margaret.

“verily, as saith the Holy Apostle, God is Love.”

“Did Love make me?”

“Mundum fecit Amor; or as Jamblicus has it, ‘God produced matter by separating materiality from essentiality,’ or as Thomas writes, ‘Creation is extension produced by the Divine power.’ ”

“Is God Latin?”

“He is in Latin. Deus is Latin for God.”

“I don’t know anything about it. I had rather go into the woods, or up to Obed’s. His mother wants to see you; she told me to ask you to call there, the next time you came to the Pond.”

“I thought she did not like me.”

“But she wants to see you very much.”

“I hope she has no designs upon me?”

“I don’t know.—It is something she wants.”

“She don’t purpose to marry me?”

“I guess that is it. Hash said Miss Amy was going to marry you.”

“What, both? You are a ninny. You never heard of the Knights of the Forked Order. There is the old song:

Malum est mulier, women are an evil.”

Thus talking, they approached the Widow’s. To the road up which they went, the Master gave the name of Via Salutaris, the stile by which they crossed the stump-fence into the herb-garden or front yard, he called Porta Salutaris, as the Leech herself he had already honored by the title of Diva Salus.

“The child said you wanted me,” outspoke the Master, as he entered the house, in a tone that savored of irritated dignity.

“Please Ma’am,” interposed Margaret, both to explain and appease, “he says he won’t marry you.”

“Mehercule! What are you about, my little Beadswoman?”

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exclaimed he, endeavoring to impose silence upon the child. “In what way, capacity, office, character, can I do you service, Mistress Wright?”

“Gummy!” retorted the woman. “He has been a talkin’ about me, and a runnin’ of me down. I wouldn’t stoop so much as teu pick him up. I wouldn’t crack my finger jints for him.”

“He didn’t mean you,” replied Margaret. “He said women were an evil.”

“Not widows, child,” added the Master.

“Yes,” said the woman, “we are evil, but not evils, I trust. No offence, I hope, sir,” she added in a softened tone.

“None in the world,” answered the Master. [“]A widow the good Fuller enumerates in his Holy State.”

“Ah yes, they would try teu make us think we are sutthin when we are nothin, as the Parson says.”

“She is one, as that old writer observes, whose head hath been cut off, yet she liveth, and hath the second part of virginity!”

“The Lord be praised,” said the woman, with a curtsey, wiping her mouth with the corner of her apron; “I do survive as good a husband, as ever woman had.”

“Her grief for her husband,” continues the Worthy to whom I refer, “though real, is moderate.”

“Yes, sir,”

“She loveth to look on the picture of her husband, in the children he hath left her, as adds our reverend Author,” subjoined the Master turning his eye towards Obed, who stood in the door, twitching up his breeches.

The manner of the Master was too pointed not to be felt, and when he had succeeded in smarting the good Widow’s sensibilities, his object was attained. But she, on the other hand, had the faculty, by a smile that was peculiar to her, of disguising her emotions, and always contrived to cover up her sense of humiliation with the airs of victory. These two persons, as we have formerly remarked, did not like each other very well, and in whatever respects they stood mutually beholden, it was the object of each to make it appear that favors were given without grace, and received without gratitude. We will not follow their diplomatic banterings, but join them when they have concluded to go peaceably about their business. The Widow had invented a new medicine which would cure a great variety of diseases. But she wanted a scientific name for it, and also the scientific names of its

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several specific virtues. Her own vocabulary supplied her with an abundance of common appellations, but her purposes aspired to something higher, and the Master’s aid was brought in requisition. The Leech sat by a table, holding a pen, with a pewter inkstand, and some scraps of dingy paper before her, and endeavored to avail herself of every suggestion of the Master’s by committing it immediately to writing.

“Widder or woman,” said she, “I knows what I knows, and I know what is in this ere medicine, how many yarbs, and how I gathered um, and how I dried um, and how I pounded um, and how I mixed um, and I kalkelate there is a vartue in it. It’ll dill fevers, dry up sores, stop rumatiz, drive out rattlesnake’s bite, kill worms—there an’t a disorder you can mention that won’t knock under to’t.[”]

“Except one.”

“What is that?”

“Cacoethes Feminarum.”

“Up-a-daisy! What a real soundin’ one! Bile me up for soap, if that an’t a pealer,” exclaimed the delighted woman, giving a kind of chuckling grin both to the Master and Margaret. “Deu tell us what it is?” she added. “Is it round hereabouts much? Has any died on’t?”

“I know,” said Margaret, “it is something about women. Femina is Latin for woman.”

“Oh foever! I dussay,” rejoined the Widow, “It’s some perlite matter, and he would’nt like to speak it out before a body. How vallible is sientifikals and larnin’! Prehaps he’d tell what brings it—lor me, what a booby I be teu ask. My skull for a trencher, if I can’t cure it, if it’s as bad as the itch itself.”

“Humors—” said the Master.

“Humors! Humors in wimmin—now don’t say no more. I knew ’twas some perlite matter. But I can cure it, or any thing else; only give us the sientifikals and larnin’. There’s elderblows in my new medicine, and they’ll drive out humors as clean as a whistle. Only if I had the name. A name that has the sientifikals and larnin’ in’t. Diseases don[’]t take now-a-days without they have the pecoolar; and you can’t cure ’em without the pecoolar. I’ve studied the matter out and out, and I knows, what I knows, Widder or no Widder. I an’t teu be befooled by nobody, not I. I don’t ask no favors of nobody. But the Master knows so much, and here’s our little Molly, she’s as smart and pecoolar as the best on um. The Master knows there’s a good deal in a name, if he’d only say so. There

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was four cases up to Snake Hill, and I got two of um, and should have got the rest bein Dr. Spoor hadn’t a come in, with his larnin’ words, and that took. They’ll all go teu the dogs if they can’t have the sientifikals and the larnin’. If he would only be so kind as to give a poor woman a name for her medicine—but I won’t beg, no I won’t.”

“Nominis stat umbra,” said the master slowly and solemnly, while with assumed gravity and inward impatience he had been listening to the balderdash of the woman.

“Is that it?” asked she hastily.

“Verily,” he replied, “Nominis stat umbra.”

“Nommernisstortumbug,” said the Leech. “Why now, I vum, I could a thought of that myself. Obed here, see how easy tis, Nommernisstortumbug, remember, Obed, and you’ll be as larnt as Miss Molly. Git Molly some honey, prehaps the Master would like teu taste on’t. We’ll go it into um now. My husband made a great push in the sientifikals, and his pills did amazin’ stout; but he didn’t live in my day. I ought by good rights to make sutthin out of it, for I’ve took pains and studied long enough teu git it through. Jest give us the names, and we’ll go right among the upper crust anywheres, and Dr. Spoor may hang his saddle-bags in his garret. There’s Deacon Penrose’s gally pots and spattles, and Nigger Tony’s prinked up Patents, I an’t afeered of none of um, no, nor of old Death himself. He daren’t show his white jaws where the larnin’ is. A box of my Nommernisstortumbug would give the saucy rascal an ague fit, and he’d be glad teu put on some skin and flesh, and dress up like a man, and not be round skeerin’ people so with his old bones. There’s Parkins’s Pints has been makin’ a great pudder over to England, but they an’t knee high to a toad to’t. The thing of it is, people has got teu be so pesky proud and perlite, they will have the very best of names. They’d all die every one on um, before they’d touch the Widder’s stuff, as they call it; but the Nommernisstortumbug they’ll swallow down box and all, and git well teu, ha, ha! I knows what I knows, I’ve seen how the cat has been a jumpin’. The ministers try to save their souls, and have to preach sich things as ’ll take;—I han’t a grain of interest in the matter, not I. As soon as Obed gits a leetle older, I mean teu send him teu Kidderminster, and Hartford, and Boston, and all about the country, with my medicines, and there won’t be a spice of disease left. The Pints is a pound sterling, and I shall put my Nommernisstortumbug right up, and when you ax a good round price, it’ll sell all the quicker.”

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The Master, secretly amused at the Widow’s self-complacence, was not disposed to give her any interruption, at least so long as he ate of her clear white honey, which Obed supplied in liberal quantities, and of which he was thoroughly fond. Nay he went farther, and at her request wrote down for her, in scientific terms, the several and various properties of her nostrum, which she described to him. The Widow’s bad feelings towards the Master were likewise so overcome by the thought of her good fortune, as for the moment to throw her off her guard, and she forgot her usual self-possessed spitefulness. Their interview was in fair progress towards an amicable termination, when the Master happend to say he wanted Margaret to do a service for him that day. But the Widow in the mean time had been concocting plans in her own brains which included the aid of the child. Their difficulties broke out anew, there were taunts on the one side, and feminine objurgations on the other. How far the matter may have been carried we know not, when Margaret took the decision into her own hands, by running off. Both started for her, and came to the stile nearly at the same moment. Margaret had already got into the road. The Master, having a little advantage in point of time, mounted the stile first, but his course was checked by the skirts of his coat catching in one of the roots that composed the fence. The lady in excess of strong feeling pounced upon his ankles, and held him fast, while Obed hovered near with a look that threatened to facilitate his mother’s purposes. The Master flourished his long golden-headed cane in the air, greatly to the consternation of Obed, and the merriment of the Widow, who dared him to strike. Margaret hastened forward, intercedingly, and begged the Master off, under such conditions as the woman chose to stipulate, to wit, that she should come and help her some other day.

The Master sometimes employed Margaret to scour the woods in search of wild flowers, a pursuit for which she was fitted both by her own lightness of heart and foot, and a familiar acquaintance with the region. It was his wish that she should preserve specimens of almost all kinds she encountered, in the expectation, partly, of discovering some new variety. He furnished her with a tin case or box to keep the flowers fresh and sound. Providing herself with a lunch of bread and cheese, she took a familiar route through the Mowing into the rich Birch and Walnut woods lying towards the village. d Bull had gone off with Hash in the morning, and she was obliged to fail of the usual companion of her rambles. The sun shone

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warm and inviting, and the air was soft and exhilarating. The olive-backs trolled and chanted among the trees, and in the shadowy green boughs, innumerable and invisible creepers and warblers sang out a sweet welcome wherever she came along. She found varieties of fungus, yellow, scarlet, and blood-colored, which she tore from the sides of trees, from stumps, and rails. She gathered the wild columbine, snakeroot, red cohosh, purple bush-trefoil, flaxbell-flower, the beautiful purple orchis, and dodder, that gay yellow-liveried parasite; and other flowers, now so well known and readily distinguished by every lover of nature, but which, at the period of our memoir, had not been fully arranged in the New England Fora. She turned to the right, or towards South, and came to a spot of almost solid granite, through the hard chinks and seams of which great trees had bored their way, and forced themselves into the light and air. This place was set down in the vocabulary of the district as the Maples, or Sugar Camp, from its growth of sugar maple trees. Over these stones she stepped as on a pavement, or leaped from one to another as one does on the foam-crags at Nahant. In these dark crevices she found the bright green bunches of the devil’s ear seed, and the curious mushroom-like tobacco-pipe; all about her, on the rocks, the bright green polypods and maiden’s hair waved in silent feathery harmony with the round dots of quavering sun light, that descended through the trees—little daughters of the sun dallying with these children of the earth, and, like spiders, spinning a thin beautiful tissue about them, which was destroyed every night, and patiently renewed every morning. Here also she found beds of shining white, and rose-colored crystal quartz stones, large and small, striped and ruffled with green moss. On the flat top of a large bowlder that was thrown up from the mass of rocks, she saw growing a parcel of small polypods, in a circle, like a crown on a king’s head. Up this she climbed, and sat among the ferns, and sang snatches from old songs she had learned:

She selected some of the fairest of the fronds, and singing—

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leaped down again. A humming-bird that she had seen, or fancied she saw, early in the morning sucking her scarlet bean flowers, shot by her. She would follow it. It led her towards the road going from the Pond to No. 4. She pursued it till she came to its nest on the branch of a tree, which she was able to reach by means of a high rock. She found the nest constructed of mosses, and lined with mullein down, and in it were two tiny white eggs, a second hatching for the season. Two birds, the male and female, darted angrily at her, and ruffled their golden-green and tabby-colored feathers, as if they would fight her. She spoke to them, and discovered that they were really the same that had fed on honey from her hand, and one took quietly to the nest, while the other winged a swift, playful roundelay above her head. Leaving the birds, she crossed the road, and entered the pines, where Solomon Smith took her a few nights before. Here, under the trees she found a crowd of persons, men and women, boys and girls, who seemed bent on some mysterious thing, which they pursued with an unwonted stillness. Among them was a man, whom she knew to be Zenas Joy, pacing to and fro with a drawn sword, and keeping the people back. Damaris Smith ran to her, and whispered her not to speak loud, and said they were after the gold. Let us explain what Margaret herself had not been apprised of, that young Smith, after discovering the supposed deposit of the gold, for two or three nights, went and dug alone there. baffled in his search, but not in his expectations, he had recourse to his neighbors, and so the secret leaked out. There were five or six men employed in digging, and for more than a week had they worked there, day and night, without intermission, relieving one another by turns. They had excavated the ground to the depth of nearly thirty feet, and with a proportionately large breadth. A prodigious heap of earth and stones had been cast up, and great pine-trees had been undermined, precipitated, cut off, and thrown out. When Margaret approached near enough to look in, she saw the men, noiseless and earnest, at work with might and main; scarcely did they stop to wipe the sweat that reeked and beaded from their faces. Among them she saw her brother hash, and others, whom she knew to be No. 4’s and Breaknecks. It was a received notion of the times, that if any spoke during the operation, the charm was destroyed, hence the palpitating silence Margaret observed, and for this purpose also a sentry had been appointed to keep order among the people.

Margaret seeing Hash, was inconsiderable enough to speak

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to him, and ask after Bull. For this Zenas Joy, since words were out of the question, administered a corporeal admonition with the flat side of his sword, and Damaris Smith, with the other girls, seconding his endeavors, fairly drubbed her from the place. She went off, singing as she went,

She had not gone far when Bull, who had been asleep in the shade of a rock, awakened by the sound of her voice, came leaping out to her, and continued in her company. In the Pines she gathered such flowers as, for the most part, are proper to that description of soil;—the sleepy catchfly that is wide awake nights, pennyroyal with its purple whorls, yellow bent spikes of the gromwell, the sweet-scented pettymorrel, the painted cup with its scarlet-tipped bractes, yellow-horned horse balm, peach-perfumed waxen ladies tresses, nodding purple gay feather; she climbed after the hairy honey-suckle, and the pretty purple ground-nut, which, despising its name, overmounts the tallest shrubs. She encountered in her way a “clearing,” now grown up to elecampane, mullein, fire-weed, wild-lettuce. She forced herself through a thicket of brakes, blackberries and thistles, and clambered upon a fence, where she sat to look at the tall lettuces that shot up like trees above the other weeds. The seeds disengaging themselves from the capsule at the top, and spreading out their innumerable long white filaments, but still hovering about the parent stalk, gave the plant an appearance as if it had instantaneously put forth in huge gossamer inflorescence. Then a slight agitation of wind would disperse these flowers or egrets and send them flying through the air, like globes of silver light, or little burred fairies, some of them vanishing in the white atmosphere, others brought into stronger relief as they floated towards the green woods beyond. Descending towards the Brook, she gathered the beautiful yellow droops of the barberry-bush, white wall-cress, yellow none-such, flowers of the sweet-briar. She came to the stream, Mill Brook, that flowed out from her Pond; near it grew the virgin’s bower or traveller’s joy, bedstraw, the

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nightshades, yellow spearwort, button-bush, purple thorough-wort, the beautiful cardinal flower or eye-bright just budding, and the side-saddle flower. On its grassy margin she took her seat under the shade of a large white birch. She ate her bread and cheese, sharing her morsel with the dog. She kneeled and drank from the swift sparkling waters, where they ran between two stones. It was now past noon; her box was full, and quite heavy enough for one so young to carry, and she might have returned home. The woods beyond, or to the west of the Brook, were close and dark, hardly did the sun strike through them, but the birds were nosy there, and she must perforce enter them, as a cavern, and walk on the smooth leaf-strewed floor. The ground ascended, then rounded over into a broad interval below, down into which she went. Here a giant forest extended itself interminably, and she seemed to have come into a new world of nature. Huge old trees, some white pines and white oaks, looked as if they grew up to the skies. Birds that she had never seen before, or head so near at hand, hooted and screamed among the branches. A dark falcon pierced the air like an arrow, in pursuit of a partridge, just before her eyes. An eagle stood out against the sky on the blasted peak of a great tree; a hen-harrier bore in his talons a chicken to his young; large owls in hooded velvety sweep flew by her; squirrels chattered and scolded one another; large snake-headed wild-turkeys strutted and gobbled in the underbrush; a wild-cat sprang across her path and she clung closer to her dog. Resting herself at the foot of a large pine-tree, she picked and ate the little red checker-berries that grew in profusion on the spot. The birds fluttered, rioted and shrieked, in strange confusion, among the trees, and she entertained herself watching their motion and noise. The low and softened notes of distant thunder she heard, and felt no alarm; or she may have taken it for the drum-like sound of partridges that so nearly resembles thunder, and which she had often heard, and though no more of the matter. Had she been on the tops of the trees, where the birds were, she would have seen a storm gathering, cloud engendering cloud, peaks swelling into mountains, the entire mass sagging with darkness, and dilating in horror. The air seemed to hold in its breath, and in the hushed silence she sat, looking at the rabbits and woodchucks that scampered across the dry leaves, and dived into their burrows. She broke into a loud laugh, when she saw a small brown-snouted martin in smart chase after the bolt-upright, bushy, black-tipped tail of a red fox, up a tree,

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and spat her hands, and stamped her feet, to cheer the little creature on. She sung out, in gayest participation of the scene a Mother Goose Melody, in a Latin version the Master had given her;—

While she was singing, hail-stones bounded at her feet, and the wind shook the tops of the trees. Suddenly it grew dark, then, in the twinkling of an eye, the storm broke over her, howling, crashing, dizzying it came. The whole forest seemed to have given way—to have been felled by the stroke of some Demiurgic Fury, or to have prostrated itself as the Almighty himself passed by. The great pine, at the root of which she was sitting, was broken off just above her head, and blown to the ground; and by its fall, enclosing her in an impenetrable sconce, under which alone, in the general wreck, could her life have been preserved. A whirlwind, or tornado, such as sometimes visits New England, had befallen the region. It leaped like a maniac from the skies, and, with a breadth of some twenty rods, and an extent of four or five miles, swept everything in its course; the forest was mown down before it, orchard-trees were torn up by the roots, large rocks unearthed, chimneys dashed too the ground, roofs of houses whirled into the air, fences scattered, cows lifted from their feet, sheep killed, the strongest fabrics of man and nature driven about like stubble. In bush and settlement, upland and interval, was its havoc alike fearful. When Margaret recovered from the alarm and bewilderment of the moment, her first impulse was to call for the dog;—but he, at the instant having been caught off by the apparition of the wild-cat, was overtaken by the storm, and borne down by the falling trees, losing all sense of duty, wounded and frightened, he fled away. She herself was covered with leaves, fragments of bark, hail-stones and sand; blood flowed from her arm, and one of her legs was bruised. The end of a bough had penetrated her box of flowers and pinned it to the earth. The sun came out as the storm went by; but above her the trees with their branches piled one upon another on the great pine that had been her salvation, formed an almost impervious thatch that enveloped her in darkness. Making essays at self-deliverance, she found her path in every direction closed, or at least distorted. The

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fallen trees, mingled and matted with the shrubbery, obscured and opposed her way, while the chasms made by the upturned roots rendered progress devious and dangerous; and when at last she reached the edge of the ruins, and stood in the open woods, she knew not where she was, or in what direction lay her home. There were no cart-tracks, or cow-paths, no spots or blazes on the trees, that she could discover. The sun was setting, but its light was hidden by the denseness of the forest. As she advanced, hoping for the best, every step led her deeper in the wood and farther from the Pond. She mounted knolls and rocks, but could discern nothing; she crossed brooks, explored ravines, but to no purpose. At last despairing, exhausted, her sores actively painful, she sunk down under the projecting edge of a large rock. She had not been sitting long when she beheld, approaching the same place, a large, shaggy, black bear, with three cubs. The beast came close to her, smelt about her; she looked into its eyes, scratched its forehead, as if it had been her own Bull. Possibly satisfied with what it had eaten during the day, the bear was not disposed to make a meal of the child. The mother-bear stretched herself on the ground, partly crowding Margaret from her seat, and the three cubs applying themselves to their supper with all infantile zest, set an example that proved contagious, and our other cub, with curiously wrought head, took possession of an unoccupied dug, and was refreshed and soothed thereby. The mother-bear and her young, cuddling themselves together, went to sleep; Margaret pillowing herself in the midst of them, went also to sleep.

Meanwhile the noise of the storm reached the Pond, where its effects came not, and distressed the family with agonizing apprehensions. Hash had not returned; after finishing his bout in the Pines, he went with his comrades to see the results of the wind at No. 4, and have a drunken carouse. The Widow and her son came down both to seek news of the storm, and inflame the impression of its terror. The ruddy and wanton face of Pluck became pale and thoughtful. The dry and dark features of his wife were even lighted up with alarm. Chilion coming in from the Pond where he had been fishing, when he learned the absence of his sister, seemed smitten by some violent internal blow. He paced to and fro in front of the house, listening to every sound, and starting at every glancing leaf. The ordinary intercourse of the family, if it were not positively rude and rough, was more frequently of a light and trivial character, and, unaccustomed to the ex-

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pression of deeper sentiments, now in the moment of their calamity, they said but little. Yet they watched one another’s looks and slightest words with an attention and reverence, which showed how strongly interested they were in one another’s feelings, as well as in the common object of their thoughts. They watched and waited, and waited and watched, uncertain what course the child had taken, not knowing where to go for her, and hoping each successive instant she might appear from some quarter of the woods. The sun was going down. Obed was despatched in the direction of the dam, or north end of the Pond; Pluck went over into the maples; Cilion seizing the tin dinner-horn, ran to the top of Indian’s Head, and blew a loud blast. No response came from the far glimmering sound but its own empty echo. Descending he beheld Bull returning alone, lame and bloody. The dog was at once questioned, and as if convicted of weakness and infidelity to his mistress, or with that native instinct which is proper to the animal, he pulled at Chilion’s trousers and made as if he would have him follow him in search of the child. Chilion took the lead of the dog, who despite his wounds pursued his way strenuously. They came to the place of the gold-digging in the Pines. The sentry and the people were gone; two men, the relay for the night, alone remained. Suspended on the trees, and fastened in stone sockets below, blazed pitch-knot torches. Deep in the hole toiled the two men, in sturdy silence, and with most religious steadfastness. Intercommunication was impossible; Chilion spoke to them, but they answered not. Bull urged him onwards, he had found the track of the child, and would abide no delay. They took the same course Margaret had gone in the morning. They crossed the Brook, they entered the thick woods. It was now night and dark, but Chilion was familiar with each vein, recess and loop-hole of the forest, and had often traversed it in the night. They followed the footsteps of the child till they came to the line of the storm. Here the prostrate trees, upturned roots, vines and brush, knitted and riven together, interrupted the track. A barrier was presented which baffled the sagacity of the dog. He ran alongside the ruins, up and down, tried every avenue, wound himself in among the compressed and perplexed fissures of the mass, but, failing to recover the scent, he returned to his master, and set up a loud howl. What could Chilion do? He called his sister’s name at the top of his voice, he rung out the farthest-reaching alarm-cry. He then repeated the attempt of his dog to gain an en-

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trance into the gnarled forest-wreck. He crept under trunks of trees, he tore a passage through vines and brambles, he climbed to the end of a tree and lowered himself down into the centre of the mass; he groped his way in utter darkness wherever he could move his hand. When he found a space large enough to kneel or stand erect in, he again called aloud; but no answer came. “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s crushed under a tree”—such was the dreadful reflection that began to ebb in upon his heart, and form itself in distincter imagery to his thoughts. Armed with fresh energy he renewed his efforts. He explored with his hand every vacant spot, trembling on the one hand lest he should lay it upon her dead and mangled body, hoping on the other that the vital spark would not be entirely extinct; wishing at least to find her before the animal warmth had wholly subsided in one for whom he evinced so strong an attachment. A large limb, broken off in the storm, which he was endeavoring to remove, fell upon his foot, bruising the flesh, and nearly severing the cords; but of this he took no notice. In uttermost despair, he exclaimed, “she is dead, she is dead.” He, the moody and the silent, gave utterance to the wildest language of distress. That deaf and dismal darkness was pierced with an unwonted cry. “O my sister! my dear, dear sister, sweet Margery, dead, dead!” He fell with his face to the earth, his spirit writhed as with a most exquisite sense of torture; from his stimulated frame dropped hot sweat. “O Jesus, her Beautiful One, how couldst thou let the good Margery die so? My music shall die, my hopes shall die, all things die; sweet sister Margery, your poor brother Chilion will die too.” His frenzy seemed to assume the majesty of inspiration, as in all simplicity of earnest love he gave vent to his emotions. Pain and weariness combined with hopelessness of success to divest him of the idea of finding her that night. He extricated himself from the fallen wood, and not without extreme difficulty and much suffering, both bodily and mental, accompanied by the dog, he returned to his home. His father and mother were still up, restless and anxious. His foot was immediately dressed and bandaged, and he was obliged to be laid in his parents’ bed. Obed was also there, strongly moved by an unaffected solicitude. As soon as it was light, he was sent to the village to have the bell rung and the town alarmed; Pluck himself immediately went down to No. 4. In the course of two or three hours the entire population of Livingston received the exciting and piteous intelligence of ‘A child lost in the woods, and sup-

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posed to have perished in the storm!’ At No. 4 Hash was aroused from his boosy stupor to something like fraternal activity, and the four families composing the hamlet, the Smiths, Hatches, Gubtails and Tapleys, more or less of them, started off for the scene of the disaster, under the direction of Pluck, whom Chilion had advised as to the course probably taken by the child. The village was deeply and extensively moved. Philip Davis, the sexton, ran to the Meeting-house and pulled swiftly and energetically a loud and long fire-alarm, on the bell. The people flocked about Obed to learn the news, and hurried away to render succor.

The Master, who was on his way to the barber’s, hearing of the sad probability respecting his little pupil, was like a man beside himself; perfectly bemazed, he made three complete circles in the road, drew out his red bandanna handkerchief, and returned it without blowing his nose, poised his golden-headed cane in the air, then leaped forward, like a hound upo0n its prey, ran down the South Street, and disappeared, at full speed, up the Brandon road. Judge Morgridge and his black man Cæsar, rode off in a swift gallop, on two horses. They overtook the Master, who had fainted and fallen, and lay beating his breasts and abstractedly moaning. Cæsar and the judge helped lift him to the saddle of one of the horses, and the Negro mounting behind and holding him on, they galloped forward. Men with ox-carts, crossing the Green for their work in the Meadows, stopped, threw out their ploughs, scythes, rakes, pitchforks, or whatever they had, into the street, turned their carts about, took in a load of old men[,] women and children, and drove for No. 4. Deacon Penrose shut up his store, Tony his shop; Mr. Gisborne the joiner, and Mr. Cutts the shoemaker, left their benches respectively. Lawyer Beach, Esq. Weeks and Dr. Spoor started off with axes and bill-hooks in their hands. Boys seized tin dinner-horns and ran. A multitude of people, old and young, men and women, hastened down the South street. At the corner or forks of the road they were joined by others, who came from the Mill. They shoaled up the Brandon road, like a great wave of the sea, rapidly, urgently, solemnly. The Pottles and Dunlaps, from Snake Hill and Five-mile-lot, came down to the Pond, on foaming horses, and receiving their directions from Chilion, hastened into the woods. A messenger had been posted to Breakneck, and those families, the Joys, Whistons and Orffs, turned out. Of all those engaged in the hunt, were absent the two most interested in it, to wit, Chilion

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and Bull, whose wounded and stiffened limbs rendered it impossible for them to go out. Dr. Spoor rode up to see Chilion, and little Isabel Weeks, her sister Helen and brother Judah also came, and brought him cordials and salves. It was his irrepressible conviction that Margaret was dead, and he was slow to be comforted. Successively, as the several parties arrived at that spot in the woods where Chilion had gone the night before, they set themselves at work clearing away the trees. It seemed to be the universal impression that the child lay buried somewhere under the wind-fall. Capt. Eliashib Tuck, and Anthony Wharfield, the Quaker, took the general superintendence of the operations. The melancholy silence of the workmen singularly contrasted with the vehemence of their action. The forest resounded with the blows of axes, and the crashing of limbs. Broad openings were made in the compact mass. Little boys crept under the close-wielded vines prying about in anticipation of the men. Beulah Ann Orff and Grace Joy helped one another bear away the heavy branches. Able Wilcox and Martha Madeline Gisborne lifted large billets of wood. Deacon Penrose executed lustily with a bill-hook. Pluck, Shooks, the Jailor, Lawyer Beach, Sibyl Radney, Mr. Cutts, Solomon Smith and Hash, rolled over a great tree, roots and all, while Judge Morgridge and Isaac Tapley stood with shovels, ready to dig into the mound of earth and stones which the roots had formed in their sudden uprise. Zenas Joy and Seth Penrose rode off to get refreshments. The Master alternatively worked with the others, and sat on a stump, covering his eyes with his hands, foreboding each moment some dreadful sight. In the midst of all, kneeling on the damp leaves in the open wood, might be heard the voice of the Camp-preacher, in loud and importunate prayer, beseeching the Most High to spare, if possible, the life of the child, and restore her to her afflicted friends and family.

To return to Margaret. The night had passed, she had slept and waked, and taken her breakfast with the cubs. She felt her strength revive, and her hopes rise. She offered her bruised and bloody arm to the bear, who licked the blood, and soothed and fomented the wound with her tongue. She attempted to walk, but her benumbed limbs refused their office, and she sat down again. She dug out with her fingers the roots of the polypods which she ate with good relish. Then with her voice she raised the signal of distress, and tried to make her situation known; but she had wandered far

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from any neighborhood, and out of the ordinary haunts of men. Dreary feelings and oppressive thoughts came over her, and tears flowed freely, which the kind motherly bear wiped away with her tongue. Then the three little bears began to play with their dam, one climbed up her back, another hugged her fore leg, and the third made as if it would tweak her nose, and the one upon her back began to bandy paws with the one that was hugging the leg, like kittens; and Margaret was forced to be amused despite herself. Then she fell to singing, and as she sang, the animals seemed to be moved thereby, and the old bear and the three little bears seated themselves on their haunches all in a row before her, to hear her; and they appeared to her so much pleased with her performance, that neither of them spoke a word during all the time she was singing.

Where the people were at work, they made satisfactory examination of a pretty large space of ground. One of the boys, Isaiah Hatch, who was burrowing mole-like under the ruins, raised an exclamation that brought several to the spot. He had discovered the flower-box, which was soon recognised as having been carried by the child. The limb that held it was cut away, and battened and perforated it was borne to the Master, who, clutching it in his hands, uttered a mixed sound of pleasure, apprehension and regret. It was concluded that she might have escaped from the storm, and while a few remained and continued the search, they agreed that the main body should distribute themselves in squads, and range the forest. They took the horns wherewith to betoken success, if success should attend them.

Margaret, who, as the hours wore away, could no more than resign herself to passing events, was startled from her reveries by the rustling of footsteps, and the sound of a human voice. At the same instant, she saw the Master running precipitously across the woods, and crying out, “Bear, Bear! Ursa major, Ursæ minores”—his arms extended, his cane dropped, his hat and wig fallen off, his big coat tearing itself to tatters in the brush, himself stumbling over roots and bestriding daddocks in extremest consternation. Close at his heels was the bear with her young, running with similar velocity, but more afraid of her pursuers than the Master was of her, and whose track she pursued only for the instant that it happened to identify itself with the direct course to her lair, whither the animal betook herself, while the Master, thinking he had dodged her fury, disappeared among the distant trees; and all

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this before Margaret, who called to him, could make herself heard. But in the same moment men and boys appeared storming and rattling through the brush, with uplifted axes, clubs and stones, in wild hue and cry after the bear, whom happening to alight upon, they had given chase to, and drove to her retreat. Their shouts after the bear were changed into exclamations of a very different character when they beheld the child. They sprang forward to Margaret, caught her in their arms, and asked her a thousand questions. Speedily the horns were blown, and presently there came up from the hill and hommoc, wood and bosket, rock and dingle, all around an answering volley. A loud trine reciprocating blast conveyed the glad intelligence wherever there were those interested to hear it. The Master at length ventured forward. What were his emotions or his manners at finding the lost one alive, we will not detail. To show feeling before folks mortified him greatly; the received mode of expression he did not follow; nor were his contradictions performed by any rule that would enable us to describe them. “We have found the child, let us now kill the bear,” became the cry;—the animal in the mean time having slunk, trembling to the death, under the low dark eaves of her den.

“No, no!” was the urgent response of Margaret, and she recounted again the passages between herself and the animal.

“Wal,” said the boys, “if she has been so good to the gal, we won’t touch her.”

It was a question how the child should be got home. For her to walk was impossible. Some proposed carrying her in their amrs, but the general voice was for a litter, which, of poles and green boughs, was quickly made, and borne by four men. The hat and wig of the Master were replaced, and his tattered garments mended by some of the women, who, leaving their homes in haste, carried away scissors, wax, thread and needle, in their pockets. Their best course to the Pond was through Breakneck, and so down the Brandon road by No. r. A fearful gorge, terminating, however, in a rich bottom, gave the name Breakneck to what was in reality a pleasant neighborhood, consisting of the three families before mentioned, the Orffs, Joys and Whistons, who were all substantial farmers. Joseph Whiston conducted the people and bearers of the child directly to his father’s. Margaret was carried into the house, laid on a bed, where Mistress Whiston and the other ladies examined and dressed her wounds, and had some toast made for her, and a cup of tea, adding also quince pre-

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serves. Refreshments were also sent out to the people, who in addition received liberal supplies from the other houses. While Margaret was resting, the young men busied themselves in putting together a more convenient carriage than the litter, and Paulina Whiston brought thick comfortables to cover it with, and pillows and bolsters to put under the child’s head. On this Margaret was placed, reclining, and borne off, as before, on the shoulders of four young men. For the Master, we would remark, a horse was kindly provided. They entered the highway, and went down the hill through the woods; the boys and younger portion of the company whooping, capering, and sounding their horns. Passing the side-path that led to Joyce Dooly the Fortune-teller’s, there, at the enrance of the woods, on a high rock, stood the mysterious woman herself, holding by strings her five cats. At sight of her the people were silent. She enacted sundry grimaces, uttered mumming sentences, declared she foresaw the day previous the loss and recovery of the child, pronounced over her some mystic congratulations, waved her hand and departed, and the people renewed their shouts. Over fences, through the woods, up from ravines, came others who had been hunting in different directions, and when the party reached No. 4, its numbers were swelled to more than a hundred. Here they found another large collection of people, some of whom came up at a later hour from the village, and others were just returned from the search. Here also were desolating marks of the storm, in roofs, chimneys, windows, trees, fences, fields. Deacon Ramsdill, lame as he was, with his wife, had walked from their home beyond the Green. Parson Welles and the Preacher were engaged in familiar conversation, the first time they had ever spoken together. “The Lord be praised!” ejaculated the Preacher. “We see the Scripture fulfilled,” said the Parson. “There is more joy over one that is brought back, than over the ninety and nine that went not astray.” “Amen,” responded the Preacher.

“You come pretty near having considerable of a tough time, didn’t you, dear?” said [D]eacon Ramsdill, advancing and shaking Margaret’s hand; “but like to never killed but one man, and he died a laughin. It ’ll do you good, it is the best thing in the world for calves to lie out of nights when the dew is on.”

“Our best hog was killed in the pen,” said Mistress Gubtail; “but here’s some salve, if it ’ll be of any service to the child.”

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“Salve!” retorted the Widow Wright, indignantly, and elbowing her way through the crowd. “Here’s the Nommernisstortumbug, none of your twaddle, the gennewine tippee, caustic and expectorant, good for bruises and ails in the vitals.”

“I’ve got some plums that Siah picked under the tree that blowd [sic] down in the storm,” said Mistress Hatch; “I guess the gal would like them, and if any body else would eat, they are welcome.”

“Bring um along, Dorothy,” said Mistress Tapley to her little daughter. “A platter of nutcakes. The chimney tumbled in while I was frying um, and they is a little sutty, but if the gal is hungry, they’ll eat well.”

Provisions of a different description were furnished from the Tavern, of which the multitude partook freely. People from the village also sent up quantities of fruit, cakes, &c. But they could not tarry, they must hasten to the child’s home. They went up the hill, Margaret erected on the shoulders of the young men, escorted as it would seem by half the town, all wild with joy. Pluck was in transports; Obed laughed and cried together all the way up the hill; Hash was so much delighted, that he drank himself nearly drunk at the Tavern. When they came in sight of the house, a new flourish of the horns was made, three cheers given, hats and green twigs swung. Chilion, whom the good news had already reached, was seated in a chair outside the door; Bull, unable to move, lay on the grass, wagging his joy with his tail; Brown Moll took to spinning flax as hard as she could spin, to keep her sensations within due bounds; the little Isabel leaped up and down spatting her hands. Margaret was conveyed to her mother’s bed. Dr. Spoor examined her wounds, and pronounced them not serious, and all the women came in and examined them and gave the same decision. Parson Welles suggested to the Preacher the opportuneness of a prayer of thanksgiving, which the latter offered in a becoming manner. A general collation was had in which the family who had tasted of nothing since the noon before, were made glad participants. Chilion, to express is own transport, or to embody and respond to the delight of the people, called for his violin. Playing, he wrought that effect in which he took evident pleasure, moving the parties in a kind of subservient unison, and gliding into a familiar reel, he soon had them all dancing. On the grass before the house, old and young, grave and gay, they danced exuberantly. Parson Welles, the Preacher and Deacon Hadlock looked on smilingly. Deacon Ramsdill’s

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wife declared Margaret must see what was going on, had her taken from the bed, and held her in her lap on the door-sill. There had been clouds over the sun all day, and mists in the atmosphere, nor did the sun yet appear, only below it, while it was now about an hour high, along the horizon, cleared away a long narrow strip of sky flushing with golden light. Above the people’s heads still hung grey clouds, about them were green woods, underneath them the green grass, and within them were bright joyous sensations, and through all things streamed this soft colored light, and in all shone a pavonine irradiancy, and their faces glowed more lustrously, and their hearts beat more rapturously. Deacon Hadlock, stirred irresistibly, gave out, as for years he had been accustomed to do in Church, the lines of the Doxology—

which Chilion pitching on his violin and leading off, they sung with great emphasis. When they were about breaking up, Deacon Ramsdill said, “Shan’t we have a collection? We have had pretty nice times, but strippins arter all is the best milk, and I guess they’ll like it as well as any thing now. We shall have to feather this creeter’s nest, or the bird will be off agin. Here’s my hat if some of these lads will pass it round.”

A contribution was made, and thus the night of the morning became a morning at night to the Pond and the people of Livingston.

CHAPTER XVI.

Winter[.]

An event common in New-England, is a its height. It is snowing, and has been for a whole day and night, with a strong north-east wind. Let us take a moment when the storm intermits, and look in at Margaret’s and see how they do. But we cannot approach the place by any of the

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ordinary methods of travel; the roads, lanes and by-paths are blocked up: no horse or ox could make his way through those deep drifts, immense mounds and broad plateaus of snow. If we are disposed to adopt the means of conveyance formerly so much in vogue, whether snow-shoes or magic, we may possibly get there. The house or hut is half sunk in a snow bank; the waters of the Pond are covered with a solid enamel as of ivory; the oxen and the cow in the barn-yard, look like great horned sheep, in their fleeces of snow. All is silence, and lifelessness, and if you please to say, desolation. Hens there are none, nor turkeys, nor ducks, nor birds, nor Bull, nor Margaret. If you see any signs of a human being, it is the dark form of Hash, mounted on snow-shoes, going from the house to the barn. Yet there are the green hemlocks and pines, and firs, green as in summer, some growing along the flank of the hill that runs north from the Indian’s Head, looking like the real snow-balls, blossoming in mid-winter, and nodding with large white flowers. But there is one token of life, the smoke coming from the low grey chimney, which, if you regard it as one, resembles a large, elongated, transparent bal[l]oon; or if you look at it by piece-meal, it is a beautiful current of bluish-white vapor, flowing upward unendingly; and prettily is it striped and particolored, as it passes successively the green trees, the bare rocks, and white crown of the hill behind; nor does its interest cease, even when it disappears among the clouds. Some would dwell a good while on that smoke, and see in it manifold out-shows and denotements of spiritualities; others would say, the house is buried so deep, it must come up from the hot mischief-hatching heart of the earth; others still would fancy the whole Pond laid in its winding-sheet, and that if they looked in, they would behold the dead faces of their friends. Our own sentiment is, that that smoke comes from a great fire in the great fire-place, and that if we should go into the house, we should find the family as usual there; a fact which, as the storm begins to renew itself, we shall do well to take the opportunity to verify.

Flourishing in the centre of these high-rising and broad-spreading snows, unmoved amid the fiercest onsets of the storm, comfortable in the extremity of winter, the family are all gathered in the kitchen, and occupied as may be. In the cavernous fire-place burns a great fire, composed of a huge green back-log, a large green forestick, and a high cob-work of crooked and knotty refuse-wood, ivy, hornbeam and beech. Through this the yellow flame leaps and forks, and the bluish-

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grey smoke flows up the ample sluice-way of the chimney. From the ends of the wood the sap fries and drips on the sizzling coals below, and flies off in angry steam. Under the forestick great red coals roll out, sparkle a semibrief, lose their grosser substance, indicate a more ethereal essence in prototypal forms of white, down-like cinders, and then fall away into brown ashes. To a stranger the room has a sombre aspect rather heightened than relieved by the light of the fire burning so brightly at mid-day. The only connection with the external air is by the south window-shutter being left entirely open, forming an aperture through the logs of about two feet square; yet when the outer light is so obscured by a storm, the bright fire within must anywhere be pleasant. In one corner of the room sits Pluck, in a red flannel shirt and leather apron, at work on his kit mending a shoe; with long and patient vibration and equipoise he draws the threads, and interludes the strokes with snatches of songs, banter and laughter. The apartment seems converted into a workshop, for next the shoemaker stands the shingle-maker, Hash, who with froe in one hand and mallet in the other, by dint of smart percussion, is endeavoring to rive a three-cornered billet of hemlock, on a block. In the centre of the room sits Brown Moll, with still bristling and grizzly hair, pipe in her mouth, in a yellow woolen long-short and black petticoat, winding a ball of yarn from a windle. Nearer the fire, are Chilion and Margaret, the latter also dressed in woollen, with the Orbis Pictus, or Wold displayed, a book of Latin and English, adorned with cuts, which the Master lent her; the former with his violin, endeavoring to describe the notes in Dr. Byles’s Collection of Sacred aMusic, also a loan of the Master’s, and at intervals trailing on the lead of his father in some popular air. We shall also see that one of Chilion’s feet is raised on a stool, bandaged, and apparently disabled. Bull, the dog, lies rounded on the hearth, his nose between his paws, fast asleep. Dick, the grey squir[r]el, sits swinging listlessly in his wire wheel, like a duck on a wave. Robin, the bird, in its cage, perched on its roost, shrugs and folds itself into its feathers, as if it were night. Over the fire-place, on the rough stones that compose the chimney, which day and night through all the long winter are ever warm, where Chilion has fixed some shelves, are Margaret’s flowers; a blood-root in the marble pot Rufus Palmer gave her, and in wooden moss-covered boxes, pinks, violets and buttercups, green and flowering. Here also, as a sort of manteltree ornament, sits the marble kitten which Rufus made, under a cedar

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twig. At one end of the crane in the vacant side of the fire-place hang rings of pumpkin rinds drying for beer. On the walls are suspended strings of dried apples, bunches of yarn, and the customary fixtures of coats, hats, knapsacks, &c. On the sleepers above is a chain-work of cobwebs, loaded and knapped with dust, quivering and gleaming in the wind that courses with all or no obstruction through all parts of the house. Near Hash stands the draw-horse, on which he smoothes and squares his shingles; underneath it and about lies a pile of fresh, sweet-scented, white shavings and splinters. Through the yawns of the back door, and sundry rents in the logs of the house, filter in, unweariedly, fine particles of snow, and thus along the sides of the room rise little cone-shaped, marble-like pilasters. Between Hash and his father, elevated on blocks, is the cider barrel. These are some of the appendages, inmates and circumstances of the room. Within doors is a mixed noise of lapstone, mallet, swifts, fiddle, fire; without is the rushing of the storm. Pluck snipsnaps with his wife, cracks on Hash, shows his white teeth to Margaret; Chilion asks his sister to sing after his playing; Hash orders her to bring a coal to light his pipe; her mother gets her to pick a snarl out of the yarn she is winding. She climbs upon a stool and looks out of the window. The scene is obscured by the storm; the thick driving flakes throw a brownish mizzly shade over all things, air, trees, hills and every avenue the eye has been wont to traverse. The light tufts of snow hiss like arrows as they shoot by. The leafless Butternut, whereon the whippoorwill used to sing, and the yellow warbler makes its nest, sprawls its naked arms, and moans pitifully in the blast; the snow that for a moment is amassed upon it, falls to the ground like a harvest of alabaster fruit. The Peach-tree, that bears Margaret’s own name, and is of her own age, seems to be drowning in the snow. Water drops from the eaves occasioned by the snow melting about the hot chimney.

“Something of a storm, an’t it, Molly?” said Pluck, looking up, at the same time strapping his knife on the edge of the kit.

“As much as you are a cobbler,” rejoined Brown Moll, “keep us wet the whole time;—can’t step out but our shoes let in all the snow that falls and all the water that makes.”

“Glad to hear you speak of water,” said her husband. “It reminds me that I am getting very dry.—Who did the Master tell you was the God of Shoemakers?” he asked, addressing himself to Margaret.

“St. Crispin,” replied the child.

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“Guess I’ll pay him a little attention,” said the man, leaving his bench and going to the rum bottle that stood by the chimney. “I feel some interest in these things, and I think I have some reason to indulge a hope that I am among the elect.”

“He wouldn’t own you,” said his wife tartly.

“Why so?” inquired Pluck.

“Because you are not a man; you are not the thrum or rag of a man. Scrape you all up, and we shouldn’t get lint enough to put on Chilion’s foot.”

“Look at that,” said her husband, exposing his bare arm, flabby and swollen; “what do you think of that?”

“Garbage!” replied the woman. “Grand grease, try you up, run you into cakes, make a present of you to your divinity to rub into his boots. The fire is getting down, Meg, can’t you bring in some wood?”

“You are a woman really!” retorted Pluck, “to send the child out in such a storm, when it would take three men to hold one’s head on.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed out Brown Moll, withdrawing her pipe to spit. “You must have stitched your own on; I don’t wonder you are afraid.—That is the way you lost your ear, trying to hold on your head in a snow-storm, ha ha!”

“Well,” rejoined Pluck, “you think [you] are equal to three men in wit, learning, providing, don’t you?”

“Mayhaps so.”

“And weaving, spinning, coloring, reeling, twisting, cooking, clinching, hen-pecking?—Well I guess you are. Can you tell, dearest Maria, what is Latin for the Widow’s Obed’s red hair?”

“No. But I can for the maggot that makes powder-post of our whole family, Didymus Hart.”

“Well done!” said Pluck with a laugh, and staggered towards his bench.

“I knew we should have a storm,” said his wife, “after such a cold spell; I saw a Bull’s Eye towards night; my corns have been pricking more than usual; a flight of snow-birds went by day before yesterday. And it won’t hold up till after the full, and that’s to-night.”

“and I thought as much too,” answered Pluck. “Bottle has emptied fast, glums been growing darker in the face, windle spun faster, cold potatoes for dinner, hot tongue for supper.”

“You shall fetch some wood, Meg, or I’ll warm your back

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with a shingle,” said her mother, flinging out a threat which she had no intention of executing. “Hash is good for something, that he is.”

“Yes, Maharshalalhashbaz, my second born,” interjected Pluck, “sell your shingles to the women; they’ll give you more than Deacon Penrose; it is such a nice thing for heating a family with.—We shan’t need any more roofs to our houses—always excepting of course, your dear and much honored mother, who is a warming-pan in herself, good as a Bath Stove.”

Hash, spurred on by this double shot, plied his mallet the harder, and declared with an oath that he would not get the wood, that they might freeze first; adding that he hauled and cut it, and that was his part.

Chilion whispered his sister, and she went out for the purpose in question. It was not excessively cold, since the weather moderated as the storm increased, and she might have taken some interest in that tempestuous outer world. Her hens, turkeys and ducks, who were all packed together, the former on their roost under the shed, the latter in one corner, also required feeding; and she went in and got boiled potatoes, which they seemed glad to make a meal of. The wind blazed and racketed through the narrow space between the house and the hill. Above, the flakes shaded and mottled the sky, and fell twirling, pitching, skimble-scamble, and anon, slowly and more regularly, as in a minuet; and as they came nearer the ground, they were caught up by the current, and borne in a horizontal line, like long, quick spun, silver threads, afar over the white fields. There was but little snow in the shed, although entirely open on the south side; the storm seeming to devote itself to building up a drift in front. This drift had now reached a height of seven or eight feet. It sloped up like the roof of a pyramid, and on the top was an appendage like a horn, or a plume, or a marble jet d’eau, or a frozen flame of fire; and the elements in all their violence, the eddies that veered about the corner of the house, the occasional side-blasts, still dallied, and stopped to mould it, and finish it; and it became thinner, and more tapering, and spiral; each singular flake adjusting itself to the very tip, with instinctive nicety; till at last it broke off by its own weight—then a new one went on to be formed. Under this drift lay the wood Margaret was after, and she hesitated to demolish the pretty structure. The cistern was over-run with ice; the water fell from the spout in an ice tube, the

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half barrel was rimmed about with a broad round moulding of ice, and where the water flowed off, it had formed a wavy cascade of ice, and under the cold snows the clear cold water could be heard babbling and singing as if it no whit cared for winter. Her great summer gobbling turkey attempted to mount the edge of the cistern to drink, but the wind blew, his feet slipped, and back he fell. She took a dish and watered her poultry. From the corner of the house the snow fretted and spirted, in a continuous stream of spray. While she looked at this, she saw a flock of snow-birds borne on by the winds, endeavoring to tack their course, and run in under the shelter of the house, but the remorseless elements drifted them on, and they were apparently dashed against the woods beyond. One of the birds was seen to drop, and Margaret darted out, waded through the snow, caught the luckless or lucky wanderer, and amid the butting winds, sharp snow-rack, and smothering sheets of spray, carried it into the house. In her Book of Birds, she found it was a snow-bunting, that it was hatched in a nest of rein deer’s hair near the North Pole, that it had sported among eternal solitudes of rocks and ice, and come thousands of miles. It was purely white, while others of the species receive some darker shades. She put it in the cage with Robin, who welcomed the travelled stranger with due respect.

That day and all that night the snow continued to fall, and the wind raged. When Margaret went to her loft, she found her bed covered with a pile of snow that had trickled through the roof. She shook the coverlid, undressed, laid herself on her thistle-down pallet—such a one had she been able to collect and make—to her sleep. The wind surged, swelled, puffed, hissed, whistled, shrieked, thundered, sighed, howled, by turns. The house jarred and creaked; her bed rocked under her; loose boards on the roof clappered and rattled; the snow pelted her window-shutter. In such a din and tustle of the elements lay the child. She had no sister to nestle with her, and snug her up; no gentle mother to fold the sheets about her neck, and tuck in the bed; no watchful father to come with a light, and see that she slept safe. Alone and in darkness she climbed into her chamber, alone and in darkness she wrapt herself in the bed. In the fearfulness of that night she sung or said to herself some words of the Master’s, which he, however, must have given her for a different purpose—for of needs must a stark child’s nature in such a crisis appeal to something above and

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superior to itself, and she had taken a floating impression that the Higher Agencies, whatever they might be, existed in Latin:—

As she slept amid the passion of the storm, softly did the snow from the roof distil upon her feet, and sweetly did dreams from heaven descend into her soul. In her dream she was walking in a large, high, self-illuminated, marble Hall, having flowers, statues and columns on either side. The top or roof of the Hall was neither covered nor open, but seemed ceiled in a sort of opaline-colored invisibility. The statues, of clear white marble, large as life, and the flowers in marble vases, alternated with each other between the columns, whose ornamented capitals merged in the shadows above. There was no distinct articulate voice, but a kind of low murmuring of the air, a sort of musical pulsation, in the place, which she heard. The statues seemed to be for the most part marble embodiments of pictures she had seen in the Master’s books. There were the Venus de Medicis; the Apollo Belvidere; Diana, with her golden bow; Ceres, with poppies and ears of corn; Humanity, “with sweet and lovely countenance;” Fortitude, with her hand on a pillar; Temperance, pouring water from a picture; Diligence, with a sickle and sheaf; Peace, and her crown of olives; Truth, with “her looks serene, pleasant, courteous, cheerful and yet modest.” The flowers were such as she had sometimes seen about the houses in the village, but of great size and rare beauty;—cactuses, purple dahlias, moss-roses, carnations, high nodding geraniums, large pink hydrangeas, white japonicas, calla lilies and others. Their shadows waved on the white walls, and it seemed to her as if the music she heard issued from their cups. She went on till she came to a marble arch, or door-way, handsomely sculptured, and supported on caryatides. This opened to a large rotunda, where she saw nine beautiful female figures swimming in a circle in the air. These stewed on her as she passed, leaves and flowers, of amaranth, angelica, myrtle, rose, thyme, white jasmin, white poppy, bluebell, bittersweet nightshade, acacia and eglantine; and spun round and round in silken silence. By a similar arch, she went into another rotunda, in the centre of

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which was a marble monument or sarcophagus, arising from which were two marble youths with wings, and also above them she saw two butterflies with iris-colored sings, flying away. Through another door-way she entered a larger space, opening to the heavens. In this she saw a woman, the same woman she had before seen in her dreams, with long black hair, and a pale beautiful face, who stood silently pointing to a figure far off on the rose-colored clouds. It was Christ, whom she recognized. A little distance from him, on the round top of a purple cloud, having the blue distant sky for a back-ground, was the milk-white Cross, twined with evergreens; about it, folding one another’s hands, she saw moving as in a dance, four beautiful female figures, clothed in white robes. These she remembered as the ones she saw in her dream at the Still, and she now knew them to be Faith, Hope, Love, and their sister, who was yet of their own creation, Beauty. She tried to speak, but could not. Then she returned through the Rotundas and Hall, and at the door she found a large green bull-frog, with great goggle eyes, having a pond-lily saddled to his back. She seated herself in the cup, held by the gold threads as a pomel, and the frog leaped with her clear into the next morning, in her own little dark chamber. When she awoke the wind and noise without had ceased. A perfect cone of pure white snow lay piled up over her feet, and she attributed her dream partly to that. She opened the window-shutter; it was even then snowing in large, quiet, moist flakes, which showed that the storm was nearly at an end; and in the east, near the sun-rising, she saw the clouds bundling up, ready to go away. She went below; Pluck and his wife were just out of bed; a dim, dreary light came in from the window; Chilion, who unable to go up the ladder to his chamber had a bunk spread for him of the pelts of wild beasts, near the fire, still lay there. Under a bank of ashes and cinders, smoked and sweltered the remains of the great back-log. Bull rose and stretched at her feet; Dick pawed round his tread-mill in fresh morning glee; Robin chirruped faintly and winterishly. Little heaps of snow that had blown in during the night, and other rubbish about the room, her mother set her to sweeping out with the green spruce-twig broom. Pluck with the slice raked open the ashes, drew forward the charred log, which cracked and crumbled in large deep-crimson, fine-grained, glowing coals, throwing a ruddy glare over the room. He dug away the ashes, as if he were laying a cellar-wall, and with the aid of his wife

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and Margaret and divers pryings and pushings, he rolled in a fresh green log, at least four feet long, and nearly two thick. Hash came lumbering down the ladder, thrusting out one arm then the other hustling on his coat, and calling the name of God over Margaret, for hitting his saw with the froe—a kind of family prayer she was quite accustomed to—and then putting on his snow-shoes he went to the barn. Mistress Hart went about getting breakfast, not putting on the tea-kettle, for she had none, and only at rare intervals did they drink tea or coffee—but a pot of potatoes, which served alike for family, hens and the pig. After breakfast Margaret opened the front door to look out. Here was raised a straight and sheer breast-work of snow five feet or more in height, nicely scarfing the door and lintels. Pluck could just see over it, but this purpose Margaret was obliged to use a chair. The old gentleman, in a fit of we shall not say uncommon good feeling, declared he would dig through it. He went round by the back-door, waded through the snow breast-deep to a spot in front of the house, where the whiffling winds had left the earth nearly bare, and commenced with a shovel his subnivean work. Margaret saw him disappear under the snow, which he threw behind him like a rabbit. She waited in greatest frolicksomeness imaginable his coming in sight at the door, hallooed to him, and threatened to set the dog on him as a thief. Pluck made some gruff unusual sound, beat the earth with his shovel; the dog growled, and thrust violently at the snow; Margaret laughed. Soon this mole of a man poked his shovel through, and straightway followed with himself, all in a sweat, and the snow melting like rain from his hot red face. Thus was opened a snow-tunnel, as good to Margaret as the Thames, two or three rods long, and three or four feet high. Through this she went to the hollow beyond. The storm had died away; the sun was struggling through the clouds as if itself in search of heat from what showed [a]s the white, radiant, warm face of the earth; there were blue breaks in the sky over head; and far off, above the snow-strown western hills, lay violet-fringed cloud-drifts. A bank of snow, reaching in some places quite to the eaves, covered the front of the house, and buried many feet deep the grass, mallows, dandelions, rosebushes, flowerbeds, hencoops.

The Chesnuts shone in the sun with their polished, shivering, cragged limbs, a spectacle both to pity and admire. The evergreens and other trees drooped under their burdens like

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full-blown sunflowers. The top of Indian’s Head was nearly bare; its bleak and wild summit being scathed and polled by the storm, and the peeled and naked old hemlock or Feather stood up a sullen and derisive monument of the desolation of the race to which it was fancifully supposed to appertain. The dark, leafless boughs and twigs of the taller trees around looked like bold delicate netting or linear embroidery on the blue sky, or as if the trees, interrupted in their usual method of growth, were taking root in mid-winter up among the warm transparent heavens. Pluck came out and began playing with Margaret, throwing great armsful of snow that burst and scattered over her like rocks of down, then suffering himself to be fired at in turn. He set her astride the dog who romped and flounced, and pitched her into a drift whence her father drew her by the ankles. As he was going in, stooping under the tunnel, a pile of snow that had formed itself on the house and jutted over, fell, and breaking in the roof of the frail passage-way, completely buried the old man in the ruins. He gasped, floudered and thrust up his arms through the superincumbent mass, like a drowning man. Margaret leaped with laughter, and Brown Moll herself coming to the door was so moved by the drollery of the scene as to be obliged to withdraw her pipe to laugh also. Bull was ordered to the rescue, who, doing the best he could under the circumstances, wallowing belly-deep in the snow, seized with his teeth the woollen shirt-sleeve of his master, and tugged away, till he raised the old man’s head above the drift. Pluck, unchilled in his humor by the coolness of the drench, stood, sunk to his chin in the snow, and laughed as heartily as any of them, his shining bald pate and whelky red face streaming with moisture and shaking with merriment. At length both father and child got into the house and dried themselves by the fire.

Margaret took her book to study, but her mother called her away, and set her to picking over butternut, peach and sumach leaves, and other coloring stuff. Chilion likewise demanded attention; his foot pained him; it grew swollen and inflamed. Margaret bathed it in rum; a poultice was applied, and she held it in her lap, and soothed it with her hand. A preparation of the Widow’s was suggested. Hash would not go for it, Pluck and his wife could not, and Margaret must go. Bull could not go with her, and she must go alone. She was wrapped in a hood, mittens, and martin-skin tippet; her snow-shoes, a pair that she had often gone on the snows with, were fastened to her feet. She mounted the

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high, white, fuffy [sic] plain; a dead and unbounded waste lay all about her. She went on with a soft, yielding, yet light step, almost noiseless as if she were walking the clouds. There was no road or path, no guide but the trees; ruts, gullies, holes, ditches by the way-side, knolls, stones, were all one uniform level. She saw here and there a slightly raised mound, indicating some large rock she clambered over in summer. The beautiful bordering of wild flowers on either side of the road was invisible; and the ever smelling and universally diffused aroma of the sweet fern was smothered and blighted. Here and there appeared above the snows the black dead spikes and seed-heads of the golden-rod, mullein, tall aster and wild sunflower. The shrubs, ivies, alders, sumachs, and grape-vines running over thorn-bushes and witch-hazles, seem to have been contending with the storm, and both to have yielded at the same moment, the snow hanging upon them in broken bunches and tatters, and their branches bending down stiffened, motionless. About the trunk of some of the large trees was a hollow pit reaching quite to the ground, as if the snow had waltzed round and round the tree and laid itself back to rest; or as if the flakes had been caught in a maelstrom and been devoured as they fell. Wherever there was a fence, pile of brush or heap of stones, thither had the storm betaken itself with full flooding force, and around, above and alongside, were erected mountain-like embankments, impenetrable dikes, and inaccessible bluffs. As she entered the thicker woods that lay between her house and the Widows, Margaret saw the deep, unalloyed beauty of the storm; the large moist flakes that fell in the morning, had dressed, furred, mossed over every limb and twig, each minute process and filament, each aglet and thread, as if the white spirits of the air had undertaken to frost the trees for the marriage festival of their Prince; or as if an ocean of pure foam had suddenly subsided in the region. The slender white-birches with silver bark and ebon boughs that grew along the path, were bent over; their arms met intertwiningly; and thus was formed a perfect arch, snow-wreathed, voluptuous, dream-like, glittering, under which she went. There was a clear bright shining of the sun, its light both softened and heightened, spread and reflected through all the wood. All was silent as the Moon; there was no sound of birds, or cows, sheep, dinner-horns, axes, or wind. There was no life, but only this white, shining, still-life wrought in snow-marble. No life? From the dusky woods darted out those birds that

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bide a New England winter; dove-colored nuthatches, she suddenly heard, quank quanking among the hemlocks; a whole troop of titmice and wood[-]peckers came bustling and whirring across the way, shaking a shower of fine tiny raylets of snow on her head; she saw the graceful snow-birds, our common bird, with ivory bill, slate-colored back and white breast, flying about and perching themselves on the dead tops of the mulleins and other flowers, and pecking out the seeds. Above all, far above the forest and the snow-capped hills, caw cawed the great black crow. All at once too, as she was going along, directly in front of her, by the side of the road, came up through the snow a little red squirrel, who sat bolt-upright on his hind legs, gravely folded his paws, surveyed her for a moment, as much as to say, “How do you do?” and in a trice with a squeak shot back into his hole.

She found the brook, Cedron, like everything else buried in snow, bridge and water alike indistinguishable, only she could hear the gurgling of the latter as in an abyss below. Approaching the Widow’s, she crossed the Porta Salutaris and all the scrawls of the stump fence, without touching them, on a mound of snow that extended across the garden, half covering the side of the house, wholly hiding beds of sage, saffron, hyssop, and what not, and nearly enveloping the bee-hive, where, on the paradoxical idea that snow keeps out cold, the bees must have been very cozy and warm. Reaching the door, she stooped down to find the handle, but Obed, who espied her coming, was already on the spot, opened to her, and handed her down from the snow as he would from the back of a horse. The Goddess of the Temple very cordially received her in her adytum, that is to say, the kitchen. She was divested of snow-shoes, hood, &c., and sat down to take breath and warmth, by the fire. The Widow was all attention, and her son all humility. What with the deep snow-banks without, the great fire within, and the deft and accurate habits of the lady of the house, they were neat, snug and comfortable as heart could wish. A kettle over the fire simmered like the live-long singing of crickets in a bed of brakes in August, and there was a pleasant garden perfume from numerous herbs dispersed through the room. On the walls and ceiling hung various kinds of medicinal plants; and on boards and flowers, drying. In a corner of the room, tier upon tier, were piled small wooden boxes. On the table were an iron pestle and mortar, graters and a pair of scales.

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The Widow asked her son to read sundry scraps of writing she had, for Margaret’s particular edification. “You see,” she said, “he’s as smart and perlite as any on um. His nat’ral parts is equal to the Master’s, and he only needs a little eddecation teu be a great man. There’s a good deal in the way of bringing children up, Peggy, you’ll know when you have been a mother as long as I have. He won’t play the back-game teu nobody, the Lord knows he won’t; they don’t put their hooks into his gills, not by a great sight. There has been a pooty consid’rable mullin goin on ’mong the doctors ever sen the Nommernisstoortumbug come out; Dr. Spoor looked dismal as snakes the first time he seed me. I am goin teu put up the price teu and penny happence a box. It’s worth it. It’s none of your slush, it’s gennewine sientifikals, it cures people. They’ll pay fo’t teu, and they ort teu. The more you ax the sooner it’ll cure. And it’s a downright gospel marcy teu hitch on a good price. How many have I sold, think, sen the Master was here? Nigh forty boxes.”

After having sufficiently enlightened Margaret in these matters, she promised her some salve of which she was in quest, provided she would help Obed awhile in pasting labels on the boxes. These she had sent to Kidderminster to be printed, black type on a red ground.

When Margaret left for home, the sun had gone down, and the moon rose full, to run its high circuit in these winter heavens. The snow that had melted on the trees during the day, as the cool air of evening came on, descended in long wavy icicles from the branches, and the woods in their entire perspective were tricked with these pendants. It was magic land to the child, almost as beautiful as her dream, and she looked for welcome faces up among the glittering trees, and far off in the white clouds. It was still as her dream too, and her own voice as she went singing along, echoing in the dark forest, was all she could hear. The moon tinged the icicles with a bright silver lustre, and the same pure radiancy, more faint, shone from the snow. Anon she fell into the shade of the Moon on her left; while at her right, through the dark boughs of the evergreens, she saw the Planet Venus, large and brilliant, set on the verge of the horizon in the impearled pathway of the Sun. She thought of her other dream at the Still, of Beauty, fair sister of three fair sisters, and she might have gone off in waking-dreams among the fantasies of real existence, when she was drawn back by the recollection of her brother, to whose assistance she hastened. It was very cold,

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her breath showed like smoke in the clear atmosphere, and the dew from her mouth froze on her tippet; but the snow settling, and her path becoming more compact and hard, she trod on with an easier step. All at once there was a glare of red light about her, the silver icicles were transformed to rubies, and the snow-fields seemed to bloom with glowing sorrel flowers. It was the Northern Lights that shot up their shafts, snapped their sheets, unfurled their flaming penons, and poured their rich crimson dies upon the white lustrous earth. She thought the Winter and the World were beautiful, her way became more bright, and she hurried on to Chilion—for whom day by day, hour by hour, she labored and watched, assiduously, tenderly; till his foot amended apace, though it never got entirely well.

One morning Obed called for Margaret to go with him to the village. There had been a rain the day before, followed by a cold night, and the snow was glazed over with a smooth hard incrustation. They both took sleds, Margaret her blue-painted Humming Bird, which she received as a Thanksgiving present awhile before. Obed wore a reddish butternut-colored coat with very long and broad skirts, buck-skin breeches, grey yarn stockings; and a bright red knit woollen cap, that came down over his ears, and fitted close to his head, having a high pointed top surmounted with a tassel. Under his shoes was fastened a pair of dogs or creepers, a strap of iron armed with points to prevent slipping. Margaret was guarded against the ice by moccasins drawn over her shoes, and against the cold by her hood, tippet and mittins; and wore her ordinary winter dress, a yellow flannel short-gown, and skirt of the same material. It was a clear bright morning, and the sun and the earth seemed to be striving together which should shine with the greatest strength; and they appeared to serve as mirrors respectively in which to reflect one another’s rays. As Margaret and Obed went on, the light seemed to blow and glow through the forest like a blacksmith’s forge, and one almost expected to be enveloped in hot flames as he advanced. Now sliding down pitches, now dragging their sleds up acclivities, they emerged so far from the woods as to overlook the village and open country beyond. A steam-like vapor arose from the frozen River, diffused itself through the atmosphere, and hung like a blue veil over the snowy summit of the Mountain. A long band of white mackerel-back clouds garnished the sky. They came at length to Dea. Hadlock’s Pasture. Here the scattered trees were all foaming with ice, and the rain having

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candied them over, trunk, branch and twig, they shone like so many great candelabras; and the surface of the lot in all its extent, burnt and glared in the singing sunbeams. Here also they encountered a troop of boys and girls coasting. Some were coming up the hill, goreing and scranching the crust with their iron corks, others wheeling about and skimmering away through the bright air, the ups and downs forming a perfect line of revolution. Margaret and Obed, joining the current, mounted their sleds, and scudded away down the smooth glassy slope, with a rapidity that would almost take one’s breath away.

At the foot of the hill and lower end of the Pasture, which bordered on Grove Street, surmounting the fence, was a high drift, or broad bank of snow; over which some of the sleds passed into the road beyond, some came to the top and halted, some with a graceful recurve turned off aslant, while others with less momentum going up half way ran backwards, and striking some obstruction, reared, and threw their riders heels over head; and up they jumped for a fresh fling. Margaret, elevated in feeling as she entered this scene flowing alike with joy and light, made a bow on the drift, and mingled with the moiling merry-hearted ups. There were trees scattered through the lot, and small rocks just rounded off with snow, and larger ones with a pitch in front, and diversities of soil that gave a wavy hucklebacked character to the entire field. The boys wore steeple-crowned caps like Obed’s, some knit, some made of strips of black and yellow cloth; the girls were dressed both in short and long gowns. Their sleds had various names, Washington, Napoleon, Spitfire, Racer, Swallow. The downs whooped by, some dodging among the trees, some shot through and dispersed the line of the ups, some sprang many feet off the rocks. Some were astride their sleds, some lay on their breasts with legs projecting behind guiding their course with their toes, some knelt on one haunch, making a rudder of the other foot. It was a youthful, exhilarating, cock-brained, winter, New England dytharimb.

“This is music,” says one boy.

“Something of the broomstick order—a fellow gets thwacked most to death,” says a second.

“There goes Judah Weeks, his trotters are getting up in the world,” says a third.

“Old Had. is rather hard upon him,” rejoined the second boy.

“He always is upon the boys, but dum him, we’ll get some fun out of him at any rate,” added the first.

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“Spitfire is as skittish as the Deacon’s sorrel colt; Jude might have known he would have got cast,” interposed the third.

“I declare, how they ache,” said Judah, blowing his red snow-dripping fingers, as he joined the ups.

“Clear the coop!” cried all hands, “here comes a straddle-bug.” But the rider, it happened to be Obed, losing his balance, his sled bolted directly in front of them, raking and hackling the crust, and scattering the bright particles on every side, and he rolled over at their feet.

“Hurt, Obed?” said Margaret.

“No,” replied he, picking up himself and his sled, and joining the upward track; “but I shall take it knee-bump, next time.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said one of the boys.

“Try bellygut, you’ll like that better,” said another.

“Does your Marm know you are out?” asked one of the large boys.

“Yes, she said I might come!”

“Do you know what will cure cold fingers?” said Judah.

“Take garlic and saffron blows, and bile um an hour and drink it just as you are gittin’ into bed, and it’ll cure any cold that ever was, Marm says,” replied Obed.

“There go Washington and Napoleon!” cried several voices, “Old Bony ’ll beat as true as guns; she’s all-fired swift.”

“Peggy’s Hummin’ Bird ’ll beat anything,” said Obed.—“She ’ll go like nutcakes,” an allusion, we should remark, he was in the habit of making founded on a favorite dish his mother cooked for him every Saturday night.

“Guess Racer ’ll give her a try, or anything there is on the ground,” answered one of the larger boys, Seth Penrose, son of the Deacon’s. “Pox me! if these Injins put their tricks on me as they do on daddy[.]”

“Sh’! sh’! Seth,” rejoined Judah, “you didn’t talk so when you was digging her out of the woods. We don’t have such a time as this every day. Let us all make the best of it.”

“Ho ho, hoop ho!” exclaimed all voices, as they reached the top of the hill. “They are coming!” Below were seen two large sleds, each drawn by five or six boys, coming up the lot. “Now for a race.” “Hoora for the Old Confederation!” shouted one party of the observers. “Hoora for the Federal Constitution!” shouted the other, as the objects of their attention drew near. These were sledges or pungs,

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coarsely framed of split saplings, and surmounted with a large crockery crate. The boys, in whom the strong political feeling of the time could not well fail to develop itself, had planned an adventure, and were about to test and signalize their respective merits and capabilities, by a race with sleds, named agreeably to the existing party distinctions. These ark-like vehicles were turned round and loaded, the crates filled with boys, and several seated in front to steer, while others did the like office behind. They started off at the same moment, those in the crates standing up, swinging their caps, and echoing the cheers of the spectators. They skewed, brustled and bumped along, the crates wabbled and warped from side to side, the riders screamed, cross-bit, frumped and hooted at each other; they lost control of their course, their bows struck, they parted with a violent rebound; one went giddying round and round, fraying and sputtering the snow, and dashed against a tree; the other whirled into the same line, plunged with its load headlong into the first. It was a regular mish-mash; some of the boys were doused into each other, some were jolled against the tree, some sent grabbling on their faces down the hill, some plumped smack on the ice, some whisked round and round, and left standing. There was a shout from the top of the hill, and a smothered response from below, then a clearer shout, and at last a full-toned hoora. None were seriously hurt; who was ever hurt sliding down hill? Yet what with their lumbering gear staved to atoms, splinters, nails, and the violence of the concussion, it was a wonder some were not killed. The cry was now for a single race, to which all parties agreed. The sleds were drawn up in a line evenly as the nature of the ground would permit, twenty or thirty of them, Margaret and Obed, and all who cared to enter the lists. The fence at the foot of the Pasture was the ordinary terminus of their slides; but they sometimes went farther than this. Crossing Grove Street, and emerging between the Court House and the Jail, they came out on the Green; to gain, by methods unimpeachable, the farthest point on which was the stake, and comprised a distance of nearly half a mile. The girls sat with their skirts trussed about their ankles, and the boys took postures as they liked best. The signal was made, and they flushed away. Soon separating, some went crankling, sheering, sidewise of the hill; some were tossed in somersets from the rocks; some ran into each other, and turning backwards channeled and

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ripped their way through the hard crust; on, on they went, skittering, bowling, sluice-like, wave-like; Margaret curvetted about the mounds, she leaped the hollows, going on with a ricochet motion, pulsating from swell to swell, humming, whizzing, the fine grail glancing before her and fuzzing her face and neck; her hood fell back over her shoulders, her hair streamed bandrols in the wind; she reined her sled-rope as if it had been the snaffle of a high-spirited horse;—she passed the first fence, and the second—others were near her—some lodged on the fences, some dropped in the street. Three or four sleds were in full chase through the orchard, they gained the Green, near the centre of which their speed exhausted itself. Margaret was evidently foremost and farthest.

“You hitched,” said Seth Penrose, somewhat angrily.

“No I didn’t,” said Margaret, somewhat excited.

“She didn’t hitch,” said little Job Luce, who had been hovering about the hill all the morning watching the sport, and at the race, crept to the Green to see them come in.

“I thought Spitfire was up to anything,” said Judah Weeks, jumping from his snow-bespattered sled; “but she is beat now.”

Margaret had indeed won the race, and that without a miracle. Chilion, her mechanical genie, had constructed her sled in the best manner of the best materials, and shod it with steel. In her earliest years, he inured her to the weather, hauled her on the snows before she could walk, made her coast as soon as she could sit a sled, graduated her starting points up Indian’s Head, so that she became equal to any roughness or steepness, and could accomplish all possible distances.

“Who beat? Who beat?” asked a score of breathless voices rushing to the spot.

“Little Molly Hart,” roundly answered Judah.

“No, the wicked Injin didn’t beat nuther,” rejoined Seth.

“Yes, she did beat teu,” interposed Obed, coming forward among the late rear; “I know she did.”

“How do you know she did, Granny?” said Seth.

“Cause Hummin’ Bird can beat anything, and I know she did,” replied Obed.

“You are done for,” said one or another to Seth.

“No I an’t done for—she hitched,” answered the sturdy rival.

“I guess she didn’t hitch,” said little Isabel Weeks, who was of the number, cause Ma says good children don’t cheat;

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and she is good, cause Ma says good children helps their ma’s, and she helps her ma.”

“I know she didn’t,” repeated Job, “cause I was here and saw it.”

“Bawh! Ramshorn!” said the indignant Seth, thrashing about and by a side-trick knocking Job on the hard crust.

“Come, pick them up,” said Isabel; “Jude, take hold of his feet.”

“I’ll help you,” said Margaret.

“Don’t touch him!” exclaimed Obed, addressing Margaret. “He’s—he’s—he’ll kill you, he’ll pizen you, he’ll give you the itch. He’s a ghost.”

“No he won’t hurt you,” replied Isabel. “it[’]s only little Job Luce with a crook in his back, Ma says; and it’s handy to lift by. Up with him.”

They placed him on Margaret’s sled, who with Isabel drew him towards his home, leaving the rest of the company to their own affairs. They went on the crust, with the road two or three feet below them, straight and narrow, fluted through the solid plane of the snow. Two or three sleighs or cutters passed them, large and heavy, with high square backs like a settle, and low square foot-boards, without buffalo, bear skin or blanket, and painted red and green. They took Job to his mother, who received her son with thankfulness toward the girls, but without surprise as regarded the boy. Mistress Luce, a wan, care-worn, ailing looking woman, yet having a gentle and placid tone of voice, was binding shoes. The bright sun-light streamed into the room, quite paling and quenching flames and coals in the fire-place. A picture hung on the walls, an embroidery, floss on white satin, representing a woman leaning mourningly on an urn, and a willow drooping over her. On a small round table, together with the shoes she was at work upon, lay open-spread a bible. Job was seated in a low armed rocking-chair on the hearth. He had always been an object of sport to the boys, and not unfrequently suffered from their wontonness.

“Poor boy!” ejaculated his mother with a sigh. “He grows worse and worse—we did all we could for him.”

“Won’t he grow straight and stout?” asked Margaret.

“No,” answered the woman. “A whippoorwill sung on the willow over the brook four nights before he was born;—we had him drawn through a split tree, but he never got better.”

“Whippoorwills sing every night most at the Pond in the summer,” said Margaret.

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“I have heard them a great many times,” added Isabel. “Ma says they won’t hurt people if they are ony good.”

“I know, I know,” responded the woman, with a quick shuddering start.

“Ma says they only hurt wicked people,” continued Isabel.

“Ah, yes,” said the woman with a melancholy respiration, “I always knew it was a judgment on account of my sins.”

“What have you done?” asked Margaret anxiously.

“oh, I don’t know,” answered the Widow, “only I am a great sinner; if you could hear the Parson preach you would think so too. I just read in my bible what God says, ‘Because you have sinned against the Lord, this is come upon you.’ ”

“I saw job at the Meeting one day,” said Margaret, “he recited the catechism so well. Do you know what it meant?” she continued, turning to the boy.

“No, I don’t,” replied Job, “but mammy does—but I know the whippoorwill’s song.”

“Do you?” asked Margaret; “can you say it?”

“No, only I hear it every night.”

“What, in the winter?”

“Yes, after I go to bed.”

“Do you have dreams?”

“I don’t know what it is,” replied the boy, “only I hear whippoorwill. It sings in the willow over the urn, and sings in here,” he said, pointing to his breast. “I shall die of whippoorwill.”

“Oh dear, yes, O Father in Heaven!” sighed out his mother strugglingly, yet with an air of resignation, “it is just.”

“It sings,” added the boy, “in the moonshine, I hear it in the brook in the summer, and among the flowers, and the grasshoppers sing it to me when the sun goes down, and it sings in the Bible. I shall die of whippoorwill.”

“How he talks!” said Isabel. “I guess Ma wouldn’t like to have me stay, only Job is a good boy, he says his prayers every night, and don’t kill the little birds, like the other boys, and Ma says he will go to Heaven when he dies. I wish they wouldn’t teaze him so.” A horn was heard, and Isabel said it was her dinner time, and Margaret must go with her.

“Good bye, Job,” said Margaret, “in the summer I will come and see you again, and you must come up to the Pond, I will show you my Bird-book, and you shall sail on the water.”

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Esq. Weeks, who lived nearly opposite the Widow Luce’s, was an extensive farmer. Mistress Weeks was the mother of fourteen children, all born within twenty-three years, all still living, and cherished under the same roof.

“A new one to dinner, hey, Miss Belle?” said her mother. “So, so, just as your Pa always said, one more wouldn’t make any difference. Take your places—I don’t know how to cut the pudding downwise, crosswise—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Eleven, where are thy all? Don’t I count straight?”

“John, Nahum and the men have gone into the woods, Ma,” said Bethia.

“I am sure I had fifteen plates put on,” said the mother.

“Washington hurt his hand, and Dolly you said wasn’t old enough to come yet,” said Bethia.

“Yes, yes,” answered the mother, “I forgot. I don’t remember anything since we had so many children. Lay to—”

“Mabel hasn’t anything,” said Helen.

“What, can’t I get it right?” said the mother. “Girls I tell you all, study arithmetic. If I had known what a family I was going to bring up, I should have learnt mine better. Arithmetic is the best thing in a family, next to the Bible.”

“And a good husband,” interposed Esq. Weeks.

“That’s fair,” replied his wife. “But gals take to your arithmetic, numeration, addition, subtraction, division and all the compounds, practice, tare and trett, loss and gane. And you’ve come all the way from the Pond, Miss Margery. How is your Ma’am? I really forgot to ask. It’s pretty cold weather, good deal of snow, comes all in a bunch, just like children. And you like to have been killed in the tornado? If it had been our little Belle how we should have felt[.”]

“And me too?” asked the littler Mabel.

“Yes, you too, can’t spare any of you. Only be good children, be good children, eat all you want. Zebulun is crying, I forgot to nurse hiMargaret82”

After dinner Margaret said she would go and see the Master, and Isabel went with her. At the Widow Small’s, the Master’s boarding house, they were told he was over the way, at the Parson’s; whither they directed their steps. The house of Parson Welles stood on the corner, as you turned from South Street up the Brandon, or No. 4 road. Isabel leading the way, they entered without knocking, and made directly for the Parson’s study. The Parson and the Master were sitting near

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the fire, with their backs towards the door, smoking long pipes, and engaged in earnest conversation, so much so that the Master only nodded to the girls, and the Parson, who was a little deaf, did not notice them at all. Isabel held her breath, and made a low curtesy to the Parson’s back, while Margaret stood motionless, looking about the room, and at the persons in it. The Parson, whose hair was shaved close to his head, wore a red velvet cap, and had on in place of his public suit of black, a long, bluish-brown linen dressing-gown, which his wife had probably wove for him at some by-gone period. The room had small windows, was wainscotted and painted a dark green, and rendered still darker by tobacco smoke. There were book-shelves about the apartment; on the walls hung pictures in dark frames similar to those Margaret saw at the Master’s; the sand on the floor was streaked in whimsical figures, and on a black stout-legged table lay paper, ink and some manuscript sermons of the dimensions of four by six inches.

“touching objections, Master Elliman,” continued the Parsons, laying his pipe on his hand, “fourteenthly, it is calumniously asserted by the opposers of divine truth that on this hypothesis, God made men to damn them; but we say God decreed to make man, and made man neither to damn him nor to save him, but for his own glory, which end is answered in them some way or another.”

“Whether they are damned or not?” said the Master.

“Yes,” said the Parson, “inasmuch as that is not the thing considered, but the rather the [sic] executing of his own decrees, and the expression of his proper sovereignty, who will be glorified in all things. The real question is, whether man was considered in the mind of God, as fallen or unfallen, as to be created or creatable, or as created but not fallen. But the idea of things in the Divine mind is not as in ours. God understands all things per genesis, we understand them per analysin. Hence going back into the Divine mind, aborigine, we first seek the status quo of the idea. In that idea came up a vast number of individuals of the human specie as creatible, some as fallen, others as unfallen. He did not create them to cause them to fall—”

“But he made them fall that they might be created—”

“Now this idea considered as an active volition is God’s decree, and this decree going into effect creates man on the earth; some predestined to everlasting life, some to everlasting death. And here the Universalists do greatly err, not perceiv-

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ing that God is equally glorified in the damnation as the salvation of his creatures: so St. Paul to the Romans, ix. 17, 18, 19. My pipe is out, and we must apply to King Solomon to help us in this matter.”

“Yea, verily,” responded the Master.

This King Solomon, we should explain, was a large silver snuff-box, with a mother-of-pearl lid, on which was carved the interview of the Queen of Sheba and the afore-mentioned king, which Parson Welles carried in his deep waistcoat pocket, and of the contents of which he and the Master partook freely in the intervals of smoking.

“Why should man reply against God?” continued the Parson.

“That would in truth be very unreasonable,” interposed the Master.

“The riches of God’s mercy do alone save us from the infernal designs of reprobate men. Those who oppose the divine decrees would soon have Satan in our midst.”

The Master sensible that some attention was due his little pupil, here broke from the Parson, called Margaret, and introduced her.

“Margaret Hart, yes,” replied the Parson. “Of the Hart family in Litchfield, I knew her grandfather well. He was an able defender of the truth.”

“She is from the pond, sir,” added the Master. “Didymus Hart, alias Pluck’s daughter.”

“Yes, yes of the Ishmaelitish race,” responded the Parson, laughing. “If she could be baptized and jine the catechizing class; appinted means whereby the Atonement is made efficacious. Isabel,” he continued, addressing the companion of Margaret, “you are sprung of a godly ancestry, and the blood of many holy persons runs in your veins. See that ye despise not the Divine goodness.”

The Master took Margaret about the room, and showed her some of the books and pictures. Of the former were the writings of the most distinguished Divines on both Continents; there were “Prey taken from the Strong, or an Account of a Recovery from the Dangerous Errors of Quakerism;” Thatcher’s Sermons on “The Eternal Punishment of the Finally Impenitent;” “An Arrow against profane and Promiscuous Dancing, drawn out of the Quiver of the Scriptures;” “Owen on Sin;” Randolph’s “Revision of Socinian Arguments;” &c. &c. The latter were chiefly faces of the old clergy; some in large wig, some in long flowing curls, some in skull-

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caps, some with moustaches and imperials, all in bands and robes.

Parson Welles was the contemporary of Bellamy, Chauncey, Langdon, Cooper, Byles, Eliot, Forbes, Franklin, Goodrich, Hopkins, West, Styles and others; with some of whom he was on terms of familiar acquaintance. He was a pupil of Edwards, and afterwards the friend and correspondent of that Divine. Whitfield and his labors, the latter especially, he never brooked, and would not suffer him to preach in Livingston.

The Master presently returned with Margaret to his room, where she accomplished her errand, that of getting his advice respecting something she was studying; when she parted with her little friend, went back to the Green, found Obed, and they proceeded on together to their homes. And there for the present we leave her.

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CHAPTER I.

Spring.—Rose.—Margaret Keeps School.—Sundry Matters.—Mr. Anonymous.

This Part commences with an omission of five or six years, the particulars of which, one familiar with life at the Pond will not find it difficult to supply. Margaret has pursued the tenor of her way, even or uneven, as the case my be; assisting her mother, entertaining her father, the companion of Chilion, and the pupil of the Master. If variety in unity be the right condition of things, then her life has been truthful and sound. She has made considerable progress in her studies, pursued for the most part in a line suggested by the peculiarities of her instructor. It is Spring; Hash is about beginning his annual labor of making maple sugar, and burning coal; Margaret has promised him her aid, after which it is understood she is to enjoy her own leisure. She carries to the Maples the alder-spouts, which Chilion makes, rights the troughs that have been lying overturned under the trees, and in due time kindles a fire beneath the large iron kettle that hangs from a pole supported between two rocks. Wreathing the trailing arbutus in her hair, and making a baldric of the ground-laurel, with a wooden yoke stretched across her shoulders, she carries two pails full of sap from the trees to the boiler. With a stick having a bit of pork on the end, she graduates the walloping syrup when it is likely to overflow, while her brother brings more sap from the remote and less accessible part of the Camp. The neighbors, boys and girls, come in at the “sugaring off;” the “wax” is freely distributed to be cooled on lumps of snow, or the axe-head; some string it about in long, flexile, fantastic lines,

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some get their mouths burnt, all are merry. Her mother “stirs it off,” and a due quantity of the “quick” and “alive” crystal sweet is the result, a moiety of which is destined to Smiths at No. 4, in consideration for the use of the lot, and another portion to Deacon Penrose’s for other well-known objects.

The Coal-pit, lying farther up the road, on the Via Salutaris, next demanded attention. She helped clear off the rubbish, and remove the sod to make a foundation for the kiln, and prevent the spread of the fire. She lent a hand also in stacking the wood, covering the pile with turf, and constructing a lodge of green boughs, where her brother would stay during the night; one whole night she herself watched with him. Then she raked up the chips about the house, and with a twig broom swept the dirt from the new-springing grass; she hoed out the gutter where the water ran from the cistern, and washed and aired her own little chamber. The cackling of the hens drew her in search of their eggs in the manger and over the hay-mow in the barn; she fed the brooders and watched the chickens when they broke from their shells. So four or five weeks pass away, and her own play-spell comes, if, indeed, her whole life were not a play-spell. She would replenish her flower-bed, and goes into the woods to gather rare wild plants. She has books of natural history with which the Master has kept her supplied. The forests in their first leafing and inflorescence, present an incipient autumnal appearance, in the variety of colors and marked divisions of the trees, but the whole effect is thinned, diluted and softened. The distant hills have a yellowish grey merging into a dim silver look, and might be taken for high fields of grass in a bright dewy morning. The atmosphere she finds deliciously balmy and exhilaratingly pure. Innumerable birds have also come out to enjoy the hour; they sing in the woods, roundelay among trees and shrubbery about the house; their notes echo across the Pond, and salute the skies from the top of Indian’s Head. She turned over logs and stones, and let loose to the light and air tribes of caterpillars, ear-wigs, sow-bugs, beetles and lizards, that had harbored there all winter. The ants open their own habitations by demolishing the roof, which they convert into a redoubt; and she watched them coming up from their dark troglodital abodes bringing the fine grit in their teeth, and stepped with a kind caution among these groups of dumb, moneyless, industrious Associationists. Toads, piebald, chunk-chaped, shrugged and wallowed up from their torpid beds, and

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winked their big eyes at her. The birds are going on with their grand opera, and she and the sun, who is just raising his eye-glass above the trees, are the sole unoccupied spectators. Hash is busy scolding and goading his oxen; her mother hastens to bring in yarn she has had out over night, and storms at the birds, who are to her no more than pilferers. Her father perhaps has some interest in the scene; he sits in the front door with a pipe in his mouth, the smoke rolls over his ruddy pate and muffles his blear eyes, but he contrives to laugh lustily, and his flabby proportions shake like a bowl of jelly. She caught at the moment, a harry-long-legs, which she holds by one of his shanks, while she very soberly inspects the book before her, to find out more about it than it is disposed to tell of itself. Her other brother, Chilion, used to love to go into the woods with her, and while he was hunting, he pointed out the different birds, gathered rare flowers, and discovered green knolls and charming frescoes where she could sit. But he is lame now, and cannot walk far, having never recovered from the injury he received some years before, searching for her in the wind-fall. Besides he never said much, and what value he put upon things that interested her, she could never precisely understand. He is engaged withal thwacking his axe-head on a long white ash stick, the successive layers of which being loosened, he tears off to make baskets with, which has become almost his sole employment. So she enjoys the world quite alone, and not the less for that, since she has always done so. The place flows with birds, and they flow with song; robins, wrens, yellow-polls, chirping and song-sparrows, bobolinks, thrushes, cat-birds, cow-buntings, orioles, goldfinches, grassfinches, indigo birds, purple linnets, swallows, martins, humming-birds; loons and bitterns on the water; and deep in the forest olive-backs, veeries, oven-birds, and many kinds of warblers and creepers; to say nothing of a huge turkey gobbling in the road, a rooster crowing on the fence, and ducks quacking in the ditches. A varied note breaks upon her, which if she is able to distinguish, she can do better perhaps than some of our readers, who will hardly thank us for giving names to what after all is very perceptible to the practised ear; twittering, chirping, warbling, squeaking, screaming, shrieking, cawing, cackling, humming, cooing, chattering, piping, whistling, mewing, hissing, trilling, yelping. Chilion is passionately attached to music in his own way, is master even of some of its technicalities, and Margaret in this matter is his pupil; and it requires no great effort to her to discern a general hallelujah

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in this bird-concert; affetuoso and mæstuoso, con dolce and con furia are agreeably intermingled; nor are there wanting those besides herself to encore the strain. She is no Priapus to drive the birds away, but as if she were a bramble-net, their notes are caught in her ears; even if their feet are not seized by her fingers as they winnow the air, wheel, dive and dally about her. They frisk in the trees, pursue one another across the lots, start fugues in a double sense, compete with their rivals, clamor for their mates, sing amatory and convivial ditties, and describe more ridottos than the Italians. Could we suppose sounds to be represented by ribbons of different colors, and the fair spirit of music to sit in the air some hundred feet from the ground, having in her hand a knot of lutestrings of a hundred hues, blue, pink, white, gold, silver, and every intermediate and combined shade and lustre, and let them play out in the sun and wind, their twisting, streaming, snapping, giddying, glancing, forking, would be a fair symbol of the voices of the birds in the ear of Margaret, on this warm sunny Spring morning. Howbeit, the profusion of Nature offers other things to her attention besides the birds; or rather we should say the good mother of all gives these beautiful voices wherewith to purify the sensibilities of her children, and animate them in their several pursuits. Thus enlivened and impelled, Margaret entered other departments of observation. Shod with stout shoes, armed with a constitution inured to all forces and mixtures of the elements, supported by a resolution that neither snakes, bears, or a man could easily abash, she penetrated a wet sedgy spot near the margin of the Pond, where she found clusters of tall osmunds, straight as an arrow, with white downy stems, and black seed-leaves, curling gracefully at the top in the form of a Corinthian capital, and shining pearl-like in the sun with their dew-spangled chaffy crowns; the little polypods with green, feathery, carrot-shaped fronds, penetrating the solid dry heaps of their decayed ancestry; horse-tails with storied ruffs of supple spines; farther down the road were the fleecy buds of the mouse-ear, bringing beautiful cloud-life from the dank leaden earth; the young mulleins, velvety, white, tender, fit to ornament the gardens of Queen Mab; buttercup-sprouts with dense green leaves, waxen and glistening; in the edge of the woods she gathered the straw-colored, pendulous flowers of the chaste bell-wort; the liver-leaves, with cups full of snow-capped threads; mosses, with slender scarlet-tipped stems, some with brown cups like acorns, other with crimson flowers; there were also innumer-

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able germs of golden rod, blue vervain, and other flowers, which at a later season shall fill the hedges and enliven the roads. In the woods a solitary white birch, bedizened with long, yellow, black-spotted flowers, pulsating in the wind, and having a scarlet tanager sitting in its thin sunny boughs, attracted her eye by its own gentle beauty; in the shaded grass were hundreds of snow-drops, like a bevy of girls in white bonnets trooping through a meadow; quantities of the slender, pink flowering-wintergreen grew among the white dog-weed; and the twin-flower interlaced the partridge berry. Within the forest was a broad opening, where she loved to walk, and which at this time disclosed in high perfection the beautiful verdure of Spring. Here were white oaks with minute white flowers, red oaks with bright red flowers, red maples with still redder flowers, rock maples with salmon-colored leaves, as it were birds fluttering on one foot, or little pirouetting sylphs; a growth of white birches spread itself before a sombre grove of pines, like a pea-green veil. The path was strown with old claret boxberries, grey mosses, brown leaves freaked with fresh green shoots; and what with the flowers of the trees illumined by the sun on either side, one could imagine her walking an antique hall with tesselated floor and particolored gay hangings. This opening discended to the shore of the Pond, where, under another clump of white birches, she sat down. The shadows of the trees refreshingly invested her, the waves struck musically upon the rocks, and in the clear air, her own thoughts sped like a breath away; the vivacity of the birds was qualified by the advance of the day, and while she had been delighted at first with what she saw, all things now subsided into harmony with what she felt. She hummed herself in low song, which as it had not rhyme, and perhaps not reason, we will not transcribe. Some new tide of sensation bore her off, and she went up the Via Salutaris to the brook Kedron. This she threaded as far as the Tree-bridge; golden blossoms of the adder and willow overhung the dark stream; she passed thickets of wild cherries in full snowy bloom; yellow adder’s tongue diversified green cowslips, pink columbines festooned the gray rocks, red newts were sunning themselves on the pebbles of the brook; she saw a veery building its nest in a branch so low its young could be cradled in the music of the stream; green, lank frogs sprang from her feet into the swift eddies, and thrust up their heads on the other side, like their cousins the toads, to look at her; clear water oozed from the slushy bog of the banks.

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Crossing from the Via Dolorosa, through the grove of walnuts and birches, and the Maples, she came to rocks that abutted the south-east boundary line of the elevated plain on which lay the basin of the Pond; a point overlooking the bed of Mill Pond, the Brandon road, ranges of hills beyond, and the Village at the left. Descending this, on the slope below, were pines, spruces and cedars; hereabouts also she discovered the dog-wood, high cranberry and tulip-tree, in showy bloom; and the prettily flowering mitrewort, saxifrage, and Solomon’s seal.

But there appeared what for the moment quite diverted her from these things[.] She heard a sound issuing from the shady side of a young pine, like that of a woman, singing or murmuring to itself. Stealing her way to the tree, through the boughs, she beheld a young lady of nearly her own age, reclined on the dry pine leaves, whiling herself in rending to shreds the bright crimson flowers of the red-bud or Judas tree, and uttering plaintive broken sounds. She was delicately fair, the outline of her face was finely shaped, long locks of golden hair trailed upon her neck; her hand was snowy white, and fingers transparently thin. She wore a white red-sprigged poplin, a small blue bonnet lay at her side, and a brocaded camlet-hair shawl falling from her shoulders discovered a bust of exquisite proportions. Her complexion was white, almost too white for nature or health, and her whole aspect betokened the subsidence and withdrawal of proper youthful vigorous expressiveness. Margaret was spell-bound, and looked in astonished silence. The young lady laughed as she scattered to the flowers, and there was a marvellous beauty in her smile, melancholy though it seemed to be, and even to Margaret’s eye, who was not an adept in such matters, it rayed out like the shimmer of a cardinal bird in a dark forest. Margaret thought of the Pale Lady of her dreams, and that she had suddenly dropped from the skies at her feet. She saw the young lady press her thin fingers to her eyes as if she wept, then she smiled again, and that smile penetrated Margaret’s heart, and she advanced from her ambuscade, but spider-like, as if she were about to catch some fragile vision of her fancy. The young lady sprang up at the noise, seized her bonnet, and ran. Margaret pursued, and what with her ready familiarity with the woods and fleetness of foot, gained upon the other, who turned abruptly, and said, “Why do you chase me?”

“Why do you run?” responded Margaret. “I would not hurt you; let me hear your voice—let me take your hand,”

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she continued. Her tone was kind, her manner innocent, and the young lady seemed won by it, and disposed to parley.

She rejoined, “I sought this spot to be away from the faces of all.”

“How strange!” ejaculated Margaret. “Where is your home? Are you from the village?” she asked.

“I have no home,” replied the young lady, “but you are Molly Hart, whom they have told me about.”

“Yes,” answered Margaret, “I am Molly Hart; but say who are you, and what is your name?”

“Those are questions I cannot answer,” replied the other.

“You look very unhappy,” said Margaret.

“Were you ever unhappy?” asked the stranger.

“No,” said Margaret, “not much so; I have always been happy, I think.”

“You seem to be fond of flowers,” said the young lady.

“Are not you?” asked Margaret.

“I used to be,” she replied. “I was going to say,” she added, “I will help carry your basket for you, and look for flowers with you; only you must not ask me any questions.”

“Then I shall want to,” said Margaret.

“But you must not,” said the young lady.

“Very well,” said Margaret, “you will be another flower and bird to me, and equally unknown with all the rest; nor will you give me less pleasure for that you are unknown, since everything else is.[”]

“Then I shall like you very much,” said the young lady, “if you can consent to my being unknown; and perhaps in that way we can contrive to amuse one another.”

They ascended the bluff, and returned through the woods together.

“Have you found the snap-dragon, that recoils when it is touched?” asked the young lady.

“That does not come out in the Spring,” said Margaret. “but here are some berries of the witch-hazle that blossomed last Fall.”

“And under our feet are withered dead leaves,” rejoined the young lady.

“But they shone in vigorous starry brilliancy, after the frosts pinched them,” said Margaret.

“Here is the morning glory,” said the young lady as they entered the Mowing, “that lasts but an hour.”

The young lady, as we have said, evinced great waste of strength, her voice was reduced in a corresponding degree,

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though it was sweet and clear as her face was beautiful; and there was something in her tone and manner of allusion that signified a secret unexpressed state of being which Margaret could not fail to remark, however far she might be removed from its proper comprehension; and her replies took the turn of one in whose breast, intuitively, will float veiled images, and be reflected therefrom indistinct recognizances of latent deep realities in the breast of another.

“Look at this blue-flag,” she said; “our neighbor, a wise simpler, declares it will cure a host of diseases.”

“The star-grass there,” replied the young lady, “hides itself and the rank verdure, and only asks to be.[”]

“The strawberry is very modest, too,” rejoined Margaret, “but its delicious fruit is for you and me, and everybody.”

“Shall I never see you again?” enquired Margaret emphatically. “Will you go away as suddenly as you came? Will you not speak to me? Have the naturalists given no description of such a one as you? You say you have no home—do you live under the trees? Where did you get that shawl and bonnet? No name! No genus, no species? Come into the house and let Chilion play to you.”

“You have seen the pond-lily,[”] replied the young lady, “that closes its cup at night, and sinks into the water.”

“But it springs up the next morning blooming as ever,” said Margaret. “Besides, if only one had appeared in my lifetime, I should be tempted to plunge in after it, come what might. “You are very ‘anagogical,’ as my Master says, strange and mysterious I mean, like a good many other things. You remind me of a pale beautiful lady I have seen in my dreams, only her hair is black[.]”

“The blood-root,” replied the imperturbable young lady, “when it is broken loses its red juice.”

“In truth!” exclaimed Margaret. “Yet it is a very pretty flower. I have a whole one just flowering in my bed near the house. Do go with me and see it. You love flowers, and I do too, and perhaps they will talk you more to me.”

“No,” replied the young lady, “I cannot go now. I am at the Widow Wright’s; but do not follow me. You are very happy, you say, and you have no need of me; you are quite busy too, and I would not call you away.”

“Do give me a name,” urged Margaret, “some point that I can seize hold upon you by, be it ever so small. I am sure I shall dream about you.”

“Since you like flowers,” answered the young lady, “you may call me Rose, but one without color, a white one.”

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So they separated, and Margaret went to her house. From her collection she transferred to her flower-beds a spring-beauty, a rhodora, a winter-green, to grow by the side of sweet briar, cardinal flowers, blood-roots, columbines, and others. Chilion brought out a neatly made box in which he wished her to set a venus shoe or ladies slipper.

It was not singular that Margaret should desire again to see the strange young lady, who was called Rose, nor was she at loss for opportunities to do so. She pursued her sedulously, and even prevailed with her to come to her father’s. The spirit of Pluck seemed to rally Rose, and Chilion’s music penetrated and charmed her soul, albeit it failed to reveal the secret of her thoughts. It was of different kind from any she had heard before; it operated as a simple melodious incantation, and did not, as music sometimes does, arouse feelings only to tantalize and distress them. Chilion played in a wild untutored way, catching his ideas from his own simple thoughts, and from what of nature was comprised above and below the horizon of the Pond, and this pleased her. Margaret sensitively alive to whatever pertained to the due understanding of Rose, sometimes gave her brother a hint at which he played; but there was developed so plain an uneasiness within the concealed being of the young lady, that both were fain to forbear. Rose came frequently to Pluck’s; she loved to be with Margaret and Chilion; even the sullen disposition of Hash she evinced a facility for softening by her playful repartees and beautiful smiles. She gained the favor of Brown Moll by assisting Margaret, who rising in domestic as well as natural science, had become equal to carding and spinning. Bull too was not insensible to her attractions, but with an enlargement of heart, not always found in the superior races, while he fell off no whit in his original attachments, he recognized her as a new Lady-love, obeyed her voice, followed her steps, wagged his tail at her smiles, and leaped forwards to meet her as readily as he did Margaret, and that too in his old age. Nothing could have been more diverting to the whole party, and to Pluck especially, though in himself the line of the ridiculous was complete, than to see Brown Moll weaving, Margaret spinning, Rose carding, and Pluck, reduced to Margaret’s childhood estate, occupying her little stool, quilling; which was often done. But Rose’s strength was not adequate to such tasks long continued, and perhaps from the entertainment it afforded was chief power derived. She and Margaret walked in the woods, sailed on the Pond, and sometimes read

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and studied together. Now also the peculiarities of Rose appe4ared. She would absent herself from Pluck’s and Margaret whole days; she would stay at the Widow’s, between whom and herself some relationship was claimed, and work silently with Obed in his herb-beds, despite the most urgent solicitations of Margaret; she resorted alone to the thickest parts of the forest; and sometimes she would break away from Margaret when they were on the Pond together, take the canoe and wander alone over the deep dark waters, or spend hours by herself on a solitary island. No questionings, no attentions, no generosity could succeed in discovering the secret that seemed evidently to labor in her breast, or a part of which she may have been. The Widow, and Obed, who took his cue from his mother, would answer nothing for her; save that the latter called her his cousin. At times she was cheerful, talkative, vivacious, even to exuberance; in the same moment she would relapse into a thoughtful and preoccupied state; not unfrequently she wept even, but would not tell Margaret why. Margaret soon learned to acquiesce in these diversities of the stranger, at whatever expense of baffled solicitude on her own part. She was delighted with the gushes of Rose’s sprightliness, she was overawed by her hidden pain, as if by some great mystery of nature, which, nevertheless, she sometimes essayed critically to explore, sometimes humanely to compose; but the subject only reminded her of her ignorance, though, meanwhile, it haunted her with new and indefinable sensations of tenderness and reflective philanthropy.

In the latter part of May, the Master came to the Pond, his thin grey face agreeably illumined by the pleasing intelligence he bore, this, to wit, that he had negotiated the Village School for Margaret,—it having recently, that is for three or four years past, been in charge of a female during the Summer. However Margaret might have regarded this proposal, there was one consideration that prevailed with her to accept it. This arose from the pecuniary embarrassments of the family. Pluck’s whole estate was under mortgage to Mr. Smith of No. 4, the original proprietor, and retained indeed from year to year with a diminishing prospect of redemption. That gentleman in fact threatened an ejectment, and if relief were not soon afforded, dismemberment and homelessness might at any moment become their lot. Pursuant to orders, the next day, Margaret paid a visit to Master Elliman’s to take such instructions as he felt bound to communicate relative to her new duties. He gave her to understand that there existed an opposition in the

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minds of some of the people to her having the School, but that he had secured the appointment through Parson Welles, whom he persuaded to his views. He next advised her as to the books used in the School. He said the children would read daily in the Psalter, recite every Saturday morning from the Primer, and for the matter of the Spelling-book, the only remaining channel of elementary instruction, he intimated there was a question. He made known that he learnt from Fenning’s Universal, which was afterwards supplanted by the New England; that many of the people were clamorous for a change, which had been effected in most of the towns; that one wanted Perry’s Only Sure Guide, another Dilworth, a third Webster’s First Part; and that he and Deacon Hadlock, who agreed in little else, had hitherto been united in resisting scholastic innovations; but the time was come when he supposed a concession must be made to the wishes of the public.

“Compare,” said he, “the First Part, and the deific Universal. Look at the pictures even. Young Noah, who propounds to us his visage in the frontispiece of his book, has doffed, you see, the wig, and is frizzed, much to the alarm of your good friend Tony, who declares the introduction of said book will ruin him. Those super-auricular capillary appendages, hardened with pomatum, to what shall we liken them, or with what similitude shall we set them forth? They are like the eaves of a Chinese temple; or in the vernacular of your brother Nimrod, they are like a sheep’s tail; yea, verily.—But by a paradox, id est, by digressing and returning, we will keep in the straight track. The Deacon, the Parson and the Master, a megalosplanchnotical triad, have recommended Hale’s Spelling Book. Enoch was a pupil of mine, and though grown sanctiloquent of late, he always knew how to say the right thing, as his book abundantly declares. Webster, moreover, advertises us that & is no letter—the goal of very breathless, whip-fearing, abcdarian’s valorous strife, the high-sounding Amperzand, no letter! Mehercule! You apocopate that from the alphabet, and Deacon Haddock will apocopate you from the School; yea, verily. It really signifies and per se, that for your private edification, Mistress Margaret. Moreover Perry makes twenty-six vowel sounds, Hale only sixteen; Webster enumerates nine vowels, Hale five; Hale preponderates in merit by reduction in number. Too many words, Margaret, too many words among men. The fewer vocals the better, as you will certainly know, when you have the children to instruct. In spelling, let the consonant be suffixed to the last

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vowel thus, g-i v-e-n, not, g-i-v e-n, as they do now-a-days. It is revolutionary and monstrous. Hand me my pipe, I shall get angry.—And, memor sis, mea discipula, vox populi, vox deit. You have asked who God is; you will probably arrive at that understanding as soon as you desire. Here,” he continued, presenting a heavy ebony ruler, “is what serves to keep up the flammula vitalis in the simulacra hominum. You will find it a good Anamnetic in the School, and useful in cases of the Iliac Passion, that the young androids are subject to. Let not he words of Martial be fulfilled in you,

The best Master I wot of is the Swabian who gave his scholars 911,000 canings, with standing on peas, and wearing the fool’s cap in proportion. With my most pious endeavors, I could never exceed more than ten castigations per diem, one at each turn of the glass; and that in thirty years that I have borne the Solomonic function, amounts only to about sixty thousand; Jove forgive me! Here also is a clepsydra, yclept an hour-glass, for you; and this is the Fool’s Cap, which it is hardly needful to put on in a world like this, but the Committee will be pleased to see it worn. Lupus pilum mutat, non mentem.”

“Your friend Fenning,” interrupted Margaret, “I see, writes thus in his preface. “I must take the freedom to say, that I am sensible a Rod, a Cane, or Ferula, are of little signification; for I have experienced in regard to Learning itself, Infants may be cheated into it, and the more grown-up youth won by good nature.’ ”

“I don’t wonder,” replied the Master, “that Deacon Hadlock is confounded at the times, when the scholar presumes to arraign his tutor! My friend Fenning, peace to his shades, had a weak side, nor could all the Divine Widow’s embrocations cure him; I mean he was tainted with heresy; he denied the plenary inspiration of the Bible; not your father’s, for of that there can be no doubt; but that wherein King Solomon appears—and this reminds you of the Parson’s snuff, which is truly after a godly sort, kept in godly packets, and is efficacious in the illuminating of the understanding of the saints—but of these things I do not discourse. It was somewhere said, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child;’ this truth carefully concealed in the holy mysteries, my Friend Fenning most unbecomingly dared to question.—But you are not through with your anagogics yet. You never saw a Mumming, or Punch and Judy? No—well—”

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While they were speaking, Deacon Ramsdill halted into the room, with one of those smiles, which, if it ever preceded him as a shadow, still was the promise of something kind and good-natured thereafter. “I heer’d what the gal was about,” said he, “and I thought I would try, and give her a lift. I am abroad a good deal, and my woman is getting old and rather lonesome-like; and we made up our minds if Miss Margery would come and stay with us, she should have her board and welcome. Hester Penrose that kept the School last summer, got her lodgings free, at the Deacon’s, and we thought we could do as much for you. Don’t know how you will like us, but we have found that swine that run at large in the woods make the sweetest pork, and we are willing to give you a try.—What on earth are you going to do with that piece of board?”

“If I understand the Master,” replied Margaret, “he intends for me to fence in the scholars with it.”

“There now,” responded the Deacon. “I tell you children have nater, and you can’t help it, no more than you can being a cripple when your hamstrings are cut. When they first come to school they are just like sheep, you put them into a new pasture, and they run all over it up and down, shy round the fence, try to break out, and they won’t touch a sprig of grass, though they are hungry as bears. You send the youngsters of an arrant, and they climb all the rocks, throw stones at the horse-sheds, chase the geese, and stop and talk with all the boys and gals in the way, and more than as likely as not forget what they have gone upon. We old folk must keep patience, and remember we did just so once. It’s sheer nater and there’s no stoppin on’t, no more than a rooster’s crowing a Sabber-day.—Blotches are apt to come out in hot weather, and you may find the scholars a little tarbulent, particularly about dog-days; but nater must have its course. Don’t keep them too tight. When the tea-kettle biles too hard, my woman has to take off the cover. ’twon’t do to press it down, it’s agin nater, you see.—But, Molly, or Mistress Margaret, as we shall have to call you, for want of a nail the shoe is lost, as Poor Richard says; you must mind little things, and see that matters don’t come to loose ends before you know it. Pull up the weeds, and then throw down some brush for the cucumbers to fasten to; it’s nateral, and they don’t get snarled among themselves. But you understand how to work a garden; well, it’s all nater alike. Ha, ha!”

This language, the Master, who perhaps on the principle

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that extremes meet, or, what is more likely, that the simple, hearty pleasantry of the Deacon was always boon company to his own laughing humor, ever maintained friendly relations with the latter gentleman—this language, we say, the Master suffered to pass without animadversion or rejoinder.

Margaret, thus turned adrift to her own reflections by the pointed opposition of her friends, thanked them both for their magnanimous interest in her behalf, took the books and other pædagogical ensigns, and returned to the Pond. Early the succeeding Monday, she reported herself at the School-house, took her seat behind the big desk, and opened with her scholars, who filed in after her, each one making his bow or her curtesy as they entered the door; and all with clean bright faces and barefeet. The boys took their places one side of the room, and the girls the other. They reckoned about twenty, and were all under twelve years of age, comprising the buds of the village population. Among them was little Job Luce, who recompensed for deformity of body in vivacity of mind, and combining withal certain singularities of sentiment, could not fail to recommend himself to the favorable attention of his Mistress, however he stood reputed with the world at large. She classed her scholars, heard their a’s, ab’s, acorns, and abandonments, gave them their outs, rapped with the ferule on the window to call them in—the only application she made of the instrument in question—turned her glass every half hour, enjoyed the intermission at noon, and at night, if like most teachers, was as glad as her scholars, to be dismissed. Her dinner this first day, which she brought from home, she ate at the School-house; a practice which she not unfrequently adopted, since Deacon Ramsdill’s where she had her quarters was some distance from the Green,—and in this she was joined by many of her scholars; and she spent the hour cultivating their acquaintance, remarking their manifold novel and diverse evolutions, moral and physical, and contributing to their pastime—she never commanded the intimacy of children before. The Deacon’s became in fact no more than her nominal abode, since there were others in the village who regarded her with kindness. Isabel Weeks, whom she had occasionally encountered, and who even visited her at the Pond, was her staunch friend. Of Isabel we might say many things, and on Margaret’s account, some amplification perhaps were demanded; but agreeably to the well used maxim, that times of peace furnish few topics for the historian, we follow all precedents, and forbear. Isabel was emphatically a time of peace, she had no contentions, in-

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trigues, or revolutions. She was so quiet and unobtrusive, she would be set down for an ordinary character. She was just as common-place and unnoticed as the sun is. She had no veiled secret like Rose, to tantalize expectation, and stimulate curiosity; she was transparent as the air, and like that element, was full of refreshment and health, sweet odors and pleasant sounds. She had always been indulgent of Margaret, and of the people at the Pond, from her childhood; and perhaps, if we ascribe to her a portion of that self-love of which so few are deprived, she found she lost nothing in continuing this friendship, which indeed had cost her something with her neighbors. In addition her sister Helen, older by one year, was one not altogether unlike herself, and Mistress Weeks felt no other concern about Margaret’s coming to her house than that it forced her to a fresh task of arithmetical action, so that she frequently passed the night there. The Widow Luce, grateful for her attention to the unfortunate Job, was also disposed to receive Margaret cordially. She sometimes staid at the Widow Small’s, where the Master kept her late in the evening employed in a manner that gave him the greatest possible gratification, playing backgammon. One day in this first week, at the close of the School, following her scholars from the house, who broke forth in noise, freedom and joy, the boys betaking themselves to their several diversions, snapping-the-whip, skinning-the-cat, racing round the Meeting-house, or what not, she found herself engaged with a group of girls, saying,

“It’s the Ma’am’s, it’s the Ma’am’s!” shouted the girls, “she must stand;” and stand she did, blinded her eyes, counted a hundred, went in search of the hiders, anticipated their return, and in fine, went through a regular game of “Touch Goal,” with the ardor and precision of their pupils.

Saturday forenoon, she omitted the customary lesson in the Primer, and on her return home, deliberately reported her conduct to the Master, and let fall some intimations about not understanding the Book. “Understand the Primer!” retorted he with considerable vehemence. “What most people dread,

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I am fain to confess I love, lunacy, to be out of one’s head. Didn’t you know that you must be out of your head when you undertook the School. Are not all teachers, preachers, speakers, out of their head? What do they know or pretend to know of what they froth and jabber about! Ugh! Eidepol! Is it not all a puppet-show, are we not all wheel-grinders? Are not Patriots cap wearers and Priests mummers? Wag your mouth and blink your eyes like most genuine pasteboard when you come out into the world among folk—Not teach the Primer, hey? That is the finest part of the whole. You would banish Harlequin from the play, like some other good moral people! Go to, go to, you little prude! Lie out in the Moon this and to-morrow night, and you will be ready to begin your work again Monday, like any good saint.”

With these condolences and ministrations, she continued her way to the Pond, where she proposed to spend the Sabbath. Rose came to see her, to whom she recounted the passages of the week, new and reflective, painful and pleasing. Pluck nearly split with laughter at what she related of the Master and the Primer, whereby also Rose was similarly affected, yet not so naturally as the old man, but like one startled from a dream, or in whom an imprisoned phantasmal voice breaks out wild and derisory.

“The bell tolls; who is dead?” asked Brown Moll, as they were sitting in the door-way about sunset Sabbath evening, and the measured melancholy note fell upon their ears, the old and familiar signal to the town that some spirit had just left the body. “Hold your yop, Gaffer, while I count.” So by keeping pace with the number of stroke she learned the age of the deceased. “Forty one, who is it?”

“It must be Mr. Morgridge,” said Margaret. “I heard that she was sick, but did not think she was going to die. Poor little Arthur!”

This exclamation over one who was a pupil of hers, was supported by no contributions of her friends, and the subject, like those to whom it owed its rise, died away. The family never said much about death, whether they feared it and did not wish their peace disturbed, or were indifferent to it and felt moved to no words, or were prepared for it and needed no admonitions, nothing in their manner would leave us the means of determining.

Monday she resumed her duties; Tuesday afternoon, she was advised by the Master that it was expected the school would be suspended on account of the funeral. she went to

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the Judge’s, who lived on the North Street, a short distance from the Green, with her friend Isabel. There was a large collection of people, many from the remote skirts of the town. After prayer by Parson Welles, the coffin was taken into the front yard, and laid on the bier, under the trees. Sunlight and shadows, fit emblems of the hour, flickered over the scene, not more breathless, hushed and solemn, than were the voice, step and heart of the multitude there assembled. The voluminous velvet pall thrown back, exposed a mahogany coffin, thickly studded with silver buttons, ornamented with some gilt armorial tracery, and having the name and age of the deceased on a silver tablet. The citizens approached one by one to take a last look at the remains, then sunk away into the silently revolving crowd. The mourners presently appeared, and the people parted in a ring on either side. These also indulged a tearful, momentary, final vision; the lid was closed, and the pall folded to its place. On the coffin were then laid six pairs of white kid gloves, one for each of the pall bearers, and a black silk scarf, designed for the Clergyman. The bier, carried on the shoulders of four young men, was followed by the relatives, when came the citizens at large, two and two abreast, forming a long train. The bell began its slow, far-echoing, heavy toll, and continued to sound till the procession reached the grave-yard. This spot, chosen and consecrated by the original colonists, and used for its present purposse more than a century, lay on the South Street, or rather at the junction of the road to the Mill and that leading to No. 4, and constituted the crown of the ridge that divided Mill Brook and Kedron. It was in fact conspicuous both for its elevation and its sterility. A sandy soil nourished the yellow orchard grass that waved ghostlike from the mounds, and filled all the intervals and the paths. No verdure, neither flowers shrub, or tree, contributed to the agreeableness of the grounds, nor was the bleak desolation disturbed by many marks of art. There were two marble shafts, a table of red sand-stone, several very hold headstones of similar material, and others of a later date made of slate. But here lay the fathers of the people, and here too they soon must lie, and it was a place of earnest solemnity to all. Coming to the grave, the men took off their hats; the four bier men lowered the coffin by leathern straps, then each in turn threw in a shovelful of earth; next Philip Davis the Sexton, taking the shove into his own hands, standing at the foot of the grave, said in form as follows, “I will see the rest done in decency and order.” Parson Welles, as the last obsequial act, in the

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name of the bereaved family, thanked the people for their kindness and attention to the dead and the living, and the procession returned to the house of the Judge. Some lingered behind to revisit the graves of their friends; Margaret and Isabel also stayed. It was, as we have intimated, a spot without beauty or bloom; like many others in New England; but in New England affections are green remembrances and enduring monuments; tears that mausoleums cannot always command, were freely shed on this dry orchard-grass, and the purest purposes of life were kindled over these unadorned graves. The drunken Tapleys from No. 4, moved in a body to a corner of the lot where four years before was laid their youngest child, a little daughter, marked by a simple swell of dry sod scarce a span long, and there at least they were sober. Margaret alone had no friends there. Isabel took her to the grave of one of her early companions, Jesselyne Ramsdill, only child of the Deacon’s, an amiable and beautiful girl who was cut off by that scourge of our climate, consumption, in her fifteenth year, wasting away, like a calm river, serene and clear to the last. As objects of curiosity, were the old monuments, made as we have said of red sand stone, now grey with moss, bearing death’s heads and cherub cheeks rudely carved, and quaint epitaphs, and the whole both sinking into the earth and fading under the effects of time. Alas, who shall preserve the relics of these Old Convenanters!

Again in the same week was she summoned to the suspension of her School, to which, from day to day, were her attachments increasing. The occasion was this; being one evening with the Master, he showed her a piece of brown parchment inscribed with the following words, which he desired her to translate;

“Universis Quorum interest.

“Attestamur Bartholomew Elliman in Actis Societatis dictæ Masoniæ ex ordine fuisse inscriptum &c.” the substance of which being, that he was a worthy member of the Masonic Lodge of the Rising States. He condescended also to explain the seal of his watch, a huge cornelian [sic] cased in gold, dangling from a long gold chain, which had attracted the attention of her earliest years. He said it was “Azure on a chevron between two castle argent, a pair of compasses somewhat extended of the first, &c.; and in fine he told her, that as the Masonic Fraternity were about to perform the ceremony of consecrating a Hall to their purposes in the village, it would be quite impossible for the School to keep, and perhaps alto-

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gether pleasant for her to witness the scene. On the appointed day, in company with Isabel, she repaired to the Green. The procession, numbering nearly two hundred of the order, out of the whole county, formed from the Crown and Bowl. It exhibited what has been called a “splendid parade” in the “gorgeous attire” of the men with their freshly powdered hair, white gloves, aprons and stockings; the six standards of crimson and gold, blue and silver, flaunting in the sunbeams; the pictured gradations of office, and the showy paraphernalia of the mystic institution. She saw Captain Eliashib Tuck, Grand Tyler, with a drawn sword, leading the march; then came her friend the Master among the Worshipful Deacons, with staves; in place were the Secretaries, Dr. Spoor being of the number; a band of Music playing Hail Columbia; a corps of Singers; Brothers bearing a gold pitcher of corn, and silver pitchers containing wine and oil; four Tylers supporting the lodge which was garnished with white satin, and, so the Master gave her to understand, was the identical Ark of the Covenant, constructed by Bezaleel, and presented to Moses; the Right Worshipful Grand Master, Esq. Weeks, who bore the Bible, Square and Compasses on a crimson velvet cushion; the Chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Lovers, of Brandon, in his robes. The uninitiated were invited to fall into the rear, among whom were Margaret and Isabel. The Hall, which was the object of this convocation, covered the second floor of a building recently put up for town occasions on the east side of the Green. The door was decorated with emblematical figures, the floor had a mosaic coloring, heavy curtains of crimson and gold shaded the windows, on the walls were blazoned sundry hieroglyphics, the Sun and Moon, a Cock, Coffin, Eye and Star; in their places were to be seen the implements of the Order, the plummet, mallet, trowel and an armillary sphere, and in the centre stood two marble pillars, understood to be Jachin and Boaz. The procession entered and marched three times round the room; at the first turn, the Grand Master, facing the East, said; “In the name of Jehovah I dedicate this Hall to Free Masonry;” then he pronounced it sacred to Virtue, and lastly to Universal Benevolence. A prayer and anthem succeeded, when an Oration was pronounced by the Chaplain. “Free Masonry,” said the Reverend gentleman, “is the most perfect and sublime institution ever devised for conferring happiness on the individual, and augmenting the general welfare of society. Its fundamental

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principles,” he continued, “are Universal Philanthropy and Brotherly Love; its pillars are Faith, Hope and Charity; its embellishments Order and Beauty; its instruments Truth and Rectitude; its end Virtue and Happiness; Religion is its Sister, its Creator is God. Its constitution is coeval with that of the world, from the Divine Architecture of the Universe are derived its Symbols, and He who said, Let there be Light, proclaimed the solemn Dedication of our Order. Free Masonry,” said he, “confounds distinctions, and is insensible to rank; owning a common affiliation of the race, it distributes its beneficence to all, and honors the meanest with its fellowship. It treats none with contempt, and pardons the imperfections of the weak. The distant Chinese, the rude Arab, and the accomplished European will embrace an American, and all sit together at the same table of fraternal confidence and affection. Unconstrained by local prejudice, unswerved by the rivalries of party, spurning alike the claims of sect and the limitations of country, we know no preference but virtue, no sanctity but truth, in whatever clime, or amid whatever fluctuations of outward life they may appear. Our Association relieves misery and shuns revenge. The tears of Widowhood it wipes away, the pangs of Orphanage it soothes, and by its hands are the stores of Destitution replenished. It curbs the fury of War, and multiplies the blessings of Peace. The sign of a brother even in an enemy’s camp, subdues our animosities and sheathes the sword. Nay, it appeals to the most barbarous heart, and the rude Corsair of Algiers receives to his bosom the hopeless victim of slavery, and shelters a Brother Craftsman from the vindictive cruelties of his tribe. The Arts behold in our Order a munificent Patron, and knowledge receives from us a constant support; in Good Manners we would be patterns, and Piety shall own us its handworkers.”—“We have been accused,” such were the closing words of his discourse, “of conspiring against the liberties of mankind, it is slanderously reported that we are leagued with the foes of law and order to demolish the entire fabric of society. Were Napoleon a Mason, as he is a Warrior, where he has drenched the earth in blood he would have strewed it with flowers, for wasted cities would have arisen Temples to Virtue, for Ministers of Wrath driving before them the horror-stricken nations, we should behold Angels of Mercy keeping watch over their happy homes, our melodies would drown the notes of the Clarion, and the race instead of closing with the ferocity of ensanguined battle, would this day meet in the embrace of Universal Brotherhood!”

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The speaker took his seat amid great applause; when an Anthem was sung as follows:

A collation was now enjoyed, consisting of fruits, cakes, and since, on a previous day, at a funeral, spirituous liquors were freely dispensed, we are only just to the times and to this festal company, in adding, that wine and brandy formed a conspicuous part of their entertainment. Three additional grand marches around the Hall finished the scene; strangers retired, and the Brotherhood were left to their private affairs.

Shortly after, with Deacon Ramsdill and his wife, and a large number of villagers, Margaret was invited to an evening party at Esq. Beach’s. This gentleman lived on Grove Street, in a house of the new style, very large and high, having a curb roof with dormar windows, eleven windows on either end, and the lower tier surmounted with carved work. The parlor was, for the times, elegantly furnished, in a mahogany side-board garishly bedecked with decanters of brandy and wine, silver cups and tankard, a knife-case, and having underneath a case-of-bottles brass-trimmed; a bright Kidderminster carpet; light Windsor chairs; a Pembroke table, now degenerated into a common dining-table; and, what caught the eye of our novitiate, more than all, superb hangings. These represented the South Sea Islands as conceived by the original discoverers. The sides of the room opened away in charming tropical scenery, landscapes and figures; the people, their costume, habits, sports, houses were brought into panoramic view, as were also apparent their innocence and simplicity, their native and rural enjoyments and peace, now, alas, to be seen no more by those who shall again visit them! These occupied Margaret so long that she well nigh trespassed upon the courtesies of the hour, and Deacon Ramsdill was obliged to recall her to her fellow-guests. There were dancing, card-playing, much spirit-drinking, and more warm political talking, very warm indeed, so fervid and life-imbued, in fact as to engross all things within itself; and Margaret became a devout listener to what for the instant appeared topics the most lofty and interests the most momentous; nor could she be diverted until the Master had thrice trod upon her toes, and engaged her in a game of backgammon.

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The School, in her own estimation, was going on prosperously and satisfactorily. Her scholars were ductile and inquisitive, many-phased and many-minded, and their proficiency in the Spelling Book was only equalled by their attachment to herself. A single instance of discipline sprang from a rude attack made by one of the larger boys, Consider Gisborne, on one whose helplessness appealed strongly to the teacher’s sensibilities, Job Luce. She called Consider from his own bench, and ordered him to sit an hour with the girls on the opposite side of the house. In enjoyment and fidelity three weeks were nearly spent.

Yet the original coolness with which the people at large received her as teacher was fast ripening into positive dissent. Some boldly proclaimed her unfitness for the station, others clamored for the restitution of the old teacher, Hester Penrose. Deacon Ramsdill was the first to break to her the no less surprising than depressing intelligence, and Master Elliman confirmed the suspicion that she would be obliged to quit the School. Parson Welles was considerate enough to suggest the propriety of an investigation in form prior to any action, which, however, she would have done well to avoid by a voluntary relinquishment of her post; but she was over-persuaded by her friend Isabel, one of those who always hope for the best, and consented to abide an issue. The study of the Parson was the appointed scene of trial, and that room which in her girlhood she had surveyed with strong delighted curiosity, was now shaded to her mind beyond the stains of t[o]bacco-smoke and time on the walls. The great mysterious books were there which she had importuned the Master to give her access to, but he put her off on one pretence or another, and now they seemed about to be forever hidden from her view. Above all was the reverend presence itself, the grave person of the Minister, a conflicting union to her eye, of extremest sacredness and extremest profanity, a sort of corporeal embodiment of all unreality with which the lessons of Master Elliman were calculated to fill her mind; and when she saw him soberly lay aside his pipe and as soberly put on his glasses—that single act affected her with a twinge of fright, which was not lessened at all by contact with Isabel, who sat next her, shaking with awe and alarm. In addition, rumor of what was afloat having drawn a number of people to the place, their faces, some frowning, some sneering, some laughing, increased the complexity of her sensation. The nominal charges were reduced to two heads;

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first, omitting to use the Primer; and second, harsh and unreasonable treatment of Consider Gisborne. To this was appended a supplement that had its full weight, this to wit, that she did not attend Meeting on the Sabbath, and that she played with her scholars; and the whole was ridden by the insinuation that she had shown partiality to the crumple-back, Job. On these several and various matters she could make no defence, and she attempted no reply. Her friends, who would under other circumstances have gladly appeared in her behalf, felt constrained to abandon the case and could do no more than secretly condole with her disappointment.

“Touching that unfortunate youth,” said the Parson, “he suffereth from that sin which we do all inherit from the Fall. The compassion which you have exhibited toward him would be counted a token of gracious affections in the regenerate mind. But continuing unregenerate, the danger is great that you will reckon it meritorious, and thus by adding to your good works, increase the probabilities of your condemnation, for truly the Bible saith, The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord. But,” he continued, addressing her with a direct interrogation, “will the Mistress wholly deny to impart the godly instruction contained in the Primer?”

“I cannot use it,” replied Margaret, with a tolerably firm accent, yet faltering in every muscle.

“Therein are to be found,” resumed the Parson, “the great truths of evangelical faith and practice.”

“I know nothing what it means,” she added, “and I could never consent to teach it.”

“Truly,” exclaimed he, “their eyes are blinded that they cannot see. What says Master Elliman on the matter?”

“Yea, verily,” replied the Master, “as the Lord hardened the spirit of Sihon, King of Heshbon, and made his heart obstinate, that he might deliver him to the hand of Israel, so it is exemplified in what we now behold.”

“She’s a dropt stitch,” said one woman, who had been busy during the proceedings footing a stocking. “She has cast her band if she is a spinner’s daughter,” was the simultaneous comment of another woman. “She ought to have put in a straining brace before she run her roof so high,” observed Mr. Gisborne the Joiner. “She had better learn of her Daddy how to mend her own ways aginst she comes down to patch up our ’n next time,” said Mr. Cutts, the Shoemaker. “How hardly have we escaped from the hands of the Philistines!” ejaculated Deacon Hadlock. “We have a small account

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against you at the Store, some pins and ferret I believe,” said Deacon Penrose, “hope you will call and settle before you leave.”

“You have lost your title, and we must call you Molly again,” said Deacon Ramsdill, as they left the house; “but you stuck to your pint, and mabby it’s as well. I see ’twas nater, and you couldn’t give it up. The Lord knows what’ll come of it, but if you follow nater, he’ll take care of you. There is more in things than we old folk have thought of, and if you young heads can find it out, for one I shall be glad. You have eat your crib and broke your halter, but there is a good deal of feed out of the stable. Fences last the longest when the logs are peeled; you are pretty well stripped, but I guess you won’t give out any quicker. The children have nater, and you and they would get along smart enough together; the old people are chock full of their notions and politicals, and I don’t know as you could do better than to let them alone. I was afraid, at the start, how the matter would turn. About Consider, he is not a nateral bad boy, only it went agin the grain to be put among the gals; and he took on dreadfully, and his people thought he had been most killed. But it was because you did it, Molly, yes because you did it; if anybody else had done so, he would not have said a word; but he liked the new Ma’am, I’ve heard him say so, and when you punished him, it broke him right down; that’s nater agin, clear nater. Hester might have thrashed the skin off his body, and he wouldn’t have cried boo. Then you know, some people’s geese are always swans, so we thought when our little Jessie was alive; yes, yes. God knows how hard it is to help setting a good deal by one’s children.—But, Molly, you mustn’t judge the people too harsh; they are just like gooseberries, with a tough skin, and sharp pricks, and yet there is something sweet inside. Remember too, he who can wait hath what he desires.”

Tony, the negro barber and fiddler, who had been hovering about the Parsonage during the trail with considerable apparent concern, and still hung on the steps of the party as they walked up the street, at length made bold to speak, and asked Margaret if she would not go to his shop and have her hair dressed; a request which she answered in the negative.

“Your brother Chilion has done great favors to this gentleman in the musical profession,” continued the negro, “and if the Mistress would let him try the tongs to her head, it would make great commendations. It an’t Tory now, and there isn’t nobody else in the world that I would see suffer if I could

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help it, and the Mistress was a most handsomest dancer, and Chilion tuned my fiddle.” Still Margaret declined.

“You had better go,” said Deacon Ramsdill, “it does a man as much good to do a favor as to get one. Tony has a feeling heart, and he mabby would serve you when nobody else would, and will take it hard if you deny him. Isabel will go with you, and he would like to show you his shop.”

The Barber, whose function was no unimportant one to the villagers, had set off his apartments in a manner for which such quarters have been famed from time immemorial. The window shutters that concealed his treasures during the night, published them in the day, serving for advertising boards, standing along the front of his shop, whereon appeared a list of articles he sold, and of services he performed. Within doors on shelves were displayed sundry of the exquisites of the day. “King Henry’s Water,” “Pink and Rose Hair Powder,” “Face Powder instead of Paint,” “Hemmett’s Essence of Pearl for the Teeth,” “Paris made Pomatum,” “Infallible Antidote for Consumption,” “Elixir Magnum Vitæ,” etc. etc. On the walls were large bills, pertaining to the aforesaid articles, flaming in color and rhetoric, and closing with a peculiar observation, which, since it is somehwat old, and serves to distinguish the times, and some virtuoso might like to have access to it, we have taken the pains to copy, this to wit; “ Beware of Counterfeits.”

Margaret was seated in the tonsorial chair, and throwing off her bonnet, delivered herself into the hands of the professor. “What a head!” exclaimed the negro, “what a figure, Miss Belle, she would make in the great world if she was only well powdered! I have had Madam Hadlock four hours together under my hands, when she was fixing for a ball, where I also had the pleasure to attend her four hours more. After she joined the Church, I lost that honor. The Sacrament, Miss Belle, makes bad work with gentlemen of my profession. I am as the Master says A. B. Android Barberosus, S. T. D. Societatis Tonsorum Dux, a great man you see, and Parsons, Judges and Masters, as Master Elliman says, bow down to me—”

“You hurt me,” said Margaret.

“Yes, indeed,” replied the negro, “ ’tis a most fashionable pain, Runy Shooks will sit it out by the hour.—You won’t need a cushion, but a little powder, patent lily, violet, gives such an etiquette—”

“No, none,” said Margaret.

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“I can’t use tongs, you are all in curls now. What shall we do, Miss Belle? A roller, toupee—that’s all Paris.”

“What!” said Isabel, “I thought you didn’t belong to the French party, Tony.”

“Oh no, I’m all Jacobin, all Federal, all Lumination, only I an’t no dum Tory. The Lady’s father was a Tory, wasn’t he? Well, they won’t hurt me now. They were good heads, all of them; I use to get five pounds a year out of Col. Welche’s. Let me comb it up over the top, and bring these back locks in front?” “No, no,” said Margaret. “you shall be welcome to one of my silver spangled ribbons to tie it with.” “let it be as it is.” “Ha! ha! who ever heard of a lady’s hair being as it is? That isn’t the fashion at all. A lady wouldn’t live out half her days. We use to set it up a foot high; but that was before the War. The War was very ruinatious to our profession, and I have heard the York gentlemen say taste had very much descended since.—I an’t no Tory, I’m Federal, Jacobin, Lumination, only if they won’t put down the Barbers so that they can’t keep the fashion perfect. I have heard ladies say they couldn’t go to meetin’ on the Lord’s day or improve a bit on the sermon because they were not in fashion. We are a means of grace, as Master Elliman says. So I must bring this curl here, and this one here, and let them be as they was. Well, this gentleman declares upon his honor, Mistress looks a beauteous as the great Queen Ann on the wall. She will not disprove a little Hungary Water?” “No.” “Thank the Lady Margaret, thank her. No pins, no spangles, no tye-top, no beads,—Miss Belle so too—well upon my soul!”

“Simplicity becomes us best, you know, Tony,” said Isabel. “Ma always said those were most adorned who were adorned the least. So you will not feel bad, I know you won’t.”

“This gentleman D. D. Devil of a Doctor,—for you must know we use to perform surgery, phlebotomy, and blood-letting, till the other professors came in, and they have well night propelled us,—this gentleman, A. B., S. T. D., D. D. see the toilette every day going down, and expect the great Napo9leon will eat the Barbers all up; but he declares Mistress the most grandiloquent head in all the country—hope no offence, Miss Belle.”

“None at all,” replied Isabel; “you know we always said Margery was beautiful, and she is good too, and good folks will bear to have anything said to them, and not take it as flattery, but only truth, Ma says.”

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The Barber held a looking-glass to Margaret, and she saw her hair not essentially affected by the professional endeavor, still as before parted on the top, and hanging in thick frizettes, which the operator had done his best to smooth, gloss and arrange. “Tell Master Chilion,” said he, as the young ladies were going, “one of my fiddle-strings is broke, and the board out of order, and he is the only gentleman this side of the Bay can fix it, as it ought to be done.—Do the Mistress take a box of the Patent Tooth Wash.”

Margaret finished out the week with Isabel and Saturday afternoon, left for Mr. Wharfield’s, where she was invited to make a visit, and two of whose children had been under her tuition. The Quaker lived on the Brandon road half-way between the Village and No. 4. Turning from the South Street between Parson Welles and the Burying Ground, she crossed Mill Brook, and rapidly commenced the ascent into a more elevated region. On the right, below her, hidden among trees and shrubbery, flowed the Brook; farther to the north-west rose the beautiful green-wooded summit of the Pond, with her favorite Indian’s Head towering above all; on her left, by alternate gentle acclivities and precipitous bluffs, sloped the long hills away to the skies. A high flat brough her to the house of her friends who were farmers, and as we say well off in the world. Where she intended to stop a single night, her abode was protracted nearly a week. The habits of the family were simple, their manners quiet, and tastes peculiar. Their enjoyment seemed to consist in listening to her, they strove to make her happy by receiving what she had to say, they watched her with the interest approaching to awe of those who beheld in one, what they described as the “inner workings of the spirit,” and from whom they looked for some surprising evolutions. Thus by appliances the most delicate they contrived to detain her. Their children were thrown continually in her way that they might catch the inspiration with which she seemed to be endowed. She pursued her studies of nature in the woods, she climbed the loftiest eminences behind the house,—books, if any were to be had, she for the moment lost all relish for.—In these strolls the children were often her companions, and they told their mother she dug up roots, examined flowers, and lay on the grass and looked into the clouds; that she sometimes explained to them the simple operations of nature. Troubled at last as her friends imagined with a desire to go home, they would no longer detain her, and gratefully dismissed her on her way. If she were depressed

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at all by the events of the School, the treatment of the Quakers was certainly fitted to reassure her; and with whatever melancholy she may have first thought of returning home as it were disgraced from the Village, this was qualified or displaced by the second thought that it was her home, that there were her best friends and purest pleasures—and she trod on with a firm step and considerable buoyancy of feeling.

She traversed No. 4, known in her vocabulary as Avernus, and not inappropriately named. In addition to every aspect of blight and waste that could conveniently be combined in a human dwelling place, the geese, those very agreeable articles in their proper use, but the greatest enemies of road-side beauty, like the locusts of Egypt, had discriminated and polled the green grasses, and more delicate flowers, and left only may-weed, smart-grass and indian-tobacco, shooting up like living monuments of desolation; an offence for which they had long since been banished the Pond. Hogs lay under the cherry-trees by the stone-wall fences, crabbedly grunting like bull-frogs, muddling the earth and walling in the mire. Leaning well-sweeps creaked in the scant gardens. She encountered a file of children, with hair thoroughly whitened and face as thoroughly blackened by the sun, kicking before them the dry dust of the road, in clouds. Sheep with fettered legs wandered from side to side of the way restless and forlorn. An overturned wood-sled, lying outside of a barn-yard fence, and protecting within its bars a collection of white-flowering catnip, was a solitary point of beauty. A flock of yellow butterflies, flying before her and lighting on the road, then flying and lighting again as she advanced, at last whisking off and forming themselves into a saucy waltz over a black pool of water, where they were finally dispersed by the incursion of a pair of blue-spotted dragon-flies, afforded her some diversion. A pink in a pewter mug standing on the window-sill of one of the low ragged houses, Mr. Tapley’s, she would fain turn aside to see; a little girl, Dorothy Tapley by name, appeared awkwardly enough with her fingers in her mouth, and said it was hers. Margaret laying hands upon it, asked if she would let her have it. The girl immediately removed her fingers from her mouth to her eyes and began to cry. Margaret enquired what was the matter. Dorothy gave her to understand that when her little sister Malvina was sick, and Miss Amy with the Parson came to see her, she wanted a pink which Miss Amy had pinned on her breast, and that having got possession of it she would not part with it, but kept it by her, and when

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she died held the wilted fragments close in her hand; whereupon she, Dorothy, went to the Parsonage and begged of Miss Amy a root of the same pink which was now growing in the pewter mug; that she had taken much care of it, and would on no account let it go. This conversation through the window, Margaret standing without and the girl within, reached the ears of Mistress Tapley, who was at work in the back shed cutting up cheese-curd; and brought her into the room. She, a very greasy looking woman, with chopping knife in one hand, and a pinch of snuff in the other, confirmed all the child had said. Margaret told them she was glad they valued the flower so, and said she would not think of taking it, and asked for a draught of water. This produced a fresh demonstration on the part of these people, the mother averring with undisguised emotion that they had used their last drinking utensil for the pink, and that they drank all their rum now from the bottle; that the gourd was broke, but she should be welcome to drink as the rest did from the bucket. “You help her, Dorothy; she won’t git away your posy; she han’t forgot how much we done for her when she was lost in the woods.” They went through the house into the back shed. That back shed! Cheese-room, dye-room, sink-room, airy, piazza, hen-roost, cupboard, wardrobe, scullery, with its soap-barrel, pot of soap-grease, a range of shelves filled with rusty nails, bits of iron hoops, broken trays, hammer, wedges, chizel; tar-pot, swill-pail, bench, churn, basket of apples, kittens, chickens, pup, row of earthern milk-pans drying about it—take it for all in all, we shall never look upon its like again! At one end was the well, its long sweep piercing the skies, its bucket swinging to and fro in the wind. Dorothy ran and caught the bucket, brought it to Margaret, who grasping the pole was about to draw it down hand over hand. She paused to look at what was below here. The mouth of the well was shaded and narrowed by green mosses and slender ferns; which also covered the stones quite to the bottom, and bore on every leaf and point a drop of water from the waste of the bucket. Below the calm surface of the water appeared a reversed shaft having its sides begemmed with the moss-borne drops, which with a singular effect of darkened brilliancy shone like diamonds in a cave. Through a small green subterranean orifice she could look into the nethermost, luminous, boundless space; a mysterious ethereal abyss, an unknown realm of purity and peace below the earth, the faintly-revealed inferior heavens; and too she beheld her own fair but shadowy face,

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in the midst of all, looking up to her. Anon a falling drop of water would ruffle the scene, and then it eddied away into clearness and repose. Such was the rare vision that detained her, and made her pause with her hands still grasping the pole. “What are you doing?” said Dorothy. “I am thinking of your pink,” replied Margaret. “I thought I could see Malvina in the well sometimes,” added the girl, “but there is nothing there only some fishes Biah put in last summer.” “At any rate there is good water there, and we will see if we can get some,” said Margaret. The bucket was drawn up, and inclined dripping on the curb, where Dorothy steadied it, while Margaret drank. Margaret sat on the long bench to rest herself, and told Dorothy Chilion would make a box for her pink. Dorothy gave her the better half of a rotten geniton apple, the best she had, and Mistress Tapley with unwashen hands hurried into the garden, that is to say a small unenclosed spot where they raised a few vines, and got a watermelon, and with the same versatile and economical member, broke it in pieces, which she divided between Margaret and her daughter. Going on her way, she passed pastures, and extensive forest-skirted uplands crimsoned over with the flowering sorrel; and large fields, planted as it would seem to mulleins like nursery trees with silvery leaves, rising into tall gold-tipped pinnacles. She saw bull-thistles, like a phalanx of old Roman soldiers of whom she had read, suddenly fallen into disorderly mutual combat, piercing one another with sharp malignant spines. The air of the place tainted as it might appear from the vapors of the Still, whose fires waited not for mid-summer heats, was yet sensibly relieved by the sweet-scented vernal grass mingling with the odors of the new-mown hay, from the meadows or lots on the margin of the Brook; she saw also women with blue and brown skirts, naked arms, and straw hats, raking and turning hay among alders and willows, that yet flourished in their best mow-lands; ox-carts with rickety racks loaded with hay, surmounted by stout men and driven by profane boys, reeled and tilted over rocks and stones which no enterprise of the people had sufficed to remove. From loads of brakes, a lazy substitute for grass, that went by, regaling her with a rich spicy fragrance, she was saluted by the slang and ugly mirth of the owners. Men and boys were seen going to the Tavern for their eleven o’clock, and in the sun before the house lay Mr. Tapley, boosily sleeping, with his bare head pillowed on a scythe-snath.

She was not sorry to turn into the Delectable Way, a name

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by which she had enlivened the road from Avernus to the Pond; and perhaps on the whole it never seemed to her more pleasant. She had often traversed it with the rum-bottle, with baskets of chesnuts, bags of yarn, she had been carried over it by her brothers, once she was borne up it in the proud arms of an exulting populace. It was steep, narrow, rough, winding. It had contributed to the elasticity of her muscles and vigor of her heart. Now it glowed with wild-flowers, which the lavish fertility of nature pours into every open space. It was a warm day, and the sunbeams were strongly reflected from the grey pebbles and glassy grit of the road, but a breeze from the valley and another in her soul, gave her endurance and self-possession. She was going home, and this, however such a home might seem to many of her readers, was, we have reason to believe, to her a solid consideration; she had been disappointed in the School, sadly, grievously; her heart was wrung in a manner that only a School-mistress can know; it cannot be told. She nevertheless consoled herself with calling to mind how much her scholars loved her, how kind some of the villagers had been to her, and she might have decided the matter at once by reflecting how utterly impossible it was, all things taken together, to have stood well with the people at large; she was encompassed by those subtle and exquisite ministries of nature that can be enjoyed at every period of life, and are capable of making themselves felt even by the most desponding, and which go to mitigate the sense of calamity, and give transport to our most temperate enjoyments. There was besides an unnamed, undeveloped feeling in her own breast, welling and provoking, partly inquisitiveness, partly wonder, partly logic, partly thoughtfulness, partly she knew not what, that heightened the interest of all things. This feeling, we have cause to believe, was allied in character to what it approximated in moral place, that, to wit, which was sported between her and the Master as “Anagogicalness,” whereby seems to have been intended any or all kinds of profundity of uncertainty; seems, we say, for the compiler of this Memoir professes to know no more of the matter than any of its readers. On a side of the road was the cow-path winding among sweet-fern and whortle-berry bushes, where she a little girl used to walk, and even hide under their shade. The great red daddocks lay in the green pastures where they had lain year after year, crumbling away, and sending forth innumerable forms of vegetable life. On a large rock grew a thistle, the flower of which a yellow-breeched bee and a tortoise-

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shelled butterfly were quietly together feeding upon. Farther off, in the edge of a dark green forest twinkled the small sunflower, like a star. She walked on with a bank of beautiful flowers on either side, golden-rods, blue-vervain, mulleins, flea-bane, thoroughwort, high-mallows and others, which she saw come up in the Spring, watched from month to month, and would yet behold giving food to the little birds on the top of the snow in mid-winter, and which had become a part of her yearly life. A thin stream of water emerging from a long line of fox-colored cotton thistle, sweet-flag, bullrushes and high blackberries, ran across the road at her feet. The sky was blue above her, relieved and variegated by mares-tail clouds, from which some would augur a rain, and over her left shoulder paled the mid-day moon. Her path in some places was carpeted with the tassels of the late flowering chesnut. A pig in a yoke started out from the bushes, scampered before her as for dear life, its ears shaking like poplar leaves, and dashed out of sight into the bushes again. The birds had finished their spring melodies, and gave themselves up to the quiet employment of the season they so delightfully introduced, and were no otherwise observable than in an occasional rustle among the trees. She made a nose-gay for Chilion of yellow loose-strife, purple spearmint, pale blue monkey flower, small white buds of cow-wheat; and a smaller one for Rose, a stem of mountain laurel leaves, red cedar with blueberries, and a bunch of the white hard-hack, a cream-like flower, innerly blushing. While thus employed, there appeared before her a gentleman descending the hill, who seemed to have just issued from the trees, and whom she fancied she had seen retreating within doors at the Tavern, as she came by, and who, if it were so, must have hastened across through the woods while she loitered in the road. The face of this gentleman was strikingly marked by a suit of enormous black whiskers that flowed together and united under his chin. His age might have been four-and-twenty; his eye was black and piercing, but softened by an affectionate expression; his look was animated, and a courteous smile played upon his lip. His dress was more elegant than that of the young men of Livingston, a scarlet coat delicately embroidered with buff facings, a richly tambored waistcoat, lace ruffles, white silk breeches and stockings, and a round brimmed hat. He addressed her with deference and urbanity, and asked if he might have the pleasure of accompanying her up the hill. “I am rambling about the country,” said he, “and pursue whatever is novel

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and interesting, and hope my presence, Madam, will not disoblige you? This is an exceedingly bleak place, and I should think you would sometimes lack for variety.” “It is a very beautiful spot to me,” she replied, “and—” “Ah yes, indeed,” said he, “I did not mean that it was not beautiful, only there are so few people here,—yet perhaps you are one who has the singular felicity of being contented almost anywhere.—A boquet! There is a rare profusion of flowers here. The atmosphere is so fresh and vivifying. Most charming day this.” So they talked of the weather, the season, the place, till they reached the summit of the road. Before they came in sight of the house, the gentleman suddenly stopping, said, “Might I venture to hope, Madam, if in my rural strolls I should chance again to encounter you, it would not be disagreeable?” “What is your name, sir?” said she. “I am—Anonymous, Mr. Anonymous;—does not that savor more of the romantic, of which I see you are passionately fond?” “All wind-fall comers here seem to be without names,” said she; “but there is really so llittle in a name, that I do not care much about it.” “are there other strangers besides myself here?” he asked. “Yes,” she replied, “we have one who would be anonymous at first, but she allows herself to be called Rose now, though she is so frail she can hardly support any name.” “Rose, Rose,” rejoined her with repetition, “that is a very pretty name indeed.” Politely bidding her good morning, he went down the hill.

Margaret hastened home to recount her misfortunes, intelligence of which must have preceded her, and enjoy the commiseration of her friends. Bull with Dick on his back, whom Chilion, seeing her come, had seated there, ran out to meet her,—the only member of the family who did not know what had befallen her, and whose expression of unmingled delight gave her a momentary deep pain in the way of contrast, and yet in the end tended to reassure her and bring her back to her former state. After dinner she went to the Widow Wright’s to see Rose, whom, unfortunately, she found plunged in the deepest melancholy, and the more distressing for that it could render no reason for itself. Margaret strove by every effort that instinct or ingenuity could suggest to compose her friend, but in vain. She remained awhile, but found her own tenderness fully reciprocated, that Rose was pained because she was pained, that she increased what she endeavored to dispel, and thus without the possibility of gaining intelligence or affording relief, she could do more than embrace her friend and go

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home. For a solitary moment she might have seen a look of returning equanimity in the face of Rose; this was when she spoke of her own defeatures and repulsions respecting the School, but it soon vanished.

Shortly afterwards, as she was occupied one morning with a book in the shade of the woods near the Delectable Way, she was aroused by the arrival of Mr. Anonymous. “Have you read Cynthia?” said he, after concluding the compliments of the hour. “I saw it at the village, the other day, she replied.” “It is a charming novel,” said he. “I do not know as I am capable of understanding it,” she rejoined. “I mean it is a delightful thing to toss off a dull hour with. Are you never afflicted with any such?” “Not often.” “Are no dangers to be apprehended in a place like this?” “I never have any fears.” “I see you know how to diversify your time. As you would walk, Madam, let me assist you. Allow me to remove that bit of brush from your path.” “I thank you, Sir, I never mind the trees.” “I am tempted to help you over that rock.” “These rocks are no more formidable than our kitchen door-sill.” “How rich these woods are in flowers!” “Indeed they are.” “The most beautiful are not the most esteemed.” “I fear they are not.” “With great justice the Poet writes,

“That is well said. I find new ones every Spring, and there are many yet hidden in the dark store-house of the earth.” So talked they awhile, when he again took an abrupt but civil departure, acting it would appear on the principle that short visits make long friends.

Margaret was obedient to her parents and faithful to the house, so that she was allowed many indulgences, the chief of which consisted in leisure for her own pursuits. She rose early, did her work with spirit, and her enjoyments were marred by few complaints of her mother, and little domineering of Hash. A peculiarity of fog-scenery as observed from the Head, a phenomenon in its perfect characteristics occurring only two or three times a year, took her to that point. The fogs arising from the River lay wholly below her; like a flocculent ocean they filled the interval between the Pond and the Mountain beyond. Above was a clear atmosphere and a bright sun. As if an entire firmament of purest white clouds had fallen into the valley, they were piled one upon another. Like sea-waves they were moved by the winds, dilating and quivering they flowed the high grounds of the Pond,

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swept around the base of the Head, and penetrated the region beyond. They were an organic lustre, sublimated wool, spiritualized alabaster; they glowed like snow-flames. It was in fact to summer what snow is to winter, a robe of whiteness thrown over the face of the earth. It was not often she could look down upon the fogs with the pure dry air about her. She had been in them, sailing on the Pond, or traversing the woods, when they seemed to fall from the sky, and drizzled rain-like over the earth; now she was over them, and could command all their beautiful varieties and forms. Higher and higher they rose till only the top of the Butternut, and the peak of the tall forest was visible above them. She fancied that the visions of her dreams were composed of fogs, and she thought she saw fair shapes of Ideal Beauty as it were precipitated in them, chemically, and becoming animated, like the Beautiful Lady. A new Venus, of whom she had read, was indeed sprung from this foam; and she looked when she should swim for the Butternut, as for a green island, and she would run down and embrace her; at the same moment, a great black crow flew up from the depths of the white waves, a true make-shift for Vulcan. But a more substantial apparition opposed itself to her view. At the west edge of the platform, or level on which she stood, arose an enormous pair of black whiskers, speedily followed by the well dressed young gentleman to whom they belonged, Mr. Anonymous, who, for some reason unexplained, perhaps because it savored more of the romantic of which he was an admirer, had chosen a very unusual and almost inaccessible route to the summit of the Head, immediately apologized for his intrusion, and hoped he had not disturbed the tenor of the young lady’s reveries. “I cannot be disturbed by one who enjoys the scene,” replied Margaret. “The fog is really uncivil,” added Mr. Anonymous, “it has quite drenched me. If it would clear away I think there would be afforded a very charming prospect. I wonder I had not sought it out before. Yet the view which the place itself affords, Madam, is unimpaired, and would richly repay clambering up a much rougher way.” “I fear you must have fatigued yourself,” said she, “you missed the path which is on the other side.” “It matters little how I came, since I am well here, and in the presence of so fair an object.” “You will join with me in the contemplation of what is about us. Perhaps, Sir, you can aid me in resolving the exceeding mystery of all these things.” “I should be most felicitated to join you in anything.” “That beauty and our beauty, how are they related?”

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“I see your beauty, and I scarcely think of that.” “But there is a connexion, I feel it. The beauty that is in me either gives, or is given. Or there is some cause that creates both, and unites them like musical chords.” “Your beauty, most enchanting lady, since you lead me to speak of it, consists in symmetry and color, those eyebrows, your forehead, your lips, that dark curling hair; it brings me near to you. Nay, pardon my presumption.” “Do look at that pile swimming through the mass, like a great white hog!” “Nay, Loveliest! I can look only at you.” “Beauteous being! do not leave me. Do not shun the person of one who adores you.” “Adores me! I hardly know what to make of that.” “I kneel at your feet, sweet Madam, allow me to take your hand.” “My hand! More mystery still. What is there in my hand?” “May I be so presumptuous as to believe that with your hand you would also bestow your heart?” “I have no heart.” “Have I vainly cherished the hope that my person had made some impression upon you?” “What, your fine clothes?” “Oh, you will not trifle with me. Your manner has been such as to inspire the hope that my feelings toward you were reciprocated.” “I would not trifle with you. I thought you better dressed than the young men hereabouts. But do see how the Mountain shines in its coat of fog!” “Be not so severe; do not retreat from me; render some condescension to my poor plaints.” “I know not what you desire.” “Yourself, Madam, is the supremest object of my wishes. Allow me to press your fingers to my lips.” “I cannot stay here, Sir, I shall leap off into the Pond.” “O, fairest of creatures, be not so cruel. Blame me not if I reveal I love you, never before unfortunate if you prove pitiless, never before happy if you prove kind.” “See, the mists are fast rising, we shall be thoroughly wet, if we stay much longer.” “Dissipate, Madam, the distressing apprehensions your words create. My purposes are legitimate, I offer you marriage, I offer you a fortune. Our banns shall be published in the neighboring Church the next Sabbath.” “I must own, Sir, you do sadly disturb me now. Your presence is becoming an intrusion.” “You will slip from the rock, you will fall into those hideous waters.” “Beautiful waters, and I could almost wish to drop through the snow-drifting mist into them.” “I will not approach you nearer; I will abide at a distance, till you say the dear, dear word that shall make me happy.” “Do not be afraid of me. I would make the birds and toads happy, and everything about me.”

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“I protest my designs are honorable as my sentiments are invincible. Consider what I shall bestow upon you.” At this crisis, our old friend Obed appeared, brustling his stalwart knobby frame through the bushes, and being somewhat short of sight, a defect that was aggravated by the dense fog-flood that now surged over the place, he wholly mistook the nature of the scene; saw Margaret, as he thought, driven to the verge of the precipice by the violence of the man, whose fervid exclamations he had confounded with demonstrations of a more fatal character, rushed upon him from behind, and perfectly trussed him in his long arms. In the struggle that ensued, both fell and rolled down the hill, performing a kind of horizontal waltz, through briars, over rocks, quite to the bottom. Margaret screamed to Obed to quit his hold, ran after them, but in vain; they finished the descent before she could overtake them. The face of Mr. Anonymous was not a little bruised and his dress soiled; Obed defended by so good a buckler escaped nearly unhurt. Pluck and his wife ran out at the alarm, Margaret proffered the unfortunate gentleman every assistance in her power; but as if disposed to withdraw from observation, he made a very rapid retreat, forgetting even his customary civilities in the hurry of departure, and was seen no more at the Pond.

CHAPTER II.

MARGARET.—MR. EVELYN.—CHRIST.

We would come nearer to Margaret; we have kept too far from her. What she denied to Mr. Anonymous, she will grant to her readers, who, as a parent, have watched about her from her babyhood,—a more intimate approximation. And if what Isabel said be true, that she could bear the truth, she can certainly bear to be looked at, a distinction not mortifying to most young ladies. She denied that she had a heart; has she any? If she has none, unlike most young ladies, in another respect also she differs from many of her sex and age, she can make good butter, which she did this very morning, churning it in

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the cool dawn, working it out, salting it, and depositing it in a cellar which, if it possessed no other merit, boasted this at least, that it was cold and free of flies. It has been intimated, and may come up again for affirmation, that Margaret was brought up on bread and cider and bean-porridge. This, however, must not be taken too literally. The facts in the case are these, sometimes the family kept a cow, and sometimes they did not. But, to our purpose. This morning, after churning and breakfast, she went out to a favorite spot, a little below the house, on the Delectable Way, lying in the shade of the eastern forest. If Bull followed, it was rather from habit than necessity, since she was wont to go where she listed, unattended, relying chiefly upon a pair of pretty strong arms, and whatever defence against danger is to be found in not fearing it. It is here, precisely in this morning retreat that we—by we is meant her readers—propose to look at her. The place she has chosen, characterized chiefly by forest association and aspect, opens to the south, where are visible the Avernian hills, and to the zenith, where is the everlasting sky. What of sound she perceives, comes from the solitary crowing of a cock in some distant hidden farm-yard, and the barking of a fox in the deep lonely woods. She has also near her what might pass for a music-box, in a bed of yellow brakes, inhabited by innumerable crickets and grasshoppers, that keep up a perpetual tuneful murmur, alternating like waves of the sea, or the wind in a pine-tree. She holds in her hand a book, or rather her arm lying on the ground the book lies there too, closed on her fore-finger. The book, we shall see, is an old one, so very old that its leathern back has changed into a polished mahogany hue; it is in Latin, and the title anglicised reads, “The Marrow of Theology, by William Ames,” a Dutchman. Not far off down the hill, in a pasture of large white rocks and tall star-flowering elecampane, are very contentedly feeding two red cows. Whether she saw these or not, she looked at them, and now her eye is directed upwards. What we see in the sky is a group of clouds, massive and dense, with white tops, dark cavernous sides, and broad bases deepening into a blueish leaden color, and having their summits disposed as it were about a common centre, thus forming a circular opening, through which appear the boundless aerial fields of fairest ultramarine. These peaks are like chalk-cliffs girding the ocean, on which one would stand to look off into the sky-sea. If we examine her eyes, those organs by which she communicates with the exterior world, and through which whatever

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belongs to the inner sanctuary of her mind more readily manifests itself, we shall discover that they have changed since her Childhood. Then, those eyes perceived with briskness and disposed of their objects with ease. The external world made a rapid transition through them, enlivened and graced her spirit, and then returned; and since material substances are by this process transmuted into moral emotions, and the nerves of the face are sympathetic throughout, a beautiful flower for example, borne in on the optic nerve, would come out an irradiation of joy generously spread over the whole countenance. Now, a world has been created in her eyes; outward objects no longer pass immediately through, but are caught and detained, as it would seem, for inquisition. Some are seen to sink with a sullen plunge into the dark waters of her soul; some she seizes upon and throws out among the waste things of the earth; others again get in by stealth, creep round upon her nerves, come out and sit under the edge of her face, and play their old pranks of beauty and joy; anon some fair large object, that she suffers to pass, floods her spirit and drowns out everything else; a full proportion of these objects, it would appear, are assigned to the region of the Anagogical. We cannot say that she is “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” yet her expression is subdued if it be not positively sober, there is a mixed look of fervid aspiration and annoying uncertainty about her. The clouds have shifted their places and forms, the cows are quietly feeding, and she betakes herself to her reading. She is interrupted by the echoing click of iron horse-steps on the stones of the Delectable Way; the cows look up, and so does she. Strangers in Livingston frequently visited the Pond to survey the scene from Indian’s Head; they went up and down taking little notice of the inhabitants, and with extreme consideration avoided laying upon them the slightest burden of civility or attention; and Margaret, accustomed to these transient manners, would have suffered the present to pass as an ordinary instance, save that, with a stranger man on horseback, she saw little Job Luce—little he was though older than when she first knew him—on the pommel of the saddle in the arms of the rider; and when they were over against her in the road, Job caused the man to stop. “That’s it,” said Job, “that’s the Pond.” “I don’t see any water,” replied the man, “nothing but a rock and a woman.” “That’s Margery,” reiterated the boy, “and that is where she sits, and I find her there ’most always.” “Is she the Pond?” asked his respondent. “She had always rather

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be in the woods than in the house,” continued Job,” she pricks flowers into her bonnet instead of ribbons, and likes to hear the birds sing Sundays better than Zenas joy, the new chorister.”

Meanwhile, Job lowered from the horse stood holding by the snaffle, and insisting that the gentleman should dismount likewise. His manifest anxiety brought Margaret also to the spot. “That is Margery, do stop and see her—here, Margery, is a billet from Isabel.”

“I overtook this little fellow on the way,” said the young man, for such it proved to be, “and as he seemed but a sorry traveller, I thought my horse could better do that office for him.”

“Do stop and see Margaret, and I guess she will go with you up the Head, you have been so good to me,” said Job, with renewed earnestness.

“Won’t you stop, Sir?” said Margaret. The young man thus importuned left his horse among the trees, and walked with Job and Margaret to the spot occupied by the latter.

“Since you have been so fairly introduced,” said he, addressing Margaret, “I ought to make myself known, Charles Evelyn—Judge Morgridge is my uncle—perhaps you are acquainted with his daughter Susan?”

“I am not,” replied Margaret, “but I have heard my friend Isabel Weeks speak of her. This is Job Luce, Mr. Evelyn, one among the very few friends of whom I can boast in the village.”

“He seems very much attached to you,” rejoined Mr. Evelyn, “to walk so far, with his feebleness, to see you. He said there was some one at the Pond who knew almost every thing and loved him very much.”

“I do love Job, poor boy, he has but few to love him, and his love for me produces a cyanosis, as Mr. Elliman, my old Master, says, whereby we do not see things clearly, and so he thinks very highly of me, as I know I do of him.”

“She knows Whippoorwill,” said Job, “and that is more than the Parson does, if she don’t go to Meeting.”

“I know nothing,” replied Margaret.

“Have you no home, no father or mother?” asked Mr. Evelyn. “Do you live in these woods?”

“There is our house behind the trees yonder,” said Margaret; “there are my father and mother; there is my brother Chilion; I have books, a squirrel, a dog, flowers, a boat; the trees, the water, the birds all are mine, only I do not understand all.”

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“The Master,” interposed Job, “said she understood Latin as well as Hancock Welles who has gone to College.”

“Yes indeed,” rejoined Margaret, smiling, “I can say as he did once, when pursuing me in the woods, he was overtaken by a bear, ‘Veni, vidi, victa sum.’ I am lost in my gains; every acquisition I make conquers me.”

“The vici,” replied Mr. Evelyn, “is a rare attainment. It is easier to know than to be masters of our knowledge;—I see from your book you are exploring an abstruse subject through what some would regard an abstruse medium. Theology is not always rendered plainer for being put in plain English. Do you find it cleared up in Latin?”

“My Teacher,” answered Margaret, “says Latin is the tongue of the learned; and so, most curiously, to convict me for a fool as it would seem, he commends me to my studies in it. I asked him some questions, and he gave me this book, but not so much in the way of a reply, I ween, as a repulse. I can construe the sentences, distinguish the supine in u; but, the ideas—gramercy! I had as lief encounter a troop of bull-beggars, or undertake to explain the secrets of the nostrummonger that lives above us. I am caught by my own fish, as brother Nimrod says, and dragged into an element where I pant and flouder as any strange creature would in ours.”

“Mammy says,” exclaimed Job, “it is because Margery is proud, has a natural heart, and won’t bend her will down, and so she lost the School. But she isn’t proud to me; she used to lead me home all the way from school. Hester Penrose, the other Ma’am, never would touch me or speak to me out of school; and when we were there, she only spoke hard to me, and whipped me, because I caught the grasshoppers that flew in, and stopped to hear whippoorwill—I could hear it in the windows. She wouldn’t give me a ticket either, for all I got my lessons well—Arthur Morgridge said I got them better than he, and he had a ticket.”

“Your mother, Job,” said Margaret, “and Deacon Ramsdill don’t agree; he applauds me for having a nateral heart, as he calls it, and says he hopes my will never ’ll be broke; he says a man with a broken will is no better than a slunk calf. But, of what we were speaking, Mr. Evelyn, are you familiar with these ideas, these things, these what-nots? Or are you, like all the rest, only a dainty, white handkerchief sort of a traveller among the hills?”

“I have dabbled a little in a good many matters,” replied

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the young gentleman, “and if there be any points that trouble you, more than as likely as not it will be found our troubles are not dissimilar, only it sometimes results that difficulties of this sort once fairly stated are dispelled; the attempt to give them form annihilates them—they pass away in the breath that pronounces them.”

“A fine prospect, indeed!” responded Margaret. “I shall be able to discharge the Universe at a whiff! But soberly, here is the source of all my perplexity, a quid and a quis. The book, as you see, discusses without satisfying the case. It is ‘Quid sit Deus,’ or ‘Quis sit Deus,’ what is God, or, who is God. He, that is the Master, says I did not put the question right, at first, and, nulla vestigia retrorsum, I have been going wrong ever since. We have quis’d and quid’d it together, till my brain whirls and my mind aches. Who is God? I will ask. ‘Do you intend,’ he replies, ‘entity or form? If the former, then you should say, What is God; if the latter, then your language is correct. Language has its rules as well as that whereto it applies. Informal language on formal subjects is altogether contrary to Logic.’ Good Heavens! say I, I don’t know which I mean. ‘Then do not talk until you know what you are talking about; let us finish this game of backgammon.’ To complete my distress he has given me this book! There is one pretty thing in it, the little boy with a girlish face in the frontispiece. He is holding up a big book before the door of some temple. Would the book would remove, then we could enter the mysterious place. Alack-a-day! ‘Where there’s a secret there must be something wrong,’ good Deacon Ramsdill says, and I believe it.”

“Look here,” said Mr. Evelyn, “Father Ames touches fairly on these topics. ‘Quid sit Deus, nemo potest perfecte definire,’ what God is we cannot perfectly define; but ‘Quis sit explicant,’ who he is his attributes sufficiently make known.”

“Read another page,” said Margaret, [“]‘1 Tim. vi. 16, Lucem habitans inaccessam, &c.’ What is referred to there seems very mystified indeed. The only Tim that I am acquainted with is our neighbor’s horse.”

“Don’t speak so—you astonish me. That,” said Mr. Evelyn, “is language addressed by the Apostle Paul to a young man whose name was Timothy. ‘God dwelleth in the light which no man can approach unto.’ ”

“I did not intend any harm,” replied Margaret. “I had

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no idea there was any feeling in the matter. The Master and the Parson are always bringing in some name, Aristotle, Moses, Scotus, Paul or somebody, whom they make responsible for what they say, and commit themselves to nothing, laughing and smoking in the man time. They are both as ‘amfractuous’ as he says I am, and as ‘anagogical’ as our little friend Job.”

“I don’t know what that means,” said the boy, “but I do know Whippoorwill, and that I shall die of it. But Margery don’t believe the Parson, and she won’t read the Bible.”

“My troth!” exclaimed the young man. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy, and more in Livingston than I had imagined. Did you never read the Bible?”

“No,” replied Margaret. “The Master has endeavored that I should never see one, and the first book he put into my hand when I asked him about God was Tooke’s Pantheon. There was a great book marked Holy Bible on the outside at Deacon Ramsdill’s; there were some singular pictures in it, and some singular reading, but not of a nature to tempt me to look far into it. Only I remember laughing outright when I came to something just like what Pa calls his Bible, and the good Deacon took the book away. Pa’s Bible is some leaves of a book hanging by a string on the chimney, and consists of names beginning with Adam and ending with Duke Magdiel, and he always uses it he says when he christens his children. It is suspended, also, you must know, directly over his rum-bottle, and he says he reads his Bible when he drinks his rum. That is our Bible.”

“Mammy gave you a Testament once,” said Job.

“The Master took it away,” replied Margaret. “He said I was not old enough to understand it, or something of that sort.”

“She doesn’t go to Meeting either,” added Job.

“Do you not indeed?” asked the young man.

“It is not quite true that I never go,” said Margaret. “I have been to a Camp Meeting and Parson Welles’s Meeting.”

“Only once,” said Job.

“I could hardly wish to go a second time. Everything was turned topsy-turvy; flowers became an abomination; for walking the streets one was liable to be knocked down; people had on gay dresses and sepulchral faces; no one smiled; the very air of the Green grew thick and suffocating; sin lurked in

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every spot, and I couldn’t do anything but it was a sin; the most beautiful and pleasant parts of my life became a sudden wickedness; the day was cursed, and I was cursed, and all things were cursed. I was glad to get out of it, and escape to the Pond once more, and breathe in brightness and love from our own skies. No, we never go here; Pa was put in the stocks for hunting his cow one Sabbath, and he swears we shall not go. I frighten you, Sir, and you will have me put in Jail right off?”

“If I am frightened,” said the young man, “I can hear all you have to say, and would much prefer you should not interrupt yourself.”

“I was young then, and these are old impressions which have grown perhaps somewhat sour by keeping, and I might not feel just so now. At the Camp Meeting—have you ever been to one? Well, I need not recount that. The Preacher I never could forgive, only he was so kind to me when I was lost in the woods. That was the pink of what the Master calls Puppetry, a hornet’s nest of Harlequins, Saints bacchantizsing. When I told the Master of some of my accidents on these holy occasions, for in one instance I liked to have been sent to Jail, and in another, to have been crushed to death, ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam,’ said he, ‘you are a shoemaker’s daughter; mind your own business, and stay at home next time;’ so I did. Nimrod once took me to an Ordination at Dunwich, where the Leech, who contrives to be everywhere, accompanied us. It was more like training-day than anything else. The town was full of people and soaking in rum. At the Church I was wedged in an impassible drift, but managed somehow to crawl out like a stream of water through their legs and feet. The Widow found means to introduce herself and me with her to the dining-hall. Such things were enacted there as would not disgrace the bar-room at No. 4. Pa when he is drunk has far better manners than those sanctiloquent Wigs exhibited. It was altogether the richest specimen of ‘deific temulency,’ you ever beheld. The side-boards were emptied half a dozen times, tobacco-smoke choked the air, and to finish the play one grey old Punch with inimitable gravity said grace at the close. The exercises of the day were rounded off by a Ball in the evening, and that was the best of the whole, save that the ministers were not there to give the occasion the zest of their jokes and laughter—I supposed at the time they were in a state of acquacœlestification, and could not dance. But Oh! Oh! Oh! Job, dear Job, I

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love you, Job! Why do I, a poorer wretch, speak of these poor things!”

This exclamation was followed by tears that fell drenchingly and hot on the face of the boy whom she clasped in her arms. Job turned up his mild blue eye to her and said, “Margaret, Whippoorwill sings, and Job don’t cry; I swing over the brook when the boys teaze me, and the bubbles take away the pain; I hear a pewee in the woods, Margaret, that sings when the whippoorwill is gone. I love you too, Margaret, and Job’s love is good, the little Mabel says. If there were no innocent hearts, there would be no white roses, Isabel says.”

Margaret began, saying, “come Job, sing too,” and they both sung,

“Now, Job,” she said, “we will go and get comfrey root for Chilion’s drink, and burdock leaves for drafts to draw out all pains. We shall detain the gentleman.”

“The detention is rather on my part,” said Mr. Evelyn. “Yet I am truly unwilling to have you go.”

“I shall only offend you if I stay,” said she.

“I have learned,” he replied, “never to be offended with any human being.”

“Then you are the strangest of all human beings, though I agree with you, and find myself small place for offence Androides furentes create a sensation of the ridiculous more than anything else.”

“You seem,” continued he, “to be sincere, however mistaken; and I am not a little interested in what you say.”

“Are you sincere?” she asked. “Are you not simulacrizing? Yet, I wrong you, Sir, I wrong myself. It confesses itself within me, that you are in earnest.”

“that is Whippoorwill,” said Job.

“It is the voice of nature,” said the young man.

“I am not,” added Margaret, “so brook-like as I used to

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be, when neither rock nor night, inundation or ultimate disemboguement disturbed my little joyous babble. The beauties and sweetnesses, the freedom and health that surround me do not so perfectly satisfy me. I have not much of the ‘acquiescentia cordis’ of which Father Ames speaks. My squirrel, Dick, has been rolling about his cage these many years, and is contented with it as ever. I, forsooth, must explore the cupboard whence my food comes, dig into the well-head whence my water flows, anatomatize the hand that caresses me. There seems to be something above the people in the village, something over their heads, what they talk to, and seem to be visited by occasionally, particularly Sundays, making them solemn and stiff like a cold wind. Is it God? What is God? Who is God? Heigh ho hum—let me not ask that question. Is it Jupiter or Ammon? Is it a star? Or is it something in the state of the weather? Going to Meeting Sundays, the Master calls a septenary ague universal in these countries. Yet the matter is deep and penetrating as it is anagogical.”

“Why do you not speak with the people,” said Mr. Evelyn, “and discover the nature of their emotions and thoughts?”

“My sooth! I had rather lie here on the grass and read the Medulla, dig roots, card and spin, clean dye-tubs, pick geese, draw chickens, or even go for rum—anything, anything. Vox populi vox Dei, he says, but it must have a very strange voice. The hygeian gibberish of the Leech is not half so bad; nor that stupendous word, honorificability, he used to make me spell, half so unintelligible. It all runs of sins and sinners, the fall and recovery, justification and election, trinity and depravity, hell and damnation—they have an idiosyncrasy of phrases, just as the Free-Masons have, and Tony the Barber and Joyce Dooly the Fortune-teller have; then there are experiences and exercises, ah’s and oh’s, sighs and laments, as if we were about to be burned up—and indeed they say we are, at least our family; and Pa laughs so about it all, and the Master while he seems to join in with it, only turns it to ridicule. Isabel says she is growing tired of it, though she is not apt to complain of anything, and has already been admonished against keeping company with the wicked Indian, as they call me. She says that those they call sinners are some of the best people in the world, that theological distinctions do not conform to anything that exists in nature. The Master says that piety is the art of concealing one’s original character, and that church-members are those who have attained

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the greatest proficiency in that art. But let me hear what you would say. I have ‘polylogized’ quite long enough. Are you a student for the ‘sacred ministry,’ a class of young men in whose behalf the Dutchman says he has prepared his Marrow?”

“No, I am not. But the subjects to which you refer possess a value that engages all professions and all minds. I have a Bible in my pocket, or a part of one.”

“What! Are you bibbleous too?”

“Bibliopalous, you mean.”

“No, bibbleous. When one comes to our house with a flask of Old Holland, or a bottle of rum, we say he is bibbleous, and has a bible in his pocket. Pardon me. I am unbridled as the winds. You seem to be drawing upon me, and I have way here within, till every, the most transient, feeling escapes.”

“I know what it is to become the sport of impulses, and will not condemn you for that.”

“Speak, Sir, and I will listen quietly. I can trim myself to patience when it is necessary.”

“You have heard of the Saviour of the world, Jesus Christ?”

“Yes, till I am sick of the name. It sounds mawkish in my ears.”

“You do shock me now,” said Mr. Evelyn, with some feeling. “You cause me grief and astonishment.”

“I pray you have mercy upon me, Sir! What have I done? Your look frightens me.”

“That you should speak so of him who to my soul is most precious.”

“I am sorry to have distressed you.”

“You have distressed one who is dearer to me than my own life.”

“Speak that name again.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“What, my own Beautiful One? Christ—yes—that is his name. I had almost forgotten it. I have thought only of him. The name is associated with whatever is distasteful in the world. It is Christ, Jesus Christ. Is he not beautiful?”

“He is described as fairer than the sons of men.”

“And you, Sir, know him and love him, and your innermost sense is alive to him? You are the first one who ever showed a deep natural sensibility to that One. I have distressed you and him through you, and myself in him! There-

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in lies my closest garnered being.” Saying this Margaret turned her face away.

“It is Whippoorwill,” said Job to Mr. Evelyn. “Don’t speak now.”

That gentleman waiting awhile in silence, was obliged, by direct enforcement, to renew the conversation.

“Tell me,” said he, “what is the meaning of this? Here is a greater mystery to me than all this strange world can offer to you. By what secret affinities are you bound to him who is my Life? How have you come to know him in this heart-felt manner? Like Nathaniel has he seen you under the fig-trees?”

“No,” said Margaret, turning herself, and speaking with composure, “it was under those trees yonder in what we call Diana’s Walk.”

“What, that you literally saw him?”

“No, it was a dream. He, the Beautiful One, called Christ, filled one of the dreams of my childhood. He spoke to me, he took my hand, he kissed me, he blest me.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It was some years ago. Its remembrance fades, then brightens again. Sometimes it bubbles up within me like a spring, sometimes it spreads away into a deep calm surface like the Pond. It haunts me like a cloud white and soft. In my sensibilities it lies and stirs me up to weeping. Forgive me a thousand times that I should have been so wanton! When you spoke of him in such a way, I was suddenly flooded with emotion such as I cannot describe. Isabel and Job know of it, but they do not precisely answer to my feelings. Indeed at the moment you came up I was endeavoring to form out of the clouds some likeness to what I had seen, the One himself, the Cross, the Dove; I gazed into the heights of the blue sky for some Apparition. I beguile the uncertainties of my thought by the creations of my fancy. But That comes not, and the clouds veil over those infinite distances. He said if I loved, I should know. I do love, how little I know.”

“But do, if it pleases you, give me the particulars of your dream.”

She repeated what is already in the possession of the reader, and recounted some things of her several dreams. “But,” said she, as the conversation went on, “I thought this was for myself alone. It has been kept in my own life. Is he, Christ, great, is he general? You, Sir, seem to know and

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to feel him, though you say you have had no dreams about him. He has been a strange beautiful flower in my garden, and so he exists in yours. What do these things mean?”

“You question raises,” said he, “a long train of reflection. Let us be seated, and we will go over the matter with that care which it deserves.”

“No, indeed,” replied Margaret, “I would not trouble you to that extent now. Job promised for me to go upon the Head with you, and it is time to start—I must be at home and help about the dinner.”

“Where is the cake for Egeria?” said Job.

“I guess she will have to be content with the grasshopper-music, or she may lie down in the shade as the cows do,” answered Margaret. “I did not tell you, Sir,” she added, “that this spot is consecrated to the Nymph whom the old Roman was wont to visit, and when we go away we sometimes leave a cake or piece of bread both as an oblation and for her dinner, and, will you believe it, Sir, when I return, it is all gone.”

They proceeded towards the eminence called the Head. Seeing Chilion moving leisurely in the direction of the water, Job importuned to go and sail with him, and Margaret with Mr. Evelyn went up the hill.

“How very beautiful this is!” said the young gentleman, “here, there, and everywhere.”

“Look down into this water,” said Margaret, standing on the rock that overhung the Pond, “if your brain is steady enough. This the Master calls Exclamation point.—I have wished to drop into that splendid cloud-flowing abyss, and perhaps I shall be missing one of these days, and you will know where to find me. You are sober—well, look off into the mountains yonder. That is Umkiddin. You will not blame a passion I cherish for climbing that sunny height, and laying hand and heart in the downy Blue.”

“No I could not.—But see that point of rock around which the water bends, with a great tree overshadowing the distance. So I admire a river, not so much in its expanse and full-tide, as in the turns and angles, where it loses itself within green shores and sinks away under the shade of cliff and forest.”

“ ‘Loses itself’!” replied Margaret, repeating the word with some emphasis. “There you have it again. Lost, gone, vanishing, unreachable, inappropriable, anagogical!—I used to sit here in my merry childhood and think all was mine, the earth and the sky. I ate my bread and cider and fed the ants and flies. Through me innumerable things went forth; the loons

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whooped me in the water, in my breath the midges sported, the Sun went down at my bidding, and my jocund heart kindled the twilight. It now flies away like a bird, and I cannot get near enough to put any salt on its tail. Then I owned so much my losses were of no account, and though I could not reach the bottom of the Pond, I saw the heavens in it, and myself sailing above them. In the darkest night, with our red tartarean links, Chilion and I have rowed across the Pond, and sniggled for eels, and so we conquered the secrets of those depths. I have cried too in my day, I have an unkind brother and a profligate father, and what with the wretchedness of those I love and their wickedness, my own heart has been duly tortured and these swollen veins have been bled with weeping; but I seem also to have lost the power of tears. Those, like the days of good Queen Bess, are gone, and how shall they be recovered!”

“Have you no faith?” asked Mr. Evelyn.

“ ‘Faith’! That sanctiloquent word! That is what the Widow Luce dins me with.”

“Faith; trust, confidence, repose, seeing the invisible, relying upon the spiritual, having an inner impersonal inhabitancy. In that alone I am happy and sustained. Would you were thus happy.”

“I wish I were—But faint heart never won fair lady. I do not quite give over—I am happy, none more. In the same moment that I am worried I am at rest. How is this? What many-colored streams flow through us, blood-red, and woolly-white! Are we divided off like sheep, has each feeling its fold? Through our skies sail two sets of clouds, one to the North, one to the South? Even now while I speak all I feel, there is more in me than I can ever speak of. What Harmony circumscribes the whole? In what are Pain and Pleasure One?—I will not ask you, I am happy. Greater simpleton than I am if I were not. Much I have lost, much remains, more comes. My dreams have a place within me; and all the books I have read. My home is every year more beautiful, the trees more suggestive, the birds more musical, the bees more knowing. Roots grow in new ways every Summer, and snow falls in new forms every Winter. There is more in churning than most people think of. Time is regenerative, and new births occur every hour. The gritty Earth, alumen and silex spring up in dream-like beauty. I have also many and improving visitations, and much select company. I told you of Egeria; then there is Diana’s Walk in the woods, and close upon the edge of

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the water you see some graceful white birches, those are the Nine Muses. Brother Chilion is our Apollo. In the house we have St. Crispin for the shoemaker, and St. Catharine for the spinner; Bull is our Cerberus. Brother Hash the Master calls Priapus; the Leech we call Dea Salus, and the road to her house has received from the Master the name of Via Salutaris. The cross-path to the Village he calls Via Dolorosa, on account of a dangerous pass in the brook; and that, (the brook) from the same cause he says, because he got into trouble going over it, he calls Kedron, though I do not understand anything about that name. Religion he says is an anagogical parenthesis, because it must be spoken in a lower tone of voice. No. 4 I called Avernus, and the road to it Descensus Averni, but, coming up, he would have it that it was The Delectable Way. The Head is called Mons Bacchi, but our cistern I call Temperance. The House dance round me in snow flakes, Naiads and Dryads inhabit our woods and water; in one of my haunts I can show you the Three Graces. That Island with a large elm in the centre is Feronia’s, where I often go. Narcissus grows in my garden, Daphnis in the woods. The Head I told you the Master called Bacchus’ Hill, and sometimes our whole region goes by that name, and the Pond he says he has no doubt is the reappearance of the river Helicon into which some fabled Orpheus was changed, and whose waters were a long time hidden under ground; so we sometimes call our place the Lake of Orpheus. To which Divinity we are on the whole consecrated, I hardly know; but for my part, I prefer the musical, to the tippling God. Then the fair lady of my dreams sometimes still comes to me with her pale beautiful face. I have also one at the Widow’s, but whether she be a phantom or a reality I know not, a girl like myself, also pale, sad and beautiful, whose smile is an enchantment, even if I know not her hidden self.—Am I not happy?”

“It may be so,” answered he, “but in a manner different from the world.”

“People about you, men and women in general.”

“If you mean the villagers, the No. 4’s, Breaknecks and Snakehills, I know I differ some from them. They drink rum, which I do not; they are unkind one with another, which for the life of me I never could be. Their Anagogics indeed I wholly fail to comprehend, their Sabbaths, Meetings, Catechizing, Freemasonry, Trainings, Politics, Courts, Jails and all that.”

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“Your Religion is so different from theirs.”

“Bless me, I have no religion; and Bull defend me from theirs! Albeit, as Deacon Ramsdill says, we must eat a peck of dirt before we die, and perhaps I must make mine out in some of their religion!—I have offended you; it is just as I told you I should do, if you talked with me.”

“I repeat, that you cannot offend me, only you must allow what you say to make me somewhat thoughtful. You said you wanted to clamber up the blue mountain yonder, and are ready even to leave your pretty Pantheon for that acquisition. That is Religion even if you had not thought it.”

“No, never would I leave my ‘pretty Pantheon,’ as you call it. But I should like to thrust my fingers between those two blues, that of the hill and of the sky. There Christ has come to me; in celestial skyey softness has that vision appeared. No one like the Beautiful One has ever visited my dreams, my thoughts, my aspirations; and I have nothing about me I dare call Christ. There is sometimes a cloud that stretches from Umkiddin to the Moon when it rises, like a turkey’s tail-feather—whence comes it?: to what serene eternal bird does it belong? is it part of the wing of Christ under whose shadow I may lie? is it the trail of the beautiful Goddess, Venus?—I know not.—No, I cannot leave my Pantheon, and I long for what I have not; and that is religion, you say. Your definition differs somewhat from my Tutor’s, and by it, I am quite religious1 ha, ha. Prithee, tell me Sir, who are you/ Are not you ‘the world’?”

“A sorry part of it, I fear; yet removed enough from it neither to drink rum nor disturb the peace of others. I do keep the Sabbath, and go to Church; I do not say the Catechism, or belong to any train-band. Most people, I confess, are degraded by their piety; I do believe there is a worship that purifies and ennobles.”

“You confound and delight me both. I know not what to say. The horn is blowing for dinner, and I am glad something befalls to put an end to the perplexity.—Won’t you stay and have your dinner with us? I will introduce you to my home, family, dog, squirrel and spinning-wheel.”

“I am engaged at the Village—May I have the pleasure of seeing you again, Miss Hart?”

“Miss Hart!”

“That is your name, I believe.”

“Yes—only I was never called it before, it sounds strange. If I do not give you more pain than pleasure, you are welcome

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to see me, when I am to be seen. I have a good deal to do. Can you break flax?”

“I fear I should bungle it.”

“Then I fear Ma would not like you. If you could help me get cotton grass or thistle down, I should be glad to see you. I would not pain a toad, I hope I shall not you.—Where is the Bible you spoke of, if it does not make me laugh to ask you.”

“You shall have it if you will promise me not to laugh when you read it.”

“I never made a promise in my life; only I will try.”

“It is not the whole Bible, it is the New Testament, so called. I hope it will please you.”

“I don’t know. ‘A clouted shoe hath oft-times craft in it,’ Deacon Ramsdill says, and there may be some good in the Bible.”

“We have had fine luck,” said Job, coming from the boat as they descended the hill. “Six white perch, four eel-pouts, six shiners and a pickerel.”

“You shall carry some to your mother,” replied Margaret, “and mind you give Whippoorwill a taste.—There is my Apollo, not so fair perchance as his namesake, but he is as good. He is lame you see withal, and in that resembles his great prototype; and this stone of my heart becomes melodious when he plays.—Mr. Evelyn, Chilion.”

“How do you do, Sir.”

“Quite well, at your service, Sir,” replied Chilion.

“What springal is that, has kept you from helping me?” said Brown Moll, coming to the window with a tray full of hot potatoes, which she was pealing, [sic] as Mr. Evelyn and Job turned down the road.

“A fox after the goslin, hey?” said Hash, who with his father arrived at the same moment. “I saw you on the Head.”

“I guess he has lain out over night,” said Pluck. “He looks soft and glossy as your Mammy’s flax of a frosty morning.—Now don’t take pet, Molly dear.”

“She swells like a soaked pea,” added the old woman. “What’s the matter, husy? [sic] I should think he had been rubbing your face with elm leaves.”

“Never mind, Molly,” interposed her father. “Better to play at small game than stand out. You are the spider of the woods. Spin a strong web; you are sure to catch something.”

“She looks as if she had been spun, colored and hung out to dry,” said her mother.

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“Gall darn it!” exclaimed Hash. “I smell potatoes. Give us some dinner.”

“Speaking of spinning,” said Pluck, when the others were gone in, “you know how to use the wheel-pin—keep the thread taught and easy in your fingers, mind the spindle, then buzz away like Duke Jehu;—only if he is a dum spot of a lawyer or a Priest, weave him into a breeches-piece, and I’ll wear him, I be blown if I don’t; and when he is past mending, I’ll hang him up for a scare-crow, blast him!”

After dinner, Margaret took her boat and went to the Island called Feronia’s, remarkable for its great elm. She threw herself on a bed of mosses under the shade of the tree. “Patience, Silence, Feronia, Venus, O Mother God! help thy child!” she said, or ejaculated with herself. “I, Icarus, with waxen wings, am melted by the light into which I fly! I, Eurydice, am in Hell; my Orpheus bore me out a little ways, left me, and I am caught back again! How cold I grow! Let me lie in the sun. Dear clouds, sweet clouds! let me shine and be dissolved with you! Oh Christ—Relent thou iron soul of the skies, and speak to me!—My little boat, where is the glad, bird-child you used to carry? Still the same, the oar, the seat; the water the same, rocks, woods; waves sing their eternal lullaby, box-berries keep their unchanging red, shadows embrace me as if my heart were free.—How I twattled, skurried! ‘Miss Hart’! Miss Pan, Miss Bacchus, rather. Now I grow hot again. Who, what am I? Quis, Quid! God and I alike anagogical. Who or what is he? Let me get it right this time. Who is Mr. Evelyn? His What is what? What is his Who? The What! Lucem inaccessam, light inapproachable. Rose too the same.—How kind his words, how gentle his voice, how mild his looks, how benign and forbearing in all things! And yet sanctiloquent, and yet so different from others! What is ‘the World’? Is he it? Is he like me? Why am I not it? I will see how this matter looks in the water, let me quench my hot limbs.” Drifting along in her boat, she bent over the water, “Molly dear,” said she, “is that you? Your face is red and feverish. Go to the Widow’s and get some balm tea.—Can’t you keep cool down there The sun shines there as well as here! Your hair wants combing, your dress is disordered, Neptune’s sea-dogs would be ashamed of you.” She left her boat and clothes on the shore, and immersed herself in the grateful water. She returned to the island; she said, “I will lie down under the tree; sleep is better than knowledge, a bed kinder than God, the

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shadows more beautiful than Truth! or, Mr. Evelyn, is rest given us wherein we find ourselves and all things? Pardon me, Sir.” She slept a long time, and awoke, refreshed and regulated, resolute but subdued; with an even hand and quiet temperature she rowed homewards, and went about such duties as domestic necessity or customary requisition imposed.

In the evening she went to see Rose, and while she had made no mention of Mr. Anonymous, she found she had much to say of Mr. Evelyn. Rose embraced her with a silent summer-like tranquility, and kissed her lips fervently, which was nearly all the response she made. She shone out if at all like the Moon through dark clouds, that are only the darker for the brightness behind them. “Death,” said she, diverging into a train of thought seemingly suggested by what Margaret related, “Death will soon end all. In the grave we shall lie and the beauty and strength of existence shall perish with us. I only ask, Margaret, that I may be buried side by side with you. The worm shall devour the fairest visions and the most dismal forebodings, alike; decay shall feed sweetly upon your ruddiness and vigor, your nobleness and benignity. A princely offering are we to Annihilation. I murmur not, I dread not, with the serenity of angelic love I submit to the all-o’ersweeping Fate. In your arms to lie, with you to die, I smile as I sink into the eternal rest. Yet, live on Margaret, while you may, fill your golden cup, it will never be too late to drink it, even if death seizes you in the act.”

CHAPTER III.

Christianity.

Another day Mr. Evelyn came to the Pond. Margaret watched his approach with composure, and returned his greeting without confusion. “You have been on the Head,” said she, “and I must take you to other places to-day. First the Maples.”

“This is a fine mineralogical region,” said he as they entered the spot. “I wish I had a hammer.”

“I will go for one,” said she.

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“O no, Miss Hart, I will get it if you will tell me where it is.”

“You are not in health you told me, and you do not look very strong. I must go by all means. I will be back in a trice. You will have quite as much walking as you can master before the day is through.”

“You may go, but I fear I shall be more tired wondering than in going.”

“See this,” said he, exposing a hollow stone filled with superb crystals, which he found and broke during her absence, “I thank you, I thank you,” she replied. [“]The Master has given me an inkling of geology, but I never imagined such beauty was hidden here.”

“With definite forms and brilliant texture these gems are created in the centre of this rough rusty stone.”

“Incomparable mystery1 New Anagogics! I begin to be in love with what I understand not.”

“Humanity is like that.”

“What is Humanity?”

“It is only another name for the World that you asked me about.”

“I am perplexed by the duplicity of words. He is humane who helps the needy.”

“That is one form of Humanity. I use the term as expressing all men collectively viewed in their better light. Much depends upon this light, phase, or aspect, what subjectively to us is by the Germans called stand-point. The Indian’s Head, in one position resembles a human face, in another quite as much a fish’s tail. Man, like this stone, is geodic—such stones you know are called geodes—”

“Have you the skill to discover them?”

“It is more difficult to break than find them. Yet if I could crack any man as I do this stone, I should lay open beautiful crystals.”

“Any man?”

“Yes, all men.”

“O passing wonderful! I would run a thousand miles for the hammer! I have been straining after the stars, how much there is in the stones! Most Divine Earth, henceforth I will worship thee!—Geodic Androids! What will the Master say?”

“I see traces of other beautiful minerals in these large rocks. Let me rap here, and lo! I show you a beryl, there is agate, yonder is a growth of garnets.”

“Let me cease to be astonished and only learn to love.”

“An important lesson, and one not too well learned.”

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“Under this tree I will erect a Temple to the God of rocks.—Was there any such? Certes, I remember none.”

“The God of Rocks is God.”

“You sport enigmas again. Let us to Diana’s Walk.”

They perambulated the forest touching upon various spots of interest to Margaret. She had given name and population to many a solitary place, and for many years, it appeared, had been deepending her worship and extending her supremacy, such as it was, over the region. Tired at last, they sat down under the trees.

“You will not relish such a walk and so many Gods, I fear,” said she.

“I could pursue the woods forever,” was his reply. [“]The trees give me more than my acquaintances.”

“They are my home. I was born in them, have been sheltered under them, and educated by them, and do sometimes believe myself of them. The Master rightly says I have a fibrous disposition. I used to think I came of an acorn, and many a one have I opened to find a baby brother or sister. Am I not an automative vegetable, a witch-hazle in moccasins? The Master says I am of the order Bipeds, and species Simulacrens; distinguished by thirty-two teeth, and having the superior extremities terminated by a hand which is susceptible of a greater variety of motions than that of any other animal, and is remarkably prehensile; that it inhabits all parts of the earth; is omnivorous; and disputes for territory, uniting together for the express purpose of destroying itse own kind; that I am of the variety Caucasiana, differing from the Americana in this, that my feet are a little broader just above the toes, and from the Simia in the configuration of the thumb. For my part, I incline to the Sylvian analogy, only my clothes are not half so durable as this bark, nor my hair so becoming as the leaves, and I must undress myself at night and take to my bed, while the trees sleep standing and unhooded. Then what a pother we make about eating, while the tree lives on its own breathing, and with more ease than a duck, muddles for nourishment with its roots.”

“You will not overlook the mind, the spirit; the inner voluntary life, the diversifier of action, the possibility of achievement, the subordinator of matter, the master of Time, the annotator of the Universe, the thinking, willing, loving, the joy and sorrow, the aspiration and submission, the retrospection and prospection, the smiling, the weeping, the speech, the silence, sight, smell and taste, the right and wrong, art,

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poetry, music, the self-consciousness of infinite affinities, heroism, and self-renunciation—all, all demonstrate the separateness and superiority of man.”

“I know what you say is true, and when I hear it said, I shall feel it to be true. Speak on.”

“The tree has no sense of happiness, like you and me, nor possesses it any capability of wretchedness. It exists for our pleasure. He, the soul of all, the supreme Intelligence, the Uncreated Creator, the invisible Seer, has caused it to grow for our use. Even now I feel Him, called in our tongue God, in the Greek Theos, in the Hebrew Jehovah, in the Indian Manitou, by some distinguished in some way, by others in another. His life inflames my life, his spirit inspires my spirit. All that is now about us is his, and he in it; the beauty of the forest is the tincture of his beneficence, the breeze is the respiration of his mercy, the box-berries and mosses are his, the rocks and roots, the dancing shadows, the green breaks into the blue sky are his creation, the fair whole of color, perfume and form, the indescribable sweet sensation that wells in our breasts, are his gift and his presence in the gift, they are the figures woven into the tapestry that girths the Universe, the fragrance that fills the vinaigrette of Creation. Through all and in all pierces his spirit, that blows through us like the wind.”

“But what becomes of my pretty Pantheon, Apollo and Bacchus, Diana and Egeria, before this all-deluging One?”

“That belongs to what is termed Mythology, a mixture of imagination, religion and philosophy. Apollo, for instance, as Tooke will tell you, denotes the sun; and of the arts ascribed to him, prophesying, healing, shooting, music, we discover a lively prototype in that luminary. It dispels the darkness, brings secret things to light, shoots its rays, imparts health and preservation to all things; and being placed in the middle of the planets makes with them a kind of harmony or music. In Hindoo Mythology is Brahma, an uncouth image, coarsely done in stone, which Christians affect to despise, having the form of an infant with its toe in its mouth, floating on a flower over a watery abyss. It represents this, that in some of the renovations which the world is supposed to have undergone, the wisdom and designs of God will appear as in their infant state; Brahma, that is God the creator, floating on a leaf, shows the instability of things at that period; the toe sucked in the mouth implies that Infinite wisdom subsists of itself; and the position of the body, drawn into the form of a ring by

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this union of the extremities, is an emblem of the endless circle of eternity. It is a mere hint of the highest ideas, and by its very rudeness effectually anticipates the error of diverting attention from the substance to the shadow, and if worship be performed before it, it is none otherwise than worship done in our Churches, which are styled, pre-eminently, houses of God, sanctuaries or sacred places. The Northern nations, inheriting the germs of spirituality from the East, superadded Beauty, and elaborated the Symbol in the fairest forms of Art. Their Statues also were an embodied Allegory, they were an Encyclopedia of truth. Now-a-days, we have lost the ancient idea, and so split up our systems of knowledge, that a statue is no more than a handsomely wrought stone; and sometimes we vituperate the attention paid to it, as Idolatry. It furnished to the eye what a written treatise does to the understanding; or in brief the chisel did the work of the pen. To the Greeks, a statue was at once a Church and a Book, it was Beauty and Inspiration, Truth and Illustration, Philosophy and Religion. The human form is more expressive than any other, and genius seized upon that as the most fitting instrument for conveying ideality, and ennobled man while it symbolized his frame.”

“So Apollo is a creation of God?”

“The original on which that is founded is a creation of God; or I should say, Apollo, representing certain facts in the creation of God, or certain attributes of God, his culture was observed by different nations under different names, till at last some artist, fusing as it were the popular idea in his own, wrought the whole in marble, and so gave us the Belvidere.”

“What are we? What am I?”

“In the words of the biblical Job, whom I fear you know less about than you do about the Widow Luce’s Job, ‘There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty hath given them understanding.’ God himself breathes into us the breath of spiritual life. This divine afflatus animates the embryon existence. The spirit assumes a material frame-work which it must quit at last. Our souls coming from God return to him. We are ever-living as the Divinity himself. The bosom of the Infinite while it nourishes us here is our ultimate home. God creates us in his own image, and we like him go on to create. He weaves, and we are his warp and filling.”

“Who winds the spools?”

“You are more at home in the detail, Miss Hart, than I am, and I leave you to answer that question yourself.—But,

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we, the woof, are also weavers. God weaves and we weave; ‘He dwells in us and we in him,’ St. John says. ‘He clothes the grass of the field,’ Christ says. ‘He works in us,’ St. Paul says.”

“Did God work in the artist that made the Apollo?”

“Yes; all beautiful works of man are an inspiration of the Almighty. We read in the Old Testament that ‘God put wisdom and understanding into men’s hearts to know how to work all manner of work,’ for a fabric the Jews were building. It is the energy of that action wherewith he endows man.”

“Then I may keep my Apollo, and all my Divinities.”

“I would not deprive you of anything that shall make you beautiful and strong, happy and chaste, devout and simple, that shall give companionship to your solitude, ministry to your susceptibilities, exercise to your imagination.”

“You are taking the pegs out of the bars, but I will not run wild—I am impatient to know about Christ; what will you say of him? I have read some in the New Testament you gave me. It is the strangest book I ever saw. It transported me with an unspeakable delight; and then I was overwhelmed by a painful complexity of sensations. I came to where he died, and I laid down the book and wept with a suffocating anguish. Then there were those sanctiloquent words!”

“That which I gave you is a version made two hundred years since, when our language was imperfect, scholarship deficient, biblical knowledge limited, and the popular belief replete with errors; and moreover done by men of a particular sect under the dictation of a king. Of course the translation suffers somewhat; but the general truth of the Gospels can no more be hindered by this circumstance, than the effect of day by an accumulation of clouds. But of the subject itself, Christ, what can I say? It is almost too great for our comprehension, as it certainly rises above all petty disputes. How can I describe what I know not? How can I embrace a nature that so exceeds my own? How can I tell of a love I never felt, or recount attainments I never reached? Can I give out what I have not, and I sometimes fear I am not completely possessed of Christ. Can I, the Imperfect, appreciate the Perfect one; can I, the sinful, reveal the sinless soul? I have not Christ’s spirit, his truth, his joy, so integrally and plenarily, that I can set him forth in due proportion and entireness. His experience and character, his spiritual strength and moral

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greatness are so transcendent, I truly hesitate at the task you impose upon me. That we may portray the Poet or the Artist, or any high excellence, we must square with it; who, alas! is equal to Christ!”

“Yet,” said Margaret, “all that is lies secretly coiled within our own breasts! All Beauty, I am persuaded, is within us; whatever comes to me I feel to have had a pre-existence. I sometimes indeed doubt whether I give or receive. A flower takes color from the sun and gives off color. Air makes the fire burn, and the fire makes the air blow; and the colder the weather the brisker the fire. A watermelon seed can say, ‘In me are ten watermelons, rind, pulp and seeds, so many yards of vine, so many pounds of leaves.’ In myself seems sometimes to reside an infant universe. My soul is certainly pistillate, and the pollen of all things is borne to me. The spider builds his house from his own bowels. I have sometimes seen a wood-spider let off a thread which the winds drew out for him and raised above the trees, and when it was sufficiently high and strong, he would climb up it, and sail off in the clear atmosphere. I think if you only begin, it will all come to you. As you drain off it will flow in. The sinful may give out the sinless. I long to hear what you have to say.”

“What you observe is too true, and I thank you for making me recollect myself. Even the Almighty creates us, and then suffers himself to be revealed in us. We, motes, carry an immensity of susceptible, responsive existence. But for this we should never love or know Christ. In his boyhood, we are told, Christ waxed strong in spirit, was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. His earliest developments must have been of a peculiarly beautiful and striking kind. When he was twelve years old, being in company of some learned people, his questions and replies were of such a nature as to excite astonishment in all present, at the extent of his understanding. We have no authentic account of him from this until his thirtieth year; excepting that he resided with his father and pursued the family avocation, that of a carpenter.”

“What, do you know nothing about him when he was as old as I am, or as you are, when he was fifteen, or twenty, or twenty-five? In the dream I remember he said I must be like him, I must grow up with him. Had he no youth? Had he no inward sorrowful feelings as I have had?”

“There is one of the books of the New Testament of a peculiar character, and it contains some intimations respecting

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Christ, not found in the others. I will read a passage. ‘In the days of his flesh he offered up or poured forth prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, to him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared,’ or as it stands in the original for his piety. This, as I believe, points to a period of his life not recorded in the other histories, and should be assigned to that which you have mentioned, his youth.”

“I have no doubt of it,” said Margaret. “It describes exactly what I have been through. Did he suffer all we do?”

“Yes, his life and sufferings were archetypal of those of all his followers. ‘He suffered for us,’ says St. Peter, ‘leaving us an example that we should follow in his steps.’ ‘Rejoice,’ he says, ‘inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings.’ ”

“How near this brings Christ to me! It seems as if I had him now in my heart. He too suffered! How much there is in that word! and in this earnest, soul-deep way! I understand his sad tender look. Apollo killed Hyacinth by accident, and was very sorry. But there was no deep capable soul in Apollo, was there? I shall not think so much of him,—I interrupt you, Sir, go on.[”]

“He suffered all that any being can suffer; he was alone, unbefriended, unsympathized with, unaided; books gave him no satisfaction, teachers offered him no light. The current, swift and broad, of popular error and prejudice, he had to stem and turn, single-handed. He grew in knowledge, we read; the problems of Man, God and the Universe were given him to resolve. But he was heard for his piety, for his goodness. He became perfect through suffering. Supernatural, divine assistance was afforded him, and he conquered at last. At the age of thirty, when he entered what is called his public ministry, which is the chief subject of history, he encountered a severe temptation, such as all are liable to, and was enabled to vanquish it; he was tempted as we are. He was ever without sin, neither was guile found in his mouth, he was holy, harmless, undefiled. At times he was made indignant at the conduct of men, he was grieved at the hardness of their hearts, he groaned in sympathy with human distress, he wept over the follies of the race; he was persecuted by the great, and despised by his own kindred; his nearest friends deserted him, and one of his chosen disciples betrayed him; the great[n]ess of his views met only with bigotry, and the generosity of his heart was repelled by meanness; he carried the heavy wood on which he was crucified, and when brought as a malefactor

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to the place of execution, he was scourged and spit upon; once prostrated by the weight of his anguish, and from very heat [sic] of internal agony, he entreated that the bitter cup might be removed; and to add to all, in the extreme stage of dissolving life, for a moment his spiritual vision seemed to be dimmed, and he cried out, ‘O my God! why hast thou forsaken me?’ Such is a brief notice of his sufferings. Let me turn to other points—”

“Oh, Mr. Evelyn!” exclaimed Margaret, "how can you go on so! How cold you are! I cannot hear any more;” and from the posture she had maintained with her eyes fixed on the ground she fell with her face into her hands, and followed the act with an audible profusion of tears.

“Do forgive me, Miss Hart,” said Mr. Evelyn. “I have been so long familiar with this most affecting history, that I know it does not move me as it should.”

“I only know,” said Margaret, looking up with a forgiving smile gleaming through her tears, “that I feel it all through me, my heart swells like a gourd, and I ache in a strange way. My memory and my sensations seem to be alike agitated.”

“That must be sympathy!” replied Mr. Evelyn.

“What is that sympathy?” asked Margaret. “I never heard, methinks, the word before.”

“It is of Greek origin, and means feeling or suffering with another. It denotes mutual sensation, fellow-feeling; it implies also compassion, commiseration. It is defined a conformity in feeling, suffering or passion with another; also a participation in the condition or state of another; and also, if you are not tired of superenumeration, the quality or susceptibility of being affected by the affection of another, with feelings correspondent in kind.”

“Sympathy, sympathy!” said Margaret. “That is it. You understand me now!”

“yes, you sympathize with Christ. I can but deplore my own insensibility.”

“I will remember that word; I like to get a good word; it is like a tin cover put over a dish of potatoes, it keeps them so nice and warm. While you were speaking, I felt myself drawn out by some strange affinities to what you said, and when you came to the extreme sufferings of Christ, my sensations were something such as I had when you spoke about him the other day, and when I read that part of the Book, only so many things being brought together, I felt more. All the sadness I ever felt was revived, and burst within me anew.”

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“I was going to tell you,” continued Mr. Evelyn, “that in addition to, and despite all, Christ was very happy, and that in manner and matter beyond what most men can conceive of, which is another secret in his character. On the last day of his life, with the horrors of crucifixion impending, he said to his sorrowing friends, ‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.’ He desired, he says, that ‘his joy might remain with them;’ he prays that ‘his joy may be fulfilled in themselves!’ This I think will please you.”

“I believe I understand something of that too,” said Margaret.

“There are still other points,” pursued Mr. Evelyn. “I must speak of the object of Christ’s coming into the world, or what is known as the plan of Redemption by him. Man had fallen, if you know what that means.”

“I remember something the Primer says, and what Pa says when he is so intoxicated he can’t stand. ‘In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.’ ”

“I do not refer to that. Eve, of whom you will read in the Old Testament, ate an apple from an interdicted tree, which is commonly known as the Fall of Man[.] There is no authority for such a belief. Men fall, each man for himself, when they sin, that is, do wrong. At the time Christ appeared, St. Paul tells us, unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, lasciviousness, envyings, backbitings, murders, wrath, strife, seditions prevailed; men were inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without natural affection, without understanding, unholy, and so forth—”

“I shall laugh now,” said Margaret, “to hear all that sanctiloquence. I must have hit upon some of those word which nearly disgusted me with the book. I have heard Deacon Hadlock called a very holy man, and Pa laughed, and the Master blew his nose.”

“Those are words,” replied Mr. Evelyn, “in common and proper use when the translation was made to which I referred. Having disappeared from the popular tongue, and being retained only in ecclesiastical terminology, it is not surprising they sound strange to you. Rendered in modern English, holiness and righteousness, mean goodness, virtue, rectitude, or any high moral and religious excellence. As respects the other vices mentioned, we have now-a-days, as you well know, war, intemperance, slavery, unkindness; and then what go by the name of bigotry, intolerance, irreligion, pious frauds, persecution, simony, villany, burglary, violence, peculation, trea-

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son, perjury, kidnapping, piracy, scandal, ingratitude, intrigue, bribery, meanness, social inequality, governmental misrule, spirit of caste, oppression of labor, superciliousness, are abundant. These and similar things are what the Gospel denominates the works of the flesh, and renders unto tribulation and anguish, as evil doing. These are that whereby men break the Divine Law, and separate themselves from God. But the primary idea in this matter, the fundamental law of sin, the very essence of the Fall, consists in this, that men ceased to love. Love is the fulfilling of the law, it is the first and great command; it unites man with God and with himself. In the subsidency and departure of love, the moral system is revolutionized and completely disordered. The instinct of self-preservation is tortured into selfishness, the desire of excellence is inflamed into ambition, the sense of right becomes the author of innumerable wrong. The whole head is sick, the whole heart faint. Nature commences a burdensome contention with abuse, misdirection, absurdity, folly. It is ever Nature versus the Unnatural. The institutions and organizations of men, founded upon the new basis, partake of the general corruption, and only foster evils it is their design to prevent. Love casts out fear; in the absence of love, fear supercedes; hence aggression and violence, superstition and the doctrine of devils.”

“I never feared,” said Margaret; “was that because I loved?”

“Fortitude,” replied Mr. Evelyn, “springs as much from superiority to our enmities, as from superiority to our enemies. And this reminds me, that the first voluntary wrong act any man ever did was done through the absence of love. But here arises a new element. We were never created to do or to suffer voluntary wrong, and there is generated in consequence of such acts, the sense of injury. Hence come all retaliations. A most mournful fact in this matter is that dissonance and disorder are themselves sympathetic and reciprocal. Aversion reproduces aversion, and selfishness is answered by selfishness.”

“I have felt that towards Solomon Smith sometimes,” said Margaret. “I know he dislikes me, and I have been moved to dislike him, and I suppose I should if I did not feel what a ridiculous piece of business it is for one most anagogical puppet to be mad with another. And since you would also convince me he is geodic, what can I do, but abide, like the ants, whose hills through [sic] trodden upon are patiently renewed every morning.”

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“When man ceases to love, he is not only estranged from God, but the image of God within him is lost, the heavenly purity of his character is sullied, and the divine harmonies of his nature are discomposed.—But what is worst of all, we are educated to regard every man with suspicion and enmity. We are taught in our earliest years that men are by nature totally depraved, and since total depravity covers every form of sin and vice, we are in effect instructed to believe every man a villain, a thief, a murdered, at heart; as mean, selfish, and malicious, in his secret conscious purpose. This is the cardinal doctrine of what passes under the name of Christianity. It is annually enforced by hundreds of thousands of discourses from Bishops and Clergy in every part of Christendom. This consummates the Fall! Every youth under the operation of that sympathetic and reciprocal law, to which I adverted, enters life in the spirit of hostility. To receive injury he expects, to do an injury on the injurious, he thinks no harm. The evil which he is made to believe all others saturated with is reflected in his own bosom, and so, in spite of himself, he becomes depraved. There is something denominated love in the religious circles; I should call it Ecclesiastical love, because it is a figment of the Church, to distinguish it from Christian love, which has its origin in Christ, or Evangelical love founded on the Gospels. After making you believe all men totally depraved, our teachers endeavor to create in the breasts of the elect so termed, a pity for this depravity, and to inspire them with a desire to remove it, and this they call love, which is no love at all, since an important element in love is that it thinketh no evil, judges not. In what I have now said, you see not only the Fall of man generally, but also that second greater catastrophe, the Fall of the Church.”

“Here I must beg of you some more explanations; what do you mean by the Church?”

“I mean that great body of men, in all countries, of all denominations and sects, who profess Christianity, in their associate capacity, with their clergy, or leaders, and creeds, or articles of establishment.”

“Have the Church-members in the Village and those who groaned so at the Camp Meeting fallen?”

“yes, all. The effect of a corrupt Christianity, or as I should say of a fallen religion, is to perpetuate and augment itself; and now, with very few exceptions, all share in the common calamity. In the progress of decline, it became a matter of course, that the Church should change its standards of faith,

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or as we say in politics, adopt a new constitution. The Gospels or Evangelicons, by which are intended the personal biographies of Jesus, a book of Acts, and certain documents known as Epistles, are indeed accredited by all. But there arose certain things which have practically superseded the Gospels. These are known as Articles of the Council of Trent, of the church of England, of the Episcopal Church, of the Methodist Church; or as Creeds in our various churches. And now a man may believe the Gospels, and aim to conform to Christ, but he is not reckoned a Christian by the Catholics unless he assent to their Articles, or by the Protestants unless he subscribe their several Creeds. And they have carried this matter so far, as to condemn a man to everlasting perdition if he depart from these Gospel-substitutes. You may examine them and canvass their qualities, you will find no more Christianity in any one of them, than apple-juice in that stone.—But we must bear in mind that the world had fallen, before the Church fell; and it was to repair the effects of this first Fall, that Christ appeared on the Earth; let us return to him. He came to renew love, and reinstate men in a pure and happy condition.”

“But how could men love if they were as you describe them?”

“Man never wholly loses his capacity for loving. The natural susceptibility to goodness and truth can never be extinguished. Our powers are perverted, not destroyed. In fact, there have been holy, loving people in the world, true Christians, in all times, all countries, all Churches, among all religions, and all nations. Such have sometimes been kings, and occupied thrones, they have been outcasts from society, and buried in dungeons. Among princes and peasants, the affluent and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, aristocrats and plebeians, have appeared from time to time sincere and earnest lovers of God and man. Some sympathy with Christ exists in all minds, either latent or active.—

[“]Christ came on his high embassage with credentials of an authoritative and remarkable character. He was the brightness of the glory of God, and the express image of his person. Indeed, He and the Father were one. He received, he tell us, all power from God. He was baptized of the Holy Spirit. He was proclaimed the beloved and well-pleasing Son of God. He had gone through the experience of life, he had studied the human mind in its every phase, he understood the condition of men, and was prepared for the exigences of his lot. The

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thirty years of his life had not been spent in idleness. The effect of his address was electrical. Cities poured forth their population to him, and the country was deserted of its inhabitants gone in pursuit of him. The multitudes that thronged him were so great no house could contain them, and he was obliged to resort to the open air and spoke sometimes from a hill-side, sometimes from a boat moored by the shore. But, as I have intimated, his course was not without trial and obstacle. His success it was in part that contributed to his unhappiness, and precipitated his death. The common people heard him gladly; and this aroused the jealousies of the higher orders, who became his unrelenting antagonists. With covert insinuation and open assault they pursued him, and by their intrigues at last brought him to the Cross.—

[“]Let me speak of what he did, of the spirit of his action and the secret of his effect. Fresh and glowing he came from the bosom of Heaven. His heart yearned for man as for a brother. His sympathies were ardent, profuse and forth-putting. His hopes were high and bright. He spared himself neither privations, self-denials, inconveniences, disrepute or toil. He gave himself for our ransom, his whole self, body and mind, his thought, his sagacity, his activity, his health, his time, his knowledge, his popularity, his example, in fact all he had or was, even to life itself; he consented that by his stripes we should be healed, by his death we should life, and shed his blood to wash away our sins. He was gentle and tender, the bruised reed he would not break, or the smoking flax quench. Wherever arose one feeblest aspiration to God he was prepared to foment and cherish it. He made an open door of his compassionate feelings, and invited to himself all who labored and were heavy laden with sin and evil. He did not join in the common execrations of men, or approve their punitive severities; he saw something excellent in the vilest, he would win by love the most ruffianish, and the profligate he bade ‘Go, and sin no more.’ When he was reviled he reviled not again, and when he suffered, he threatened not. If he received an injury he did not retaliate, but committed himself, Peter says, ‘to him that judgeth righteously,’ that is, to God.

[“]And here we see the high moral perfection of Christ; he had no disciplined his spirit, he was so preoccupied with love, he was so magnanimously considerate, that enmity and aversion, which in most breasts give rise to corresponding qualities, in his excited only kindness and favor. Here also discovers itself his sublime Heroism, that he stood unshaken before all

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moral assaults, and faced undaunted every moral danger. Yet he was one of the strongest sensibilities; he wept like a child in pure sympathy with the distresses of his friends. He ‘took upon himself our infirmities,’ and if sensitiveness be an infirmity, he possessed it equally with the rest of us. The insane, those who chained, imprisoned and under keepers, and who in their paroxysms were ungovernable and dangerous, he approached freely, became very familiar with in love, and expelled the delusion that possessed them. The miraculous power with which he was endowed he employed in ways most instructive and beneficial. He gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, strength to the weak, and health to the sick. He did not consult what was expedient, but pursued what was right, and broke the popular Sabbath, an exceedingly bold act, and one that nearly cost him his life. Yet he was not harsh and sweeping in his movement; he was sparing of those feelings which are deep because they belong to our childhood, of convictions that are honest because they are all we possess, and of forms of public life to which a long antiquity imparts an air of reverence; and he would not see the Temple of the Jews mercenarily profaned. The spirit of the Goth and Vandal was most remote from Jesus. God called his Heavenly Father, and sought to create a near and filial relation with the Divinity. Man he called his brother, and in all he would find fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. Little children, what is unparalleled in all religions, he took in his arms and blessed. National, local, and geographical antipathies he sought to correct, and strove to unite all men on a common footing of brotherhood; and the Samaritans, who were regarded by his own people the Jews as the offscouring of all things, he demonstrated both by precept and example to be deserving a common friendship and love.”

“that is what Mr. Lovers said about the Freemasons,” interposed Margaret, “and Isabel and I were so smitten we determined to join them right off, and went to the Master, but he said they did not admit women.”

“Freemasonry,” replied Mr. Evelyn, “is a partial good. It recognizes every man as a brother who is a Mason, but Christ recognized every one as a brother who was a man. Woman shared equally in his sympathies, and was embraced by his love. The motto of Masonry, Faith, Hope and Charity, is a fragment borrowed from the Gospels. Freemasonry in some of our States excludes the black; Jew and Gentile, Barbarian and Scythian, male and female, bond and free, are one in Christ.—He was

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invidiously styled the Friend of Sinners, because he maintained a kindly intercourse with those whom the world despised; he dined with Pharisees, the chief men of the nation, that he might understand their position, and be better able to meet their wants. Certain leaders of the people were the only ones whom he seems ever to have addressed with severity, and that not from any hostility, but because they appeared to him wholly dissolute and abandoned; yet his language, in the original, savors more of a lament than a proscription. I cannot tell you all he did. In the expressive words of one of his disciples ‘he went about doing good.’ ”

“I thank you for what you have told me,” said Margaret. “Christ certainly seems to me the most wonderful being of whom I have ever heard. I have read about Plato, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Epaminondas, Diogenes, Seneca, Cicero, Cato, Numa, Confucius, Budha, [sic] Manco Capac, and others, who interested me a great deal, but nothing seemed like this.”

“I have not told you half,” replied Mr. Evelyn. “I have only spoken of what he did. How can I describe the greatest, most excelling part of him, what he was!—It is a small thing to say that he was affable, generous, honorable, brave, warm-hearted, truthful, discreet, wise, talented, disinterested, self-denying, patient, exemplary, temperate, consistent, charitable, industrious, frugal, hospitable, compassionate, and such like. He was meek and lowly in heart, and that with more incentives to arrogance and pride than ever fell to the lot of one individual; he was forbearing when a precept of his religion demanded an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; his affection was universal, while the sentiment and practice of his people condemned intercourse with other nations; he was self-relying in a community ruled by tradition and resting on prescription; he was pacific where war was sanctioned and encouraged; he was free in a world of bondage, he was spiritual in a world of forms, he was great in a world of littleness, he was a God in a world of men. His intrinsic nobility rose above meanness and subterfuge, and if he ever withheld all he thought, it was because he would not cast his pearls before swine. He was frank without bluntness, courteous without guile, familiar without vulgarity, liberal without licentiousness. He combined tenderness of feeling with rigor of principle, harmlessness with wisdom, simplicity with greatness, faith with works. He fellowshipped men without countenancing sin, he mingled in all classes of society without losing his singleness of character. In him were harmonized the opposite extremes of trust and in-

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dependence, forethought and impulse, plain common sense and the highest spirituality, theory and practice, intuition and reflection, cheerfulness and piety, toil and refinement, candor and enthusiasm; he was lord of lords and king of kings, and the companion of peasants and confidant of the obscure. He was eloquent and persuasive, yet his voice was not heard in the streets, he had no boisterous tones, no demagogical manner; he discoursed of the highest truths, yet his language was so simple, the people were astonished at the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth; God-possessed as he was, all-engrossing as was the object he had in view, and preoccupied as we must suppose his attention to have been, he was ever alive and fresh to the beauty and suggestiveness of nature, and the falling rain, a flying sparrow, the bursting wheat, the luxuriant mustard, the blooming vine, the evening twilight, the clouds of heaven, wells of water in the deserts of the East, oxen and sheep, a hen brooding over her chickens, all things about him left their impression in his heart, and became the illustrators of his doctrine. Considering the fervid Oriental imagination, the perspicuous chasteness and emphatic directness of his style, adapted to all climates and people, is not a little remarkable. Made in all things like his brethren, he was still one whom the offer of empire did not flatter, or a houseless night dishearten. His miraculous power he used unostentatiously and sparingly; and with no other intent than the good of man and the glory of God. You have asked if he was not Beautiful; he was superlatively so. In the translation it reads the Good Shepherd; but here and elsewhere in the original Gospels a term is employed by which the Greeks denoted the highest description of Beauty, and if the public mind were not debased, we should understand what is meant when it is said, he is the Beautiful Shepherd. Yet it is not mere beauty of color or features, but something from within that expresses itself in the face.”

“I remember,” said Margaret, “that look; his eyes were fair, his hair and countenance; but there was something behind, deeper, like music in the night, like the shining of a fish in the water, like a nasturtion [sic] flowering under its green leaves.”

“Something like that; it glowed in his look and illuminated his manner. The hidden source of his Beauty was Love; and once, as his Love increased, as he became more and more perfect through his sufferings, when his spirit had completely passed through the veil of his flesh, this inward Beauty shone out in a most wonderful way; and in connection with the

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splendor of God which answered to it at the moment, constitutes a striking scene known as the Transfiguration, which you will read. That same looked melted one wicked man to tears, and felled to the ground some brutal soldiers.”

“Do explain to me one thing; in one of my dreams were three girls, whom I knew to be Faith, Hope and Charity, because I had seen pictures of them. They created a fourth whom I called Beauty, because it could be nothing else but that. Yet you say Beauty comes from Love.”

“That Charity,” replied Mr. Evelyn, “is none other than Love. It is an evangelical term, and there again our translators committed a blunder when they rendered it Charity, who is none other than an alms-giver. But Love, as Christ would have it, is something entirely different, greater than Faith or Hope, the greatest of all things, and from it comes true Beauty. As David desired to behold the Beauty of the Lord, so that of Christ was not without its effect in the rapid spread of his doctrine; he was altogether lovely. The grace of your Venus, the symmetry of your Apollo, the colors of flowers, the brilliancy of gems, pass with me as nothing compared with the Moral Beauty of Christ. Apollo is a perfect material form; Christ a perfect moral soul. What Apollo is in the galleries of Art, Christ is in the galleries of Spirit. The Apollo comprises all the bodily excellences of men, Christ all their moral excellences. There is some worth, some virtue in every human being; in Christ these all united and made a harmonious whole. The Apollo, as I told you, represented the higher operations of Nature; Christ represented the higher operations of God; or as I might say, the Apollo represented the natural attributes of God, Christ his moral attributes. By as much as the statue of Apollo differs from the image of Brahma, by so much does Christ differ from Plato.”

“I have thought sometimes,” said Margaret, “of Regulus going back to the Carthaginians,—wasn’t that an unexampled act? of Codrus and Eubule sacrificing themselves for their country, of Epaminondas’s magnanimity, Arrius’s integrity, Evephenus’s truthfulness; and Oh! how I have wished to get away from Christians, sit down on a stump in the groves of the Academy and hear Plato preach, or squat with Diogenes in his tub and listen to his railings. When the Master laughs about people, and I ask him who is good, he says, ‘The Seven Wise men of Greece.’ I am sure there was some virtue in those days—yet—I know not what to say.”

“If you intend a comparison,” replied Mr. Evelyn, “it

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were easy to prove, if you put me upon that, that Christ differs from those to whom you have referred, toto cœlo, by the greatest possible distance. True, they possessed many virtues, but what you would glean from a whole antiquity seems to me aggregated in Christ. There may be some analogy between Christ and them, but no similitude. How this matter stands you will see when I have said all I shall say about him. Besides, regarding Regulus for instance, there seems to be no basis of comparison, they do not stand upon any common footing. Among fallen men there exist certain notions of rectitude, which go by the name of honor. It is a familiar saying, there is honor among thieves. [sic] The Romans and Carthaginians were fallen men, they made war upon each other, they were mutual pillagers, incendiaries, liars, assassins. Yet they retained this sentiment of honor. Regulus indeed, true to his word, went back, even when he knew it would cost him his life, a noble act; yet he was put to death by those whom he had just before been trying to kill, and possibly by the friends of those whom his own sword had pierced. Then in retaliation, the Carthaginians in Rome were by the public authority barbarously tortured.”

“I see, I see,” rejoined Margaret. “I did not think of comparison. Only those noble deeds detached from everything else, have lain in my mind, as things very beautiful. And while you were speaking they rose up vividly.”

“Christ’s was no dependent, distorted, or relative excellence,” continued Mr. Evelyn; “he was not conspicuous because he stood a head taller than his countrymen. He was excellent from the sole of his foot upwards. He was absolutely and rudimentally great, and would have appeared so equally alone, or with a million. He was un-fallen; he did not stand upon a platform of depravity, and exhibit how much excellence was compatible therewith. He stood upon a platform of pure goodness, and shows how beautiful it is. Regulus aided in carrying on the wicked purposes of the world, Christ contemplated regenerating the whole world. Epaminondas was made great by the vices of his countrymen, Christ from his own inherent Life. Plato maintained that fire is a pyramid tied to the earth by numbers; Christ is guilty of no philosophical absurdity, and what is not a little noticeable is this, that while he pursued the track of high, transcendent truth, he does not exhibit the slightest tinge of those metaphysical speculations that prevailed in his time. Plato travelled into Egypt in pursuit of knowledge, Christ into the region of

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himself. Plato borrows from the Brahmins. What absence of that anagogical, all-prevalent, all-winsome Brahminism in Christ! Socrates, the wise, beneficent and pious, lifted a bloody arm against his fellow men. Thales thanked God he was born a man, not a woman; a Greek, not a Barbarian. Solon ordered robbery to be punished with death. Anaxagoras, when he was old and poor, wrapped himself in his cloak, and resolved to die of hunger. These were all stars in the night time, worthy of admiration, and pleasant to go to sleep under. Christ seems to me a Morning Sun.”

“Keep to Christ, I can afford to forget all others, a while at least.”

“It is after all by approximations we know Christ, not by any comprehension. We must rest content to paddle about in the inlets of this great ocean. Consider his intellectual character—‘he knew what was in man,’ his biographer declares. He had not books or teachers; he worked at his father’s bench; he had never, as I believe, travelled farther than from Nazareth to Jerusalem, and his doctrine savors as little of Jewish hagiography as it does of the lore of the Rabbins; and well was it asked, ‘How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?’ He studied his own mysterious nature, his own manifold necessities, his own disposition; and by thus first knowing himself, he knew all men. Through himself he read the race. That love, which is the secret sap of the soul, by which our being enlarges itself, the faculties grow apace like the arms of an oak, the knots of thought are loosened, and a clear shining intellectual vision is attained, he possessed in unbounded measure. He did God’s will, and therefore knew of the doctrine. He grew in wisdom, and love added to his insight and fortified his reason. He was pure in heart, and thus saw God. Christ is perfectly adapted to man, as a well-adjusted piece of carpentry, as light to the eye, as air to the lungs, as musical notes to a musical ear. He, the prototypal Diapason of the race, studying himself, and man in himself, so strikes a chord that vibrates to every heart. Christ was a genius, one without compeer or parallel, a spiritual genius; not of the Homeric, Phydian, or Praxitelean order, but of his own most singular, most exalted kind. A sculptor, from the several beauties found in a collection of human bodies, gives you a beautiful material statue; Christ gives you a beautiful spirit. A sculptor from his own Ideal produces a beautiful Form; Christ from his Ideal produces beautiful Men. A sculptor sometimes succeeds in throwing

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passion, action, a soul into marble; Christ threw a soul into man. Art explains nature to man; Christ explained God to man. His power was strictly creative, as it was rare and benign. A spiritual landscape painted he, that no Claude could equal. Indeed such an impression had his disciples of his productive energy, that by him they say ‘the worlds were made.’ A new Heaven and a new Earth created he. Christ was, if we are willing to apply to him modern terms, both Art and an Artist. He was in himself the fairest, self-wrought, divine creation. Then patiently, studiously, lovingly, he went on to form new creations. In Love lies all Artistic energy; from the highest love proceeds the highest work. Praxiteles, in the composition of his Venus, is said to have been inspired by the presence of a beautiful female. Christ needed no other inspiration than what his own beautiful heart could furnish. But I must delay on this till I have said some other things.

“Having all to meagrely spoken of him in himself, I will speak of him in his relation to God. The Soul of the Universe entered into his soul, and was cherished there. The Spirit of God, as a dove, descended and rested upon him. In him dwelt the fulness of the Godhead bodily. He is called the only begotten Son of God. With a nature harmonious in all things with God, God himself sympathised, and he dwelt in God, and God in him. The Word became flesh. He was the Bread of God, he was a Vine of the Father’s planting; he was Emmanuel, God with us. But of what chiefly interests us, his relation to man, I will tell you. In this respect we learn much of Christ from his immediate successors, called Apostles, in whom is seen the Ideal of Christ as it were projected, and who manifest in effect what he held in purpose. ‘As he was, so are we in this world,’ they declare. This expresses the gist of the matter. Whatever he himself was he designed man to become. God sent him into the world, through him to restore his own fallen image. He was made perfect, that through his perfection we might become perfect. He would restore us by the infusion of himself, by re-uniting man with his spirit, his holiness, his love. His wish and prayer were that we together with him might become one with God. He announced himself the Way, the Truth, the Life. He did not teach, he was the Resurrection and the Life, and those who were dead in trespasses and sins heard his voice, came forth from their graves and lived. ‘Take up your Cross and follow me,’ were his words; ‘eat me,’ ‘ive on me.’ As he laid down his life for us, so are we directed to lay down

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our lives for the brethren. ‘I travail,’ says one, ‘till Christ be formed in you.’ ‘Christ in us’ is the Mystery of Revelation. ‘We die daily;’ ‘we live, yet not we, but Christ lives in us.’ As he forgave, so are we to forgive. The same mind that was in him is to be in us. As he suffered without the gate, so are we to go forth, bearing his reproach. We are crucified together with him. As he died to sin, so do we. As he was a sacrifice, so are we to offer our bodies living sacrifices. He suffered, leaving us an example. If we imitate his Passion, we shall reign with him. The Glory which God gave him, he says, he gives his disciples. Greater works than he did he declares they shall do. So perfect was this contemplated identity that he says, He who receives you receives me; and it was even declared, that he who sinned against a brother, sinned against Christ. This inner, received Christ, Paul declared, worked in him mightily. Through him, thus received, we escape the pollutions of the world. His blood, his doctrine, his spirit, his death, his whole self, washes away our sins. As he is holy, so we become holy. We are partakers of the divine nature. He is to us a Moral Revelation of God; as there is a Natural Revelation in the material creation. He embodies, and sets forth the Moral attributes of God. So he came into the world, as it were, suffused with the effulgence of God, raying out with love, benignity, paternal affection. He addressed himself to human sympathies, I mean to that power of which we were speaking, of reciprocating the feelings and passions of another; to that susceptibility of truth and goodness which exists in all minds. This was the medium whereby he would communicate himself to man. He relied upon the spirit of God to second and bless his labors. He would uncurb the well-spring of love that is found in every soul, and let its waters flow out over the earth. He begins with saying, ‘Repent,’ or in the original, Change your minds, Reflect upon yourselves. In the only discourse of any length which remains to us, he pronounces the Beatitudes, which I hope you will soon read. His object is the salvation of man; he is called the Saviour, because he shall save his people from their sins. In the revival, development, and extension of love, he would bring men to holiness; in becoming holy, sin is expelled and forgiven; in the expulsion of sin, Hell both as an experience and a destiny ceases, and Heaven is secure. On the deep, eternal foundations of Nature he would erect the superstructure of Grace. He came mature in preparation, flushing with hope, dextrous for attempt. He looked with

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loving eyes to behold loving eyes in return, he spake in kindness to be greeted with kindness, his warm heart would be met with warm hearts, his lofty purposes would kindle lofty purposes, his holy life shall stimulate a holy life, his gentle rebuke shall react in penitence, his pity shall arouse from despair. As by a conjuror’s touch he shall awaken the dead soul of the world. His Divine Spirit propagating itself, the image of God shall reappear in the face of man. He, the Heavenly Sculptor, works on rocky souls, and with his chisel fashions a form of immortal beauty. Thousands upon thousands heard his voice and lived. The stately Pharisee, the unknown rustic, and the despised foreigner became his converts. To his resurrection from sin and sense, fashion and fortune, multitudes strove to attain; many vied in his crucifixion; by the new and living way through the veil, that is, the flesh, the carnal and self-indulgent denied themselves to enter. A living, sympathetic response to Christ arose in John and Peter, Martha and Mary, and hosts. A splendid Ideal had he, which he called the Kingdom of Heaven; the reproduction of himself among men he spoke of as his coming again; the reappearance of Virtue and Peace, Truth and Righteousness, he described as the clouds of Heaven and Angels of God. Such was his Ideal of Truth, that while he says he himself judged no one, he expected that would judge the world, condemn sin, and extirpate it forever; and those who possessed this truth he speaks of as standing upon thrones. The ordinary magistracy of man would be supplanted, and all iniquity flee away before the brightness of his Advent. Such is the scheme of Redemption, so called; a scheme or plan, originating with God, executed by Christ, fostered by the Holy Spirit, energetic through human sympathies and affections; a method, as we are graphically told, ‘of redeeming unto Christ a peculiar people, zealous of good works,’ of instituting a ‘Church without spot or blemish,’ Let me now explain some of your troublesome ‘anagogics.’ The Atonement is the union of man with God through Christ by the reproduction of Christ in us; the Trinity is this trifold union, God, Christ and Man; Faith, a Saving or Evangelical Faith, or Believing in Christ, is taking Christ to yourself in this living and warm way, receiving his spirit into your spirit, his feelings into your feelings, his character into your character, whereby his whole self becomes grafted upon, and fused into yourself. Sanctification or Holiness is the subsidence and departure of sin in proportion as you thus receive Christ. Justification is God’s approval of you; Adoption is

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becoming a member of the great Divine family. This is Christianity! The regeneration of the world went on well for a while; the spirit and power of Christ reached many nations; Christism survived a few years after his death, when, alas! the dog returned to his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire. The Church began its Fall in the second century; Christians became degraded into the ways of the world, the forms of Judaism were revived, a false philosophy was introduced, and sacerdotal and imperial ambition finished the work. With Constantine in the fourth century, the union of the Cross and the Sword was complete, and in the name of Christ, Christian nations have gullied the earth with the blood they have split, and rent the skies with the yells of mutual massacre.”

“I must ask you one question,” said Margaret. “How came the first man to fall?”

“That question belongs to a subject of the most subtle nature, the prime origin of Evil, which I must take some other time to discuss.”

“I know you are tired, but let me ask you how these wicked things could be done in the name of Christ?”

“That name has been perpetuated, although so great was its abuse that in the seventh century a new sect arose who are now called Mohammedans. The solitary divine virtue immanent in Christ has ever found a response in the heart of humanity; and such was the original majestic effect of his name, that it has served as a convenient basis for delusion, error and sin, craft, avarice and pride, to raise their fabrics upon. Besides, the Gospels, handed down from age to age, have been held in nominal reverence.”

“You mentioned the name of Mary?”

“Yes, there were two Marys, one of whom was so affected by Christ, that she washed his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head.”

“You have said the last word; I have no more questions. Sweet sister Mary! my name too is Mary. Oh Tony, tony! Your profession is done in a way you little wotted of. Toupee, tyetop, pomatum, powder,—my hair goes for a towel to wipe Christ’s feet with. My handkerchief cannot hold my tears, they go to do Mary’s service too! I have not understood, Sir, all you have said, but it is enough, enough; I am filled to distention, I can bear no more. Apollo, Diana, Orpheus, are you scared? Have you hid under the bushes? Dear little Gods and Goddesses all, don’t be frightened,—Christ won’t

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hurt us. They have been beautiful and true to me, he will love them for that, won’t he, Mr. Evelyn? Christ shall preside over us, I will worship him. It is late, I thank you, I bless you, Mr. Evelyn, I must go, I would be alone. But the names must be changed. Bacchus Hill shall be Christ’s Hill, Orpheus’ Pond, his Pond. He shall be supreme; Head, Pond and all, shall henceforth be called Mons Christi.

CHAPTER IV.

Sundry Matters.

Another day found Mr. Evelyn at the Pond, and with Margaret, on the Head, now called Mons Christi.

“The name which this eminence has commonly borne,” said Mr. Evelyn, “together with the broad forest about, bring strongly, I may say, mournfully to recollection, the original population, the Indians, I mean.”

“What do you know about them?” asked Margaret.

“If we may rely on accounts written when they and the whites first met as friends, before a mutual hostility exasperated the judgment of the historian, and disordered the conduct if the natives, we shall form a pleasing picture of their character and condition. ‘These people,’ the New England Indians, say the first discoverers, ‘are exceeding courteous, gentle of disposition, and well-conditioned; for shape of body and lovely favor they excel all the people of America; of stature much higher than we. They are quick-eyed and steadfast in their looks, fearless of other’s harms, as intending none themselves; some of the meaner sort given to filching. Their women are fat and well-favored, and the men are very dutiful towards them. The wholesomeness and temperature of the climate doth argue them to be of a perfect constitution of body, active, strong, healthful and very witty, as sundry toys of theirs, very cunningly wrought, may easily witness.’ A friendly intercourse was had with them in those days, ‘and,’ say the whites, ‘in great love we parted.’ They are universally represented as kind-hearted, hospitable, grateful,

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truthful, simple, chaste. Property was never more secure than with them, bolts and bars they had none on their doors, and one vice that gangrenes Christian nations, was unknown amongst them, they never offered indignity to woman; they were also, in respect of drinks, a very temperate people. They possessed more virtues and fewer vices than Christians. But when in the process of time their young men were pirated into slavery, their population was thinned by the introduction of new immedicable diseases, intemperance shed its baneful influence, inflaming their passions and corrupting their morals, the mercenariness of border intercourse alternately cajoled and defrauded them, their several sovereignties were drawn into destructive collision, and their entire strength became the game of a foreign and unknown intrigue when the disposition of the settlers was more clearly ascertained, the pressure of civilized policy began to tighten about them, and they grew sensible of the value of what they had in their simplicity surrendered; and when in the contest that ensued between the two powers, they were driven to every resort, for the defence of their rights, the recovery of their empire and the preservation of existence itself, they assume a new attitude, as all men do in similar circumstances. They exhibit a melancholy instance of the reflex, reciprocal action of evil, agreeably to a law that we before talked about. And yet, if we would give to their revenge the name of reprisals, call their subtlety and cunning military manouvres, their hatred patriotic pride, if we would render their ferocity gallant behavior, record their cruelties as vigorous measures for disarming an enemy, and if instead of distinguishing them as savages, we should write them simply Americans, they would not appear very unlike other people of the globe.”

“It is not so bad a thing for me to be called an Indian after all,” said Margaret. “Yesterday I felt that I was a Christian, I don’t know but I had better remain an Indian.”

“I told you there was a difference between Ecclesiastical Christians and Evangelical Christians.”

“I would call myself a Christoid, a Christman, or anything. I wanted to tell you how glad I was I persuaded Nimrod, my brother, not to enlist, when they were about, awhile since, after soldiers to go against the Indians on the Ohio.”

“Poor Indians! We have driven them from their reserves in the West, and they may at last be compelled to take refuge in the forests of the Mississippi, or even to cross its waters for defence!”

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“I know one Indian,” said Margaret, “an old man, who comes here every year, and has come almost since I can remember. He lives in the blue yonder, on the sides of Umkiddin. He looks very old, as if he had seen a hundred years. Yet he is tall and straight, has fine muscular proportions, and passes the house with a [taut], Junonian step. He comes and sits up here. He makes his annual return in dry, yellow Autumn, when the frosts have fallen and the leaves change and drop. He is silent almost as Jupiter himself, and I cannot get much out of him. His expression is majestically sad. He sometimes brings a little girl with him, whom I have more than once induced to play with me. She says he is her grandfather. Here he sits in a sort of brown study, and muses over the water and wood. His hair is tied in a knot behind, and surmounted with a coronet of white heron’s feathers; he wears a robe of tambored deer-skin. I have seen him stop and listen to Chilion’s music, and once the girl gave me a pair of beaded moccasins, in return, I suppose, for some of my bread and cider.”

“He is probably a relic of the departed race, and comes to look upon the home of his ancestors. He may have lived hereabouts. A distinguished tribe of Indians formerly occupied the borders of the River. They always selected the most fertile and picturesque spots for their residences. And truly this was a goodly heritage of theirs. The Connecticut, the Merrimack, the Kennebec, the Penobscot were their noble rivers. The early voyagers whom I have quoted to you seem to have found the lost Eden. ‘This main,’ say they, ‘is the goodliest continent that we ever saw. The land is replenished with fair fields, and in them fragrant flowers, also meadows, and hedged in with stately groves, being furnished with brooks of sweet water, and large rivers.’ Their woods abounded in beasts of the chase, their rivers in valuable fish. They raised corn in their meadows, beans, peas, pumpkins and melons in their gardens. They had plums, cherries and grapes. The Indian children gathered strawberries in the Spring, and whortleberries in the Fall. Their maidens found violets, lilies-of-the-valley, and numerous flowers in the fields and forests. God they called by various names, Squanto, Kishton, Manitou, Areouski.”

“What a pity they should not be here still; and I—I would willingly be not.”

“They were not always at peace among themselves. The Maquas, an imperious race, did much harm to the others, and

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threatened universal supremacy. But they are gone. For reasons which we cannot well understand the red gives place to the white man. With their wigwams and canoes, their Gods and their pawwas, their government and titles, their language and manners, they have vanished forever. No trace of them remains, except in the names of a few localities. The way is cleared for a new population, a new religion, new society, new life. We wait to see what will be done. New England is swept and garnished. It is an unencumbered region.”

“Do I live in New England?”

“Yes, you are a New Englander.”

“Mehercule! I thought I lived anywhere between the sky and this most anagogical rotundity, and have been entertaining my later years with soap-bubbling a few Divinities—I will be serious, Mr. Evelyn, I do know the realities of things. But how the Gods chase one another over the world, Manitou, Jupiter, Jehovah! Are not New Englanders like Old Englanders, and Old Englanders like the Hindoos?”

“Men are all formed of one blood; yet there are specific differences. But God is one, and if New Englanders were pure in heart, as Christ says, they would see him, and that more truly perhaps than any other people. Yet many of them ascribe acts to their God which would disgrace a heathen deity. This results from the debased state of the public mind; or rather I should say from the debased doctrines of a fallen church which have been transmitted to us. Still in many respects we have an advantage over all other nations, which it is worth your while to think of.”

“I am glad to hear anything you say.”

“A good part of the Old World on its passage to the New was lost overboard. Our ancestors were very considerably cleansed by the dashing waters of the Atlantic. We have no monarchical supremacy, no hereditary prerogatives, no patent nobility, no Kings, and but few Bishops, by especial Divine interposition. The gift of God is with the virtuous and truthful. ‘All men are equal,’ is our favorite motto; and it is one of far-piercing, greatly humanizing, radically reforming force, though now but little understood. Many things that affect character and condition in the Old World, adulterate truth, perpetuate error, degrade society and life, sully the soul, and retard improvement, we have not. I intend to take a trip thither soon, and shall see what they are of and for.”

“Are you going away?”

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“My health and taste both require a sea-voyage, which I shall make as soon as Bonaparte and Mr. Pitt settle their differences a little.—There are no fairies in our meadows, and no elves to spirit away our children. Our wells are drugged by no saint, and of St. Winifred we have never heard. Our rivers harbor no nereids, they run on the Sabbath, and are all sacred alike, Mill Brook as the Ganges; and there is no reason why the Pond of Mons Christi should not become as celebrated as the Lake of Zurich. In the clefts of our rocks abide the souls of no heroes, no spirits of the departed inhabit our hills, nor are our mountains the seats of any Gods; Olympus, Sinai, Othus, Pico-Adam, Umkiddin, Washington, Monadnock, Holyoke, Ktaadin, it is all one. The Valley of the Housatonic is beautiful as the Vale of Tempe, or of Cashmere, and as oracular. We have no resorts for pilgrims, no shrines for the devout, no summits looking into Paradise. We have no traditions, legends, fables, and scarcely a history. Our galleries are no cenotaphic burial grounds of ages past; we have no Haddon Hall, or Raby Castle Kitchen; no chapels or abbeys, no broken arches, no castled crags. You find these woods as inspiring as those of Etruria or Mamre. Robin-Good-Fellow is unknown, and the Devil haunts our theology not our houses, and I see in the last edition of the Primer his tail is entirely abridged. No hideous Ghosts appear at cock-crowing. Witches have quite vanished, and omens from sneezing and itching must soon follow. At least in all these things there is a sensible change in the public mind. If the girls put wedding-cake under their pillows to dream upon, it is rather sport than magic. Astrology, Alchemy, Physiognomy and Necromancy are fast dying out, and Animal Magnetism has not ventured to cross the sea. January and May are not, as in the Old World, unlucky months, and Friday is rapidly losing its evil eye. At marriages the bride is not obliged to throw her shoe at the company; at births, we have no Ragged Shirt or Groaning Cheese; if a child die unbaptized, it is not thought to wander in woods and solitudes; at deaths our common people do not cover up the looking-glasses. Ecclesiastical Holidays have a precarious hold on New Englanders; curses are not denounced upon sinners, Ash Wednesday; we have no Whitsuntide given to bearbaiting, drunkenness and profligacy; Trinity Sunday our bachelors do not kiss our maidens three times in honor of that mystery; bread baked on Christmas eve turns mouldy as soon as any other; we are not obliged to use tansy to purge our stomachs of fish eaten

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in Lent. In our church-yards bodies are buried on the North as well as the South side. There is no virtue in the points of compass that our clergy repeat the Creed looking towards the East, and none in wood that we bow to the Altar. All these things our Fathers left behind in England, or they were brushed away by contact with the thick, spiny forests of America. Our atmosphere is transparent, unoccupied, empty from the bottom of our wells to the zenith, and throughout the entire horizontal plane. It has no superstitious inhabitancy, no darkening prevalence, no vague magistracy, no Manichean bisection. As you say, Manitou is gone, and with due courtesy to your Pantheon, the One God supervenes; there is no Intermediation but Christ, and for man, the bars are let down. Our globe stands on no elephant, but swings clear in open boundless space; it is trammeled by no Northern Snake, and circumvented by no Oriental Sea of Milk. We have no Hindoo Caste, and Negro Slavery is virtually extinct in New England. Education is universally encouraged, and Freedom of Opinion tolerated.”

“So you think New Englanders are the best people on the Earth?”

“I think they might become such; or rather I think they might lead the August Procession of the race to Human Perfectibility; that here might be revealed the Coming of the Day of the Lord, wherein the old Heavens of sin and error should be dissolved, and a New Heavens and New Earth be established, wherein dwelleth righteousness. I see nothing to prevent them reassuming the old Hyperionic type, rising head and shoulders to the clouds, crowding out Jupiter and mars, Diana and Venus, being filled, as the Apostle says, with all the fulness [sic] of God, reaching the stature of perfect men in Christ Jesus, and reimpressing upon the world the lost image of its Maker. New England! my birth-place, my chosen pilgrimage, I love it. I love its earth and its sky, and the souls of its people. They, the Unconquerable, could alone subdue its ruggedness, and they are alone worthy to enjoy its amenities. I love the old folks and the children; I love the enterprise of its youth and honorable toil of its manhood. I love its snows and its grass, its hickory fires and its cornbread. The seeds of infinite good, of eternal truth, are already sown in many minds; these might germinate in another generation, and in the third bear fruit. High Calculation, which is only the symbol of a higher Moral Sense, is even now at work; and they are ripping up the earth for a

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Canal from Worcester to Providence; and what shall next be done, who knows. Only, if love lay at the heart of all things, thought and action, what might not be! But how stint we ourselves! Politics, society, life, the church, love, aim, what are they all!”

“Why don’t you lead off yourself in this matter? You shall be a Hero, the days of Chivalry shall be renewed.”

“I! I have neither health nor spirit. I only perceive, I only deplore.”

“Really, we must go to the Widow’s without delay, and get some of the Nommernisstortumbug, that will cure you. Speaking of the Widow, I think of Rose, poor Rose. I asked her to come with me and see you to-day; she hesitated, and declined. I told her you would speak better to her than anybody else. She shook her head mournfully, and said, ‘Only you, Margaret, only you!’ What can we do for her?”

“I do not know, I am sure, I have turned over the account you gave me of her. I am persuaded she has some chord that could be reached, some secret self to be disclosed.”

“Can you send me for no hammer that will break her to pieces?”

“Christ might reach her, if nothing else.”

“Oh no. She has a perfect horror of that name. She hates it, worse than I did; I only laughed at it, she seems to loathe it inwardly. Said I, ‘Rose, Christ loves you, he suffered for you, can’t you have faith in him?’—‘Gracious Heavens!’ she broke out[,] ‘if you won’t kill me, Margaret, don’t speak of that,’ and so shut my mouth, and I could say no more.”

“I think I see how it is; I believe I understand the difficulty, so far at least as that demonstration is concerned.”

“I can very well understand how a person might not like the name of Christ, how it might offend one; but that it should give a shuddering pain is quite beyond my comprehension.”

“Be good and kind to Rose, and she may yet listen to you.”

“I have borne her deep in my heart, I have felt most strange motions towards her, I am ready to melt and flow into her, and much sorrowful feeling she gives me, and I am willing to have for her.”

“Persevere, and I am confident she will yield. I might say many things of what I think about her, but perhaps it were of no use. I am willing to leave her with you, though if it were

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in my power I should be glad to see her. When shall I find you at leisure again?”

“To-morrow I must spin, next day help Chilion on his baskets; then is Sunday, we do not work that day, I wish you would come up then.”

“I go to Church.”

“Alackaday! so you do. I quite forgot you belong to the fallen race!”

“I told you all had some excellences; and if you would come and hear Parson Welles you might think so too. He is serious-minded, his prayers are earnest, his sermons have some good sense, and the place itself is grateful to one’s spiritual feelings. Perhaps in no one more than in him would you see the struggle that goes on between Nature and the Unnatural. Nor is it easy to overcome the effect of our education so but that old erroneous influences seem to minister to one’s spiritual peace, and I find many things in going to Meeting very pleasant.”

“No, it is not,” replied Margaret laughing, “and I find much pleasure in staying at home.”

“Monday, I may see you?”

“Yes, after washing. Besides you have left me enough for a three days’ rumination, at least.”

CHAPTER V.

Mr. Evelyn Unexpectedly Detained.—Margaret Goes After Him, is Absent from Home Some Weeks.—He Returns with Her to the Pond, in the Fall.—When Also Rose Makes Herself Companionable.

Monday came, but not Mr. Evelyn, nor did the whole week bring him. His absence can be accounted for. He exhibited symptoms of the Small Pox, a disease the scourge and terror of the age. He was from a town on the sea-board where the infection raged. The people of Livingston immediately took the alarm, town meetings were held, a Pock House was established, Mr. Evelyn conveyed thither, and a general beating up for patients was had throughout the town. All who had

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been exposed were ordered to the Hospital, and candidates for the disease universally were taken thither. This number was made up chiefly of youths of both sexes. Margaret and Obed were both sent for; Rose escaped by secreting herself in the woods.

The house selected for the terrible ordeal, was that known as Col. Welch’s, the Tory absentee, now used as a Poor House, a large building, occupying a commanding site on the west side of the village, north of Deacon Hadlock’s Pasture, and detached from the highway by a deep front yard, which was once ornamented with gravel walks and flower-beds, but of late years had been abandoned to the pleasure of swine. In the rear the grounds extended a long distance, also intersected by walks, shaded by a grove of forest trees, and rising to an eminence where were the ruins of a Summer-house. Above the ridge of the Hospital, on a long pole, waved a blood-red flag, an admonition to all of the fearful disease that was there doing its work. Guards were set about the premises to prevent all unliscensed ingress or departure.

Margaret, having been brought from home by the authorities of the town, was shut in a room with several other young ladies then and there awaiting the process of inoculation by Dr. Spoor. Among the number she found Isabel Weeks, who, at the instance of the latter, introduced her to Susan Morgridge. It being supposed that Margaret and Susan might have received the disease in the natural way, they two were for a few days consigned to a room by themselves. Margaret’s first inquiries related to Mr. Evelyn, who the nurse told her was very sick in the male apartment, but not in apparent danger; Susan supplied her with other particulars respecting her cousin, for whom she expressed the highest esteem, and it might have been a little flattering to Margaret to know how kindly he had spoken of her in the Judge’s family. Susan, sobered by the recent death of her mother, serious by nature, and of a retiring disposition, was yet most excellent company for Margaret. She possessed amiability and good sense, sweetness and strength, cultivated manners and great delicacy of sentiment, and she was not one to condemn all that she could not approve. For the first time in her life, Margaret had a bed-fellow, if we except Bull. No symptoms of the natural disease appearing, and the virus with which they were charged begin[n]ing to develop itself, the enviable privilege of solitude, which these two enjoyed, was disturbed, and they were reduced to the common lot, and became occupants of a chamber where

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were four beds, alternatingly from five to eight patients, three or four nurses, and a stagnant atmosphere—ventilation being prohibited for fear of taking cold. It boots not to describe that Middle Passage of the Pock House, or follow from day to day the progress of a dreadful disorder;—the primary dullness and lassitude, succeeded by fever and ague, the hot, blinding eruption, sharp, darting pains, the swollen face, the sore throat, tiresome sleep, haunted dreams, convulsions, delirium, blindness; a noisome air, slow haggard midnights, inflamed, nettlesome noontides; jalap and the lancet; saffron and marygold infusions, rum and brandy, applied to “throw the eruption from the heart;” the body half roasted with blisters to keep the disease from “striking in.” Thanks to Lady Mary Wortley Montague and the Turks for our lives indeed, and thanks to Dr. Jenner and the cows for our comfort! The aspect of the town was suddenly transformed, the streets were comparatively deserted, the people wore their lengthened and distressful, and stealthlike was all intercourse. Prayers multiplied for the sick, sermons were preached on the vanity of life. It is a wonder that so many of the number returned again to their homes, in fact only two died, one a boy, from the North Part of the town; the other, a friend of Margaret’s, and sister of Isabel’s, Helen Weeks. Unshriven unblest, she died; at midnight, without prayer, or funeral, or passing bell, was she buried; by the hands of the sexton, Deacon Ramsdill, and her own father and mother, was she laid in the grave, which closed over one as pure in heart and guileless in life as this world often produces.

She, whose especial province was the health of the people, the Widow Wright, could not fail to bestir herself on an occasion like the present. In Rose’s sequestration she aided, Obed’s being taken to the Hospital she opposed, and however hostile to the practice of the Faculty, she still felt it incumbent upon her to do something. Accordingly, laden with sundry medicaments, she presented herself one morning at the gate of the infected grounds. Here presided Captain Eliashib Tuck, with a staff instead of a firelock—a long black Pole barbed with iron, and formerly used by tythingmen for the admonition of unruly children on the Sabbath—which he carried with the precision of a soldier on guard, pacing to and fro, but raised in a manner somewhat threatening, when he observed the sedulous lady trying to open the gate.

“Marcy on us, Cappen!” exclaimed the Widow,[ “]ye wouldn’t spile a woman’s gear and forsan break her head,

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for deuin a dight of good, would ye, bein it was Sabber day?”

“There are the General Orders,” replied the Captain with sturdy brevity.

On a post the Leech read as follows:—

“1. No person is allowed to enter or leave the grounds without permission. 2. If a person cause the spread of the disease, he or she shall be fined fifty pounds. 3. If any person be inoculated in any other place than the Hospital, he shall pay forty pounds. 4. No Paper Money to be carried into the building under penalty of ten pounds.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” snickered out the woman. “More afeerd of paper money, than they are of the Doctor’s knife. I kalkilate, Cappen, if they’d a kept paper money out of the War, there wouldn’t have been quite so many broke doun.”

“I was in the War,” rejoined the Captain, “and I was afraid neither of paper money nor British swords. I consider myself honored by my losses. I am no gambler. Where is your countersign, Ma’am? You can pass with a ticket, not without.”

“Ra’aly, you look as if you Cappen Granded it over all creation, and the Hospital besides. The Doctor has got um all penned up here. He daren’t let um come out and have fair play. Won’t ye let a woman see her boy?”

“The countersign, Ma’am.”

“They’ll kill him with jollup and rhubarb. They’ll make a shadder of him, and won’t leave enough teu bury him by.”

“I know,” rejoined the Captain, “neither men nor women, mothers nor children, judges nor ministers. Have you never heard, when I stood sentry before General Washington’s tent, then only a raw recruit, and the Old Hero himself rode up in his carriage, I challenged him. ‘Who goes there?’ said I[.] ‘General Washington,’ said he, looking from the window. ‘I don’t know General Washington,’ said I. ‘What is the countersign?’ and he had to give it before he could pass one inch.”

“You had better a stuck teu the Camp, old feller, and gone out agin the Injins, and not be here a meddlin’ with the sientifikals, and a killin’ poor folk’s children.”

The Captain, who stood too much on his dignity to take an affront, replied that she might go to Mr. Adolphus Hadlock’s, where perhaps her services would be valued. “They are building a Smoke House there,” said he, “and perhaps Aunt Dolphy will let you pass without the word. The whole family is in panics.”

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On this cue, the Widow sidled off up the road, and going partly by cultivated grounds and partly through the forest, a short distance this side of Mr. Hadlock’s house, she met that gentleman himself, flurrying in the way, with a long pole which he flourished with a wild menace, evidently prepared to dispute the passage with her[.]

“Do you come from the infected precincts?” asked he with earnest precipitancy, and speaking with what clearness his nostrils stuffed with sundry herbs would allow. “Aristophanes, Ethelbert! Ho, here, Holdup, knave! Urania Bathsheba, my little daughter, run back, run for your life!”

“I han’t been nigh the smittlish consarn,” said the Leech. “Cock on a hoop! Don’t be so adradd. I wouldn’t tech it sooner a cow’d eat elder blows. I’ve come up teu help ye. What have you got in yer nose?”

“Rue and wormwood—don’t come near—our lives depend on it. Do, Sophronisba, my dear wife, do supply Holdup, his has fallen to the ground. Never mind if he is our servant, the safety of the whole of our darling family is at stake.”

“I’ve got the stuff in my pocket,” said the Leech, “the gennewine sientifikals, what ’ll keep off the pest, and cure it when it comes. I am as sound as a new born baby. Let us see what you are deuin here.”

“These are direful days, Mistress Wright,” responded Mr. Hadlock. “Our son Socrates, and Purintha Cappadocia our daughter dear, are already under treatment at the Hospital; and as the law allows and our duty enjoins, we are aiming to prevent the spread of the miasm. We have erected a fumitory for the more complete cleansing of all that pass this way.—Cecilia Rebecca, my dear, do go back and continue your prayers—”

“I can’t find it, Papa.”

“That on The Visitation of the Sick.”

“Where, Papa, where is it?”

“Take the first you come to, one is as good as another in such a case as this; run child.—Don’t approach too near the good lady, Aristophanes, lest your garments should brush. Keep the rags burning, my dear Ethelbert.”

“Don’t be so despit skeered, Mr. Hadlock,” said the Widow. “Bein I was steeped in their pus and pizens, I tell ye, I can keep ye clear and wholesome, as ye was born.”

At the edge of the woods, a rude structure had been hastily thrown up, of staddles interlaced with boughs, and within were quantities of water, soap, salt and vinegar. Over a heap of char-

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coal and cobs, the Widow beheld a woman crouched, in a tattered and begrimed long-short, with the collar open exposing a dingy neck and broad shoulders, and blowing lustily at the fire which she was striving to kindle with her breath.

“How d’y’e?—Sibyl, for sartain,” said the Leech. “Wal if you an’t here, pon my soul!”

“How’s the Widder? I am glad you’ve come,” responded Sibyl Radney, for it was she, intermitting her labors, and looking up.

“Get the pile ignited,[”] exclaimed Mr. Hadlock; “we can’t lose any time.”

“Then you must have some fire,” replied Sibyl; “I can’t make a puss out of a sow’s ear, nor light cobs with my wind-wipe, death or no death.”

“Where is the tinder-box. I thought you had struck a fire. Haste, Holdup, knave, get some fresh coals. Havn’t you been for the brimstone yet, Ethelbert, my son?”

“You told me to keep the rags burning, Papa[.]”

“Never mind what I told you, run to Deacon Penrose’s, but don’t, for dear Heaven’s sake, go by the road, speed down across the woods.”

“A touch case, I can tell you, Miss Wright,” said Sibyl, rising to her feet. “But we mean to stop the plague. We are going to catch every scrag that comes this way from the Pest, and soak, smoke, salt and rub them, till there isn’t a hang-nail of the pock left. They won’t get off so easy as the Colonel did. The law gives it and we’ll do it. Here comes Miss Dunlap, and Miss Pottle and Comfort.”

“We are all in a toss in our neighborhood,” said Mistress Pottle. “I got Comfort to come down with me, and see how things were doing. Sylvina is there, if she an’t dead before this.”

“We heard there was seventeen dead up to yesterday,” said Mistress Dunlap, “and four to be buried to-night; we havn’t had a word from our Myra since they took her down.”

“It’s cruel skeersom about there, I knows,” said the Widow. “I jest kum up, and I had a tight rub teu git by. I kalkilate my son Obed is lying stone dead there now.”

“Lord have mercy!” exclaimed Mistress Pottle. “Comfort, you go to felling trees across the way.”

“They are killin’ um with the lancet, and starvin’ um to death with milk-sops,” said the Widow. “Here’s white cohush, it ’ll bring out the whelk in less than no time; brooklime will break any fever. There’s lavender and horse-mint,

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and calamus to burn when you go inteu the room. I’ve got um here, but they won’t let me go nigh um.”

“Halloo!” shouted Comfort Pottle, who was busy cutting the trees. “There’s Soc. coming up the road!”

“Ah Socrates, my dear son!” cried the father, seizing a pole, and rushing forwards, followed by the others. “How,—why—what has happened?—My dear Triandaphelda Ada, don’t be alarmed—don’t come near, my dear son—What shall we do—Are you well?—Holdup, knave, where is your crow-bar?—Don’t cry, Sophronisba, my—he is upon us—my dear son—we shall all be killed!”—

“I wasn’t going to stay any longer,” replied the boy, who with no other vestment than his shirt, was now rapidly approaching the party. “It didn’t take. I stole off through the barn and got into the woods. I havn’t had any thing but sour whey and barley water this week. If I could get the smell of mother’s buttery, the doctor shouldn’t know me for one month.”

“Bide back,” said Comfort, striking forwards with his axe.

“Don’t come nigh me,” said Holdup, clenching his crow-bar.

“He ’ll get well combed before he gets through this,” said Sibyl Radney, advancing with a long branch of a tree, which she shook in her brawny arms.

“Let us all retreat a little,” said Mr. Hadlock, “and form with our several instruments a line both of offence and defence, along which, Socrates, do you proceed into the Fumitory. It is a case, my dear son, in which our parental feelings must yield for a moment to our severer judgment; but the conflict will soon be over. When you are in take off your shirt, and lay it in the tub of water; and so dispose yourself over the burning heap that the smoke will reach your whole body.” The boy obedient to the paternal wishes entered the lodge, where he was presently followed by his parents and some of the women. Meanwhile, being missed from the Hospital, two or three servants were despatched for him. Hastening up the road, and dispersing whatever force was opposed to them, they broke in without ceremony upon the process the runaway at the moment was undergoing. Four women, one at each extremity, held him face downwards over the fumes of coal, sulphur, lavender and calamus, while the Widow was rubbing his back with vinegar. Mr. Hadlock stood a suitable distance from the tub stirring the shirt with a long pole. As the pursuers entered, this gentleman, uttering a faint scream, bolted

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through the sides of the hatch. At the cost of a sharp but short altercation with the women, the boy was delivered up, and duly appareled, returned to the Hospital;—whither, as some of these good mothers are going, let us also betake ourselves.

These ladies from the smoke-house encountered some other elderly women who, with a slow step and solemn air, came up the West Street; among whom were Mistresses Whiston, Joy, Hoag, Ravel and Brent, whose names have already been mentioned.

“Can’t any of us be admitted?” enquired Mistress Whiston of Captain Tuck.

“Not if the Great Queen Catherine herself should apply on her knees before me,” replied the trusty warden.

“Do you know how our little Joan is doing?” said the lady.

“None I believe are considered dangerous since the death of Helen Weeks,” rejoined the Captain.

“Poor Miss Weeks!” ejaculated Mistress Whiston.

“Mournful times these!” added Mistress Joy.

“It is most as bad as the Throat Distemper that was round when I was a gal,” said one of the ladies; “there were more dead than alive.”

“So it was in the Rising of the Lights,” said another.

“What is that to the Camp Fever, we had in the War!” echoed the Captain. “There were two thousand sick at one time, and never a quarter recovered; and we had to march, sick or well, alive or dead.”

“That tells how our Luke came to his end,” said Mistress Dunlap.

“And how glorious it was to die for one’s country!” said the Captain.

“That was nothing to the Great Earthquake when I was a gal, and lived to the Bay,” said Mistress Joy. “The spindle and vane on Funnel Hall was blown down, chimblys were cracked, brick and tile choked up the streets. It sounded as if God Almighty’s chariot was trundling over the pavements in Old Marlboro.”

“That was the same year one of the niggers in Kidderminster cut his master and mistresses’ throat, as I have heard Ma’am tell,[”] said Sibyl Radney.

“No it was four year arter,” said an elderly lady, “it was the same year our Prudence was born, and that was just four year arter the Earthquake.—I can remember an old Indian slave we had at our house, one of the Nipmucks, and what a

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time we had of it. Daddy kept him chained nights, but he broke away, and killed one of the men that was sent arter him; and he was hung the next week. I remember Dad’s saying, ‘there goes twenty pounds.’ But he wouldn’t work, and wan’t worth his hide.”

“The Indians and Negroes never did us much good,” said Mistress Whiston; “and I am glad there are going to be no more slaves.”

“I kalkilate as much,” said the Widow, “if you had seen the niggers burnt alive down teu York, nigh fifty of um, for bringing in the Papists. My Granther was on the spot and saw it all, and said it did his heart good teu see the fat fry out of the sarcy dogs.”

“I remember,” said the Widow Brent, who was a little deaf, “milking a cow a whole winter for a half a yard of ribbin.”

“I remember,” said Mistress Ravel, “the Great Hog, up in Dunwich, that hefted nigh twenty score.”

“Morrow to ye, Good Wives. Are you not running some risk here?” said a voice behind them, that of Deacon Hadlock, whose approach the ladies, diverted by memories of other days, and transported to scenes of legendary horror, had not perceived.

“I don’t know but we are a matter exposed,” said Mistress Whiston.

“I had as lief go right inteu it arm’s length,” said the Leech.

“The danger is that you might carry it away in your clothes,” answered the Deacon. “I have no business here, but I saw ye all, and I thought I would just ride up and give ye a friendly warning.”

while these ladies disperse it is safe for the rest of us to remain; and by methods which the vigilance of Captain Tuck cannot counteract we will enter the forbidden spot.

Favored by a constitution, which often in life stood her in hand, Margaret has been able to carry forward her disease more rapidly than many others, and is so far recovered as to have passed from the sick chamber through the “Cleansing Apartment,” and is now almost sole occupant of the “Clean Room.” Glad enough is she to exchange mint-tea and jalap for water-gruel and milk-porridge. She goes out into the open air. The aspect of things has changed during her confinement. The verdure of nature shows in gold and crimson colors. The frosts have fallen, and the flowers are drooping, Summer is giving place to Autumn. The fresh air of the

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heavens and the free tread of the earth were an exhilaration. But when she saw a morning glory with its black, blistered leaves, heard the feeble notes of the birds wailing a farewell to our northern latitudes, and the mournful underflowing murmurs of the crickets that so betoken a fading season; and especially when she thought of Helen Weeks, whose death occurred in the same chamber with her, but at a time when she could be hardly conscious of what transpired, she was seized with a deep melancholy, so that, in her present debilitated state, she well night fainted, and staggering with weakness and a burdensome sense of evil, she went back to the house. Sorrow for the death of a friend she never before experienced, nor was she in a condition the most apt for meeting it. She sank in a chair by the window, turned her face from all, and her thoughts wandered confusedly, painfully, darkly, over the trees, the landscape, the sky, God and the Universe. Susan Morgridge and Isabel Weeks were yet in the sick-room, the latter at a point of dangerous reduction, so much so that her convalescence was for some months delayed. Of Mr. Evelyn she heard he had passed the hands of the cleansers, but she saw nothing of him. To the Clean ones, with whom she was now associated, she might have addressed herself, but they were strangers to her, and the freedom and spirits which most of them seemed to enjoy, rendered the weight in her feelings more intolerable, and she was constrained to keep by herself, and spent a good part of two days in solitary reverie by the window. On the third day she had the good fortune to see Mr. Evelyn walking in the garden, cloaked and muffled, and tears in fresh large drops rose into her eyes. Presently he sent by one of the attendants a summons to herself, which she could not but obey. Clearing her eyes, throwing on shawl and bonnet, she went out. Her face, ordinarily animated with the colors of health and hope, was stricken and sorrowful, and bore evident traces of sickness and disappointment; nor was the appearance of Mr. Evelyn, altogether dissimilar. He took her hand cordially, and spoke to her soothingly. “Helen,” said he, “has indeed gone from us, as all must go at last. But in Christ, we never die. By the Atonement are we immortal. Where he is there shall we be. Possessed of him, death has no terror for us, or power over us. The trees fade to renew themselves.”

“I have felt,” said she, “that I should never wish to see another summer, and all beautiful human faces seemed hidden from me forever. But I hope these feelings will not last always.”

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“Beauty and Pureness,” said he, “are everlasting; they are of God and can never die. They may for a moment be obscured, but they shall reappear in brighter lustre. Angels have charge over them that they dash not their foot against a stone. Let us turn to the pleasant face of God in what is about us.”

“I wish we were at the Pond, how beautiful it is there in the Fall! You see the woods that go up there metamorphosed into great marygolds filled in here and there with a cardinal flower.”

“They remind one of a flame of fire, still burning, but not consumed, like the Bush of which the Bible speaks. They bring to my recollection an army of staff-officers with crimson coats on roan steeds. Would that all blood were as innocent as that which yonder straggling trooper of a red-maple is dyed with! They call up the solemn convocations of our old fashioned Judges in their scarlet robes.”

“You confound me by such things. I should not like to look upon trees in that ‘stand-point;’ that savors only of trainings, rum-drinking and jails. I would rather see in them the sunsetting, and my dream-clouds.”

“I love the Beautiful wherever I see it, and perhaps sometimes see it where I should not. But we are not in strength for any disquisitions of this sort. Let us enjoy without reason. How long do they keep you here, Miss Hart?”

“I am sure I don’t know. I wish I could go home to-day, but the Committee are very exact, and they may keep me a month.”

“Dr. Spoor thinks I may be allowed to go day after to-morrow, and I will intercede with him to let you off. I am anxious to return home, having already been delayed beyond my time, as I must sail so soon.”

“I did not know as you had any home. If I had thought anything about it, I should have imagined you dropped right out of the sky.”

“I have a home indeed, with a holy mother.”

“I will not laugh, because I cannot laugh. You are so soon away! I am tired, had we not better return to our rooms?”

The extensive grounds of Col. Welch were the allotted limits of the convalescing patients. The next day Margaret and Mr. Evelyn went out together; they met others like themselves revelling in their tethered liberties, and enjoying the sumptuousness of the hour and the place. Conventional dis-

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tinctions and proprieties were foregone in this general invalid exuberance, and no surmises were raised or words uttered while the feeble Indian strolled arm in arm with the feeble relative of the Judge. An early frost had smitten the vegetation, but the sun was warm and the air bland. The grove-thridding walks they pursued, now looking out upon the village, the salmon-colored woods on the North of the Green, and the russet mountains beyond the River, now immersed in the mellow golden trees. They felt the glow of returning health and invigorated frames, and were grateful for deliverances often delayed and sometimes never afforded. Red squirrels chased one another over the yellow leaves that covered the ground, and along the branches of the trees, yelping and chattering, like king-fishers. Fox-colored sparrows, titmice, nuthatches, snow-birds, and the great golden-winged wood-pecker vied in their notes, and seemed resolved on merriment while the season lasted. They reached the knoll on which the old Summer-house stood; by broken steps they ascended, and on a broken seat they sat down.

“Have you strength enough to sing to me?” said Mr. Evelyn.

“I will sing you ‘To Mary in Heaven.’ ” said Margaret.

The next morning two horses were brought to the gate, one assigned to Margaret, while Mr. Evelyn mounted the other.

“Are you going up with me?” said Margaret.

“I brought you down,” replied Mr. Evelyn, “and it is but fair I should see you back.”

They went through the South Street, entered the Brandon road, and ascended the long steep hill Margaret had formerly climbed on her way to Mr. Wharfield’s. The Indian Summer had just begun, a soft haze pervaded the atmosphere, and settled like a thin grey cloud on the horizon; there was a delicious, sweet, sleep-like feeling created by all things about, both inspiring and tranquillizing. Above, and as it were close to them, the sky rested on red trees and green grass; Mill Brook dashed and tinkled below as through a bed of roses. Margaret’s horse proved mettlesome, and she reached the summit-level before Mr. Evelyn.

“I should have a magnificent scene,” said she, turning her horse and waiting for him, as he came up, “even if I had to see it all alone. You yourself are a live man and horse in a field of embroidery such as Mrs. Beach can’t equal, and she is said to be the most skilful needle-worker in town.”

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“Look at your own Mons Christi,” said he. “All the looms of the Gobelins could not garnish it so! There is a solitary maple, like a flamingo on its nest of green cedars and laurels.”

“How hot those yellow witch-hazles look under the tall trees, if I were cold I would go in there; and yonder the dark forest is burning with glowworms and tapers, if I were gloomy I would go in there. I wish, Mr. Evelyn, you were going to stay a little longer in Livingston. See that hemlock so covered with grey moss, and there is a row of red trees peeping out from green hemlocks behind it. It stands out alone, you see; its kindred have deserted it, and the mosses are taking pity on its old age. Will you find anything as beautiful on the sea-coast, or beyond the sea; the master says there is nothing like it in Europe.”

“I do not go to the Old World for its scenery, I only wish to see Man there. There is nothing like New England, and nothing in New England like its interior districts. The sea-coast is more level and uniform; here you have the advantage of mountain, bluff, interval, to set off the view. This Autumnal tapestry is hung upon windows and arches, and flung over battlements. With us it is only spread on the floor. but why do you notice that old tree? You are too young to be attracted by age and decay.”

“I don’t know —I seem sometimes to have lived half a century, and again as if I was just born. How many years I have lived the last month. When I was very young I used to think this frost-change was owing to yellow bugs, humble-bees and butterflies lighting on the trees; and then it was orioles and goldfinches; and afterwards it seemed to me twilight clouds snowing upon the earth—and now—now—There is a dash for you, Mr. Evelyn, which the Master says implies a suspension of the sense. There is sister Ruth coming out to meet us, let us start our fillies.”

“How is sister Margaret?” said Mrs. Wharfield, advancing into the street.

“This is Mr. Charles Evelyn,” said Margaret.

“Glad to see thee, Friend Charles. Will ye not tarry awhile? How is the malady?”

“No,” replied Margaret; “we must hasten homewards. They are getting better at the Hospital. Helen Weeks is dead.”

“So we learned. She has found the true light now whereto the world is dark. Farewell, if you cannot rest. Anthony

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would rejoice to see thee. He has been much moved towards thee, Margaret.”

They presently met a drove of cows driven by an old man and a boy.

“That is Kester Shield, Uncle Ket, the cowherd,” said Margaret. “See he is afraid of us, he is running into the woods to escape contagion—his cows also are much moved by our horses, as the Quaker said.”

“Phin! Boy,” shouted the old man hiding himself among the brush. “Keep clear of the wind of the horses—there—there, head off the Parson.”

“Uncle Ket, Uncle Ket, don’t be scared,” cried Margaret. “We havn’t any of the disease. We are all free. We have been smoked clean.”

The old man continued to retreat and to cry to his boy. “Keep out of the wind. We shall lose Miss Luce—the Parson ’ll have them all crazed.”

[“]We must stop this movement,” said Mr. Evelyn. “I will help the boy, while you ride along by the edge of the woods, and see if you can compose the old man.”

“The Parson,” said the cow-herd, whom Margaret reached and quieted, “is the worst pair of horns I ever druv, and I have had the business now rising of sixty year, and take it by and large, fifty head a season, and she is the beater of all.”

“Have you, indeed,” said Mr. Evelyn, “followed the business so long.”

“I was chose arter Old Increase Tapley died. I was ’prenticed to Old Increase, but he got to be so old I had it pretty much all to myself.”

“How old was he?” enquired Mr. Evelyn.

“He was going hard on to seventy-five, when he died, though he didn’t do much for a spell before.”

“How old are you, Sir.”

“I was seventy-two eighteen day, March, last; though I like to have lost one year by them heathenish Papists. Zuds! You’ll begin to think I am getting old too; I never should have thought of it. I havn’t seen an old man this thirty year, they used to be thick as blackberries when I was a boy; only there is Old Miss Radney, Sibyl’s mother, she’s rising of ninety. But, as I was saying, I was chose the very next Town Meeting arter Increase died, I took oath under the Old King—Phin, boy, the Parson’s hunching Miss Luce—and I have been run ever since; fair or foul, wet or dry, bloom or blow, hot or cold, mud or dust, I stick it through.”

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“The cows must give you some trouble in your advancing years,” said Mr. Evelyn.

“O, it an’t a circumstance to what it used to be, when the Injins skulked round and stole my cows, and run off with the horses—in them days we took all kinds—the troops in the War pressed some of the best of them, and they tried to make Uncle Ket make it good; and in Burgwine’s time when the Hissians and Highlanders came through, with their check backs, long pipes and busky caps, they distarbed them so it took a whole day to bring them to; and latterly when the wagons began to come, the whole pack would up and off, capering and snorting, into the woods. I’m glad you keep to the saddle, and don’t interfere with people’s business. They are fencing in the commons now, and putting their cows to pasture. I had a calculated to leave a handsome run of business to my Grandson, Phin. My wife is dead and children, and he and the cows is all there is left. The cows you see are dwindled down to less than a quarter. Great changes—Uncle Ket’s trade is most done.—You are a young man, and I could larn you a good many things. Molly I’ve known ever since she was dropt; she has brought in the strays, and many is the poundage she has saved Uncle Ket. She is brisk-eyed, full-breasted and straight-limbed, as a Devon heifer; she wants coaxing and patting a little—she don’t run with the old cows enough to larn their ways,—Glad you got through with the pock so well—it takes a second time, some say—its [sic] worse than horn-ail, hoven or core—There, Molly, let Bughorn go by, we will manage them.”

“You see,” said Margaret as they rode on, “there are things besides trees to remind us of age and regrets. But I had rather talk of the trees. They become individually developed by the frosts; you can distinguish them better now than in the summer.”

“I have known the beauties of the forest only in the aggregate;” said Mr. Evelyn. “It is a fair whole of form, color and effect that interests me. What is that orange-crowned tree glowing so in the sun, over among those pines?”

“That is a rock-maple.”

“These straw-colored trees and that dark purple clump?”

“These are oaks, and that is a grove of wild cherries. I know them in the Spring, I seem to half lose them in the Summer; in the Fall they announce themselves again. The red-maple is deep crimson, that tawny colored grove is beeches, there is the purple woodbine trailing over the rocks. What a pretty picture

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is that flock of sheep and lambs feeding among the blood-red blueberries.”

“Here is a solitary maple, so soft, limpid, silken, as if the Spirit of Color dwelt in its leaves. These are scenes which Rosa or Poussin could never have commanded.”

“There is some advantage in knowing the detail.”

“Yes, one could not be a Painter or Poet without it.”

“More than that, ourselves are there in those trees. Distress, like the frosts, brings out all our feelings, light and dark, cheerful and sombre. The trees have a sympathy with me. I am but a mottled forest. These last weeks have unfolded all my colors. You say you sketch sometimes, you cannot carry me away in your portfolio, I shall only allow you a leaf. I must grow green again.—See those dark trees above, the yellow hobble-bush and brakes below, and on the ground the green arbutus, mosses and wintergreen. The lowest down the greenest. Let me lie low, where no frosts can touch me. Shall you ever think of these things when you are away, Mr. Evelyn?”

“Yes, and I will think of you the Wintergreen, unscathed by frost, unaffected by changing seasons.”

“Geodic Christian Androidal Wintergreen Indian Molly Pluck, mater bovum divumque! what a string of names you put on me! What shall I call you?”

“Let us look a little farther on and perhaps we shall find something.—Here we open into a tropical grove of lemons and oranges, the golden fruit glows on the trees and crackles under the hoofs of our horses; beyond I see a warm sunny vale of tulips and carnations; truly this cannot be surpassed.”

“What say you to the pool of water under that arbor of trees? I can count you crimson gooseberry, flaming maples, claret sumach, yellow birch and what not.”

“Those are garnets, topazes and sapphires set in a dark rock of polished steel. Indeed look about you, Miss Hart, would it not seem as if the trees extracted all the colors of the earth, cobalt, umber, lapis-lazuli, iodine, litharge, chrome, copper and gold, and compounding them in the sap, drenched and dyed every leaf; or as if Great Nature herself, making a canvass of the forests, had painted them as you say with rainbows and twilight.”

“Do you, Sir, remember what I say?”

“Most certainly I do.”

“So does Job, and Isabel, and I shall have one in Europe, and two in Livingston to remember me. I never before felt

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there was a pleasure in being remembered, at least such a thing never was a thought to me. And all New England, that you admire so much, you will bear in your heart into Old England; I wonder what they will think of you!—Here we come to the Delectable Way.”

They rode in silence up the rough ascent. “Will you wear this, Miss Hart?” said Mr. Evelyn, at length breaking the monotony, and offering a ring with a small diamond stud.

“I will,” replied Margaret, “if my Bona Dea allows it.”

“Who is your Bona Dea?”

“I think it must be Christ, it used to be something else. I will give you some of these leaves you admire so much; and there are berries in the woods, the scarlet devil’s ear, blue dracira and crimson cranberries.”

“You must not think of it, you are to weak to leave your horse. A beautiful wish I shall cherish as much as beautiful fruit.”

“Here in my stirrup,” said Margaret, “I can get you the leaves, maples, beeches, cherries, hobble-bush and all. These leaves will keep their color a long time; there you have pink, beet, carrot and what not. Don’t you lose them.”

Reaching the house, Bull and Dick came out to meet Margaret, her father handed her from the saddle, Chilion undid the budget that was strapped to the crupper, and her mother offered Mr. Evelyn a cup of water. Cæsar, the negro servant of the Judge whose were the horses, had come up across to take the spare beast.

“God love you, Margaret,” said Mr. Evelyn.

“Christ love you, Mr. Evelyn,” said Margaret.

Mr. Evelyn, with Cæsar rode off through the trees.

“Dat be one nice gal,” said the Negro speaking to relieve the quiet of the way, “ef she no hab brack, but only Ingin blood. She steel-trap.”

“What do you mean, Cæsar?”

“She catch Massa heart.”

“What makes you think so? Was your heart ever caught?”

“Yes, once, Phillis Welch grabbed him in her two hands.”

“Has she got it now.”

“She took him off wid de Curnel ober de seas in de War time.”

“Don’t you love her now?”

“Cæsar hab two lubs, Massa Parson say, when him jine de Church, de wicked nater lub, and de good God lub, and

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him kill de wicked nater lub.—Cæsar fraid Massa no tink ob de Pond wench when him gone.”

“No; him hab no tink ob Phillis now. De wicked lub tink get in Cæsar’s heart sometimes, and de tears in him eyes. Massa see Phillis ober de seas, gib Cæsar’s lub to Phillis, but only for de lub ob God’s sake. Tell Phillis, Cæsar old, soon sink in de grabe, meet her in de glory; him hab no wife, no children for Phillis sake.”

“Can’t I think of that young lady, the same as you do of Phillis?”

“Fear Massa not convarted, hab wicked tink, dem no tink, lub oder faces.”

Margaret, debilitated by her illness, tired by the long ride, went immediately to her mother’s bed. In a short time Rose appeared, and ministered unto her. The broth of a fresh chicken was prepared; some peaches Chilion had saved from her own tree she ate. The next morning she went into the woods and gathered some of the brilliant leaves, corresponding to those she gave Mr. Evelyn, and put them carefully away. She ascended Mons Christi, she looked in the direction she supposed Mr. Evelyn had gone, she pressed the ring to her lips, and her handkerchief to her eyes.

“Why do you weep, Margaret?” was an unanticipated voice.

“Rose! are you here?”

“I followed you up,” said Rose. “You were abstracted.”

“Why do I weep, Rose? I know not why.”

“If you do so, it shall be in my arms. I am stronger than you to-day, Margaret. Lay your head here and go to sleep.”

“Nay, Rose, I am very dry, I want some water, let us go down to the cistern. I shall feel better if I can drink.”

“Not all the waters of the Pond can quench your thirst, Margaret, methinks—but I will go down with you.”

“Let us go, and then we will have some plums Judge Morgridge sent up this morning, nice damsons. We will also go and make our oblations to Egeria, who has been a long time deserted[.]”

Did Judge Morgridge, or Mr. Evelyn, send you these plums?” asked Rose when they had gained their retreat.

“Cæsar said it was the judge,” replied Margaret coloring.

“I thank you! I thank you! I love you Margaret,” said Rose, and by a very unexpected gesticulation buried her face, with apparent strong feeling in Margaret’s lap.

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“Well done, Rose,” said Margaret, “you are lux inaccessa, unapproachable, inexplicable. What is the meaning of this? You are crushing my bonnet, you are staining yourself with the plums.—I have exhausted myself in vain upon you, and have failed to discover you at all, and now you flood me with yourself!”

“Margaret!” said Rose regaining her position, “you are angry with me! I have offended you! I can expect no more from you. I will not inflict myself upon you.”

“Hold, Rose!” said Margaret laying her hand upon her arm. “No one knows what I have felt and suffered for you. I am not angry with you. In my heart I love you, and never more than now. Why did you thank me?”

“For that blush when I asked you about the plums,” said rose.

“In good sooth,” replied Margaret, “your face is red as a beet with the plums, now; and I doubt if you would thank me for thanking you for it. Here is my handkerchief, wipe it off and we shall be even.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Margaret, if you do I can never speak to you again. I have stains in my soul, Margaret, which cannot be so easily effaced.”

“Tell me, Rose,” said Margaret, “what is this you speak of?”

“When I saw the color in your face,” replied Rose, “it seemed to me as if you possessed feelings which I never supposed you to have, or you appeared in a light different from ever before.”

“Surely,” said Margaret, “you need not have waited for that, to know I have in my keeping a pretty considerable variety of emotions, as many as there are speckled hens in our roost.”

“I know,” rejoined Rose, “that you have been most kind to me, a perfect angel, and the only one I ever expect to see, but you were always happy you said, and you seemed so healthy and strong; and a certain description of feeling I concluded you were never troubled with. And even while Mr. Evelyn was here you seemed on the whole quiet and undisturbed. but I did see you weep on the hill, and I did see a tremulous flush in your face, when I spoke about the plums—”

“And you do suppose I have some feelings of human nature about me?”

“Yes, of a kind that would fit me; I had despaired to find any, wholly such, in the world. You must needs have suffered

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some in your innermost soul, to feel with me, and that I supposed you never had.”

“It is sympathy you want,” said Margaret.

“Yes, sympathy,” replied Rose, “that is it.”

“That word,” said Margaret, “Mr. Evelyn taught me. But I hardly need wait for an instructor to tell me its meaning.”

“I knew you pitied me,” said Rose, “but I feared you did not sympathise with me.”

“Well, now,” said Margaret, “perhaps after all I do not. How do I know what to sympathise with?”

“If you will promise to sympathise, without knowing precisely what with, I will tell you. Margaret!” continued Rose solemnly, “do not I exhibit symptoms of a decline? Can I live long? I do not wish to. Let me die. Let me sleep the eternal sleep. But before I die, you shall know all I have to tell.”

“I will see that you do not die, Rose, if you will only tell what you are.”

“A broken-hearted girl, Margaret, that is all. Can you sympathise with that?”

“I knew, dear Rose, something pierced and wounded you inwardly, and by intimations of which I can give no account, I have felt it all. It has been repeated in my own breast, though I never spoke of it. Come where you need to be, into my arms, Rose, and speak or be silent, as you best can. That word broken-hearted is a strange word, I never heard it, methinks, before. I have heard of puppet-hearts and wicked hearts, and hard hearts, but never till now, Rose, of a broken heart.”

“A broken heart is all I boast of, and a poor thing it is, and sad its story to me, perhaps to you foolish.”

“I have seen nothing foolish in you, Rose, only some things that I could not understand, and some that made me very sad. Do tell me all.”

“I am simply one,” said Rose, “who has pined for human sympathy, a disease of which I am about to die, coupled with a few other things. But let me tell you, you once asked my name. I used to be called Rose Elphiston. I had a father, a mother and a dear sister. My native town is Windenboro, about thirty miles hence. My father was a clergyman, venerable and esteemed. We were a very happy family, none could be more so, until I ruined their happiness. Oh, Margaret, you have no sins to cause you to shed tears, as I have—but hear. I had companions, pretty and lively young girls, with

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whom I ought to have been content, but was not. No voice spake what my heart felt, no eyes saw what mine did, so I must needs be silent, and look where others did not, and then I took to making company of brooks and flowers, and my own thoughts; and such things. I thought I would give the universe if I could find somebody’s else heart beating into my own, or somebody’s else eyes looking through mine. I longed for a twin existence; to divide and find myself in another. My father and mother loved me, and my sister was always kind to me, but she had not the same feelings that I had. One day there was a donation party at our house. The ladies of the town brought their wheels and spun quantities of flax, which they gave to my mother; and the young men made an ox-sled, which, with a yoke of oxen, they presented to Pa. A merry time it was, and I enjoyed it with the rest. I could even be very happy with my old mates. Among the young men was a stranger in town, a gentleman from New York, who was called Raxman. He contributed largely towards the sled. He spoke to me in a manner different from the rest, he was a great admirer of nature, and seemed in many things to anticipate my own feelings. My thought, and I do not know but I must say my affections, turning towards him with the quickness of the needle to the pole. All at once I fancied that in him my ideal was complete. But I am only telling you a common love-story, Margaret.”

“It is all new and strange to me, Rose, do tell me everything.”

“But Raxman was base and unprincipled. I was horror-struck, stupified at his conduct, I know not what, I must have fainted and fallen, I only remember being borne into the house of one of or town’s folk; and then walking home. A crowd of people met me in the way with taunts and hisses. I seemed to lose my self-control, I became confused and maddened. I did not answer my own parents coherently. I was summoned before a magistrate, and condemned to stand in the pillory with a rope on my neck, and have a significant red letter sewed to my back. My father most earnestly interceded for me, and only the latter part of the sentence was executed. Raxman fled. There were a thousand rumors afloat about him and me. He had money, good looks and some accomplishments, and his company had been in considerable quest; whether it was envy or morality, or what not, the people turned most violently against him, and I came in for my share of censure. I was reduced to a state bordering on distraction, I

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would make no confession, I repelled and scoffed at the whole world. I tore the detested badge from my shoulders. I was caught in the streets by my own playmates, I was carried to women who had once loved me as a daughter, and by their own hands was it replaced. My father interposing in my behalf lost credit with the parish, old difficulties were renewed, and by this head of opposition he was swept from his influence, his salary and his pulpit. He died soon of that disease with which his daughter will soon follow him, a broken heart. My mother, always of a delicate constitution, enfeebled by the excitement of the times, was not long behind my father, she too died. My sister became insane. I alone watched by her in her fearful ravings; I prayed that I might become insane too. My old friends all deserted me, my sister at length took the mood that I was her enemy, and I was obliged to leave her; she was carried to the Poor-house. On me no door was opened, to me no friendly face was turned. An example, they said, must be made of the Parson’s daughter, ‘her will must be humbled;’ ‘if she escapes, contamination will spread in all our families.’ I could not yield. All the energies of my being rebelled. In addition, let me tell you, my father was a believer in the doctrine of Election and Reprobation. What he preached I found myself compelled to carry out in practice; I believed myself thoroughly reprobated. In my earliest years I was very thoughtful, it was said that I often experienced the strivings of the Holy Spirit, I was under conviction three months, and at last obtained a hope, and was admitted to the Church—you do not understand these things, Margaret, your education has been so different—”

“Only tell them, Rose, and I shall understand them.”

“I was not at ease; the first flush of youthful enthusiasm was spent, and pious people no longer satisfied me; the singing of hymns and going to Prepatory lectures became irksome. I sought in books and the woods what I did not find in religion. My father’s sermons, my mother’s private admonitions had no effect upon me. I found myself growing hard as a rock to all serious impressions. Being negligent in my Christian duties, I became the subject of Church accusation and reprimand. I felt badly to be disgraced, I have wept bitter tears when I thought of my mother’s tears, but religious considerations had not a tittle of weight with me. In this situation I was when I encountered Raxman, on the one hand yearning for an indefinite good, and most sensitive to all impressions of beauty; on the other, reduced by a consciousness

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of religious dereliction, and wholly indifferent to the state of my soul. The sequel of that acquaintance I have told you. Disgraced, discarded, bereaved, I lost all self-equipoise, I boiled over like an Iceland geyser, I recoiled upon myself with such violence as seemed to rend me in tatters; with Job I would have cursed God and died, I was alternately a hurricane of passion and a Dead Sea of insensibility. I went to an uncle’s of mine, in a distant town, a kind-hearted man, who sought, as he said, to bring me to repentance, and restore my Christian peace, by an application of the truths of the Gospel. I could not listen to him, I could not endure his family prayers; I hated the God he invoked, I hated that name of Christ, by which alone he said I could be saved. I knew of a cousin of my mother, the Widow Wright, who had once been at our house; I knew her temperament and habits, I knew how secluded she lived, and thinking that I could at least die with her, if not live, and that I could render myself so useful my support my support would not be a burden, hither I came. I learned of my sister’s death before I left my uncle’s. Here you behold me, as I told you, a broken-hearted girl, a wreck, a mutilation, a shadow!”

“Rose, poor Rose, dear Rose,” outspoke Margaret, “come to my heart, lie down in my spirit, return to your sorrow’s home in my soul. A prophetic unconscious sensation is fulfilled in you! You shall be renewed in my arms, you shall live in my love.”

“Oh Margaret!” replied Rose, “I am vile, I am sinful. Your pureness appals [sic] me. Yet if I might but die, and be buried here, it were all I should ask. The prayers of my innocence I can utter no more, the dreams of my childhood are fled, the happiness of youth is gone, the inner strength of virtue I no more feel, on the face of Beauty I wish no more to look, the bloom of nature is transformed to darkness and dread, the voices of birds fill me only with remorse. Man and woman I loathe, God is not. Yes, I have become an atheist, I believe nothing, and at times I fear nothing.”

“Your sorrowful pathway, Rose, I am sure I have followed, I have overtaken you to be only your own sad sister. Why did you not speak of these things before?”

“Only, Margaret, because I wronged you. I felt that I never could speak of myself to any one. Who could sympathise with me! Who could bear the burden of my heart! But when I knew that you too had suffered, when I saw your own heart

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innerly moved, I could no more restrain myself.—I am sometimes light-hearted, or I should say light-headed, blithe and free, and sometimes dejected beyond recovery or reason—all this you have seen and wondered at.”

“I have seen it—yes—but Father Democritus I think will explain it. ‘The spirits,’ he says, ‘are subtil vapors expressed from the blood,’ and these coursing backwards and forwards between the brain and the heart produce all sorts of feelings. Besides, Rose, this melancholy of yours is not of the black kind, but very white, and I think it may be cured. ‘Exercise,’ is recommended, ‘good air, music, gardening, swimming, hunting, dancing, laughing,’ all these we have. ‘Spoon meat and pure water,’ he says, are excellent; balm and annis-seed tea he says will drive away dumps and cheer the spirits, and these your aunt the Widow will furnish. You never read the Anatomy of Melancholy, it is a most wonderful book, and will cure you immediately.”

“You are good, Margaret, if you do banter me. If I were any body else but what I am, I should more than half believe what you say to be true. That I can laugh you know, that I love Chilion’s music you also know. I would dance if I had an opportunity. I used to think it a sin, but all qualms of that sort are gone forever.”

“Eat some of the plums, Rose.”

“I will, for Mr. Evelyn’s sake.”

“Eat them for my sake, for their own sake. You would not see Mr. Evelyn!”

“No, I could see nobody but you. I was too, too much ennuyée, too wicked.”

“Eat the plums, and perhaps I have a story to tell you, of—”

“Mr. Evelyn?”

“No, but of somebody. I shall not tell you who, Mr. Anonymous.”

“Really, Margaret, I am anxious to hear. What have you to say? Where did you see him?”

“Here at the Pond, my story is not so long as yours, and I will begin with what I know. Scarlet coat, white breeches, Napoleon hat, sparkling black eyes, large black whiskers meeting under his chin, like a muskrat.”

“Raxman!”

“Raxman! what do you mean?”

“It was he. A soft, pleasant voice?”

“Yes.”

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“Raxman; the very same.”

“I do remember his echoing your name in a strange way, when I told him such an one was in the neighborhood.”

“I did not think of it at the time, but I can recollect a sort of suspicion I have had that he was here. Obed told me of his rencontre on the Head. But what with his fear and his ardor, his perceptions were not very clear, and all he remembered was the black whiskers. I have suspected too, that my aunt knew of him, but she is a very queer woman, and I do not pretend to sound her. Were you not afraid?”

“No more than I am of the cows, who are ever disposed to yield the path, when I am ready to demand it; this I have been trying to teach Isabel, who always runs from them.—Obed’s tempestuousness may have hastened his departure, but it did not secure my safety. Indeed, he interrupted me sorely, and I lost my patience. It was Court week you know, and I supposed it was some lawyer, or other stranger in town; he came two or three times, his manners, as Mrs. Beach would say, were excellent. Yet I was perfectly alone even while he was present, he was not company to my thought, and when at last he broke in upon my solitude, by kneeling before me and saying something about adoration, he so far recalled me to myself and attracted my attention, that I cried out at the intrusion.”

“and so you wonder,” said Rose, “that my name and his should ever be brought together, that I could have been drawn towards him. You will blame me, more than you pity me.”

“Why should I blame you?”

“For loving Raxman.”

“Ought I not to honor you for that? What else, as a Christian could you do, if he were the pitiful wretch you describe?”

“Death and forever, Margaret! Don’t you know I am no Christian, that I abhor and eschew the name; you know I mean something different from such an affection.”

“What do you mean?”

“An absorbing concentration on some one object, an intense movement to a single point, a gravitation of your whole being around a solitary centre.”

“Is that what you mean by love?”

“Yes. You think of nothing else, dream of nothing else, care for nothing else, as you do for that one object.”

“And all this you felt for Raxman?”

“No, no, no! I wanted to feel it for some one. I wanted some Infinite to come and take up my soul, and he, a Devil, disguised as an Angel of Light, appeared and deluded me. I

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cannot tell all I felt for him, it was something, it was too much, but it was not that. His dress or looks did not captivate me. He did express a sort of sympathy for my tastes, and my solitariness.—He made no impression on you, and me he affected deeply!”

“How shall I blame you for that? What you now tell me, Rose, is new, anagogic, mysterious—”

“Wholly so?—Nay, tell me, Margaret.”

“How urgent you are, Rose!”

“Is there no oneness no individuality, to all you feel or ever have felt?”

“I love Chilion, and Isabel, and Job, and Rose.”

“Nothing more?”

“Christ.”

“You torture me. I told you not to mention that name again. I mean a man.”

“Not a woman?”

“Yes, a woman either, if you will have it so.”

“Mr. Evelyn?”

“Yes, Mr. Evelyn.”

“Mr. Evelyn!”

“You echo the name as if it had no place in your heart, but only in your speculation.”

“Mr. Evelyn.”

CHAPTER VI.

The Husking Bee.

The full fall of the year had set in. The leaves of the trees, merging from their bright dappled colors into a dull uniform brown, had dropped to the earth, and were swept by the winds in dusty crackling torrents. The crops were harvested; potatoes garnered in the cellar, apples carried to the cider-mill, corn stacked for husking. A part of Margaret’s work for the season was gleaning from the bounties of forest and field, and aided by Rose she gathered several bushels of walnuts and chesnuts, and many pounds of vegetable down. The

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had formerly depended upon such wild animals as the woods afforded to meet their extraneous expenses, but Chilion was no longer able to pursue his calling, even if the supply itself were not diminished. What a poorly cultivated farm afforded could no more than keep them in food and clothing. Pluck had done little as yet towards the final redemption of his estate. Nor could it fail of observation that Solomon Smith had rendered himself quite conspicuous of late in urging the suit of his father with Mr. Hart. It was evident he regarded Margaret, and through her, the whole house, with a pointed interest, a mixed-feeling of aversion and esteem. Ever since the unfortunate issue of the gold-hunt, he seemed to look upon her as his evil genius, and yet one of that sort, who would abundantly compensate by its person for its mistakes. At least we know that at the time in which this chapter opens, the affairs of the family were not a little involved. There were sundry items at Deacon Penrose’s, a large item of Rum, interest money, expenses accruing at the Hospital, etc., and but a beggarly account of offsets. Nimrod might have afforded some relief, but his habits were reckless as his temper was volatile; he tended bar, groomed, raced, peddled, smuggled, blacksmithed and what not, but saved little money. The drafts on Mr. Girardeau were regularly made and conscientiously devoted to Margaret. What she earned during her few weeks of school-keeping, Pluck refused utterly to employ on his own necessities, but insisted she should lay it out for clothes. Mistress hart, originally a good weaver, fell off in her care and her business together, and drank more, and was more irritable than ever. Through the intercession of Deacon Ramsdill and Master Elliman, Esq. Beach consented to receive Margaret as private tutor, for a few weeks, to his children; a duty upon which she was expecting to enter immediately after the Husking Bee, the great annual family Festival. Before attending to that, let us go back in our narrative for a moment. The early infantile relations of Margaret cannot have been forgotten. What became of Mr. Girardeau? Had he no knowledge of Margaret these many years? It may not be out of place to state the following. The year previous to that of the present chapter, there came to the Pond an old man wearing a wig, and dressed in other respects like a clergyman. When he entered the house, Brown Moll, who seemed to have an intuitive dread of the cloth, disappeared, and the stranger was left alone with Margaret. He asked for a cup of water, gave her a close perusal with his eye, enquired the road to Parson Welles’s, mounted his

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horse, and rode away. This was Mr. Girardeau. His object in this transient visit is not disclosed.

At the Bee, which fell on a pleasant evening in the early part of October, were collected sundry people, male and female, from the several districts bordering on Mons Christi; there were also present the Master, Abel Wilcox, Sibyl Radney, and Rose, who if she had become an inmate, as Margaret promised, of her heart, was almost equally so of her house and bed. Nimrod was also at home, and for his honor in part this occasion was supposed to make. The corn was piled in the centre of the capacious kitchen, around the heap squatted the huskers. The room was abundantly as well as spectrally lighted from the immense fire-place briskly glowing with pitch knots and clumps of bark, which it became Margaret’s duty, as occasion required, to renew; she was also waiter-general to the company, and sat on a three-legged stool in the chimney-corner. Opposite her was Chilion, quietly busy, platting a basket, which he now and then laid down for his fiddle, as better suited to the hour. The workmen varied their labors with such pleasantry as was natural to them and the occasion; and great ardor was displayed in pursuit of the red ear, for which piece of fortune the discoverer had the privilege of a kiss with any lady he should nominate. The much coveted color at last made its appearance in the hands of Solomon Smith; but Ambrose Gubtail said that Solomon brought it in his pocket, while Smith himself was equally certain he found it in the heap. Relying upon this assurance he announced that Margaret should kiss him; a favor which she very properly delayed until it should be ascertained how he came by the ear in question; and thus for the present the matter dropped. The pile was finished, and the shining golden ears carried into the loft occupied by Margaret, and stowed under the eaves. Next came a brief relay of food and drink. This was followed by a dance, in form and spirit befitting the character of the company and that of their musician. Even Rose dismissed her gloom, exchanged smiles with Margaret, when Master Elliman, in full-blown wig and large ruffle cuffs, sought her for a partner and bowed her to the floor, with the precise courtliness and bland mannerism of the Old School. Next succeeded a scene which promised greater entertainment than anything before. A long table of rough boards extended through the room, was laden with the fruits of the season apples, pears, peaches, plums; pies of all kinds; pewter platters of dough-nuts and gingerbread; bottles of porter and wine, jugs of distilled spirits; and prominently, the silver family tankard

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of cider. These were in part the contribution of the Master, Nimrod, and the neighbors who in this matter were either returning or anticipating obligations in kind. Pre-eminent above all in the centre of the table was a grotesque piece, a pyramidal pile of pumpkins, each one emptied of its core, perforated with sundry holes, and containing a piece of lighted candle; and the whole representing a very comical sort of lantern, or a monstrous beast bestarred with glaring eyes. Pluck sat at the head of the table having Rose at his side, Master Elliman occupied the foot; the others were disposed about on blocks of wood, backs of chairs, the shaving horse, the kit, some on their feet. Margaret having lighted all the candles in the pumpkins, and symmetrized the pile, resumed her station by the fire.

“Brethren and Sisters,” began Pluck, who was evidently somewhat excited by liquor, “this is not the house of God, but of Gods; and it behoveth us to proceed with due solemnity; St. Anthony, St. Crispin, and Bacchus are with us, and a host. We have a text inspired and inspiring from a Bibblecal source; ‘Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine to those that be of heavy hearts.’ Pass the goblets, as it is elsewhere said,

“Most venerable Pater divum hominumque!” exclaimed the Master, “thou art too presumptuous, thy zeal excelleth thy piety. The prefatory oblation. Let all service begin with reverence meet and becoming to our supreme.”

Pluck. “In yonder pumpkin shrine burn the fires of our Divinity, fed by mutton tallow. Rising all, in meek obeisance due, pressing the bottom of our soles, worship we his Majesty. Thy health we drink, thy name we praise, Great King of Puppetdom! defender by the grace of God of England, France and America; with the most serene, serene, most puissant, puissant, high, illustrious, noble, honorable, wise and prudent Borgomasters, Counsellors, Governors, Committees and all demigods of thy powerful and mighty realm. Now, brethren, since the Gods help them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says, let us verify the promise, by laying hold. In the words of my Bibblecal son, Maharshalalhashbaz, ‘I feel that in my flesh dwelleth no good thing.’ Rose, dear, have an apple, a pearmain, here is no curse; it shall wed your face to your name; pity it is, as the old Indian said, Eve had not left the apples to make cider with.

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S’death! how pale you grow. Take some genuine Bracrag. That’s charming. What a nice example you set to our Molly.

Abel Wilcox. “the toasts, Sir, the toasts! I have eaten enough and should like to drink.”

The Master. “Fides et veritas, faith and truth! thou art no wassailer, Abel, or thou wouldst drink without bawling so about it. Here are Burgundy, Rhenish, in comfortable supply.”

Abel. “I don’t hold to getting drunk, I believe in drinking just enough. Besides, what there is left Deacon Penrose has promised to take back, and perhaps it is all we shall get. We, we, Sir, did you know the old man was going to make a partner of me, and I am going to marry Matty Gisborne?”

The Master. “Thou art no man, Abel, but only a boy niggard, and there is no law authorizing copartnership with such an one. Thou art the shadow of an homunculus, Abel, and expletive among puppetic entities.”

“You shall have the Toasts; twelve regular ones, the number of the Twelve Apostles.

“First—Margaret, here; you wrote these, but I made them, blow me, if I didn’t. You shouldn’t spoil a man’s thoughts in the copy.”

Margaret whispers her father, who proceeds:—

“First; Ourselves, and all that pertains to us

“Second; The Constituted Authorities of every man’s body and mind.

“Third; Freedom of speech, though, touch, sight, smell, taste, earth and air.

“Fourth; Jemima Wilkinson, Consul Napoleon, Dr. Byles and St. Tammany.

“Fifth; Success to our arms.

“Sixth; The Memory of the brave Johnny Stout.

“Seventh; the Patriots of the Pond, No. 4, Breakneck and Snakehill.

“Eighth; Perpetual itching without the benefit of scratching to all our enemies.

“Ninth; All true and upright Masons, who saw the East when the light rose, and, by name, the Right Worshipful,

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Past Grand Deacon, Bartholomew Elliman, pedagogue; with a tear for all brother Cowans.

“Tenth; All Pumpkin-headed, mutton-tallow-lighted Gods and Goddesses, Priests and Lawyers.

“Eleventh; the liquor of Jove.

Twelfth; the Officers and Soldiers in the Present War.”

Abel Wilcox. “Now that the Regular are disposed of, I begin with the volunteers.

“Death to the Excise Laws.”

Joseph Whiston. “The memory of Eli Parsons and Daniel Shays, with a tear for Bly and Rose.”

Brown Moll. “General Washington, Jonathan Trumbull and John Hancock.”

Pluck. “King George III.”

Mr. Tapley. “Samuel Adams.”

Tony, the Barter. “The honorable Profession of all gentlemen.”

The Widow Wright. “Death teu quacks and success teu the gennewine sientifikals.”

The Master. “Mistress Margaret, C. B. Custos Bibbleorum.”

Many voices. “Margaret, Margaret!”

Pluck. “let this be drank standing.”

The Master. “Nay, good friends, be not too hasty. Feminam et vinum, Margaret, C. B. and the Bey of Muscat.”

Rose. “Do Margaret drink with us. It is beautiful. I havn’t felt so well this long while. Do join us this time. You have been dull long enough.”

The Master.

Pluck. Come, Molly, pretty dear; no black-strap to night; no switchel, or ginger-pop. Brown Bastard, Aqua Cœlestis, Geneva, Muscadine—have your choice; come crush a glass with your dear Papa; and all this nice company. You have skinked quite long enough.”

The Master. “I hold under my thumb and finger the veritable Lachrymæ Christi, just what you are in search after, Mistress Margaret.”

Rose. “You will taste a little, Margaret; it is better than Democritus for driving away the dumps, don’t you see how gay we all are?”

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Margaret. “Tears of Christ! Can it be that name is given to any? Who could have thought of the idea? I could drink a barrel of those tears.”

The Master. “The unsophisticated, megalopsychal, anagogical Lachrymæ Christi!”

Rose. “I am glad you tasted. Isn’t it delightful. Who would not drive dull care away?”

Pluck. “The songs, gentlemen and ladies, the songs, Chilion, Molly, Grace, Deacon Elliman, come. Sibyl, what are you doing there with my second born, knock off your heel-taps, and lend us your wind-pipe.”

The Master. “One stanza of the New England Hymn in memory of our distinguished friend and the prince of Paronomasiacks, Dr. Byles.”

All sing.

Pluck sings.

Pluck. “You’ve got the fogs broke; come now let us have a few select pieces. Sweet Sibyl begin. What shall it be—give us ‘Lovewell’s Fight.’ ”

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Pluck. “A stiff corker on that. Grace, thou Apostolic child, give us some of the pathetic. Chilion, you must change your key, try some Malaga, my son.”

Pluck. “Now it is Beulah Ann’s turn; some of the sentimental, Beulah. Some new cider, chilion, soft and sweet.”

Pluck. “We want a little mixture of the heroic. Molly, the Indian’s Death Song; you like the Indians, show them off to the best advantage. Silence all.”

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Pluck. “That’s beautiful! See how the Pumpkin Gods grin—Another brimmer—Now scrape away, Chilion. Egad! What a breeze we are getting into. Hoora! for the Old Bastile, I goes ahead, keep up who can;—

Ho! neighbors, a hurdy gurdy. See the puppets caper. There’s two priests, in sailors’ rig, black-balling one another. Phew! That’s Religion you see next, in Harlequin’s dress; with Faith and Repentance playing Punch and Judy. Six Pumpkin Gods after a poor nincompoop sinner—Grind away, my boy—”

Margaret. “Pa is going off, Nimrod; what shall we do?”

Nimrod. “never mind; he’ll come to. He flakes and scatters like hot iron; get some water, that will cool him.”

Pluck. “Haven’t you learned your manners yet, Miss Molly. ‘Speak not at the table; if thy superiors be discoursing, meddle not with the matter. Smell not of thy meat, turn it not the other side upward to view it upon thy plate. Talk not in meeting, but fix thine eye on the minister. Pull off thy hat to persons of desert, quality, or office.’ Hem! you’ll never do for Miss Beach in the world till you learn your rules. Don’t interrupt the sport. Knuckle to, my good fellow. Ha! ha! King George and old johnny Trumbull playing foot-ball with the head of the people. Look sharp, Rose. Land! What’s this? Old Nick himself in a coach and two, with the Parson’s wig and bands; the Archbishop of Canterbury on the

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box; St. Peter and Whitfield outriding. Give them the long oats, Old Sacristy! Jack Pudding baptizing four Indians in the river Jordan; souse them under, they’ll be damned if you leave a hair dry—”

Margaret. “Don’t let him go on so; shall I sprinkle it in his face?”

Nimrod. “Hand me the gourd; I’ll make him sober as a walrus.”

Pluck. “Don’t refuse a penny, my boy,—Glory! Didn’t Coachee throw the silk handsomely, Rose? Don’t have such a show every day. By the Living Jingo! it grows cold and dark. Don’t I shiver? Has it rained over night? You are all here, ladies and gentlemen, hope none of you are wet. Molly, pile on the chips. Hand down the pipes; who will smoke? Give your dear Mamma the tobacco. Here is for a game of cards, Old Sedge; the Most Worshipful Deacon, my bibblecal son, Nimrod, and the Divine Widow, come. Grace, you stand flasher. Cut, my son. It’s the Divinity’s deal, we shall have fair play. Clubs trump, knock down and drag out. You are flush, Nimrod, in your face, if you an’t in hand.”

The Widow Wright. “You’ll have teu put mugwort in in yer stampers, Old Crisp, before ye ketch me this time, I kalkilate; I’m high, low.”

Nimrod. “I’m jack and game.”

Pluck. “You are two and. Round again.”

The Master. “That is not conformable to syntatctic rules. Conjunctiones copulativæ conjungunt verba similia—”

Pluck. “Molly dear, stir the embers, we want some light on this subject. What are you doing with Sol Smith in the corner? Is he giving you lessons in the bibblecal Art?”

The Master. “Studium grammaticum omnibus est necessarium.”

Pluck. “Come Molly, unravel this skein of the Master’s.”

Solomon Smith to Margaret. “You shan’t go, Peggy, till you answer me. Let the buffle-heads work out their own game. Say, will you?”

Rose, aside to Chilion. “There, Chilion, it is just as I told you. The rake-shame, put a caveson on him. I would not endure it a moment if she were my sister.”

Chilion. “Sol is a bad fellow. He has no music in his soul, and such I have heard are fit for any villany. He has not forgotten the wild-goose chase after gold, and now he wreaks his disappointment on Margaret.”

Pluck. “Quantinupio tentrapiorum quaggleorum, rattle bang, with a slap dash? It is your play, Sir Deacon.”

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The Widow Wright. “I’m up teu snuff, I can tell ye. The Master ’ll have teu kiss the cook this time; he han’t enough left for the cat teu lick[.]”

The Master. “I am suffarcinated, in a very thlipsis. Such philogicide, such amaurosis. Where am I? By what rules is the game played?”

Nimrod. “He holds on to his cards like the whooping cough; he is as long coming round as the seventeen years locusts.”

The Widow. “I wonder how he ’s on ’t for face cards; ha! ha! He ’s hauled up with the rheumatiz; give him a dose of water-treffile and burdock root. So pesky slow, we sha’nt git through teu night.”

Pluck. “It’s my stack this time; you begged before, my son. Show out, can you, Mistress Divinity? Then you will do better than most gods do.”

Rose to Chilion. “Can you, a brother, abide such insolence? I am not so bewildered by drink but I can see his design. I believe she struck him; Oh, Chilion, you know not what we have to suffer.”

Pluck. “Beg, will you, my son?”

Nimrod. “Yes, like a cripple at the Cross.”

Pluck. “No, I will give you one—i am ten, four, three—game. Show your face, my pretty fellow, Jack—I’m out.”

The Master. “I am a—ab—absque—absquatulated—”

Nimrod. “i—fi—ca—tion. He ’ll play the rest of his tricks on the floor with the cockroaches.”

The Widow. “I’ll stump ye teu another game.”

Nimrod. “Ho, Abel, Grace, Beulah Ann, will you play?”

Pluck sings, accompanied with a violent thumping of his fists on the table,

Rose. “Heavens! Lend me your file. I would stop his wicked presumption!”

Chilion. “I ’ll jog him a little with it. Wait a minute till I have fixed this screw. Let me get my strings in order, and perhaps we shall see some effect in music. He is more than half drunk, and I am not sure as Margaret is altogether her-

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self. Sol is a cunning knave, and I would not care to offend him, since he might do us much evil.”

Rose. “How slow you are, there, there, see that.”

Chilion. “We are both as drunk as the rest, Rose. I can’t see what I am about here.”

Rose. “Oh, Chilion, do something to save Margaret.”

Chilion. “He isn’t fit to live. I will stop him.”

The instrument with which Chilion has been at work is thrown towards Solomon Smith, the disorderly action of Pluck overturns the table, and with it the pile of pumpkins; Smith falls to the floor with the blood spirting from an artery of his neck.

CHAPTER VII.

The Arrest.—The People of Livingston Deliberate on the State of Affairs.

The next morning dawned dismally and darkly on the Pond and over the town. Rumor of what had fallen out at the husking party was rapidly distributed through the region. Early in the forenoon an inquest was holden on the body of young Smith, at No. 4, and it was declared that he came to his death from violence inflicted by one or more members of the family of Pluck. The uncertainty of the affair, aggravated by the bewildered state of the witnesses, rendered it expedient to arrest the entire household. Shortly on the Brandon road, which, but a few days before Margaret and Mr. Evelyn had traversed with so much serene hopefulness and in the midst of such inspiring beauty, appeared the Constable, Captain Tuck, armed with a warrant, and supported by a large body of people, bearing sundry instruments of offence, and hastening along with mingled imprecations and laments. At No. 4 were still greater confusion and alarm; and there turned up the Delectable Way a multitude large as once bore Margaret in triumphal procession over the same ground, who now were in pursuit of her and her friends with tempers exacerbated by the recital of atrocious deeds, imaginations inflamed by horrific suggestions, and a purpose which nothing short of her own life or that of those

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dear to her, could qualify or extinguish. From the Via Salutaris and Via Dolorosa poured in numbers more with swords, axes and pitchforks, who halting at a distance, and forming a cordon of defence and affright about the premises, awaited the arrival of Capt. Tuck. The several parties mutually reinforced, commenced their approach to the house. Those behind pressing forward with a zest and courage proportionate to the interval between them and the scene of danger, the mass became wedged about the door which was opened without the usual formality of knocking, or pulling the string. Sibyl Radney, who stood barring the door with her back, obliged to yield to the energy with which the entrance was made, was the only moving person they saw. Pluck and his wife, stupified by an intoxication that had probably been enhanced after the fatal event was understood, Sibyl had dragged to their bed. The wantonness and disorder of the night she endeavored to correct, and was busily employed gathering up the fragments of food, broken bottles and decanters that strewed the floor. Over the decayed and blackened embers of the fire, sat Margaret and Chilion in rigid silence and haggard immobility; his face dropped into the palms of his hands, she with her arms closed about her brother’s neck into which her head was sunk. Hash was discovered, overpowered by his fears and his potations, under the bed in the garret. Nimrod and Rose, the Widow foremost in execration of the family and loudest in clamor for vengeance, declared had fled on horseback together during the night. The Master was found in a thicket near the water, whither in his own frenzy and the turbulence of the house he had betaken himself, plunged to his knees in mire and shaking with cold and alarm. Margaret and Chilion, without remonstrance or delay, prepared to obey the summons of the officer, and went forward a-foot. The other three were carried in a cart to the Village, where they were all consigned to the Jail, there to lie until the returning senses of the inebriated should justify an examination. The Master was taken to his bed, where, with fever superadded to his surfeit, he had a prospect of remaining for some time. The people, a portion of them, staid about the Jail, in earnest conference on what had transpired; others went to their old resorts, the Meeting-house steps, the Tavern, the Barber’s Shop, and the Store of Deacon Penrose. In the Counting Room of the latter collected Parson Welles, Judge Morgridge, Dr. Spoor, Deacons Hadlock, Ramsdill and Penrose, Esquires Weeks, Beach and Bowker, the latter a junior member of the profession, and recent settler in Livingston,

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Captain Tuck, Ex-Captain Hoag, Mr. Adolphus Hadlock, Mr. Whiston a Breakneck, Mr. Pottle a Snakehill, and other citizens.

“Mysterious is the Providence of God,” outspoke Parson Welles, the first to break the dubious and oppressive silence. “Some are appointed to damnation by a just indeed and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible judgment of God; some he brings to repentance unto life. Let us not rebel against his most righteous sovereignty. In what has now eventuated, my brethren and friends, we behold the Scripture verified, that the carnal mind is enmity against God. And let all of us, whose desert is the same, not be high-minded but fear; let us humble ourselves before the mighty hand of God, who in this administereth a needed rebuke for our manifold sins.”

“Can any one tell us how this melancholy affair was brought about?” enquired Judge Morgridge after a pause.

Deacon Penrose. “As I learn from Mr. Wilcox, who was providentially present and able to make a distinct report, it was an unprovoked and malicious attack of some members of that depraved family on the unfortunate young man.”

Esquire Beach. “I think I can inform your Honor more explicitly, that it is probably a result of anterior and long cherished animosities on the part of the persons named in the precept against the family of Mr. Smith, arising from indentures in the hands of said Smith of grants and covenants, on the part of said persons, yet unfulfilled and for a considerable period delayed.”

Deacon Hadlock. “Why do we mince the matter? I can tell you all it is owing to defect of justice; that we havn’t heavier penalties, tighter execution, more wholesome laws. If these persons had only been kept under, or been enough broke by the chastisements they have already had, they never would have come to this. Truly we can say, we let the wicked go unpunished. Magistrates are set for the terror of evil doers; our commissions enjoin us to look arter the good and safety of the State. For their Sabbath-breaking, their disobedience to rulers, their unbelief, their blasphemies, their hardness of heart, their stiff-neckedness and perverse ways, has this come upon them. They have fallen into a pit which their own hands have digged. And for our sinful remissness has this judgment lit upon the town. We ought to have hewed to pieces these Agags before the Lord. God teareth them in his anger who hate his church and despise governments. We have been slower in rendering justice than the Almighty in executing his fierce wrath; we have spared the rod and spoilt the child.”

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Parson Welles. “It behoveth us in truth that we consider of our wicked declensions and great provocations before God, whereby he hath reached forth to us this bitter cup of shame and sorrow. And, brethren, is it not meet that we appoint a Fast, touching this matter, as has been the practice of our Fathers in all calamitous visitations?”

Little Girl. “Daddy wants a quart of pupelo.”

Deacon Penrose. “Mr. Wilcox, wait on this child, and when you have done that, bring in some glasses and a measure of our best New England.”

Captain Tuck. “We had a heavy frost last night, the air is raw and piercing this morning, and this is trying business. I well remember during the War standing sentry by the General’s Markee half the night, in the depth of winter, on the solid snow, barefoot, with never a drop to cheer or warm one with.”

Deacon Ramsdill. “It takes two to make a quarrel, and I count there must have been something hard said or done on t’other side.”

Esq. Beach. “Our worthy Deacon would do nothing that should prejudice the case, or compromit the parties concerned; nor interpose obstacles to the due process of justice and impartial effect of the laws. His generous feelings we know always tempt him to act in behalf of those who may be called to suffer; but he should remember that Law, Law is the essence of the Deity, the genius of the Bible, the guardian Angel of humanity; and that Law ever must be and ever shall be sustained.”

Deacon Ramsdill. “I don’t know much about law, but I know something about nater. A cow won’t kick when she is milked unless she has either core in her dugs or chopped teats, and is handled roughly; and she always knows who is a milking of her. Cappen Tuck speaks about the last War. I recollect when we was in the Provinces down to Arcady, where the Black Flies come out as thick as birds arter a thunder-storm, they won’t let you feel the sting till arter you see the blood. I guess there has been a Great Black Fly about here, and now the blood has come we begin to feel the sting.”

Parson Welles. “We have convened on a serious intendment, and Brother Ramsdill would be in the way of Scripture to avoid foolish jesting which is not convenient, and whereby the brethren may be offended.”

Judge Morgridge. “Is it understood how many persons

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are supposed to be involved in this crime? Is it thought the younger female member of the family is to be accounted either principal or accessory? I know not that, in the present stage of the affair, I ought to make this inquiry; nor, considering my own position, whether it becomes me to raise any question at all. I do it, not on my own account, but for the sake of others.”

Deacon Hadlock. “I know of no vessel of wrath more fitted for destruction than that gal. She is so hardened in iniquity that any abominable conduct is to be looked for in her. We have compassionated her ignorance, but it is of no avail; we have done all that could be done for her, but she braces herself agin God, despises divine truth, breaks the holy Sabbath.”

Deacon Ramsdill. “Sows over-littered eat their own pigs. Perhaps you have done too much for her, Brother Hadlock. Mabby she hasn’t forgot the bed you spread for her when she was down here to Meetin’ a few year ago, and when she had the School this Summer past.”

Deacon Penrose. “Will the Parson taste a little of our New England? We call it a prime article, and think this the very best we ever manufactured.”

Abel Wilcox. “It has as handsome a bead as I ever saw; and we think it possesses a flavor very much like the West India.”

Parson Welles. “Truly, in the words of Scripture, we may say, Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine to those that be of heavy hearts. We need something to make our faces shine these dark times.”

Deacon Penrose. “Gentlemen, help yourselves.”

Deacon Ramsdill. “Down to Arcady, when a rattlesnake bit one, his comrade sucked out the pizen; if he didn’t, the fellow died. I think we had better try and see if we can’t get some of the pizen out of these poor folk, instead of taking it into our own bodies. I know it’s a cold morning, but sap runs best arter a sharp frost, and my blood, old as it is, is enough moved without any urging.”

Deacon Hadlock. “Dark times, indeed, Brother Penrose; we have contempt in the Church, as well as abuse in the state. Things are getting worse and worse every day. We are all at loose ends. Judgment follows judgment. The Christian religion itself is just tottering to fall. The Universalists I heared yesterday had appeared a little to the west of us, at Dunwich Equivalents; their preacher, John Murray, is

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drawing away people by hundreds. The Socinians have broke into the fold at the Bay. But for the elects’ sake, who should be saved! The good man is perished out of the earth, there is none upright among men. We cannot trust in a friend or put confidence in a guide. We know not on whom to rely.”

Judge Morgridge. “It is an old story, Deacon, that the times are deteriorating; I have heard it ever since I was a boy. The world has stood some pretty hard shocks, and it seems to be able to survive a good many more. So the old Worthy Fuller records, more than a century ago, ‘I have known the City of London forty years,’ says he, ‘their shops did ever sing the same tune that trading was dead; and when they wanted nothing but thankfulness, this was their complaint.’ Let us be patient, Deacon, and the coming tide will lift us from the rocks. The hand that has smitten will heal our wasted and torn condition.”

Deacon Ramsdill. “Time is the stuff that life is made of, as Poor Richard says. I think if we would spin and weave it better, we should not have so much raggedness to complain of; and things wouldn’t be falling to pieces so.”

Captain Tuck. “Raggedness and ruin! what do gentlemen mean? Have we not had a glorious War! Are we not independent! Isn’t this a great country? Was there ever an era like the present, and will there ever be another such a one? Isn’t America the envy of all worlds, and isn’t it honor enough to have fought her battles even if we had lost our all? Does she not shine like the meridian sun in his splendor? Our children will sigh and pine for the golden period in which we now live.”

Esq. Bowker. “I think, if I may take the liberty to express my thought, that I partially agree with our friend Captain Tuck. We discern indisputable signs of improvement. There is an amelioration in the order of events; there is a softening of the crude and undigested matter with which the breast of the ages has been so long gorged; Influence has a vigorous but better regulated pulse, gladness and love are on its countenance; History is emerging from its corruptions and appears in a regenerated form; there is a tendency to individualization and perfection; if there be a breaking up in what is about us it is the Preparatory movement towards the great Unity; the iron and mailed hand of Public Opinion greets you less violently; the strictures of Organization are less heavy and embarrassing; Prerogative is disposed to re-

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linquish some of its self-will and austerity; Literature is beginning to replenish itself from the infinity of Virtue; Religion is becoming more humanized; and we can scarcely hope to enter upon the new century that is now opening to us, without leaving at the threshold much trumpery and feculence, and bearing with us abundant elements of a renovated condition.”

Deacon Hadlock. “Alas the day, that I should come to this! Alas the day, that my old eyes should see what they now see! I stand like a man cutting the grave-stones for his own wife and children. I sarved under the old king, I fought agin the Spanish, the French and the Indians; I buckled to among the first for our liberties, I gave a hand through all the tug of the War, I have helped build up our Constitution and Laws, and now we are worse off than ever. Woe is me! A sorer pest than any before has overtaken us.”

Mr. Adolphus Hadlock. “What, Uncle, what, the Small-pox has not broke out anew? Aristophanes, my son—”

Deacon Hadlock. “No, Adolphus, worse than that; worse than Throat Distemper, or Putrid Fever, or anything else. The Jacobins, the Jacobins are in amongst us; all the bloodhounds of the French kennel are let loose upon us, Freethinkers, Illuminatists, Free-Masons, Papists.”

Judge Morgridge. “Don’t you remember, Deacon, when the news of Braddock’s Defeat, in the year ’55, was brought here, what an alarm we had? Every man and woman, and child, ran out of their houses to learn the news, all was despair. ‘The country is betrayed by Government.’ ‘We are undone, they have sold us to the French.’ ‘They’ll make Catholics of us all,’ were cries that filled the streets; and your father, a greyheaded old man, and our good minister, then a young man, spoke to the people from the Meeting-house steps, and told them not to be afraid, but put their trust in God. We recovered from our reverses, and have passed safely through a good many difficulties since. The French indeed have done us much good, and in the War we courted their alliance and were glad of their aid.”

Deacon Hadlock. “I know what you say, Judge—I never liked the French, I was always agin that contract. But we never had such trying times as these; so many intarnal as well as extarnal foes to our peace and prosperity. Things never looked nigh so dark.”

Mr. Whiston. “I agree with the Deacon exactly; he has put the case right on its own legs. For one, I am near about

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done for. I havn’t hardly a hair left to my hide, or a pewter fip in my pocket. Taxes, taxes are eating us all up; taxes upon your whole estate, then on the parts of it, horses, carts, tools; taxes on all you eat and drink; taxes paid by taxes, taxes breeding taxes; and when all is gone, then tax the body and lug it off to Jail.”

Deacon Ramsdill. “Misery makes us acquainted with strange bed-fellows, Judge.”

Judge Morgridge. “You see, Deacon Hadlock, into what company you fall; Mr. Whiston is one whom I believe you committed for being concerned in the late disturbances in these States.”

Deacon Hadlock. “Just as I say, Judge, we are too lenient, we didn’t put on the screws half hard enough. The Insargents ought to have been hung, or banished from the country, or else condemned to imprisonment for life. The State was not cleansed of the plague that was upon it, and the sore waxes fouler every hour.”

Mr. Whiston. “ ’Tis true I harbored the men; ’tis true I fell in with the movement; and I wish to heaven we could have a rebellion—I will say it here if I have to swing to-morrow for it. I wish Shays could have carried the matter through all the States. I helped throw off one government, but I little calculated how I was going to be sucked in by another. Courts, lawyers, sheriff-fees, constable-fees, justice-fees, imposts excise, stamp-duties, continental bills, paper tender, forced sales, have swept off everything. The grubs of the law have gnawed into us, and we are all powder-post. How many actions did you try in one term, Judge? Was it less than a thousand?”

Judge Morgridge. “Well, let that go, Mr. Whiston; it is past, and we will endeavor to forget it.”

Mr. Whiston. “I shan’t let it go, it an’t past, and it can’t be forgotten. Can I forget the cries of Bly and Rose, up there in Lenox? Not so easy. We fought for liberty in the War, and if a man hasn’t liberty to own his own, to use his own, to be his own, what are our liberties good for? Government is Lord God almighty, and skin-flint besides. Where is my title to my estate? Government has got it. Where is my income? Government has got it. Where is the disposal of my person? Government has got it. Where is the control of my actions? Government has got it. Where are my boys? Gone to fight the Government battles agin the Indians. Where are my gals? Spinning out taxes for Government.

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What is the Government for? To protect me, you say; yes, as the wolf did the lamb, by stripping me of all I have. We help make the Government? No. Didn’t we petition to have the Constitution altered, some of the courts abolished, and the under officers set aside? And were our petitions granted? No, they were not admitted; Government spurned us and our petitions together. Such bungling and frippery never were seen. I wouldn’t give a fiddlestick’s end for all the governments in creation. They take the best of everything, and leave us only the orts and hog-wash. Times are mopish and nurly. I don’t mean to be scrumptious about it, Judge, but I do want to be a man, if I am a Breakneck, and havn’t so much eddecation as the rest of you.”

Judge Morgridge. “It is getting warm here; we shall be called to the trial soon, and we need all calmness of mind.”

Mr. Whiston. “I am ready to stay and argufy the matter out with anybody. I have no notion of hushing it up so.”

Dr. Spoor. “More parties than one have been implicated. I think our worthy Deacon named the Free-masons, a Fraternity to which I deem it an honor to belong.”

Deacon Hadlock. “Yes, I did mention them; they are rising in France, Germany and England; they are leagued with the Jacobins on both sides of the water, and threaten the destruction of all this ’varsal world.”

Dr. Spoor. “They acknowledge the three cardinal doctrines of Faith, Hope and Charity.”

Deacon Hadlock. “I know it, they are as bad as the Socinians; under cover of religion they would destroy religion itself. Hasn’t Tom Jefferson threatened he would burn up all the bibles in the land, if he comes in President? Isn’t he the jaw-bone of Jacobinism in this country? Havn’t there been town-meetings called agin Jay’s Treaty? Hasn’t John Jay himself been burnt in effigy? Yes, in Boston he was carted through the streets, with a watermelon shell on his head, carried past Governor Adams’s house where they made him salute the old man, and then took and burnt on the Common. Houses were broken open, persons assaulted. What is all this but playing into that whale’s hands, Buonaparte, and he means to swallow us all up?”

Captain Hoag. “These things are jest so. We heard in our part of the town last week, that he had taken the city of London, and was burning over all England; that he had made the Pope God of the whole airth, and that they were both coming to America, were going to put us all into the Inquisition, and then set fire to’t.”

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Deacon Ramsdill. “You eat nothing if you watch the cook; I think we had better be thankful for what we have, and god will give us what we want.”

Mr. Pottle. “I believe the Deacon made a fling at the Universalists?”

Deacon Hadlock. “They are the seed of the old Sarpent; they are leagued with the Devil himself; they take advantage of the natural heart to entrap us with their soul-destroying doctrines; they make a fling at the righteous justice of God.”

Mr. Pottle. “For one I must say, my eyes have been opened; I an’t a going to be hood-winked any longer. I do not believe God is a wrathful being, I do not believe he will keep us in red-hot Hell to all Eternity for what we do in this short life.”

Deacon Hadlock. “Oh! oh! What will come next? We are undone,—I am the man that has seen affliction.”

Mr. Pottle. “I believe the Atonement is broad enough to cover the whole race.”

Parson Welles. “God be praised, his decrees shall stand against all the lying deceit of man!”

Esq. Weeks. “We do indeed seem to be quite in a toss. I have said nothing hitherto, because I have had so many other things to think about. There are sometimes domestic and personal calamities which seem for the moment to outweigh all public concerns; and how many in our midst are at this moment, we must believe, in deepest affliction. But I cannot well let what has been here expressed pass without at least offering a word of encouragement and hope. I agree with Mr. Whiston, that our Government is not all we could desire. I did not vote, as you well know, for the Constitutions either of the State or the Nation. But having been adopted by a majority of the people, I am willing to give them my cordial support. I have confidence in the people; and believe that they will right what is wrong, and better what is bad. I concur in the old maxim, that that government is best which governs least, and I think the evils we deplore will be remedied in time.”

Esq. Bowker. “There is a principle of health in Time itself, agreeably to which we may hope that the diseased body politic will ultimately recover, the tumid aspect of society subside, noxious sentiment be thrown off, and the clouded atmosphere of our public life clear away.”

Esq. Beach. “There are some gentlemen who have all the urbanity of the Original Tempter himself; who pursue by

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indirection what they dare not openly propose, and under the guise of flattery harbor the deadliest intent. Heavens! has it come to this! shall driveling be substituted for sound reason, phrenzy for dispassionate conduct! Oh, Humanity, where is thy blush! Oh Virtue, where hast thou fled! Was it not the firmness of President Washington in resisting the overtures of the French, that saved us from that gulf? Was it not the explosion of Randolph’s connection with Fauchet that prevented the worst of calamities? Are not French emissaries scattered through the land, corrupting our citizens, and disturbing our politics? Have we not seen the Tricolored Cockade, that emblem of massacre and blood, voting at our polls? Has not France twice dismissed our envoys with ignominy? No Festival is so celebrated in this country as the Birth of the Dauphin; yes, we revere the birth of a Monarch more than the virtues of Washington! You cannot, gentlemen, have forgotten the refined patriotism of one of our Judges, who recently invested the city of Providence with a regiment of soldiers, and endeavored to arrest the Celebration of the Anniversary of our Independence, and prevent the Ratification of the then ninth pillar of the Federal Constitution, New Hampshire. The Gazettes of that clique are distributed with a diligence worthy a better cause. Our own mails, yes, to my shame and sorrow I repeat it, the mails of this good old Federal town of Livingston are loaded with their prints; Chronicles, Auroras and Arguses are circulated in our midst, through which the great Monster of Evil belches forth his falsehoods, seditions, blasphemies and calumnies upon our population. This Anglophobism is the most malignant and incurable of all diseases.”

Esq. Weeks. “Yes, enough of it worse than Gallophobism. We have no dastardly Refugees voting at our polls—no. Reams of Russell’s Gazettes, Courants, Centinels, Spys, are not every week brought to our village—no. They are full of truth, religion, candor, sweetness—yes. We have no readers of Porcupine’s Gazette, a writer who is an avowed British subject—no. The Editor of the Aurora was not recently whipped in the streets—no. How many Black Cockades could I count in this room? But, soberly, Sam Adams’s threadbare coat must give place to John Hancock’s lace and ruffles. Our ladies must have negroes to bear their trains through the streets as their mothers did. Captain Hoag, here, would have us kneel to his Spread Eagle and Blue Ribbon, and we must barter our old-fashioned pewter for

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Cincinnati plates, and cups and saucers. We must import mustard, muffs, tippets and Flanders lace. We must baptize all things into the mild spirit of Federalism; we have a Federal Congress, Federal Gazettes, Federal Hotels, Federal Theatres, Federal Circuses, Federal Streets, Federal Warehouses, Federal Flour, Federal Babies; we have long had a Federal Gospel, no offence to our good Minister, and must look for a Federal Heaven.”

Esq. Beach. “I shall make no reply to matters like these; I know we are somewhat diverted from the objects that brought us here. But one thing I would have impressed on all minds; there are three political sects in the United States. The first in number, as well as in sense, without umbrage to Brother Weeks, are the Federalists, who believe mankind are in need of the restraints of good government. The second are the Jacobins, who see in every book of acts and resolves, gibbets, pillories and jails. But there is a third sect, who are less despised and yet are more contemptible, the Illuminatists. These will have it that government is unnecessary. They want common sense to such a degree, that they do not know their want of it. They are under-workers to the Jacobinical purpose of power, plunder and vengeance.”

Abel Wilcox. “ ’Lexis Robinson is here again with his notes, Sir.”

Deacon Penrose. “I dare say. He is punctual to a day. He holds some of the Consolidated Notes and Quarter Master General’s Certificates, and comes every year to dispose of them. I offered him eight and six pence on the pound; then as they depreciated four shillings, and at last when they were good for nothing, in pure compassion, I told him I would give one and six; but he wouldn’t be easy without the full face. He might have taken advantage of the Funding.”

Mr. Whiston. “That is what we tried to bring about, a means to pay the old soldiers; but we could not do it. Poor Lex, his face half gone, his wits nigher done for, his old sores still a running—well if the country for which he fought can give him sward enough to cover his bones!”

Deacon Ramsdill. “He that lives upon hope will die fasting, as Poor Richard says; if this belongs to ’Lexis I guess it will apply to some other folks. What is the hour, Judge?”

Judge Morgridge. “I think we had better give attention to the prisoners. The warrant was issued from your office, Squire Bowker, I believe; shall we not adjourn there?”

Parson Welles. “God send the right.”

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CHAPTER VIII.

The Trial.

The magistral investigation resulted in the discharge of all the family but Chilion, who was committed to answer before the Supreme Court, which would sit the next week. The testimony of the witnesses was varying and confused, as their observation had been uncertain and indistinct. What with the trepidation of the moment, and the clouded condition in which the catastrophe found the party, it took no small sagacity and patience in Esq. Bowker, who seemed disposed to conduct the case with entire candor, to distinguish, resolve, and average the singular materials that were submitted to his attention. Chilion himself would make neither confession nor denial. He was seen with a file in his hand, an instrument without an haft, and consequently pointed at both ends. Ambrose Gubtail testified he saw him throw it towards young Smith, and that immediately thereupon the deceased cried out. Beulah Ann Orff said she saw Margaret cross the fire-place, and take the file from her brother’s hand; but Obed and Abel Wilcox both declared they were sitting near, observing her passages with Solomon, and that she did not move from the chimney corner. The connection of Pluck with the affair hovered for a while in doubt; the Widow averring that she did not know but he might have seized the instrument and sent it on its fatal errand, as she heard him wrangling at Solomon, and saw him fling out his arms passionately; but Grace Joy said she was looking at him, and that he was only beating the table with his fists. The Widow also said that Rose was at the moment walking away from Chilion towards the back side of the room. Brown Moll, it was clearly shown, had followed the Master in his retreat to the floor. Regarding Hash, Sibyl Radney testified that he was employed with other missiles than those of iron, even assailing herself with the importunities of love; she also testified that Smith was sitting on a tottering milking-stool, that he fell simultaneously with the overthrow of the pumpkins and the table, that she afterwards found the file fixed in one of the pumpkins, and another one apparently grazed by the same instrument; and that she believed he as upset from his stool by a pumpkin dropping upon it, and that

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if the wound of which he died was occasioned by the file she conjectured it was diverted from its course by striking one pumpkin and fixing itself in another, which in its descent drove the instrument into his neck. She said in addition that she thought the wound might have been occasioned by the edge of a piece of crockery, since the table with its various contents was precipitated at the same moment with the pumpkins, and fragments of glass and other things quite covered the body. To rebut this, Zenas Joy declared Solomon fell before the pumpkins did. Sibyl replied that the pumpkins, the table, which was composed of two heavy boards, and its furniture, precipitated upon the man were sufficient to kill him. It was, however, the opinion that he came to his end by the loss of blood from the jugular vein, and it was the unanimous sentiment of all, that that vein was opened by the direct course and momentum of the file.

The deceased was buried the next day, and at his funeral was exhibited every circumstance of solemn array and mournful impressiveness. The body was carried to the Church, where Parson Welles preached an appropriate sermon, and followed to the grave by a long train of people swayed by alternate and mingled grief and indignation.

On the succeeding day Mr. Smith, the father of the deceased, came to the Pond claiming the expiration of the conditions on which Pluck held the estate, and ordered the immediate removal of the family; who were consequently obliged to look for new homes. Pluck went off with his kit on his back to seek employment wherever it should offer. Hash and his mother were invited to Sibyl Radney’s. Of Nimrod and Rose nothing had been heard. Bull followed Hash. When Margaret had assisted the rest away, she had time to turn her two birds and Dick, the squirrel, out of doors, and gather a bundle of clothes and Chilion’s violin, before Mr. Smith proceeded to nail up the house. She besought her mother and Hash to take the birds and squirrel, but the hurry, preoccupation and irritation of the moment were too great to pamper wishes of that sort. Up the Via Salutaris she saw her father, her mother, her brother and Sibyl filing along, drearily, all with heavy packs on their shoulders. Deacon Penrose sent up an attachment on the oxen and cart which were driven by the Constable, Capt. Tuck, down the Delectable Way. Her own course had been resolved upon; she was going to Esq. Beach’s to seek occupation, be near Chilion, and fulfil her engagement as Governess. She paused a moment, looking up and down

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the road, and back to Mons Christi, then striking across the mowing, buried herself in the thickets of the Via Dolorosa. Reaching the Village, she turned into Grove street, and went directly to the Squire’s. Mrs. Beach received her at the door, and asked her into the parlor. She was barely seated, when the door opened, and in poured a parcel of children.

“Julia, William,” said Mrs. Beach, “why do you behave so unmannerly? How often have I told you not to come into the house with a noise, and those other boys havn’t scraped their feet.”

“I have got a tame squirrel here, Ma,” said William Beach.

“What are you doing with that dirty thing?” exclaimed Mrs. Beach.

“It’s the Ma’am’s,” said Julia Beach, “Arthur said it was.”

“We found it trying to get in at the door,” said Arthur Morgridge.

“she isn’t your Ma’am now,” said Mrs. Beach.

“Isn’t she going to live here, and teach us?” asked Julia.

“Not as we know of,” replied the mother. “You take away the squirrel, and run to your plays.”

Dick meanwhile wrested himself from the hand of the boys, and leaped into the lap of his mistress.

“take the creature away,” reiterated Mrs. Beach.

Margaret interceded in behalf of her pet. “I shan’t touch it, if the Ma’am wants to keep it,” said Consider Gisborne. “Come, let us see if we can’t get the kite up.” The children retreated with as much impetuosity as they entered.

“Did you expect to bring that creature with you?” asked Mrs. Beach.

“I know not how he came,” replied Margaret, “I left him at home;” and she might have added, that delaying on her steps two or three hours in the woods, the squirrel, shut out of doors, and growing tired of silence and solitude, concluded to follow her, a trick he had more than once in his life attempted.

“What have you in that green sack?” enquired the lady.

“It is my brother Chilion’s fiddle,” replied Margaret; “I thought it would be some comfort to him in the Jail, and so I brought it down.”

“Your brother, indeed!” rejoined Mrs. Beach. “A sorry crew of you. I must inform you that the Squire and myself

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have judged it best to dispense with your services. We thought it would be extremely bad to have one of your family a member of ours. Since the dreadful things that have happened at your house, it would be unsafe to our property, and perhaps to our lives, and certainly detrimental to the morals of the children, to have anything to do with you. And it would be wrong not to break a promise made with those who have proved themselves so unworthy to keep it.”

“What shall I do?” asked Margaret passionately.

“It is of no use for you to practise any dissimulation, miss art. I quite wonder that you should have had the presumption to come at all. We were going to send word that we did not want you. But your anxiety for your brother, it seems, has brought you down even sooner than was anticipated! If worse comes to worst, you can go to the Poor-house, perhaps you can find employment with that class of people to whom you properly belong. I am not unreasonable,—for the time has come when we can no longer tamper with low and vile characters.”

The appearance of the lady evidently encouraged no protestation or parley, and Margaret withdrew. She stood on the door-steps, with her bundle and squirrel in her arms, disordered in purpose, palsied in feeling, and almost blind in vision, from this unforeseen turn of affairs. The children, who were trying to fly a kite on the grounds in front of the house, came around her.

“Are you not going to stay?” asked Julia Beach.

“No,” replied Margaret.

“Won’t the ma’am help us fly the kite?” said Consider Gisborne.

“Yes,” replied Margaret.

“The string is all in a snarl,” said Arthur Morgridge. Margaret, most mechanically, most mournfully, fell to getting out the knot, then, having dropped her luggage, ran with the string, and when the kite was fairly up, offered it to one of the boys to hold.

“She’s crying,” said Julia Beach. “She is crying!” was the word whispered from one to another. The kite was at once dropped, and as she resumed her burden, the children huddled about her.

“What makes you cry?” said Julia.

“Oh! I cannot tell,” said Margaret; “I have no home, no friends, no place to go to.”

“Never mind the kite,” said Consider. “I’ll carry this,”

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he added, seizing the sack containing the violin; “I don’t care if she did put me on the girl’s side, she is the best School-Ma’am I ever went to.”

“I will carry this,” said Arthur, taking the clothes-bundle from her hand.

“I want to have the squirrel,” said Julia.

“Let me take hold with you, Arthur,” said Mabel Weeks.

“Where are you going?” asked Margaret.

“I don’t know,” said Consider, “we wanted to help the School-Ma’am.”

“I am going to take the violin to my brother who is in the Jail, he loves to play on it. Perhaps you wouldn’t like to go there.”

“Deacon Ramsdill was at our house, and said he didn’t believe he meant to kill Solomon Smith,” said Consider.

“I remember what you said when you kept the school, that we mustn’t hate anybody,” said Arthur.

“Ma said people wasn’t always wicked that was put in Jail,” said Mabel.

Preceded by the children bearing their several loads, Margaret went towards the Green. Approaching the precincts of the Jail she found her way impeded by large numbers of people, who were loitering about the spot, of all ages and sexes. Some sat on the Stocks, one stood on the top of the Whipping Post, several had climbed into the Pillory. She was greeted with sundry exclamations of dislike, and the aspect of the people was not the most inviting. Even threatening words were bestowed upon her, and some went so far as to jostle her steps. She stopped while the children gathered closer to her, and then they all proceeded in a solid body together. The crowd parted, and she went through a long file of people. “I can see the Devil in her eyes,” said one. “The whole family ought to be hung,” said another. “Poor Mr. Smith’s heart is most broke,” said Mistress Hatch. “How Damaris takes on!” said Beulah Ann Orff. “I always knew Chil would come to a bad end,” said Mistress Hatch, “there were spots on his back when he was born, and his mother cut his finger nails before he was a month old.” “There was a looking-glass broke at our house the week before,” said Mistress Tuck. “I had a curious itching in my left eye,” said Mistress Tapley, “and our Dorothy dropped three drops of blood from her nose.” “There was a great noise of drums and rattling of arms in the air, just before the Spanish War broke out,” said old Mr. Ravel. “The Saco River run blood when the last

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War begun,” said Capt. Hoag; “I was down in the Province and saw it.” “He beat his head all to smash with a froe,” said one boy. “No, it was with an axe,” said another; “Biah Tapley told Aurelius Orff, and Aurelius told Myra Dunlap, and Myra told me.” “They are the most dangerous wretches that ever walked God’s earth,” said Mr. Cutts. Coming to the porch of the Jail house, Margaret took the baggage into her own hands, dismissed her guard, who ran back to their sports, and sought of Mr. Shooks admission to Chilion’s cell. The reply of that gentleman was brief and explicit. “Troop! Gump,” said he, “don’t hang sogering about here, you sauce-box. Havn’t you smelt enough of these premises? It will be your turn to be hung next. Pack and be off.” She turned from the door. A hundred people stood before her, they closed about her, she encountered the gaze of a hundred pairs of eyes, dark and frowning; Mr. Shooks, by the application of his hand to her shoulder helped her from the steps to the ground, where she seemed almost to lose the power of motion. “what do you ax for that are beast?” enquired one. “That’s Chil’s fiddle she’s got there in that bag,” said Zenas Joy. “That’ll help pay for what the dum Injins owe daddy,” said Seth Penrose. “Come, you may as well give it up.”

“You shan’t touch it,” outspoke Judah Weeks. “I’ll stand here, and if anybody wants to put his tricks on her, he’ll have to play rough and tumble with me a while first. She an’t to blame for what her brother did.” While he was speaking, Sibyl Radney elbowed herself into the midst, and seizing the bundle under one arm, and Margaret under the other, bore her off through the crowd who retreated before her. Sundry boys still saw fit to follow; who again closed about Sibyl when she stopped with her load. “There is Deacon Ramsdill,” shouted one. “We’ll have some fun out of him if we can’t out of the Injin,” cried another.

“Well, my lads,” said the Deacon, limping in among them with his insenescible smile, “what have we here? You must truss up a cow’s tail if you don’t want to be switched when you are milking; if there is any mischief here we must attend to it. Come, Molly, you must go with me. Out of the way boys, a cat may look upon a king; I guess you will let a squirrel look at you.—There, Molly,” continued the Deacon, leading her across the Green into the East Street, “we have got through the worst of it, and we praise a bridge that carries us safe, even if it is a poor one.”

“I thank you, Sir, I thank you,” said Margaret; “but, oh, let me be, let me die, let the boys kill me.”

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“Dogs that bark arter a wagon,” replied the Deacon, “keep out of the way of the whip; I guess the boys wouldn’t hurt you much. The people are a good deal up, and when the grain is weedy we must reap high, we must do the best we can. I have seen Judge Morgridge, and he thinks you will be safest at my house; Squire Beach says he can’t employ you, and I think you had better go home with me. The Judge says his Susan wants to see you, and it wouldn’t be best for you to go to his house now, because he is Judge. Freelove will be glad to see you. When you was at our house before, you was gone so much you didn’t hardly give her a taste.”

“There is nothing left to me,” said Margaret; “I am blank despair.”

“The finer the curd the better the cheese,” replied the Deacon. “they are cutting you up considerable smart, but it may be as well in the end. What you are going through is nothing to what I saw down to Arcady, when we went to bring off the French under Col. Winslow. We dragged them out of their houses, tore children from their mothers, wives from their husbands, and piled them helter-skelter in the boats. Then we set fire to everything that would kindle, burnt up houses, barns, crops, Meeting-houses. They stuck to their old homes like good fellows. One boy we saw running off with his old mother on his back into the woods, and we had to bring him down with a bullet before he would stop. We took off nigh eighteen thousand of them. When we weighed anchor, their homes were in ashes, their woods all a fire, and the black smoke hung over the whole so funeral-like—they set up such a dismal yell as if the whole airth was going to a butchery—yours an’t a feather to it, Molly.”

“How could you do such things!” exclaimed Margaret.

“Oh, they was Papists and French, it was political, I believe, I don’t know much about it. Here is our house, and the fifty acres of land I got for that job. It has lain powerful hard on my conscience, I have struggled agin it—I don’t know as I should ever have got the better of it, if the Lord hadn’t a come and forgiven me. Freelove, I have found the gal. She will pine away like a sick sheep if we don’t nuss and cosset her up a little.”

The Deacon’s, to which Margaret was not altogether a stranger, was a small, one-story, brown house, having a garden on one side, a grass lot on the other, and a corn-field in the

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rear. Over the front door trailed a large luxuriant woodbine, now dyed by the frosts into a dark claret. What with the grant of land, a small pension continued until the Revolution, the Deacon, maugre his lameness, had secured a comfortable livelihood for himself and wife, which was the extent of his family. The usual garnish of pewter appeared in one corner of the room into which Margaret was led, in the other stood a circular snap-table, between the two hung a black-framed looking glass supported on brass knobs blazoned with miniature portraits, underneath the glass was a japaned comb-case, and a cushion bristling with pins and needles, on one wall ticked a clock without a case, its weights dangling to the floor; against the opposite wall was a turn-up bed, over the fire-place were pipes suspended by their throats and iron candlesticks hanging by their ears; there was a settle in the room, an oval-back arm chair which the deacon occupied, while his wife, in mob-cap and iron-rimmed bridge spectacles, sat knitting in a low flag-bottomed chair by the chimney corner, and Margaret had her place assigned opposite in a large stuffed easy chair. For dinner Mistress Ramsdill prepared tea for Margaret, which she poured from a small, bluish, gold-flowered, swan-shaped china pot into cups of similar character, and the Deacon roasted her some apples with his own hands, and both insisted upon her eating something, to which she seemed in no way inclined.

“Why do you treat me so much more kindly than other people?” said Margaret, when she resumed her seat in the easy chair.

“I don’t know,” replied the Deacon, “except it’s nater. By the grace of God, I yielded to nater. I fought agin it till I was past forty; when what Christ says in what they call his Sermon on the Mount, and a Colt brought me to. I will tell you about the Colt. Mr. Stillwater, at the Crown and Bowl, had one, and he wouldn’t budge an inch; and they banged him, and barnacled him, and starved him, and the more they did, the more he wouldn’t stir, only bob, and fling, and snort. He was an ear-brisk and high-necked critter, out of Old Delancy. It kinder seemed to me that something could be done, and they let me take the Colt; I kept him here in the mow-lot, made considerable of him, groomed him, stroked him, and at last I got him so he would round and caracol, and follow me like a spoon-fed lamb; he was as handy as the Judge’s bayard; just like your squirrel there, he is docile as a kitten. I had this nater when I was arter the Hurons under

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General Webb, and it shook my fire-lock so when I was pulling the trigger upon a sleeping red-skin, I let him go. And when we were in the ships coming away from Arcady, it made me give up my bed to a sick French gal, about as old as you, Molly, and nigh as well favored; yes, it made me take her up in my arms, rough, soldier-like as I was, and lay her down in my hammock, and she thanked me so with her eyes; she couldn’t speak English—”

“What became of her?”

“She had a lover, I believe, in the other vessel, and when we got to the Bay, it wasn’t political to have them put in one place, he was sent away and they put her in a Poor-house, where she fell off in a decline. One of them old French Priests that I helped tear away from the blazing altar of his church, used to come round hereabouts peddling wooden spoons, and I declare, it made the tears come in these eyes to see him, and nater got the upper hands, so I gave him lodgings once a whole month. I fought agin nater, I tell you, and a tough spell I had of it. I read in the Good Book what Christ said about the Blessed Ones, and it wan’t me, and Freelove said it wan’t her. It went through us like a bagonet. I was struck under conviction here lone one night, when our little Jessie lay in the crib there by the fire. I looked into her sweet white face as she was asleep, and knew Christ would have blessed her, and that she belonged to the kingdom, and it all came over me how I had slided off from what I was when I was a boy, that I had been abusing nater all my life. When Freelove come in I told her, and she said she felt just so too. I tried to pray, but nater stood right up before me, and prayed louder than I did, and I couldn’t be heard. The arrows of the Almighty stuck fast in me. We lay one night on the floor, fighting, sweating, groaning. We were not quite ready to give in. We tried to brace up on the notions and politicals, but nater kept knocking them down. Then the Colt came, then I saw it in the Old Brindle, our cow, then I saw it in the sheep, then I remembered the French Gal and the Indian; and at last we give in, and it was all as plain as a pipestem. When I went out in the morning, I saw it in the hens and chickens, the calves, the bees, in the rocks, and in all Creation. There is nater in everybody only if it was not for their notions and politicals. The Papists, the Negroes and the Indians have it. Like father like child,—I believe we all have the same nater. I have heard Freelove’s grandfather tell—his father told him, he was cousin of Captain Church,

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and sarved in the expedition—how when they went out arter the Pequods, and killed the men, and burned the women and boys and gals in their wigwams, they found one woman had covered her baby with the mats and skins, and then spread herself over to keep off the blazing barks and boughs; and when they raked open the brands there was the roasted body of the woman, and under her the little innocent all alive, and it stretched up its baby hands—but the soldiers clubbed their firelocks—”

“Oh! these are dreadful stories, I cannot bear them now.”

“There is nater agin, Freelove, just as we always told, one another. What is bred in the bone will never be out of the flesh; it is only kicking agin the pricks, wrastle with it as hard as you will.”

“I can never think of myself again,” said Margaret; “but my poor brother and Mr. Smith’s family—”

“I stuttered up to No. 4 yesterday arter the funeral, but they are so grown over with rum there, you can hardly tell what is nater, and what is not. I read out of the Bible to Mr. Smith’s folk, and tried to pray with them, but they couldn’t bear it. That agin is part rum and part nater. You know, Freelove, how we felt when our Jessie died, we didn’t want to see any one; all their words couldn’t put life into her cold dead body. I should have gone up to see you at the Pond, but I can’t get round as I used to before I was hamstrung on the Plains of Ab’ram, under General Wolfe. It’s dreadful business, this killing people, it’s agin nater; I followed it up a purpose, and have killed a good many in my day. Christ have marcy on me! If I had my desarts I should have been hung long ago. Rum too is dreadful business, Molly; and I guess it had a good deal to do with that matter up to your house.”

The Deacon was a great talker, and in modern parlance might have proved a bore, if his wife had not jogged him, and said, “the gal had not had any sleep for three nights, and she guessed she had better try and see if she couldn’t get some.” The bed was lowered, and Margaret laid upon it, where she was quiet if she did not sleep most of the afternoon. In the evening, Susan Morgridge came to see her. Susan’s manner was calm, but her heart was warm and her sentiments generous. She told Margaret that nothing had been heard from Mr. Evelyn since his departure for Europe, and that Isabel Weeks was still at the Hospital slowly recovering from a long fever which had succeeded the Small-pox. But the absorbing

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topic was Chilion and the death of young Smith. Susan told Margaret there were some who would do all that could be done in the case, but that her father apprehended her brother could not be saved from the extremest penalty of the law. Margaret replied that the whole affair was to her own mind enveloped in mystery, that Chilion would reveal nothing to her, and that she had hardly equanimity enough to give the subject any cool reflection. Finally, for this seemed to be a part of her errand, Miss Morgridge proposed that Margaret should see Esq. Bowker, who she said was a valued friend of hers, and that he would be happy to do her any service in his power in the approaching crisis; and that gratuitously.

The moment the nine o’clock bell dropped its last note, Deacon Ramsdill spread open a large book on his lap, put glasses on his nose, while his wife deliberately pulled off her glasses, drew out her needle from the sheath and laid her knitting carefully aside. “I have got the Bible here,” said the Deacon, “and we want to pray—that is, if you can stand it. When you was here in the Summer, you staid out so much we couldn’t bring it about. I saw you once laughing at what was in the Book, and I took it away, because I knew you wasn’t prepared for it, and hadn’t got hold of the right end. Freelove and I have talked this matter over; and we know how it is with you; we know how you feel about these things up to the Pond. A hen frightened from her nest it is hard to get back, and you was handled pretty roughly down here to Meeting once. We musn’t give a babe strong meat, the Book says, and nater says so too; and folks that tend babies musn’t have pins about them. Then agin you can’t wean babies in a day; it takes some time to get them from milk to meat. Praying, arter all, isn’t a hard thing; its [sic] nater. I used to pray when I was a boy, but I left it off in the Wars, and didn’t begin it agin till nater got the upper hands once more. I have seen the Indians pray up among the Hurons, and they couldn’t say a word of our language. It is speaking out what is inside here, it is sort o’ feeling up. It comes easier as you go along, just as it is with the cows, the more they are milked the more they give. I hope, Molly, you won’t feel bad about it. It is time to reap when the grain becomes shrunk and yellow, and I think you look nigh in the same case; and it seems time to pray.”

“I shall not feel bad,” replied Margaret; “you are so good to me, and I love Christ now, and should be glad to hear anything he says.”

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The Deacon proceeded to read from the Gospels, then with his wife knelt in prayer. Margaret also by some sympathetic or other impulse also kneeled down, and for the first time in her life united in a prayer to the Supreme Being; and we cannot doubt the effect was salutary on her feelings. She slept that night in the other front room, where was the spare-bed, with red and blue chintz curtains over square testers, and a floor neatly bespread with rag-mats. The next morning she expressed great anxiety about her brother, said she wished either to see him, or have his violin conveyed to him.

“Things are a good deal stived up,” answered the deacon. “People’s minds are sour, and I don’t know, Molly, what we can do. It’s nater you see, one doesn’t like to have a son killed. Then the politicals are all out of kelter, one doesn’t hardly know his own mind, and all are afraid of what’s going to be done. I suppose they won’t allow you to go into the Jail, they think you and your brother would brew mischief together, and perhaps he would break out. The building is old and slimsy, you know. I am going to the Barber’s to be dressed, and I will take the fiddle along with me, and see what can be done. But don’t you stir out of the house, I don’t know what might happen. It is no use reasoning with the people, any more than with a horse that is running away.”

The Deacon took the instrument under his surcoat, and went to the Barber’s, where the bi-weekly operation of shaving and powdering was performed. When he was alone with Tony, he propounded the wish of Margaret; to which the negro replied that he would do what he could. The same evening, Tony, with his own and the instrument of Chilion, presented himself to Mr. Shooks. “You know,” said he, “that at the last Ball, I couldn’t play because my strings were broke, and the Indian is the very best man this side of York to fix them. And then this gentleman is learning a new jig, and he wants the Indian to try it with him.”

“You can’t go in,” said Mr. Shooks. “We have got the rascal chained, and mean to keep him down. And there is no trusting any body now-a-days. Who knows but all the vagabonds in the country will rise, and have the government into their hands the next thing we see?”

“If Mister Shooks would permit this gentleman to bestow so much honor on him as to go into the Prison, and take the Indian’s fiddle, he would shave Mr. Shooks and powder him with the most patent new violet, crape and roll Miss Runy in

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the most fashionable etiquette, and give her an Anodyne Necklace, all for nothing, all for the honor of the thing.”

“You may go in once,” replied Mr. Shooks, “but don’t come again, and Tony,” whispered the vigilant warden, “see if you can’t find out if the villain means to break Jail. I would not lose having him hung for a thousand pounds.”

Tony being admitted, remained a short time with Chilion, left the violin, and was summoned away.

The next day esquire Bowker called on Margaret, informed her of the usages of Courts, and while he tendered his services on behalf of her brother as Counsellor, he urged the necessity of a more complete acquaintance with the case than he then possessed; but Margaret replied that on all points she was as ignorant as himself. That night, impatient of a profitless delay, anxious to approach nearer her brother, at a late hour when the streets were vacant of people, having asked the Deacon’s consent, she sallied out, and crossed the Green to the Jail. Presently she heard the familiar voice of Chilion’s music, proceeding from a low and remote corner of the building. Climbing a fence, and reaching a spot as near the cell of her brother as the defences of the place would permit, she again listened; then in the intervals she made sounds which she thought might be heard by her brother; but no token was returned; only she continued to hear low, sad, anguished notes that pierced her heart with the most lively distress. Dick, it appeared, had again followed her; perhaps in the midst of strangers he could abide her absence with less composure than ever; and soon she had him in her arms. He took heard the sound from the prison, the familiar tones of his Master; it required little urging on the part of Margaret to send him clambering over the palisade—up the decaying logs of which the building was framed he must have gone, and into the cell of Chilion; for soon Margaret heard a changed note, one of recognition and gladness; and soon also the creature came leaping back on to her shoulder. Glad would she have been to leave him with her brother, but it would be unsafe for him to be found there; glad was she thus to communicate with him at all. A new thought struck her; she hastened back to the Deacon’s, and on a slip of paper wrote to her brother, then returned to the Jail, and fastening her billet to the body of Dick, renewed her former experiment with success; she also sent in a pencil and paper for her brother. The next night pursuing this device, she had the satisfaction not only to transmit something to her brother, but also to receive a word from him. This novel spe-

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cies of Independent Mail she employed the few nights that remained before the trial. On one point she could draw nothing from Chilion, that of his relation to the murder. She kept within doors most of the day, and only ventured abroad under cover of midnight; she saw little or nothing of her own family; and heard nothing of Rose and Nimrod.

The day of the dreaded trial came at last. A true bill had been found against Chilion, and he stood arraigned on the charge of murder. Margaret heard the Court-bell ring, and her own heart vibrated with a more painful emphasis. Leaving her at the Deacon’s, we will go up to the Court-house; the tribunal was organized with Judge Morgridge at the head of the bench. Chilion was brought in, his face, never boasting great color or breadth, still paler and thinner from his confinement, and darkly shaded by a full head of long black hair. The right of challenge he showed no inclination to employ, and the empanneling of the jury proceeded without delay.

To the Indictment, charging, that “not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, feloniously, wilfully and of his malice aforethought, he did assault, strike and stab Solomon Smith, thereby inflicting a mortal wound,” etc., the prisoner arose and pleaded Not Guilty; then sat down and threw his head forward on the front of the Box; a position from which neither the attentions of his Counsel nor any interest of the trial could arouse him. The building was thronged with curious and anxious spectators from Livingston and the towns about. The examination of the witnesses went on. The substance of the testimony was similar to that given before the Justice. It bore increasing proofs of a general belief in the guilt of the prisoner; first impressions had been corrected by subsequent reflection, doubts moulded into conviction, and whatever was obscure rendered distinct and intelligible. Sibyl Radney was the only one whose evidence tended to exonerate Chilion. Indeed Esq. Bowker and Deacon Ramsdill, during the week, went to the Pond, and with Sibyl examined the scene of the fatal event. But those little circumstances on which the guilt or innocence of the prisoner seemed to depend, Sibyl herself had partly destroyed in her haste to restore order in the house; the pumpkins had been cast out of doors and consumed by the hogs, the broken crockery was removed, and there remained nothing but the boards of the table, the milking-stool and the file. Nor was there much left to Esq. Bowker, but to employ his labor and skill, his arts and cunning, if such he had, in the invidious

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cross-examination. In addition to causes operating in the immediate circle of the prisoner, the newspapers of the country came in filled with details of a “Shocking and Brutal Murder in Livingston,” and in one instance, it was pertinenly hinted that “the present afforded another opportunity for the exercise of Execute Clemency.” Obviously there was a clear conviction of the guilt of the prisoner in the public mind, and the testimony before the Court went far towards establishing the soundness of that feeling. Night closed the scenes and nearly finished the results of the trial. After dark, Margaret, whose sensations during the day can as well be imagined as described, sought a breathing place in the open air; she went into the street, she turned her steps towards the Green; but the shadows of men moving quickly to and fro, the echo of excited voices drove her back. As she retreated, she was stopped by the sound of her own name; Pluck called after her, evidently moved by other than his ordinary stimulus. “It is all over with Chilion,” said he, “unless we can get the Judge to do something; he can set the Jury right in his charge, or do something; you must go right up and see him.”

Margaret, by a cross-path, sped her way to the Judge’s; she met Susan at the door, to whom she stated her errand. Susan sought her father in the library. “No,” replied the Judge, “let me not see the girl. There are points in the case I do not understand, but the evidence against the prisoner is overwhelming.” “Oh, father,” replied Susan, “what if she were me, or her brother our Arthur!” “Speak not, my child, our duties are imperious, our private feelings are borne away by a higher subserviency. The public mind is much excited, God knows where it will end, or how many shall be its victims.” “But, if my dear dead mother were her mother, or if you were his father!” “Go away, my child, let me be alone, let the girl not come near me, let me not hear her voice, let not her agony reach me, leave me to compose myself for the awful task before me. Go out, go out, my child.”

Stung by this repulse, terrified at the prospect before her, Margaret passed a sleepless night, and before day-break she left the house, and directed her course towards Sibyl Radney’s. She had not gone far when she met many people hastening down to the closing scenes of the trial. This diverted her into the woods, and so delayed her that when she reached sibyl’s they were gone from there, excepting Bull, who ran fondly towards her, and was caressed with tears. With the dog, she went down to the Widow Wright’s, whose house was lik[e]wise

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vacated; and she continued on the Via Salutaris to her own home. Here were only silence and desolation; one of her birds she found frozen to death on the door-stone. Restless, anxious, she returned towards the Village by the Via Dolorosa. She hung on the skirts of the Green with an indeterminate feeling of curiosity and awe; seating herself on a rock in the Pasture, a chilling desperation of heart seized her, and with an agitating sense of the extinguishment of hope her eye became riveted on the Court-house. Presently she saw persons running towards that building, which was now an object of public as well as individual interest. She knew the hour of final decision had arrived. With a rapid step she descended the West Street, turned the corner of the Crown and Bowl, and soon became involved in a crowd of people who were urging their way into the Court-room. “The Judge is pulling on the Black Cap,” was the cry reported from within. “Tight squeezing,” said one, “and your brother will soon be thankful for as much room to breathe in as this I guess.” “Won’t you let me pass?” said Margaret. “We can’t get in ourselves,” was the reply. “The Injin’s dog has bit me, I’m killed, I’m murdered,” was an alarm raised in the rear. “Drub him, knock him in the head,” was the response; and while the stress relaxed by numbers breaking away in pursuit of the dog, who had followed his Mistress, Margaret pressed herself into the porch; wimble-like, she pierced the stacks of men and women that filled the hall. “What, are you here, Margery!” exclaimed Judah Weeks, with an undertone of surprise. “Do help me if you can,” was the reply. She sprang upon the back of the prisoner’s Box, seized with her hand the balustrade, and resting her feet on the casement, was supported in her position by Judah, who folded himself about her. Her bonnet was torn off, her dress and hair disordered, her face and eye burned with a preternatural fire. This movement, done in less time than it can be told, had not the effect to divert the dense and packed assemblage, who were bending forward, form, eye and ear, to catch the words of the sentence, then dropping from the lips of the Judge. Her brother who was standing directly before her, with his head bent down, remained unmoved by what transpired behind him. The Judge himself seemed the first to be disturbed by this vision of affection, anguish and despair that arose like a suddenly evoked Spirit before his eye. He halted, he trembled, he proceeded with a stammering voice—“you have violated the laws of the land, you have broken the commands of the Most High God; you have assailed the person

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and taken the life of a fellow being. With malice aforethought, and wicked passions rife in your breast—” “No! No!” out-shrieked Margaret. “He never intended to kill him, he never did a wicked thing, he was always good to us, my dear brother.”—She leaned forwards, grasped her brother’s head and turned his face up to full view.—“Look at him, there is no malice in him; his eye is gentle as a lamb’s; speak, Chilion, and let them hear your voice, how sweet it is.—Stop! Judge Morgridge, stop!”—“Order in the Court!” cried the Sheriff. “Down with that girl!” “It’s nater, it’s her nater; just so when I was down to Arcady,” exclaimed Deacon Ramsdill, leaping from his seat with a burst of feeling that carried away all sense of propriety. The Judge faltered; there was confusion among the people; but the jam was so great it was impossible for any one to stir, and those in the vicinity of Margaret who attempted to put into effect the commands of the Sheriff were resisted by the stubborn, and almost reckless firmness of Judah. But Margaret[,] throwing herself forward with her arms about the neck of her brother, became still. The popular feeling, only for a moment arrested, again flowed towards the Judge, who, in the midst of a silence, stark and deep as the grave, went on to finish his address, and pronounce the final doom of the prisoner. He came to the closing words—“be carried to the place of execution, and there be hung by the neck till you are dead, dead,” when with a sudden convulsive shriek, Margaret raised herself aloft, extended her arms, and with a startling intonation cried out, “Oh God, if there be a God! Jesus Christ! Mother sanctissima! am I on Earth or in Hell! My poor, murdered brother! Fades the cloud-girt, star-flowering Universe to my eye! I hear the screaming of Hope, in wild merganser flight to the regions of endless cold! Love, on Bacchantal drum, beats the march of the Ages down to eternal perdition! Alecto, tisiphone, Furies! Judges bear your flaming Torches; the Beautiful One brandishes and axe; Serpents hiss on the Green Cross-Tree; the Banners of Redemption float over the woe-resounding, smoke-engulphed realms of Tartarus!—” [S]he relapsed into incoherent ravings, and fell back in the arms of Judah, who bore her senseless body out through the gaping and awe-stricken crowd.

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CHAPTER IX.

Margaret and Chilion.

Margaret was carried to Deacon Ramsdill’s, where she was bled, and after lingering for three or four days in comparative exhaustion, she recovered so far as to be able to go abroad. There was no precedent that forbade a man, under sentence of death, the sight of his friends, and, what she had so much at heart, she at length attained, permission to visit her brother. In the Jail-house, her dress and persons were strictly searched by Miss Arunah Shooks, maiden daughter of the Jailer, who stripped her of every article by which it was supposed the death or escape of the prisoner could be compassed. She found her brother hand-cuffed, and locked to the floor by a chain about his ankles; a precaution some might think unnecessarily rigid, but one to which her own conduct had contributed; since a scrap of paper had been discovered on Chilion, and Mr. Shooks suspecting something out of the way, suggested the matter to the Sheriff, General Kingsland of Dunwich, who ordered the additional confinement of the wrists. The cell was small, dark, cold and infested with many descriptions of noisomeness. Her brother rose as she entered, she heard the clanking of chains; she stood for a moment like one stupified, then rushed forward, and wrapped herself about him. They sat down together upon the edge of the bed. “My brother! O my brother! poor Chilion!” and other similar out-bursts of a deep sisterly affection were all she could utter. She had many tears to shed, and many sighs to dispose of, before she could speak with connection or composure.

“It is all over with me,” said Chilion at length.

“I know it, I know it,” said she.

“I knew it must come to this,” said he. “I have been making up my mind to the worst. If I could only put my arms around you, Margaret, I would ask no more.”

“Dear, dear Chilion! lean against me. I can hold you.”

“When you was little I carried you in my arms, and how I have loved to lead you through the woods! If it were not for you, Margaret, I should not care so much to die. Let me feel your face.”

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“Tony gave me some Nuremburg salve to rub on your sores; but they took it away because they thought it was poison. Would that it were, and that you could kill yourself at once. Your foot is dreadfully swollen.”

“That is the foot I lamed when I was in the woods after you, Margery; I suffered more that night, when I thought you was dead, than I have here in the Jail.”

“Poor, dear Chilion; I will sit on the floor and hold your feet. The chain has worn through your stocking. Let me put my hand under.”

“That feels easier—but don’t you sit there, my pains will soon be ended. If you smooth [sic] my hair a little I should be glad; I have not been able to lift my hand to my head these four days, and it is all touzled.”

“You look deadly pale,—or is it the light of the room? and you have lost almost all of your flesh.”

“I have not been able to stir about any, I used to walk the length of my chain, till it hurt me so much.”

“I will hold up the chain and see if you cannot walk a little.”

“No, no, Margery, I am content to sit here by the side of you. It is but a little while we have together, and I feel as if I had many things to say to you.”

“To say to me, my dear brother! How little we have spoken to one another. Why do you tremble so?”

“O Margaret, Margaret! I have loved you, so loved you as no words can tell. All my heart has been bound up in you; and all that I care for now is, that I must die and leave you.”

“Speak, Chilion, tell me all you feel; you have always been so silent.”

“I know I have, but only because I could not talk, or did not know what to say. And since I have been in prison things have labored in my mind, and I have been afraid I should die without seeing you. When I have been silent I have thought about you the most, and loved you the most. When you came a little baby, I loved you; I used to feed you, play with you, sleep with you; I rocked you to sleep on my shoulder, I loved your sweet baby breath; I set you on the grass and watched you while I spooled on the door-stone for Ma; I took you out in my boat on the Pond, and got Bull for you to play with. When you grew older I led you into the woods, I made you a canoe and taught you how to paddle it; I made a sled for you to coast with in the winter, I let you run about in the summer.

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You loved to do these things, and I knew it would make you strong, healthy and bold. I grew proud of you, you had better parts than I; and when the Master used to come to our house, he took a good deal of notice of you, and when he brought you books, he said you learned so well, better than a great many did. I told you the names of the birds and the flowers, and songs of the birds. As you grew up, I followed you in my mind, and with my eye every day, every hour.”

“Why have you not told me this before, Chilion? I always knew you loved me, but you never expressed your feelings to me.”

“It was never my nature to talk much; I did not seem to have the use of words as others did; and I never knew what to say. Perhaps I took a kind of pride in seeing you go on; you went farther than I did, you had more thoughts than I; that I knew when I heard you talk with the master, and I was willing to be silent. You seemed to have a mysterious soul, anagogical, the Master calls it, and all I could do was to play to you. I played myself, my feelings, my thoughts to you.”

“So you did, Chilion, and I knew you felt a good deal.”

“Almost my only comfort in this world has been you and my fiddle. Our family were once in better circumstances, we have not always lived at the Pond; but that was before you were born. Pa did something wrong and lost his ear, and he never has been himself since. We have followed drinking, and that has ruined us. Ma has lost her courage, Pa doesn’t care what he does, and Hash is not what he was when he was a boy.—And we were all in drink that dreadful night.”

“Can you not now, Chilion, tell me something about what happened then?”

“Solomon behaved bad to you?”

“He only asked me to kiss him.”

“Was that all?”

“He said if I wouldn’t he would turn us out of house and home; but I knew he was drink, and did not mind him.”

“Did he do nothing more? Rose said his manner was insulting.”

“Perhaps it was; but you know I tasted some, and it went into my head so, I hardly knew what was done. But do tell me if you did murder him?”

“If I tell you all I knew, will you sacredly promise never to speak of it till after I am dead.”

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“I will promise anything; but your manner frightens me. What is coming?”

“Rose, Margery, you know, loves you as much as I do. She is happy only with you; and she feels for you as for her own sister. That night she told me what Solomon was doing, and she was very much excited about it. We had both taken too much, and hardly knew on which end we stood. I was at work on my violin with a file, and she told me if I did not throw it she would—”

“Then you did not do it, you will not be hung!”

“Hear me, Margaret, I had murder in my heart, I should have been glad at the moment to have seen Solomon shot dead. I know it was a wrong feeling, but I had it. I have not had right feelings towards him for some time. Rose told me how he followed you—”

“I was never afraid of him; if he was drunk I knew I could get out of his way, and if he was sober he would not dare to touch me.”

“That may be, but Rose is very sensitive about what might happen, she seems to look upon most men as a kind of devils [sic].”

“Poor Rose—yes.”

“I knew Solomon had a spite against you, because he could not find the gold; and Rose told me of his saying you should marry him, or he would turn us out of doors. He has been rough with me, he cut down some nice ash-trees he knew I had marked for basket-stuff, and once when I was shut up a long while he bored a hole in my boat and let her fill with water. Rose kept urging me, and saying if I didn’t do something she would. I took aim towards him with my file, I thought I would see how near I could come to him and not hit, as the Indians do; then I thought I would strike his arm. The pile of pumpkins you know was very high, and he was right under then; I saw one jutting out from the rest, Pa was shaking the table, I thought they would all soon fall, then I remember thinking I would knock the loose one on to Solomon’s head. Rose shook my shoulder, I threw the file, and I know no more about it.”

“Then you did not intend to kill him?”

“The law holds people answerable when they are sober for what they do when they are intoxicated. Besides, the Judge laid down that if death followed an act done with intention to injure, it was murder, as much as if there was an intention to kill. That is all I know about it, and we have no help but to wait for what is before us.”

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“There was so much noise and hurly-burly in the room, I saw nothing till I heard him scream out and the tables fall. Pa leaped up and down, and began to fling the chairs about. I took him by the arm and led him out doors to the Cistern. When I came back, they had carried Solomon away, and most of them were gone.[”]

[“]What did Rose do?”

“They cried out that I had done it. One and another said they could swear they saw me do it. I seemed to come to my senses; I saw how it was. I might have tried to get away, but I was lame and could not run; if I took Nimrod’s horse I knew I should soon be caught. Besides I knew somebody must suffer. Rose said it was her act, and she would abide the consequences; and told me to go. When I refused, she said she would stay with me. We told her that it was of no use, that one of us must abide the result; and if she stayed they might take us both. She fell on her knees and pleaded to stay, said she did not wish to live, and that perhaps my life would be saved. I could not listen to her, I told her I wanted she should be a comfort to you, Margaret, if I should be taken away. She flatly refused to go. At last, Nimrod got his horse, and as he sat in the saddle, Sibyl dragged Rose out of the house, and lifted her up into his arms, and they rode off.”

“Poor Rose!”

“She grew very dear to me, Margaret; I could almost say, if it were possible for me to say such a thing, I loved her. One day she told me something of what she had been through. She loved to hear me play, and I knew the music made her happier and better. I would die a hundred deaths, before a hair of her head should come to harm. I have now told you all, Margaret, I could say nothing before. Esq. Bowker questioned me a good deal, but I was afraid I should injure Rose, and I held my peace.”

“Have I not loved you, Chilion? Have I not been kind to you? Yet not so much as I ought to have been. I remember once you asked me to dig you some worms, and I went off into the woods, and did not do it. Can you forgive me for that? And now you are going to die, it seems as if I had not been half so good to Pa and Ma, and Hash and Bull, as I ought to have been. I thank you for telling me about that; do, Chilion, tell me some more about yourself.”

“What I think of more than anything is you, my dear sister. I seem to have had strange hopes about you. I remembered the dreams you had when you was a girl, you have

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seemed to me sometimes destined to good things. There is something about you I could tell, but if you live, you will know all, and if you do not,—well, let it go. I have brought you up to Music, Margaret, I have taught you the notes, and as much of the Art as I know. The Master always insisted you should have books, though I did not care much about them. There is a great deal in Music. I have played myself to you when I could not speak it.”

“Alas! And where shall I hear any more Music, or another Chilion!”

“Let that go now.—Those who can be reached by nothing else are reached by music; at the Balls and dances, I have seen this.”

“I thought things went strange sometimes, and I could not account for it.”

“I could raise a storm, and then still it. It was given me to perceive this power when I was quite a boy. You remember the brawl at No. 4, one Thanksgiving, we cured by a song. I cannot explain it, I only saw it was done.”

“It must be what Deacon Ramsdill calls ‘nater.’ ”

“There is nature in it. I have seen the Old Indian stop against our door a long time when I have been playing.”

“Rose was completely subdued, and at times wholly transformed by your Music.”

“Yes, and how we could manage Dick; and when they brought you up out of the woods, I had them all a dancing, even what the Master calls the saints danced, and the Ministers looked on and smiled.”

“Is not Music what the Deacon calls praying? He says it is ‘feeling up.’ ”

“Yes, it is that. I have done all my praying with my fiddle. I had a tune almost ready for the Lord’s Prayer, which I was taught a good many years ago. When you talk with people their prejudices close their ears against you; when you play it seems to open their hearts at once. Music goes where words cannot. And Music makes people so happy, and when they are happy, they love one another. Music takes away the bad passions, and people are not envious or quarrelsome while you play. All this I have seen, and it would always be so, if it were not for the drinking. If I could have got ready and played, as I was going to do, I think Solomon would not have been rude to you, as you say somebody tamed wild beasts and savages by Music—”

“Orpheus, you mean, who subdued Pluto and rescued Eurydice with his lyre?”

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“Yes, Orpheus. But I threw an iron instead of a musical point, and here I am! There is something else, it has seemed to me that Music might be a good thing for the world. I have sometimes thought if I were not lame, and we were not so poor, I would travel off and make Music. You, too, Margaret, can play, you can sing songs, your voice and ear are most excellent. You know how we are at home, you know what people think of us; it has seemed to me that we might make our way up among folks by Music. I have had many, many thoughts about you and Music, and the world, more than I can speak of. You yourself have a certain unknown connection with Music, which I cannot tell. Then I do not mean mere fiddle-strings, because when you told me about your Dream of Jesus, he seemed to me like a Harp, it had the same effect on me that Music does; then in one of your Dreams you said you heard invisible Music. It is not all in catgut and rosin. There has been a certain Something in my mind, which I have not words to explain. I has been coming upon me for several years. I think it is one thing that has closed my mouth so. My heart and thought have gone out to it very often. And now I am cut off in the midst of my hopes—”

“O sad condition! O most inexplicable existence! I am sunk lower than our bottomless Pond in doubt and fear. I can now feel as Rose does what a dreadful thing our life is. The Fates have left us the solitary comfort of a tear!”

“Let us, my dear sister, bear up under it as well as we can. You will live if I do not; Apollo’s Lyre, as you call it, I bequeath to you.”

“Pitiful Fiddle! Here it lies broken-hearted like its Master. When I heard you playing the other night, it sounded to me for all the world, as if Rose’s heart had been set in musical motion like a wind-harp. It will never, never play another tune.”

“I heard the bolts opening, they are coming for you. Parson Welles and Deacon Hadlock were here yesterday, but I could not say much to them. I wish you would ask Deacon Ramsdill to come, and the Camp-preacher. He prayed so for you, when you was lost in the woods, I can never forget him. I want also to have Dick stay with me, if they will let him. If you see Ma, I wish you would ask her to bring me a clean linen shirt, and my best clothes, those I wore to Balls, I had rather be hung in them.”

“Oh, Chilion! Oh, my brother!”

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“Be quiet, Margaret, as you can: Let us hope if our sins are forgiven we shall meet in a better world.”

Margaret was obliged to leave her brother. She represented his wishes to Deacon Ramsdill. “The Parson and Brother Hadlock tell a hard story of Chilion, I know,” replied that gentleman. “But we should not judge too ha[r]sh. Down to Arcady they said the French were savages, that their crosses bewitched the people; but they were a dreadful harmless set of folk. And we must take care too, Molly, what we think. The Parson has a good deal of nater in him; only it is all grown over with notions and politicals. You give your cows tarnips and you taste it in the milk; now he has been feeding on tarnips all his days, and I count your brother don’t like the smack of him. Besides, Chil is what we were saying the other day, a baby in these matters, and he ought to have the very sweetest and best of milk, and if you put in a little molasses it wouldn’t hurt him. Brother Hadlock has nater too, nobody in the world would sooner do you a kindness. But he runs of an idee that things are about done for, that there is no use trying any more. But, if we would fetch the butter we must keep the dasher a going; if you stop, you know it all runs back. Yellow-bugs have been the pest of our gardens for two or three year; now I have noticed that in new-burnt ground they don’t appear at all. If we should get burnt over a little, perhaps we could raise better squashes and cucumbers than we do now. The Preacher is more nateral, but he is as a calf dropped in the woods. When you wind a ball of yarn you make little holes with your thumb and finger, and as you wind you cover them up, and when you are done, the ball has a great many of these holes. So folk get all wound up with their notions and politicals and harem-scarems, but they are still chock full of these little holes of nater. Speaking of holes, I have seen mice make their nests in rocks, and then the bees came and used these nests for hives, so that arter all, we got nice honey out of hard rocks and mischievous mice. I will try to get the squirrel to your brother. Down to Arcady, the little gals cried as if their hearts would break because we wouldn’t let them bring away their moppets and baby-houses; and I can’t forget that.”

During the interval between the Trail and the Execution, a period of ten days, Margaret was allowed to visit her brother two or three times. Soon as possible after the sentence, under the auspices of Deacon Ramsdill, a petition was got up, and privately circulated, for the pardon of the prisoner; it was

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sent to the Governor with about half a dozen signatures, at the head of which stood the name of Judge Morgridge. This movement was unknown to Margaret, and on the whole without consequence, since the answer was in the negative. The day preceding the Execution she went to have her final interview with him. The sheriff having taken up his quarters at the Jail-house, and a guard being kept about the premises at night, it was deemed safe to knock the chains from the prisoner, and allow him a more commodious and better-lighted apartment. He had on the dress he ordered, a pearl-colored coat, buff-swansdown vest, white worsted breeches and stockings, all somewhat worn and faded. Margaret brought a new linen stock the Widow Luce made for him. Tony the Barber came in to perform his last office on the condemned.

“Don’t know but I cut you,” said the negro. “I am getting old, and my hand is unsteady.”

“You stand a chance to wash off the blood,” replied Chilion.

“Cold, gusty day,” said Tony, “can’t keep the water out of these eyes. Never shaved a man going to be hung the next day, since the War, and them was wicked Tories. Neck as fair as Mistress Margery’s. Sheriff Kingsland wanted to get this gentleman to play the drum to-morrow. Can’t degrade the profession so—God bless Chilion, good bye, my brother—Forgot my rose-powder—There—threw the towel out of the window for the soap-paper. I am growing old and forgetful.”

Margaret and Chilion were left to themselves.

“Let me kiss your neck,” said she. “I would put my hands about it, an amulet to keep off the ugly rope. Hold your face to mine, let me feel it, and keep the feeling as long as I live; look into my eyes that I may have your eyes also. I want some of your hair too. How shall I get it unless I bite it off. I had a pair of scizzors in my pocket, but they were taken from me.”

“There, Tony has forgot his razor too. He laid it on the bed. You can use that.”

“What a tempting edge!” said Margaret.

“Don’t hold it up to me so,” replied Chilion, “I shall be tempted by it.”

“I had a thousand times rather you should take your own life than be hung by the Sheriff to-morrow. How easy for you just to slit a vein. I would catch the blood with my own lips, you should expire in my arms. See your stocking is

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bloody now, where the chains were. If Rose was here she would call this wicked business, and put a stop to it very shortly.”

“It is considered wrong to kill one’s self,” replied Chilion. “They hold it right to kill me because I killed another.”

“Right and wrong! right and wrong! I am all confusion, Chilion. There is no truth or nature in anything. I am losing all clearness, all sense of consistency.”

“God have mercy on you, Margaret, and on me too. Throw the razor out of the window. Let us not keep it, or talk about that.”

“I will, Chilion. I would not trouble you. A brief hour alone remains to us. Our wretchedness and our communion shall be alike undisturbed.”

“I wish for your sake, my dear sister, I could live longer. You are all I care for. You have made our home happy. But I do not know as I would stay in this town. I would go elsewhere, and perhaps you will find some to love you. I should like to go up and see the Pond once before I die.”

“Can I leave it, Chilion, its water, its woods, my little canoe, our house, my flowers, the dear Gods, Mons Christi, that we had given to the Beautiful One? Whither in this wide wicked world shall I go? If I were going to be hung with you I should be glad. Mr. Evelyn is gone, Isabel is sick, and perhaps she too will die, the Master is sick, and Rose—she, after all, is worse off than I. Why do I complain. And Damaris Smith I know loved her brother, and he too is dead!”

“Be composed, Margaret. There are things not quite so bad in my case as in some others. Dr. Spoor says he will not take my body for dissection, and Deacon Ramsdill says he will have me buried in the grave-yard. Don’t cry, Margaret, don’t cry, if you do I shall cry, and here is little Dick looking up into your face as if he meant to cry too. I want you to go to Mr. Smith’s and ask their forgiveness for me and the little willow-basket I made to hold your sewing work, I want you to give to Damaris. My boat I want you to sell to pay Deacon Penrose for some screws and a chisel; and some red-lead I got to paint your canoe with, and some silk Ma had to mend this waistcoat. I have eight or ten baskets ready made which he will take. My Fiddle I wanted you to have, but I think you had better sell it to pay some of Pa’s debts; Tony I guess will give six or seven dollars for it. You will find, Margaret, in the bottom of my chest, up garret, five dollars and a

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quarter; it is what I got several years ago, for some wolf skins; I have been saving it to buy you a Guitar; but you must take it to help pay for my coffin; and I want you to go up to the Ledge to Mr. Palmer’s, and get a plain slab of marble to put on my grave. He has always remembered you kindly, and I think he will let you have it for a low price. Mr. Gisborne was in yesterday to take my measure for the coffin; he said if he could not get his pay any other way, his wife would be glad to have you do some weaving for her. This is a good deal to ask of you, Margaret, but when I am dead and gone, I don’t want people to lay up little things against me.—Speak, Margaret, don’t you feel so bad. Get up from the floor. I can’t raise you, but I can hold you in my arms. There, there, Margaret.”

“I will do anything, all you wish; but when it is ended, I only ask to be laid under the same sod with you.”

“You may live for good. God only knows. You may see Mr. Evelyn again; if you do I want you to give him a lock of my hair, and tell him as my dying words, that I truly forgave all men, and wished to be forgiven of all. The lady’s slipper that I made a box for, I want you to give to Susan Morgridge, for Esq. Bowker’s sake; he is going to marry her, and this is all I can do for his kindness to me. On the slab I want Mr. Palmer to mark ‘Chilion,’ simply. I should like to have it said, ‘Here lies one who tried to love his fellow men’—but that cannot be.—I hear Pa a-hemming. Let us try and be as still as we can.”

There entered the cell the prisoner’s father and mother, and his brothers, Hash and Nimrod. Margaret receded to the foot of the bed, where she sat with her face folded in her hands. The bloated frame of Pluck surged and trembled, on his bald crimson pate stood large drops of sweat, in most sober and earnest grief he embraced Chilion; with a quivering lip, and a faltering accent, he said, “Farewell, my son, farewell forever;” and turned away and wept like a child. “My Chilly!” exclaimed the mother, falling upon her son’s neck, “My youngest boy—would God I could die for thee. My young hands welcomed you in your fair babyhood, now these old arms send you away to the gallows. You were beautiful for a mother’s eyes to look upon. You have been a comfort to your mother, weak and sinful as she is. I have sometimes hoped for better days, but all is over now.” She sunk to the floor and sobbed hysterically. “Good b—b—b” was all Hash could utter. “I have not always been patient and kind to-

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wards you,” said Chilion; “can you forgive me, my dear brother?” “Stuff it out, like a red Indian,” said Nimrod. “The Hell-hacks would crack to see you flinch. Your lips are white as a fox’s—you are sick, Chilion, you can’t stand, let me lay you on the bed—they’ll have to hold you up to hang you, like a stuck sheep. If you should die betwixt this and to-morrow, twelve o’clock, how many mourners you would get, more than you have now—I feel as if the rope was round my throat—hem—I’m choking—Ecod!—I was going to be married to Rhody next thanksgiving—Chilion will not be there—I have been wicked—I am going to try to do better.”—Margaret broke into louder weeping, and the room was pervaded with an uncontrollable and shattered wait. In the midst of all appeared Rose, like a pale and sudden Ghost, she ran forward to Chilion, she clung frantically about his neck; “He shall not die, I did it, I did it, I will be hung,” she said in a wild passionate tone. Nimrod was obliged to interfere; she resolutely persisted; by force he unfastened her grasp, he carried her struggling in his arms out of the apartment. Deacon Ramsdill and the Preacher came in; all knelt while the latter, in heart-felt earnestness and tender solemnity, commended the soul of the prisoner to God and the forgiveness of his grace. Smiles and good humor fled the face of the Deacon, whose deep and variegated furrows were filled with tears. Other persons entered to say their farewells, Judge Morgridge and his daughter, Esquires Beach, Bowker and Weeks, the Widow Luce and her son Job, the Widow Wright and Obed, Mr. and Mistress Wharfield, Sibyl Radney, and a few who had known Chilion; when Margaret was again left alone with her brother. These final moments of the two, so tenderly attached, so mournfully separated, we will not intrude upon.

CHAPTER X.

The Execution.

The morning of the Execution, like that of the Resurrection, brought out “both small and great, a multitude which no man could number.” They came “from the East and the West,

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the North and the South.” Highways were glutted with wagons and horses, by-ways with foot-people. They came from distances of eight, twenty, and even forty miles. Booths, carts, wheel-barrows supplied a profusion of eatables and drinkables. A man with a hand-organ in cap and bells, hawkers of ballads, a “Lion from Barbary,” Obed peddling his nostrums, gaming tables, offered attractions to the crowd, and contributed to the variety of objects with which the Green brimmed and overflowed. At an early hour Margaret left the Deacon’s; where, whatever might have been her inclinations, she could hardly have found accommodations, since the house was filled with people from the fourth up to the fourteenth shade of connection, including half a score of infants. Taking what on the whole seemed to be the most feasible route, whereby to escape the annoyance of the multitude and horrors of the day, she hid herself in the deep bed and under the decayed foliage of Mill Brook. Slowly sauntering up the channel of the stream, she found herself on the open road, and close by the premises of Anthony Wharfield. Ruth espying her as she was on the point of fleeing again into the recess of the water-course, crossed the road, took her by the arm and endeavored to persuade her into the house. “Am I too late for the hanging?” said a man stopping to take breath. “I havn’t missed of one these thirty year, and I wouldn’t, any more than Sunday.” “Thee had better go and see,” was the laconic reply. “Aristophanes, my son! Holdup, knave, you graze the limbs of my dear daughter,” was the hurried language of Mr. Adolphus Hadlock. “I have been to cousin Sukeyanna’s to bring down the children. I am fearful we shall not be there in season.—Socrates, your sister is slipping from the pillion. Triandaphelda Ada, my daughter, how could you suffer your brother to do so. I would not have you fail of this opportunity on any account. It has a most happy effect on the mind of children. Your mother, dear, is waiting for us; she says seeing a man hanged is the most interesting sight she ever beheld.”—“I can’t endure this,” said Margaret. “Well, then, come into the house,” said the woman. “Anthony will succor thee; he is sorely troubled for thee.”

Leaving Margaret at the Quaker’s, let us follow up this current of general attraction. The bell tolled, and the prisoner, supported by Sheriff Kingsland, was conducted to the Meeting-house, under a guard of soldiers. Parson Welles preached a discourse, a printed copy of which, with its broad black margin, and vignette representing the gallows, now lies before us. The

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following passage occurs, which illustrates the style of the Parson’s ordinary pulpit exercises.

“Let the improvement be lastly to the wretched man who is now before us. God says, ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’ The just laws of Man and the holy Law of Jehovah call aloud for the destruction of your mortal life. Alas, miserable youth, you know by sad, by woeful experience, the living truth of our text, that the wages of Sin is Death. As we have shown under our third proposition, by man’s disobedience many were made sinners; and under our fourth, Mankind are already under sentence of condemnation. But there is a door of hope. As God demanded a perfect obedience of the first Adam, the second fulfilled it. Jesus Christ made a Propitiation. He endured on the cross the vengeance of a broken law, he was punished by an insulted Divinity. We can do nothing of ourselves. But take the Lord Jesus by faith; trust to his merits, repent, Oh, repent. Lay hold of the hope set before you. This is the last day of mercy to your poor soul. But if you refuse these offers of grace, your departed soul must take up its lodgings in sorrow, woe and misery. You must be cast into the Lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, where deformed Devils dwell, and the damned ghosts of Adam’s race.”

The religious solemnities being concluded, the procession for the place of execution was formed. The prisoner with the coffin was placed in a cart, having on either side the Sheriff and his Deputy; while lines of bayonets bristled before and behind. A band of music accompanied them, playing Roslin Castle, the shrill piping of fifes pathetically blending with the muffled and measured boom of drums—not Tony’[s, for he declined serving on the occasion—and that which had been Chilion’s life now became his death-dirge. The multitude of the people followed, in numbers rated at the time as high as twenty thousand. The Gallows was erected on a plain in the North Part of the Town, about three miles from the Green, whither had already been removed stores of refreshment and minor objects of interest. The spectators were kept in a ring by the soldiers, prayer was offered by the Parson, and the prisoner asked if he had any thing to say. He replied no. He requested that the cap might not be drawn over his eyes, nor his hands tied. “You will seize hold of the rope and hinder the execution,” replied the Sheriff. “No, I will not,” said Chilion, “I had rather die free.” “We understand it,” answered the officer; “you are determined not to die.”

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The drop fell, on the part of the spectators a gasp, a sudden blink of the eye, a suffocating sensation in the throat, a sicker one in the stomach, responded for a moment to the struggles of the dying man, and, on both sides, all was over. The body was decently laid in the coffin, and, under the superintendence of Deacon Ramsdill, borne to its last resting-place, in the grave-yard. The crowd dispersed to drink, to game, to riot, to wrestle, to race horses, see the Lion, hear the hand-organ.

Margaret, unable to contain herself in the house, anxious if possible to find her own family, plunged again into the woods. She clambered up the rocks and steeps that threw such a charm over her ride with Mr. Evelyn, in the direction of the Pond. Night was coming on, she hastened through the Maples. A light startled her, the fumes of smoke arrested her senses. She crossed the Mowing towards her old home. In the West, and over Mons Christi rolled up dark, cold clouds, but in the North-east, beyond the forest that immediately skirted the Pond, the heavens were distinctly illuminated. She saw smoke rising and occasional spirits of flame. While she was looking, a swarthy giant form stood before her. It was the Indian and his grand-daughter. He seized her arm, and silently and unresistingly led her forwards. He took her by an old and familiar path up the Head. What had been a streak of light in the horizon, they now beheld a boiling angry river of flame. The woods on the North of the Village, an extensive range of old forest, were on fire. The Indian, without speaking, slowly raised his arm, and pointed steadily at the scene of the conflagration. Each moment the effect increased, and the fire driven by a brisk northerly wind seemed to be making rapid progress towards the Green. Sheets of sluggish smoke were pierced and dispersed by the nimble yellow flames which leaped to the tops of the tallest trees, assaulted the clouds, and threw themselves upon the solid ranks of the forest as in exterminating battle. Beyond the fire, and up in the extreme heavens, was a pitchy overshadowing blackness; the faces of the three shone in a blood-red glare; behind them gathered clouds and darkness; below, the water, the house, the Mowing, the road, were immersed in impenetrable shade. Margaret gazed with a mixed expression of anguish, surprise and uncertainty. The Indian stood majestically erect, with one arm folding his mantle, his countenance glowing with other than the fire of the woods, his pursed and wrinkled features dilating and filling with some great internal emotion. The girl looked quietly and smilingly on. The wind shook the tall white feather in

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old man’s head, threw Margaret’s bonnet back from her face, and quivered in the long black locks of the girl.

“Daughter!” said the Indian to Margaret, almost the first words she ever heard him utter, as the flames seized and crunched the gnarled top of an old tree, “Behold Pakanawket, grandson of Pometacom, great-grandson of Massassoit, the last of the Wampanoags! Ninety winters have passed over him, he has stood the thunder-gust and the storm-shock—see, the fires consume him!

[“]Daughter, hear! The great Pometacom, called in your tongue King Philip, who rose to be the liberator of his country, was hacked in pieces by your people, his head exposed twenty summers in one of your towns to insults of men, and the laughter of women. His wife, Wootonekanuske, and his son, my father, were sold for slaves. My grandmother pounded corn for the whites, she bore on her breast the brand of her master; but she whispered into Pakanawket’s ear, the purpose of his grandsire, she charmed him with the spell of the Great spirit. My father, escaping from slavery, and my mother, perished with the Neridgewoks. Swift as a deer, still as the flight of an owl, I have gone from the Kennebec to the Mississippi; I have visited our people on the Great Lakes; I have fought against French, English and Americans. Pakanawket gave a belt to no tribes of the whites, he sat at no council-fire but those of his own countrymen. His wife was murdered by the French, his children scalped by the English. His old arm grew weak, the strength of his people had perished[.] The Snow-heron came and built his lonely nest in the green Cedars of Umkiddin; there he has dwelt with the little Wootonekanuske, in your tongue Dove’s Eye. I have put my ear to the ground, I hear the tramping of horses and the noise of battle; he whose eye never sleeps is on the trail of the red-man; Wyandot, Seneca, Delaware, Shawanese, all have fallen. The white man throws his arm about the Great Lakes, he gathers into his bosom the Father of Waters. The red man drags his canoe across the graves of his Fathers; the feet of his children are sore with travelling in the long wilderness.

[“]Daughter, listen! I saw your song-brother struggling in death; pleasant has been his viol to me, pleasant the sound of his voice. My heart wept for him, memories gushed forth. Where are the brothers, fathers, sons, friends of Pakanawket? Massassoit, the generous, the noble, died as the caged Eagle dies. Jyanough, the fair and gentle, wasted in swamps where your violence had driven him. Miantunnimoh was cast as a

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bear to appease the wolf you had enraged. Mononotto, Nanunteeno, Annawon, Tispaquin, Paugus, Pumah, Chocorua, Logan, Hendrick, Pontiac, Thayendanaga, Sagoyewatha, where are they? Burnt, beheaded, hung, tortured, enslaved, exiled!

[“]Daughter, listen! I was taught to read by a French Panisee; I have read your books, I know what you say. The Bashaba that lived in the east, that great Pirate of the seas, gave away to his men our country. He made grants of our land and our waters, our meadows and our fisheries, our woods and our plains, our fowls and our beasts, our gardens and our houses, our towns and our villages, our precious stones and our minerals. You have called us savages, dogs, heathens, devils, monsters; we welcomed the strange men to our shores; cold and hungry, we nourished them in our houses. When their children were lost in the woods we found them, when their poor people wanted corn we gave it them. They stole our young men away and sold them for slaves in unknown lands. They built forts upon our grounds, they offered bounties for our scalps. When our children were burning, they gave thanksgiving to their God. They slept in our wigwams and defiled our maidens. They asked us to their Council Fires, they blinded us with rum. When we resisted, they declared war upon us. There is no brother among the Indians, they have turned our hearts against each other. When we were weak, they subdued us.

[“]Daughter, look! The fire goes on, the flames are consuming their Church. The Spirit of Wrath scowls above their village. I saw your elder brother asleep in the woods, his pipe had kindled the leaves; these hands heaped together the faggots, this mouth blew up the flames. Ha! Manitou fights with Jehovah, Areouski strikes down their Holy Ghost! See, the steeple burns. Men shall mourn to-night, children shall be houseless. But where are the Pequods, the Narragansetts, the Nipmucks, the Massachusetts? Prate they of Quaboag, Pekomtuck, Cherry Valley and Wyoming? Where are Pakonoket, Mystic, Mettapoiset, Monaheganic, Wessagusgus, Knawaholee, Kanadaseega, Kendaia, Kaniandaque, Genessee? Between sea and sea there is not a field, a hill, or a brook, we can call our own. Pakanawket utters his voice, no Indian answers. He looks over the homes of his fathers, he sees only the faces of his enemies. The leaves have fallen from the trees, his strength and hope have fallen too. Wootonekanuske has no brother, no friend, no country, no people, no home. The eyes of a Dove are red with weeping, she looks towards

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the stars. Manitou calls, we go to the Spirit-land. In my belt is a weight of gold, the bribe that sought for Arnolds among the Indians. Let it do what it was designed for, finish the Last of his race. In yonder woods Pometacom had sometime his home, on these waters he sailed with his little son. I have come hither to die. Daughter of the Beautiful, take this Heron’s Wreath, wear it for Wootonekanuske’s sake; she never forgets a kindness. Take this land, this hill, these woods, these waters, they are yours. Sometimes in your love, your happiness, your power, remember the poor Indian!”

The Chief, taking his grand-daughter in his arms, deliberately advanced to the edge of the rock, balanced himself over the abyss, leaped off into the dark waters, and borne down by the weight of his girdle sank beyond recovery. We are told of one, who, being broken on a wheel, after the first blow, laughed in the face of the executioner, his nervous sensibility becoming so far extinguished that subsequent inflictions created no suffering. Our moral nature has its analogies in the physical; and Margaret, already stricken by the events of the day, heard the fearful resolution of the Indian, and witnessed his appalling act without discomposure; she looked coolly for a moment at the fire, she saw the tall spire of the Church totter and fall, she folded carefully in her hand the feathered ornament the Indian gave her, and descended the hill. Entering the Via Salutaris, she was accosted by the voice of Sibyl Radney, coming on horseback from the opposite direction. “Is that you, Molly?” said Sibyl. “What in creation are you about? We have hunted every where for you. Your folks are up to our house; Rose is there too. Rufus Palmer has come down, and you are all going to the Ledge. Rufus and I rode down to the Green after you, we went to Deacon Ramsdill’s, but couldn’t find you. Then I went up to the Quaker’s, somebody said they saw you going that way, Ruth said you came off this way. Get up, we must hurry on. There is a stump, now spring. Rufus staid helping Tony get the things out of his shop. The fire took in Judge Morgridge’s woods down back of our house; it went through Aunt Dolphy’s piece, and so down to the Horse Sheds; then the Meeting House caught, and the brands blew from that to the Crown and Bowl—the Lord knows where it will stop. They are all drunk as beasts, and wild as bedlamites, down there.” They traversed the semi-luminous shadows of the wood, till they came to the junction of the Via Salutaris with the West road from the Village. Here Sibyl halted her horse; at this point

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the scene of the devastation was frightfully distinct. The fire was still at his work; before them was a long line of blazing, crackling forest; down the road, beyond Mr. Adolphus Hadlock’s, the stream of brightness and ruin extended more than a mile. They beheld the old Church, its huge oaken timbers resisting to the last extremity, yet presenting a Laocoon-like spectacle of serpent-flames coiled about it and stinging it to death. The Tavern was fast sinking beneath the devouring element, and the roofs of the buildings beyond were shooting out flames. Multitudes of human forms, in dim red coloring, they saw on the Green, some violently gesticulating, some leaping wildly into the air, some running to and fro, some standing in evident stock-still amazement. Whatever might be the interest of the scene, it did not detain them long, and they made the best of their way to the house of Sibyl. Here Margaret found all her family, her mother the image of frozen despair, Pluck trying to laugh, Nimrod trying to whistle, Hash stupidly intoxicated; she and Rose buried themselves in each other’s embrace. Presently Rufus Palmer came up from the Village. “There were a thousand people there, I should think,” said he; “but three-quarters were drunk, and the rest were so scared they didn’t know what they were about. The prisoners in the Jail yelled like Devils in burning hell. The Jail-house was on fire, and we could not get in that way, and we stove in the fence, ripped out the bars, and let the poor dogs out through the windows. We saved Tony by the skin of his teeth; the flakes lit on his shop, but we made out to smother them. As I came along a drunken crew got hold of the Stocks and threw them into the fire, then they tore up the Whipping-post, pulled down the Pillory, and they followed, and I left them blazing away among the Jail timbers. It hasn’t rained for six weeks, and the buildings were dry as tinder, and burnt like a heap of shavings. The Court House and Tavern were down, and the frame of the Meeting House fell just as I got up the hill. Heaven save me from such another sight! Rose ran away from our house yesterday. Father sent me down, and said I must bring her back, and mother sent word for Margaret and Nimrod to come right up there.”

“It is beginning to rain,” said Sibyl, “and you can’t go to-night.”

The storm, which had been threatening through the day and evening, broke at last, it rained violently, and if it interrupted the plans of this party, it also served to check the farther progress of the fire. Regarding the origin of the last, it appeared

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as the Indian intimated, that Hash, in the course of the afternoon, saturated with liquor, went with his pipe into the woods. Relapsing into stupor, his pipe fell from his mouth, and the fire was set. The Indian, crossing the forest from the scene of execution, supplied materials for its continuance and spread. A long Autumnal drought, a blasted vegetation, a thick coat of new fallen leaves, heaps of dry brush, a strong breeze, bore forward the result to the final catastrophe. However the action either of the Indian or of Hash shall be estimated, the former was beyond the reach of inquisition; and the latter, Sibyl had the strength to rescue from personal danger, and the tact to preserve from detection by consigning the secret of the affair to her own breast, and that of those whom she deemed trustworthy to receive it.

They fared the night at Sibyl’s as they best could, and the next day Rufus and Rose, Nimrod and Margaret, rode to the Ledge, a distance, as we have had occasion to observe, of six or seven miles. At Mr. Palmer’s Margaret with her friends was received with a liberal hospitality and unaffected good will. The family remembered the service she had done for them in former years, and Mistress Palmer made a deliberate work of endeavoring to divert her mind by sitting down, with her box of snuff open in her left hand, and explaining with her right, how they had been able to bring the water directly into the house, and that Mr. Palmer had made a new marble sink, and Rufus had carved a marble stem, with a sheep’s head, from the mouth of which a living stream perpetually flowed. Roderick, her oldest son, had married Bethia Weeks, joined the “Dunwich Genessee company,” and gone to the west, where also Alexander was about to follow[.] Rufus, his mother declared, was a good boy, and said she believed he had great parts; in proof of which assertion as well as for the entertainment of Margaret, he was ordered to show the toys he had made, consisting of sundry vases, images, imitations of flowers and trees, done in marble. At the same time Margaret could not avoid associating and contrasting that first prosperous adventure of her childhood with her present mournful condition. In addition to any claims on their kindness which the family of Mr. Palmer might have felt disposed to reimburse, there existed other grounds for the friendliness of the parties. Nimrod and Rhody, between whom an attachment and quasi-troth-plight had for a long time subsisted, were expecting to marry; indeed, their nuptials were assigned to the present season. In the absence of his other sons, Mr. Palmer proposed

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to Nimrod, that if he would forswear his errant habits, and set himself to steady labor, he should have a share in his farm, and a home in his house. He himself was a good deal occupied at the quarry, and Rufus, he said, was always dropping the plough, and running after the mallet. But in the recent calamity which had befallen his family, Nimrod said he had given up all thoughts of marriage for the present, and avowed a determination to wait at least until Spring; in addition, for reasons which did not transpire, he declared that it had become unexpectedly necessary for him to go to the Bay, before that event, and take Margaret with him.

When Rose had Margaret alone, she recited her history from the night of the Husking Bee. She said she and Nimrod wandered in the woods one or two days, that they at last went to Mr. Palmer’s, where she was taken sick, and recovered on the eve of Chilion’s execution, and that only so far as enabled her to adopt some desperate resolution for his delivery; that she stole away from the house and made all haste to town. Borne out from the prison by Nimrod, she was carried to Sibyl’s, where they kept her until the crisis was over.

Margaret divulged Chilion’s last wishes, and was solicitous for their accomplishment. In the prosecution of this object, events fell out in a manner that she could not have anticipated. Rufus volunteered to furnish the grave-stone; Mr. Palmer said he would become surety to Mr. Smith for the liabilities of Pluck, until Nimrod returned from his jaunt, so that the family might again be gathered in their home. Nimrod was despatched on the other errands. The lady’s slipper he carried to Miss Morgridge; Chilion’s boat was bought by Sibyl Radney, who seemed desirous to have it preserved for the use of the family. What with the baskets and the money in the chest, all debts were paid without disposing of the violin, which was retained as a keep-sake. The duty at Mr. Smith’s, Margaret found it more difficult to perform; and what they told her of the state of that family at length decided her to postpone her task, until time should have moderated their grief, or give her sufficient strength of spirit to encounter it.

Preparations for their intended journey were now all that remained to be done, and these the advancing season, not less than certain concealed motives of Nimrod, admonished them to accelerate. Rose could not be detached from Margaret, and she too must go, at whatever rate. But for this also a means was provided, the nature of which we will disclose. The Widow Wright, as perhaps is well known, had long

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cherished extensive expectations of her son Obed, and not less of her business, and, we might reasonably add, of Margaret. Whether she aspired to riches or fame, let those answer who can best judge; but of this we are certain, that she desired to experiment with her commodities in a larger theatre than Livingston and its neighborhood afforded; and when she learned the plans of Margaret and the wishes of Rose, she eagerly sought the privilege of joining with them Obed and his horse Tim—an arrangement that could not but prove satisfactory on all sides, since it provided a method of conveyance for Rose without additional cost. Whether any other design crept into the lady’s mind than to make Obed acquainted with the world, and the world acquainted with her art, one would not hesitate to guess, when it is related that she gave her son explicit and repeated instructions to watch with all diligence and scrupulousness the movements of Margaret.

To the new object Margaret and Rose addressed themselves with diligence, and we may imagine without reluctance. They had no wish to remain on the hands of the Palmers, however generous or well-affectioned might be the disposition of that family. They were glad to escape the deep, and as it would seem ineffaceable gloom that now not only shrouded the Pond, but penetrated the whole town. In a fresh atmosphere they could find a breathing place for their stifled hearts, and among novel scenes they might be diverted from those associations that were sapping the foundations of existence itself.

CHAPTER XI.

Margaret Goes to the Bay.

When all things were ready, one cool but pleasant morning in the early part of November, they took their final start from the Widow Wright’s,—Obed and Rose on Tim, a thick-set animal of small stature, who in addition to his load bore a pair of large panniers, stocked with the Leech’s simples and compounds; Nimrod with Margaret, on a horse of his own, and one, in the estimation of his master who piqued himself with being a good judge in such things, of admirable proportions and other desirable qualities. Margaret passed her old home,

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now deserted and dead, with some sensation. She descended the Delectable Way and the Brandon road with quite a complexity of emotions, and came to the Burial Ground, where they all stopped their horses, went and shed a silent tear on Chilion’s grave, and proceeded on their way. Halting, without dismounting, at the Widow Small’s, to inquire after the Master, that gentleman himself appeared at the door in a loose gown, with a cap on his head, and wearing a look of evident sickness and debility. He seemed quite overcome at seeing Margaret. “Vale, vale, eternumque vale, O mihi me discipula carior!” was all he could say, and covering his eyes with his red bandanna handkerchief, withdrew. As they rode up the street, Job Luce came out to shake hands with them, and Mistress Weeks with several of her children, who said Isabel was getting better. Tony also had his adieus to make, and certain commissions for Nimrod to execute. The Green presented a melancholy aspect, the entire West side was in ruins; the church lay smouldering in its own ashes; what had been a beautiful grove, sweeping down the acclivities on the North, was now a waste, as if a black winter had overtaken it, half-devoured trees, charred stumps, roots unearthed, lean and hollow, a soil of sackcloth grey. Some little children came scudding and shouting across the Green to speak with Margaret. They entered the East Street, and made their last call at Deacon Ramsdill’s. The old man gave Margaret a letter, superscribed “Mrs. Pamela Wiswall.” “It’s for sister Pamela,” said he; “I thought it might do you some good. She is a good-hearted critter as ever lived, if she is my sister. I don’t know where she is now, I havn’t been to the Bay since the War, and things have altered some since then I suppose. She used to keep lodgings next door to Deacon Smiley’s Auction Room, a little over against the Three Doves. There are people enough there that know her,—ask for the Widow Wizzle, and anybody will tell you where she lives. I can’t blame you for wanting to get away. When our Jessie died, we thought we should have to pull up stakes. Freelove couldn’t bear to make the bed up where she died, and I had to do it. I guess she didn’t go into the room full a month. I had to put off Jessie’s sheep; she had a cosset that used to follow her. Freelove couldn’t bear the sight of it. We are all down, on the green. People don’t know what to do. But old sward wants turning under once in a while, and if land lies fallow a year or so, it don’t hurt. The Lord knows what

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is best for us. We had preaching in the Town Hall last Lord’s Day, and I guess there wasn’t a dry eye there. Good bye, Molly, God bless you all.”

They continued on the East Street, crossed the River, and entered the region beyond. The sun which has shone upon all ages and countries alike, and dispensed its ministrations of life, hope, and joy to every suffering heart equally on this many-peopled globe, shone brightly upon them; the atmosphere was clear, fresh and invigorating; the scream of the red-hammer, the brown herbage, the denuded forest, harmonized with their feelings. Margaret had never been beyond the River before. Looking back she beheld what had formerly been esteemed a beautiful prospect, the village, its environs, the rising grounds beyond, and, crowning all, the Indian’s Head; but it suggested at the present moment any other feelings than those of gratification and delight, and she was not sorry to find herself rapidly receding from Livingston. Touching the objects of this sudden excursion Margaret and Rose were alike ignorant and indifferent; and they went on only anxious to be a-going. Margaret had been able to procure suitable clothing; she wore a black beaver hat, and a dress of cambleteen. In her hair was fastened the Indian’s gift, an aigrette of white heron’s feathers. Rose had on her blue silk bonnet, and a queens-stuff habit of the same color. In Nimrod appeared the transition from the old style to the new. He wore a round-rimmed hat, straightbodied coat with large pewter buttons, and a pair of overalls buttoning from the hip to the ankle. He was more dressed than usual, and the caparison of his horse corresponded with the elegance of that animal circumstances denoting rather the weakness of Nimrod, than any pecuniary ability. Obed bore up the olden time, and showed his respect for the memory of his father and the purse of his mother, in his tattered cocked-hat, broad-flapped drab coat, leather breeches and silver buckles. His red hair was powdered and queued, and on his nose were his brass-bowed bridge spectacles. The habits of Tim, who resented all approach of strangers, might have interrupted the sociability of the company, or even proved hazardous to life or limb, unless Nimrod had suggested to Obed a method of prevention, which the latter executed by cutting squares from the sides of his hat, which he fastened as blinders to the head-stall; a step Obed had been slow to undertake save that his mother promised him a new hat on conditions of fidelity and success in this expedition. This movement served another effect, which

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Nimrod probably had not overlooked; this, to wit, of animating the gloom of Margaret and Rose, whose smiles, having long been worried by the contrast of the parties, their horses and accoutrements, were now provoked into open laughter, in which neither the finesse of Nimrod, nor the habitual dignity of Obed, allowed those gentlemen to join. Margaret had sometime in course of her life said she could manage Tim as well as his master. To put this point to test, and make an exhibit of his own dexterity, when they stopped to breathe the horses Nimrod proposed that Margaret should touch the animal. She called his name familiarly, as she must have often done before, and he suffered her to lay hands upon him and stroke him, with the docility of a cat. But whenever Nimrod approached, the ears of Tim were seen to fall, his heels rose, and Nimrod retreated. Sometimes the girls walked long distances. Again Nimrod, who knew the whole region as well as his own mother’s kitchen, led them about by-paths that afforded the best views of the country and the towns. So in various ways, with a generous if not the most discreet attention, he contrived to relieve the monotony of the ride, and move their spirits, which he said were binding, and the renovation of which he declared was one purpose of the journey. It was not difficult to observe that in all this Nimrod consulted what was due to his own state of mind also, and the girls were sometimes obliged to recall him from reveries into which the scenes of the last month might have plunged one even more light-minded than himself. As regards the region they traversed, in some of its aspects, if any one is curious to compare former times with the present, he might be guided in his inquiries by a passage from the letters of Wilson, the Ornithologist, who was over the same ground a short time afterwards. “Every where,” says he, “I found schoolhouses ruinous and deserted; the taverns dirty, and filled with loungers brawling about politics and lawsuits; the people idle and lazy.” They arrived at Hartford that evening, where Nimrod declared he had business of an express nature, and Obed was desirous of finding a market. They left the next morning, Obed in fine humor, having been able, by Nimrod’s assistance, to turn some of his goods for a new hat. On the afternoon of the fourth day, having accomplished a journey which can now be made in almost as many hours, they arrived in the suburbs of Boston, at a place then and we believe now known as Old Cambridge. Here, if they had not intended to stop, their course must have been arrested by a great swell of

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people, who crowded about the tavern, and seemed to check all progress except in a northerly direction, whither multitudes were hastening.

“Ho, Nim,” cried a burly fellow from the crowd in a tarpaulin and blue jacket, who evidently recognized an old acquaintance. “What are you so loaded for? Break bulk, box-haul, and make sail in company. We are going to have a pull-all-together up here.”

“How fares ye, Hart?” said another. “You liked to be late at the feast. Always expect to see you when anything is going on. Didn’t see you at Plimbury Roads. Turn the ladies in, warm your nose with Porter’s flip-dog, and follow on. Great stakes. Old Highflyer himself, out of Antelope; grandam, Earl of Godolphin’s Arabian.”

“Well,” said Nimrod, “if you have got anything here equal to Tartar, out of the Scarboro Colt, nephew to the late Hyder Ali, and first cousin to Tippoo Saib, I should like to see him, that’s all.”

“My old fellow,” said one addressing Obed, “don’t you wan’t to see the fun? Four horses, one greased pole to climb, two sheared pigs to catch, and a silver punch-bowl the prize. It will do your old heart good to see it.”

Nimrod, subject to a vacillation of spirit and passion for novelty, that had both chequered and vitiated his life, might, without surprise to the girls, have been tempted by the inducements now spread before him, and gone off with the crowd, if he had not anticipated anything of the sort, or even had these very scenes in his eye when he started from home. However this might be, he kept his own counsels, told the girls he should soon be back, threw his purse to Margaret, intimating there were pickpockets among the people, had them shown to the parlor of the Inn, and rode off. Obed also, whose ardor was inspired by the prospect of trade, soon followed.

Margaret and Rose, left to themselves, occupied the hour examining the contents of the room, looking from the windows. Finally they went into the street, walked through the College grounds, saw the buildings and the students. The day was nearly spent, people returned from the races, the tavern rang with their noise and revels. Nimrod and Obed came not. They grew alarmed; they overheard reports from the race, intimations of brawls and constables. Pushing their inquiries, they learned that two strangers had fallen in a drunken dispute, done some mischief, and been carried to prison. They

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waited awhile, till there could be no doubt the delinquents were Nimrod and Obed. Ascertaining the direction and distance of the city, they took their bundles and started forward. Night was coming on, but of that they were not afraid. They had a three miles’ walk before them, but the habits of Margaret and spirit of Rose were equal to it. They came to the bridge. The long tiers of lights stretched across their vision, like a protecting or an embattled array of stars, according as their moods should work. The dim outline of the State House they mistook for a mountain. They came suddenly upon a fence that arrested their progress. This was the drawbridge, which some one in the same predicament with themselves said would presently be lowered. For this result they must abide in patience. They passed over; a voice hailed them, “Toll, Ma’ams, toll.” They avowed their ignorance, and asked how much it was. “Tuppence, tuppence a head.” While Rose was satisfying this voice, which like death seizes upon all, Margaret asked, “Where are we now?” “At Pest House Pint,” replied the man; not very pleasant intelligence to our travellers. Some other inquiries were made, and Margaret asked, “Where does the Widow Wizzle live?” “I don’t know, but you can find out up the way,” rejoined the man. They pursued their course along Cambridge Street, through what was little better than a morass, and furnished with an occasional lamp, that shone like fire-flies in a swamp. “Can you tell us where the Widow Wizzle lives?” said they, applying to an old man whom they next encountered. “Go by Lynde’s Paster, down Queen’s, turn Marlbro, then follow your nose till you come to it,” he answered, and disappeared down a cellar. They might reasonably be expected to be bewildered. They had anticipated finding the house of the lady in question without difficulty. It was late, and not many persons abroad, and these passed them with such speed they found no opportunity to interpose their inquiries. Their hearts almost sunk. At last they stopped by a lamp-post, planted themselves against it, as if to make a regular attack upon the next one that appeared. Nor did they wait long before a young man came by. “Can you tell us, Sir, where the Widow Wizzle lives?” said they, the light dropping full in their faces, and revealing countenances flushed with earnestness. “I am going partly in that direction,” replied the man, “and if you will follow me I think I can set you on the right track.” They went on with him some distance, by one or two turns, and through two or three lanes, when, stopping at a dark corner, their guide,

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saying that business drew him in another quarter, pointed out the course they should pursue. They were overtaken by another man, who, overhearing the point of inquiry, said he was going by the house and would conduct them directly to the spot. This one they followed till they were opposite a large house, retired somewhat from the street, having the entrance to the yard by an iron gate. “This,” said the man, “is Mrs. Wiswall’s,” and opening the gate to the ladies, departed. They crossed the deep front yard, mounted a flight of stone steps, knocked at the door, and were received by an elderly, kind-looking woman, who put all their troubles at rest by announcing herself the woman in question. She took them into a pleasantly lighted parlor, where they found opportunity to warm themselves by a coal fire. The letter which Margaret brought was produced. “Yes,” said the lady, “from my good brother Simeon. When did you leave Livingston? He says Freelove complains of pain in her back, a trouble incident to advancing years. Miss Margaret, lost your brother, I am sorry for you. Miss Rose, hope you are well. Make yourselves at home while you stay here; and I hope you will afford us a good long visit. Havn’t seen any of Simeon’s folks this great while.”

A cup of tea was soon ready for our travellers, they were in rooms furnished with some degree of elegance, they found the lady pleasant and talkative, and in many respects reminding Margaret of the worthy Deacon. Two young ladies came in, one of whom their hostess introduced as her daughter Bertha, and the other, whom she called Avice, she said was a boarder. They were shown to a pleasant chamber, where they had a good night’s sleep. The next morning, after interesting Mrs. Wiswall in the fate of Nimrod and Obed, and gaining assurances that their friends should be looked after, having ruminated awhile on the succession of events that had fallen so thickly and portentously upon them, they were at liberty to observe what was about them. The parlor offered to their eye an aspect of splendor and elaborate embellishment, as it might to some of our readers that of antiquity and an obsolete taste. The wainscotted walls bore the fading vestiges of that passion for royalty and blood possessed by some of our ancestors, and the tarnished gilt of the lion’s head was in good keeping with his broken tail. There were fluted pilasters sustaining, on burnished capitals, a heavy frieze, in which deer were seen sporting among flowers. The ceiling was divided by whisks of flowers, with a margin of honey-suckles. From

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a rosette in the centre depended an Argand lamp. On either side of the chimney stood marble columns, once the trunk of busts, now surmounted by vases of living flowers. Above the manteltree, was a painting of Dog and Dead Game, which seemed to occupy a place once devoted to a larger piece. Faded French curtains festooned the windows. There were Dutch chairs in the room, with tall backs and black leather cushions; the lounge where they sat had a covering done in red and blue tent-stich [sic]; there was a dark oval mahogany table, with raised and chased rim, loaded with books. In a back parlor, entered by a broad arch, they saw a tesselated floor, and through the windows appeared an extensive garden, with rows of shrubbery and flowers, a decaying barn, an old Turkish Summer-house, vines trained on high walls. In the front yard were green cedars and firs interspersed with mountain ashes laden with their familiar red berries. “Where are the Three Doves?” said Margaret. “That is gone long ago,” replied Mrs. Wiswall. “New houses occupy its place. Boston is becoming a great city, nothing old remains long. We have now more than twenty thousand inhabitants. Bertha, Avice, show Margaret and Rose your books. They both call me mother, and you shall too, that is, if you are the good girls Simeon says you are.” “There are the Adventures of Neoptolemus, The Fatal Connexion and Lord Ainsworth,” said Bertha. “You have read The Girl of Spirit?” “No,” replied Margaret. “the Fair Maid of the Inn?” “No.” “I think she would like the Marriage of Belfegar,” said Avice, “and The Curious Impertinent.” “The Loves of Osmund and Duraxa are perfectly bewitching,” rejoined Bertha. There were books enough at all events to serve them either in the way of selections or perusal for a long time.

For several days Mrs. Wiswall said she could gather no intelligence of their friends, and they resigned themselves as well as they could to their lot. They spent most of the time alone together, and in good part in their own chamber, a pleasant front room, which their hostess kindly provided with a fire. They read, they talked, they saw much that was new in the streets. Two or three gentlemen boarding there appeared at the dinner-table, but they chose their own society before any they saw about them, and in this preference they suffered no molestation. From their windows they saw ladies in black beaver, purple tiffany, pink satin, melon-shaped and cupelo-crowned hats; short cloaks of all materials and colors, with hoods squabbing behind, known as cardinals; muffs and tip-

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pets of every species of fur; pink satin, yellow brocade shoes, supported on clogs and pattens; gentlemen in coats of all colors, and Suwarrow boots, some in scarlet over-coats; and altogether Boston seemed to them a gay, happy place.

“You must do something to amuse your sisters,” said Mrs. Wiswall to her daughters. “Avice, Bertha, you can show them what there is in the city, the Museum, the Circus, or something of the kind.”

They were taken to the Museum at the head of the Mall, near the Alms-house, over a Cabinet-shop, in the centre of Park Street Church. They saw Young Ladies in Wax, the Guillotine and Assassination of Marat, alligators, &c., and were regaled with the Musical Clocks. Their next excursion was to the Circus in West Boston; the singular docility of the horses, the extraordinary feats of the men, the grotesque wit and manners of the clown, afforded them occasion for wonder and a smile. Margaret wrote to Deacon Ramsdill she was more happy than she could have foreseen, and applauded the benevolent conduct of his sister.

“I guess you must take the girls to the Theatre to-night,” said Mrs. Wiswall. “I don’t know of what party you are. We have a Federal House and an Anti-Federal.” “We are of no party at all,” said Rose. “It is all one to us.” “It is just so with me,” said the lady. “How does Brother Simeon stand now?” “He thinks there is some good on both sides,” replied Margaret. “He does not approve the excesses of either.” “That’s Sim, all over,” responded Mrs. Wiswall. “But at the Federal they have—what is it, girls?” “Pizarro,” replied Bertha. “At the Haymarket they have The Castle of Almunecar.” “Yes,” added the lady, “the dungeons, and strange noises and sights.” “I would rather see Pizarro,” said Margaret. “I prefer the Black Castle,” said Rose. “That is it,” said Mr[s]. Wiswall. “Both be suited, one go to one, the other to the other.” “We cannot be separated, Mrs. Wiswall,” replied Margaret. “I want to go where Rose does.”

To the Haymarket they went, near the South end of the Mall, and were shown to a box not very remote from the stage. The piece that had been the subject of discussion, sombre in its scenes, terrific in its imagery, the storm at sea, the wreck, grim towers, dark chambers, apparitions, hollow voices, Rose declared suited her exactly. “It is myself,” she said to Margaret. “But I suppose you see a smooth haven, and the light of true life comint of it all.” “It has all been

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in me,” replied Margaret, “only if it is not of me, I shall be glad.” But surprise combined with other reflections when they beheld their hostess’s daughter, Bertha, moving amid the fearful scenes of the play. And in the pantomime that composed the after-piece, they again saw her as Joana and Avice as Columbine, along with Harlequin and Punch, and they thought they detected the features of one of the gentlemen boarders figuring under the cap of Scaramouch. But the delight mingled with a variety of sensations this piece afforded Margaret, was such that she forgot everything else while she saw represented the parts, characters, buffooneries, dresses and forms, that constituted a lively part of her father’s drunken vagaries, and had disclosed to her eye the origin of a certain description of allusion and sentiment that predominated in Master Elliman, and which she never before understood.

They spoke to Mrs. Wiswall of seeing her daughter on the stage. “I suppose you think it very bad,” she replied. “O no,” said Rose, “I only wished I was there, that I could have been in the darkness with her.” “My good brother the Deacon would probably be opposed to it.” “I never heard him speak of it,” replied Margaret, “nor did any one ever say anything to me on the subject.” “Bertha,” continued the lady, “took a passion for the stage, and I humored her in it. There is little that she can do, poor child; and she seems pleased with this. Some of our gentlemen are interested there, and they help her what they can. Avice plays with them sometimes.” “How I wish I could join them,” said Rose. “Should you like to?” asked the lady. “Yes, better than anything else.” “Bertha, here, Miss Elphiston says she should like to have a part in your playing. I am sure I would not oppose the young lady’s feelings.” “We want some one for Lady-in-waiting to Lady Teazle, in the School for Scandal; it is to be brought on next week;” replied Bertha. “I don’t care what it is,” said Rose; “though I should prefer the Black castle.” “That is to be repeated in a fortnight, and perhaps they will give you a place in it;” rejoined Bertha.

Sunday came, Margaret and Rose were listening to the chime of bells, and watching the passers-by. “I am a good deal troubled with the gout,” said Mrs. Wiswall,[ “]and don’t get out to Meeting very often. The girls were so late at the rehearsal they are not up yet. I suppose you keep up the good old way in the country, and are always at Church; and would miss it if you did not go?”

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“I never went to Meeting but once in my life,” said Margaret.

“Indeed!” rejoined the lady. “Can it be possible? Does Simeon allow of such a thing?”

“I believe he is satisfied it would not do me much good.”

“Yes, I know,” answered Mrs. Wiswall. “It is not all one could wish. I have no doubt my brother feels the evil as much as I do. Perhaps Rose would like to go.”

“No,” said Rose, “I have been to Church, and I think for the last time.”

“Is there not,” asked Margaret, “A Church in the city called King’s Chapel? I think I have heard of it. Mr. Evelyn, Rose, said something to me about it. That is the name, I believe. I have been feeling this morning as if I should like to go there once.”

“One must be a little cautious where one goes to Church, now-a-days,” said Mrs. Wiswall. “Would not brother Simeon prefer that you go—say to the Old South?”

“I am persuaded he would wish me to go wherever I desired,” replied Margaret.

“Yes, indeed,” said the lady. “It is in Tremont Street, corner of School.”

“If you would be willing to let the servant show me there, I should like to go,” said Margaret.

“Certainly,” answered Mrs. Wiswall; “anything you wish while you stay here.”

Margaret was soon ready, and conducted to the Church in question. She was awed as she entered by what presented itself to her eye as the magnificence of the place; its massive columns, its lofty vault, its symbols, its monuments, its silence, its richness, were so different from anything she had seen; she seemed to have dropped into one of the palaces of her dreams. The mysterious peals of the organ united to subdue her completely. The people were set, when she arrived; she walked up the centre aisle, an elderly gentleman opened his pew to her. Hardly was she seated when she knelt instinctively, and wept profoundly; and not without difficulty was she able to efface the traces, or prevent the renewal of her emotion. The prayer excited sentiments she had never before felt, and raised the decaying energies of her aspirations. The music tranquilized her like oil, and penetrated her with a solemn strange transport. The Minister, the Rev. Dr. Freeman, then in the prime of life, had that day among a multitude of hearers whom extraneous interests are wont to

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distract, or long familiarity harden, one that devoured his words, and was melted by his address; while with manner becoming his subject, he discoursed from the words of the Prophet, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.” If he had known how much good in that single instance he was able to effect, it might have recompensed him for any amount of laborious endeavor, and sufficed for successive seasons of fruitlessness. Margaret lingered on the closing steps of the service, and by the singularity of her demeanor even drew the attention of the occupants of the pew. These consisted of the elderly gentleman, a lady who might be his wife, two young ladies, and a young gentleman, their daughters and son. The face of the last recalled to Margaret the street-lamp, and floated in with her first impressions of relief the night she entered the city. “You are welcome to a seat with us,” said the elderly gentleman. “I thank you,” replied Margaret, and mingled with the retiring congregation. The afternoon she spent with Rose in their own room.

The next week she aided Rose in the part assigned her for the stage. During the same time, at an Assembly in Concert Hall, to which the Theatrical Corps were invited, Margaret and Rose became parties. Here they found what seemed to them a brilliant and imposing collection, of lights, hangings, persons, dresses, figures, music. They declined action, and were content with the spectacle—ladies sweeping by in silver-gauze tunics, showily pinked, crape and silk velvet dresses glittering with gold spangles, depending skirts twinkling and rattling with silver and gold, short sleeves sporting voluminous ruffles, waists riding the shoulders; hair frounced and puffed and garnished with flowers; gentlemen in fancy colored coats, with powdered hair, white stockings, with long garters streaming like a ship’s pennon, shed a shower of perfume, as they passed.

On the night of the representation, Margaret was permitted to accompany Rose behind the boards, where she helped dress the Lady-in-waiting, and fortified her friend for the delicate and novel adventure to which she was committed. The piece was received with applause, and Margaret and Rose, out of the small part they enacted, contrived to eke considerable amount of self-gratulation. The play was repeated, and Rose bore herself so well she had the promise of being advanced to Maria, which Bertha took, who was going off in Lady Teazle. The succeeding Sabbath, Margaret repaired again to King’s Chapel, thus exhibiting

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the somewhat anomalous sight of a virtual stage-player, and a devout church-goer; but she was witless of any contradiction. Admitted to the secrets of the theatre, as we gather from her conversations with Rose, her first impressions gradually dulled. Not to speak of other things, she remarked, that her ideas became sadly disarranged by observing the superficiality of that on which so much consequence depended. Pasteboard, paint, hollowness, heartlessness, she said, were inadequate for such an effect. “I looked into the pit,” said she, “there were tears, and smiles, and fervid passion, while here Avice was fretting because her shoes pinched, Bertha in the farce was down-sick with a cold, and one gentleman died in the tragedy, and was brought off drunk. The Theatre seems to me almost as bad as the Church; it is all Puppetry alike.”

“I know it, Margaret,” replied Rose, ‘but what shall we do? I suppose you will call me a Puppet too; if not acting one’s self constitutes a person such, then I am a Puppet. And that is just what I want, to get away from myself. Yet when the Black Castle comes on I will show you real acting.”

“Dear Rose, how sorry we are for ourselves, are we not? But how can I consent to such methods of arousing people’s attention, and moving their affections?”

At whatever judgment she might have been destined to arrive on these subjects, she was not long in finding new topics of speculation. Returning that night at a late hour from the Theatre, with Rose and their company, she stopped a moment to look at the effect of a bright moon on the high tide waters that filled the bay west of the Common, a conjunction it had not fallen to her lot before to witness, and one that insensibly detained her while the rest were a long distance ahead. “let fly your sheets, there! the bite is after you!” was a loud blunt cry that startled her ears. “What! what!” she exclaimed. “Run, run,” shouted the voice. She stood under the shadow of a tree, and before she could collect herself, or comprehend the cause of this sudden alarm, a hand was upon her; but no sooner did she feel it, than it left her; and turning she beheld a man struggling in the grasp of another man. “Climb the rattlings, mount the horse there,” cried the last man, “while I make the cull easy, you are in danger, Margaret, that’s Obed’s horse, up with you.” She beheld the veritable Tim, standing close by, she called his name, she sprang upon his back; and directly after her mounted the man whose voice she had heard. No sooner were they seated, than the other man rushed forward, seized the stirrup, the crupper, or whatever he could lay

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hands upon; the horse flung out, and galloped away. When Margaret recovered herself in this sudden flurry, she recognized in the man with whom she was riding, the sailor who accosted Nimrod the day they reached Cambridge. He said his name was Ben Bolter; and in a dialect mongrel and strange, he gave Margaret to understand, as well as he could, that he was an old friend of her brother’s; that Nimrod and Obed after a short confinement were released from prison; that Nimrod having searched the city in vain for her, went back to Livingston to see Deacon Ramsdill about her; while Obed remained, both to find his friends, and sell his wares; that he himself was also on the lookout for her; that enjoying a furlough, he had engaged the use of Tim, who he declared was the worst craft he ever sailed in; and finally, being at the Theatre that night, he thought he discovered her behind the curtains; and following the matter up, he came upon her just as one, whom he characterized as an old enemy of his, and whom Nimrod did not like, seemed to take advantage of her being alone to do her an injury.

Hastening forward to Mrs. Wiswall’s, Margaret found Rose standing alone at the gate. “How you have frightened me!” exclaimed the latter, “I thought you were with Bertha. They were telling me of a new play—I went back after you, you must have taken another street, I thought you were lost.”

“Have you been anchored here?” said the sailor. “What place is this?”

“Mrs. Wiswall’s,” answered Margaret.

“I guess Nimrod cast the name overboard, before he got here, or something,” replied the sailor. “But I don’t like her build. What flag does she sail under? What’s her crew?”

“Oh, Margaret!” outspoke Rose, “I have suspected something wrong. I don’t like Mrs. Wiswall’s face. Some old remembered villany sleeps in it. She is not the Deacon’s sister.”

“It has seemed to me sometimes, as if all was not right,” said Margaret.

“Ben Bolter,” said Rose, “take us to sea with you. Carry us out of the world.”

They went, however, as Margaret proposed; they came to a

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house lying, like Mrs. Wiswall’s, off from the road; it was a late hour, there were no lights to be seen; but the resolution of Rose and the confidence of Margaret led them straightway through the yard, and up the steps. The sailor did the knocking in a manner easy enough to himself, but such as might have wrought violence on the peace of others. They had not long to wait, when the door was opened by one whose face was now familiar to Margaret, and which Rose might perchance remember having seen, the young man whose father gave Margaret a seat in Church, and to whose house she now fled for refuge. They stated their errand and their distress, in which was contained their apology.

“Come in,” said the young man. “I will speak to my sister; the knocking I think has saved me the trouble of calling her from her bed. I was already up.”

They were taken into the parlor, and the young man soon returned with his sister whom he introduced as Anna Jones; she made him known as her brother Frank. Preliminaries were speedily settled, and our wanderers shown to their bed. They met in the morning with a kind reception from Mr. and Mrs. Jones, and another daughter, Winifred. These five composed the family, between whom and Margaret an interest had already been reciprocated from their casual rencontre at Church, and which did not fail to extend to Rose. The ring on Margaret’s finger seemed also to find old acquaintances, and served to recall the name of Mr. Evelyn, who the Joneses said, was an intimate friend of theirs, and they expressed pleasure in seeing one of whom he had spoken in terms of commendation. Our wanderers here entered upon quiet but shadowy days, the family using every method to domesticate them; Nimrod was gone, and Obed was a peddler about the town; they must in patience possess their souls. Mr. Jones had been a prosperous India merchant; his house contained many things to interest them. Paintings—Christ bearing the Cross by Raphael divided Margaret’s attention with a Magdalen at Devotion by the same hand; a Lady taking the Veil, and Murillo’s Prodigal Son engaged Rose; there were Tenier’s Rent-day Feast, Landscapes by Claude, Abraham receiving the Angels by Il Mudo, and others; they were introduced to rooms furnished with superb mirrors, satin-wood tables, French chairs, tamboured lounges, marble busts, etc.; the Library rich in its architecture, more in its books; they ate from gold and silver plate; they slept under sumptuous satin curtains; their tooth-brush case was inlaid with gold and silver; they

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reveled in a Conservatory of rare and beautiful flowers. What especially delighted them was a piano played with skill and effect by Anna, while with a strong but latent peculiarity of feeling, Margaret listened to a guitar, the instrument of Winifred. Frank Jones they learned was a student of Theology, in which science he supplied them with his views. They were also introduced to a mother of Mr. Jones, a very old woman, who entertained them with tales of ancient time. So two or three days wore pleasantly away. One morning, Rose cried out that Obed was coming! “There he is with his saddle bags and new hat mounting the steps.” Margaret sprang for the door. “Hold,” said Rose, “let us get under the curtains, and see what he is after, if he knows we are here.” They concealed themselves and Obed entered.

“Don’t want teu buy some of my things, I kalkelate, deu ye?”

“Be seated, Sir,” said Anna, “and let me see what you have.”

“Han’t seen nothin’ of Molly, have ye?”

“Molly, Molly! I have not heard of such a person.”

“I’m feered she’s kilt, or pizened, run over, lost, or drounded.”

“Who is she, your daughter, Sir?”

“No, she’s Molly, Pluck’s Molly, one of the Injins, what lives under the Head, next the Pond, and neighbor of Marm’s. Nim and I brung her teu the Bay, and Rose; I run arter a shoat at the races, and they wouldn’t let me have the cup; they wouldn’t let Nim have his beat, and we knocked um down, and they knocked us down, and put us into Jail; and when we went back, the gals was gone. This is an orful place. One woman said she would call the pleese, and have me took right up, cause I went inteu her house, and threw a broom at me, cause I wanted teu sell her something. They’ve kilt Molly, and drounded her under the bridge.”

“I am sorry for you. You should not have left her.”

“Marm telled me teu look arter her; she was always good teu me, and helped me dig roots, and kept Bull off.”

“Then you want her to work for you. Can’t you find somebody else for that?”

“I dun know; she’s a right smart consarn, Marm says. When she was at home, I could always find her, if she warn’t gone inteu the woods. If I know’d where she was, I could find her now.”

“What would you give if I would help you find her?”

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“I dun know, I’ve axed all the folk, and they never seen her; and there she lives close by our house, and the Master knows her, and she can read eeny most as well as Parson Welles, and she is the only man in the world can go up teu Tim, only me and Marm. If you would find her, I’d stay and sleep with ye, and let you have some flag that is good teu chaw, and some salve what’ll cure the itch. Don’t you want teu buy some of the sientifikals, some of Marm’s Nommernisstortumbug? I’ve sold more than nine hundred boxes, since we found it out. It’ll cure yer croup, chopped hands, ager, coughs, burns, sores, cuts, scalt-head, measle, small-pox, worms, piles, sore-throat, tetters, felons, jaunders, toothache, dropsy, headache, backache, tongue-tye.”

“What a wonder!”

“That an’t half; Marm told me all; rumatis, hypo, gluts, blue-skin, plague in the vitals, lock-jaw, St. Vitus dance, palsy, wind-gall in her horses, loss of cud in the cows, drive rot out of yer sheep, keep the wind out of yer babies, kill bed-bugs;—here is the paper what the Master wrote about it. ‘Sudorific, anamnetic, detergent, scorbutic, tonic, febrifugous, vermifugous, stimulant, sedative, aromatic, antiseptic, narcotic, refrigerant, antispasmodic, demulcent, expectorant, stypitic, cathartic, emetic,’—that is what he says, and he knows every thing.”

“ ‘Garrulousness,’ he has down.”

“Yes it cures that; that is the larnin’—sore-tongue—swab out your mouth with quince core jell, I’ve got some in my bags, and take a spoonful of the Nommernis when you go teu bed.”

“ ‘Acrasial Philogamy?’ Brother Frank, what is that?”

“That,” replied Frank, “is an incurable malady to which young persons are subject.”

“Yes, the Master said ’twas takin’, and Marm said it was an orful complaint, she knew. Take pennyrial, pound up sweet cicely root, and bile with henbane and half an ounce of the Nommernis till it’s done, and it ’ll break the fever.”

“What is this, ‘Cacoethes Feminarum’?”

“That’s humors. Elder-blows ’ll drive um out.”

“ ‘Diæta et oratio est optima medicina—diet and prayer he says are the best medicines—what does that mean?”

“Them is the sientifikals; one of the ministers took teu boxes of the Nommernis when he read that, he liked it so well.—What is that noise? Ye han’t got anything shet up here?”

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“Nothing that will hurt you.”

“I don’t like her housen; they are full of bull-beggars and catamounts. Marm ’ll scold at me like nutcakes, if I can’t find Molly. She’s kilt, they’ve drounded her under the bridge.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Don’t know, Marm han’t said. They are all broke up down there since the murder. Marm said if Molly come teu our house she might have the best bed. But she don’t want Pluck nor Hash; they are an orful set. I can’t stay, I can hear um snickerin’ at me as they did up teu tother house, and Marm wouldn’t like it.”

Rose and Margaret burst from their retreat with a loud laugh, and gave Obed a hearty greeting; which he, bemazed and extracized, returned as handsomely as he knew how. Obed confirmed the account given by the sailor, and said Nimrod promised to return as soon as he could see Deacon Ramsdill, and that he was looking for him every day. To the great joy of all, the next morning Obed with Ben Bolter appeared, conducting Nimrod and Deacon Ramsdill to the house.

“This beats old Suwarrow,” said Nimrod. “You have kept as shy as young partridges.”

“A pretty tough spell you have had of it, gals,” said the Deacon. “But you know, Molly, you always find the chesnuts arter a biting frost and hard wind. Some good may come of it.—the Lord knows. A little butting agin the bag cures the core.—I havn’t no particular business here, but Freelove thought I had better come down, and see what was to pay.—We are all broke up at home, about the Meetin-’house and the Parson and everything. Some want a new Minister, they won’t help about putting up the house. We have had several Town Meetings, but there is a good deal of disorder, and some hard feeling. I count, it’s best for every one to paddle his canoe his own way, and when he hasn’t a canoe, then let him go a-foot. There an’t no two spears of grass alike, and you can’t make all people think alike, only I count they might live in peace together in the same field. But Brother Hadlock wouldn’t listen to me, and when you can’t do nobody any good, then you had better let them alone. It’s no use talking agin the grain. When hens are shedding their feathers they don’t lay eggs; and one can’t look for much among our folk now—so I thought I had as goods come away.—But the hotter the fire the whiter the oven; if our fire will be of any service the Lord knows.—I have been arter sheep through brush and ditches, before now, gals, and I

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commonly found them in better feed than their own close, ha, ha!”

“They have found a good birth,” said Ben Bolter, looking about the room. “But I should like to fall upon them Algerines.”

“There has been some singular mistake or mischief at work,” said Mr. Jones. “There must have been an error in the name, or something of that sort, I think.”

“The old fox, weazle, or what not, I am determined to dig it out,” said Nimrod.

“I have been to Pamela’s,” said the Deacon, “and she says she hasn’t seen anything of you; and she wants you to go right round there.”

“We will go together,” said Mr. Jones.

Accordingly they went to “the Widow Wizzle’s,” the sister of the Deacon, whom they found a different person in some respects from their old acquaintance her namesake. Nimrod and Ben Bolter exhibited strong desire to visit the late hostess of the young ladies, and Nimrod said they must go with him; their repugnance to such a measure was overborne by the Joneses, who supported Nimrod, and offered to be of the company. In force, now numbering seven persons, they proceeded to the house of their late residence, were ushered into the parlor, where they found Mrs. Wiswall evidently much agitated, and a very aged man sitting leaning on his staff from which he hardly raised his face. Whatever might have been their method of address, or the purport of this visit, they were met by the apparition of a human being, in large black whiskers, deathly pale, leaning on the arm of Bertha, and emerging from the back parlor. “Raxman!” involuntarily shuddered Rose, and fires that had long consumed her heart flashed into her face, and retired; and she hung convulsed on the arm of the younger Jones.

“Nope him on the costard,” said Ben Bolter.

“Keep still,” said Nimrod, “and let us see what the fellow has to say.”

He, to whom all eyes were now turned, as if he had come in on some such errand, thus spoke,

“I am,” said he, “a sick and dying man. Your violence, Ben Bolter, comes too late; the blow from the horse has done the work. Miss Elphiston, Miss — — — Margaret, can you forgive me. I have wished to see you to ask this last earthly favor. It was I who led you to this house, it was through my instigation you were detained here, it was my wishes that regulated all behavior towards you; nor would my mother, whom you see before you, or my sister, have consented to such a

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transaction as this must appear in your eyes except through me. If my motives were selfish, they were not so disgraceful to you, Miss Hart, as to me. I cannot unfold it all now; that shall be done at other hands. I am weak, I am dying. I have only strength to ask, ladies, will you forgive me. Miss Elphiston, to you I make no apology, I ask no charity, my conduct admits of no qualification. I only crave your forgiveness; a sheer wretch, I entreat it; at your feet I implore you to forgive me. Your beauty, ladies, ensnared me, an uncontrolled ambition has led me on, your virtues and your sufferings have brought me to repentance, and not, I trust, the fear of death alone.”

There was breathless silence, then a discordant tremor pervaded the room;—the old man shook audibly on his cane, the group in the centre worked with a varied phrenzy. Margaret was the first to break this singular perplexity. “I forgive you,” said she, “I forgive all your wrong to me, whatever may have been its intention.”

“Never, never,” said Rose, “can I forgive you.”

“It is late shutting the door when the mare is stolen,” said Deacon Ramsdill; “but when she comes back of her own accord, you had better let her in. Besides, Rose, the Good Book says, ‘Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”

“I have foresworn the Bible,” answered Rose. “He and it have alike damned me.”

“Don’t speak so, Rose,” said Frank. “He seems to be sincerely penitent. It would be a relief to his last moments to have your forgiveness.”

“I cannot, I cannot!” she rejoined.

“O that Miss Elphinston would forgive my brother,” said Bertha, weeping.

“You see, Mr. Jones,” said Mrs. Wiswall, addressing the senior of the name, “the wretched mother of two wretched children. But where is pity for her to be sought or received! In that son and daughter you behold the tokens of all my sins, and all my sufferings. Have you, Sir, been ignorant of my course? My vanity was allured and my confidence betrayed by a British Officer. One, in whose house we now are, instructed me in the arts, and unbridled me for a career of deception. When he left the country, and could make no farther reparation for his injuries, he gave me the title to his estate. I followed the American camp; I was cajoled by your own officers. I became a runner between the two armies, when the British held New York. And when it is his turn to

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speak that sits there,” she said, pointing to the old man, “he will tell you more. I returned after the War to this house, and here I am; my unhappy children pleading in vain for that mercy which another’s infamy might justly implore, and which their guilty, miserable mother, the cause of all their calamities, can never bestow. Who, Miss Elphiston, ever asked my pardon? Who ever knelt for my forgiveness? What dying man has flung me the poor boon of his remorse? By whose penitence has my own conscious load of sin been lightened? My relentings, were they ever so great, had been lavished on the winds; my commiserations had been squandered on scoffs and jeers; my love, which even the guilty sometimes feel, and it is a relief to the abandoned to exercise, has been answered by the frowns of the honored and the repulse of the prosperous. Here I am, freshly awakened to a sense of my enormities, and denied the privilege of seeing one gleam of peace fall upon the heads of my poor children. My own guilt seems to augment, and they are plunged into still deeper distress. Miss Margaret, my conduct towards you must appear equivocal, suspicious, and fraught with duplicity. But the crime belongs rather to the means than the intent, and I have been too long familiar with the ways of the world, to haggle at the manner when the end is desirable. I had reason to believe that my son’s purposes were honorable, however his action must forever degrade him in your eyes. In what a world do we live! By what steadfastly increasing evil are our steps pursued! Our life is but the ministration of woe and ruin by man to man! He who rules all things for the best, permits some to fall where others rise. Your beauty, which princes might covet, shall bear you aloft, like the star of Evening, diffusing glory all about you, and cheering your own existence. Mine sinks beyond recovery, the darkness of disgrace adding new deformity to the waste of years; and the lost innocence of my childhood returns to shed vengeance on my enfeebled age!”

“Ho!” hemmed Ben Bolter; “I must overhaul my coppers, and get my head on another tack.”

“I do forgive you,” said Rose, “and may Heaven forgive me too.”

While these scenes were transpiring among the principal parties in the room, one might have detected Nimrod in earnest whisper with the old man aside; “Not now, sir, not now; this is enough for once; wait till we get away, we will go to Mr. Jones’s.”

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The company returned to the house whence they started. Meanwhile, Mr. Jones taking Margaret by herself, said he would open on a subject of some interest to her. He doubted not, he added, that her good sense would receive what he was commissioned to declare without confusion, and the fortitude she had displayed in adverse circumstances would not forsake her under more agreeable events. What was coming, she might well ask, that required such a preface. Have you a grandfather, he asked; she replied she knew of none, that she supposed the parents of both her father and mother were dead. “I have the pleasure, then,” continued Mr. Jones, “to inform you that your grandfather is living, and the old man we saw at Mrs. Wiswall’s is he.” He then proceeded to put her in possession of what the reader already knows, that she was the adopted child of Pluck and Brown Moll, that her own father and mother died in her infancy, that she had been disowned by her grandfather, who, nevertheless, had contributed supplies to her comfort, and in a word that she must prepare to receive him the following day.

The next morning, Nimrod and Ben Bolter, accompanied by the old man, Mr. Girardeau, came to Mr. Jones’s. The way having been prepared, little remained but for Margaret to embrace her grandfather. The old man laid his hand on her head, looked in her face, and with a voice broken by age, and husky with emotion, said, “Jane, Jane, my own Jane, my Jane’s own?” Summoning Rose, he held them face to face, and said, “This is your cousin, Margaret, the grandchild of my wife’s sister; and Nimrod,” continued he, “is not your adopted brother only, his mother is the daughter of my only sister. Others have asked your forgiveness, but who needs it more than I? I turned you off in helpless infancy, I have greatly sinned against you and others too, more than I can tell. But Nimrod and Ben Bolter will inform you of what I cannot. Let me be forgiven, and you shall know my wrong doings afterwards.”

“Sit down, Sir,” said Nimrod, “and I will tell all I know about the matter,” and he proceeded to relate his first connection with Margaret, and his taking her to the Pond.

“Yes,” added Ben Bolter, “it is all true. Nim and I were messmates. I was there when he brought you off; I helped stow you away; I dandled you when he was asleep; I lowered you down when he left the sloop; you was a good looking cock-boat, but make a spread eagle of me, if you havn’t grown into as handsome a merchantman as ever carried a bone in her

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mouth. But, blow me, if Obed’s horse, hadn’t bunged the cull’s puddings, I don’t know where you would have brought up.”

“God’s hand is in it!” said Deacon Ramsdill, who came in during these disclosures. “You know we read that when the lost one came home they danced and made merry. And you recollect, Molly, when they brought you up out of the woods, the Preacher prayed before the dance begun. I feel as if I should like to pray before we get on to the rejoicings.” Whereupon they all joined with the Deacon, who, in simple, heart-felt manner, made thanksgiving to Almighty God.

Leaving these persons to recapitulate details, exchange congratulations, and make such demonstration of joy as was natural to the hour, we must go with our readers to places and times somewhat remote, and bring up a brief account illustrative of events that have now been recorded.

CHAPTER XII.

The History of Mr. Girardeau.

During the period of our Colonial existence, the American Planters were in the practice, not of importing black slaves from the coast of Guinea alone, but also white servants from various parts of Europe. Among the proprietors of the Simsbury Copper Mines were several Frenchmen, the wealthy, enterprising, exiled Huguenots. It became an object with these gentlemen to combine in their establishment those who could speak their own tongue. About the year 1740, there arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, a cargo of servants, and of the number were some from Jersey, an Island belonging to the English Crown, but inhabited in good part by a French population. A purchase was made including a portion of this last description of persons. In the lot, were Jean Waugh, and Marie his sister. Jean was a young man of some ambition. He was ready to exchange poverty and oppression in the Old World, for temporary vassalage in the New, with the prospect of ultimate enfranchisement and possessions. He threw him-

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self, with his sister, into the hands of an American shipmaster, consented to be advertised with coals and salt in the public prints, to be knocked off at public vendue, and for the consideration of twelve pounds paid the importer became the subject of indentures binding him to the Simsbury Company for six years, the term affixed by law to those of his age. Jean was master of the French and English languages; he could read and write, he was spirited and active. He wheeled ore with blacks, he labored with the pick-axe, he drilled rocks. By the regulations of the peculiar institution to which he was subservient, he could not marry, none could trade or truck with him, he could not leave the premises, he was ineligible to office. In the result it appears, he became tired of his condition, one indeed not congenial with the spirit of the present age, and the vestiges of which can only be traced in an obscure antiquity. To relieve himself, he ran away, a criminal offence, for which he was publicly whipped. Returning a blow upon the executioner he became liable to two years’ additional service. He again contrived to abscond. He connected himself with a gang of counterfeiters, and the Bills of Credit issued by the Provinces in periods of alarm became encumbered and perplexed. He fled the region, and a few years afterwards reappeared in New York, associated with brokers, smugglers, and that class of men who contrive to reap advantage from public distress or private credulity. Here he took the name of Girardeau, and, as such, has already been introduced to our readers.

It so happened that a little boy, who dwelt in the neighborhood of the Mines, and often played about the grounds, was a witness of Jean’s punishment, and from a habit peculiar to his nature, took sides with the delinquent; and ultimately gave him essential support in his attempts to escape. This lad was Didymus Hart, familiarly known in this Memoir as Pluck. Marie, the sister of Mr. Girardeau, seduced by an Overseer at the Mines, died in giving birth to twin daughters, one of whom Didymus subsequently married, and the other became the Mrs. Wiswall mentioned in the foregoing chapter. To digress a moment on the history of Pluck—after Mr. Girardeau was in circumstances to recompense his benefactor, as well as show his attachment to the child of his sister, he made liberal grants to Mr. Hart; and even aided him in becoming established in some mercantile pursuit. But Pluck, abandoning himself to his cups, dissipated at once his good name and his estate; and for some misdemeanor losing one of

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his ears, he became still more reckless and thriftless, and finally succeeded in completely estranging the affection of Mr. Girardeau, as he had already forfeited the respect of his fellow citizens. He removed to Livingston, where he supported his family awhile by tending bar for Mr. Smith at No. 4, and at last took up his residence at the Pond.

Mr. Girardeau married a sister of the grandmother of Rose. The acquisition of wealth became the engrossing passion of this man. This object he clutched with a miserly and inextinguishable activity; and with that singleness of aim and sagacity of calculation which rendered elusion impossible. In this pursuit, he sacrificed every generous sentiment of his nature, inflicted unhappiness on his family, sent his wife to a premature grave, would have wrecked the virtues as he finally contributed to the death of his child. When imposts were high he contrived to smuggle his commodities; when premium was exorbitant, he had money to lend. If trade was interrupted in one quarter, he opened channels for it in another. As fortune is said to aid the bold, when the ports were closed what should happen but his own well-laden ships were already in the offing. During the first alarms of the War, when multitudes deserted the city, he became chapman of their estates; confiscated property he bid in for a trifle. He trafficked in public securities, and realized much, where many lost their all. Mr. Girardeau was master of the German, either by an original acquisition, or from intercourse with that portion of our immigrant population; thus supplied with three important dialects, he held a position superior to most of his contemporaries. This language he also taught his daughter, who, it will be recollected, was able to discourse with Brèckmann, the young Waldecker, in his own tongue. During the War, for purposes humane or military, large quantities of gold and silver were transported backwards and forwards between the adjacent country and the city. Much of this passed through the hands of Mr. Girardeau, who did not fail to take due brokerage. He was a Patriot and a Tory, as was most convenient; and if he accommodated his coat to the hue of the parties with whom he dealt, its facing retained but one color, that of their common gold. In these negotiations he also employed the services of his other twin niece, Mr. Wiswall and her little boy, called Raxman, whom at the close of the War, it has been related Nimrod found on the premises of Mr. Girardeau. The acquaintance of this woman on both sides of the line, the protection afforded by her sex, the harmless-

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ness of the lad, were circumstances of which he did not fail to avail himself. Introduced to the secrets of the contending powers, he made adventures with a safe foresight of the issue. The agent of factions and intrigues, he never violated his trust except when driven to what is termed the first law of nature, to which he had timely recourse. The public good he satisfied himself he carried, where others have borne important sections of the country, in his breeches pocket. At the close of the War he purchased city-lands, which in the progress of time doubled and quadrupled on his hands. In Politics he became what is known as a trimmer, and his sails were set to catch the breeze from whatever quarter it blew. In the game of public life, leaving to others offices and honors, place and power, he managed to sweep the banks into his own drawers. When war threatened with France, he obtained foreign exchange at a discount, and after the disturbance sold it at an advance. He speculated in continental bills; he profited by the wars of Europe. Such was Mr. Girardeau. At the expiration of the century, the Jersey servant had arisen to a fortune, estimated at the time, as high as two millions of dollars.

But old age had already overtaken him, and death was not far off. Palsy, without a figure, loosened his hold of his gains, and he could not be indifferent to the destination of an estate amassed with so much painstaking. From the depths of the ocean come up bubbles that sparkle on its surface. In Mr. Girardeau appeared some symptoms of an imperishable humanity. His daughter he had persecuted even unto death. He began to refreshen his memory with some thoughts of the grandchild. He discovered the place of her abode, and, in an assumed costume, appeared at the Pond. He certified himself of her existence and identity and departed. Why did he not then make himself known? Nimrod, whose parentage was disguised, when he first became the servant of Mr. Girardeau, exceedingly provoked and irritated him. Pluck, having once pitied, he could never forgive. To Brown Moll, his niece, he attributed a share of her husband’s misfortunes. But we cannot explain what we do not understand, the labyrinths of the human mind, nor can we relate all the operations of that of Mr. Girardeau. It suffices to know that he did relent, at least so far as his grandchild was concerned, and embraced Margaret in his munificent intentions. Raxman had continued in his grand-uncle’s employ in the capacity of a clerk, an office he fulfilled with the fidelity of a child and the industry of a slave.

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But this young gentleman’s conduct with Rose, having reached the ears of Mr. Girardeau, gave him great provocation. At length, however, the apparent reformation of Raxman induced him to offer him a liberal endowment if he would marry Margaret. To effect this object Raxman made a journey to the Pond, where his success has been related. Here also he found an unexpected obstacle to his wishes in the presence of Rose. It needs also to be told that he applied to the Widow Wright, and sought, by means which he found most acceptable with that lady, to gain her to his purpose; which had now become two-fold, that of securing Margaret, and withdrawing Rose. But the Widow, who had her dreams about Margaret, when she found she was likely to lose her to herself, immediately changed her tactics, and endeavored to detain Margaret, and insisted that he should marry Rose. Raxman left the Pond, and returned to New York, where he found Nimrod, to whose assistance, in these embarrassing circumstances, he appealed. But Nimrod had no friendship for Raxman, and a very strong one for Margaret. Now at this time, Mr. Girardeau himself began to exhibit signs of penitence, he avowed a most benevolent interest in his grandchild; and assured Nimrod that everything should be done for the good and felicity of Margaret, if he would render aid to Raxman. Accordingly he was hired to take her away from the Pond, a measure which he understood in the manner described. He was to meet Raxman at Hartford; great was the disappointment of the young man to find Rose of the company. He suggested the continuation of the journey to Boston. He hastened on before an acquainted his mother with his designs. He was in Cambridge when the party arrived there; he had intelligence conveyed to the girls of the imprisonment of Nimrod and Obed; he hovered on their steps as they entered the city; he knew of the letter to the sister of the Deacon; he came up with them as they parted with Frank Jones; and muffled in a cloak, disguising his voice, he conducted them to his mother’s; who in truth was sometimes called Wiswall. He remained about the house, but was not seen in it. The attachment of Margaret and Rose was a difficulty not easily surmounted; various methods were taken to detach them, but all failed. At length the accidental withdrawal occurred as they returned from the Theatre. Raxman endeavored to improve the occasion; but a new balk to his projects offered itself in the person of Ben Bolter. The result is known. Tim, whom the Sailor sported on all occa-

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sions, dealt the young man a mortal blow. It might appear that Ben Bolter himself had some secret antipathy to Raxman; but of this we have no farther knowledge than his own words imply. Mr. Girardeau, learning what had befallen his relative, immediately came to Boston.

Such is the narrative to which the preceding chapter has given rise; and now that whatever relates to these accidental personages has been told, and the thread of the story is evolved; let us return to the principal subject of this Tale.

A new sphere of interest was open to Margaret, and one in which, notwithstanding her need of quiet and repose, she set herself to making immediate exploration; we refer to the circumstances of her own birth, and the history of her father and mother, Gottfried Brückmann and Jane Girardeau. Sedulous and minute were her inquiries on these points; and she found her grandfather as well as Nimrod disposed to communicate whatever they knew. Frank Jones, then in correspondence with Mr. Evelyn, wrote his friend, who was expecting to visit Germany, to make inquiries concerning Brückmann and Margaret Bruneau, in Pyrmont and Rubillaud. Mr. Girardeau had religiously preserved the relics of his daughter and her husband, and said he had in his possession the flute, books and sundry papers, which they left. The bulk of his estate he made over to Margaret, reserving annuities for his niece, Mrs. Wiswall and Bertha, in amount sufficient to rescue them entirely from their present mode of life; Rose also received a gratuity equal to a moderate fortune. They were summoned ere long to fulfil the last duties of humanity upon Raxman. It was decided that Margaret and Rose should spend the winter in Boston. Deacon Ramsdill, Nimrod and Obed returned to Livingston; the latter handsomely laden with gifts, and the profits of his enterprise, Nimrod furnished with the means of redeeming the estate at the Pond, and also of executing his proposed marriage. The father of Margaret being a German, and having left books and manuscripts in that tongue, in which also her mother was skilled, she must also attempt its acquisition; an exercise in which she was assisted by Frank Jones. She devoted some time every day to music, that of the piano and guitar. There were not wanting benevolent persons in the city, who, apprised of his good fortune, endeavored that she should turn it to the best account. New bonnets, new ribbons, the latest style of dresses, were topics on which she was duly enlightened. To balls, theatres, routs, card-parties, her company was incessantly solicited; but this

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proved an attention it was not in her power to answer. A concession on the part of Rose afforded her unmingled pleasure; she agreed to go with Margaret to Church; and having gone half a day they went a whole day; and from going occasionally they went constantly. Spring came at last; and Margaret and Rose, with Frank Jones in company, started on horseback for Livingston. The sadness with which they approached the town, did not abate when they entered the still desolate Green. They returned the greetings of their old friends, and hastened to the Pond. The whole family came out to welcome them, Bull, Dick and all. Chilion was not there! Here the compiler takes leave of Margaret, submitting to such as would pursue the sequel of her life, the Part which follows.

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LETTER FROM MARGARET TO ANNA JONES.

Mons Christi — —

My dear Anna:—you told me to write you everything; but how shall I utter myself? How can I give shape or definition to what I am? Easy were it for me to tell you what I am not. Has a volcano burst within me; has a tornado prostrated me? If you were to excavate the Herculaneum that I seem to myself to be, would you find only the charred semblance of life, the skeletons of old emotions, the very slaves of my hopes stricken down in the act of running away? With Rose, I would forget myself, that to which this writing recalls. She says I can endure the prospect better than she. If this be so, it must be attributed to its possessing the merit of novelty. I am in ruins, and so are all things about me. Yet in the windfall some trees are new-sprouting; invisible hands are rebuilding the shattered edifice. View me as you will, I think I am somewhat improving. Do I begin existence wholly anew, or rise I up from the fragments of an earlier condition? What is the transition—from myself to myself, or from myself to another? What is the link between Molly Hart and Margaret Brückmann, can you tell? In which of the climacterics do I now exist? I am witheringly afflicted. Chilion is not!

The vision of those days distracts me, the remembrance of my brother turns the voices of the birds into wailing, and the sun is pale at mid-day. In Scotland are deep caverns, where invisible streams of water make subterranean melodies. They are called caves of Music. I am such a Cave. Chilion flows through me, a nethernmost, mournfulest dirge. Then, too, Ma is so silent, her features are so rigidly distressed. She smokes

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and weaves, hour by hour—I fear she will never smile again. Pa has lost the glow of his countenance; he has grown absolutely pale; and where he sits working, I see tears drip on his leather apron. Hash is so sober, so soft, it frightens me. Nimrod comes down from the Ledge, and does his best to enliven us, but his gayety has fled, and he knows not how to be mournful. Bull had one leg broke at the time of Chilion’s trial, and hopples out to Chilion’s boat, where he sits by the hour. Rose is soothing and active, but she has a load at her own heart, which in truth I need help her bear. Isabel comes up almost every day, full of sympathy and generous love. Deacon Ramsdill, Master Elliman, Mrs. Bowker and others have made us some kind visits. Sibyl Radney comes down, and milks the cow, and does some of my other little chores. Yesterday, Rose and Isabel went with me to the Burying Ground. Good old Philip Davis, the Sexton, came one night, so I have been told, and neatly covered Chilion’s grave with green sod. It is by itself apart, in one corner of the grounds. Few persons have gone near it, and the tall yellow grass has grown rank about it. I threw myself upon it and dissolved in weeping. Murmur I could not, an inarticulate, ungovernable anguish was all I could feel. O my brother! I knew not I had such a brother, I knew not I loved such a brother! We found a dandelion budding on it—when I was little he taught me to love dandelions! Rose folded me in her arms, Isabel prayed for me. I thought of the blood-sweating agony of Him, the Divine Sufferer; it penetrated and subdued mine. Mrs. Bowker gave me a lady’s slipper taken from the plant Chilion sent her. There is a fancy that flowers die, when those who have tended them do. Will Chilion’s flowers live? there are many of us who will fulfil his love towards them.

We live at home as we were wont to do, only Rose is ever with me. I share with her my bed in the garret. I love the old house, more than all places, and what matters it? I seem to myself to be deep as our own bottomless Pond. The Indian and his child lie there; in me the last of many ages and races of hope and life seem to have perished. Clamaci de profundis. Yet, yet, the sun swims through me, and I hear Jesus walking on the troubled waters above. “Peace, be still;” yes, he still. How sadly does suffering make us conscious of ourselves. I knew not that I had any depth. Now shaft opens into shaft, and the miners are still at work.—I hear my chickens peeping, and I must go feed them. Rose comes in from a sail on the water with Bull. Her beautiful

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smile greets me afar. Thanks, dear Anna, for yourself, thanks for your flowing hair, your blue, brimming eyes, for your royal spirit that daily visits me. Your brother Frank was immeasurably good to us. He has written Rose, who blesses him in her own soul, if she can in no other way. She will write him.

I had a melancholy commission to execute at No. 4, on behalf of Chilion. Since the death of Solomon, Mr. Smith’s affairs have gone on disorderly. The Still took fire one night and was consumed. He himself drinks to intoxication every day, and I did not see him. Mrs. Smith and Damaris were taken wholly unprepared by my errand. The idea of forgiving Chilion had never entered their heads. And indeed it would not restore Solomon to life! I showed them the willow basket Chilion wished me to give them. Damaris cried, and we all cried. At length she said she would forgive Chilion, if I would forgive her for striking me when they were digging in the Pines. How complicate is our life! When I came away I made them a present, small for me, but large perhaps for them. I offered also to put up a monument for Solomon. But, ah’s me! I have since been told, Mr. Smith declares it shall recite the fact that he was murdered by Chilion, or he will have it done himself. Can it not be avoided? Yet I will submit.

In the town the greatest excitement prevails. They cannot decide about rebuilding the Church. Then, Isabel says, there is a preliminary and deeper question. Some are anxious that Parson Welles should have a colleague, and they also stipulate that he shall be a very different man from their old minister. On the one side are Judge Morgridge, Deacon Ramsdill, Esq. Bowker, Esq. Beach, Esq. Weeks, Mr. Adolphus Hadlock, Deacon Penrose, Dr. Spoor, Mr. Gisborne, Mr. Shooks; among the more prominent ones. All these persons I believe I spoke to you about, in answer to your world-wide inquiries, a point in which you excel any one I ever knew. I have not been to the Green, or Desert, as Isabel says it is.

Your loving but afflicted
Margaret.

—
ROSE TO FRANK JONES.

My dear Frank Jones,

I cannot forget you, I live in your approbation, I thrive under your care. Many obligations for your kind note. I am

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externally more calm, my nerves are less susceptible, I sleep more soundly, and Margaret says there is some color in my cheeks. If we were composed of four concentric circles, I can say the three outer ones approximate a healthy and natural state. But the fourth, the innermost, the central one, the core, what can I say of that? I dare not look in there, I dare not reflect upon myself. One thing, I have no real guilt to harass me; I only call to mind my follies. My ambition ever centred upon a solitary acquisition, and for that alone have the energies of my being been spent, sympathy; an all-appreciating, tender, great, solemn sympathy. Beguiled by this desire, I mistook the demonstrations of a selfish passion for tokens of a noble heart. Betrayed beyond the bounds of strict propriety, I became an object of the censure of mankind. Too proud to confess, or too much confounded to explain my innocence, I suffered the penalties of positive infamy. It always seemed to me that I was placid by nature, and moderate in my sensations. This opposition created in me a new nature; my calamities have imparted heat to my temper, and acrimony to my judgment. I became impetuous, vehement, and as it were possessed. A new consciousness was revived, both of what I was and of what the world was. Up to that time I had floated on with a tolerable serenity, trusting myself and others, and ever hoping for more. Then commenced my contention and my despair. I became all at once sensible of myself in a new way; as one does in whose bosom literal coals of fire shall be put. My heart swelled to enormous proportions; it became diseased, and dreadfully painful. It spread itself through my system, tyrannized over my thought, and fed upon the choicest strength of my being. My intellect was darkened, I became an Atheist. Under these circumstances, which you already know something about, after having long kept it hidden, I declared myself to Margaret. She had penetration enough to understand me, and sufficient magnanimity to love me; she awed me by her superior, uniform goodness. I availed myself of a moment when she was in tears to unfold the cause of my own. I rejoiced in her weakness, because I thought thereby I could find entrance to her greatness. The melancholy, to me most melancholy events of her brother’s death, I need not recapitulate. When we left Livingston, I seemed to be driven on as by the elements; whither or how I cared not. I had some tact, and my connection with the Theatre, it was said, would be an advantage to the company. Indeed, it was hinted that I might become a

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Star! My God, how I should have shone! This new life glittered before me, and into the prospect I threw whatever power of resolution or hope I had remaining. Margaret agreed to abide ever with me, and aid me as she could; while I was to earn the livelihood for us both. One good I did derive from this adventure, self-forgetfulness. I attained a sort of ecstasy of outward delight; and, will you believe it, I grew better. This external happiness sank into my being deeper and deeper; it chased away my regrets, it healed my morbidness. My evil and distress seemed to diminish. I was becoming cleansed and purified. Can you understand this? The happier I waxed the more reconciled I became, and the strife between what I was and what I would be, between my hopes and calamities, ceased. Self-forgetfulness the road to virtue! What will you Divines say to that? All at once we were thrown into your house, where all is so elegant, so serene, so pure, so affectionate. Your goodness, Sir, startled me. I dare not be left alone with you. When you spoke, it agonized me. You recalled me to myself. If you had been only good, I believe I should have died, or run away. Anna came to your aid. You were a man. Can a man understand a woman? Margaret says they can. I have denied it. I needed more than your goodness, I needed sympathy, sympathy with my feelings, my wretchedness, my wickedness even. Could you render it? I had a woman’s need of sympathy; could any man give it? Many and painful were the struggles I underwent. Now that I am away from you I can speak more freely and composedly, as I know you will and must allow me to do. Margaret says my smile bewitched you; a game it has more than once practised. How fervently have I prayed for a Medusa-face! But it was not that; it was that your kind feelings, as of old, “took me in.” Then your good minister spoke so discriminatingly and benevolently to me. Truly I can say, never man spake like that man. But could you reach my heart, could you underlie my deepest feelings, could you sustain, heal and assure that which your presence animated into painful life? Let me not disquiet you by questions like these. But I have no alternative, either I must describe my whole estate, or retreat from you forever. You, in effect, demand a disclosure, and Margaret urges me to make it in full. I have not seen a great deal of the world, but I have felt enough of it. I have become suspicious of men, not of their motives altogether, or of their wishes, or kindness; but of their moral capability. Then whatever benefit

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the theatre afforded, I am deriving in a purer manner and with a larger measure here. All kinds of diversion are at our command. We have purchased horses, and can ride; we have boats, and can sail; we have woods, and can walk. We work too, weed the garden, drive the cow to pasture, feed the poultry, wash dishes and wind spools. We have leisure and books, and can read. Beyond this, am I prepared to encounter the world in the particular manner you propose to conduct me to it? I have left it, I have bade it a long adieu[.] I will not say I hate it, only I will have nothing to do with it. Margaret, with all that oppresses her so sensibly, is still elastic, hearty, luxuriant. She has a great being, and evil floats through her and passes away. I am so contracted and small it all lodges in me, and propagates itself through my whole existence. Or at least, so great is her power of self-recuperation. That if the whole globe were heaped upon her she would make her way through it; and not only that, she would assimilate its elements to her nature, and convert its forces to her uses. A cloud that drives me home for shelter against the rain, only enhances the beauty of her Universe. Then her compassion is so quick, and her ministries so gentle, while I am cold and stubborn to the wants or woes of all. She too is a believer in Christ, which I am not, or at least in the sense that she is. Her faith is life-giving, soul-penetrating, noble, luminous, purifying. Mine, all that I ever had, was a mechanical, artificial, vulgar sort of calculation. I was once converted indeed; but I have sadly fallen away. At the best I am but a poor Christian truly. Margaret, I know, never sinned. I have sinned day by day. I say not these things to commend her, but to reveal myself.

Shall I turn to the other more significant, and so far as this question is concerned, more weighty reflections,—the formidable fourth circle I mean; a combination of impressions, characteristics, substances, of not the most auspicious nature. Forgetting you, I forget that. With you, that revives. It is I would fain believe drawing to a diminished diameter; its action is reduced, it beats with a less audible pulse. It is a woman’s broken heart, a woman’s despair; it is a woman’s feebleness, acute delicacy, shrinking sensitiveness, high sentiment of honor and low consciousness of disgrace, all thrown in together. What would you do with it? What would it do with you? What would you do with such a woman? There is a bird, Margaret says, that crosses sheets of water on the leaves of the floating lily; can you cross me so? There is

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another bird that refuses to drink of streams and pools, and only catches the drops as they fall from the skies. I have refused to quench my thirst at common sources, and whither shall I look? Dearest Frank, I must yield to your judgment what I dare not to your love—myself. You will have need of strength as well as affection if you take me. On your soberest discretion I can alone rely. Seeing how I am, is it in your power to make me what I should be?

How we long for Mr. Evelyn’s return. I am sure Margaret loves him; when I tell her so, she smiles, and says, “Yes, and Frank Jones too.” But I know she desires my consent to your wishes, and I think she would feel badly to have Mr. Evelyn marry abroad. But what an admirable wife she would make you; this entre nous. Perhaps we shall both set up a Convent here, and feed poor children. Margaret is all there is left to me in this world; and I, who am the whole cause of her sorrows, still live on her bounty. I am a last year’s leaf that I have sometimes seen on the beech trees blanched and dry, still cleaving to the brightness and bloom of her Spring-time.

Your very dutiful and truly humble
Rose.

—
EXTRACT FROM ROSE TO FRANK.

Mr. Evelyn has come! The effect I am sure was not small on Margaret. The night before she did not sleep a wink, for she kept me awake till morning. Pa and Ma, as I call her father and mother, were for fixing up a little, but she would allow of no changes. She half smiled and half cried by turns; her face went through all the variations of the prism. Mr. Evelyn had forwarded a kind note, saying he would like to see her alone. She took me with her down the Delectable Way to an old haunt of her’s, where she first encountered him. I would have withdrawn, but she held me fast. We heard his horse coming up the hill. “This is a strange feeling,” said she; “is this what you mean by love, Rose?” She never looked more beautiful. Her heron’s wreath set off her rich dark curls, she wore a simple muslin, her expression might have ravished an angel. Mr. Evelyn left his horse and came forward. Hardly could she articulate my name in the introduction. By an instantaneous and almost invisible act, their hearts, so long one, sealed the unison. I had anticipated something, but I was excited and enchanted. Margaret has

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fair, womanly proportions, Mr. Evelyn is tall, and of so noble a carriage;—to see them in that pure embrace, and with such an interpretation of soul and spirit, quite overpowered me. Deacon Ramsdill came limping along with one of his queerest of all smiles—“Sheer nater, just so when I was a youngster,” said he, and so diverted us from a fit of crying into which I am sure I should have fallen. Mr. Evelyn was then introduced to Pa, Ma, and Hash. He made inquiries after Chilion, which we could only answer by our tears.

We have sometimes wondered that he never wrote Margaret, but he says his letters were lost on the way. She showed him some autumnal leaves and flowers she gathered, and has kept in remembrance of him. These were her letters to him, dumb signals, that she preserved in the garret! She has loved him, I do insist; but that lively pain of love we girls are so wont to indulge, perhaps she has not felt. This may be partly owing, such is my solution, to the strange, rapid, distressing scenes she has been through since she first saw him.

Mr. Evelyn has taken the spare room at Aunt Wright’s. There is a cause for sorrow in that family, which, I fear, will not soon be removed. Aunt has long had her heart set on Margaret for cousin Obed. This interest did not abate on Margaret’s accession to fortune. Though I believe Obed had if not his hopes damped, at least his ideas of things very much chastened by his trip abroad. The world is so large, and there are so many men in it, I think he had relinquished whatever thoughts he may have entertained of Margaret. In addition, her connection with Chilion has of late inspired him with a secret dread of her. But none of these things availed with his mother, who has rendered herself positively annoying by urging the fulfilment of certain promises she says Margaret made in years gone by. However, the matter is settled now, and Aunt freely consented to admit to her house the rival of her son, when she found there was prospect of an handsome remuneration.

—
EXTRACT FROM ROSE TO WINIFRED JONES.

The marriage came off last night. The service was done by Parson Welles, who really seemed to be as happy as the rest of us. How delighted we were to have Frank and Anna here! There were also present a few other of the select friends of the family. We assembled in the kitchen. It was

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my office to light up the great fire-place; Frank was master of ceremonies. Mrs. Weeks sent us up some cake for the occasion; there was wine for our friends; all we ourselves have eschewed spirituous drinks. I need not say how some of us were reminded of another night and other scenes. It was, to my own eye, a scene within a scene, beauty, love and life haunted by profanity, revelry and death. Deacon Ramsdill was almost beside himself with joy, and Master Elliman with joy and wine. Mr. Girardeau seems to be very much pleased with the disposition Margaret had made of herself, and Mrs. Wiswall and Bertha think there is nobody like Mr. Evelyn; so do I, excepting of course Frank.

What can I say of your dear brother, and my own love? He is all I wished—wished? all I needed. I shall begin to believe with Margaret, that love is more powerful than all evil. He risks much in taking me, not that I am much, but that I am mean. He promises to sustain all my feebleness, and renew my defects. He bears me in his own arms to the Infinite arms. Through him, streams upon my soul the long hidden light of God. The Christ whom he preaches I begin to love and adore. He does understand my heart, and composing with uplifts my whole nature into serenity and peace.

Margaret and Mr. Evelyn are going on a journey; in the mean time, we clear out the work-shop, and fit it up for their return.

—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

Our excursion was rich and blest indeed. In New-York, we saw the room where I was born, and the bed even whereon my father and mother died. Nimrod was with us and showed us every thing. The Clergyman who married my dear parents is dead, but in Baltimore we found his daughter, who bore me to her father’s, and nourished me like a mother. My grandfather’s abode, the shop where my mother tended, the room where she slept, we saw. In one of the cemetries [sic] their graves were shown to us, near that of my grandmother; the monument bore the names, Gottfried Brückmann, and Jane Girardeau. My grandfather, when he knew not where I was, became sorrowful on his daughter’s account, and had her remains removed where they now lie. My dear, dear mother! The inscription says she was twenty years old; so near her poor orphan daughter’s age! New fountains of grief are opened in my soul. I am persuaded the pale beautiful

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lady of my childhood dreams, was none other than my mother. She has watched over her child, she has blessed the earth-wanderer!—We went up the Hudson, whither Nimrod and Ben Bolter carried me; we stopped at the same landing-place; we found the Irish woman who nursed me, and I was glad to be able to repay her kindness. We went to Windenboro, Rose’s native town, but found little to relieve the impressions that may have occupied us. To our inquiries about their old minister we received but few warm-hearted replies. The successor of Mr. Elphiston, while he preaches a milder form of dogma, exhibits less benignity of feeling. I hesitated about speaking of these things to Rose; but she said she could hear anything, that that part of herself once devoted to these painful reminiscences, through successive processes of anguish, remorse and penitence, had become hollow.

We have a manuscript life of my father, done in English, with my mother’s correction; also, in several forms, my mother’s hand-writing. We possess likewise several letters from Margaret Bruneau to Gottfried Brückmann, and some of his to her, which Mr. Evelyn found in Rubillaud. The clothes of my father and mother, his flute, violin and several other little things are here. Mr. Evelyn visited the grave of Margaret Bruneau, which he found covered with flowers. Her letters are full of sweet simplicity and holy love. All whom he saw extolled her virtues. In Pyrmont, he found a brother of my father’s, whom we hope to be able to persuade to come to America. Withal, in our travels we heard of a German soldier in the interior of Pennsylvania, who served in the same corps with my father. Him also we visited. I have been travelling in search of my childhood! An unknown history opens to me. I have been living here how unconsciously with Ma, who is the cousin of my mother. Yet she has treated me as her own child. I was confided especially to the care of Chilion, whom Nimrod told my mother about. How well he executed his charge! The change in my grandfather’s name, and that of Nimrod, prevented all recognizances for many years. I know not that Ma ever understood the relation subsisting between us. This past, how precious to me! Hidden events scattered over many years, and many countries, become a part of my biography. It has taken a whole century to give me birth! Time, like mother Carey’s chickens, bides the blast, rocks on the gulphy wave, bearing her eggs under her wings, which she deposits at length on the broody shore. In me shall these transactions be cherished into life! Do I dep-

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recate the evil that has befallen me and mine; that shed itself on these by-gone years? Dust sometimes falls with the purest snow discoloring the face of Winter, but it enriches the growth and enhances the beauty of Spring. Shall I become better, as a new season of existence opens to me?

* * *

Our house is begun, but it must necessarily move on slowly. We hope to be able to go into it, or some part of it, in the course of twelve or fourteen months. It stands on the Delectable Way, near the Eastern margin of the Pond. It will command a more extensive Western view than we now enjoy, taking in the whole length of the Pond, the Brandon hills, and Umkiddin. Through avenues that we shall cut in the Maples will be seen the Village, the River, the Meadows, the champagne country and mountains beyond. At the South will be opened the valley of Mill Brook and the neighboring highlands. The space between the house and Butternut is to be converted into a garden. It is to be constructed of granite, of which an abundance, and that of the finest quality, is found in the neighborhood. We have an architect from New York, Mr. Palmer from the Ledge is a master workman. Of the style I shall say but little, nor repeat the discussions we have had on the subject. Mr. Evelyn knew more of the world, and it was right I should yield to him. His travels abroad have tinged, and perhaps moulded his taste. It will have, I fancy, a slightly castellated appearance; so at least it looks on paper. It is to be two stories high, and ample in all its appointments. Mr. Evelyn talks of effect, the high grounds, woods, and all that; entire simplicity he objects to. Without ever giving any reflection to the matter, I found Master Elliman had in fact indoctrinated me with a love of the plain Grecian. But not as a dwelling-house, and here, Mr. Evelyn says, only as a Temple or Church. We are to have a room for Music and Art, one for Natural History and Philosophy, a Library, Conservatory, Aviary, and all that, and a plenty of rooms for our friends. There are also extensive barns and out-houses. We have gained a title to the whole of Mons Christi, by purchasing the complete environs of the Pond, and a square mile of territory on the North and West. We are clearing away woods, and bringing many acres of excellent soil under cultivation. There are nearly one hundred men employed in all departments, and, if you will believe it, I do not think they consume more than three gallons of spirit a day. We are widening and grading the Delectable Way into a carriage road. Pa and Hash have

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both left off drinking, and are busy and happy as need be. Hash and Sibyl Radney will be married as soon as we shall have finished their house. Hash superintends the farm; Nimrod and Rhody are anxious to remove here; it is his ambition to take care of the barn and horses. He has become our jockey, and went out lately and made us a purchase of some beautiful Narragansetts with draught and carriage horses. Master Elliman comes up, stares about, applies his red handkerchief to his nostrils, and the other day frankly confessed there were realities in the universe. People from the Village, Avernus, and all parts, visit us, and gaze wonderingly upon our works. Joyce Dooly, the Fortune-teller, was here the other day with her five black cats. She mounted a rock, in presence of the multitude, and harangued them, declaiming on her own merits. She said she had brought about this change, had foretold it all, and seen it in her cats. Rufus Palmer, who is really a genius, is engaged on statuary, from plates Mr. Evelyn brought from Europe.

Side by side, in the midst of the noise of hammers, the shouting of teamsters, on the beach, lie in lonely silence my canoe and Chilion’s fishboat. His viol hangs in our room, unlike St. Dunstan’s, it makes no music! In Nova Zembla, it is reported, men’s words are wont to be frozen in the air, and at the thaw may be heard. In a cold grave, and colder world are all Chilion’s sweet melodies frozen, will they ever be heard again?

* * *

They are building a Church in the Village. We furnished the balance of the subscription for that purpose, and they have adopted a model suggested by Mr. Evelyn. The Church will suit me, it is pure, that is to say, elegant, Grecian. It is now decided to form a new society, and one with which Mr. Evelyn has connected himself. It is called Christ-Church. The house stands on the East side of the Green, under two stately elms; and forms a prominent object from our dwelling. The Free Masons, in full company and costume, laid the corner stone. Deacon Hadlock, the main pillar of the old Church, is inconsolable, and inapproachable. Mr. Evelyn went to see him, but he would not be persuaded. We offered them a sum of money towards rebuilding the old Meeting-house, but it was rejected. I need not tell you all the gossip that is afloat between the two societies, or write how our people say the others are endeavoring things to their prejudice. There is probably some wrong feeling on both sides. The Master was here to-day, and said

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they had had several meetings of the old Church, reported grievances, appointed committees, and ordered an examination of the derelicts; and finally excommunicated Deacon Ramsdill and Esq. Weeks, and suspended Judge Morgridge and Esq. Beach. Hee laughed himself into a perfect dry convulsion fit, when he told me. “That android sanctissimus,” said he, referring to the Rev. Dr. Brimmerly of Kidderminster, “is moving.” That gentleman, he said, had held several private conferences with Parson Welles. Reports unfavorable to the reputation of Mrs. Wiswall, who has taken a house in town, and of Bertha, and also of Rose, have reached here, and we are called a harboring place of unprincipled persons, a community of —

Deacon Ramsdill was here this afternoon; he has not been deprived of his good cheer. “They have picked us out,” said he, “and thrown us to the hogs. But arter all,” he added, “rotten apples are the sweetest.”

—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

What shall you think of Frank being our Minister, and Rose our Minister’s wife! On the election, there could have been but one sentiment, as you know there was but one voice. His views and feelings, and the character of his discourses, precluded much disputation. We had some difficulty in the Ordination. A Council of Clerical and Lay Delegates, from the County, assembled, examined the candidate and rejected him. Parson Welles I believe was at first disposed to have Frank for a colleague, and retain a pastoral connection with Christ-Church; but he was diverted from these inclinations by causes which I do not understand. The Church was reduced to the necessity of adopting other measures. The Rev. Mr. Freeman of your city, was sent for, and the rev. Mr. Lovers of Brandon, who had expressed a willingness to aid us. Mr. Lovers preached the sermon, and the ordaining prayer with the imposition of hands was made by Mr. Freeman. Thus, Mr. Evelyn says, through Dr. Freeman, who was himself Episcopally ordained, and derives his authority from a succession said to remount to the first ages of the Church, we have an Apostolic Bishop ordained over this Diocese of Livingston! The new spacious house was filled, and many came in from abroad. At the close, the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was administered to the congregation. I joined in the participation! With what sensations I cannot now relate. Springs of new

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water welled within me, the soul of Jesus oppressed and charmed my soul. Poor Rose sat by me trembling like a leaf.—We have ordered an Organ from London, and I suppose it will fall to me and Rose to play it, for the present at least. Tony the Barber plays the violin for us. He has not touched his instrument before since Chilion’s death. How we miss Chilion at every step!

Frank and Rose are boarding at Esq. Bowker’s; a Parsonage I suppose will be built for them next year, on Grove Street. Rose says the only feeling she has, or of which she is at present capable, is humility; and that whether she estimates her duties to the world at large, or reflects on the favors received in her own soul. She relies much upon Frank, who will nourish, renovate and guide her. If she can at all embody the graces, or disseminate the love of Christ, in whom her faith is confirmed, she says she shall be satisfied. She says she is like those trees, which fall over on the banks of rivers, and grow with the roots upwards; but if she only grows she does not care how. She is fair almost to fragility; she has at times, a most mysteriously spiritual look, like the Moon shining through white window curtains. There are those in the Church who truly love her, and will tenderly treat her. In Mrs. Bowker and Isabel Weeks she finds a most according friendship. To Frank she is all in all. How good and great in him to love her so! Her unnaturalness has gradually subsided, and the sweetness and freshness of her youth begin rapidly to unfold. Christ, that makes us all children, Frank says, has reproduced the morning of her childhood, and she advances to beautiful perfection.—She had often been to the Communion before, she says, but never with such feelings. She never before realized what our new Bishop said it was, an inter-communing with the soul of Jesus. She is succulent as the Widow’s house-leek, and would thrive I believe if she were only attached to the shingles of Christ-Church. Like the dodder, her rooting in the old world is destroyed, and she now winds about goodness and mercy, which she is destined I think ever to adorn. Dear Rose, she has been to me a child, a sister, a lover. She will always be near me—can we be too happy? For all, how much are we indebted to Frank and Mr. Evelyn! The friendship so long subsisting between our husbands, how delightfully is it consummated!

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MARGARET TO ANNA.

Our house is finished, and what has been a long story to us, I shall make a short one to you; which can be done the more readily, since I hope you will soon come and see all things for yourself. The expense within and without Mr. Evelyn says has not been less than one hundred thousand dollars. We have imported some things, not that Mr. Evelyn would not have preferred domestic articles, but many we could not find. Besides what matters it. I am made up of all nations, some German, some French, some English, some American; and it is only dealing with my countrymen, trade with whomsoever I may. You should not have introduced me to your house unless you supposed I was more or less than human. Our plate certainly does not equal yours; our linen is home-made; our curtains and hangings are very beautiful, thanks to your good taste. Mr. Evelyn brought from Europe a valuable library, some elegant maps and engravings, and a few choice pieces of sculpture. We have since ordered more of these articles. In addition, Rufus Palmer has been engaged on statuary for us these two years. He is now in Europe, and when he returns, we have promised him in exchange for his productions, our Isabel; that is if they will consent to take up their residence at Mons Christi. We have busts of the old Philosophers, a copy of the Venus de Medici, Apollo Belvidere, Antinous, Belisarius, a Psyche and Butterfly, a Prometheus and others, and some excellent Paintings; we have a parlor orgain, a piano and guitar, in addition to my father’s flute and violin; also an excellent set of chemical, philosophical and astronomical instruments. At the head of the Delectable Way stand statues of Peace and Truth; under the trees in front of the house, are Faith, Hope, Love and Beauty. Near the Tree-bridge, in the Via Dolorosa, we design to put Penitence and Fortitude. On the Via Salutaris stands Humanity. A Ceres has been set up in our cornfield. In Diana’s Walk is her own Ladyship with the Gold Bow. On Feronia’s Isle and in Egeria’s Haunt we propose to place something, and if the white birches are not sufficient of themselves, we shall add marble Muses. My Pantheon, that Mr. Evelyn used to banter me about, still remains, and my bubbles have taken marble forms. Between the Butternut and the old house is a broad opening conducting to the foot of Mons Christi, which we call The Avenue of the Beautiful. In this is a Temperance pouring water from a goblet into a marble

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trough. It is supplied from the same spring-head that has so long furnished the water of our Cistern, and is designed both for man and beast. On it hangs’ Pa’s silver tankard, which he himself put there, the only relic of his former prosperity, and which he is glad to have diverted from its customary use. This water, always a copious stream coming down from the highlands back of Pa’s, serves for a fountain in the garden, where its jet and spray may be perpetually seen, and flows thence to our house and barn in quantity sufficient for all needs. When we formerly made our escape from Mons Christi to the Ledge, Rufus showed me a figure on which he had been hammering at his leisure, designed to represent me as I was when I found the water; this he has since completed. It is a perfect Molly Hart, in short gown, pinafore and gipsey hat. Ma wanted it put in the old house, but there seemed to be no room for it. We have it in our drawing-room; and near it are the cherry plate, bowl and spoon I used to eat bread and cider and bean porridge with, and also the wolf’s bone knife and fork Chilion made me. The old Chesnuts, which were already in decay, have been cut down, and the bounds of the Mowing enlarged, which gives us a beautiful green lot in our front view. North of the Mowing is an extensive young orchard of various kinds of choice apples, pears, quinces and peaches. Our Aviary, which is large, and well furnished with shrubbery, we intend to stock with native birds. In the Conservatory we have some foreign plants, and shall experiment more with the domestic. We have a room called the Prophet’s Chamber, which our Bishop frequently occupies, and where he writes some of his sermons. In the garden is a large Bee-range. The old house remains as it was, saving repairs. There Pa and Ma live. The loom and wheels have been restored to the work-shop, and there sits Ma, in her short-gown and naked arms, smoking and weaving us blankets. She cannot be induced to forego any of her old habits. Pa, who never suffered from what the Master would call a cacoethes laboris, loves and enjoys his ease. He has made us some stout walking shoes, which is the most he has done for a year. On the chimney are my marble kitten and flower-pot. About the house still grow my beans, hops, virgin’s bower, eye-brights, blood-roots, and other flowers Chilion helped me rear. Chilion’s clothes, fishing tackle, gun, powder horn, shot-bag, occupy their old places on the walls of the kitchen. The suit in which he was executed, his violin, a partly finished basket

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with some partly finished spools, he was making, hang in the work-shop; Ma will not allow them to be touched. Some of his hair she has wrought into a ring, which she wears on her finger. Margaret, my peach tree, is dead, but a young Margaret is growing in the same spot. Dick, my squirrel, and my birds are dead, their empty cages hang in the old place. Bull, whose heart, as well as his leg, was broke, when Chilion died, totters backwards and forwards from house to house. So have perished some of the dear fellow-fixtures and comrades of my life! Beyond Pa’s, stands Nimrod’s house, and a little farther up the way live Hash and Sibyl. Grandfather, who is exceedingly interested, and I believe pleased, in all we do, divides his time between us and Aunt Wiswall. Judah Weeks has promised marriage to Cousin Bertha. Speaking of this reminds me to tell you, that Obed has married Beulah Ann Orff. Mrs. Evelyn, the good mother of Charles, has also come to Livingston, and lives with us for the present.

* * *

You inquire what our household arrangements are to be. Our regular family is composed of Mr. Evelyn, myself, Sylvina Pottle and Dorothy Tapley. Then we have more or less of our friends with us a good deal of the time. Mr. Pottle has a large number of children, and at Mr. Tapley’s they are very poor, and those people were anxious their daughters should come and live with us, and earn something. Our food is simple; I never had any other, and what is bred in the bone will never be out of the flesh, as Deacon Ramsdill says; and Mr. Evelyn is not particular. I still enjoy a dish of bean porridge with Molly. I always got up early, and could not easily be taught new tricks. Then I have been out in the air so much I must still be out. We have prayers every morning, and Mr. Evelyn explains the Scriptures to us. We have breakfasted this Summer at six and a half o’clock, dined at twelve, and taken tea at five. So we are doing at present. Our hired men board with Nimrod and Hash. Ma has woven a working suit for Mr. Evelyn. We have both had our hands full getting the house in order. I look for leisure this winter to read more, and practise music more.

—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

I must tell you of a delightful change that has come over No. 4. You remember how the place looked the first time

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you were through it. The people were notorious for their indolence and dissipation; and their estates were mortgaged to Mr. Smith, who held the inhabitants as fiefs, and sometimes harassed them. Mr. Evelyn had their houses repaired and painted, sent men to help them clear out their intervals, planted a row of trees along the street, and had a beautiful statue of Diligence set up at the corner. He then assumed their debts, and said he would give them no trouble for three years, provided they would pay the interest punctually. He also contributed to a School-house that was erected half way between No. 4 and Breakneck. In six months the Gubtails, with what work they did for us and hay they brought us, cleared themselves entirely. Mrs. Tapley and Mrs. Hatch wove for us, and Mr. Hatch and Isaiah made our iron work. Old Mr. Tapley, a very sot, has labored unremittingly on his farm. When they had new door-yards, the girls began to ornament them with flowers and shrubs. We let Dorothy go into the woods two days for this purpose; and that hamlet has now a truly picturesque appearance. The people, I think, do not drink any ardent spirits. The Still, that Mr. Smith undertook to rebuild, Mr. Evelyn purchased for a barn, which those people found they needed. Mr. Smith himself, I am told, has amended his habits; he has at least renovated the exterior of his house. Avernus should rather be called Elysium; God made it a beautiful spot, and man has restored its fallen image. Nor is this effect confined to No. 4; it has reached the village, and is more or less distributed into every part of the Town. Our Bishop says Temperance is a Christian grace, and has preached strongly against the Sin of Intemperance. In this he is also joined by Parson Welles, who still preaches in the Town-house. Many have abandoned drinking, and four distilleries have stopped. Mr. Readfield, our new merchant, keeps no ardent spirits, and Deacon Penrose must have found his sales materially lessened. Esquires Beach and Bowker both say their duties, as Justices of the Peace, have greatly abated. Mr. Stillwater has converted his new bar-room into a reading-room, and says his profits are nearly equal to what they were before. On Sunday you will see the No. 4’s flocking down to Meeting with a constancy only equalled by their former negligence, in which they were quite of a sort with ourselves.

At the time they were upon rebuilding the Jail, Mr. Evelyn proposed to the Commissioners if they would consent to an establishment on an enlarged scale, with rooms more com-

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modious, windows more numerous, and better conveniences for warmth in winter, he would bear the additional cost. Judge Morgridge, Esq. Bowker and others, thought it would be an excellent plan; and it was consented to. The building stands a little back from the old site. Each room, Mr. Evelyn furnished with a good bed, books, lights, looking-glass, wash-stand and flower vase. The windows have green blinds, which by a simple contrivance the prisoners can open and shut at their pleasure. The horrors and discomforts of the old Jail I have myself too sensibly realized. A new keeper has been appointed in place of Mr. Shooks. At the last Town meeting the Selectmen were instructed to look after the moral condition of the prisoners. What with the site of the old Meeting-house smoothed and grassed, the burnt woods improved by Mrs. Wiswall’s house and grounds, a new School-house, new Court-house, Tavern and Jail, the Green has reassumed some of its former beauty.

Christ-Church have made choice of three Deacons, Esq. Bowker, Joseph Whiston and Comfort Pottle. Deacon Ramsdill was getting old, and Judge Morgridge and Esq. Beach, who have served in that office, thought they had better choose some young men.

* * *

You would sometimes have tempted me to live in your City. But, dear Anna, do you not come under the jurisdiction of Master Elliman’s Puppetdom? Are you not, measurably, simulacra hominum feminarumque? Are you foot-free, tongue-free, soul-free? The representation of the Theatre seemed to me to be carried through the City; all were acting not themselves, but their parts. Perhaps I judge wrongfully. You, I know, are natural and real. But what will you say of Mr. Boxly, Mrs. Winchen, Miss Lees and others whom I saw at your house? I would not do them injustice, and I know I am incompetent to give an opinion, but how could I live among such people! I remember once looking at the sea near the wharves in January. The water and the cold were in deadly combat. The waters winced, bellowed and agonized. But the cold kept steadily at work, as a spider, and with threads of ice, the Borean monster glued and entangled the whole surface, and soon it all lay a sullen, ghastly, adamantine heap. Such seemed to me to be the strife between fashion and nature; and such, alas! it is, Mr. Evelyn says, the world over. Give me leave to yawn when I am tired, wonder at what is admirable, and wear a shoe that fits my foot. I fear the

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Cacoethes Feminarum is a deeper disease than Obed’s elder blows will cure, and that you will have to take a good many boxes of his nostrum before you are well quit of plague in the vitals. “The whole world belike,” says the Father from whom I learn all my wisdom, “should be new-moulded, and turned inside out as we do hay-cocks, top to bottom, bottom to top.” For the presented I am contented to keep away, not from you anna, but from what is about you; and if you push upon me I shall run as far as there is land-room on the Continent; and if worse comes to worse, I shall make my expiration in the words of one of old;

Have we not here what his Grace the Duke of Devonshire might envy; pleasure-grounds, rich meadows, the embellishment of a full grown plantation, beautiful lawns, many a paddock. We are in the midst of a royal hunting ground, packs of hounds are in the neighborhood; we have plenty of game, and an unlimited right of common, in which in their season are excellent wild-turkey and grey-squirrel shooting; admirable fox-chases; a full command of the view up and down; a capital kitchen garden; our estate is well watered; gravel walks intersect our grounds, and lead in all directions. We see live Hippiades every day; we have a perpetual advowson to the living of Mons Christi, and are subject to no ground rent. For rustic ruins I can show you an abundance of reverend stumps, garnished with grape-vines, and studded with fungus. In Italy are palaces ventilated by wind-mills; we resort to no contrivances of that sort. Guianerius, out of my author, recommends the air to be moistened with sweet-herb water, and the floor to be sprinkled with rose-vinegar. We take the air as it comes, wet or dry, hot or cold, and find that blowing across Mons Christi to be always exhilarating and salubrious. In Summer it is charged with the freshness of the earth, the aroma of woods, the music of birds. In Winter it glitters with health and life—Then we all work, not take exercise, but work. “The Turks,” said says Democritus Junior, “enjoin all men, of whatsoever degree, to be of some trade or other: the Grand Seignior himself is not excused. Mahomet, he that conquered Greece, at that very time when he heard ambassadors of other princes, did carve spoons.” There is some difference, peradventure, between the habits of Turks and Christians! “Through idleness,” continues my authority, “it is come to pass that in city and country, so many grievan-

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ces of body and mind, and this ferall disease of Melancholy so frequently rageth, and now domineers almost all over Europe amongst our great ones.” The ancient Germans plunged idlers into the thickest marshes, leaving them to perish by a death that resembled their own dispositions. Without executioners to expedite the matter, all of that class do so perish now-a-days, nillywilly. Friction is recommended. Think of our farmers stimulating their skins with flesh-brushes to keep up a circulation! Nay, verily, we must work. Fowls do not appear ready spitted, Deacon Ramsdill says, and we must work for them too. The Lacedemonians had such an idea of liberty they could not reconcile it with any manual labor. One of them, returning from Athens, said, “I come from a City where nothing is dishonorable.” Work shall be no disgrace at Mons Christi.

We have our sports too, hawking, fowling, fishing, riding, berrying. “To walk amongst orchards, gardens, mounts, thickets, lawns and such like pleasant places, like that Antiochan Daphne, brooks, pools, ponds, betwixt wood and water, by a fair river side, ubi variæ avium cantantiones, florum colores, pratorum frutices, to disport in some pleasant plain, run up a steep hill sometimes, sit in a shady seat,” must needs be, as my benevolent author observes, “a delectable recreation.” This we enjoy. Then there are our indoor diversions, music, dancing, chess and various games. In winter, we sleigh-ride, coast, skate, snow-ball. No, Anna, let me stay here while I may.

—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

The end of my being is accomplished! The prophecy of my life is fulfilled! My dreams have gone out in realities! The Cross is erected on Mons Christi!! Yesterday, the Anniversary of our National Independence, was the event consummated. It was made by Mr. Palmer, from a superb block of the purest marble, which he got from his quarry, and is fifteen feet high, with a proportionate breadth. We met near the Brook Kedron on the Via Salutaris. There were all the embers of Christ-Church, the masonic Corps and a multitude of others. I was to lead the procession, supported by Mr. Evelyn; they had me seated on a milk-white horse, dressed in white, and a wreath of twin-flowers vine on my head. Then followed the Cross, borne on the shoulders of twenty-four young men; next came the Bishop and wife, the

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Deacons and their wives, Christ-Church members, two and two, man and woman; these were succeeded by the Masons, and the line was closed by the people at large. On the Head was a band of Christ-Church musicians playing the Triumphs of Jesus, which we got from Germany. We came over the brook Kedron, traversed what we have made the broad, and ornamental Via Salutaris, and entered the Avenue of the Beautiful. At the foot of the hill I dismounted. By a winding gravel-walk I went up—with a trembling, joyous step I went—followed by the Cross-bearers. Reaching the summit, I wound the arms and head of the Cross about with evergreens; the young men raised it in its place, a solid granite plinth. Returning, we assembled under the Butternut in the Avenue of the Beautiful, where Frank made a discourse to the people; some idea of which I would like to convey to you. He had for his text, “God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Cross he said stood to us in two aspects; first the end of Christ’s life, and second, the burden of his life. Of the first he said it was the termination of his career, the finale of a distinguished course of mercy and love; hence as the finishing stroke of his life, he said it represented his whole life. As the stars and stripes stand for our country, our government, our liberties, our national all, so he said the Cross stood for Christ’s all. He said a christian would glory in the Cross of Christ as a citizen glories in the flag of his country. But more than this, he said the Cross of Christ had a deeper significance than was implied in merely his decease on Calvary. He said it referred to what transpired before his death, to events of his personal history and experience, in a word, to the burden of his life. He said that Christ bearing his own Cross, his telling his disciples to take up their cross and follow him, Paul’s expression “I am crucified with Christ,” the declaration that “he died unto sin once,” all denoted that he underwent a crucifixion in his life-time, a crucifixion to the world, to sin and all evil; that his resistance to the diabolical temptation, his strong crying and tears, his being touched with the feeling of our infirmities, his agony and bloody sweat, were such a crucifixion; that his watchings, his labors, his deprivations, his rebuffs, the intrigues of his enemies, the desertion of his friends, were a cross; that meeting evil with good, repulse with kindness, insults with forbearance, his blessing those who hated him, his grandeur in the midst of what was low, his effulgence in the midst of what was dark, his singleness and sincerity in a period of calculating

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expediency, his advancement that overleaping his own, synchronized with all ages and squared with an unlimited future, his incarnation of God among sin-possessed men, his attempts at the transfusion of himself into the race, and such thing, were all a cross. He said we bore the cross when we reversed the practices of a fallen world and adopted those of the highest humanity; when we shone as lights in the world; when we were blameless and harmless in the midst of a crooked and pe[r]verse nation; when we forbore one another in love; when we were ready to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake; when we obeyed God rather than man; when we lived unspotted from the world; when we put off the old man with his deeds, and put on the new man; when we became the pillar and the ground of truth; when we returned blessing for cursing, and good for evil; and so whatever obstacle we overcame, or impediment encountered in our progress towards perfection, or in the extension of the kingdom of God in the earth, he said was a cross. He said glorying in the Cross of Christ would be the selectest ambition of every Christian. We have adopted the Cross, he said, for our emblem, because it is so good an exponent of Christ, and of our character, purposes and principles as Christians. In allusion to the green flowering aspect of the Cross, he said that betokened the Final Triumph, the Conquest over Sin, the destruction of the Evil by the Good; and also the bloom and lustre of Virtue. While he was speaking, a milk-white Dove from our cot flew and alighted on the top of the Cross. Hardly could we contain ourselves; a most delicious tremor ran through me. The Dove, said he, is the symbol of the sweet love, and pure effluence of God!—I cannot tell you all he said; I repeat his principal topics. That certain unction of his, that holy medium in which his mind moves; that rosy sun-light of love that tinges the peaks of his thoughts, that creative effect of pure goodness wherein lies his forte—all this you will understand better than it can be told. After the address, we went into the woods to Diana’s Walk, and had a collation, when the Lord’s Supper was administered, and hundreds partook. Returning, Mr. Evelyn embraced me with tears—he does not often weep. Christ has also embraced me with tears, and I too must weep. The heart of the Beautiful One is touched, and what can I do? I dreamed of him the other night, lying prostrate under the Butternut. His Cross too had fallen, and the flowers were withered. “I am aweary,” said he, “I have no place to lay my head. I am a stranger in the world, and no one takes me in; I am sick, and no one visits me. My heart

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aches, Margaret. My locks are wet with the dews of the night. I was bruised for their iniquities, but they are iniquitous still. From Calvary I have wandered over the earth. From age to age I have been an outcast. My agony in the garden was too true, too real; I was overshadowed by my destiny. I could not bear the insupportable load.—I do not see the travail of my soul. I have come hither to die, Margaret.” He leaned upon my arm; he looked as he does in Moralz’s Ecce Homo, stricken with a divine grief, wasting under an inexpressible disappointment. I brought him water from the spring Temperance, and his spirit came again; his look changed into the Transfiguration of Raphael. I sprinkled water on the cross-leaves, and they revived. Our marble group, Faith, Hope, Love and Beauty, appeared from under the trees, living, and ministered unto him. He came into our house, I dreamed, with the Sisters, gave a pleased glance at the rooms; said, “I dwell with them that dwell with me,” and vanished.

Explain to me, Anna, what do these things mean? Have Christians treated Christ so badly? You recollect the story circulated when I was in Boston, that the French had torn Raphael’s Tapestries from the Vatican, and sold them; and some one purchasing that which bore an image of Christ, burnt it to ashes, for the gold and silver he hoped to get from it! Does Christ haunt the world like Fionnula, the daughter of Lir, sighing for the first sound of the mass-bell that was to be the signal for her release? Was his light hidden under ground at the time of his death, and does it there burn eternally, like the lamp in the Tomb of Pallas? Tell me, what is the significance of this distress? Whither has fled the Redemption of man?—How far are we called upon to submit to an irretrievable order of events? Was Christ done, eighteen hundred years now last past? Were Calvary and Tyburn Hill alike as two peas? Are the Star Chamber and Fanueil Hall the same? Is it all one whether I pick strawberries on Mons Christi, or dance a rigadoon in a raree-show? whether I am a geode or a Milliner’s baby? Eidepol! God is one, but man is many, and the soul is none.

The green-wreathed Cross towers afar. It can be seen from the Green, and beyond the River; at No. 4, Breakneck, Snakehill, Five-mile-lot; and I presume in half a dozen towns. From my window I see it piercing the clouds, which are its perpetual aureola. The stars shall crown it; the sun shall stoop to do it reverence. I mean to train over it a Boursalt rose, and in winter drape it with running club-moss.

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* * *

This Cross has travailed in my soul, Anna; I could not rest till it had gone forth in substance. We have trimmed the path up the Head with rose-bushes, amaranths, angelicas, thyme, bitter-sweet night-shade, and here and there a thorn. Can you realize how much Christ has been to me? How much of beauty, goodness, virtue, love, peace, hope, light, strength, I owe him! I do find his yoke easy and his burden light. Even when I knew him not, he blessed me. I could not be more happy if I had had my birth in his soul. The Eider Duck of Heaven, he lines the nest of his offspring with down plucked from his own breast. He offered himself for our sins; he suffered for us. The voluntary Prometheus, he bound himself to the Caucasian rock of humanity, his heart was preyed upon by all the evils of the race. He sympathizes with us. Why is the world so insensible to him! Venus, bewailing the death of Adonis, changed his blood into the wind-flower. Christ, bewailing the death of man, would have changed his blood into beautiful soul-flowers. But—Venus running to the aid of her boy, pricked her foot with a thorn, and that blood changed the white rose into the red. Christ pricked his feet with thorns, the roses of the woods are ed, humanity still welters in its blood.

To Mr. Evelyn and Frank how much I owe. They have removed the dross, the dogmatic obscurity and wanton frivolity, that attached to the New Testament; and made it a luminous, divine book to me. When Mr. Evelyn was in England, this was told him. Lord Northwick had just brought from Italy a picture of St. Gregory, by Annibal Caracci. For some cause connected with the troubles of the times, in order to get possession of the picture, a poor dauber had been hired to paint over it in body-color, an imitation of some inferior artist. When it was opened, his Lordship’s friends, who had been looking for something admirable, stared in mortified astonishment. “It has got soiled, I see,” said his Lordship, “give me a sponge.” Whereupon, with a sponge, he began to rub the piece, nor had he long done so, when out peeped the head of St. Gregory; soon the attendant Angels were seen, and in a short time the whole of that magnificent picture became visible. So the Bible has been daubed over to my eyes. I have seen in it not the work of God, but the production of some poor artist. I have turned from it as a miserable travesty. The sponge has been applied; the false colors removed, and the original is inexpressibly beautiful.—The Gospels are the Word

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of Christ, as he was the Word of God. Before the Gospels, Christ was. He shines through them. They stand in him, like the Apocalyptic Angel in the Sun. Mr. Evelyn reads them to us from the Greek, whereby, he says, he himself has a better sense of them, and can impart a better sense.

Come, Anna, come to Mons Christi. Come and see our happiness, come and feel it. I am running over. I wish there was a silver pipe reaching from here to you, such as I once saw let down from the blue sky, that you might draw off and be surcharged like me. I wish from the great spring-head of Jesus, an aqueduct could be laid that should fill your beautiful Common with fountains! And, Oh, I wish all hearts might become gardens of fountains, like what Mr. Evelyn saw in the Tuilleries at Paris. I never feared death. I was never troubled about the hereafter. I have an immortality each moment of my life. I am inundated with ages of bliss. I could die to-morrow, and feel that I had lived forever. I could live forever, and never be sensible of an addition to what I now have. Rose is here playing one of Beethoven’s Waltzes; it is a jet of music spriting into my ecstasy. My life is hid with Christ in God. The One circumflows and in-heavens us. The Infinite Father bears us in his bosom, shepherd and flock. I feel that all good beautiful souls live forever. Rose says she begins to feel so too. She brought me a bunch of flowers from the Via Dolorosa The birds are jubilating in the woods. I see Pa and Mr. Evelyn at work in the garden. Come and spend the Summer with us.—I am but a child. I feel only a child’s feelings. I lie on the grass, and frisk with my hands and feet, a mere baby in God’s Universe. Come, and you shall instruct me.—Let me be Jesus’ child; I ask no more.

For the nonce, I sign myself,
Margaret Christi.

—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

We have a new Cemetery. It lies back of Grove Street, south of Deacon Hadlock’s Pasture, and is intersected by the Brook Kedron, and covers part of the wooded slope on the descent of Mons Christi. It possesses a variety of surface and of trees, and the ornaments of walks and shrubbery. On either side of the Brook is a willow-shaded gravel path. When Mr. Evelyn was in Europe he visited the Cemeteries of Naples, Pisa, and Père la Chaise at Paris, and here he would reproduce the effect. We cannot imitate all architectural and princely forms,

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but we can do that which pleases ourselves. Several of the citizens have already put up tasteful monuments. Rufus Palmer helps us in this, as in other things, and he has two young men studying and practising with him; one of whom, Socrates Hadlock, gives excellent artistical promise. Mr. Girardeau has a lot, and to it have been brought the remains of his wife, my own father and mother, his sister Marie, and Raxman. Rose also intends to remove here her father and mother, and sister. The kind Arab wish, “May you die among your kindred,” we shall in some sense realize! We have been concerned about Chilion, his dying request we supposed it impossible ever to execute, and had kept it graven on our own memories. At last, however, we ventured to speak of it to the people, and in full town-meeting it was asked if they would consent to the carrying out of Chilion’s wishes. All who spoke, answered affirmatively, and whatever denials existed kept silence. The plain marble shaft, Mr. Palmer first made, now stands over his new grave; on it is his name, Chilion, and underneath are these words, “Here lies one who tried to love his fellow men”—words know that were near his heart, and are now gone forth to the world. Mr. Smith, when the transfer of graves was had, allowed that Solomon’s monument, on which has so long stood the dreadful word “Murdered,” should be changed for another. The old burial ground remains; the ancient head-stones, those which are identified, as the spot itself is, with the early history of Livingston, keep their primitive places. The Cemetery seems to us mournful and attractive; an iron fence surrounds it, but its gates are always unlocked. With dove-like, Pleiadian melody, the Brook Kedron flows through it. Mr. Evelyn has striven to diffuse a taste that prevails in Europe, and already are many of the mounds and lots blooming with flowers. People walk there a great deal, and on the Sabbath it is thronged. It shears death of its terrors, spiritualizes life, and hallows affection.

There is a Fountain reaching from Mons Christi to our Common! It is fed by the Brook Kedron, and rises in the centre of the Green. It springs by graceful impulses, and breaks into beautiful attenuations. The Green is encircled by great elms, and here is a little liquid elm in the midst of them.—Mr. Stillwater has changed his Tavern to the Cross and Crown.

* * *

Col. Welch, who left here during the War, has returned. He addressed a letter to Judge Morgridge, the brother of Mrs. Welch, intimating a wish to come back and end his days

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among his old town’s people. At a meeting of the citizens, the subject was considered, and they declared unanimously for his request, and voted moreover to reimburse his expenses hither, repair his house and renovate his grounds. Col. Welch’s, the Poor-House, the Pock-House, or whatever it be, is ineffaceably associated with my first knowledge of Mr. Evelyn, and with a morbific career of no uncertain character. Mr. Evelyn has said he did not know as he should have ever married me, if he had not first given me the Small-Pox. (?) Col. Welch’s is a commanding situation, and one of the finest on the Green. His family of sons and daughters, becomes a great acquisition to our circle of friends.

You are acquisitive of all the news, Anna, and I must tell you, Cæsar, Morgridge and Phillis Welch, Tony Washington and old Dill, are married; and Master Elliman is betrothed to Miss Amy! How this last was brought about I can hardly say; only it was natural that a matter of thirty years standing should come to a head at last. He told me, laughing, that he was now heir-apparent to the tottering throne of Puppetdom in Livingston. He has long occupied the sacerdotal office of Parish-clerk, he says, and now aspires to higher degrees in Anagogics. But, soberly, I think my good, fast, tender-hearted, queer old friend has changed somewhat—not in his dress, for he wears the same nankin breeches, shovel hat, fringed vest, tye-wig, as of yore—but in his feelings and interior self. He consents to reality and nature more; he exhibits a cordial interest in life, men and manners. I am under irredeemable obligations to him. He instructed me largely in the form, but kept me away from the heart of things, the common heart I mean; and left me wholly to find a heart for myself, or make such an one as I could. This, Mr. Evelyn says, was a great service.

* * *

Training-days have provoked a good deal of talk. Their innumerable evils we all felt. Pa himself was brought home drunk from a recent muster-field! The question took a serious form among the people. Parson Welles, sensible of the growing skepticism, preached to his, now so small, congregation, in behalf of the practice. This had the effect to deepen inquiry in the general mind. Christ-Church members, went one day in solemn, mournful procession, men, women and children, to their Oracle, the Gospels—for such they emphatically are;—they went with as much perturbation of curiosity and weight of concern as ever Athenians did to the Delphian

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Tripod. “Christ says so and so,” responded the Bishop, at whose house they met. The next training-day, Capt. Tuck came forward, and with a speech quite in his vein, threw up his commission. The subaltern officers followed the example of their captain, the soldiers went into no balloting, and the Livingston Company was not. Capt. Hoag said also that his mind had changed. Deacons Penrose and Hadlock with some others, sought to reorganize a band; but they were too old for such a purpose themselves, and they could not find young men enough even to form an Irish company. General Kingsland, of Dunwich, ordered our people to attach themselves to the Dunwich Company. One or two muster-days passed, and nothing was done. At last he sent in an armed body, of fifty or a hundred men, to take our people to Dunwich, without fail. In work-shops, mills, farms, offices, the citizens continued their ordinary pursuits. These soldiers dispersed themselves in all parts of the town. I was riding in the Meadows, when they came there. Several of our people were at work, and among them, Judah Weeks, who was mowing. “Don’t you intend to go with us?” said the soldiers, after explaining their errand. “I am very busy,” replied Judah, “I could not possibly go to-day, neither do I care to at any time.” “I am empowered to force you,” said one of the troop. “Very well,” replied Judah, and continued his mowing. The soldier seized him by the collar, but Judah, who is very strong, still kept his scythe swinging, until he had drawn the soldier one or two rods into the grass. “I will shoot you,” said the soldier, “if you don’t obey.” “That is it, hey?” said Judah. “If I am to die I wish to do so with my wife and child. Call Bertha, some of you,” he said to the people who began to flock around. His wife and child were brought. “Now I am ready,” said he. The soldier raised his musket, and lowered it. I know not that he had any intentions of shooting. The soldiers went off, and Judah resumed his work. We next encountered them carrying a young fellow, who proved to be my old pupil, Consider Gisborne. Four of them had him by his arms and feet. He kicked lustily, and got away. An affair occurred at the Mill, of which there have been several accounts. I will give you the version we received from Captain Tuck himself. General Kingsland in person, a Captain and Lieutenant, all in field costume, came to the Mill, and sent in a message that they had express business with Capt. Tuck. The Captain went to the door, told them he was much hurried, that all his stones were running, and several people were waiting for their

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grists; and politely asked them in. However loth, they dismounted, entered the Mill, followed the Captain, who was actively employed from hopper to hopper. The place was floating in the dust of meal, which presently found lodgment on their plumes, blue coats and sashes. The General became uneasy and urgent, the Captain replied that he was very busy, and at the same time demonstrated the nature of his business by emptying a meal-bag, from which fumed up any quantity of the fine white effluvium. Whereupon, in the words of Captain Tuck, “the General and his forces made a precipitate retreat.” Sprinkled with flower [sic] from crest to spur, they mounted their horses, and by most private ways withdrew from Livingston. The Captain vaunts himself much on what he calls his ruse de guerre; and declares that meal-powder is more effective than gun-powder.

We are menaced with fines, but our people say they had better pay them, than train. Indeed, a levy was made, some property put up at auction, but no bidders appeared. However the whole matter is to be carried before the State Legislature, and we are looking forward to their action with no small solicitude.

The world rattles about us, like wood-peckers in the forest. If any thing rotten or defective can be discovered, well for us, we will have it cut down.—I have certified myself of the meaning of that very anagogical word, “world;” it signifies any thing that is not Livingston, or out of Christ-Church, or below Mons Christi. We means us, and they them. How very pleasant to be brought plump up against the fence of the not you! By being ourselves we have developed another being, quite as long and as broad, and inclined to pugilism withal. I used not to be, and nobody else was. Mr. Evelyn first scared me with this idea of “the world.” But our world grows larger every day, and I lack not for company, though theirs grows pari passu. How will either come out in the end?

Some of our people walk carefully, as birds on ice. Soon I trust they will find the earth, or wings wherewithal to leave it.—How good a thing it is, in all our doubt and uncertainty, that we have an oracle to which we can appeal, I mean the Gospels. In the wreck of so much that is excellent, why have they not perished also? When the Persians destroyed the Temples of Greece, they did not dare touch that of the Isle of Delos, it was so sacred. Has the extreme value of these books saved them from pillage? Therein, through the vices of men let me discern their virtues.

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—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

Our Sabbaths are delightful days; they always were to me; because I did not have to go to Meeting; now, because I do go. They were ever, liberty, rest, and recreation to me, now they bring a higher spiritual enjoyment. We go to Church, forenoon and afternoon, and sometimes dine in the Village, at Frank’s, or elsewhere. In Summer we walk, in Winter ride. We all go, Pa, Ma, Hash and Nimrod, with their families, and whoever is living with us. There is a mellowness about the sky and air, that day; which is all the difference I perceive. People tell me what a drearily solemn day, it used to be to them. “It was a despit pinched up sort of a time,” said Mrs. Whiston to me awhile since, “as if God was asleep and we had to go tip-toe all day, and couldn’t speak above our breath for fear of waking him.” We all carry flowers to Church, not quite so extravagant a bunch as I once got a rebuke for. The death of Deacon Hadlock, and the infirmities of Parson Welles, have quite thinned off the old society, and Christ-Church includes almost the whole town. Indeed, the old Parson himself, with such of his flock as chose to accompany him, was at our Church, a few Sabbaths since. Zenas Joy is our chorister, and Dorothy Tapley, who has fine musical powers, plays the organ. One half of the hymns are sung by the whole congregation; this, Deacon Ramsdill says, is as it used to be, and so the old folks are pleased, and the young ones too. The Feast of the Lord’s Supper occurs every month. Our Communion days are so Christ-giving, so abounding in what some are wont to call soul-food, so contributory to the Divine Atonement, they seem almost the best days. We all eat that bread and drink that wine whereby we mean to show the Lord’s death until he come; that is, as our Bishop says, until Christ perfectly comes in our souls, and over the earth. The children many of them are Communicants; the excellent teaching they have in the Sunday school, prepares them for this higher Church order. At noon, the people go into the Cemetery, and eat their dinner on the seats near the Brook Kedron. At night, scores and sometimes hundreds come to Mons Christi, visit the Cross, walk about our grounds; sometimes they come into our drawing-room, where we have religious conversation, and sing hymns. How much there is in the religion of Christ to talk about, and I have become sanctiloquent as any of them. That word Love, of which St. John says, he who has it dwells in God and God in him, how much there is in it! It has already given us a new Heaven and a new Earth, and goes on creating

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stars, nebulae and milky ways, without number. It would astonish you, Anna, to hear some whom you would consider most jejune and sterile, talk. The graces of the Spirit, joy, love, peace, goodness, &c., have thrown up tropical islands in these wastes of brine. I shall have many things to tell you, more than I can write.—Last Sunday, Obed brought his child to be baptized. It received the name Bartholomew Elliman! The Master and the Widow, I understand, have made peace, or suspended hostilities. The Master promised an annuity to the child if it might be named from him. Frankly, Anna, I must confess, the Widow is the most purely selfish woman I ever heard of. Some would get drunk, some were bigots, some fanatics, some intolerant, but all had a spice of honesty at the bottom. But she is a hypocrite to the core. She has given me some trouble, and done me some good, perhaps; for which all thanks. An ambitious avarice has been her ruling passion. Will you believe it, the day of the Erection of the Cross, when we were having the sacrament in the woods, she was there, so they say, with her pockets filled with her Nommernisstortumbug, which she endeavored to truck among the people. Nimrod never could endure her; he always said she followed Church-going the same as black-birds do the plough, to pick up the worms. Our Bishop has had a sober talk with her, as every good Christian should do. And this admonishes me, that I perhaps am somewhat at fault in what I say. I have dealt too roundly with her. Words do so cover the whole field of our vision while the object shall go half naked. He says she has some incorrupt nature, that she is not wholly dead in the old Adam, sin; and declares that Christ may yet make her live. He says, Christ and the Gospels are sufficient to destroy any amount, and any inveteracy of evil, in the heart. If the Leech can be touched, we must all believe so too. The Bishop says the Gospel must find something in our natures similar to itself before it can have effect; that roots [feel] their way into the earth in search of nutriment, homogeneous and corresponding, each root for itself, that of wheat for one substance, and that of sorrel for another; so he says the Gospel feels its way in the human heart. As music addresses and develops the musical sentiment, so Evangelical love and truth address and develop the sentiment of love and truth. In this way he acts; he gains access to the heart, makes sure that the floor will hold him; then commences an onslaught on the unclean spirits, drives them out, with old Adam at their head; brushes away the dust and cobwebs of meanness; opens the shutters,

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and lets in the light of God, and the clear shining of the Sun of Righteousness. Such are many of the wonders God hath wrought by him in Livingston! Can he succeed with the Widow? In all countries moss grows, the ice-bolstered rocks of the Arctic are green and soft with it. There the merganser spends its summer, the snowbird rears its young, and our own robin sings. Shall we despair then of these temperate regions? The Master says Whitfield did more to puppetize and dehumanize New Englanders than my other man; that he seized upon the idea of total depravity and sowed it broad cast in the Churches; and that Parson Welles, while he agreed with him in doctrine, was so averse from his measures, that he would never have him in Livingston. This for your private benefit, Anna. You ask many questions about matters and things, and I can only return you such answers as I am able to pick up. Address your next inquiries to Mr. Evelyn; he will give you more satisfaction. When our troops went to the attack of Louisburg, Whitfield gave them this motto, “Nil desperandum, Christo Duce;” an admirable one for our own flag.—I am forgetting, like many other sinners, the Sabbath. It is the Lord’s Day to us; in the most exalted sense, it is Christ’s own day. All days are holy, this seems to be the cream of the week. On the spiritual river where we would ever sail, the Sabbath opens into clearer water, a broader bay; and we can rest on our oars to get a distincter view of the blue heavenly hills whither we tend. Is it not a good thing, this hebdomadal renovation of skin and clothes? You know the old saw; “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” Our Bishop preaches on cleanliness, carnal and spiritual; and if it be a true sign, I think you would count us a very godly people. Houses, rooms, yards, fences, streets, as well as persons, in all parts of the town, look wonderfully clean, neat, tidy; No. 4 would grace Hyde Park. You would also see, on the Sabbath conspicuously, greater simplicity in dress; there is taste and some ornament: but “gaudy apparel,” has almost entirely disappeared, “as unbecoming those who profess Godliness.” That transition in fashion with which a foreign connection so afflicts your city, is here neither frequent nor abrupt. In an intermixture of styles from one season to another, the variety is not sufficiently marked to prevent our wearing out the old without disquiet, or adopting the new at our convenience.

* * *

The other night at a party at our house, Deacon Bowker

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danced with Miss Amy, I should say Mrs. Elliman; a thing she has not done this two score years. Col. Welch said he was falling into his second childhood by renewing his youth, sooner than he anticipated. A dance on cold water he pronounced strange, but excellent. Deacon Ramsdill declared he should live an hundred years. “It’s sheer nater,” said he, “it is just like soap, the longer you keep it, the better it grows.” If Chilion could only play for us! William Beach proves a first rate violinist, so does Abiah Tapley.

We make much of music, and it does well by us. I wish to see unfolded and embodied the entire musical capability of the town. We have an instrumental company called The chilion Band. They play on the Green, Summer evenings, and in the Cemetery; they have gone to Breakneck, Snakehill and all parts of the town. They frequently come to Mons Christi, play in our groves, and on the Head. The effect of this last is indescribable. It reaches the village, and the inspiring melodies, like morning light, irradiate over wood, valley and mountain. Mr. Evelyn has written some Christian Hymns, very beautiful, and combining some lyric fire. These hymns you will hear in many a house, in the fields, and the children sing them at school.

Our Schools are doing well. There were formerly but two in town, we have now six. Hancock Welles, grandson of the Parson, after he left College, was engaged for a permanent teacher in the Grammar School, for which a new and commodious house was erected on the Green, in place of the one that was burnt.

—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

We have digested and adopted a system of Christ-Church Festivals. Mr. Evelyn observed the extent and influence of these things in the Old World, and, after due sortings and siftings, we thought something of the kind might be produced in the New. The idea, he says, is a good one, but the manner in which the thing has been managed is open to reprehension. Festivals, he says, have been instituted by Kings and Popes, for Machiavellian purposes, or any other than Christian or human; that they have never been the offspring of a free and enlightened mind, but either the enforcements of arbitrary power, or the expedients of priestly art. Christ-Church Festivals have at least this merit; the people were cognizant of their incipiency, assisted in each step of their progress, and

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gave their suffrages to the entire plan. Ecclesiastical Holidays, Mr. Evelyn says, are also open to exception in their subjects. Why should we observe the Purification of the Virgin Mary, St. Michael’s Day, or Ash-Wednesday? Or why, neglecting more affecting and spiritual events, should we make use of the Circumcision of Christ? We cannot, of course, with the English Church, keep the Gunpowder Plot and King Charles’s Martyrdom. Our Festivals are twelve in number, one for each month of the year. Three of them are such as have already become national or at least New England, the Spring Fast, Independence and the Autumnal thanksgiving; three more are founded on the Beatitudes, and are named as follows, the Festival of the Poor in Spirit, that of the Peacemakers, and of the Pure in Heart. There is the Festival of Charity, or Christian Love, from 1 Cor. xiii. Then from the life of Christ, are Christmas, drawn from his birth, etc. Childmas, which refers to his holy Boyhood and Youth; the Festival of the Crucifixion, which comprises his strong crying and tears in the flesh, his temptation, his bearing his Cross, his agony in the garden and his death; that of the Resurrection, which includes his transfiguration, his spiritual anastasis, his being the Life of the soul, and his rising from the dead. Then we have the Festival of the Universal Brotherhood, taken from Christ’s interview with the Samaritan woman, and the declaration of Paul, that in Christ all are one. We have also twelve other Festivals in the monthly recurrence of the Holy Communion. Our Bishop has also prepared a system of Sabbaths, which he pursues with tolerable regularity. He has given us, Baptismal Sunday, founded on Christ’s Baptism; Children’s Sunday,—his blessing the little children; Unity Sunday; Atonement Sunday—“that they may be one in us;” Regeneration Sunday—“except a man be born again;” Repentence Sunday, etc. etc.

Christmas, if you please, leads the signs in our evangelical Circle, is the beginning of the Christian year; this falls in September; the Pure in Heart, in October; Thanksgiving in November; the Festival of the Universal Brotherhood, which also includes All Saints, is given to December. In January is the Peacemakers, when we decorate the Church with evergreens, have the Lion and Lamb symbolized, and make our endeavors for private and universal Peace. We seek forgivness and proffer restitution. To February, the Poor in Spirit is assigned; the Crucifixion to March; and in April is Fast. May gives us Childmas, which is peculiarly for the children;

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June, the Festival of Love; July, Independence, social, political, mental, moral, religious; this is also the Anniversary of the Erection of the Cross. The year closes in August, with the Resurrection.

The time of Christmas was changed for the following reasons;—that the month and season of our Saviour’s birth are not known; that the 25th of December, the Calendar day, is of Gentile origin, which indeed were not an insuperable objection, provided it were recommended by any intrinsic propriety. But this is not the case. The Festival to which that day refers, obtaining among Northern nations, is only adapted to a Northern latitude. The sun’s annual return, which they were wont to celebrate, gave them a cause of gratulation, at the expense of their trans-equatorial brethren, who at the same moment are mourning its withdrawal. Such an arrangement would not be cosmopolitan and universal enough for Christ-Church. Therefore we selected an equinoctial point when it shines with the same strength on all portions of the globe. So far as Livingston is concerned, there were few or no pre-existing Ecclesiastical prejudices to be affected, and the people were at full liberty to select what time they chose. This Festival with us is not taken up solely with the Birth of Christ, it contemplates in addition his Second Coming, i. e. his spiritual revelation in the hearts and lives of his disciples. So looking both backward and forward, it may well occupy some central point.

On most of our Festivals, there is a short religious exercise in the Church. The Poor in Spirit is a season of sober introspection, humility and prayer. The Crucifixion has for its objects to effect within us a crucification to the world and of the world to us. We become truly partakers of the sufferings of Christ, his temptation, his reproach, his cross-bearing, his dying. Childmas, in May, gives several holidays to the children. They have a May-pole, May-dances, and a Queen of May. They go into the woods for evergreens and flowers. In the evening the Band play for them, and they dance with their parents on the Green. You will see them, going down, in the morning, from Breakneck and Snakehill, blithe as the birds about them; the girls dressed in white, and the boys in blue-checked linen. This Festival is also devoted by the people at large to ornamenting the streets, replenishing the flowers of the Cemetery, and planting shrubbery about their houses. Independence day, the 4th of July, we have an Oration, a rural dinner and a dance in the evening at the Masonic

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Hall. This is a superb room, over the Town House, which the Masons have freely relinquished to our use whenever we want it. They always unite with us in keeping this Festival. The Resurrection, in August, seeks to realize for us that spiritual resurrection from sin which St. Paul strove to attain, and which Christ so perfectly enjoyed. It also looks to the final elimination of the spirit from the body. The Festival of Love in June would advance us in that love which thinketh no evil, beareth all things, is the bond of perfection, the seal of our being born of God, and fulfils the law. The Pure in Heart among other things, is devoted to a general School visitation. The School-houses are filled with parents and friends; the scholars examined, and addresses made. The election of the May Queen is made to turn somewhat on these examinations. She who received the crown this year was Delinda, the daughter of Zenas Joy. Peacemaker’s, coming the first of January, is supplied with whatever of interest attaches to that day. Thanksgiving is observed agreeably to immemorial New England usages, bating the Turkey-shoot at No. 4, and Horse-racing, which are abolished; and the Ball at Mr. Smith’s has been supplanted by a general dance at the Masonic Hall. Our Festivals are not put by for Sunday, but when they fall on that day, which not infrequently happens, the Bishop prepares discourses accordingly. Thus is the whole year interwoven and girded about by our beautiful Festivals; some of them exceedingly joyous and gay, others more sedate and reflective. What Herbert says of them I dare not;—

Yet we do love them, and that, because we love God, and Christ and Happiness.

* * *

The sectaries have sought to introduce themselves among us. Our Bishop freely offered them his pulpit, but they refused to occupy it; he has proposed exchanges, but those they declined. They would not join in our Communion, although the emblems are tendered to all who love the Lord Jesus Christ. They kept aloof from our festivals. We have all been baptized, and nearly two hundred the Bishop has immersed. What could they want! They came, nearly forty of them, preachers and all, from Dunwich, one night, to Snakehill. The superintendent of the Schools in that District had orders to open the School-house to them.

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Our Bishop, Mr. Evelyn, Deacon Bowker and several went up; the room was full. Our Bishop said we should be glad to hear anything they had to say, and hoped they would express themselves freely. One began to say something, but he appeared embarrassed and stopped. Then one of their leaders fell upon his knees, and said, “Let us pray,” and pray he did, nearly half an hour, and with a most stentorian voice. Such a prayer may it never be my lot to hear again! He argued with us, philippized us, denounced us, and as Nimrod said, “whipped us over God Almighty’s back!” Has the Prince of Puppetdom in reserve a more horrid piece of drollery? Deacon Whiston could not contain himself; like Elijah of old he mocked them, and said, “Cry aloud, for he is a god; either he is deaf, or is talking, or is on a journey.” “There is no voice, nor any that answereth,” added our Bishop. The effect was irresistible. The meeting was broken up, and those most misguided people mounted their horses and made all haste to depart. They would convert us, from what? Christ himself! To what, in the name of all that is good? To John Wesley, or John Calvin! They would save our souls. These are already saved, or at least Christ is doing that work for us hour by hour. They have been in various parts of the town endeavoring to ply the ridiculous enginery of God’s wrath and eternal damnation. They are eighteen hundred years behind the age, our Christian age at least. As Nimrod says, they “are barking up the wrong tree.” I have no grudge against these people. Some of them have excellent private qualities. Whatever there is of the christian in them I like, and there we and they agree, and that ought to be a common foundation broad enough for us all to stand upon. But the Ism is the difficulty. This governs their action, this they would thrust upon us. Their Ismaticalness conceals and extrudes the Christian. We meet them as Christians, they meet us as Ismatics. It is Christ versus Isms. Which shall prevail?

Lycurgus forbade the entrance of strangers into Laconia, and the departure of his subjects. He was afraid of contamination. The gates of Livingston are ever open, come in, go out, who will. “The Lord encampeth round about them that fear him,” was our Bishop’s text last Sunday. We have thus far been delivered from serious evil. We are not afraid of the world, only the world must expect to get most condignly meal-powdered, if it undertakes mischief against us. We have, in Livingston, nine hundred members of Christ-Church, bold

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hearts, true hearts, completely clad in the armor of God, ready for any battles of the Lord; and equally ready to die at the stake, if needs be. “If the Lord were pleased to kill us, he would not have received a burnt-offering at our hands, and showed us all these things,” our Bishop says. “Cursed cows have short horns,” Deacon Ramsdill says. And plantain thrives best when it is most trod upon, that I know. Pray for us that we may be able to go safely through all fiery trials.

It is related that the Cyclops for their savageness and cruelty were condemned to Tartarus; but that Tellus, the Goddess of the Earth, persuaded Jupiter it would be for his interest to employ them in forging thunder-bolts, and other instruments of terror with a frightful and continual din of the anvil. When I call to mind certain kinds of preaching I remember to have heard, and which I am told everywhere abound, I reflect that Christ banished all such things from his kingdom; but the gods of this lower world have persuaded themselves it would be for the interest of the Supreme to have these Cyclops recalled, and our pulpits are full of their din! Where, alas! where is the sweet, gentle, loving voice of Jesus, a voice that would not lift itself up, nor cry, but did sometimes weep!

The Preacher, he whom I first heard in the woods some years ago, acts singularly. He hovered about Livingston, peeping in upon us, and then running away. He said he believed the Latter Days were come; then he hid himself in the woods, and nobody heard from him for a long time. At last he came to the village, is now an attentive waiter on our Bishop’s ministrations, and says he is resolved to become a Missionary, and disseminate the principles of Christ-Church in the world.

* * *

We have had various sorts of people among us within two or three years, and with an equal variety of motives; Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, Jews, Mohammedans, Hindoos. The latter were foreigners, gentlemen travelling the world in pursuit of knowledge. We had most of them at our house. What should happen one Sunday, but a venerable Presbyterian Doctor of Divinity, a Jew, and the Mohammedan, should set in the same pew in Christ-Church, and as it was Communion day, they all partook of the Sacrament together, and after service, came to Mons Christi in company! The Doctor remarked he had always preached faith in Christ, and the

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regeneration of our natures, “but I declare,” said he, “I never understood these things before, or saw them so happily exemplified.” The Jew said, laughing, if it were not for our pig-pen, he believe he should be a Christian. The Mohammedan published an account of his travels, and from Teheran in Persia, I received a copy done in Arabic. We taxed our wits, and at the same time gratified our vanities, in translating it. The chapter on Livingston would amuse you. The author has even given a description of me! This is a precious tidbit, and I shall not endanger it by committed it to the post-rider. You shall see it, when you visit us. One of the Hindoos—there were two of them in company, and Brahmins, I believe—said he would leave with us words from their sacred books; as follows. “Truth, contentment, patience, mercy, belong to great minds.” “A man of excellent qualities is like a flower, which whether found among weeds, or worn on the head, still preserves its fragrance.” An Episcopal Bishop was here, and he said that sooner than deny the Apostolic authority of our Bishop, he would forego his own. He said this to us, but whether he wished it to go abroad to the world, is more than I know. Such are some of the pleasant records of visits we have had. That other things of a very different nature have been said and done, I cannot deny. But I should tire you by reporting all the evil there is in the world, or the want of love which many betray, who come here. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!” What a prayer was that! Let us aspire to it.

Here is another affair for you. One day there came to our house a gentleman with a letter from his Holiness Pope Pius VII, addressed to us as his dear children, and recommending to us the bearer, and his objects. The bearer was a Roman Cardinal, and his objects thus appeared. He said the Pope had learned that we had erected the Cross, and that he hoped to find us obedient children of the Holy Catholic Church. We told him that we belonged to that Church. He said he hoped to effect our affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church. We told him that we fellowshipped all churches in which was the spirit of Christ, and that so far as the Roman Church possessed that, we were happy to belong to it. He then said something about allegiance. “What,” said Mr. Evelyn, “to Pope Pius?” “Not exactly that,” replied the gentleman. “To the Council of Trent?” persisted Mr. Evelyn. “I perceive I have made a mistake,” said the gentleman, and making a very polite apology started to leave. “Give our sincere

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respects to the Pope,[”] said Mr. Evelyn, “tell him we pay him the allegiance due to him, that contained in the Apostolic direction, to honor all men. If he should come this way we hope he will give us a call.” The Cardinal had not reached the door when an Armenian Prelate was announced from Syria. He said he had understood we were Monophysites, and came to see if we were not a lost branch of their Church established in this country centuries ago. While he was yet speaking a Patriarch of the Greek Church came in. He said he had been told we denied the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son, and hoped to find us identified with his order. Presently we had them all three seated and pleasantly talking together. We sent for our Bishop, and they all dined with us. The Greek made the sign of the cross with three fingers, the Armenian with two, and the Catholic with his hand indiscriminately. We took them in our carriage to the village and about the town. They passed the night at our house. We had other friends with us, and could not give them each a room; and the Roman Cardinal and Greek Patriarch slept in the same bed; an event, Mr. Evelyn said, that had probably not happened since the year 1054, when Pope Leo X. and the Patriarch Cerularius excommunicated each other. At our devotions in the morning, the Greek read the hymn, the Armenian read the Scripture, and the Catholic made the prayer. They left us, and we have heard nothing from them since. I hope, when these gentlemen reach home, they will not suffer, as did that Timagorus; who, sent on an embassy to Persia, for conforming to some of the usages of that Court, on his return, was put to death by the Athenians, who thought the dignity of their city compromised by his conduct.

—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

We have had a more considerable alarm, the causes and course of which I will speak of. Livingston you know has been the subject of public remark, and perhaps some scandal. The conduct of our people in military matters has gone abroad to their prejudice; in addition, Judge Morgridge has been accused of remissness in duty; it was said that he had not sent so many convicts to the State Prison as formerly, and that he shortened the term of such as were committed to the Jail. It was intimated that we had rendered ourselves obnoxious to Legislative severity, and some punitive action on the part of the government was apprehended. A memorial to the

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General Court was got up, and signed by nearly a thousand of our people, men, women and children, setting forth our condition and most earnest wishes. Deacon Bowker was our representative at the time; he read the memorial, but added nothing, only took his seat, and as he said, prayed God to aid the issue. The Legislature, in a manner that does credit equally to their prudence and humanity, ordered an investigation of the case; and a Committee was raised to visit Livingston, and report at the next session. Two gentlemen with plenipotentiary powers of inspection came amongst us. They were here frequently, and in fact spent several weeks of the year on their object. We sought neither to meal-powder nor gold-blind them, but showed them the civilities due to all, and maintained the uniformity due to ourselves. They tell the story of a young painter, who being very poor, was reduced to the necessity of converting one of his pictures into lining for his jacket; and thus exposed his genius by wearing it on his back. Livingston wears its virtues on its back—and in its heart too—where they can be seen at a glance:—but to our history. The Committee made up their report, which having been printed swells into a large pamphlet. I will give you a syllabus of it. They say our roads are in fine order, in fact none are better in the State; that the whole town has a striking aspect of neatness and thrift; that during all the time of their visit they saw not one drunken man, while in most towns such characters appeared without looking for them; that the consumption of intoxicating drinks has diminished from six or eight thousand gallons annually to a few scores; that the amount paid for schools has risen from three or four hundred dollars to two thousand; that all taxes laid by the State and County have been promptly paid; that our poor have lessened three quarters; they say also, that the value of real estate in Livingston has advanced twenty per cent., and that wholly exclusive of the improvements on Mons Christi; and that the mania for removing to the West, which prevails all over New England, has here subsided. On the charges preferred against Judge Morgridge, so far as his connection with this town and vicinity are concerned, they report in the first place that fewer criminal actions have been brought before him than formerly, and those of a less malefic nature; and that the number of prisoners in the Jail has fallen from forty or fifty to eight or ten, and only one of these belonged to Livingston. They next inquire if these facts are to be attributed to the official negligence of the Judge, or to the actual decrease of crime. On

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this point, which is elaborated with considerable care, thanks to those gentlemen, I will give you the results of their observation. They say that during the last four years since the enlargement of the Jail, the addition to the comfort of the inmates, and the practice we have of visiting them frequently, and attending to their moral condition, the recommitments have almost entirely ceased; whereas in former times these constituted nearly one half of the subjects of prosecution; and they consent that our mode tends really to reform the prisoner, and restore him a useful citizen to the State; and they say they see not cause for censuring the Judge who sends convicts rather to the Jail, where their morals and manners are amended, than to the State Prison where the reverse is wont to befall. The Committee came evidently possessed with the suspicion, which some have taken the pains to create in the public mind, that we shielded our criminals, and snatched them from public justice. They say they have canvassed the whole town, explored by-places, gone into private dwellings, watched about taverns, traversed the streets by night, and cannot find any criminals; that the people appear to be industrious, time-saving, minders-of-their-own-business, and free from the ordinary tokens of guilt. They speak also of the absence of petty offences, which exist almost everywhere; and we could tell them once flourished here, such as unhinging gates, hanging cart-wheels on trees, plundering gardens and hen-roosts, shearing horses, etc. etc. They add, pleasantly enough, that, while they have been in a hundred houses, at all hours of the day, they have not heard a woman speak scandal, or scold her children. They remark that a petition for divorce from Hopestill Cutts and his wife, formerly pending before the Legislature, has been withdrawn; and here, as all along, apprehensive of some collusion, they declare they made such an investigation as perfectly satisfied them these people were living in harmony and love.

Regarding the nature and extent of the penalty, they say Judge Morgridge has generally adopted the minimum point of the law, which he thinks has proved itself to be adequate both for the protection of the community and the punishment of the offender. They report a visit to the Jail, where, they say, they found what appeared to be a radical change going on in the minds and hearts of the convicts. The fact that none are recommitted indicates, they say, that the accommodations of the Prison do not offer a premium on crime. Another circumstance which demonstrates to their minds the actual cessa-

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tion of offences, is the abolition of the use of intoxicating drinks. The able-bodied poor, who used to waste their time and aggravate their indolence by liquors, they found soberly working, and wisely economizing. Our merchants also told them the people traded as liberally and paid more punctually than ever, and that they had less occasion for prosecutions. Thus, in various ways, the Committee profess themselves satisfied that there is a diminution both in the causes and the sum of criminality; and they report a resolve which entirely exonerates the Judge from the charge of infidelity to the laws, and carelessness of the good of the state.

As regards military drills, our people made a solemn exhibit to the Committee of what formerly existed here, the intoxication, profanity, gambling, horse-racing, brawling, dissipation of time, wreck of morals, etc. the offsprings of those occasions; and furthermore, they protested, that, as members of Christ-Church, as Christians, as believers in the Gospel, they could not conscientiously engage in taking, or preparing to take, the lives of their fellow-beings, in premeditated battle. “I lost my all in one war,” said Captain Tuck, “and am prepared to do the same in another. Take our property, consign us to dungeons, load us with chains, but do not compel us to violate our consciences. I am under orders from Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ is my commander-in-Chief, in their service I shall deem it my highest honor to live, or to die.” Our people affirmed, in addition, that the military expenses of the town, taking the matter in all ways, had not been less than one thousand dollars a-year; some said two thousand; and that they needed the money for other purposes. They added that they were willing to pay such taxes as the government imposed, and they only sought the ability to pay. These facts the Committee reported without comment. They were present at several of our Festivals, at Christ-Church on the Sabbath, at our Town Meetings, and dances, and expressed a general satisfaction in what they saw.

And now what is the good news I have to tell you?—this, that in the ultimate decision of the Legislature, it was voted, nearly unanimously, by both houses, that Judge Morgridge should not be disturbed in his office, and that the Town of Livingston should be exempt from all Military duty! It was the Summer Session, when the resolve was finally passed, and Deacon Bowker arrived with the glad intelligence Independence day; our fears took flight in raptures, and our ordinary good cheer creamed like a tankard of beer. Master Elliman’s

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toast was quite characteristic; “Our Legislature, a convert from Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus.”

There has been a multiplication of travel hither, the influx of strangers is incessant and great. One advantage the people say they begin to realize from their mode of life; that is money. Mr. Stillwater says his tavern profits exceed by far those of other years. The people generally speak of increased sales, on this score. Many orchards, formerly miserable rum-lots, have been converted into productive fruiteries. We have imported grafts, and new seed, and now they raise choice apples, pears and peaches, that find a ready market anywhere. Some of the people, who cannot confine themselves wholly to cold water, make cider, by an improved process, which Mr. Evelyn says is equal to the purest wines of France. Dr. Johnson tells a story of Steele to this effect. The essayist having one day invited to his house several persons of quality, they were surprised at the number of liveries that surrounded the table. One of the guests inquired of Steele how such a train of domestics could be consistent with his fortune, for he was known to be poor. He frankly confessed they were fellows of whom he would very willingly be rid; and being asked why he did not discharge them, declared they were bailiffs, who had introduced themselves with an execution, and whom, since he could not send them away, he had found it convenient to embellish with liveries, that they might do him credit while they did stay. How much of the equipage, the appointments, the furniture, the dress, of the world, is a sort of liveried bailiff, who as soon as the feast is over will take every thing from you! Whatever decorations Livingstonians exhibit, are their own, their debts are paid. Mr. Evelyn has accomplished a good deal with the somewhat rugged soil of Mons Christi. Last year he sold, in New York, four hundred bushels of apples, at an average of seventy five cents per bushel. He raised also six hundred bushels of rye, corn and oats, potatoes and other things as many as we want. We have six cows, and such cream, and butter, and cheese, did you ever taste better? Our sheep, hogs, turkeys, ducks, hens, are innumerable. In the Saw-mill, at the Outlet, we have put a run of stone, and grind our own grain. The Notch through the hill from the Via Salutaris to the Outlet is now a fine road, and a fine drive; and that wild and superb scenery back of the highlands is accessible to all. Balboa, he that discovered the Pacific Ocean, when he came in sight of it, fell on his knees and thanked God; then plunging into the water up to his waist,

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with his sword and buckler, took possession of it in the name of his sovereign. We have just reached the edge of this illimitable, whale-bearing, sky-cleaving Nature; with hoe and axe, microscope and alembic, love and health, we take possession of it, in the name of God and Christ, amen. The Chinese carry their gardens and rice-fields to the tops of their mountains. What may yet become of New England! The Indians indeed are gone; what do we in their stead? This suggests to me that the remains of Pakanawket and his grandchild, after reposing so long in the depths of the Pond, at last rose to the surface. We had them buried in the woods which he pointed out as the home of his grandfather; and over them we put an antique monument of red sand-stone, on which are sculptured their effigies in the style of the Middle Ages. In the darkest woods they lie, but their shrine has as many visitors as that of Thomas a Becket. What more, what better could we do?

—
MR. EVELYN TO ANNA.

From the tone of your letters, I gather that Margaret, in what she writes you, treats of her own agency in these matters Livingstonian, in a manner somewhat obscure. I shall take the liberty to elucidate this point briefly. I do not intend to overtax her modesty, or involve her singleness of heart, beyond what is meet; but in truth I must declare, the first person in her letters would be more fitting and exact, than any second; it is she herself, and not we, who is, under God, and in Christ, the soul of all that which we now behold. This may be as frankly avowed, as it is sincerely felt. Nor do I fear inducing a dispute with my dear wife, by saying as much. She knows that I know it, and if she has not confidence enough in herself to confess the fact, she has in me to yield to it. If she has not a consciousness of her own strength, it is because it is so absolutely and plenarily great that she lacks the contentions and annoyances of weakness which reveal to most of us the little strength we do possess. Wherein she is conscious of her strength, she so expends it in action as to leave no carking and petted residuum to trouble her with. Her self-consciousness is not, what we sometimes behold, a crying infant, but a grown-up sister; it resides quite as much with her industry as in her heart, and she is not obliged to quit her work and rock the cradle of herself. She thus escapes a morbid tendency on the one hand, and a heedless one on the other; she can be self-forgetful and self-moved; she can love and she can labor.—

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She will not charge me with any adroit humility that seeks to hide itself under her laurels. You have known me, anna, that I had some vis in my composition, but of that kind which the books call mortua, more than the description viva; in other words, that I was sluggish and lazy. I saw, and thought, and speculated enough, I attained many correct conclusions; but I never did anything. When I left College, I soon convinced myself, that like many other rare geniuses, I was doomed to be the victim of circumstances. I was not poverty-stricken, but man-stricken. The forms and the spirit of error and evil had distorted the face of the globe; but why should I attempt to remove mountains, or change the bed of rivers? Let me travel over the one, and sail on the other. I would not perish where so many of my kith and kin had come to their end, that is to say in contention. I essayed poetry, but soon learned, that I had not only to make verses, but remodel the standards of taste; that if I would succeed, I must first put all the critics to death, as the Emperor Hadrian did Apollodorus, for blaming the proportions of a Temple he had erected. Of the Professions, Theology I could not, Law and Medicine I would not; and then, as a last resort, I concluded to fall in love with a very pretty, and very poor girl, here in Livingston. I knew I could live with her, whereas I must die in all the world besides. Well for me that I had sense enough to understand her, or heart enough to love her. I could always philosophize, but lacked the energy of execution. In place of hastening the better day, I was disposed to yield most implicit obedience to that direction of the Apostle, “Wait until the Lord come.” Margaret’s energy has inspired all my capabilities, and given motion to my will. But more than this, for example, I could sit with Phidias in his studio, and out of ideal gold and ivory make a Jupiter, with all suitable enrichments. She takes the veritable materials, and the statue is done. Thus is our whole history; I have been able to impart a certain fanciful existence to ideality; she perpetually reduces the same to the Actual. Nor does she seem to study her plan, with most artists, and then go to work; she goes to work, and the plan and the result are both before you. She seems to be only embodying herself in what is about her, her profuse and impulsive being creates life in all things, her own going forth is the signal for the appearance of Beauty and Virtue; she translates Nature to Man; and Man to himself. I talk like a doting husband, but this is what I am, and what she has made me. She was reared on bread and cider, and

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bean porridge; she slept in a cold chamber, she hardened her constitution among snow-banks; her mind, never overloaded, was always occupied; her nature would neither endure, nor did it ever receive, the fetters of fashion, conventionality, dogma, or world-fear. Without education, in the common sense of the term, her faculties were matured; without instruction, she was wise; and having never heard of Mr. Nash, she was graceful and polite. Christianity she was unembarrassed to receive, and in that alone has she found a master. For this indeed she was somewhat prepared by her night-visions; but when it came, it overpowered and aggrandized her. I never could have imagined so perfect an incarnation of Christ, as she is; and that without parting with any of her proper individuality. She drinks in Christ as the oaks do the dews, to replenish herself in greater proportion and beauty thereby. The Bread from Heaven, designed for the aliment, development, and ripening of all souls, she feeds daily upon. I know not that she is a Philosopher, save that she acts philosophically. Our Philosophers, for the most part, by an industrious collation of many facts, like travellers with heavy packs on their shoulders, fare slowly up the hill of their conclusions. On a few facts her conclusions rest; one fact sands with her for many facts, and this from a certain comprehensive and nice power of analogy she possesses. That law by which all facts in the physical, moral and religious world gravitate towards a common centre, and coalesce in one, she has an intuitive perception of. Or rather the soul of all things, the Truth and Love, of which facts are but the signs, she understands by the correspondence of her own soul therewith. Hence is her logic rapid, and correct, and her action perfect and sure. She is perhaps more Philosophy than a Philosopher; and if, as has been observed, History be Philosophy teaching by example, Nature is Margaret teaching by practice. She also possesses much of the Universal Heart; a variety of hearts enter into the ingredients of hers. Hence, occupying the stand-point of the many, her sight is extensive, her projects are feasible, and her success certain. When I first saw her, she was more purely in a state of nature, than any civilized person I ever encountered. To this, partly, I attribute the power of the Gospel on her. Neither internal sin nor external evil had deformed or diseased her, and she was prepared, like a new-born babe, to breathe the atmosphere of Christ the moment she came in contact with it, and to drink the sincere milk of the word. I once wholly despaired of seeing a Christian; she is one! I might say, I more than

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despaired of fulfilling my ideal in myself; she has aided me to do it! Christ pervades every corner and cranny of her being; she is filled with the fullness of God. And yet she loves me, with a most devout and child-like love. “And yet?” Why should she not?—In pursuing her objects in town, she is no dry, hoarse-voiced, arrow-speeding, denunciatory, monomaniac; she gushes up like a fountain, and having supplied her home, has enough wherewithal to overflow, and run down the hill. She is meek and lowly of heart in an uncommon degree. Whatever manly qualities she exhibits, it is without masculineness, and she is a woman, without effeminacy. She has no bitterness of spirit; the only person in the world whom she was disposed to view as thoroughly and hopelessly depraved, was the Widow Wright; but I believe she has got the better of that judgment. She has no blur in her own eye when she would remove that of her brothers.

But of her connection with this Livingstonian re-Christianization—I say, she may report to you what she does, more than what we do. This is a palpable truth. For instance, our Festivals; I had witnessed their working in the Old World, I was convinced of their utility; I could relate their history, distinguish their errors and defects; while I was speaking on the subject, she had elaborated the system we now enjoy. Is it my doings or hers? At the same time, standing as she does in the common heart, corresponding with so many minds, it seemed to emanate as much from the people as from herself. The hierophancy that exists in all souls, needed only to be awakened, to make every one a practical interpreter of Nature. This, you will recollect, was after the extraneous habits and factitious modes of the people had somewhat worn away, and they were prepared to act on an original native sense of things. How this superincrustation, hardened by many years duration, and even converted into the commonest uses of life, became removed, would puzzle a greater philosopher than she thinks I am, to tell. Its disappearance was gradual, and yet perceptible. The Spirit of God entered into men’s souls, and these dead forms were uplifted, the oppressive bands were broken asunder. Truth and Love, here as everywhere, like that Nebuchadnezzarean tree, had their branches cut off, and its leaves shaken off, but the stump of the roots was in the earth and needed but to be wet with the dew of Heaven, to shoot forth in primeval, paradisian vigor and bloom. Humanity, like a buried giant, heaved off its superincumbence, and rose to life; Religion cast aside her Harlequin robes. Margaret

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ever courted alliance with an imperishable Nature. The sentiments of Deacon Ramsdill, sound as they are homely, must have assisted her. From breast to breast an electrical fire spread itself. She subsidized all y strength, she drew your brother into the field; and she had also a most serviceable coadjutorship in many other wise and valiant men and women. Her knowledge of human nature would strike you as very great. She says Jesus Christ taught her this knowledge; that since she has been a Christian, and a student of the gospels, this intuition, or experience, has been singularly developed in her. Our taking up our abode at Mons Christi was, on the whole, her own suggestion; what we did for the No. 4’s, and particularly the setting up of the Statue, was for the most part a plan of hers. A pink she once saw in one of their filthy houses seemed to suggest the Statue; and a beautiful image of Diligence she felt would carry a varied impression to the hearts of those gross people, that should work their complete reformation. And the result did not disappoint her. Many, many things about our house, grounds, ways, and in the town are purely her own inventions. All our superb statues are chiefly hers. I would not applaud her at the expense of any others. I shall not write myself altogether a “puppet;” your brother has done a great work for us. He came with purposes possibly not fully ripe, but with talents of the first order, and a heart glowing with a Christ-like ambition. There is a host besides of whom, if not the world, Livingston is worthy.

Of Margaret I was speaking. I have translated to her the whole of the New Testament; and, she, I must concede, understands it better than I do. She has a most accurate perception of the general sense, she detects hidden springs of beauty, she harmonizes varying passages and contradictory language, she gathers what may be termed the manner of Christ, his accents and emphases, his moods and feelings; she is not constrained by those unnatural prominences which to those of us who have been long accustomed to hear particular topics discussed, and particular texts dwelt upon, occur everywhere in the Bible. A parable, a trope, an hyperbole, never embarrasses her. There may be a reason for this, in the fact that she understands Christ so well; she is, if I may so say, so much in his vein. She goes deeper than the partial, varying human letter, even into the spirit of Jesus, and comes up full of his meaning. Then, she brings to the Gospel so fresh and pure a nature. Do the best I can, I still find myself stumbling upon certain passages which have been detached

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from Scripture, inwrought into some human system, and invested with a sense wholly remote from the original. She has been troubled by no systems, and these passages, to her, all melt down, and flow on in harmony with the great stream of Gospel truth.

My dearest wife! I see her now on the Pond. She comes from the Islands; and our little Gottfried is with her. Her head is wreathed with evergreens, and the boy has a cincture of the same. With featest stroke she drives forward her canoe, firmly the child clutches the seat. Happy husband and father of so good a wife, so good a child am I! Fresh and warm is she in heart and complexion, as when I with her first looked on these beautiful waters. Yearly does my love for her increase, with every holy deed our souls are knitted more closely together. She leaps upon the beach, she runs along the grass, the little Gottfried chases his mother. I must go and meet them, for I am made young and agile too. She will bide what I have written; she never blushes at truth, but only when I love her.

—
MARGARET TO ANNA.

From the same fountain flow tears and smiles! How curiously we are made. My cheeks tingle, my heart goes pit-a-pat. Mr. Evelyn would not send off his letter without showing it to me. All the world may speak well or ill of me; I take it, as Nimrod says a horse does the bit, very coolly. His censure or approbation quite undoes me. What is he not to me! When other things are so much, how much is he! God, Christ, and Mr. Evelyn; the Infinite and the Finite, in triune, golden chain encircle me, in one sweet heaven embosom me. Man is that wind-harp, through which the breath of God sounds so softly, as in the thick pines. Mr. Evelyn revealed Christ to me, Christ revealed God to him. Dear, dear, thrice dear Mr. Evelyn. Does he not know how much my strength is nourished from him, as well as from bean porridge? He has not told you how I have watched him when he was asleep; nor how I vibrate to his voice when he calls me in the garden; nor how I wait upon his words, his opinions, his judgment. When he was gone so long, and so far away, I cherished him, as a hidden birth in my soul, which his coming alone brought into life. Did I not tell you, Anna, how much I loved him? Yet, you understood something of me, and more of him, and you would not be surprised that I

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did love him. But when he left for Europe, I knew not that I should ever see him again, and he did not write me. What under these circumstances could a girl like me do? Why, love in silence, the same as fishes swim. You are a woman, and you know what that is; and we are women, Rose says, and we are but women, I allow. It never occurred to me that I was poor, or that I was bred in “the orful wicked ways of the Pond,” as the Leech said. Yet how did I love Mr. Evelyn? His letter, if it does not recall me to myself, does certainly recall all my life to me. And if I have not always answered all your questions, dear Anna, it was because I was more apt to fill out my sheet with what was then on my hands, than with what had slid off into my memory.—But I must first settle certain preliminaries as to what a woman is. You would sometimes seem to admonish me lest I become a partaker of a vague somewhat unwomanly. Yet in theory I always agreed with you, and our differences, if there were any, only contemplated the details of practice. And, here, what I have to say is formed, not from any considerable stress of logic, but out of what lies all around me. To say “We are women,” means no more at Mons Christi, than to say, “We are men,” and just as much. There is the same difference, I think, between a man and a woman, as between a black birch and a white one. The character of woman has risen a hundred fold in Livingston, yet are we all women still. The girls are not boys, neither are the ladies lords. We have no amazons, or hybrids, unless I except the Goddess of Health. Man and woman, we are both united and elevated by the common tie of respect and esteem, mutual deference and goodwill, love and honor. We are boys and girls, wives and husbands, men and women still. Man is less exclusive and despotic, woman is less slavish and tame. Our Festivals, our dances, the general diffusion of Christianity in town, have had the effect to abrade many prejudices, correct many diversities, raise the women in their proper scale, and restore the just order and equitable arrangements of society. It seems, after all, to be a question of beards and breeches, and since nature has not furnished us the first, why should we be anxious to supply ourselves with the last? “Don’t be afraid of Livingston!” Captain Tuck says, and in this matter, so say I.

Now, being a woman, how should, or how did I love Mr. Evelyn. They tell of two yew trees that fell in love, but being separated by a large extent of forest, could not speak together. Cherishing their love in concealment, they at length

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grew so tall, they could overlook the intervening trees; they saw each other, their love was consummated. We did love, we were separated, we at last met, and our love was consummated. But, the growing tall, how was that? Were we prepared for a perfect love at the first? Did we need each other? Were we of proportionate moral stature? Were there no distances even in ourselves requiring that we should first grow tall before we could overlook them? Does not one need a certain amount of self-subsistence, before he or she can subsist another? We are capable of loving, long before we are capable of being loved; I mean capable of supporting the love of another. “A solemn thing is love,” said Isabel, when Rufus offered her his heart. Mr. Evelyn, as I recollect, when I first saw him, imparted to me something of a tremor. But what if he had then proposed to marry me? That would have made me tremble worse and more hopelessly. His love for me must first become a subjective part of my own existence, it must grow up in me, it must mould me somewhat into his image; and so too must mine for him act upon him; then when we meet, our diversities will have vanished, we shall be like each other, we shall be ready to live together always. Perhaps you will say this is rather the record of my own experience, than the establishment of any principle; and what is worse, it may indicate a very dull and unsavory process. I do believe in falling in love, spontaneously, ardently, as much as Rose does, but I do not believe in falling into a quagmire. I cannot approve of those marrying who have no points in common. I confess indeed to the power of love in diminishing differences, and uprooting antipathetic tendencies. But should not their general tastes, sentiments, views, feelings, be accordant? Let love set the mill a-going, but how can we expect any good results from cogs that never fit, or from a wheel-band running on the barrel of a watch?—Yet, are we not pythagorean half-souls? Men or women, do we not all need our mates? Do we not float through the world, like loose planets, till we are caught in the attraction of some other orb? I must have Mr. Evelyn, Rose must have Frank, Rhody must have Nimrod, Sybil Hash, Isabel Rufus, you Mr. Greenwood; and so, vice versa. This at least is Rose’s doctrine, and I leave it with her to carry on the discussion.

Marriage is proposed as the cure of love; “Get them husbands betimes,” says my oracle. We find marriage the sustentation and enrichment of love. When did I love Mr. Evelyn more than to-day! That we have diversities is cer-

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tain; but what shall we do with them? Wink them out of sight; agree to disagree; bear with one another in silent, consuming pain? No. Let them be thrown into the common crucible of our affection, and fused together into some tertium quid, some new homogeneous form. We have been married seven years. Twice,—for they say I have an excellent memory, and I cannot very well forget the times,—twice he has distressed me, agonized my heart beyond description; I could have died. I thought—I cannot tell what—it is past now. Only I fancied he did not do me justice—it was a little thing—it was not that I was a woman and he a man, for he has never failed not only to love but even to honor me. It was two souls becoming dark to each other, veiling their faces. We were hidden only a short time; the dew of sadness that was upon our windows became beautiful, and then vanished. Yet when he chided me, he loved me. You look from a well-lighted room through a window when it is pitch dark abroad, and you see your own image out in the darkness. He was dark, but in his soul was my image; he tenderly cherished me, and I had to ask to be forgiven. The Apostle prays that we be perfect in love. In love we go on to perfection, in perfection we go on to love. “Are we not illimitable and immortal only in love?” asks my father of my own dear mother. “God dwelleth in him that dwelleth in love.” He dwells in Mr. Evelyn and me. His Shekinah is our house and our hearts. Our trees and our flowers grow larger and more beautiful every year; so does our love. God is the same forever, he never grows old, he is never common place; nor is our love ever dull, having its roots in the Infinite. To the eyes of love all things are new.

I too am a mother, so is Rose, so are you. Gottfried Brückmann is four years old, Jane Girardeau, two. Rose has the prettiest little blossom you ever beheld; she daily waxes more happy, more strong. How pleasant to multiply the avenues into which the Divinity may pour itself! You used, sometimes to raise questions about miracles. Let us cease wondering, and become wonder-workers. The ways of nature are the true anagogics. Gottfried is brown as a nut, and I see Jeannie rolling on the grass. They are hale and hearty, and do not grow under a board; they eat lustily three times a day, and sleep well o’nights. The root called pie-plant, just before it shoots from the earth in the Spring, is the most beautifully tinted thing you ever beheld. Remove the soil, and there you have disclosed a most exquisite rose flesh color,

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deepening into the purest carmine, and alternating with vermilion and gold. Children that germinate with a plenty of mother earth about them, come out in the fairest hues. Cloth, as Ma used to say, is sometimes killed in coloring; but those are artificial dyes. The tints of nature betoken vigor and heart.

Rhody has a son whom they call Chilion; Isabel a daughter, Margaret height. Rufus has built an elegant marble Italian Villa, on the north eastern brow of Mons Christi. Thus we form an extensive community. I am not afraid of our children becoming contaminated here. Hash and Nimrod are really new men in Christ Jesus. You would hardly believe that they have daily prayers with their households; which is nevertheless the fact. Our Bishop has urged the duty of family religion, and great is the change in this respect, in all parts of the town. I can hardly describe my astonishment, when, the other morning, going into Pa’s, to find that once blasphemous, atheistic old man, soberly reading the Scriptures with Ma, and devoutly praying! But what shall become of our children, in aftertimes, and elsewhere? Livingston seems to us, like Arranmore to the Irish, where, in clear weather, they fancy they can see Paradise. The world is dark and sinful, and how can we adventure our children in it! Pa takes a great liking to the little ones, and they often run over there. The old man is still mercurial; but his pot-valiantry is gone; cold-water is his only fog-breaker; for Anacreontics he sings Christian hymns. He only wishes he had two ears. Ma says Jeannie looks like me. And I was a child once.—The other day I rowed across the Pond, and leaped off into the water where I used to bathe, and chase the sand-pipers. The rocks, the shadows, the vines were there, and I was there, in my little canoe. I forgot the Universe, and my life, and my children, to be a child once more. Presently Mr. Evelyn came, with Gottfried and Jane, and we frolicked in the water together, and were all children as one. How should a child punish a child; I mean, how should I punish my children. Are parents never in the wrong? Are children never in the right? “Nurses should not have pins about them,” said Deacon Ramsdill. Do not parents, by their own pride and ignorance, often prick their children, and then whip them for crying?

“The bones of an infant,” said Dr. Buchan, “are so soft and cartilaginous, that they readily yield to the slightest pressure, and easily assume a bad shape. Hence it is that so many people appear with high shoulders, crooked spines, and

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flat breasts, having had the misfortune to be squeezed out of shape by the application of stays and bandages from their birth.” The world abounds in what Comenius calls Deformed and Monstrous people, in both a physical and moral aspect; all squeezed out of shape in their infancy. Can you fail to understand how men become depraved? “Laissez faire,” says Mr. Evelyn. We would encompass our children by the influences of the Good and the Beautiful, which is all they can, primordially, understand of God. Let their characters have an imperceptible development, like rose buds.

* * *

Mr. Evelyn would make you believe that I have been personally interested in this rejuvenescence of the town; so mote it be. After all it is God’s work, and we are only his subalterns. You are surprised at the result; I am not. There are 2,304,000 pores in the human body; so many avenues, I might say, has God to the heart; and if we will but be co-workers with him, we can find access also. God follows, or I should say, makes nature his mode of entrance and influence; we have but to go in by the same way, and work after the same pattern. Not but that there have been difficulties; but the greatest one, after all, was to find God’s stand-point of Nature. What the people of Livingston needed, I could but see; what they would receive, may, at times, have admitted of some questioning. Their vices were not indeed peculiar, they shared in the common backsliding from God; their cisterns, drained of water, held only sediment, for which they were ready, at any moment, to do battle. I remembered the feeling that prevailed here when I was lost in the woods; how good everybody was, self-sacrificing, and self-forgetful; I remembered my dreams. There were the many things Deacon Ramsdill told me; there was my experience with the children, when I kept the School, where I learned more of the infinite susceptibilities, wants, tendencies of our nature, than could in any other way have been presented to me out of myself; there was what Chilion told me about Music; there was the geode, and the incrusted crystals. Ever too was myself, I could but be sensible of my own wants, and what would do me good. There was the revelation of Christ to me, by Mr. Evelyn. There was the well at No. 4, of which he speaks, clear water, a subterranean Heaven in that greasy, odious place, and along with it Dorothy’s pink, that seemed to me like another little Heaven in the deep degradation of humanity. There was also a strong conviction that the sin which I saw

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in the world was unnatural and self-destructive, that much of the folly of men was preposterous and remediable. So in many ways I was taught the Will of God. I know not that I was ever conscious of any mission to this people; but after our house was done, I could not be satisfied till something else was doing. Our, or my, if you please, first experiment was at No. 4, as he has told you. The effect was almost instantaneous, and quite magnificent; that the Scripture might be fulfilled where it is written, “though they have lain among pots, they shall become as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold.”

I have a fortune indeed; and some would fain make themselves believe that we have opened a battery of systematic bribery, that we have got into the human heart, as Philip did into the Athenian walled-towns, by our gold. You would be surprised to know how little we have bestowed in a mere eleemosynary manner. We gave nothing to the No. 4’s, except what took an ornamental form. Their solid comfort and prosperity is wholly to be attributed to themselves. It was not largesses they needed, but industry, economy, temperance and love. We bought them a barn, when their hay and corn began to increase; but they have since repurchased it. I gave Abiah Tapley a clarionet, and Isaiah Hatch a bugle, that they might join our Band; Dorothy we have educated. In the town at large we have done little for charity; our money indeed has gone freely, but more in ways æsthetic and religious than anything else. It has aided in the erection of a Church, a Cemetery, a Fountain, School-house, remodelling the Jail, planting trees, setting up Statues, etc. etc. To Judah Weeks we made a loan, on an importation of sheep, cows, fruits and seeds, he was bringing from England; but he has repaid it. And, I believe, at this moment, I could receive back principal and interest, all I have laid out. The pecuniary ability of the people has kept pace with their moral excellence. Land has advanced in price, strangers are anxious to come and settle amongst us. The people have expended a good deal, and they have made money. Abstinence from ardent spirits, military duty, needless fashions, lawsuits, have saved the town ten thousand dollars a year; so Judge Morgridge said at our house the other night. Add to this the recovery from idle habits, negligent dispositions and an unproductive uniformity, and you will see our people are able to expend much in other ways.

Waste lands have been redeemed; sundry improvements in

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agricultural and mechanical arts adopted, whereby at once is a saving, and a profit. Education, Literature, Religion, Recreation, Beauty, Music, Art, Morality and General Happiness, are things the people enjoy, and for which they are able to pay. They have laid the foundation for a building to serve a composite purpose, of Library, Museum, Lecture Room, Reading Room, &c. The Natural History of the place some are beginning to develop and illustrate; its insects, birds, fishes, rocks, flowers, weather and sky. Arthur Morgridge and Aurelius Orff spent the whole of last year in examinations of this sort, and their book under the superintendence of Master Elliman will be published, and two hundred copies will be sold in Livingston. Hancock Welles, the Principal of the Grammar School, spends one whole day in the week with his scholars, studying the world about them; I mean the Livingstonian world, of wood, earth and water. Of our extraneous public taxes some of the people complain a little. Mons Christi paid a general tax last year of two thousand dollars. Mr. Evelyn says the State has helped Livingston somewhat, and if Livingston can help the State out of its difficulties, it will be better for all in the end.

Speak of wealth, Anna? Mr. Evelyn says our country expends for military and warlike purposes, in all ways, at the rate of 80,000,000 dollars a-year, for intoxicating drinks, 50,000,000 more, and for vain and hurtful customs enough to carry the tale to 200,000,000! What is this sum could every where be devoted to Christ, Beauty and Happiness; you would cease to wonder at what is done in Livingston.

What time, what labor, what money is laid out in the great world on what is known as Fashion! Vice is ugly, and yet you embrace her; if she were beautiful, that might be an excuse for your conduct. Can anything exhibit a more “hideous mien” than Fashion? The French Milliners are a more dangerous foe to the race than French arms. Madame Laponte threatens a worse evil than Napoleon. She has actually invaded America, and thousands of females have fallen victims to her arts. Your grandmother said I should certainly lose my symmetry if I did not wear a whalebone corset, which she showed me, and one that would have weighed I should think three pounds. Your friend Miss Lees, said I should lose caste if I did not carry my waist up over my shoulder; long waists she said were fast going out of fashion, or worn only by the vulgar. Is it not, after all, only a circular race between Tippee and Twaddle? Tippee is now ahead, Twad-

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dle soon overtakes her, Tippee falls behind; so round and round they go; which leads, or which is beaten, who can tell. Can that be Beauty which lowers your corsage to-day, and raises it to-morrow; which flaunts a furbelow one year and denounces it the next? Your ladies seem to me more jiggered than dressed; they are tasty, but not neat; they struggle for good keeping, but attain no harmony; they are bespangled without ornament, and fashionable without beauty. Mr. Evelyn has a volume with plates illustrative of our ancestral costumes; and I am persuaded that if the Indians had appeared in an attire which has been the glory of Christian belles, it would have been set down as the proper accompaniment of Barbarism, and the Greeks in such dresses would never have advanced beyond the woods of Attica. One department of our Museum, devoted to Antiquities, I recommend to have supplied with garments showing the fashions of our own and other times; as suitable a relic as we can transmit to posterity. The Spartans forbade all colors but purple. If we do not restrict ourselves to that extent, we will at least become more moderate. A robe, a la Grecque, has been introduced into town, is greatly admired, and somewhat worn. But alas for the persons of quality who have wens on their necks! You contrive to hide this deformity by your cardinal-hoods. But what will you do with the next person of quality who has monstrous ankles? The wen must then go bare! Our people have got the good graces of the Quakers! four of whom have come to reside here, with hands full of industry, and purses full of money; and they are interested members of Christ-Church.

We have had the staunchest concurrence, a munificent sympathy, a most effective aid. Names, which if it could be, I should like to have published to the world, are blazoned here on Livingston hills, and storied in Livingston hearts; Judge Morgridge, Deacon Ramsdill, Deacon Bowker and wife, Esq. Weeks, Isabel, Judah and Mabel Weeks, Esq. Beach, William and Julia Beach, Mr. Stillwater, Abiah and Dorothy Tapley, Captain Tuck, Consider Gisborne, the Pottles, the Whistons, Anthony and Ruth Wharfield, the Palmers, Tony Washington, Arthur Morgridge, Mr. Readfield, the new Merchant, Job Luce, Grace Joy and Beulah Ann Orff, Zenas Joy, Captain Hoag, Socrates Hadlock, Hancock Welles, Kester Shield, Philip Davis; and many, many others, whose names are writ in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

How has it been done? I will tell you. Dorothy Tapley, you know, lived with us. She used frequently to be in the room

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when I was playing the piano. She was not long in disclosing a deep musical aptitude. I gave her what little instruction I could, and sent her to your city to be perfected. She is now, as we judge, a singer and player of the first order, and has many pupils in town. Again, one Sunday, there came to our house, in company with many others, a poor, ragged boy from the North Part of the Town. Some of our paintings were shown to him. Again he came, and sat an hour alone, and looked at them. In a few days, he brought us some rude chalk imitations of a Sir Joshua Reynolds. Of course we should assist him. His name is Elam Dater; Julia Beach found him wandering in the streets, took him to Church, and had him come to Mons Christi. He has taken some portraits, but his forte is Landscape and Design. He has furnished us several fine views of Livingston, one of Mons Christi, as seen from the Green, which I mean to send to you. He is now engaged on an original work, the Beatitudes, to be executed on one piece of canvass, having Christ with the green tree-cross, in the centre, and the several groups arranged about him. It is to be purchased by Christ-Church members, and put in the Church. So genius, as well as real-estate, and all good things, rise under the influence of an indomitable, universal Christian Love. “When we love God and love our fellow-men,” says our Bishop, “then and only then is our insight clear, our judgment sound, our strength available, and our resolve steadfast. Hereby alone we attain to virtue, are inspired by Beauty, and moved to Greatness. The Spirit of Christ in a man, does more enlarge the mind, develop the capabilities, animate the will, than all other things. In the new Heavens and the new Earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, Art, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, taking new forms from the divine life of the soul, shall offer to the world unexampled creations, and transcendant grandeur.” This is the secret of what you behold in Livingston, Anna; all contained in a nut-shell.

Music I cherish for its own sake, for my dear brother Chilion’s sake, my dear dead father’s sake, and for Christ’s sake. Some of the Ancients did not encourage music, lest it should weaken the temper of the people. The object of most nations, Mr. Evelyn says, has been to make the citizen subservient to the State. Nor has it been sufficient to enslave his strength, and drain his products, they must also prevent his proper moral growth. Ability to prosecute wars has been the test of a healthy national condition. Individuality of character

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has been construed into rebellion, and simple happiness stigmatized as effeminacy. To live for the State became the chief end of man. We discern a higher end, the glory of God. He made man musical; Music is a Divine gift, and God works in it.—The more I reflect upon Chilion, the more am I impressed with his greatness. His conceptions, as I see them now, were magnificent, and his execution powerful. But he was chaotic and undeveloped. Only at the hour of his death did I understand the feelings of his life. He came out, like the sun, at the close of a cloudy day, glittered, and expired. His music always thrilled me, as I have seen it blow many about, like leaves in the wind. His violin was truly oracular, orphean, superhuman. Through it, I am sure, he would have communicated much of the hidden secrecy of the soul. Reserved in manner, hesitating in speech, his instrument became his confidence, his utterance, his communicable self. An inexplicability took him from us! Soul of Chilion, descend into my soul. If tears were song, I would sing thee over the world; when I have ceased to weep, I only pray there may remain strength enough to sing. Yet like an inapproachable star, his light descends to me from afar. All Livingston has caught something of his spirit. There were many, in whose hearts he silently sank, and upon whom he scattered his wild but divine musical seeds. Without speaking, he originated sensations in many a breast, and without putting forth a hand, his designs have been moulded into the beautiful forms of Art. Many pieces which he played extemporaneously and aboriginally, I remember; Abiah Tapley is able to recall others; so that our Band is in possession, not only of his name, and ideal, but of many of his creations. He very early taught me the use of the violin, and in this way I have been able to retain and distribute more of him than I otherwise should. I did not know how good Chilion’s music was, until I discovered how much poor music there is in the world! His frozen words have thawed, and may be heard all over our Town. Robert Bruce, since in his lifetime he could not go to the Holy Land, at his death ordered his heart to be embalmed and carried thither. Chilion could not come to this our Holy Land, but we have here his embalmed melodies.

Have you not reflected that Christ was a singer? At the Last Supper “they sang a hymn.” Mr. Evelyn says he thinks it could not have been, what some suppose, the Hillel of the Jews. David, he says, could not compose a song for Christ. I think it was an extemporaneous swan-song of Jesus.

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His voice itself, as I have heard it, is pure music. Are not the Beatitudes the highest kind of Poetry. Or I should say, I do not think the highest kind of Inspiration to be Poetry, I mean at least it is not rhyme. In many of Christ’s words are harmony and softness, mellifluence and music. The Gospels seem to me truth melodized. The best parts of the New Testament have never been thrown into a lyric-form; even by those whose profession is scripture versification. Master Elliman has a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins, and I had a lief use it as Watts; notwithstanding the great distance between them. Your Mr. Belknap is better, but he falls sadly below the true Gospel Idea. The Gospel, if it were understood, if with warm hearts, they descended into the depths of its spirit, our Poets, I am certain, could turn into rhyme and beauty. Mr. Evelyn’s volume, prepared for Christ-Church, we like very much.—Nature is musical, and God in Nature; the stars, the brooks; so must all things become, Religion, Life, Society, Intercourse, Labor, Politics, Controversy, Reform; so speaks my sprite. “My Peace I leave with you,” said Jesus. The Peace of Jesus would be the music of the world.

Beauty also has its own end and office, is absolute and divine. Beauty is musical, music is beautiful. God made the trees of the garden of Eden good to look upon, that is, beautiful. Beauty if Truth’s usher, whereby it is introduced to the heart. No Truth is received till it puts on a beautiful aspect. The mind even seems to have the power of exorcising Falsehood, expelling from it the spirit of Ugliness, and transfusing it with that of Beauty. People tell me that they never used to make up their minds to believe Theological errors, until they were first presented in a beautiful form. The Widow Luce says, she was first made to see some beauty in the doctrine of Reprobation, before she assented to it! The old Prophets had ideas of beauty that we have lost sight of. “The Beauty of the Lord our God be upon us,” says David. Then in the New Testament, Christ is called the Beautiful Shepherd; of the woman who anointed him he says, “She hath wrought a Beautiful work on me.” St. Paul says, “Provide things Beautiful in the sight of all men.” This secret sentiment of high moral Beauty, a Beautiful Goodness runs through the Gospels. God is Beautiful, and Christ has ever seemed to me the Beautiful One, beyond all created description or compare. His Beautiful Goodness won my unconscious child’s heart, and when I knew it not, made me its own; and as it were when I was asleep, impressed its image upon me,

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which reappeared when I awoke, and still rises with my higher existence of thought, and shall live with me forever.—The power of Beauty over what is known as the common mind, our house and grounds, our statuary and paintings furnish instances of, every day. “This is a beautiful spot,” people say, when they come to Mons Christi. I remember overhearing old Mr. Shooks, the former Jail-keeper, the flintiest, driest, crossest man I ever saw, make that exclamation; and he really looked pleased when he said it. His heart was touched. Innocent gladness is one of the most beautiful things under the sun; it is the roses and pansies of humanity. Pa’s gay humor, wicked though he was, always impressed me as something beautiful. How shall we account for this effect of Beauty? I know of no better way than that given by my Author. “It gets in at our eyes, pores, nostrils; engenders the same qualities and affections in us as were in the party whence it came. The rays sent from the object carry certain spiritual vapors with them, and so infect the observer. Our spirits are inwardly moved by this subtil influence.” In this connection, Anna, read that what I shall call stupendous passage of St. Paul, where speaking of Christ, he says, “Whom beholding, we are changed into the same image, from glory to glory.” If we only beheld Christ as we should, we should be transformed into his Divinest Beauty; there would be “engendered in us the same qualities and affections as are in him.” Mr. Evelyn says, Christ is not preached as any complete whole, soul and body; not as a full-orbed, deeply capacious personal being; but only as one who, in a certain moment, did something, as one who, at the end of his life, died to execute a certain intention of God. Hence no body is changed into the real image of Christ, but all are casting about to satisfy themselves as to the application of that single executive stroke of his. So many paintings of a merely dead Christ, I do not fancy. That by Giotto, from which it is said most of the famous paintings in Europe are obtained, originated in this way. Giotto hired a man to hang an hour on the cross, and at the expiration of the time, instead of relieving him, stabbed him dead, and then fell to drawing! Are we not more saved by a living, than a dead Christ? Is there nothing in a living Christ for a painter to draw from, and a Christian too?—Beauty, God’s creation, is sinless and pure; and it helps to make us good. In 1529, when the soldiery took Florence, and entered a monastery for purposes of pillage, where was a picture of the Last Supper by Andrea, they were so struck with it, they

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retired without committing any violence. Such is the power of a living Christ, such is the power of simple Beauty!

The matter of Philosophy I shall leave wholly with Mr. Evelyn. I think when we are Philosophers, we shall have Philosophy. Or if, as he says, I am Philosophy, it is because I am myself. Not being what we should be, our speculations are buffoonery. Could we understand the Philosophy of a single moment, or a single atom, we should understand the Philosophy of Infinity. “Who by searching can find out God?” Could I understand God in the structure of a single head of fox-tail grass, I should know more than all theosophists. Let me fall back and work the work of Nature, so shall I work the work of God, and be above all schools. Mr. Evelyn says the Germans will presently surprise the age with the novelty of their views, and the grandeur of their speculations. What avails speculation in this slouched, vagabondish world? Eternity is made up of moments, let me live the present moment well, and I shall live forever well. Immensity is composed of square rods, let me tread well where I now stand, and I shall always have a good foothold. Christ was a true Philosopher, let me be a Christian. Mr. Evelyn says I act philosophically; I am only conscious of acting according to my nature. I confess I am much less uneasy than I used to be; I am quite a convert to the Master, and as he once told me, like a cow I have learned to eat my grass quietly and thankfully, asking no questions. “God,” says Job, “giveth not account of any of his matters.” Be He monotheistic or pantheistic, as some dispute, my duty is one, to live well. God is and I am, God lives and I live, God works and I work, in God I shall be; with this I am satisfied. A Universe of beauty, love, joy and truth are before me, let me press on. So, at least, I feel to-day, and the morrow shall take care for the things of itself.

Another distinct and stringent law of God and Nature is recreation. Of the many kinds that are afloat, we have been obliged to use care in our choice. What would Christ approve, what is best, we ask. In what can all ages and conditions unite? What relaxes without weakening, is cheerful without frivolity, and offers attraction without danger? Not to the exclusion of other things, our election has fallen on the Dance, a species of recreation enjoined in the Old Testament, and recognized in the New; one practised in every age and country, and recommended by the sanction of the best and greatest of men. All these things our people soberly thought of, while I had got my lesson years ago. It has Music and

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Beauty for its garniture and strength. Its intrinsic value has won for it the approval of all. We sometimes dance on the Green, sometimes in our Hall. It is enjoyed in all families. Parents dance with their children, husbands with wives. It has supplanted many ridiculous games, and extirpated cruel sports. It has broken up drunken carousals, and neutralized the temptation to ardent spirits. Having once entered upon it, we become straightway sensible of its advantages. Whatever grace is needed in person, or courtesy in manners, it operates to perfect. And surely, as my authority observes, “it is pleasant to see those pretty knots and swimming figures.” It brings the people together, interests strangers, and diffuses a serene, whole-souled harmony over the town. It has no boisterousness and much life. It embodies the recreative element in the healthiest and holiest forms. Where all unite, there is no excess. We praise God in the dances; it is a hymn written with our feet. I would dance as I would pray, for its own sake, and because it is well-pleasing to God. Fenelon, when one of his curates complained to him that his parishioners would dance after their religious services, replied, “Let us leave those poor people to dance; their hours of happiness are not too numerous.” This was kind of the good Fenelon, but it indicates a bad state of society, that wherein the greater part of life is a drudgery. We are happy when we work, when we pray, as well as when we dance.

We are great politicians, so at least President Jefferson said. I will tell you. We were visited successively by both the Presidents, Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Adams’ forte, Mr. Evelyn says, is the science of government, on which topic he has written a book. Of course he and Mr. Evelyn fell to talking politics. Said he, “I have perused the history of every monarchy and republic, the records of which have descended to our times. Salonina, the most virtuous and distinguished empress that ever adorned a Roman throne, promised the philosopher Plotinus, that she would rebuild a decayed city of Campania, and appoint him over it, that he might experimentally know, while presiding over a colony of philosophers, the validity and use of the ideal laws of the republic of Plato. The history of that republic I have never seen, until by the hospitality which has invited me to your house, and the attention which has taken me over your town, I seem to be all at once transported into the bosom of it!” President Jefferson has the reputation of being less of a theorist, and more acquainted with men as they are. Said he, “You are

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the very best politicians in the land; I wish the country was full of such. You have freedom, competency, virtue. I had rather be Mrs. Evelyn than William Pitt. Don’t you blench though all danger menaces you. The Government shall not molest you; the nation is honored by having within its borders the town of Livingston!”

“Courage!” said Diogenes to a young man whom he saw blushing. “That is the color of virtue.” One needed courage to face this battery of applause. Epaminondas, the day after his victory at Leuctra, came abroad in squalid attire, and with an abject look, giving as a reason that he was overmuch joyed the day before. I do not understand that we need to put on sackcloth and ashes because men are pleased with God’s doings, nor behave like a certain artist, somewhat whimsical he was, who, when one praised a statue he was making, smote it with his hammer and dashed it in pieces. I recollect, when I was keeping school, at Esq. Beach’s one evening, hearing a warm discussion, a sort of grave snip-snap, about Napoleon’s return from Egypt, Russia seceding from the Coalition, Tom Jefferson becoming President, and what not. There were Esq. Beach on one side, Esq. Weeks on the other, and Esq. Bowker a sort of third party man. Indeed, you would have thought a new geological cataclysm was at hand, and that we were about to be submerged in some diplomatic ocean, or swallowed by some Megalosaurian man. These men are all on one side now, that of Christ and Love. Our people have lost all fear of England or France, and Mr. Jefferson has at heart, I think, some of the noblest purposes that ever filled a human breast. If the great Suwarrow comes amongst us and behaves himself, he shall be welcome; but if he goes to playing his pranks, we shall have to open our meal-bags upon him. These Megalosaurian Men, O Anna! But in the New Earth now in process of creation, we shall dig for their remains, as we do for other fossils, and wonder, not how they got in there, but how they could have subsisted. We do not lean on an arm of flesh whereby we are cursed, but on that of God; and what saith the Prophet? “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord; he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green.” “Who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good?” is the question of Christianity. “Fear not, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” are the words of Christ. What Atheistic, Anti-Chris-

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tian fear pervades Church and State! How much men pay, and do, to demonstrate their infidelity!

I am writing a long, long letter. Like Elihu, the son of Barachel, the Buzite, I could have “answered and said, I am young, and ye are very old, wherefore I was afraid and durst not show you mine opinion. But great men are not always wise. Therefore I said, Hearken to me. I am full of matter. I am ready to burst like new bottles. I will speak that I may be refreshed.” I am sensible, Anna, that I have not told you everything that your interest relates to, and Mr[.] Evelyn urges me on to give you my views and notions.

there are individual histories in town, each in itself sufficient to make a book. We read accounts of conversions; I could recite you some here, equal to any you ever heard of. When the Lives of our Saints, and the Exploits of our Champions shall be published, it will make a volume superior to any that has issued from the press this some time. I wish you could hear what is rehearsed at our house every week of battles won on the field of Evil, of temptations endured from the world; the poor becoming rich in grace; the besotted finding their way up to virtue; the fearful overcoming their dread; the persecuted blessing their enemies; the proud humbling themselves, and such things. There is a long story to Elam Dater; there is Miss Arunah Shooks encountering inward foes, such as might have intimated St. George himself; there are the trials of Hiram Ravel, in the North Part of the Town, that would embellish a Book of Martyrs; there is the conviction and conversion of John Weeks, reminding you of George Fox; there are Isabel, Dorothy, Triandaphelda Ada Hadlock, Sylvina Pottle, and others, whose biographies ought to be written. But I leave them for the present.

We are a united but not an identical population, Mr. Evelyn wishes me to tell you. Striped grass, planted with other grass, becomes of one color, an uniform green. For one, I wish to see no such loss of individuality, and absorption in the aggregate. Let each spear retain its own lines, each man his own qualities, and why as Deacon Ramsdill says, can they not all live happily and perfectly together in the same field, the same town? I do not wish the people all to do as we do, only I do wish to see them Beautiful, True, Happy, Christian. The town is eight miles long by six broad; it contains two hundred farms, three stores, two taverns, one Church, six school-houses, three or four joiners’ shops, a tannery, fulling-mill, grist-mill, blacksmith shops, &c., no

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distillery, no jail. A right spirit prevails with the major part of the inhabitants; that is our identity. Each one eats his own meals, maintains his own family, follows his own calling, thinks his own thoughts, dies his own death; in this are we separated. Unity in variety is a good motto. There are many common interests, our Church, our Festivals, Roads, Cemetery, Dances, Library, Schools, Music, Art, Love, Christ, Nature, God. The inhabitants of ancient Cuma, were reputed stupid by their neighbors. But it was found they owed this character to their virtues. We are indifferent to some things that engage and distract the world. But there is life, spirit, and enterprise among the people. Sour rivalries, envious association, jostling activities, are not. To perfect ourselves, our institutions, our Town, is a life-work. If there arises a dispute, there are trusty people enough to whom we are glad to refer the matter. Nor can one take advantage of our confidence. The spirit of Christ is lynx-eyed; or as our Bishop says, it penetrates the secret things of darkness, unmasks the hypocrite, and reads the heart of the designing. “If we should all become good,” you said, “there would nothing remain whereby to keep philanthropy and benevolence alive.” Love, like jealousy, grows with that it feeds on; thrives on itself. Like plants, the fruits of the Spirit mature best in a soil where the elements are analogous. Virtue grows on God, as the misletoe [sic] on oaks. Does God ever decay?

Of myself need I say anything more, or of my connection with these things? Can a bee tell how it builds its comb? Other people might give you a more satisfactory account, but to me it seems to have grown up as corn grows. Judge Morgridge is about publishing a little history of our affairs, which I recommend to your friends. The leaves of the five-finger draw together to shelter the flower when it rains, and open when the sun comes out. So have I done to my plans; can I tell how? The Widow Wright taught me utility; “Not looks, it’s use, child,” was her maxim. The hang-bird taught me Caution. Mother Goose’s Melodies taught me not to cry when I could not help a thing. But more than this, if we could but see it, there is a waiting for Goodness and Truth in all souls. “In every bone there is marrow, and beneath every jacket lives a man,” saith the Arab proverb. Then through the world wanders the spirit of Love, though she be no more than the chipping bird that builds a nest in the rose-bush, or a butterfly that shimmers over a dirty pool. Did I have dreams which others enjoyed not? Were they mature and finished

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even beyond my experience? In this also is not the Scripture fulfilled; “In a dream he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction.” Did Christ himself come very near to me and speak with me? As the disciples after Christ’s death understood many sayings of their Master, which were hidden before, so have I in later years come to understand the deep meaning of Christ to me. I must live his childhood’s life; i must grow up in his image; “his life must be made manifest in my mortal body,” as St. Paul has it. When I came to compare the inward Christ of my soul with the historical Christ, whom Mr. Evelyn made known to me, they flowed together, and mingled in one.

I had dreams of Beauty and Art, a Classical Magician waved over me his wand. Could I see the chain that binds together, Christianity, Æsthetics, Heroism! But in me they are one, in the world they are at odds. I could not rest till these things went forth in forms and life. In purity and love have we genius; the Gospel gives beauty to the eye, and holiness to the soul. Our Cross, not like Constantine’s which he bore at the head of his armies, blossoms as the rose, and heals up the ravages of war. Our Oriflamme of silver whiteness, is such as the Apostle John might have unfurled when he started on his mission of love. I am dealing with great subjects, quite beyond my depths. I admire old Atlas, but I have neither his thews nor his good nature, I cannot bear up the world. I remember when Hash was driving a cart up a hill, I used to trig the wheels, that is, put under a stone. If any Demiurgic Teamster is disposed to drive the Cart of Peace and Good Will over the Earth, I stand ready to trig the wheels; beyond this I cannot do. My hand aches with writing, as your eyes must with reading. Wait till I come back, Rose is at the door on horseback, we are going to take a ride.

* * *

We went full four miles to the North Part, and carried some supplies to a poor sick family there. How beautiful is our town! No European village that I have heard of, no American village that I have seen, is so beautiful. Here are views that would, I will engage, match you with Greenwich Tower, or St. Mark’s Steeple in Venice. The Green with its majestic rim of elms, thanks to our forefathers, and its central star, the Fountain; the Cemetery with its white monuments under the green trees; the River beyond the Village, the fine houses on Grove Street; Aunt Wiswall’s, whose house and ornamental grounds cover the burnt forest, Col. Welch’s, Mons

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Christi, our house, Rufus’ tasteful seat, above all, the Cross. That Cross, seen at sunset among the gorgeous clouds, is superb. Rose, who used to be afraid of thunder-storms, says she looks to that and grows quiet. In all the streets, and many of the bye-ways are ornamental trees, elms, maples, tulip-trees, horse-chesnuts, spruces, larches; the houses of the town are painted white, grey, cream-color, some red. You meet such happy, loving faces, merry groups of children; the old people seem so warm-hearted and benevolent; the young men and women are easy and polite. Esqs. Beach and Bowker we saw; they had been arbitrating on a case. This is now their principal business, and they get ample pay for it. Even people come in from other towns and great distances to employ them. They say they can trust Livingston lawyers! Mr. Adolphus Hadlock also we saw. He has twice sold out, and moved from town, and twice returned. No poor man was ever so frightened. But the conversion of his Triandaphelda Ada, and the marriage of his son Socrates to Dorothy, seem to have reconciled him; and he walks the streets now more like a man than that “Aunt Dolphy.” The Jail is tenanted by a man with his family, who was originally confined for murder; he was converted through the instrumentality of our Bishop, pardoned by the Governor, and now keeps an agricultural seed and implement store; but is engaged to yield his rooms whenever there is any convict to occupy them. Old Alexis Robinson, who became wholly insane, and was confined in the old Jail, has recovered his senses, and is supported handsomely by the town, and has a room in the new prison, dwelling-house, or whatever it be. Master Elliman has dubbed Livingston L. L., Laudabilis Locus.

Holy and delightsome is the Earth! God saw that every thing he had made was very good. I bless God for the dandelions that bestar the green grass; I bless him for the song-sparrow that sings out against my window; I bless him for the little Jane Girardeau that is here playing with the kitten. What an ecstasy were the golden fires kindled as the Sun went down last night, and the polished silver dawn I saw at four o’clock this morning, set with the Mohammedan’s sign of worship, the crescent Moon. The Spring, the Summer, the Autumn, the Winter, do feast and ravish me. Not that anagogical Hebrew Oil, compounded of stacte, onycha, galbanum, had so sweet a perfume as that with which I am daily anointed, and which maketh my face to shine in innumerable flowers, that fill the woods and ways all the season through. The best prayer I can

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offer is to use all things well; my highest gratitude enjoyment. Sin, I cannot. All things are incense to me,—the woods, the brooks, the birds, the fogs, the dew, the clouds, the sky; I will be incense to God; like my dear Redeemer, a sweet smelling savor. Into me the Universe flows, from me it returns back to its Maker. If I cannot tell the cause of the flux and reflux, like Aristotle on the banks of the Euripus, I will not get angry, and die.

How singularly are we situated; on one side you approach Mons Christi, by the Delectable Way, on another, by the Via Salutaris; from the east, by the Via Dolorosa; across the place runs the Brook Kedron! Names taken up in stark caprice, have become animated with the deepest significance. Our Bishop had told the people there was a street in Jerusalem called the Via Dolorosa, through which Christ is said to have borne his Cross to Calvary. One Sunday Miss Arunah Shooks, deeply impressed with a sense of her sinfulness, as she said, in having so often offended Christ and broken the laws of the Gospel, came up that way, alone; she said she wanted to bear her cross to Mons Christi. And what do you think that cross was? This, she said, that she treated me so rudely when I went to see Chilion in the Jail, and she wanted to come and ask my forgiveness. She said she had long struggled with her convictions, but after the confession, she felt a load drop off.—Livingston itself—a name derived from a respectable American family—the Living Stone, disallowed, it may be, of men, but chosen of God and precious; the Stone cut out of a mountain without hands—may it at least become a Mountain great enough to fill its own place in the Earth!

I did not tell you that my old friend Ben Bolter is here. One of his legs was shot off by the Tripolitans; he has made a full-rigged miniature schooner for Gottfried, and they sail together on the Pond. My boy may become a sailor after all. Ben Bolter exhibits gratifying tokens of a renewed mind.

In the North part of the town, on the very spot where the Gallows stood and Chilion was hung, has been erected a monumental piece representing Moses kneeling to Christ and surrendering the Book of the Hebrew Code; Christ appears as it were closing the Book with his foot—the action being partially veiled by drapery. It is exquisitely done; Art is satisfied, Justice acquiesces, Humanity triumphs.

We have a library indeed, but how few good books! Is it a dream; or has some one said it, or will some one say it, or is it my sprite that says—“America has not fulfilled the rea-

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sonable expectations of mankind. Men looked, when all feudal straps and bandages were stripped asunder, that Nature, too long the mother of dwarfs, would reimburse herself in a brood of Titans, who should laugh and leap in the continent, and run up the mountains of the West with the errand of genius and love.” A very facetious sprite is that, whoever he be. He reminds me of a certain Talmudic God, that spent his time whittling sharp sticks, wherewith he was wont at his leisure to prick the sides of mortals and enjoy their grimaces. “We have a thousand authors of all sorts,” says Father Burton two hundred years ago. But in truth I have found little to entertain me more than “The Loves of Osmund and Duraxa,” I saw in Boston some years since. So I must “conclude myself a mere block that is affected by none of them,” according to the writer aforesaid. As soon as Napoleon finds his quietus, I hope the world will take breath again, and somebody be moved to write a good book here in America.

We have had our crosses frequent and severe; individual and corporate, personal and social. The last the Town was called to endure, fell out in this wise. The following appeared in the Kidderminster Chronicle.

“Livingston.—We have long kept silence about the movements in this place; but the matter has become too public to excuse any farther negligence. Over the Red Dragon of Infidelity they have drawn the skin of the Papal Beast, and tricked the Monster with the trappings of Harlotry! On the ruins of one of our Churches they have erected a Temple to Human pride and Carnal Reasoning. The contamination is spreading far and wide; and unless something be attempted, the Kingdom of God in our midst must soon be surrendered to the arts of Satan. It is understood that the Rev. Mr. L—, of B—, has openly and repeatedly exchanged pulpits with the man, who having denied his Lord and Master, they have had the hardihood to invest with the robes of the Christian Office. Brethren shall we sleep, while the enemy is sowing tares in our midst?

Clericus.”

A convention of Clergy was soon called at Kidderminster, before which the Rev. Mr. Lovers of Brandon, the gentleman alluded to, was summoned. He had made three or four exchanges with Frank. His prosecutor was the Rev. Mr. Orstead, of Windenboro, who wrote the notice for the paper. The trial went on two or three days. The council was divided on the question of withdrawing fellowship from Mr. Lovers, suspending, or deposing him. But their meeting was brought

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to a conclusion in an unforeseen way. While they were debating what to do, an accuser appeared against Mr. Orstead in the person of an unmarried female, who charged upon him a child she had recently borne. His guilt was so far proved, that he confessed it. Mr. Lovers was saved, and Mr. Orstead degraded. The unhappy man, despised at home, Frank went to see, invited him to Livingston, where he has spent some months; and I hope has become a better man.

During the excitement this affair gave our people, Dr. Freeman came to see us, and renew those condolences and sympathies he has so often expressed for us. While at our house, he told me this story. When the Dutch in Albany, some years since, would renew and enlarge their Church, they suffered the old one to remain, and erected the new one about it, completely enclosing it. Their worship continued in the old place till the new house was nearly done. They then tore the old Church to pieces, and carried the fragments out of the door of the new one, into the finishing of which they entered. “Great reforms,” continued the Doctor, “must be gradual. It is easier to tear down than to build up; easier to remove an error than supply a truth. Rome was not built in a day. There are more Alarics than Romuluses in the world.” This was a good story, and you have it for what it is worth. “But I see,” said the Doctor, “you have built up far more than you ever pulled down.” I replied that we had not sought to pull down anything, but rather to put life into what was dead, and reinstate Christ in his own Church. He agreed that it was so.

As regards those who oppose us, could we, as did Nicholas Sture, that Swede, who when he was stabbed by his Sovereign, drew out the sword, kissed it, and returned it, could we so meet all attacks, happy were we. “Tell me how I may be revenged on my enemy?” said some one to Diogenes. “By becoming more virtuous,” replied the philosopher. We are charged with Infidelity! Will unkindness, traducement, insinuation, bleardness, never cease? Anaxagoras, the most religious of Philosophers, was persecuted for profanity; Socrates was condemned for an heretic; Christ himself was executed as a blasphemer, impostor and insurgent! When Pyrrho, who professed indifference to all evils, was reproached for driving off a dog that flew at him, “Ah,” replied he, “it is difficult to bear everything!” So indeed it is; but as he added, “We must try.” The Athenians constructed a Statue from the marble which the Persians brought to raise as a monu-

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ment to their victories. We will make no ovation out of this signal defeat of our enemies; I feel disposed the rather to weep over human follies.

What will become of us? If we trust in God, we have his promise, that the waters shall not overflow us, or the fire burn us. We abide under the shadow of his wing. That a great work has been done here none can deny. It is said that certain fish, when brought to the surface of the water, sometimes burst from the rarefaction of the air. Livingston has been raised from a lowest depth. Yet it seems to me so compact in all its proportions, that it cannot fall asunder. The world may wholly leave us; but the thrush sings sweetest in the loneliest woods, and we will keep up our song in solitude. The Spartans were forbidden to pursue a flying foe; we shall not follow our retreating enemies, with any intent to kill; nor shall we turn our backs upon them if they rally again.

Orpheus has seemed to me a natural prophecy of Christ; a part of the groaning of the creation after the Redemption. By the sweetness of his music he drew the wild beasts after him; he caused trees and rocks to move; his strains subdued the rulers of Hell; through the charms of his melody the wheel of Ixion stopped, and even the Furies relented. His music was at last drowned by a hoarse discordant horn. He was himself, too, torn in pieces, and the river Helicon, sacred to him, hid itself under ground. Our Pond I used to call the Lake of Orpheus, at the Master’s suggestion, that here those waters had risen. I have since called it the Lake of Christ. Such Orphean music was he. He drew after him a whole age. He stilled the fury of man, and the malice of devils. Some hoarse discordant horn was raised in the Church; his music was quenched; he was torn in pieces; his waters, hid under the Earth, as I would fain fancy, have appeared on Mons Christi! Whither now shall the Christian Helicon flow?

THE END.