p467-016 CHAPTER I. THE AUTHOR DEFINES HIS POSITION.

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IT appears to me that the world is returning to its
second childhood, and running mad for Stories.
Stories! Stories! Stories! everywhere; stories in
every paper, in every crevice, crack and corner of the house.
Stories fall from the pen faster than leaves of autumn, and
of as many shades and colorings. Stories blow over here
in whirlwinds from England. Stories are translated from
the French, from the Danish, from the Swedish, from the
German, from the Russian. There are serial stories for
adults in the Atlantic, in the Overland, in the Galaxy, in
Harper's, in Scribner's. There are serial stories for youthful
pilgrims in Our Young Folks, the Little Corporal, “Oliver
Optic,” the Youth's Companion, and very soon we anticipate
newspapers with serial stories for the nursery. We shall have
those charmingly illustrated magazines, the Cradle, the Rocking
Chair, the First Rattle, and the First Tooth, with successive
chapters of “Goosy Goosy Gander,” and “Hickory
Dickory Dock,” and “Old Mother Hubbard,” extending
through twelve, or twenty-four, or forty-eight numbers.

I have often questioned what Solomon would have said if
he had lived in our day. The poor man, it appears, was
somewhat blasé with the abundance of literature in his times,
and remarked that much study was weariness to the flesh.
Then, printing was not invented, and “books” were all
copied by hand, in those very square Hebrew letters where
each letter is about as careful a bit of work as a grave-stone.
And yet, even with all these restrictions and circumscriptions,
Solomon rather testily remarked, “Of making many

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books there is no end!” What would he have said had he
looked over a modern publisher's catalogue?

It is understood now that no paper is complete without its
serial story, and the spinning of these stories keeps thousands
of wheels and spindles in motion. It is now understood
that whoever wishes to gain the public ear, and to
propound a new theory, must do it in a serial story. Hath
any one in our day, as in St. Paul's, a psalm, a doctrine, a
tongue, a revelation, an interpretation—forthwith he wraps
it up in a serial story, and presents it to the public. We
have prison discipline, free-trade, labor and capital, woman's
rights, the temperance question, in serial stories. We have
Romanism and Protestantism, High Church, and Low Church
and no Church, contending with each other in serial stories,
where each side converts the other, according to the faith of
the narrator.

We see that this thing is to go on. Soon it will be necessary
that every leading clergyman should embody in his
theology a serial story, to be delivered from the pulpit Sunday
after Sunday. We look forward to announcements in
our city papers such as these: The Rev. Dr. Ignatius, of the
Church of St. Mary the Virgin, will begin a serial romance,
to be entitled “St. Sebastian and the Arrows,” in which he
will embody the duties, the trials, and the temptations of
the young Christians of our day. The Rev. Dr. Boanerges,
of Plymouth Rock Church, will begin a serial story, entitled
“Calvin's Daughter,” in which he will discuss the distinctive
features of Protestant theology. The Rev. Dr. Cool Shadow
will go on with his interesting romance of “Christianity a
Dissolving View,”—designed to show how everything is, in
many respects, like everything else, and all things lead
somewhere, and everything will finally end somehow, and
that therefore it is important that everybody should cultivate
general sweetness, and have the very best time possible
in this world.

By the time all these romances get to going, the system of
teaching by parables, and opening one's mouth in dark
sayings, will be fully elaborated. Pilgrim's Progress

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will be no where. The way to the celestial city will be as
plain in everybody's mind as the way up Broadway—and so
much more interesting! Finally all science and all art will
be explained, conducted, and directed by serial stories, till
the present life and the life to come shall form only one
grand romance. This will be about the time of the Millennium.

Meanwhile, I have been furnishing a story for the Christian
Union, and I chose the subject which is in everybody's
mind and mouth, discussed on every platform, ringing from
everybody's tongue, and coming home to every man's business
and bosom to wit:

My Wife and I.

I trust that Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, and all the
prophetesses of our day, will remark the humility and propriety
of my title. It is not I and My Wife—oh no! It is
My Wife and I. What am I, and what is my father's house,
that I should go before my wife in anything?

“But why specially for the Christian Union?” says Mr.
Chandband. Let us in a spirit of Love inquire.

Is it not evident why, O beloved? Is not that firm in human
nature which stands under the title of My Wife and I,
the oldest and most venerable form of Christian union on
record? Where, I ask, will you find a better one?—a wiser,
a stronger, a sweeter, a more universally popular and agreeable
one?

To be sure, there have been times and seasons when this
ancient and respectable firm has been attacked as a piece of
old fogyism, and various substitutes for it proposed. It
has been said that “My Wife and I” denoted a selfish,
close corporation inconsistent with a general, all-sided diffusive,
universal benevolence; that My Wife and I, in a
millennial community, had no particular rights in each other
more than any of the thousands of the brethren and sisters
of the human race. They have said, too, that My Wife
and I, instead of an indissoluble unity, were only temporary

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partners, engaged on time, with the liberty of giving three
months' notice, and starting off to a new firm.

It is not thus that we understand the matter.

My Wife and I, as we understand it, is the sign and symbol
of more than any earthly partnership or union—of
something sacred as religion, indissoluble as the soul, endless
as eternity-the symbol chosen by Almighty Love to
represent his redeeming, eternal union with the soul of man.

A fountain of eternal youth gushes near the hearth of
every household. Each man and woman that have loved
truly, have had their romance in life—their poetry in existence.

So I, in giving my history, disclaim all other sources of
interest. Look not for trap-doors, or haunted houses, or
deadly conspiracies, or murders, or concealed crimes, in this
history, for you will not find one. You shall have simply
and only the old story—old as the first chapter of Genesis—
of Adam stupid, desolate, and lonely without Eve, and how
he sought and how he found her.

This much, on mature consideration I hold to be about
the sum and substance of all the romances that have ever
been written, and so long as there are new Adams and new
Eves in each coming generation, it will not want for sympathetic
listeners.

So I, Harry Henderson—a plain Yankee boy from the
mountains of New Hampshire, and at present citizen of
New York—commence my story.

My experiences have three stages.

First, My child-wife, or the experiences of childhood.

Second My shadow-wife, or the dreamland of the future.

Third, my real wife, where I saw her, how I sought and
found her.

In pursuing a story simply and mainly of love and marriage,
I am reminded of the saying of a respectable serving
man of European experiences, who speaking of his position
in a noble family said it was not so much the wages that
made it an object as “the things it enabled a gentleman to

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pick up.” So in our modern days as we have been observing,
it is not so much the story, as the things it gives the
author a chance to say. The history of a young American
man's progress toward matrimony, of course brings him
among the most stirring and exciting topics of the day,
where all that relates to the joint interests of man and
woman has been thrown into the arena as an open question,
and in relating our own experiences, we shall take occasion
to keep up with the spirit of this discussing age in all these
matters.

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p467-022 CHAPTER II. MY CHILD-WIFE.

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THE Bible says it is not good for man to be alone.
This is a truth that has been borne in on my
mind, with peculiar force, from the earliest of my
recollection. In fact when I was only seven years old I
had selected my wife, and asked the paternal consent.

You see, I was an unusually lonesome little fellow, because
I belonged to the number of those unlucky waifs who come
into this mortal life under circumstances when nobody wants
or expects them. My father was a poor country minister in
the mountains of New Hampshire with a salary of six hundred
dollars, with nine children. I was the tenth. I was
not expected; my immediate predecessor was five years of
age, and the gossips of the neighborhood had already presented
congratulations to my mother on having “done up
her work in the forenoon,” and being ready to sit down to
afternoon leisure.

Her well-worn baby clothes were all given away, the cradle
was peaceably consigned to the garret, and my mother was
now regarded as without excuse if she did not preside at the
weekly prayer-meeting, the monthly Maternal Association,
and the Missionary meeting, and perform besides regular
pastoral visitations among the good wives of her parish.

No one, of course, ever thought of voting her any little
extra salary on account of these public duties which absorbed
so much time and attention from her perplexing
domestic cares—rendered still more severe and onerous by
my father's limited salary. My father's six hundred dollars,
however, was considered by the farmers of the vicinity as
being a princely income, which accounted satisfactorily for
everything, and had he not been considered by them as
“about the smartest man in the State,” they could not have

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gone up to such a figure. My mother was one of those gentle,
soft-spoken, quiet little women who, like oil, permeate
every crack and joint of life with smoothness.

With a noiseless step, an almost shadowy movement, her
hand and eye were every where. Her house was a miracle
of neatness and order—her children of all ages and sizes
under her perfect control, and the accumulations of labor of
all descriptions which beset a great family where there are
no servants, all melted away under her hands as if by enchantment.

She had a divine magic too, that mother of mine; if it be
magic to commune daily with the supernatural. She had
a little room all her own, where on a stand always lay
open the great family Bible, and when work pressed hard
and children were untoward, when sickness threatened,
when the skeins of life were all crossways and tangled, she
went quietly to that room, and kneeling over that Bible,
took hold of a warm, healing, invisible hand, that made the
crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

“Poor Mrs. Henderson—another boy!” said the gossips on
the day that I was born. “What a shame! poor woman.
Well, I wish her joy!”

But she took me to a warm bosom and bade God bless
me! All that God sent to her was treasure. “Who
knows,” she said cheerily to my father, “this may be our
brightest.”

“God bless him,” said my father, kissing me and my
mother, and then he returned to an important treatise which
was to reconcile the decrees of God with the free agency of
man, and which the event of my entrance into this world
had interrupted for some hours. The sermon was a perfect
success I am told, and nobody that heard it ever had a moment's
further trouble on that subject.

As to me, my outfit for this world was of the scantest—a
few yellow flannel petticoats and a few slips run up from
some of my older sisters cast off white gowns, were deemed
sufficient.

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The first child in a family is its poem—it is a sort of
nativity play, and we bend before the young stranger, with
gifts, “gold, frankincense and myrrh.” But the tenth child
in a poor family is prose, and gets simply what is due to
comfort. There are no superfluities, no fripperies, no idealities
about the tenth cradle.

As I grew up I found myself rather a solitary little fellow
in a great house, full of the bustle and noise and conflicting
claims of older brothers and sisters, who had got the floor in
the stage of life before me, and who were too busy with
their own wants, schemes and plans, to regard me.

I was all very well so long as I kept within the limits of
babyhood. They said I was the handsomest baby ever pertaining
to the family establishment, and as long as that
quality and condition lasted I was made a pet of. My sisters
curled my golden locks and made me wonderful little frocks,
and took me about to show me. But when I grew bigger,
and the golden locks were sheared off and replaced by
straight light hair, and I was inducted into jacket and
pantaloons, cut down by Miss Abia Ferkin from my next
brother's last year's suit, outgrown—then I was turned upon
the world to shift for myself. Babyhood was over, and manhood
not begun—I was to run the gauntlet of boyhood.

My brothers and sisters were affectionate enough in their
way, but had not the least sentiment, and as I said before
they had each one their own concerns to look after. My
eldest brother was in college, my next brother was fitting
for college in a neighboring academy, and used to walk ten
miles daily to his lessons and take his dinner with him. One
of my older sisters was married, the two next were handsome
lively girls, with a retinue of beaux, who of course took
up a deal of their time and thoughts. The sister next before
me was four years above me on the lists of life, and of course
looked down on me as a little boy unworthy of her society.
When her two or three chattering girl friends came to see
her and they had their dolls and their baby houses to manage,
I was always in the way. They laughed at my

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awkwardness, criticised my nose, my hair, and my ears to my
face, with that feminine freedom by which the gentler sex
joy to put down the stronger one when they have it at advantage.
I used often to retire from their society swelling
with impotent wrath, at their free comments. “I won't play
with you,” I would exclaim. “Nobody wants you,” would
be the rejoinder. “We've been wanting to be rid of you this
good while.”

But as I was a stout little fellow, my elders thought it advisable
to devolve on me any such tasks and errands as
interfered with their comfort. I was sent to the store when
the wind howled and the frost bit, and my brothers and sisters
preferred a warm corner. “He's only a boy, he can go,
or he can do or he can wait,” was always the award of my
sisters.

My individual pursuits, and my own little stock of interests,
were of course of no account. I was required to be in
a perfectly free, disengaged state of mind, and ready to drop
every thing at a moment's warning from any of my half
dozen seniors. “Here Hal, run down cellar and get me a
dozen apples,” my brother would say, just as I had half built
a block house. Harry, run up stairs and get the book I left
on the bed—Harry, run out to the barn and get the rake I
left there—Here, Harry, carry this up garret—Harry, run out
to the took shop and get that”—were sounds constantly occurring—
breaking up my private cherished little enterprises
of building cob-houses, making mill dams and bridges, or
loading carriages, or driving horses. Where is the mature
Christian who could bear with patience the interruptions and
crosses in his daily schemes, that beset a boy?

Then there were for me dire mortifications and bitter disappointments.
If any company came and the family board
was filled and the cake and preserves brought out, and gay
conversation made my heart bound with special longings to
be in at the fun, I heard them say, “No need to set a plate
for Harry—he can just as well wait till after.” I can recollect
many a serious deprivation of mature life, that did not

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bring such bitterness of soul as that sentence of exclusion.
Then when my sister's admirer, Sam Richards, was expected,
and the best parlor fire lighted, and the hearth swept, how
I longed to sit up and hear his funny stories, how I hid in
dark corners, and lay off in shadowy places, hoping to escape
notice and so avoid the activity of the domestic police. But
no, “Mamma, mustn't Harry go to bed?” was the busy outcry
of my sisters, desirous to have the deck cleared for
action, and superfluous members finally disposed of.

Take it for all in all—I felt myself, though not wanting in
the supply of any physical necessity, to be somehow, as I
said, a very lonesome little fellow in the world. In all that
busy, lively, gay, bustling household I had no mate.

“I think we must send Harry to school,” said my mother,
gently, to my father, when I had vented this complaint in
her maternal bosom. “Poor little fellow, he is an odd one!—
there isn't exactly any one in the house for him to mate
with!”

So to school I was sent, with a clean checked apron,
drawn up tight in my neck, and a dinner basket, and a
brown towel on which I was to be instructed in the wholesome
practice of sewing. I went, trembling and blushing,
with many an apprehension of the big boys who had promised
to thrash me when I came; but the very first day I was
made blessed in the vision of my little child-wife, Susie
Morril.

Such a pretty, neat little figure as she was! I saw her first
standing in the school-room door. Her cheeks and neck
were like wax; her eyes clear blue; and when she smiled,
two little dimples flitted in and out on her cheeks, like those
in a sunny brook. She was dressed in a pink gingham
frock, with a clean white apron fitted trimly about her little
round neck. She was her mother's only child, and always
daintily dressed.

“Oh, Susie dear,” said my mother, who had me by the
hand, “I've brought a little boy here to school, and will be
a mate for you.”

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How affably and graciously she received me—the little
Eve—all smiles and obligingness and encouragement for the
lumpish, awkward Adam. How she made me sit down on a
seat by her, and put her little white arm cosily over my
neck, as she laid the spelling-book on her knee, saying—“I
read in Baker. Where do you read?”

Friend, it was Webster's Spelling-book that was their
text-book, and many of you will remember where “Baker”
is in that literary career. The column of words thus headed
was a mile-stone on the path of infant progress. But my
mother had been a diligent instructress at home, and I an
apt scholar, and my breast swelled as I told little Susie
that I had gone beyond Baker. I saw “respect mingling
with surprise” in her great violet eyes; my soul was enlarged—
my little frame dilated, as turning over to the picture of
the “old man who found a rude boy on one of his trees
stealing apples,” I answered her that I had read there!

“Why-ee!” said the little maiden; “only think, girls—he
reads in readings!”

I was set up and glorified in my own esteem; two or three
girls looked at me with evident consideration.

“Don't you want to sit on our side?” said Susie, engagingly.
“I'll ask Miss Bessie to let you, 'cause she said the big
boys always plague the little ones.” And so, as she was a
smooth-tongued little favorite, she not only introduced me
to the teacher, but got me comfortably niched beside her
dainty self on the hard, backless seat, where I sat swinging
my heels, and looking for all the world like a rough little
short-tailed robin, just pushed out of the nest, and surveying
the world with round, anxious eyes. The big boys
quizzed me, made hideous faces at me from behind their
spelling-books, and great hulking Tom Halliday threw a spit
ball that lodged on the wall just over my head, by way of
showing his contempt for me; but I looked at Susie, and
took courage. I thought I never saw anything so pretty as
she was. I was never tired with following the mazes of her
golden curls. I thought how dainty and nice and white her

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pink dress and white apron were; and she wore a pair of
wonderful little red shoes; her tiny hands were so skillful
and so busy! She turned the hem of my brown towel, and
basted it for me so nicely, and then she took out some
delicate ruffing that was her school work, and I admired
her bright, fine needle and fine thread, and the waxen little
finger crowned with a little brass thimble, as she sewed
away with an industrious steadiness. To me the brass was
gold, and her hands were pearl, and she was a little fairy
princess!—yet every few moments she turned her great blue
eyes on me, and smiled and nodded her little head knowingly,
as much as to bid me be of good cheer, and I felt a thrill
go right to my heart, that beat delightedly under the checked
apron.

“Please, ma'am,” said Susan, glibly, “mayn't Henry go
out to play with the girls? The big boys are so rough.”

And Miss Bessie smiled, and said I might; and I was a
blessed little boy from that moment. In the first recess Susie
instructed me in playing “Tag,” and “Oats, peas, beans, and
barley, O,” and in “Threading the needle,” and “Opening
the gates as high as high as the sky, to let King George and
his court pass by”—in all which she was a proficient, and
where I needed a great deal of teaching and encouraging.

But when it came to more athletic feats, I could distinguish
myself. I dared jump off from a higher fence than she
could, and covered myself with glory by climbing to the top
of a five-railed gate, and jumping boldly down; and moreover,
when a cow appeared on the green before the school-house
door, I marched up to her with a stick and ordered her
off, with a manly stride and a determined voice, and chased
her with the utmost vigor quite out of sight. These proceedings
seemed to inspire Susie with a certain respect and
confidence. I could read in “readings,” jump off from high
fences, and wasn't afraid of cows! These were manly accomplishments!

The school-house was a long distance from my father's,
and I used to bring my dinner. Susie brought hers also,

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and many a delightful picnic have we had together. We
made ourselves a house under a great button-ball tree, at
whose foot the grass was short and green. Our house was
neither more nor less than a square, marked out on the
green turf by stones taken from the wall. I glorified myself
in my own eyes and in Susie's, by being able to lift stones
twice as heavy as she could, and a big flat one, which nearly
broke my back, was deposited in the centre of the square, as
our table. We used a clean pocket-handkerchief for a table-cloth;
and Susie was wont to set out our meals with great
order, making plates and dishes out of the button-ball-leaves.
Under her direction also, I fitted up our house with
a pantry, and a small room where we used to play wash
dishes, and set away what was left of our meals. The pantry
was a stone cupboard, where we kept chestnuts and
apples, and what remained of our cookies and gingerbread.
Susie was fond of ornamentation, and stuck bouquets of
golden rod and aster around in our best room, and there we
received company, and had select society come to see us.
Susie brought her doll to dwell in this establishment, and I
made her a bedroom and a little bed of milkweed-silk to lie
on. We put her to bed and tucked her up when we went
into school—not without apprehension that those savages,
the big boys, might visit our Eden with devastation. But
the girls' recess came first, and we could venture to leave her
there taking a nap till our play-time came; and when the
girls went in Susie rolled her nursling in a napkin and took
her safely into school, and laid her away in a corner of her
desk, while the dreadful big boys were having their yelling
war-whoop and carnival outside.

“How nice it is to have Harry gone all day to school,” I
heard one of my sisters saying to the other. “He used to
be so in the way, meddling and getting into everything”—
“And listening to everything one says,” said the other,
“Children have such horridly quick ears. Harry always
listens to what we talk about.”

“I think he is happier now, poor little fellow,” said my

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mother. “He has somebody now to play with.” This was
the truth of the matter.

On Saturday afternoons, I used to beg of my mother to
let me go and see Susie; and my sisters, nothing loth, used
to brush my hair and put on me a stiff, clean, checked apron,
and send me trotting off, the happiest of young lovers.

How bright and fair life seemed to me those Saturday
afternoons. When the sun, through the picket-fences, made
golden-green lines on the turf—and the trees waved and
whispered, and I gathered handfuls of golden-rod and asters
to ornament our house, under the button-wood tree!

Then we used to play in the barn together. We hunted
for hens' eggs, and I dived under the barn to dark places
where she dared not go; and climbed up to high places over
the hay-mow, where she trembled to behold me—bringing
stores of eggs, which she received in her clean white apron.

This daintiness of outfit excited my constant admiration.
I wore stiff, heavy jackets and checked aprons, and was constantly,
so my sisters said, wearing holes through my knees
and elbows for them to patch; but little Susie always appeared
to me fresh and fine and untumbled; she never
dirtied her hands or soiled her dress. Like a true little
woman, she seemed to have nerves through all her clothes
that kept them in order. This nicety of person inspired me
with a secret, wondering reverence. How could she always
be so clean, so trim, and every way so pretty, I wondered?
Her golden curls always seemed fresh from the brush, and
even when she climbed and ran, and went with me into the
barn-yard, or through the swamp and into all sorts of compromising
places, she somehow picked her way out bright
and unsoiled.

But though I admired her ceaselessly for this, she was no
less in admiration of my daring strength and prowess. I felt
myself a perfect Paladin in her defense. I remember that
the chip-yard which we used to cross, on our way to the
barn, was tyrannized over by a most loud-mouthed and
arrogant old turkey-cock, that used to strut and swell and
gobble and chitter greatly to her terror. She told me of

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different times when she had tried to cross the yard alone,
how he had jumped upon her and flapped his wings, and
thrown her down, to her great distress and horror. The
first time he tried the game on me, I marched up to him, and
by a dexterous pass, seized his red neck in my hand, and confining
his wings down with my arm, walked him ingloriously
out of the yard.

How triumphant Susie was, and how I swelled and exulted
to her, telling her what I would do to protect her under
every supposable variety of circumstances! Susie had confessed
to me of being dreadfully afraid of “bears,” and I
took this occasion to tell her what I would do if a bear should
actually attack her. I assured her that I would get father's
gun and shoot him without mercy—and she listened and believed.
I also dilated on what I would do if robbers should
get into the house; I would, I informed her, immediately get
up and pour shovelfuls of hot coal down their backs—and
wouldn't they have to run? What comfort and security this
view of matters gave us both! What bears and robbers
were, we had no very precise idea, but it was a comfort to
think how strong and adequate to meet them in any event I
was.

Sometimes, of a Saturday afternoon, Susie was permitted
to come and play with me. I always went after her, and
solicited the favor humbly at the hands of her mother, who,
after many washings and dressings and cautions as to her
clothes, delivered her up to me, with the condition that she
was to start for home when the sun was half an hour high.
Susie was very conscientious in watching, but for my part I
never agreed with her. I was always sure that the sun was
an hour high, when she set her little face dutifully homeward.
My sisters used to pet her greatly during these visits.
They delighted to twine her curls over their fingers, and try
the effects of different articles of costume on her fair complexion.
They would ask her, laughing, would she be my
little wife, to which she always answered with a grave
affirmative.

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MATRIMONIAL PROPOSITIONS.
"Early marriages?" said my mother, stopping her knitting, looking at
me, while a smile flashed over her thin cheeks: "what's the child thinking
of?" [figure description] Image of Harry kneeling on the floor in front of his mother, holding onto her knees. His parents are both sitting in tall-backed wooden chairs in front of the fireplace. His mother is in the midst of knitting, with a small ball of yarn in her lap, while the father sits with one hand holding a book in his lap and the other placed inside his jacket.[end figure description]

p467-034

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Yes, she was to be my wife; it was all settled between us.
But when? I didn't see why we must wait till we grew up.
She was lonesome when I was gone, and I was lonesome
when she was gone. Why not marry her now, and take her
home to live with me? I asked her and she said she was
willing, but mamma never would spare her. I said I would
get my mamma to ask her, and I knew she couldn't refuse,
because my papa was the minister.

I turned the matter over and over in my mind, and thought
sometime when I could find my mother alone, I would introduce
the subject. So one evening, as I sat on my little stool
at my mother's knees, I thought I would open the subject,
and began:

“Mamma, why do people object to early marriages?”

“Early marriages?” said my mother, stopping her knitting,
looking at me, while a smile flashed over her thin
cheeks: “what's the child thinking of?”

“I mean, why can't Susie and I be married now? I want
her here. I'm lonesome without her. Nobody wants to play
with me in this house, and if she were here we should be together
all the time.”

My father woke up from his meditation on his next Sunday's
sermon, and looked at my mother, smiling. A gentle
laugh rippled her bosom.

“Why, dear,” she said, “don't you know your father is a
poor man, and has hard work to support his children now?
He couldn't afford to keep another little girl.”

I thought the matter over, sorrowfully. Here was the
pecuniary difficulty, that puts off so many desiring lovers,
meeting me on the very threshold of life.

“Mother,” I said, after a period of mournful consideration,
“I wouldn't eat but just half as much as I do now, and I'd
try not to wear out my clothes, and make 'em last longer.”

My mother had very bright eyes, and there was a mingled
flash of tears and laughter in them, as when the sun winks
through rain drops. She lifted me gently into her lap and
drew my head down on her bosom.

“Some day, when my little son grows to be a man, I hope

[figure description] Page 016.[end figure description]

God will give him a wife he loves dearly. `Houses and
lands are from the fathers; but a good wife is of the Lord,'
the Bible says.”

“That's true, dear,” said my father, looking at her tenderly;
“nobody knows that better than I do.”

My mother rocked gently back and forward with me in the
evening shadows, and talked with me and soothed me, and
told me stories how one day I should grow to be a good man—
a minister, like my father, she hoped—and have a dear little
house of my own.

“And will Susie be in it?”

“Let's hope so,” said my mother. “Who knows?”

“But, mother, arn't you sure? I want you to say it will be
certainly.”

“My little one, only our dear Father could tell us that,
said my mother. “But now you must try and learn fast,
and become a good strong man, so that you can take care of
a little wife.”

p467-036 CHAPTER III. OUR CHILD-EDEN.

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My mother's talk aroused all the enthusiasm of my
nature. Here was a motive, to be sure. I went
to bed and dreamed of it. I thought over all
possible ways of growing big and strong rapidly—I had
heard the stories of Samson from the Bible. How did he
grow so strong? He was probably once a little boy like
me. “Did he go for the cows, I wonder,” thought I—“and
let down very big bars when his hands were little, and learn
to ride the old horse bare-back, when his legs were very
short?” All these things I was emulous to do; and I resolved
to lift very heavy pails full of water, and very many
of them, and to climb into the mow, and throw down great
armfulls of hay, and in every possible way to grow big and
strong.

I remember the next day after my talk with my mother
was Saturday, and I had leave to go up and spend it with
Susie.

There was a meadow just back of her mother's house,
which we used to call the mowing lot. It was white with
daisies, yellow with buttercups, with some moderate share
of timothy and herds grass intermixed. But what was specially
interesting to us was, that, down low at the roots of
the grass, and here and there in moist, rich spots, grew wild
strawberries, large and juicy, rising on nice high stalks,
with three or four on a cluster. What joy there was in the
possession of a whole sunny Saturday afternoon to be spent
with Susie in this meadow! To me the amount of happiness
in the survey was greatly in advance of what I now
have in the view of a three weeks' summer excursion.

When, after multiplied cautions and directions, and careful
adjustment of Susie's clothing, on the part of her

[figure description] Page 018.[end figure description]

mother, Susie was fairly delivered up to me; when we had turned
our backs on the house and got beyond call, then our
bliss was complete. How carefully and patronizingly I
helped her up the loose, mossy, stone wall, all hedged with
a wilderness of golden-rod, ferns, raspberry bushes, and asters!
Down we went through this tangled thicket, into such
a secure world of joy, where the daisied meadow received
us to her motherly bosom, and we were sure nobody
could see us.

We could sit down and look upward, and see daisies and
grasses nodding and bobbing over our heads, hiding us as
completely as two young grass birds; and it was such fun
to think that nobody could find out where we were! Two
bob-o-links, who had a nest somewhere in that lot, used to
mount guard in an old apple tree, and sit on tall, bending
twigs, and say, “Chack! chack! chack!” and flutter their
black and white wings up and down, and burst out into
most elaborate and complicated babbles of melody. These
were our only associates and witnesses. We thought that
they knew us, and were glad to see us there, and wouldn't
tell anybody where we were for the world. There was an
exquisite pleasure to us in this sense of utter isolation—of
being hid with each other where nobody could find us.

We had worlds of nice secrets peculiar to ourselves. Nobody
but ourselves knew where the “thick spots” were,
where the ripe, scarlet strawberries grew; the big boys
never suspected them, we said to one another, nor the big
girls; it was our own secret, which we kept between our own
little selves. How we searched, and picked, and chatted, and
oh'd and ah'd to each other, as we found wonderful places,
where the strawberries passed all belief!

But profoundest of all our wonderful secrets were our discoveries
in the region of animal life. We found, in a tuft
of grass overshadowed by wild roses, a grass bird's nest.
In vain did the cunning mother creep yards from the cherished
spot, and then suddenly fly up in the wrong place; we
were not to be deceived. Our busy hands parted the lace

[figure description] Page 019.[end figure description]

curtains of fern, and, with whispers of astonishment, we
counted the little speckled, bluegreen eggs. How round and
fine and exquisite, past all gems polished by art, they seemed;
and what a mystery was the little curious smoothlined
nest in which we found them! We talked to the birds
encouragingly. “Dear little birds,” we said, “don't be afraid;
nobody but we shall know it;” and then we said to each
other, “Tom Halliday never shall find this out, nor Jim
Fellows.” They would carry off the eggs and tear up the
nest; and our hearts swelled with such a responsibility for
the tender secret, that it was all we could do that week to
avoid telling it to everybody we met. We informed all the
children at school that we knew something that they didn't—
something that we never should tell!—something so wonderful!—
something that it would be wicked to tell of—for
mother said so; for be it observed that, like good children,
we had taken our respective mothers into confidence, and
received the strictest and most conscientious charges as to
our duty to keep the birds' secret.

In that enchanted meadow of ours grew tall, yellow lilies,
glowing as the sunset, hanging down their bells, six or seven
in number, from high, graceful stalks, like bell towers of
fairy land. They were over our heads sometimes, as they
rose from the grass and daisies, and we looked up into their
golden hearts spotted with black, with a secret, wondering
joy.

“Oh, don't pick them, they look too pretty,” said Susie to
me once when I stretched up my hand to gather one of these.
“Let's leave them to be here when we come again! I like to
see them wave.”

And so we left the tallest of them; but I was not forbidden
to gather handfuls of the less wonderful specimens that
grew only one or two on a stalk. Our bouquets of flowers
increased with our strawberries.

Through the middle of this meadow chattered a little
brook, gurgling and tinkling over many-colored pebbles,
and here and there collecting itself into a miniature

[figure description] Page 020.[end figure description]

waterfall, as it pitched over a broken bit of rock. For our height
and size, the waterfalls of this little brook were equal to
those of Trenton, or any of the medium cascades that draw
the fashionable crowd of grown-up people; and what was
the best of it was, it was our brook, and our waterfall. We
found them, and we verily believed nobody else but ourselves
knew of them.

By this waterfall, as I called it, which was certainly a
foot and a half high, we sat and arranged our strawberries
when our baskets were full, and I talked with Susie about
what my mother had told me.

I can see her now, the little crumb of womanhood, as she
sat, gaily laughing at me. “She didn't care a bit,” she
said. She had just as lief wait till I grew to be a man.
Why, we could go to school together, and have Saturday afternoons
together. “Don't you mind it, Hazzy Dazzy,” she
said, coming close up to me, and putting her little arms coaxingly
round my neck; “we love each other, and it's ever
so nice now.”

I wonder what the reason is that it is one of the first
movements of affectionate feeling to change the name of
the loved one. Give a baby a name, ever so short and ever
so musical, where is the mother that does not twist it into
some other pet name between herself and her child. So Susie,
when she was very loving, called me Hazzy, and sometimes
would play on my name, and call me Hazzy Dazzy, and sometimes
Dazzy, and we laughed at this because it was between
us; and we amused ourselves with thinking how surprised
people would be to hear her say Dazzy, and how they
would wonder who she meant. In like manner, I used to call
her Daisy when we were by ourselves, because she seemed to
me so neat and trim and pure, and wore a little flat hat on
Sundays just like a daisy.

“I'll tell you, Daisy,” said I, “just what I'm going to do—
I'm going to grow strong as Sampson did.”

“Oh, but how can you?” she suggested, doubtfully.

“Oh, I'm going to run and jump and climb, and carry ever

[figure description] Page 021.[end figure description]

so much water for Mother, and I'm to ride on horseback
and go to mill, and go all round on errands, and so I shall
get to be a man fast, and when I get to be a man I'll build
a house all on purpose for you and me—I'll build it all myself;
it shall have a parlor and a dining-room and kitchen,
and bed-room, and well-room, and chambers”—

“And nice closets to put things in,” suggested the little
woman.

“Certainly, ever so many—just where you want them,
there I'll put them,” said I, with surpassing liberality. “And
then, when we live together, I'll take care of you—I'll keep
off all the lions and bears and panthers. If a bear should
come at you, Daisy, I should tear him right in two, just
as Sampson did.”

At this vivid picture, Daisy nestled close to my shoulder,
and her eyes grew large and reflective. “We shouldn't
leave poor Mother alone,” said she.

“Oh, no; she shall come and live with us,” said I, with an
exalted generosity. “I will make her a nice chamber on
purpose, and my mother shall come, too.”

“But she can't leave your father, you know.”

“Oh, father shall come, too—when he gets old and can't
preach any more. I shall take care of them all.”

And my little Daisy looked at me with eyes of approving
credulity, and said I was a brave boy; and the bobolinks
chittered and chattered applause as they sung and skirmished
and whirled up over the meadow grasses; and by and by,
when the sun fell low, and looked like a great golden ball,
with our hands full of lilies, and our baskets full of strawberries,
we climbed over the old wall, and toddled home.

After that, I remember many gay and joyous passages
in that happiest summer of my life. How, when autumn
came, we roved through the woods together, and gathered
such stores of glossy brown chestnuts. What joy it was to
us to scuff through the painted fallen leaves and send them
flying like showers of jewels before us! How I reconnoitered
and marked available chestnut trees, and how I gloried in

[figure description] Page 022.[end figure description]

being able to climb like a cat, and get astride high limbs
and shake and beat them, and hear the glossy brown nuts
fall with a rich, heavy thud below, while Susie was busily
picking up at the foot of the tree. How she did flatter me
with my success and prowess! Tom Halliday might be a
bigger boy, but he could never go up a tree as I could; and
as for that great clumsy Jim Fellows, she laughed to
think what a figure he would make, going out on the end
of the small limbs, which would be sure to break and send
him bundling down. The picture which Susie drew of the
awkwardness of the big boys often made us laugh till the
tears rolled down our cheeks. To this day I observe it as a
weakness of my sex that we all take it in extremely good
part when the pretty girl of our heart laughs at other fellows
in a snug, quiet way, just between one's dear self and
herself alone. We encourage our own dear little cat to
scratch and claw the sacred memories of Jim or Tom, and
think that she does it in an extremely cunning and diverting
way—it being understood between us that there is no
malice in it—that “Jim and Tom are nice fellows enough,
you know—only that somebody else is so superior to them,”
etc.

Susie and I considered ourselves as an extremely forehanded,
well-to-do partnership, in the matter of gathering in our
autumn stores. No pair of chipmonks in the neighborhood
conducted business with more ability. We had a famous
cellar that I dug and stoned, where we stored away our
spoils. We had chestnuts and walnuts and butternuts, as
we said, to last us all winter, and many an earnest consultation
and many a busy hour did the gathering and arranging
of these spoils cost us.

Then, oh, the golden times we had when father's barrels of
new cider came home from the press! How I cut and gathered
and selected bunches of choice straws, which I took to
school and showed to Susie, surreptitiously, at intervals, during
school exercises, that she might see what a provision of
bliss I was making for Saturday afternoons. How Susie was

[figure description] Page 023.[end figure description]

sent to visit us on these occasions, in leather shoes and
checked apron, so that we might go in the cellar; and how,
mounted up on logs on either side of a barrel of cider,
we plunged our straws through the foamy mass at the bunghole,
and drew out long draughts of sweet cider! I was sure
to get myself dirty in my zeal, which she never did; and
then she would laugh at me and patronize me, and wipe me
up in a motherly sort of way. “How do you always get so
dirty, Harry?” she would say, in a truly maternal tone of reproof.
“How do you keep so clean?” I would say, in wonder;
and she would laugh, and call me her dear, dirty boy.
She would often laugh at me, the little elf, and make herself
distractingly merry at my expense, but the moment she saw
that the blood was getting too high in my cheeks, she would
stroke me down with praises, as became a wise young daughter
of Eve.

Besides all this, she had her little airs of moral superiority,
and used occasionally to lecture me in the nicest manner.
Being an only darling, she herself was brought up in the
strictest ways in which little feet could go; and the nicety
of her conscience was as unsullied as that of her dress. I
was hot tempered and heady, and under stress of great provocation
would come as near swearing as a minister's son
could possibly do. When the big boys ravaged our house
under the tree, or threw sticks at us, I used to stretch every
permitted limit, and scream, “Darn you!” and “Confound
you!” with a vigor and emphasis that made it almost equal
to something a good deal stronger.

On such occasions Susie would listen pale and frightened,
and, when reason came back to me, gravely lecture me,
and bring me into the paths of virtue. She used to rehearse
to me the teachings of her mother about all manner of good
things.

I have her image now in my mind, looking so crisp and
composed and neat in her sobriety, repeating, for my edification,
the hymn which contained the good child's ideal in
those days:

[figure description] Page 024.[end figure description]

I can hear now the delicious lisp of my little saint, and
see the gracious gravity of her manner. To my mind, she
was unaccountably well established in the ways of virtue,
and I listened to her little lectures with a secret reverence.

Susie was especially careful in the observation of Sunday,
and as that is a point where children are apt to be
particularly weak, she would exhort me to rigorous exactitude.

I kept it, first, by thinking that I should see her at church,
and by growing very precise about my Sunday clothes,
whereat my sisters winked at each other and laughed slyly.
Then at church we sat in great square pews adjoining to
each other. It was my pleasure to peep through the slats at
Susie. She was wonderful to behold then, all in white, with
a profusion of blue ribbons and her little flat hat over her
curls—and a pair of dainty blue shoes peeping out from her
dress.

She informed me that little girls never must think about
their clothes in meeting, and so I supposed she was trying to
be entirely absorbed from earthly vanities, unconscious of
the fixed and earnest stare with which I followed every
movement.

Human nature is but partially sanctified, however, in little
saints as well as grown up ones, and I noticed that occasionally,
probably by accident, the great blue eyes met mine,
and a smile, almost amounting to a sinful giggle, was with
difficulty choked down. She was, however, a most

[figure description] Page 025.[end figure description]

conscientious little puss and recovered herself in a moment, and
looked gravely upward at the minister, not one word of
whose sermon could she by any possibility understand,
severely devoting herself to her religious duties, till exhausted
nature gave way. The little lids would close over
the eyes like blue pimpernel before a shower,—the head
would drop and nod, till finally the mother would dispense
the little christian from further labors, by laying her head
on her lap and drawing her feet up comfortably upon the
seat, to sleep out to the end of the sermon.

When winter came on I beset my older brother to make
me a sled. Sleds, such as every boy in Boston or New York
now rejoices in, were blessings in our parts unknown; our
sled was of rough, domestic manufacture.

My brother, laughing, asked if my sled was intended to
draw Susie on, and on my earnest response in the affirmative
he amused himself with painting it in colors, red and blue,
most glorious to behold.

My soul was magnified within me when I first started
with this stylish establishment to wait on Susie.

What young fellow does not exult in a smart team when
he has a girl whom he wants to dazzle? Great was my joy
and pride when I first stopped at Susie's and told her to
hurry on her things, for I had come to draw her to school!

What a pretty picture she made in her little blue knit
hood and mittens, her bright curls flying and cheeks glowing
with the keen winter air! There was a long hill on the
way to school, and seated on the sled behind her, I careered
gloriously down with exultation in my breast, while a
stream of laughter floated on the breeze behind us. That
was a winter of much coasting down hill, of red cheeks and
red noses, of cold toes, which we never minded, and of abundant
jollity. Susie, under her mother's careful showing,
knit me a pair of red mittens, warming to the heart and
delightful to the eyes; and I piled up wood and carried
water for Mother, and by vigorous economy earned money
enough to buy Susie a great candy heart as big as my two

[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]

hands, that had the picture of two doves tied together by a
blue ribbon on one side, and on the other two very red
hearts skewered together by an arrow.

No work of art ever gave greater and more unmingled
delight. Susie gave it a prominent place in her baby-house,—
and though it was undeniably sweet, as certain little nibbling
trials on its edges had proved, yet the artistic sense
was stronger than the palate, and the candy heart was kept
to be looked at and rejoiced in.

Susie's mother was an intimate and confidential friend of
my mother, and a most docile and confiding sheep of my
father's flock. She regarded her minister's family, and all
that belonged to it, as something set apart and sacred. My
mother had imparted to her the little joke of my matrimonial
wishes, and the two matrons had laughed over it together,
and then sighed, and said, “Ah! well, stranger
things have happened.” Susie's mother told how she used
to know her husband when he was a little boy, and what if
it should be! and then they strayed on to the general truth
that this was a world of uncertainty, and we never can tell
what a day may bring forth.

Our little idyl, too, was rather encouraged by my brothers
and sisters, who made a pet and plaything of Susie, and
diverted themselves by the gravity and honesty with which
we devoted ourselves to each other. Oh! dear ignorant
days—sweet little child-Eden—why could it not last?

But it could not. It was fleeting as the bobolink's song,
as the spotted yellow lilies, as the grass and daisies. My
little Daisy was too dear to the angels to be spared to grow
up in our coarse world.

The winter passed and spring came, and Susie and I
rejoiced in the first bluebird, and found blue and white violets
together, and went to school together, till the heats of
summer came on. Then a sad epidemic began to linger
around in our mountains, and to be heard of in neighboring
villages, and my poor Daisy was scorched by its breath.

I remember well our last afternoon together in the

[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]

meadow, where, the year before, we had gathered strawberries.
We went down into it in high spirits; the strawberries
were abundant, and we chatted and picked together
gaily, till Daisy began to complain that her head ached
and her throat was sore. I sat her down by the brook, and
wet her curls with the water, and told her to rest there, and
let me pick for her. But pretty soon she called me. She
was crying with pain. “Oh! Hazzy, dear, I must go home,”
she said. “Take me to Mother.” I hurried to help her, for
she cried and moaned so that I was frightened. I began to
cry, too, and we came up the steps of her mother's house
sobbing together.

When her mother came out the little one suppressed her
tears and distress for a moment, and turning, threw her
arms around my neck and kissed me. “Do n't cry any more,
Hazzy,” she said; “we'll see each other again.”

Her mother took her up in her arms and carried her in,
and I never saw my little baby-wife again on this earth!
Not where the daisies and buttercups grew; nor where the
golden lilies shook their bells, and the bobolinks trilled;
not in the school-room, with its many child-voices; not in
the old square pew in church—never, never more that trim
little maiden form, those violet blue eyes, those golden curls
of hair, were to be seen on earth!

My Daisy's last kisses, with the fever throbbing in her
veins, very nearly took me with her. From that time I have
only indistinct remembrances of going home crying, of turning
with a strange loathing from my supper, of creeping up
and getting into bed, shivering and burning, with a thumping
and beating pain in my head.

The next morning the family doctor pronounced me a case
of the epidemic (scarlet fever) which he said was all about
among children in the neighborhood.

I have dim, hot, hazy recollections of burning, thirsty,
head-achey days, when I longed for cold water, and could
not get a drop, according to the good old rules of medical
practice in those times. I dimly observed different people

[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]

sitting up with me every night, and putting different medicines
in my unresisting mouth; and day crept slowly after
day, and I lay idly watching the rays of sunlight and flutter
of leaves on the opposite wall.

One afternoon, I remember, as I lay thus listless, I heard
the village bell strike slowly—six times. The sound wavered
and trembled with long and solemn intervals of shivering
vibration between. It was the numbering of my
Daisy's little years on earth,—the announcement that she
had gone to the land where time is no more measured by
day and night, for there shall be no night there.

When I was well again I remember my mother told me
that my little Daisy was in heaven, and I heard it with a
dull, cold chill about my heart, and wondered that I could
not cry.

I look back now into my little heart as it was then, and
remember the paroxysms of silent pain I used to have at
times, deep within, while yet I seemed to be like any other
boy.

I heard my sisters one day discussing whether I cared
much for Daisy's death.

“He don't seem to, much,” said one.

“Oh, children are little animals, they forget what's out
of sight,” said another.

But I did not forget,—I could not bear to go to the
meadow where we gathered strawberries,—to the chestnut
trees where we had gathered nuts,—and oftentimes, suddenly,
in work or play, that smothering sense of a past,
forever gone, came over me like a physical sickness.

When children grow up among older people and are
pushed and jostled, and set aside in the more engrossing
interests of their elders, there is an almost incredible amount
of timidity and dumbness of nature, with regard to the
expression of inward feeling,—and yet, often at this time the
instinctive sense of pleasure and pain is fearfully acute.
But the child has imperfectly learned language. His stock
of words, as yet, consists only in names and attributes of

[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]

outward and physical objects, and he has no phraseology
with which to embody a mere emotional experience.

What I felt when I thought of my little playfellow, was a
dizzying, choking rush of bitter pain and anguish. Children
can feel this acutely as men and women,—but even in mature
life this experience has no gift of expression.

My mother alone, with the divining power of mothers,
kept an eye on me. “Who knows,” she said to my father,
“but this death may be a heavenly call to him.”

She sat down gently by my bed one night and talked with
me of heaven, and the brightness and beauty there, and told
me that little Susie was now a fair white angel.

I remember shaking with a tempest of sobs.

“But I want her here,” I said. “I want to see her.”

My mother went over all the explanations in the premises,—
all that can ever be said in such cases, but I only sobbed
the more.

“I can't see her! Oh mother, mother!”

That night I sobbed myself to sleep and dreamed a blessed
dream.

It seemed to me that I was again in our meadow, and that
it was fairer than ever before; the sun shone gaily, the sky
was blue, and our great, golden lily stocks seemed mysteriously
bright and fair, but I was wandering lonesome and
solitary. Then suddenly my little Daisy came running to
meet me in her pink dress and white apron, with her golden
curls hanging down her neck. “Oh Daisy, Daisy!” said I
running up to her. “Are you alive?—they told me that you
were dead,”

“No, Hazzy, dear, I am not dead,—never you believe that,”
she said, and I felt the clasp of her soft little arms round
my neck. “Didn't I tell you we'd see each other again?”

“But they told me you were dead,” I said in wonder—and
I thought I held her off and looked at her,—she laughed
gently at me as she often used to, but her lovely eyes had a
mysterious power that seemed to thrill all through me.

“I am not dead, dear Hazzy,” she said. “We never die

[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]

where I am—I shall love you always,” and with that my
dream wavered and grew misty as when clear water breaks
an image into a thousand glassy rings and fragments.

I thought I heard lovely music, and felt soft, clasping
arms, and I awoke with a sense of being loved and pitied,
and comforted.

I cannot describe the vivid, penetrating sense of reality
which this dream left behind it. It seemed to warm my
whole life, and to give back to my poor little heart something
that had been rudely torn away from it. Perhaps
there is no reader that has not had experiences of the
wonderful power which a dream often exercises over the
waking hours for weeks after—and it will not appear incredible
that after that, instead of shunning the meadow
where we used to play, it was my delight to wander there
alone, to gather the strawberries—tend the birds' nests, and
lie down on my back in the grass and look up into the blue
sky through an overarching roof of daisies, with a strange
sort of feeling of society, as if my little Daisy were with me.

And is it not perhaps so? Right along side of this
troublous life, that is seen and temporal, may lie the green
pastures and the still waters of the unseen and eternal, and
they who know us better than we know them, can at any
time step across that little rill that we call Death, to minister
to our comfort.

For what are these child-angels made, that are sent down
to this world to bring so much love and rapture, and go
from us in such bitterness and mourning? If we believe
in Almighty Love we must believe that they have a merciful
and tender mission to our wayward souls. The love
wherewith we love them is something the most utterly pure
and unwordly of which human experience is capable, and
we must hope that every one who goes from us to the world
of light, goes holding an invisible chain of love by which to
draw us there.

Sometimes I think I would never have had my little
Daisy grow older on our earth. The little child dies in

[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]

growing into womanhood, and often the woman is far less
lovely than the little child. It seems to me that lovely and
loving childhood, with its truthfulness, its frank sincerity,
its pure, simple love, is so sweet and holy an estate that it
would be a beautiful thing in heaven to have a band of
heavenly children, guileless, gay and forever joyous—tender
Spring blossoms of the Kingdom of Light. Was it of such
whom he had left in his heavenly home our Saviour was
thinking, when he took little children up in his arms and
blessed them, and said, “Of such is the Kingdom of
Heaven?”

p467-051 CHAPTER IV. MY SHADOW-WIFE.

[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]

MY Shadow Wife! Is there then substance in shadow?
Yea, there may be. A shadow—a spiritual
presence—may go with us where mortal footsteps
cannot go; walk by our side amid the roar of the city: talk
with us amid the sharp clatter of voices; come to us through
closed doors, as we sit alone over our evening fire; counsel,
bless, inspire us; and though the figure cannot be clasped
in mortal arms—though the face be veiled—yet this wife of
the future may have a power to bless, to guide, to sustain
and console. Such was the dream-wife of my youth.

Whence did she come? She rose like a white, pure mist
from that little grave. She formed herself like a cloud-maiden
from the rain and dew of those first tears.

When we look at the apparent recklessness with which
great sorrows seem to be distributed among the children of
the earth, there is no way to keep our faith in a Fatherly
love, except to recognize how invariably the sorrows that
spring from love are a means of enlarging and dignifying a
human being. Nothing great or good comes without birthpangs,
and in just the proportion that natures grow more
noble, their capacities of suffering increase.

The bitter, silent, irrepressible anguish of that childish bereavement
was to me the akwakening of a spiritual nature.
The little creature who, had she lived, might have grown
up perhaps into a common-place woman, became a fixed star
in the heaven-land of the ideal, always drawing me to look
upward. My memories of her were a spring of refined and
tender feeling, through all my early life. I could not then

[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]

write; but I remember that the overflow of my heart
towards her memory required expression, and I taught myself
a strange kind of manuscript, by copying the letters of
the alphabet. I bought six cents' worth of paper and a
tallow candle at the store, which I used to light surreptitiously
when I had been put to bed nights, and, sitting up
in my little night-gown, I busied myself with writing my
remembrances of her. I could not, for the world, have
asked my mother to let me have a candle in my bed-room
after eight o'clock. I would have died sooner than to explain
why I wanted it. My purchase of paper and candle was my
first act of independent manliness. The money, I reflected,
was mine, because I earned it myself, and the paper was
mine, and the candle was mine, so that I was not using my
father's property in an unwarrantable manner, and thus I
gave myself up to my inspirations. I wrote my remembrances
of her, as she stood among the daisies and the
golden lilies. I wrote down her little words of wisdom and
grave advice, in the queerest manuscript that ever puzzled
a wise man of the East. If one imagines that all this was
spelt phonetically, and not at all in the unspeakable and
astonishing way in which the English language is conventionally
spelt, one may truly imagine that it was something
rather peculiar in the way of literature. But the heart-comfort,
the utter abandonment of soul that went into it, is
something that only those can imagine who have tried the
like and found the relief of it. My little heart was like the
Caspian sea, or some other sea which I read about, which
had found a secret channel by which its waters could pass
off under ground. When I had finished, every evening, I
used to extinguish my candle, and put it and my manuscript
inside of the straw bed on which I slept, which had a long
pocket hole in the centre, secured by buttons, for the purpose
of stirring the straw. Over this I slept in conscious
security, every night; sometimes with blissful dreams of
going to brighter meadows, when I saw my Daisy playing
with whole troops of beautiful children, fair as water lilies

[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]

on the shore of a blue lake. Thus, while I seemed to be like
any other boy, thinking of nothing but my sled, and my bat
and ball, and my mittens, I began to have a little withdrawing
room of my own; another land in which I could walk
and take a kind of delight that nothing visible gave me.
But one day my oldest sister, in making the bed, with
domestic thoroughness, disemboweled my whole store of
manuscripts and the half consumed fragment of my candle.

There is no poetry in housewifery, and my sister at once
took a housewifely view of the proceeding—

“Well, now! is there any end to the conjurations of
boys?” she said. “He might have set the house on fire and
burned us all alive, in our beds!”

Reader, this is quite possible, as I used to perform my
literary labors sitting up in bed, with the candle standing
on a narrow ledge on the side of the bedstead.

Forthwith the whole of my performance was lodged in
my mother's hands—I was luckily at school.

“Now, girls,” said my mother, “keep quiet about this;
above all, don't say a word to the boy. I will speak to
him.”

Accordingly, that night after I had gone up to bed, my
mother came into my room and, when she had seen me in
bed, she sat down by me and told me the whole discovery.
I hid my head under the bed clothes, and felt a sort of burning
shame and mortification that was inexpressible; but she
had a good store of that mother's wit and wisdom by which
I was to be comforted. At last she succeeded in drawing
both the bed clothes from my face and the veil from my
heart, and I told her all my little story.

“Dear boy,” she said, “you must learn to write, and you
need not buy candles, you shall sit by me evenings and I
will teach you; it was very nice of you to practice all alone;
but it will be a great deal easier to let me teach you the
writing letters.”

Now I had begun the usual course of writing copies in
school. In those days it was deemed necessary to

[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]

commence by teaching what was called coarse hand; and I had
filled many dreary pages with m's and n's of a gigantic size;
but it never had yet occurred to me that the writing of
these copies was to bear any sort of relation to the expression
of thoughts and emotions within me that were clamoring
for a vent, while my rude copies of printed letters did
bear to my mind this adaptation. But now my mother
made me sit by her evenings, with a slate and pencil, and,
under her care, I made a cross-cut into the fields of practical
handwriting, and was also saved the dangers of going off
into a morbid habit of feeling, which might easily have
arisen from my solitary reveries.

“Dear,” she said to my father, “I told you this one was
to be our brightest. He will make a writer yet,” and she
showed him my manuscript.

“You must look after him, Mother,” said my father, as he
always said, when there arose any exigency about the children,
that required delicate handling.

My mother was one of that class of women whose power
on earth seems to be only the greater for being a spiritual
and invisible one. The control of such women over men is
like that of the soul over the body. The body is visible,
forceful, obtrusive, self-asserting. The soul invisible, sensitive,
yet with a subtle and vital power which constantly
gains control and holds every inch that it gains.

My father was naturally impetuous, though magnanimous,
hasty tempered and imperious, though conscientious; my
mother united the most exquisite sensibility with the
deepest calm—calm resulting from habitual communion
with the highest and purest source of all rest—the peace
that passeth all understanding. Gradually, by this spiritual
force, this quietude of soul, she became his leader and
guide. He held her hand and looked up to her with a
trustful implicitness that increased with every year.

“Where's your mother?” was always the fond inquiry
when he entered the house, after having been off on one of
his long preaching tours or clerical counsels. At all hours

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

he would burst from his study with fragments of the sermon
or letter he was writing, to read to her and receive her suggestions
and criticisms. With her he discussed the plans
of his discourses, and at her dictation changed, improved,
altered and added; and under the brooding influence of her
mind, new and finer traits of tenderness and spirituality
pervaded his character and his teachings. In fact, my
father once said to me, “She made me by her influence.”

In these days, we sometimes hear women, who have reared
large families on small means, spoken of as victims who had
suffered unheard of oppressions. There is a growing materialism
that refuses to believe that there can be happiness
without the ease and facilities and luxuries of wealth.

But my father and mother, though living on a narrow
income, were never really poor. The chief evil of poverty
is the crushing of ideality out of life—the taking away its
poetry and substituting hard prose;—and this with them
was impossible. My father loved the work he did, as the
artist loves his painting and the sculptor his chisel. A man
needs less money when he is doing only what he loves to
do—what, in fact, he must do,—pay or no pay. St. Paul said,
“A necessity is laid upon me, yea, woe is me, if I preach not
the gospel.” Preaching the gospel was his irrepressible
instinct, a necessity of his being. My mother, from her
deep spiritual nature, was one soul with my father in his
life-work. With the moral organization of a prophetess, she
stood nearer to heaven than he, and looking in, told him
what she saw, and he, holding her hand, felt the thrill of
celestial electricity. With such women, life has no prose;
their eyes see all things in the light of heaven, and flowers
of paradise spring up in paths that to unnanointed eyes, seem
only paths of toil. I never felt, from anything I saw at
home, from any word or action of my mother's, that we
were poor, in the sense that poverty was an evil. I was
reminded, to be sure, that we were poor in a sense that
required constant carefulness, watchfulness over little
things, energetic habits, and vigorous industry and

[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]

self-helpfulness. But we were never poor in any sense that restricted
hospitality or made it a burden. In those days, a minister's
house was always the home for all the ministers and
their families, whenever an exigency required of them to
travel, and the spare room of our house never wanted guests
of longer or shorter continuance. But the atmosphere of
the house was such as always made guests welcome. Three
or four times a year, the annual clerical gatherings of the
church filled our house to overflowing and necessitated an
abundant provision and great activity of preparation on the
part of the women of our family. Yet I never heard an
expression of impatience or a suggestion that made me
suppose they felt themselves unduly burdened. My mother's
cheerful face was a welcome and a benediction at all times,
and guests found it good to be with her.

In the midst of our large family, of different ages, of
vigorous growth, of great individuality and forcefulness
of expression, my mother's was the administrative power.
My father habitually referred everything to her, and leaned
on her advice with a childlike dependence. She read the
character of each, she mediated between opposing natures;
she translated the dialect of different sorts of spirits, to
each other. In a family of young children, there is a chance
for every sort and variety of natures; and for natures
whose modes of feeling are as foreign to each other, as
those of the French and the English. It needs a common
interpreter, who understands every dialect of the soul, thus
to translate differences of individuality into a common language
of love.

It has often seemed to me a fair question, on a review of the
way my mother ruled in our family, whether the politics of
the ideal state in a millennial community, should not be one
equally pervaded by mother-influences.

The woman question of our day, as I understand it is this.—
Shall motherhood ever be felt in the public administration
of the affairs of state? The state is nothing more nor
less than a collection of families, and what would be good

[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]

or bad for the individual family, would be good or bad for
the state.

Such as our family would have been, ruled only by my
father, without my mother, such the political state is, and
has been; there have been in it “conscript fathers,” but no
“conscript mothers;” yet is not a mother's influence needed
in acts that relate to the interests of collected families as
much as in individual ones?

The state, at this very day, needs an influence like what I
remember our mother's to have been, in our great, vigorous,
growing family,—an influence quiet, calm, warming, purifying,
uniting—it needs a womanly economy and thrift in husbanding
and applying its material resources—it needs a
divining power, by which different sections and different
races can be interpreted to each other, and blended together
in love—it needs an educating power, by which its immature
children may be trained in virtue—it needs a loving
and redeeming power, by which its erring and criminal
children may be borne with, purified, and led back to virtue.

Yet, while I thus muse, I remember that such women as
my mother are those to whom in an especial manner all
noise and publicity and unrestful conflict are peculiarly
distasteful. My mother had that delicacy of fibre that made
any kind of public exercise of her powers an impossibility.
It is not peculiarly a feminine characteristic, but belongs
equally to many men of the finest natures. It is characteristic
of the poets and philosophers of life. It is ascribed by
the sacred writers to Jesus of Nazareth, in whom an aversion
for publicity and a longing for stillness and retirement
are specially indicated by many touching incidents. Jesus
preferred to form around him a family of disciples and to
act on the world through them, and it is remarkable that
he left no writings directly addressed to the world by himself,
but only by those whom he inspired.

Women of this brooding, quiet, deeply spiritual nature,
while they cannot attend caucuses, or pull political wires or
mingle in the strifeof political life, are yet the most needed

[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]

force to be for the good of the State. I am persuaded that
it is not till this class of women feel as vital and personal responsibility
for the good of the State, as they have hitherto
felt for that of the family, that we shall gain the final elements
of a perfect society. The laws of Rome, so said the graceful
myth, were dictated to Numa Pompilius, by the nymph,
Egeria. No mortal eye saw her. She was not in the forum,
or the senate. She did not strive, nor cry, nor lift up her
voice in the street, but she made the laws by which Rome
ruled the world. Let us hope in a coming day that not Egeria,
but Mary, the mother of Jesus, the great archetype of the
christian motherhood, shall be felt through all the laws and
institutions of society. That Mary, who kept all things and
pondered them in her heart—the silent poet, the prophetess,
the one confidential friend of Jesus, sweet and retired as
evening dew, yet strong to go forth with Christ against the
cruel and vulgar mob, and to stand unfainting by the cross
where He suffered!

From the time that my mother discovered my store of
manuscripts, she came into new and more intimate relation
with me. She took me from the district school, and kept
me constantly with herself, teaching me in the intervals of
domestic avocations.

I was what is called a mother's-boy, as she taught me to
render her all sorts of household services, such as are
usually performed by girls. My two older sisters, about
this time, left us, to establish a seminary in the neighborhood,
and the sister nearest my age went to study under
their care, so that my mother said, playfully, she had no
resource but to make a girl of me. This association with
a womanly nature, and this discipline in womanly ways, I
hold to have been an invaluable part of my early training.
There is no earthly reason which requires a man, in order
to be manly, to be unhandy and clumsy in regard to the
minutiæ of domestic life; and there are quantities of occasions
occurring in the life of every man, in which he will
have occasion to be grateful to his mother, if, like mine, she

[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]

trains him in woman's arts and the secrets of making
domestic life agreeable.

But it is not merely in this respect that I felt the value of
my early companionship with my mother. The power of
such women over our sex is essentially the service rendered
us in forming our ideal, and it was by my mother's
influence that the ideal guardian, the “shadow wife,” was
formed, that guided me through my youth.

She wisely laid hold of the little idyl of my childhood,
as something which gave her the key to my nature, and
opened before me the hope in my manhood of such a friend
as my little Daisy had been to my childhood. This wife of
the future she often spoke of as a motive. I was to make
myself worthy of her. For her sake I was to be strong, to
be efficient, to be manly and true, and above all pure in
thought and imagination and in word.

The cold mountain air and simple habits of New England
country life are largely a preventive of open immorality;
but there is another temptation which besets the boy,
against which the womanly ideal is the best shield—the
temptation to vulgarity and obscenity.

It was to my mother's care and teaching I owe it, that
there always seemed to be a lady at my elbow, when
stories were told such as a pure woman would blush to hear.
It was owing to her, that a great deal of what I supposed
to be classical literature both in Greek and Latin and in
English was to me and is to me to this day simply repulsive
and disgusting. I remember that one time when I
was in my twelfth or thirteenth year, one of Satan's agents
put into my hand one of those stories that are written
with an express purpose of demoralizing the young—stories
that are sent creeping like vipers and rattle-snakes stealthily
and secretly among inexperienced and unguarded boys
hiding in secret corners, gliding under their pillows and
filling their veins with the fever poison of impurity. How
many boys in the most critical period of life are forever
ruined, in body and soul, by the silent secret gliding among

[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]

them of these nests of impure serpents, unless they have a
mother, wise, watchful, and never sleeping, with whom
they are in habits of unreserved intimacy and communion!

I remember that when my mother took from me this book,
it was with an expression of fear and horror which made
a deep impression on me. Then she sat by me that night,
when the shadows were deepening, and told me how the
reading of such books, or the letting of such ideas into my
mind would make me unworthy of the wife she hoped
some day I would win. With a voice of solemn awe she
spoke of the holy mystery of marriage as something so
sacred, that all my life's happiness depended on keeping it
pure, and surrounding it only with the holiest thoughts.

It was more the thrill of her sympathies, the noble poetry
of her nature inspiring mine, than anything she said, that
acted upon me and stimulated me to keep my mind and
memory pure. In the closeness of my communion with her
I seemed to see through her eyes and feel through her nerves,
so that at last a passage in a book or a sentiment uttered
always suggested the idea of what she would think of it.

In our days we have heard much said of the importance of
training women to be wives. Is there not something to be
said on the importance of training men to be husbands?
Is the wide latitude of thought and reading and expression
which has been accorded as a matter of course to the boy
and the young man, the conventionally allowed familiarity
with coarseness and indelicacy, a fair preparation to enable
him to be the intimate companion of a pure woman? For
how many ages has it been the doctrine that man and woman
were to meet in marriage, the one crystal-pure, the other
foul with the permitted garbage of all sorts of uncleansed
literature and license?

If the man is to be the head of the woman, even as Christ
is the head of the Church, should he not be her equal, at
least, in purity?

My shadow-wife grew up by my side under my mother's
creative touch. It was for her I studied, for her I should

[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]

toil. The thought of providing for her took the sordid element
out of economy and made it unselfish. She was to be
to me adviser, friend, inspirer, charmer. She was to be my
companion, not alone in one faculty, but through all the
range of my being—there should be nothing wherein she and
I could not by appreciative sympathy commune together.
As I thought of her, she seemed higher than I. I must love
up and not down, I said. She must stand on a height and I
must climb to her—she must be a princess worthy of many
toils and many labors. Gradually she became to me a controlling
power.

The thought of what she would think, closed for me many
a book that I felt she and I could not read together—her
fair image barred the way to many a door and avenue,
which if a young man enters, he must leave his good angel
behind,—for her sake I abjured intimacies that I felt she
could not approve, and it was my ambition to keep the
inner temple of my heart and thoughts so pure, that it
might be a worthy resting place for her at last.

p467-062 CHAPTER V. I START FOR COLLEGE AND MY UNCLE JACOB ADVISES ME.

[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

THE time came at last when the sacred habit of intimacy
with my mother was broken, and I was
to leave her for college.

It was the more painful to her, as only a year before, my
father had died, leaving her more than ever dependent on
the society of her children.

My father died as he had lived, rejoicing in his work and
feeling that if he had a hundred lives to live, he would devote
them to the same object for which he had spent that
one—the preaching of the Gospel. He left to my mother the
homestead and a small farm, which was under the care of
one of my brothers, so that the event of his death made no
change in our family home center, and I was to go to college
and fulfill the hope of his heart and the desire of my
mother's life, in consecrating myself to the work of the
Christian ministry.

My father and mother had always kept sacredly a little
fund laid by for the education of their children; it was the
result of many small savings and self-denials—but self-denials
so cheerfully and hopefully encountered that they
had almost changed their nature and become preferences.
The family fund for this purpose had been used in turn by
two of my older brothers, who, as soon as they gained an
independent foothold in life, appropriated each his first
earnings to replacing this sum for the use of the next.

It was not, however, a fund large enough to dispense with
the need of a strict economy, and a supplemental self-helpfulness
on our part.

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

The terms in some of our New England colleges are
thoughtfully arranged so that the students can teach for
three of the winter months, and the resources thus gained
help out their college expenses. Thus at the same time they
educate themselves and help to educate others, and they
study with the maturity of mind and the appreciation of the
value of what they are gaining, resulting from a habit of
measuring themselves with the actual needs of life.

The time when the boy goes to college is the time when he
feels manhood to begin. He is no longer a boy, but an unfledged,
undeveloped man—a creature, half of the past and
half of the future. Yet every one gives him a good word
or a congratulatory shake of the hand on his entrance to
this new plateau of life. It is a time when advice is plenty
as blackberries in August, and often held quite as cheap—
but nevertheless a young fellow may as well look at what
his elders tell him at this time, and see what he can make
of it.

As I was “our minister's son,” all the village thought it
had something to do with my going. “Hallo, Harry, so
you've got into college! Think you'll be as smart a man as
your dad?” said one. “Wa-al, so I hear you're going to college.
Stick to it now. I could a made suthin ef I'd a had
larnin at your age,” said old Jerry Smith, who rung the
meeting-house bell, sawed wood, and took care of miscellaneous
gardens for sundry widows in the vicinity.

But the sayings that struck me as most to the purpose
came from my Uncle Jacob.

Uncle Jacob was my mother's brother, and the doctor not
only of our village, but of all the neighborhood for ten miles
round. He was a man celebrated for medical knowledge
through the State, and known by his articles in medical
journals far beyond. He might have easily commanded a
wider and more lucrative sphere of practice by going to
any of the large towns and cities, but Uncle Jacob was a
philosopher and preferred to live in a small quiet way in a
place whose scenery suited him, and where he could act

[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]

precisely as he felt disposed, and carry out all his little
humors and pet ideas without rubbing against conventionalities.

He had a secret adoration for my mother, whom he regarded
as the top and crown of all womanhood, and he
also enjoyed the society of my father, using him as a sort of
whetstone to sharpen his wits on. Uncle Jacob was a
church member in good standing, but in the matter of belief
he was somewhat like a high-mettled horse in a pasture,—he
enjoyed once in a while having a free argumentative race
with my father all round the theological lot. Away he
would go in full career, dodging definitions, doubling and
turning with elastic dexterity, and sometimes ended by
leaping over all the fences, with most astounding assertions,
after which he would calm down, and gradually suffer
the theological saddle and bridle to be put on him and go
on with edifying paces, apparently much refreshed by his
metaphysical capers.

Uncle Jacob was reported to have a wonderful skill in the
healing craft. He compounded certain pills which were
stated to have most wonderful effects. He was accustomed
to exact that, in order fully to develop their medical properties,
they should be taken after a daily bath, and be followed
immediately by a brisk walk of a specific duration in the
open air. The steady use of these pills had been known to
make wonderful changes in the cases of confirmed invalids,
a fact which Uncle Jacob used to notice with a peculiar
twinkle in the corner of his eye. It was sometimes whispered
that the composition of them was neither more nor
less than simple white sugar with a flavor of some harmless
essence, but upon this subject my Uncle Jacob was impenetrable.
He used to say, with the afore-mentioned waggish
twinkle, that their preparation was his secret.

Uncle Jacob had always had a special favor for me, shown
after his own odd and original manner. He would take me
in his chaise with him when driving about his business, and
keep my mind on a perpetual stretch with his odd

[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]

questions and droll, suggestive remarks or stories. There was a
shrewd keen quality to all that he said, that stimulated like
a mental tonic, and none the less so for a stinging flavor of
sarcasm and cynicism, that stirred up and provoked one's
self-esteem. Yet as Uncle Jacob was companionable and
loved a listener, I think he was none the less agreeable to
me for this slight touch of his claws. One likes to find
power of any kind—and he who shows that he can both
scratch and bite effectively, if he holds his talons in sheath,
comes in time to be regarded as a sort of benefactor for his
forbearance: and so, though I got many a shrewd mental
nip and gripe from my Uncle Jacob, I gave on the whole
more heed to his opinion than that of anybody else that I
knew.

From the time that I had been detected with my self-invented
manuscript, up to the period of my going to college,
the expression of my thoughts by writing had always
been a passion with me, and from year to year my mind had
been busy with its own creations, which it was a solace and
amusement for me to record.

Of course there was ever so much crabbed manuscript,
and no less confused, immature thought. I wrote poems,
essays, stories, tragedies, and comedies. I demonstrated
the immortality of the soul. I sustained the future immortality
of the souls of animals. I wrote sonnets and odes,
in whole or in part on almost everything that could be mentioned
in creation.

My mother advised me to make Uncle Jacob my literary
mentor, and the best of my productions were laid under his
eye.

“Poor trash!” he was wont to say, with his usual kindly
twinkle. “But there must be poor trash in the beginning.
We must all eat our peck of dirt, and learn to write sense
by writing nonsense.” Then he would pick out here and
there a line or expression which he assured me was “not
bad.” Now and then he condescended to tell me that for a
boy of my age, so and so was actually hopeful, and that I

[figure description] Blank Page.[end figure description]

UNCLE JACOB'S ADVICE.
"So you are going to college, boy! Well, away with you; there's no use
advising you; you'll do as all the rest do. In one year you'll know more
than your father, your mother, or I, or all your college officers—in fact,
than the Lord himself." [figure description] Image of a young Harry having a solemn discussion with his Uncle Jacob. Both men are wearing suits and standing in front of a fireplace. On the wall behind the fireplace are various trinkets, such as a candle, ornate clock, an engraved bottle and a landscape portrait. On the wall is a bookshelf with books askew.[end figure description]

p467-068 [figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

should make something one of these days, which was to me
more encouragement than much more decided praise from
any other quarter.

We all notice that he who is reluctant to praise, whose
commendation is scarce and hard-earned, is he for whose
good word everybody is fighting; he comes at last to be the
judge in the race. After all, the fact which Uncle Jacob
could not disguise, that he had a certain good opinion of
me, in spite of his sharp criticisms and scant praises, made
him the one whose dicta on every subject were the most important
to me.

I went to him in all the glow of satisfaction and the tremble
of self-importance that a boy feels who is taking the
first step into the land of manhood.

I have the image of him now, as he stood with his back to
the fire, and the newspaper in his hand, giving me his last
counsels. A little wiry, keen-looking man, with a blue,
hawk-like eye, a hooked nose, a high forehead, shadowed
with grizzled hair, and a cris-cross of deeply lined wrinkles
in his face.

“So you are going to college, boy! Well, away with you;
there 's no use advising you; you 'll do as all the rest do. In
one year you'll know more than your father, your mother,
or I, or all your college officers—in fact, than the Lord himself.
You'll have doubts about the Bible, and think you
could have made a better one. You 'll think that if the
Lord had consulted you he could have laid the foundations
of the earth better, and arranged the course of nature to
more purpose. In short, you'll be a god, knowing good and
evil, and running all over creation measuring everybody
and everything in your pint cup. There'll be no living with
you. But you'll get over it,—it's only the febrile stage of
knowledge. But if you have a good constitution, you'll
come through with it.”

I humbly suggested to him that I should try to keep clear
of the febrile stage; that forewarned was forearmed.

“Oh, tut! tut! you must go through your fooleries. These

[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]

are the regular diseases, the chicken-pox, measles, and
mumps of young manhood; you 'll have them all. We only
pray that you may have them light, and not break your constitution
for all your life through, by them. For instance,
you'll fall in love with some baby-faced young thing, with
pink cheeks and long eyelashes, and goodness only knows
what abominations of sonnets you'll be guilty of. That
isn't fatal, however. Only don't get engaged. Take it as
the chicken-pox—keep your pores open, and don't get cold,
and it'll pass off and leave you none the worse.”

“And she!” said I, indignantly. “You talk as if it was
no matter what became of her—”

“What, the baby? Oh, she'll outgrow it, too. The fact
is, soberly and seriously, Harry, marriage is the thing that
makes or mars a man; it's the gate through which he goes
up or down, and you shouldn't pledge yourself to it till you
come to your full senses. Look at your mother, boy; see
what a woman may be; see what she was to your father,
what she is to me, to you, to every one that knows her.
Such a woman, to speak reverently, is a pearl of great
price; a man might well sell all he had to buy her. But it
isn't that kind of woman that flirts with college boys. You
don't pick up such pearls every day.”

Of course I declared that nothing was further from my
thoughts than anything of that nature.

“The fact is, Harry, you can't afford fooleries,” said my
uncle. “You have your own way to make, and nothing to
make it with but your own head and hands, and you must
begin now to count the cost of everything. You have a
healthy, sound body; see that you take care of it. God gives
you a body but once. He don't take care of it for you,
and whatever of it you lose, you lose for good. Many a
chap goes into college fresh as you are, and comes out with
weak eyes and crooked back, yellow complexion and dyspeptic
stomach. He has only himself to thank for it. When
you get to college they'll want you to smoke, and you'll
want to, just for idleness and good fellowship. Now,

[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]

before you begin, just calculate what it'll cost you. You can't
get a good cigar under ten cents, and your smoker wants
three a day, at the least. There go thirty cents a day, two
dollars and ten cents a week, or a hundred and nine dollars
and twenty cents a year. Take the next ten years at that
rate, and you can invest over a thousand dollars in tobacco
smoke. That thousand dollars, invested in a savings bank,
would give a permanent income of sixty dollars a year,—
a handy thing, as you'll find, just as you are beginning life.
Now, I know you think all this is prosy; You are amazingly
given to figures of rhetoric, but, after all, you've got to get
on in a world where things go by the rules of arithmetic.”

“Well, uncle,” I said, a little nettled, “I pledge you my
word that I won't smoke or drink. I never have done
either, and I don't know why I should.”

“Good for you! your hand on that, my boy. You don't
need either tobacco or spirits any more than you need water
in your shoes. There's no danger in doing without them,
and great danger in doing with them; so let's look on that
as settled.

“Now, as to the rest. You have a faculty for stringing
words together, and a hankering after it, that may make or
spoil you. Many a fellow comes to naught because he can
string pretty phrases and turn a good line of poetry. He
gets the notion that he's to be a poet, or orator, or genius of
some sort, and neglects study. Now, Harry, remember that
an empty bag can't stand upright; and that if you are ever
to be a writer you must have something to say, and that
you've got to dig for knowledge as for hidden treasure.
A genius for hard work is the best kind of genius. Look at
great writers, and see how many had it. What a student
Milton was, and Goethe! Great fellows, those!—like trees
that grow out in a pasture lot, with branches all round.
Composition is the flowering out of a man's mind. When
he has made growth, all studies and all learning, all that
makes woody fibre, go into it. Now, study books; observe
nature; practice. If you make a good firm mental growth,

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

I hope to see some blossoms and fruits from it one of these
days. So go your ways, and God bless you!”

The last words were said as Uncle Jacob slipped into my
hand an envelope, containing a sum of money. “You'll
need it,” he said, “to furnish your room; and hark'e! if
you get into any troubles that you don't want to burden
your mother with, come to me.”

There was warmth in the grip with which these last
words were said, and a sort of misty moisture came over
his keen blue eye,—little signs which meant as much from
his shrewd and reticent nature as a caress or an expression
of tenderness might from another.

My mother's last words, after hours of talk over the evening
fire, were these: “I want you to be a good man. A
great many have tried to be great men, and failed; but
nobody ever sincerely tried to be a good man, and failed.”

I suppose it is about the happiest era in a young fellow's
life, when he goes to college for the first time.

The future is all a land of blue distant mists and shadows,
radiant as an Italian landscape. The boundaries between
the possible and the not possible are so charmingly vague!
There is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow forever
waiting for each new comer. Generations have not exhausted
it!

De Balzac said, of writing his novels, that the dreaming
out of them was altogether the best of it. “To imagine,”
he said, “is to smoke enchanted cigarettes; to bring out
one's imaginations into words,—that is work!”

The same may be said of the romance of one's life. The
dream-life is beautiful, but the rendering into reality quite
another thing.

I believe every boy who has a good father and mother,
goes to college meaning, in a general way, to be a good fellow.
He will not disappoint them.—No! a thousand times,
no! In the main, he will be a good boy,—not that he is
going quite to walk according to the counsels of his elders.
He is not going to fall over any precipices—not he—but

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

he is going to walk warily and advisedly along the edge
of them, and take a dispassionate survey of the prospect,
and gather a few botanical specimens here and there. It
might be dangerous for a less steady head than his; but he
understands himself, and with regard to all things he says,
“We shall see.” The world is full of possibilities and open
questions. Up sail, and away; let us test them!

As I scaled the mountains and descended the valleys on
my way to college, I thought over all that my mother and
Uncle Jacob had said to me, and had my own opinion of it.

Of course I was not the person to err in the ways he had
suggested. I was not to be the dupe of a boy and girl flirtation.
My standard of manhood was too exalted, I reflected,
and I thought with complacency how little Uncle
Jacob knew of me.

To be sure, it is a curious kind of a thought to a young
man, that somewhere in this world, unknown to him, and
as yet unknowing him, lives the woman that is to be his
earthly fate,—to affect, for good or evil, his destiny.

We have all read the pretty story about the Princess of
China and the young Prince of Tartary, whom a fairy and
genius in a freak of caprice showed to each other in an enchanted
sleep, and then whisked away again, leaving them
to years of vain pursuit and wanderings. Such is the ideal
image of somebody, who must exist somewhere, and is to be
found sometime, and when found, is to be ours.

“Uncle Jacob is all right in the main,” I said; “but if I
should meet the true woman even in my college days, why
that, indeed, would be quite another thing.”

p467-073 CHAPTER VI. MY DREAM-WIFE

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

ALL things prospered with me in my college life. I
had a sunny room commanding a fine prospect,
and uncle Jacob's parting liberality enabled me
to furnish it commodiously.

I bought the furniture of a departing senior at a reduced
price, and felt quite the spirit of a householder in my possessions.
I was well prepared on my studies and did not
find my tasks difficult.

My stock of interior garnishment included several French
lithographs, for the most part of female heads, looking up,
with very dark bright eyes, or looking down, with very long
dark eyelashes.

These heads of dream-women are, after all, not to be
laughed at; they show the yearning for womanly influences
and womanly society which follows the young man in his
enforced monastic seclusion from all family life and family
atmosphere. These little fanciful French lithographs, generally,
are chosen for quite other than artistic reasons. If
we search into it we shall find that one is selected because
it is like sister “Nell,” and another puts one in mind of
“Bessie,” and then again, there is another “like a girl I
used to know.” Now and then one of them has such a
piquant, provoking air of individuality, that one is sure
it must have been sketched from nature. Some teasing,
coaxing, “don't-care-what-you-think” sort of a sprite,
must have wreathed poppies and blue corn-flowers just so
in her hair, and looked gay defiance at the artist who drew
it. There was just such a saucy, spirited gipsy over my

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

mantel piece, who seemed to defy me to find her if I
searched the world over—with whom I held sometimes
airy colloquies—not in the least was she like my dream-wife,
but I liked her for all that, and thought I would
“give something” to know what she would have to say to
me, just for the curiosity of the thing.

The college was in a little village, and there was no particular
amity between the townspeople and the students.
I believe it is the understanding in such cases, that college
students are to be regarded and treated as a tribe of Bedouin
Arabs, whose hand is against every man, and they in
their turn are not backward to make good the character.
Public opinion shuts them up together—they are a state
within a state—with a public sentiment, laws, manners,
and modes of thinking of their own. It is a state, too,
without women. When we think of this, and remember
that all this experience is gone through in the most gaseous
and yeasty period of human existence, we no longer wonder
that there are college rows and scrapes, that all sort of
grotesque capers become hereditary and traditional; that
an apple-cart occasionally appears on top of one of the
steeples, that cannon balls are rolled surreptiously down the
college stairs, and that tutors' doors are mysteriously found
locked at recitation hours. One simply wonders that the
roof is not blown off, and the windows out, by the combined
excitability of so many fermenting natures.

There is a tendency now in society to open the college
course equally to women—to continue through college life
that interaction of the comparative influence of the sexes
which is begun in the family.

To a certain extent this experiment has been always
favorably tried in the New England rural Academies, where
young men are fitted for college in the same classes and
studies with women.

In these time-honored institutions, young women have
kept step with young men in the daily pursuit of science,
not only without disorder or unseemly scandal, but with

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

manifestly more quietness and refinement of manner than
obtains in institutions where female association ceases altogether.
The presence of a couple of dozen of well-bred
ladies in the lecture and recitation rooms of a college would
probably be a preventive of many of the unseemly and
clumsy jokes wherewith it has been customary to diversify
the paths of science, to the affliction of the souls of professors.

But for us boys, there was no gospel of womanhood except
what was to be got from the letters of mothers and sisters,
and such imperfect and flitting acquaintance as we
could pick up in the streets with the girls of the village.
Now though there might be profit, could young men and
women see each other daily under the responsibility of serious
business, keeping step with one another in higher studies,
yet it by no means follows that this kind of flitting
glimpse-like acquaintance, formed merely in the exchange
of a few outside superficialities, can have any particularly
good effect. No element of true worthy friendship, of sober
appreciation, or manly or womanly good sense, generally
enters into these girl-and-boy flirtations, which are the
only substitute for family association during the barren
years of student life. The students were not often invited
into families, and those who gained a character as ladies'
men were not favorably looked upon by our elders. Now
and then by rare and exceptional good luck a college student
is made at home in some good family, where there is
a nice kind mother and the wholesome atmosphere of human
life; or, he forms the acquaintance of some woman,
older and wiser than himself, who can talk with him on all
the multitude of topics his college studies suggest. But
such cases are only exceptions. In general there is no
choice between flirtation and monastic isolation.

For my part, I posed myself on the exemplary platform,
and remembering my uncle Jacob's advice, contemplated
life with the grim rigidity of a philosopher. I was going to
have no trifling, and surveyed the girls at church, on

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

Sunday, with a distant and severe air—as gay creatures of an
hour, who could hold no place in my serious meditations.
Plato or Aristotle, in person, could not have contemplated
life and society from a more serene height of composure.
I was favorably known by my teachers, and held rank at
the head of my class, and was stigmatized as a “dig,” by
frisky young gentlemen who enjoyed rolling cannon balls
down stairs—taking the tongue out of the chapel bell—
greasing the seats, and other thread-bare college jokes,
which they had not genius enough to vary, so as to give
them a spice of originality.

But one bright June Sunday—just one of those days that
seem made to put all one's philosophy into confusion, when
apple-blossoms were bursting their pink shells, and robins
singing, and leaves twittering and talking to each other in
undertones, there came to me a great revelation.

How innocently I brushed my hair and tied my neck tie,
on that fateful morning, contemplating my growing moustache
and whiskers hopefully in the small square of looking-glass
which served for me these useful purposes of
self-knowledge. I looked at my lineaments as those of a
free young junior, without fear and without anxiety, without
even an incipient inquiry what anybody else would
think of them—least of all any woman—and marched forth
obediently and took my wonted seat in that gallery of the
village church which was assigned to the college students
of Congregational descent; where, like so many sheep in
a pen, we joined in the services of the common sheep-fold.

I suppose there is moral profit even in the decent self-denial
of such weekly recurring religious exercises. To be
forced to a certain period of silence, order, quiet, and to
have therein a possibility and a suggestion of communion
with a Higher Power, and an out-look into immortality, is
something not to be undervalued in education, and justifies
the stringency with which our New England colleges preserve
and guard this part of their régime.

But it was to be confessed in our case, that the number

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

who really seemed to have any spiritual participation or
sympathy in the great purposes of the exercises, was not a
majority. A general, dull decency of demeanor was the
most frequent attainment, and such small recreations were
in vogue as could be pursued without drawing the attention
of the monitors. There was some telegraphy of
eyes between the girls of the village and some of the more
society-loving fellows, who had cultivated intimacies in
that quarter; there were some novels, stealthily introduced
and artfully concealed and read by the owner, while his
head, resting on the seat before him, seemed bowed in
devotion; and some artistic exercises in sketching caricatures
on the part of others. For my own part, having been
trained religiously, I gave strict outward and decorous attention;
but the fact was that my mind generally sailed off
on some cloud of fancy, and wandered through dream-land,
so that not a word of anything present reached my ear.
This habit of reverie and castle-building, repressed all the
week by the severe necessity of definite tasks, came upon
me Sundays as Bunyan describes the hot, sleepy atmosphere
of the enchanted ground.

Our pastor was a good man, who wrote a kind of smooth,
elegant, unexceptionable English; whose measured cadences
and easy flow, were, to use the scripture language, as a
“very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and
can play sweetly upon an instrument.” I heard him as
one hears murmurs and voices through one's sleep, while my
spirit went everywhere under the sun. I traveled in foreign
lands, I saw pictures, cathedrals; I had thrilling adventures
and hair-breadth escapes; formed strange and exciting acquaintances;
in short, was the hero of a romance, whose
scenes changed as airily and easily as the sunset clouds of
evening. So really and so vividly did this supposititious life
excite me that I have actually found myself with tears in
my eyes through the pathos of these unsubstantial visions.

It was in one of the lulling pauses of such a romance,
while I yet heard the voice of our good pastor proving

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

that “selfishness was the essence of moral evil,” that I lifted
up my eyes, and became for the first time conscious of a
new face, in the third pew of the broad aisle below me.
It was a new one—one that certainly had never been there
before, and was altogether just the face to enter into the
most ethereal perceptions of my visionary life. I started with
a sort of awakening thrill, such, perhaps, as Adam had
when he woke from his sleep and saw his Eve. There, to
be sure, was the face of my dream-wife, incarnate and
visible! That face, so refined, so spiritual, so pure! a baptized,
Christianized Greek face! A cross between Venus
and the Virgin Mary! The outlines were purely, severely
classical, such as I have since seen in the Psyche of the
Naples gallery; but the large, tremulous, pathetic eyes
redeemed them from statuesque coldness. They were eyes
that thought, that looked deep into life, death, and eternity—
so I said to myself as I gazed down on her, and held
my breath with a kind of religious awe. The vision was all
in white, as such visions must be, and the gauzy crape bonnet
with its flowers upon her head, dissolved under my
eyes into a sort of sacred aureole, such as surrounds the
heads of saints. I saw her, and only her, through the remaining
hour of church. I studied every movement. The
radiant eyes were fixed upon the minister, and with an
expression so sadly earnest that I blushed for my own
wandering thoughts, and began to endeavor to turn my
mind to the truths I was hearing told; but, after all, I
thought more about her than the discourse. I saw her
search the hymn-book for the hymn, and wished that I
were down there to find it for her. I saw her standing
up, and looking down at her hymns with the wonderful eyes
veiled by long lashes, and singing—

How miserably gross, and worldly, and unworthy I felt

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

at that moment! How I longed for an ideal, superhuman
spirituality,—something that should make me worthy to
touch the hem of her garment!

When the blessing was prnounced, I hastened down and
stood where I might see her as she passed out of church.
I had not been alone in my discoveries: there had been
dozens of others that saw the same star, and there were
whisperings, and elbowings, and consultings, as a knot of
juniors and seniors stationed themselves as I had done,
to see her pass out.

As she passed by she raised her eyes slowly, and as it
were by accident, and they fell like a ray of sunlight on one
of our number,—Jim Fellows—who immediately bowed.
A slight pink flush rose in her cheeks as she gracefully
returned the salutation, and passed on. Jim was instantly
the great man of the hour; he knew her, it seems.

“It's Miss Ellery, of Portland. Have n't you heard of
her?” he said, with an air of importance. “She 's the great
beauty of Portland. They call her the `little divinity.'
Met her last summer, at Mount Desert,” he added, with
the comfortable air of a man in possession of the leading
fact of the hour—the fact about which everybody else is
inquiring.

I walked home behind her in a kind of trance, disdaining
to join in what I thought the very flippant and unworthy
comments of the boys. I saw the last wave of her white
garments as she passed between the two evergreens in
front of deacon Brown's square white house, which at that
moment became to me a mysterious and glorified shrine;
there the angel held her tabernacle.

At this moment I met Miss Dotha Brown, the deacon's
eldest daughter, a rosy-cheeked, pleasant-faced girl, to
whom I had been introduced the week before. Instantly
she was clothed upon with a new interest in my eyes, and
I saluted her with empressement; if not the rose, she at
least was the clay that was imbibing the perfume of the
rose; and I don't doubt that my delight at seeing her

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

assumed the appearance of personal admiration. “What a
charming Sunday,” I said, with emphasis. “Perfectly charming,”
said Miss Brown, sympathetically.

“You have an interesting young friend staying with you,
I observe,” said I.

“Who, Miss Ellery? oh, yes. Oh! Mr. Henderson, she
is the sweetest girl!” said Dotha, with effusion.

I did n't doubt it, and listened eagerly to her praises, and
was grateful to Miss Brown for the warm invitation to
“call” which followed. Miss Ellery was to make them a
long visit, and she would be so happy to introduce me.

That evening Miss Ellery was a topic of excited discussion
in our entry, and Jim Fellows plumed himself largely
on his Mount Desert experiences, which he related in a
way to produce the impression that he had been regarded
with a favorable eye by the divinity.

I was in a state of silent indignation, at him, at all the
rest of the boys, at everybody in general, being fully persuaded
that they were utterly incapable of understanding
or appreciating this wonderful creature.

“Hal, why don't you talk?” said one of them to me, when
I had sat silent, pretending to read for a long time; “What
do you think of her?”

“Oh, I'm no ladies' man, as you all know,” I said, evasively,
and actually pretended not to have remarked Miss
Ellery except in a cursory manner.

Then followed a period of weeks and months, when that
one image was never for a moment out of my thoughts.
By a strange law of our being, a certain idea can accompany
us everywhere, not stopping or interrupting the course
of the thought, but going on in a sort of shadowy way with
it, as an invisible presence.

The man or woman who cherishes an ideal is always
liable to this accident, that the spiritual image often descends
like a mantle, and invests some very ordinary person,
who is, for the time being, transfigured,—“a woman
clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet.”

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

It is not what there is in the person, but what there is in
us, that gives this passage in life its critical power. It would
seem as if there were in some men, and some women,
preparation for a grand interior illumination and passion,
like that hoard of mystical gums and spices which the
phenix was fabled to prepare for its funeral pile; all the
aspiration and poetry and romance, the upheaval toward an
infinite and eternal good, a divine purity and rest, may be
enkindled by the touch of a very ordinary and earthly
hand, and, burning itself out, leave only cold ashes of experience.

Miss Ellery was a well-bred young lady, of decorous and
proper demeanor, of careful religious education, of no particular
strength either of mind or emotion, good tempered,
and with an instinctive approbativeness that made her
desirous to please every body, which created for her the
reputation that Miss Brown expressed in calling her “a
sweet girl.” She was always most agreeable to those with
whom she was thrown, and for the time being appeared
to be, and was sincerely interested in them; but her mind
was like a well-polished looking-glass, retaining not a
trace of anything absent or distant.

She was gifted by nature with wonderful beauty, and
beauty of that peculiar style that stirs the senses of the
poetical and the ideal; her gentle approbativeness, and
the graceful facility of her manner, were such as not at
least to destroy the visions which her beauty created. In a
quiet way she enjoyed being adored—made love to, but she
never overstepped the bounds of strict propriety. She received
me with graciousness, and I really think found something
in my society which was agreeably stimulating to
her. I was somewhat out of the common track of her
adorers; my ardor and enthusiasm gave her a new emotion.
I wrote poems to her, which she read with a graceful pensiveness
and laid away among her trophies in her private
writing-desk. I called her my star, my inspiration, my
ight, and she beamed down on me with a pensive purity.
“Yes, she was delighted to have me read Tennyson to her,”

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

and many an hour when I should have been studying, I
was lounging in the little front parlor of the Brown house,
fancying myself Sir Galahad, and reading with emotion,
how his “blade was strong, because his heart was pure;”
and Miss Ellery murmured “How lovely!” and I was in
paradise.

And then there came wonderful moonlight evenings—
evenings when every leaf stirring had a penciled reproduction
flickering in light and shade on the turf; and we
walked together under arches of elm trees, and I talked and
quoted poetry; and she listened and assented in the sweetest
manner possible. All my hopes, my plans, my dreams,
my speculations, my philosophies, came out to sun themselves
under the magic of those lustrous eyes. Her replies
and utterances were greatly in disproportion to mine; but
I received them, and made much of them, as of old the
priests of Delphi did with those of the inspired maiden.
There must be deep meaning in it all, because she was a
priestess; and I was not backward to supply it.

I have often endeavored to analyze the sources of the
illusion cast over men by such characters as that of Miss
Ellery. In their case the instinctive action of approbativeness
assumes the semblance of human sympathy, and brings
them for the time being into the life-sphere, and under the
influence, of any person whom they wish to please, so that
they with a temporary sincerity reflect back the ideas and
feelings of others. There is just the same illusive sort of
charm in this reflection of our own thoughts and emotions
from another mind, as there is in the reflection of objects in
a placid lake. There is no warmth and no reality to it;
and yet, for the time being, it is often the most entrancing
thing in the world, and gives back to you the glow of your
own heart, the fervor of your imagination, and even every
little flower of fancy, and twig of feeling, with a wonderful
faithfulness of reproduction.

It is not real sympathy, because, like the image in the
lake, it is only there when you are present; and when you
are away, reflects with equal facility the next comer.

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

But men always have been, and to the end of time always
will be, fascinated by such women, and will suppose
this mere reflecting power of a highly polished surface to
be the sympathetic response for which the heart longs.

So I had no doubt that Miss Ellery was a woman of all
sorts of high literary tastes and moral heroisms, for there
was nothing so high or so deep in the aspirations of poets or
sages in my readings to her, that could not be reflected
and glorified in those wonderful eyes.

Neither are such women hypocrites, as they are often
called. What they give back to you is for the time being
a sincere reflection, and if there is no depth to it, if it
passes away with the passing hour, it is simply because
their natures—smooth, shallow, and cold—have no deeper
power of retention.

The fault lies in expecting more of a thing than there is
in its nature—a fault we shall more or less all go on committing
till the great curtain falls.

I wrote all about her to my mother; and received the usual
cautionary maternal epistle, reminding me that I was yet
far from that goal in life when I was warranted in asking
any woman to be my wife; and suggesting that my taste
might later with maturity; warning me against premature
commitments—in short, saying all that good, anxious
mothers usually say to young juniors in college in similar
circumstances.

In reply, I told my mother that I had found a woman
worthy the devotion of a life—a woman who would be inspiration
and motive and reward. I extolled her purity
and saintliness. I told my mother that she was forming
and leading me to all that was holy and noble. In short I
meant to win her though the seven labors of Hercules were
to be performed seven times over to reach her.

Now the fact is, my mother might have saved herself
her anxiety. Miss Ellery was perfectly willing to be my
guiding star, my inspiration, my light, within reasonable
limits, while making a visit in an otherwise rather dull town.

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

She liked to be read to; she liked the consciousness of
being incessantly admired, and would have made a very
good image for some Church of the Perpetual Adoration;
but after all, Miss Ellery was as incapable of forming an
ineligible engagement of marriage with a poor college
student, as the most sensible and collected of Walter Scott's
heroines.

Looking back upon this part of my life, I can pity myself
with as quiet and dispassionate a perception as if I were a
third person. The illusion, for the time being, was so real,
the feelings called up by it so honest and earnest and
sacred; and supposing there had been a tangible reality to
it—what might not such a woman have made of me, or of
any man?

And suppose it pleased God to send forth an army of such
women, as I thought her to be, among the lost children of
men, women armed not only with the outward and visible
sign of beauty, but with that inward and spiritual grace
which beauty typifies, one might believe that the golden age
would soon be back upon us.

Miss Ellery adroitly avoided all occasions of any critical
commitment on my part or on her's. Women soon learn a vast
amount of tact and diplomacy on that subject: but she gave
me to understand that I was peculiarly congenial to her, and
encouraged the outflow of all my romance with the gentlest
atmosphere of indulgence. To be sure, I was not the only
one whom she thus held with bonds of golden gossamer. She
reigned a queen, and had a court at her feet, and the
deacon's square, white, prosaic house bristled with the activity
and vivacity of Miss Ellery's adorers.

Among them, Will Marshall was especially distinguished.
Will was a senior, immensely rich, good-natured as the
longest summer day is long, but so idle and utterly incapable
of culture that only the liberality of the extra sum paid to
a professor who held him in guardianship secured his stay in
college classes. It has been my observation that money
will secure a great variety of things in this lower world, and

p467-085 [figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

among others, will carry a very stupid fellow through college.

Will was a sort of favorite with us all. His good nature
was without limit, and he scattered his money with a free
hand, and so we generally spoke of him as “Poor Will;” a
nice fellow, if he couldn't write a decent note, and blundered
through all his recitations.

Will laid himself, so to speak, at Miss Ellery's feet. He
was flush of bouquets and confectionery. He caused the village
livery stable to import forthwith a turnout worthy to be
a car of Venus herself.

I saw all this, but it never entered my head that Miss
Ellery would cast a moment's thought other than those of
the gentlest womanly compassion on poor Will Marshall.

The time of the summer vacation drew nigh, and with the
close of the term closed the vision of my idyllic experiences
with Miss Ellery. To the last, she was so gentle and easy
to be entreated. Her lovely eyes cast on me such bright
encouraging glances; and she accorded me a farewell moonlight
ramble, wherein I walked not on earth, but in the
seventh heaven of felicity. Of course there was nothing
definite. I told her that I was a poor soldier of fortune, but
might I only wear her name in my bosom, it would be a
sacred talisman, and give strength to my arm, and she
sighed, and looked lovely, and she did not say me nay.

I went home to my mother, and wearied that much-enduring
woman, all through the vacation, with the hot and
cold fits of my fever. Blessed souls! these mothers, who
bear and watch and rear the restless creatures, who by
and by come to them with the very heart gone out of them
for love of another woman—some idle girl, perhaps, that
never knew what it was either to love or care, and that plays
with hearts as kittens do with pinballs!

I wrote to Miss Ellery letters long, overflowing, and got
back little neatly-worded notes on scented paper, speaking
in a general way of the charms of friendship.

But the first news that met me on my return to college
broke my soap-bubble at one touch.

MY DREAM-WIFE.
"I told her that I was a poor soldier of fortune, but might I only wear
her name in my bosom, it would be a sacred talisman, and give strength
to my arm; and she sighed and looked lovely, and she did not say me nay." [figure description] Image of Harry and his dream-wife standing near a grove of trees. Both are dressed quite formally: Harry in a suit, dress shoes, bow tie and hat; his dream wife in a long frilly dress with bustle and small hat, with a veilin the back and giant feather on top, that is tied in a large bow under her neck. She is looking demurely to the side as Harry leans in to kiss her.[end figure description]

[figure description] Blank Page.[end figure description]

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

“Hurrah! Hal—who do you guess is engaged?”

“I don't know.”

“Guess.”

“I couldn't guess.”

“Why, Miss Ellery—engaged to Bill Marshall.”

Alnaschar, in the Arabian tale, could not have been more
astonished when his basket of glass-ware fell in glittering
nothingness. I stood stupid with astonishment.

“She engaged to Will Marshall!—why, boys, he's a fool!”

“But you see he's rich. Oh, it's all arranged; they are to be
married next month, and go to Europe for their wedding
tour,” said Jim Fellows.

And so my idol fell from its pedestal—and my first dream
dissolved.

p467-089 CHAPTER VII. THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION.

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

MISS ELLERY was sufficiently mistress of herself,
and of circumstances, to close our little pastoral
in the most graceful and amiable manner possible.

I received a beautiful rose-scented note from her, saying
that the very kind interest in her happiness which I always
had expressed, and the extremely pleasant friendship
which had arisen between us, made her desirous of informing
me, &c., &c. Thereupon followed the announcement
of her engagement, terminating with the assurance that
whatever new ties she might form, or scenes she might visit,
she should ever cherish a pleasant remembrance of the
delightful hours spent beneath the elms of X., and indulge
the kindest wishes for my future success and happiness.

I, of course, crushed the rose-scented missive in my hand,
in the most approved tragical style, and felt that I had been
deceived, betrayed and undone. I passed forthwith into
that cynical state of young manhood, in which one learns
for the first time what a mere unimportant drop his own
most terribly earnest and excited feelings may be in the
tumbling ocean of the existing world.

This is a valley of humiliation, which lies, in very many
cases, just a day's walk beyond the palace, beautiful with
all its fascinations.

The moral geographer, John Bunyan, to whom we are
indebted for much wholesome information, tells us that
while it is extremely difficult to descend gracefully into this
valley, and pilgrims generally accomplish it at the expense
of many a sore trip and stumble, yet when once they
are fairly down, it presents many advantages of climate
and soil not other where found.

The shivering to pieces of the first ideal, while it breaks
ruthlessly and scatters much that is really and honestly

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

good and worthy, breaks up no less a certain stock of unconscious
self conceit, which young people are none the
worse for having lessened.

The very assumption, so common in the early days of
life, that we have feelings of a peculiar sacredness above
the comprehension of the common herd, and for which only
the selectest sympathy is possible, is one savoring a little
too much of the unregenerate natural man, to be safely
let alone to grow and thrive.

Natures, in particular, where ideality is largely in the
ascendant, are apt to begin life with the scheme of building
a high and thick stone wall of reticence around themselves,
and enthroning therein an idol, whose rites and service are
to be performed with a contemptuous indifferenceto all the
rest of mankind.

When this idol is suddenly disenchanted by some stroke
of inevitable reality, and we discern that the image which
we had supposed to be the shrine of a divinity, is only a
very earthly doll, stuffed with saw-dust,one's pinnacles and
battlements—the whole temple in short, that we have prided
ourselves on, comes tumbling down about us like the walls
of Jericho, not without a certain sense of the ridiculous.
Though, like other afflictions, this is not for the present
joyous, still the space thus cleared in our mind may be so
cultivated as afterwards to bring forth peaceable fruits of
righteousness.

In my case, my idol was utterly defaced and destroyed
in my eyes, because I could not conceal from myself that
she was making a marriage wholly without the one element
that above all others marriage requires.

Miss Ellery was perfectly well aware of the mental inferiority
of poor Bill Marshall, and had listened unreprovingly
to the half-contemptuous pity with which it was customary
among us to speak of him. I remembered how
patronizingly I had often talked of him to her, “Really
not a bad fellow—only a little weak, you see;” and the
pretty, graceful drollery in her eyes. I remembered things

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

that these same eyes had looked at me, when he blundered
and miscalled words in conversation, and a thousand sayings
and intimations, each by itself indefinite as the boundary
between two tints of the rainbow, by which she showed
a superior sense of pleasure in my conversation and society.

And was all this acting and insincerity? I thought not.
I was and am fully convinced that had I only been possessed
of the wealth of Bill Marshall, Miss Ellery would
infinitely have preferred me as a life companion; and it was
no very serious amount of youthful vanity to imagine that
I should have proved a more entertaining one. I can easily
imagine that she made the decision with some gentle regret
at first,—regret dried up like morning dew in the full
sunlight of wedding diamonds, and capable of being put
completely to sleep upon a couch of cashmere shawls.

With what indignant bitterness did I listen to all the
details of the impending wedding from fluent Jim Fellows,
who, being from Portland and well posted in all the
gossip of the circle in which she moved, enlightened our
entry with daily and weekly bulletins of the grandeur and
splendors that were being, and to be.

“Boys, only think! Her wedding present from him is a
set of diamonds valued at twenty-five thousand dollars.
Bob Rivers saw them on exhibition at Tiffany's. Then she
has three of the most splendid cashmere shawls that ever
were imported into Maine. Captain Sautelle got them from
an Indian Prince, and there's no saying what they would
have cost at usual rates. I tell you Bill is going it in style,
and they are going to be married with drums and trumpets,
cymbals and dances; such a wedding as will make old Portland
stare; and then off they are going to travel no end of
time in Europe, and see all the kingdoms of the world,
and the glory of them.”

Now, I suppose none of us doubted that could Miss Ellery
have attained the diamonds and the cashmeres and the
fortune, with all its possibilities of luxury and self-indulgence,
without the addition of the husband, nothing would

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

have been wanting to complete her good fortune; but it
is a condition in the way of a woman's making a fortune by
marriage, as it was with Faust's compact with an unmentionable
party, that it can only be ratified by the sacrifice
of herself—herself, and for life! A sacrifice most awful
and holy when made in pure love, and most fearful when
made for any other consideration. The fact that Miss
Ellery could make it was immediate and complete disenchantment
to me.

Mine is not, I suppose, the only case where the ideal
which has been formed under the brooding influence of a
noble mother is shattered by the hand of a woman. Some
woman, armed with the sacramental power of beauty, enkindles
the highest manliness of the youth, and is, in his
eyes, the incarnate form of purity and unworldly virtue, the
high prize andincitement to valor, patience, constancy and
courage, in the great life-battle.

But she sells herself before his eyes, for diamonds and
laces, and trinkets and perfumes; for the liberty of walking
on soft carpets and singing in gilded cages; and all the
world laughs at his simplicity in supposing that, a fair
chance given, any woman would ever do otherwise. Is not
beauty woman's capital in trade, the price put into her
hand to get whatever she needs; and are not the most
beautiful, as a matter of course, destined prizes of the
richest?

Miss Ellery's marriage was to me a great awakening, a
coming out of a life of pure ideas and sentiment into one
of external realities. Hitherto, I had lived only with people
all whose measures and valuations had been those relating
to the character—the intellect and the heart. Never in my
father's house had I heard the gaining of money spoken of
as success in life, except as far as money was needed to
advance education, and education was a means for doing
good. My father had his zeal, his earnestness, his exultations,
but they all related to things to be done in his life-work;
the saving of souls, the conversion of sinners, the

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

gathering of churches, the repression of intemperance and
immorality, the advancement of education. My elder brothers
had successfully entered the ministry under his influence,
and in counsels with them where to settle, I had never heard
the question of salary or worldly support even discussed.
The first, the only question I ever heard considered, was
What work was needed to be done, and what fitness for the
doing of it; taking for granted the record, that where the
Kingdom of God and its righteousness were first sought,
all things would be added.

Thus all my visions of future life had in them something
of the innocent verdancy of the golden age, when noble
men strove for the favor of fair women, by pureness, by
knowledge, by heroism,—and the bravest won the crown
from the hand of the most beautiful.

And suddenly to my awakened eyes the whole rushing
cavalcade of fashionable life swept by, bearing my princess,
amid waving feathers and flashing jewels and dazzling robes
and merry laughs and jests, leaving me by the way-side
dazed and covered with dust, to plod on alone.

Now first I felt the shame which comes over a young man,
that he has not known the world as old wordlings know it.

In the discussions among the boys, relating to this marriage,
I first learned the power of that temptation which
comes upon every young man to look on wealth as the first
object in a life race.

Woman is by order of nature the conservator of the ideal.
Formed of finer clay, with nicer perceptions, and refined
fiber, she is the appointed priestess to guard the poetry of
life from sacrilege; but if she be bribed to betray the
shrine, what hope for us? “If the salt have lost its savor,
wherewith shall it be salted?”

My acquaintance with Miss Ellery had brought me out
of my scholastic retirement, and made me an acquaintance
of the whole bevy of the girls of X. Miss Ellery had
been invited and fêted in all the families, and her special
train of adorers had followed her, and thus I was “au

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

courant” of all the existing girl-world of our little town.
It was curious to remark what a silken flutter of wings,
what an endless volubility of tongues there was, about this
engagement and marriage, and how, on the whole, it was
treated as the height of splendor and good fortune. My
rosy-faced friend, Miss Dotha, was invited to the festival as
bridesmaid, and returned thereafter “trailing clouds of
glory” into the primitive circles of X; and my cynical
bitterness of soul took a sort of perverse pleasure in the amplifications
and discussions that I constantly heard in the
tea-drinking circles of the town.

“Oh, girls, you've no idea about those diamonds,” said
Miss Dotha; “great big diamonds as large as peas, and just
as clear as water! Bill Marshall made them send orders
to Europe specially for the purpose; then she had a pearl
set that his mother gave, and his sister gave an amethyst
set for a breakfast suit! and you ought to have seen the
presents! It was a perfect bazar! The Marshalls are an
enormously rich family, and they all came down splendidly:
old uncle Tom Marshall gave a solid silver dining set
embossed with gold, and old Aunt Tabitha Marshall gave
a real Sévres china tea-set, that was taken out of one of
the royal palaces in France, at the time of the French
Revolution. Captain Atkins was in France about the time
they were sacking palaces, and doing all such things, and he
brought away quite a number of things that found their
way into some of these rich old Portland families. Her
wedding veil was given by old Grandmamma Marshall, and
was said to have been one that belonged to Queen Marie
Antoinette, taken by some of those horrid women when they
sacked the Tuilleries, and sold to Captain Atkins; at any
rate, it was the most wonderful point lace, just like an old
picture.”

Fancy the drawing of breaths, the exclamations, the groans
of delight, from a knot of pretty, well-dressed, nice country
girls, at these wonderful glimpses into Paradise.

“After all,” I said, “I think this custom of loading down a

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

woman with finery just at her marriage hour, is giving it
when she is least able to appreciate it. Why distract her
with gew-gaws at the very moment when her heart must
be so full of a new affection that she cares for nothing else?
Miss Ellery is probably so lost in her love for Mr. Marshall,
that she scarcely gives a thought to these things, and really
forgets that she has them. It would be much more in point
to give them to some girl that hasn't a lover.”

I spoke with a simple, serious air, as if I had most perfect
faith in my words, and a general gentle smile of amusement
went round the circle, rippling into a laugh out-right,
on the faces of some of the gayer girls. Miss Dotha said:

“Oh, come, now, Mr. Henderson, you are too severe.”

“Severe!” said I; “I can't understand what you mean,
Miss Dotha. You don't mean, of course, to intimate that
Miss Ellery is not in love with the man she has married?”

“Oh, now!” said Miss Dotha, laughing, “you know perfectly,
Mr. Henderson—we all know—it's pretty well understood,
that this wasn't exactly what you call a lovematch;
in fact, I know,” she added with the assurance of
a confidant, “that she had great difficulty in making up
her mind; but her family were very anxious for the match,
and his family thought it would be such a good thing for
him to marry and settle down, you know, so one way and
another she concluded to take him.”

“And, after all, Will Marshall is a good-natured creature,”
said Miss Smith.

“And going to Europe is such a temptation,” said Miss
Brown.

“And she must marry some time,” said Miss Jones, “and
one can't have every thing, you know. Will is certain to be
kind to her, and let her have her own way.”

“For my part,” said pretty Miss Green, “I'm free to say
that I don't blame any girl that has a chance to get such
a fortune, for doing it as Miss Ellery has. I've always been
poor, and pinched and plagued; never can go any where,
or see anything, or dress as I want to; and if I had a chance,

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

such as Miss Ellery had, I think I should be a fool not to
take it.”

“Well,” said Miss Black, reflectively, “the only question
is, couldn't Miss Ellery have waited and found a man who
had more intellect, and more culture, whom she could respect
and love, and who had money, too? She had such
extraordinary beauty and such popular manners, I should
have thought she might.”

“Oh, well,” said Miss Dotha, “she was getting on—she
was three-and-twenty already—and nobody of just the right
sort had turned up—`a bird in the hand'—you know. After
all, I dare say she can love Will Marshall well enough.”

Well enough! The cool philosophic tone of this phrase
smote on my ear curiously.

“And pray, fair ladies, how much is `well enough?”'
said I.

“Well enough to keep the peace,” said Miss Green, “and
each let the other alone, to go their own ways and have no
fighting.”

Miss Green was a pretty, spicy little body, with a pair of
provoking hazel eyes; who talked like an unprincipled
little pirate, though she generally acted like a nice woman.
In less than a year after, by the by, she married a home
missionary, in Maine, and has been a devoted wife and
mother in a little parish somewhere in the region of Skowhegan,
ever since.

But I returned to my room gloriously misanthropic, and
for some time my thoughts, like bees, were busy gathering
bitter honey. I gave up visiting in the tea-drinking circles
of X. I got myself a dark sombrero hat, which I slouched
down over my eyes in bandit style when I walked the street
and met with any of my former gentle acquaintances. I
wrote my mother most sublime and awful letters on the
inconceivable vanity and nothingness of human life. I
read Plato and æschylus, and Emerson's Essays, and
began to think myself an old Philosopher risen from the
dead. There was a melancholy gravity about all my college

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

exercises, and I began to look down on young freshmen
and sophomores with a serene compassion, as a sage who has
passed through the vale of years and learned that all is
vanity.

The valley of humiliation may have its charms—it is said
that there are many flowers that grow there, and nowhere
else, but for all that, a young fellow, so far as I know,
generally walks through the first part of it in rather a surly
and unamiable state.

To be sure, had I been wise, I should have been ready to
return thanks on my knees for my disappointment. True,
the doll was stuffed with saw-dust, but it was not my
doll. I had not learned the cheat when it was forever too
late to help myself, and was not condemned to spend life in
vain attempts to make a warm, living friend of a cold
marble statue. Many a man has succeeded in getting his
first ideal, and been a miserable man always thereafter, and
therefor.

I have lived to hear very tranquilly of Mrs. Will Marshall's
soirées and parties, as she reigns in the aristocratic circles
of New York; and to see her, still like a polished looking-glass,
gracefully reflecting every one's whims and tastes
and opinions with charming sauvity, and forgetting them
when their backs are turned; and to think that she is the
right thing in the right place—a crowned Queen of Vanity
Fair.

I have become, too, very tolerant and indulgent to the
women who do as she did,—use their own charms as the
coin wherewith to buy the riches and honors of the world.

The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting
and locking every door through which a woman could step
into wealth, except the door of marriage. All vigor and
energy, such as men put forth to get this golden key of life,
is condemned and scouted as unfeminine; and a woman
belonging to the upper classes, who undertakes to get
wealth by honest exertion and independent industry, loses
caste, and is condemned by a thousand voices as an oddity

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

and a deranged person. A woman gifted with beauty, who
sells it to buy wealth, is far more leniently handled. That
way of getting money is not called unwomanly; and so long
as the whole force of the world goes that way, such marriages
as Miss Ellery's and Bill Marshall's will be considered en
régle.

p467-099 CHAPTER VIII. THE BLUE MISTS.

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

MY college course was at last finished satisfactorily
to my mother and friends. What joy there is to
be got in college honors was mine. I studied
faithfully and graduated with the valedictory.

Nevertheless I came back home again a sadder if not a
wiser man than I went. In fact a tendency to fits of despondency
and dejection had been growing upon me in these
last two years of my college life.

With all the self-confidence and conceit that is usually
attributed to young men, and of which they have their
share undoubtedly, they still have their times of walking
through troubled waters, and sinking in deep mire where
there is no standing.

During my last year, the question “What are you good
for?” had often borne down like a nightmare upon me.
When I entered college all was distant, golden, indefinite,
and I was sure that I was good for almost anything that
could be named. Nothing that ever had been attained by
man looked to me impossible. Riches, honor, fame, any
thing that any other man unassisted had wrought out for
himself with his own right arm, I could work out also.

But as I measured myself with real tasks, and as I rubbed
and grated against other minds and whirled round and
round in the various experiences of college life, I grew
smaller and smaller in my own esteem, and oftener and
oftener in my lonely hours it seemed as if some evil genius
delighted to lord it over me and sitting at my bed-side or
fire-side to say “What are you good for, to what purpose
all the pains and money that have been thrown away on

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

you? You'll never be anything; you'll only mortify your
poor mother that has set her heart on you, and make
your Uncle Jacob ashamed of you.” Can any anguish
equal the depths of those blues in which a man's whole
self hangs in suspense before his own eyes, and he doubts
whether he himself, with his entire outfit and apparatus,
body, soul, and spirit, isn't to be, after all, a complete
failure? Better, he thinks never to have been born, than to
be born to no purpose. Then first he wrestles with the
question, What is life for, and what am I to do or seek
in it? It seems to be not without purpose, that the active
life-work of the great representative Man of Men was
ushered in by a forty days dreary wandering in the wilderness
hungry, faint, and tempted of the Devil; for certainly,
after education has pretty thoroughly waked up all there
is in a man, and the time is at hand that he is to make
the decision what to do with it, there often comes a wandering,
darkened, unsettled, tempted passage in his life. In
Christ's temptations we may see all that besets the young
man.

The daily bread question, or how to get a living,—the
ambitious heavings, or the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them, all to be got by some yielding to Satan,—the
ostentations impulse to come down on the world with a rush
and a sensation,—these are mirrored in a young man's smaller
life just as they were in that great life. The whole Heavens
can be reflected in the little pool as in the broad ocean!

All these elements of unrest had been boiling in my mind
during the last year. Who wants to be nothing in the great
world? No young man at this time of his course. The wisdom
of becoming nothing that he may possess all things is
too high for this stage of immaturity.

I came into college as simple, and contented, and satisfied,
as a huckleberry bush in a sweet-fern pasture. I felt
rich enough for all I wanted to do, and my path of life lay
before me defined with great simplicity.

But my intimacy with Miss Ellery, her marriage and all

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

that pertained to it, had brought before my eyes the world
of wealth and fashion, a world which a young collegian
may try to despise, and about which he may write the most
disparaging moral reflections, but which has, after all, its
power to trouble his soul. The consciousness of being gloveless,
and threadbare in toilet, comes over one in certain
atmospheres, as the consciousness of nakedness to Adam
and Eve. It is true that in the institution where I attended,
as in many other rural colleges in New England, I was backed
up by a majority of healthy-minded, hardy men, of real
mark and worth, children of honest toil and self-respecting
poverty, who were bravely working their way up through
education to the prizes and attainments of life. Simple
economies were therefore well understood and respected in
the college.

Nevertheless there is something not altogether vulgar in
the attractions which wealth enables one to throw around
himself. I was a social favorite in college, and took a stand
among my fellows as a writer and speaker, and so had a
considerable share of that sincere sort of flattery which college
boys lavish on each other. I was invited and made
much of by some whose means were ample, whose apartments
were luxuriously and tastefully furnished, but who
were none the less good scholars and high-minded gentlemanly
fellows.

In their vacations I had been invited to their houses, and
had seen all the refinement, the repose, the ease and the quietude
that comes from the possession of wealth in the hands of
those who know how to use it. Wealth in such hands gives
opportunities of the broadest culture, ability to live in the
wisest manner, freedom to choose the healthiest surroundings
both for mind and body, not restricted by considerations
of expense; and how could I think it anything else than
an object ardently to be sought?

It is true, my rich friends seemed equally to enjoy the vacations
in my little, plain, mountain home. People genererally
are insensible to advantages they have always enjoyed,

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and have an appetite for something new; so the homely rusticity
of our house, the perfect freedom from conventionalities,
the wild, mountain scenery, the wholesome detail of
farm life, the barn with its sweet stores of hay, and its
nooks and corners and hiding places, the gathering in of
our apples, and the making of cider, the corn-huskings and
Thanksgiving frolics, seemed to have their interest and
delights to them, and they often told me I was a lucky fellow
to be born to such pleasant surroundings. But I thought
within myself, It is easy to say this when you feel the control
of thousands in your pocket, when if you are tired you can
go to any land or country of the earth for change of scene.

In fact we see in history that the crusade of St. Francis in
favor of Poverty was not begun by a poor man, but by a
young nobleman who had known nothing hitherto but
wealth and luxury. It is from the rich, if from any, that our
grasping age must learn renunciation and simplicity. It
is easier to renounce a good which one has tried and of which
one knows all the attendant thorns and stings than to renounce
one that has been only painted by the imagination,
and whose want has been keenly felt. When I came
to the College I came from the controlling power of home
influences. At an early age I had felt the strength of that
sphere of spirituality that encircled the lives of my parents,
and, being very receptive and sympathetic, had reflected in
my childish nature all their feelings.

I had renounced the world before I knew what the world
was. I had joined my father's church and was looked upon
as one destined in time to take up my father's work of the
ministry.

Four years had passed and I came back to my mother,
weakened and doubting, indisposed to take up the holy
work to which in my early days I looked forward with enthusiasm,
yet with all the sadness which comes from indecision
as to one's life-object.

To be a minister is to embrace a life of poverty, of toil, of
self-denial. To do this, not only with cheerfulness but with

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an enthusiasm which shall bear down all before it, which
shall elevate it into the region of moral poetry and ideality,
requires a fervid, unshaken faith. The man must feel the
power of an endless life, be lifted above things material
and temporal to things sublime and eternal.

Now it is one peculiarity of the professors of the Christian
religion that they have not, at least of late years, arranged
their system of education with any wise adaptation to having
their young men come out of it Christians. In this they
differ from many other religionists. The Brahmins educate
their sons so that they shall infallibly become Brahmins;
the Jews so that they shall infallibly be Jews; the Mohammedans
so that they shall be Mohammedans; but the Christians
educate their sons so that nearly half of them turn out
unbelievers—professors of no religion at all.

There is a book which the Christian world unite in declaring
to be an infallible revelation from Heaven. It has
been the judgment of critics that the various writings in
this volume excel other writings in point of mere literary
merit as much as they do in purity and elevation of the
moral sentiment. Yet it is remarkable that the critical
study of these sacred writings in their original tongues
is not in most of our Christian colleges considered as an
essential part of the education of a Christian gentleman,
while the heathen literature of Greece and Rome is treated
as something indispensable, and to be gained at all hazards.

It is a fact that from the time that the boy begins to fit
for college, his mind is so driven and pressed with the effort
to acquire the classical literature, that there is no time to
acquire the literature of the Bible, neither is it associated
in his mind with the dignity and respect of a classical
attainment. He must be familiar with Horace and Ovid,
with Cicero and Plato, æschylus and Homer in their original
tongues, but the majestic poetry of the Old Testament, and
its sages and seers and prophets, become with every advancing
year more unintelligible to him. A thoroughly educated
graduate of most of our colleges is unprepared to read

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

intelligently many parts of Isaiah or Ezekiel or Paul's epistles.
The scripture lessons of the church service often
strike on his ear as a strange quaint babble of peculiar
sounds, without rhyme or reason. Uncultured and uneducated
in all that should enable him to understand them, he
is only preserved by a sort of educational awe from regarding
them as the jargon of barbarians.

Meanwhile, this literature of the Bible, strange, wierd,
sibylline, and full of unfulfilled needs and requirements of
study, is being assailed in detail through all the courses of a
boy's college life. The objections to it as a divine revelation
relate to critical questions in languages of which he is
ignorant, and yet they are everywhere; they are in the
air he breathes, they permeate all literature, they enter
into modern science, they disintegrate and wear away, bit
by bit, his reverence and his confidence.

This work had been going on insensibly in my head during
my college life, notwithstanding the loyalty of my
heart. During those years I had learned to associate the
Bible with the most sacred memories of home, with the
dearest loves of home life. It was woven with remembrances
of daily gatherings around the family altar, with
scenes of deepest emotion when I had seen my father and
mother fly to its shelter and rest upon its promises. There
were passages that never recurred to me except with the
sound of my father's vibrating voice, penetrating their
words with a never dying power. The Bible was to me
like a father and a mother, and the doubts, and queries,
the respectful suggestions of incredulity, the mildly suggestive
abatements of its authority, which met me, now here
and now there, in all the course of my readings and studies,
were as painful to me as reflections cast on my father's
probity or my mother's honor.

I would not listen to them, I would not give them
voice, I smothered them in the deepest recesses of my
heart, while meantime the daily pressure that came on me
in the studies and requirements of college life left me

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

neither leisure nor inclination to pursue the researches that
should clear them up.

To be sure, nothing is so important as the soul—nothing is
of so much moment as religion, and the question “Is this
God's book or is it not?” is the question of questions. It
underlies all things, and he who is wise would drop all other
things and undergo any toil and make any studies that should
fit him to judge understandingly on this point. But I speak
from experience when I say that the course of study in
christian America is so arranged that a boy, from the grammar
school upward till he graduates, is so fully pressed and
overladen with all other studies that there is no probability
that he will find the time or the inclination for such investigation.

In most cases he will do just what I did, throw himself
upon the studies proposed to him, work enough to meet
the demands of the hour, and put off the acquisition of that
more important knowledge to an indefinite future, and sigh,
and go backward in his faith.

But without faith or with a faith trembling and uncertain,
how is a man to turn his back on the world that is before
him—the world that he can see, hear, touch and taste—to
work for the world that is unseen and eternal?

I will not repeat the flattering words that often fell on my
ear and said to me. “You can make your way anywhere;
you can be anything you please.” And then there were
voices that said in my heart, “I may have wealth, and with it
means of power, of culture, of taste, of luxury. If I only set
out for that, I may get it.” And then, in contrast, came that
life I had seen my father live, in its grand simplicity, in
its enthusiastic sincerity, in its exulting sense of joy in what
he was doing, down to the last mortal moment, and I wished,
oh, how fervently! that I could believe as he did. But
to be a minister merely from a sense of duty—to bear the
burden of poverty with no perception of the unspeakable
riches which Christ hath placed therein—who would not
shrink from a life so grating and so cold? To choose the

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ministry as a pedestal for oratory and self-display and poetic
religious sentiment, and thus to attain distinction and easy
position, and the command of fashionable luxury, seemed
to me a temptation to desecration still more terrible, and
I dreaded the hour which should close my college life and
make a decision inevitable.

It was with a sober and sad heart that I closed my college
course and parted from class-mates—jolly fellows with
whom had rolled away the four best years of my life—years'
that as one goes on afterwards in age look brighter and
brighter in the distance. It was a lonesome and pokerish
operation to dismantle the room that had long been my
home, to bargain away my furniture, pack my books,
and bid a final farewell to all the old quiddities and oddities
that I had grown attached to in the quaint little village.
The parting from Alma Mater is a second leaving of
home—and this time for the great world. There is no staving
off the battle of life now—the tents are struck, the
camp-fires put out, and one must be on the march.

p467-107 CHAPTER IX. AN OUTLOOK INTO LIFE.

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

MY coming back to my native town was an event of
public notoriety. I had won laurels, and as I was
the village property, my laurels were duly commented
on and properly appreciated. Highland was one of
those thrifty Yankee settlements where every house seems to
speak the people so well-to-do, and so careful, and progressive
in all the means of material comfort. There was not a
house in it that was not in a sort of healthy, growing state,
receiving, from time to time, some accession that showed
that the Yankee aspiration was busy, stretching and enlarging.
This had a new bay-window, and that had a new
veranda; the other, new, tight, white picket fences all round
the yard. Others rejoiced in a fresh coat of paint. But all
were alive, and apparently self-repairing. There was to
every house the thrifty wood-pile, seasoning for winter;
the clean garden, with its wealth of fruit and its gay borders
of flowers; and every new kind of flower, and every
choice new fruit, found somewhere a patron who was trying
a hand at it.

Highland was a place worth living in just for its scenery.
It was at that precise point of the country where the hills
are inspiriting, vivacious, reminding one of the Psalm,—
“The little hills rejoice on every side!” Mountains are
grand, but they also are dreary. For a near prospect they
overpower too much, they shut out the sun, they have savage
propensities, untamable by man, shown once in a while
in land-slides and freshets; but these half-grown hills uplift
one like waves of the sea. In summer they are wonderful

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

in all possible shades of greenness; in autumn they are like
a mystical rainbow—an ocean of waves, flamboyant with
every wonderful device of color; and even when the leaves
are gone, in November, and nothing left but the bristling
steel-blue outlines of trees, there is a wonderful purple
haze, a veil of dreamy softness, around them, that makes
you think you never saw them so beautiful.

So I said to myself, as I came rambling over hill and dale
back to the old homestead, and met my mother's bright
face of welcome at the door. I was the hero of the hour
at home, and everything had been prepared to make me
welcome. My brother, who kept the homestead, had relinquished
the prospect of a college life, and devoted himself
to farming, but looked on me as the most favored of mortals
in the attainments I had made. His young wife and
growing family of children clustered around my mother
and leaned on her experience; and as every one in the little
village knew and loved her, there was a general felicitation
and congratulation on the event of my return and my
honors.

“See him in his father's pulpit afore long,” said Deacon
Manning, who called the first evening to pay his respects;
“better try his hand at the weekly prayer meeting, and stir
us up a bit.”

“I think, Deacon,” said I, “I shall have to be one of
those that learn in silence, awhile longer. I may come to
be taught, but I certainly cannot teach.”

“Well, now, that's modest for a young fellow that's just
been through college! They commonly are as feathery and
highflying as a this year's rooster, and ready to crow
whether their voice breaks or not,” said the deacon.
`Learn in silence!' Well, that 'ere beats all for a young
man!”

I thought to myself that the good deacon little knew the
lack of faith that was covered by my humility.

Since my father's death, my mother had made her home
with my Uncle Jacob. Her health was delicate, and she

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

preferred to enjoy the honors of a grandmother at a little
distance. My Uncle Jacob had no children. Aunt Polly,
his wife, was just the softest, sleekest, most domestic dove
of a woman whose wings were ever covered with silver. I
always think of her in some soft, pearly silk, with a filmy
cap, and a half-handkerchief crossed over a gentle, motherly
bosom, soft moving, soft speaking, but with a pair of
bright, hazel eyes, keen as arrows to send their glances into
every place in her dominions. Let anybody try sending in
a false account to Aunt Polly, and they will see that the
brightness of her eyes was not merely for ornament. Yet
everything she put her hand to went so exactly, so easily,
you would have said those eyes were made for nothing but
reading, for which Aunt Polly had a great taste, and for
which she found abundance of leisure.

My mother and she were enjoying together a long and
quiet Saturday afternoon of life, reading to each other, and
quietly and leisurely discussing all that they read,—not
merely the last novel, as the fashion of women in towns
and cities is apt to be, but all the solid works of philosophy
and literature that marked the times. My uncle's house was
like a bookseller's stall,—it was overrunning with books.
The cases covered the walls; they crowded the corners
and angles; and still every noteworthy book was ordered,
to swell the stock.

My mother and aunt had read together Lecky, and
Buckle, and Herbert Spencer, with the keen critical interest
of fresh minds. Had it troubled their faith? Not
in the least; no more than it would that of Mary on the
morning after the resurrection! There is a certain moral
altitude where faith becomes knowledge, and the batwings
of doubt cannot fly so high. My mother was
dwelling in that land of Beulah, where the sun always
shineth, and the bells of the heavenly city are heard, and
the shining ones walk. All was clear to her, all bright,
all real, in “the beyond;” but that kind of evidence

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

is above the realm of heavy-footed reason. The “joy unspeakable,”
the “peace that passeth understanding,” are
things that cannot be passed from hand to hand. Else I
am quite sure my mother would have taken the crown of
joy from her head and the peace from her bosom, and
given them to me. But the “white stone with the new
name” is Christ's gift to each for himself, and “no man
knoweth it save he that receiveth it.”

But these witnesses who stand gazing into heaven are
not without their power on us who stand lower. It steadied
my moral nerves, so to speak, that my mother had read
and weighed the words that were making so much doubt
and shaking; that she fully comprehended them, and that
she smiled without fear.

She listened without distress, without anxiety, to all my
doubts and falterings. “You must pass through this; you
will be led; it will all come right,” she said; “and then
perhaps you will be the guide of others.”

I had feared to tell her that I had abandoned the purpose
of the ministry, but I found it easy.

“I would not have you embrace the ministry for anything
but a true love,” she said, “any more than I would that
you should marry a wife for any other reason. If ever
the time comes that you feel you must be that, it will be
your call; but you can be God's minister otherwise than
through the pulpit.”

“Talk over your plans with your uncle,” she said; “he
is in your father's place now.”

In fact, my uncle, having no children of his own, had
set his heart on me, and was disposed to make me heir, not
only to his very modest personal estate, but also to his
harvest of ideas and opinions,—all that backwater of
thoughts and ideas that accumulate on the mind of a man
who thinks and reads a great deal in a lonely neighborhood.
So he took me up as a companion in his daily rides
over the country.

“Well, Harry, where next?” he said to me the day after

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

my return, as we were driving together. “What are you
about? Going to try the ministry?”

“I dare not; I am not fit. I know father wanted it, and
prayed for it, and nothing would be such a joy to mother,
but—”

My uncle gave a shrewd, sidelong glance on me.

“I suppose you are like a good many fellows; an education
gives them a general shaking up, and all their beliefs
break from their lashings and go rolling and tumbling
about like spars and oil-casks in a storm on ship-board.”

“I can't say that is true of all my beliefs; but yet a great
many things that I tried to regard as certain are untied. I
have too many doubts for a teacher.”

“Who hasn't? I don't know anything in heaven or
earth that forty unanswerable questions can't be asked
about.”

“You know,” answered I, “Tennyson says,

“H'm! that depends. Doubt is very well as a sort of
constitutional crisis in the beginning of one's life; but if
it runs on and gets to be chronic, it breaks a fellow up, and
makes him morally spindling and sickly. Men that do anything
in the world must be men of strong convictions; it
won't do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and
lifting up one foot, and not knowing where to set it down
next.”

“But,” said I, “while I am passing through the constitutional
crisis, as you call it, is the very time I must make up
my mind to teach others on the most awful of all subjects.
I cannot and dare not. I must be a learner for some years
to come, and I must be a learner without any pledges,
expressed or implied, to find the truth this way or that.”

“Well,” said my uncle; “I'm not so greatly concerned
about that—the Lord needs other ministers besides those in
the pulpit. Why, man, the sermons on the evidences of
Christianity that have come home to me most have been

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preached by lay preachers in poor houses and lonely
churches, by ignorant men and women, and little children.”
“There's old Aunt Sarah there,” he said, pointing with his
whip to a brown house in the distance, “that woman is
dying of a cancer, that slowly eats away her life in lingering
agony, and all her dependence is the work of a sickly,
consumptive daughter, and yet she is more than resigned to
her lot, she is so cheerful, so thankful, so hopeful, there is
such a blessed calm peace, and rest, and sweetness in that
house, that I love to go there. The influence of that
woman is felt all through the village—she preaches to some
purpose.”

“Because she knows what she believes,” I said.

“It was the same with your father, Harry. Now my
boy,” he added, turning to me with the old controversial
twinkle in his eye, and speaking in a confidential tone—
“The fact is, I never agreed with your father doctrinally,
there were weak spots in his system all along, and I always
told him so. I could trip him and floor him in an argument,
and have done it a hundred times,” he said, giving a touch
to his horse.

I thought to myself that it was well enough that my
father wasn't there to hear that statement, otherwise there
would have been an immediate tilting match, and the
whole ground to be gone over.

“Yes,” he said; “it wasn't mainly in your father's
theology that his strength lay—it was the Christ in him—
the great warm heart—his crystal purity and simplicity—
his unworldly earnestness and honesty. He was a godly
man and a manly man both, and he sowed seed all over
this State that came up good men and good women. Yes,
there are hundreds and hundreds in this State to-day that
are good men and good women, mainly because he lived.
That's what I call success in life, Harry, when a man carries
himself so that he turns into seed-corn and makes a harvest
of good people. You may upset a man's reasonings, and
his theology may go to the dogs, but a brave Christian

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

life you can't upset, it will tell. Now, Harry, are you going
to try for that?”

“God helping me, I will,” I said.

“You see, as to the theologies,” he added, “I think it has
been well said that the Christian world just now is like
a ship that's tacking, it has lost the wind on one side and
not quite got it on the other. The growth of society, the
development of new physical laws, and this modern scientific
rush of the human mind is going to modify the manmade
theologies and creeds; some of them will drop away
just as the blossom does when the fruit forms, but Christ's
religion will be just the same as ever—his words will not
pass away.”

“But then,” I said “there are a whole labyrinth of perplexing
questions about this Bible. What is inspiration?
What ground does it cover? How much of all these books
is inspired? What is their history? How came we by them?
What evidence have we that the record gives us Christ's
words uncorrupted?”

“If you had been brought up in Justin Martyr's time or
the days of the primitive Christians you would have been
put to study all these things first and foremost in your
education, but we modern Christians, teach young men
everything else except what we profess to think the most
important; and so you come out of college ignorant, just
where knowledge is most vital.”

“Well, that is past praying for now,” said I.

“Yes; but even now there is a way out—just as going
through a bog you plant your foot hard on what land there
is, and then take your bearings—so you must do here. The
way to get rid of doubts in religion, is to go to work with all
our might and practice what we don't doubt, and that you
can do whatever your calling or profession.”

“I shall certainly try,” said I.

“For example,” said my uncle, “There's the Sermon on
the Mount. Nobody has any doubt about that, there it lies—
plain enough, and enough of it—not a bit of what's called

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theology in it. Not a word of information to settle the
mooted questions men wrangle over, but with a direct answer
to just the questions any thoughtful man must want
to have answered when he looks at life. Is there a Father
in the heavens? Will he help us if we ask? May the
troubles of life be our discipline? Is there a better life
beyond? And how are we to get that? There is Christ's
philosophy of life in that sermon, and Christ's mode of dealing
with actual existing society; and he who undertakes
in good faith to square his heart and life by it will have his
hands full. The world has been traveling eighteen hundred
years and not come fully into the light of its meaning.
There has never been a Christian state or a Christian
nation, according to that. That document is in modern
society just like a lump of soda in a tumbler of vinegar,
it keeps up a constant commotion, and will do so till every
particle of life is adjusted on its principles. The man who
works out Christ's teachings into a palpable life-form,
preaches Christianity, no matter what his trade or calling.
He may be a coal heaver or he may be a merchant, or a
lawyer, or an editor—he preaches all the same. Men always
know it when they meet a bit of Christ's sermons walking
out bodily in good deeds; they're not like worldly wisdom,
and have a smack of something a good deal higher than
common sense, but when people see it they say, “Yes—
that's the true thing.” Now one of our Presidents, General
Harrison, found out on a certain day that through a flaw in
the title deeds he was owner to half the city of Cincinnati.
What does he do? Why, simply he says to himself, `These
people have paid their money in good faith, and I'll do by
them as I'd be done by,' and he goes to a lawyer and has
fresh deeds drawn out for the whole of 'em, and lived and
died a poor, honest man. That action was a preaching of
Christ's doctrine as I take it, and if you'll do as much
whenever you get a chance, its no matter what calling you
take for a pulpit. So now tell me what are you thinking of
setting yourself about?”

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“I intend to devote myself to literature,” said I. “I
always had a facility for writing, while I never felt the call
or impulse toward public speaking; and I think the field of
current literature opens a wide scope. I have had already
some success in having articles accepted and well spoken
of, and have now some promising offers. I have an opportunity
to travel in Europe as correspondent of two papers, and
I shall study to improve myself. In time I may become an
editor, and then perhaps at last proprietor of a paper. So
runs my scheme of life, and I hope I shall be true to myself
and my religion in it. I shall certainly try to. Current
literature—the literature of newspapers and magazines, is
certainly a power.”

“A very great power, Harry,” said my uncle; “and getting
to be in our day a tremendous power, a power far outgoing
that of the pulpit, and that of books. This constant daily
self-asserting literature of newspapers and periodicals is acting
on us tremendously for good or for ill. It has access to
us at all hours and gets itself heard as a preacher cannot,
and gets itself read as scarcely any book does. It ought to
be entered into as solemnly as the pulpit, for it is using a
great power. Yet just now it is power without responsibility.
It is in the hands of men who come under no pledge,
pass no examination, give no vouchers, though they hold a
power more than that of all other professions or books
united. One cannot be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a minister,
unless some body of his fellows looks into his fitness to
serve society in these ways; but one may be turned loose to
talk in every family twice a day, on every subject, sacred
and profane, and say anything he chooses without even the
safeguard of a personal responsibility. He shall speak from
behind a screen and not be known. Now you know old
Dante says that the souls in the other world were divided
into three classes, those who were for God and those who
were for the Devil, and those who were for neither, but for
themselves. It seems to me that there's a vast many of
these latter at work in our press—smart literary

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

adventurers, who don't care a copper what they write up or what
they write down, wholly indifferent which side of a question
they sustain, so they do it smartly, and ready to sell their
wit, their genius and their rhetoric to the highest bidder.
Now, Harry, I'd rather see you a poor, threadbare, hardworked,
country minister than the smartest and brightest
fellow that ever kept his talents on sale in Vanity Fair.”

“Well,” said I, “isn't it just here that your principle of
living out a Gospel should come? Must there not be writers
for the press who believe in the Sermon on the Mount, and
who are pledged to get its principles into life-forms as fast
as they can?”

“Yea, verily,” said my uncle; “but do you mean to keep
faithful to that? You have, say, a good knack at English;
you can write stories, and poems, and essays; you have a
turn for humor; and now comes the Devil to you and says,
`Show me up the weak points of those reformers; raise a
laugh at those temperance men,—those religionists, who,
like all us poor human trash, are running religion, and
morals, and progress into the ground.' You can succeed;
you can carry your world with you. You see, if Virtue
came straight down from Heaven with her white wings and
glistening robes, and always conducted herself just like an
angel, our trial in life wouldn't be so great as it is. But
she doesn't. Human virtue is more apt to appear like a
bewildered, unprotected female, encumbered with all sorts
of irregular bandboxes, dusty, disheveled, out of fashion,
and elbowing her way with ungainly haste and ungraceful
postures. You know there are stories of powerful fairies
who have appeared in this way among men, to try their
hearts; and those who protect them when they are feeble
and dishonored, they reward when they are glorious. Now,
your smart, flippant, second-rate wits never have the grace
to honor Truth when she loses her way, and gets bewildered
and dusty, and they drive a flourishing business in laughing
down the world's poor efforts to grow better.”

“I think,” said I, “that we Americans have one brilliant

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

example of a man who had keen humor, and used it on the
Christian side. The animus of the “Biglow Papers” is the
spirit of the Sermon on the Mount translated into the language
of Yankee life, and defended with wit and drollery.”

“You say truth, Harry, and it was no small thing to
do it; for the Anti-Slavery cause then was just in that
chaotic state in which every strange bird and beast, every
shaggy, irregular, unkempt reformer, male and female,
were flocking to it, and there was capital scope for caricature
and ridicule; and all the fastidious, and conservative,
and soft-handed, and even-stepping people were
measureless in their contempt for this shocking rabble.
Lowell stood between them and the world, and fought the
battle with weapons that the world could understand.
There was a Gospel truth in

`John P. Robinson, he,'

“The fortunate man,” said I, “to have used a great
opportunity!”

“Harry, the only way to be a real man, is to have a cause
you care for more than yourself. That made your father—
that made your New England Fathers—that raises literature
above some child's play, and makes it manly—but if you
would do it you must count on one thing—that the devil
will tempt you in the outset with the bread question as he
did the Lord.

“Command that these stones be made bread;”

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

perhaps as well as anybody—it will sell. Will you be barkeeper
to the public, and when the public call for hot
brandy sling give it to them, and help them make brutes of
themselves? Will you help to vulgarize and demoralize
literature if it will pay?”

“No;” said I, “not if I know myself.”

“Then you've got to begin life with some motive higher
than to make money, or get a living, and you'll have sometimes
to choose between poisonous nonsense that brings pay,
and honest truth that nobody wants.”

“And I must tell the Devil that there is a higher life than
the bread-life?” said I.

“Yes; get above that, to begin with. Remember the
story of General Marion, who invited some British officers to
dine with him and gave them nothing but roasted potatoes.
They went away and said it was in vain to try to conquer a
people when their officers would live on such fare rather
than give up the cause. Do you know, Harry, what is
my greatest hope for this State? It's this: Two or three
years ago there was urgent need to carry this State in an
election, and there was no end of hard money sent up to buy
votes among our poor farmers: but they couldn't be bought.
They had learned, `Man shall not live by bread alone,' to
some purpose. The State went all straight for liberty.
What I ask of any man who wants to do a life-work is ability
to be happy on a little.”

“Well,” said I, “I have been brought up to that. I have
no expensive habits. I neither drink nor smoke. I am
used to thinking definitely as to figures, and I am willing to
work hard, and begin at the bottom of the ladder, but I
mean to keep my conscience and my religion, and lend a
helping hand to the good cause wherever I can.”

“Well, now, my boy, there're only two aids that you need
for this—one is God, and the other is a true, good woman.
God you will have, but the woman—she must be found.”

“I felt the touch on a sore spot, and so answered, purposely

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

misunderstanding his meaning. “Yes, I have not to go far
for her—my mother.”

“Oh yes, my boy—thank God for her; but Harry, you can't
take her away from this place; her roots have spread here;
they are matted and twined with the very soil; they run
under every homestead and embrace every grave. She is
so interwoven with this village that she could not take
root elsewhere, beside that, Harry, look at the clock of
life—count the years, sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, and
the clock never stops! Her hair is all white now, and that
snow will melt by and by, and she will be gone upward.
God grant I may go first, Harry.”

“And I, too,” said I, fervently. “I could not live without
her.”

“You must find one like her, Harry. It is not good for
man to be alone; we all need the motherly, and we must find
it in a wife. Do you know what I think the prettiest story
of courtship I ever read? Its the account of Jacob's marriage
with Rebecca, away back in the simple old times. You
remember the ending of it,—“And Isaac brought her into
her mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebecca and she became
his wife, and Isaac was comforted for his mother's death.'
There's the philosophy of it,” he added; “it's the mother
living again in the wife. The motherly instinct is in the
hearts of all true women, and sooner or later the true wife
becomes a mother to her husband; she guides him, cares
for him, teaches him, and catechises him all in the nicest
way possible. Why I'm sure I never should know how to
get along a day without Polly to teach me the requirings
and forbiddens of the commandments; to lecture me for
going out without my muffler, and see that I put on my
flannels in the right time; to insist that I shall take something
for my cough, and raise a rebellion to my going out
when there's a north easter. So much for the body, and as
for the soul-life, I believe it is woman who holds faith in
the world—it is woman behind the wall, casting oil on the
fire that burns brighter and brighter, while the Devil pours

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

on water; and you'll never get Christianity out of the earth
while there's a woman in it. I'd rather have my wife's and
your mother's opinion on the meaning of a text of Scripture
than all the doctors of divinity, and their faith is an anchor
that always holds. Some jackanapes or other I read once,
said every woman wanted a master, and was as forlorn
without a husband as a masterless dog. Its a great deal
truer that every man wants a mother; men are more forlorn
than masterless dogs, a great deal, when no woman cares
for them. Look at the homes single women make for
themselves; how neat, how cosy, how bright with the oil
of gladness, and then look at old bachelor dens! The fact
is, women are born comfort-makers, and can get along by
themselves a great deal better than we can.”

“Well,” said I, “I don't think I shall ever marry. Of
course if I could find a woman like my mother, it would be
another thing. But times are altered—the women of this
day are all for flash and ambition, and money. There are
no more such as you used to find in the old days.”

“Oh, nonsense, Harry; don't come to me with that sort
of talk. Bad sort for a young man—very. What I want to
see in a young fellow is a resolution to have a good wife
and a home of his own as quick as he can find it. The
Roman Catholics weren't so far out of the way when they
said marriage was a sacrament. It is the greatest sacrament
of life, and that old church does yeoman service to
humanity in the stand she takes for Christian marriage. I
should call that the most prosperous state when all the
young men and women were well mated and helping one
another according to God's ordinances. You may be sure,
Harry, that you can never be a whole man without a wife.”

“Well,” I said; “there's time enough for that by and by:
if I'm predestinated I suppose it'll come along when I have
my fortune made.”

“Don't wait to be rich, Harry. Find a faithful, heroic
friend that will strike hands with you, poor, and begin to
build up your nest together,—that's the way your father and

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

mother did, and who enjoyed more? That's the way your
Aunt Polly and I did, and a good time we have had of it.
There has always been the handful of meal in the barrel and
the little oil in the cruse, and if the way we have always
lived is poverty, all I have to say is, poverty is a pretty nice
thing.”

“But,” said I, bitterly, “you talk of golden ages. There
are no such women now as you found, the women now are
mere effeminate dolls of fashion—all they want is ease and
show, and luxury, and they care nothing who gives it—one
man is as good as another if he is only rich.”

“Tut, tut, boy! Don't you read your Bible? Away back
in Solomon's time, it's written, `Who can find a virtuous
woman? Her price is above rubies.' Are rubies found
without looking for them, and do diamonds lie about the
street? Now, just attend to my words—brave men make
noble women, and noble women make brave men. Be a true
man first, and some day a true woman will be given you.
Yes, a woman whose opinion of you will hold you up if all
the world were against you, and whose `Well done!' will be
a better thing to come home to, than the senseless shouting
of the world who scream for this thing to-day and that
to-morrow.”

By this time the horse had turned up the lane, and my
mother stood smiling in the door. I marked the soft
white hair that shone like a moonlight glory round her
head, and prayed inwardly that the heavens would spare
her yet a little longer.

p467-122 CHAPTER X. COUSIN CAROLINE.

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

“YOU must go and see your cousin Caroline,” said
my mother, the first evening after I got home;
“you've no idea how pretty she's grown.”

“She is what I call a pattern girl,” said my uncle Jacob, “a
girl that can make the most of life.”

“She is a model housekeeper and manager,” said Aunt
Polly.

Now if Aunt Polly called a girl a model house-keeper, it
was the same for her that it would be for a man to receive
a doctorate from a college; in fact it would be a good deal
more, as Aunt Polly was one who always measured her
words, and never said anything pro forma, or without
having narrowly examined the premises.

Elderly people who live in happy matrimony are in a
gentle way disposed to be match-makers. If they have
sense, as my elders did, they do not show this disposition
in any very pronounced way. They never advise a young
man directly to try his fortune with “So and so,” knowing
that that would, in nine cases out of ten, be the direct way
to defeat their purpose. So my mother's gentle suggestion,
and my uncle Jacob's praise, and Aunt Polly's endorsement,
were simply in the line of the most natural remarks.

Cousin Caroline was the daughter of Uncle Jacob's brother,
the only daughter in the family. Her father was one of
those men most useful and necessary in society, composed
of virtues and properties wholly masculine. He was strong,
energetic, shrewd, acridly conscientious, and with an intensity
of self-will and love of domination. This rugged
rock, all granite, had won a tender woman to nestle and

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

flower in some crevice of his heart and she had clothed
him with a garland of sons and one flower of a daughter.
Within a year or two her death had left this daughter the
mistress of her father's family. I remembered Caroline of
old, as my school companion; the leading scholar, in every
study, always good natured, steady, and clear-headed, ready
to help me when I faltered in a translation, or the solution
of an algebraic problem. In those days I never thought of
her as pretty. There were the outlines and rudiments,
which might bloom into beauty, but thin, pale, colorless,
and deficient in roundness and grace.

I had seen very little of Caroline through my college
life; we had exchanged occasionally a cousinly letter, but
in my last vacation she was away upon a visit. I was
not, therefore, prepared for the vision which bloomed out
upon me from the singer's seat, when I looked up on
Sunday and saw her, standing in a shaft of sunlight
that lit up her whole form with a kind of glory. I rubbed
my eyes with astonishment, as I saw there a very beautiful
woman, and beautiful in quite an uncommon style, one
which promised a more lasting continuance of personal
attraction than is usual with our New England girls. I
own, that a head and bust of the Venus de Milo type; a
figure at once graceful, yet ample in its proportions; a rich,
glowing bloom, speaking of health and vigor,—gave a new
radiance to eyes that I had always admired, in days when
I never had thought of even raising the question of Caroline's
beauty. These charms were set off, too, by a native
talent for dress,—that sort of instinctive gift that some
women have of arranging their toilet so as exactly to suit
their own peculiar style. There was nothing fussy, or furbelowed,
or gaudy, as one often sees in the dress of a
country beauty, but a grand and severe simplicity, which
in her case was the very perfection of art.

My Uncle Ebenezer Simmons lived at a distance of nearly
two miles from our house, but that evening, after tea, I
announced to my mother that I was going to take a walk

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

over to see cousin Caroline. I perceived that the movement
was extremely popular and satisfactory in the eyes of all the
domestic circle.

Whose thoughts do not travel in this direction, I wonder,
in a small country neighborhood? Here comes Harry Henderson
home from college, with his laurels on his brow, and
here is the handsomest girl in the neighborhood, a pattern
of all the virtues. What is there to be done, except that
they should straightway fall in love with each other, and
taking hold of hands walk up the Hill Difficulty together?
I presume that no good gossip in our native village saw any
other arrangement of our destiny as possible or probable.

I may just as well tell my readers first as last, that we
did not fall in love with each other, though we were the very
best friends possible, and I spent nearly half my time at my
uncle's house, besetting her at all hours, and having the best
possible time in her society; but our relations were as
frankly and clearly those of brother and sister as if we had
been children of one mother.

For a beautiful woman, Caroline had the least of what one
may call legitimate coquetry, of any person I ever saw.
There are some women, and women of a high class too, who
seem to take a natural and innocent pleasure in the power
which their sex enables them to exercise over men, and
who instinctively do a thousand things to captivate and
charm one of the opposite sex, even when they would greatly
regret winning his whole heart. If well principled and
instructed they try to keep themselves under control, but
they still do a thousand ensnaring things, for no other reason,
that I can see, than that it is their nature, and they cannot
help it. If they have less principle this faculty becomes
their available power, by which they can take possession of
all that a man has, and use it to carry their own plans and
purposes.

Of this power, whatever it may be, Caroline had nothing;
nay, more, she despised it, and received the admiration and

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

attentions which her beauty drew from the opposite sex,
with a coldness, in some instances amounting to incivility.

With me she had been from the first so frankly, cheerfully
and undisguisedly affectionate and kind, and with such a
straightforward air of comradeship and a literal ignoring of
everything sentimental, that the very ground of anything
like love-making did not seem to exist between us. The
last evening before I was to leave for my voyage to Europe,
I spent with her, and she gave me a curiously-wrought
traveling-case, in which there was a pocket for any imaginable
thing that a bachelor might be supposed to want on his
travels.

“I wish I could go with you,” she said to me, with an
energy quite out of her usual line.

“I am sure I wish you could,” said I; and what with the
natural softness of heart that a young man feels, when he
is plunging off from the safe ground of home into the world,
and partly from the unwonted glow of feeling that came
over Caroline's face, as she spoke, I felt quite a rush of
emotion, and said, as I kissed her hand, “Why didn't we
think of this before, Caroline?”

“Oh, nonsense, Henry; don't you be sentimental, of all
things,” she replied briskly, withdrawing her hand. “Of
course, I didn't mean anything more than that I wished I
was a young fellow like you, free to take my staff and
bundle, and make my way in the great world. Why couldn't
I be?”

“You,” said I, “Caroline, you, with your beauty and your
talents,—I think you might be satisfied with a woman's lot
in life.”

“A woman's lot! and what is that, pray? to sit with folded
hands and see life drifting by—to be a mere nullity, and
endure to have my good friends pat me on the back, and
think I am a bright and shining light of contentment in
woman's sphere?”

“But,” said I, “you know, Caroline, that there is always a

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

possibility in woman's destiny, especially a woman so beautiful
as you are.”

“You mean marriage. Well, perhaps if I could do as you
can, go all over the world, examine and search for the one I
want, and find him, the case would be somewhat equal;
but my chances are only among those who propose to me.
Now, I have read in the Arabian Nights of princesses so
beautiful that men came in regiments, to seek the honor of
their hand; but such things don't occur in our times in New
England villages. My list for selection must be confined to
such of the eligible men in this neighborhood as are in want
of wives; men who want wives as they do cooking-stoves,
and make up their minds that I may suit them. By the
by, I have been informed already of one who has had me
under consideration, and concluded not to take me. Silas
Boardman, I understand, has made up his mind, and informed
his sisters of the fact, that I am altogether too
dressy in my taste for his limited means, and besides that
I am too free and independent; so that door is closed to me,
you'll observe. Silas won't have me!”

“The conceited puppy!” said I.

“Well, isn't that the common understanding among men—
that all the marriageable girls in their neighborhood are
on exhibition for their convenience? If the very first idea of
marriage with any one of them were not so intensely disagreeable
to me, I would almost be willing to let some of
them ask me, just to hear what I could tell them. Now you
know, Harry, I put you out of the case, because you are
my cousin, and I no more think of you in that way than if
you were my brother, but, frankly, I never yet saw the man
that I could by any stretch of imagination conceive of my
wanting, or being willing to marry; I know no man that it
wouldn't be an untold horror to me to be doomed to marry.
I would rather scrub floors on my knees for a living.”

“But you do see happy marriages.”

“Oh, yes, dear souls, of course I do, and am glad of it,
and wonder and admire; yes, I see some happy marriages.

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

There's Uncle Jacob and his wife, kind old souls, two dear
old pigeons of the sanctuary!—how charmingly they get
along! and your father and mother—they seemed one soul;
it really was encouraging to see that people could live so.”

“But you musn't be too ideal, Caroline; you musn't
demand too much of a man.”

“Demand? I don't demand anything of any man, I only
want to be let alone. I don't want to wait for a husband to
make me a position, I want to make one for myself; I don't
want to take a husband's money, I want my own. You have
individual ideas of life, you want to work them out; so have
I: you are expected and encouraged to work them out
independently, while I am forbidden. Now, what would
you say if somebody told you to sit down quietly in the
domestic circle and read to your mother, and keep the wood
split and piled, and the hearth swept, and diffuse a sweet
perfume of domestic goodness, like the violet amid its leaves,
till by and by some woman should come and give you a
fortune and position, and develop your affections,—how
would you like that? Now the case with me is just here,
I am, if you choose to say it, so ideal and peculiar in my
views that there is no reasonable prospect that I shall ever
marry, but I want a position, a house and home of my own,
and a sphere of independent action, and everybody thinks
this absurd and nobody helps me. As long as mother was
alive, there was some consolation in feeling that I was everything
to her. Poor soul! she had a hard life, and I was her
greatest pride and comfort, but now she is gone, there is
nothing I do for my father that a good, smart housekeeper
could not be hired to do; but you see that would cost money,
and the money that I thus save is invested without consulting
me: it goes to buy more rocky land, when we have already
more than we know what to do with. I sacrifice all my tastes,
I stunt my growth mentally and intellectually to this daily
tread-mill of house and dairy, and yet I have not a cent that
I can call my own, I am a servant working for board and
clothes, and because I am a daughter I am expected to do it

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

cheerfully; my only escape from this position is to take a
similar one in the family of some man to whom, in addition
to the superintendence of his household, I shall owe the
personal duties of a wife, and that way out you may know
I shall never take. So you are sure to find me ten or twenty
years hence a fixture in this neighborhood, spoken of familiarly
as `old Miss Caroline Simmons,' a cross-pious old maid,
help up as a warning to contumacious young beauties how
they neglect their first gracious offer. `Caroline was a
handsome gal in her time,' they'll say, `but she was too perticklar,
and now her day is over and she's left an old maid.
She held her head too high and said “No” a little too often;
ye see, gals better take their fust chances.”'

“After all, cousin,” I said, “though we men are all unworthy
sinners, yet sometimes you women do yield to much
persuasion, and take some one out of pity.”

“I can't do that; in fact I have tried to do it, and can't.
This desperate dullness, and restraint, and utter paralysis of
progress that lies like a nightmare on one, is a dreadful
temptation; when a man offers you a fortune, which will give
you ease, leisure, and power to follow all your tastes and a
certain independent stand, such as unmarried women cannot
take, it is a great temptation.”

“But you resisted it!”

“Well, I was sorely tried; there were things I wanted
desperately—a splendid house in Boston, pictures, carriages,
servants,—oh, I did want them; I wanted the éclat, too, of a
rich marriage, but I couldn't; the man was too good a man
to be trifled with; if he would only have been a good uncle
or grandpa I would have loved him dearly, and been ever so
devoted, kept his house beautifully, waited on him like a
dutiful daughter, read to him, sung to him, nursed him,
been the best friend in the world to him, but his wife I could
not be; the very idea of it made the worthy creature per
fectly repulsive and hateful to me.”

“Did you ever try to tell your father how you feel?”

“Of what earthly use? There are people in this world

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

who don't understand each other's vernacular. Papa and I
could no more discuss any question of the inner life together
than if he spoke Chickasaw and I spoke French. Papa has
a respect for my practical efficiency and business talent, and
in a certain range of ideas we get on well together. He
thinks I have made a great mistake, and that there is a crack
in my head somewhere, but he says nothing; his idea is
that I have let slip the only chance of my life, but still, as I
am a great convenience at home, he is reconciled. I suppose
all my friends mourn in secret places over me, and I should
have been applauded and commended on all hands if I had
done it; but, after all, wouldn't it be a great deal more
honest, more womanly, more like a reasonable creature, for
me to do just what you are doing, fit myself to make my
own way, and make an independence for myself? Really
it isn't honest to take a position where you know you can't
give the main thing asked for, and keep out somebody perhaps
who can. My friend has made himself happy with a
woman who perfectly adores him, and ought to be much
obliged to me that I didn't take him at his word; good, silly
soul that he was.”

“But, after all, the Prince may come—the fated knight—
Caroline.”

“And deliver the distressed damsel?” she said, laughing.
“Well, when he comes I'll show him my `swan's nest among
the reeds.' Soberly, the fact is, cousin,” she said, “you men
don't know us women. In the first place they say that there
are more of us born than there are of you: and that doesn't
happen merely to give you a good number to choose from,
and enable every widower to find a supernumerary; it is
because it was meant that some women should lead a life
different from the domestic one. The womanly nature can
be of use otherwhere besides in marriage, in our world. To
be sure, for the largest class of women there is nothing
like marriage, and I suppose the usages of society are made
for the majority, and exceptional people mustn't grumble if

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

they don't find things comfortable; but I am persuaded that
there is a work and a way for those who cannot marry.”

“Well, there's Uncle Jacob has just been preaching to me
that no man can be developed fully without a wife,” said I.

“Uncle Jacob has matrimony on the brain! it's lucky he
isn't a despotic Czar or, I believe, he'd marry all the men
and women, wille nille. I grant that the rare, real marriage,
that occurs one time in a hundred, is the true ideal state
for man and woman, but it doesn't follow that all and everything
that brings man and woman together in marriage
is blessed, and I take my stand on St. Paul's doctrine that
there are both men and women called to some higher state;
now, it seems to me that the number of these increases
with the advancement of society. Marriage requires so
close an intimacy that there must be perfect agreement and
sympathy; the lower down in the scale of being one is, the
fewer distinctive points there are of difference or agreement.
It is easier for John and Patrick, and Bridget and Katy, to
find comfortable sympathy and agreement than it is for
those far up in the scale of life where education has developed
a thousand individual tastes and peculiarities. We
read in history of the Rape of the Sabines, and how the
women thus carried off at hap-hazard took so kindly to their
husbands that they wouldn't be taken back again. Such
things are only possible in the barbarous tages of society,
when characters are very rudimentary and simple. If a
similar experiment were made on women of the cultivated
classes in our times I fancy some of the men would be killed;
I know one would,”—she said with an energetic grasp of her
little fist and a flash out of her eyes.

“But the ideal marriage is the thing to be sought,”
said I.

“For you, who are born with the right to seek, it is the
thing to be sought,” she said; “for me, who am born to
wait till I am sought by exactly the right one, the chances
are so infinitesimal that they ought not to be considered;
I may have a fortune left me, and die a millionaire; there

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

is no actual impossibility in that thing's happening—it is a
thing that has happened to people who expected it as little
as I do—but it would be the height of absurdity to base
any calculation upon it and yet all the arrangements that
are made about me and for me, are made on the presumption
that I am to marry. I went to Uncle Jacob and tried to
get him to take me through a course of medical study, to
fit me for a professional life, and it was impossible to get
him to take any serious view of it, or to believe what I said;
he seemed really to think I was plotting to upset the Bible
and the Constitution, in planning for an independent life.”

“After all, Caroline, you must pardon me if I say that it
does not seem possible that a woman like you will be allowed—
that is you know—you will—well—find somebody—that is,
you will be less exacting by and by.”

“Exacting! why do you use that word, when I don't exact
anything? I am not so very ideal in my tastes, I am only
individual; I must have in myself a certain feeling towards
this possible individual, and I don't find it. In one case certainly
I asked myself why I didn't? The man was all he
should be, I didn't object to him in the slightest degree as
a man; but looked on respecting the marriage relation, he
was simply intolerable. It must be that I have no vocation
to marry, and yet I want what any live woman wants; I
want something of my own; I want a life-work worth doing;
I want a home of my own; I want money that I can use as
I please, that I can give and withhold, and dispose of as absolutely
mine, and not another's; and the world seems all
arranged so as to hinder my getting it. If a man wants
to get an education there are colleges with rich foundations,
where endowments have been heaped up, and scholarships
founded, to enable him to prepare for life at reasonable
expense. There are no such for women, and their schools,
such as they are, infinitely poorer than those given to men,
involve double the expense. If you ask a professional man
to teach you privately, he laughs at you, compliments you,
and sends you away with the feeling that he considers you

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

a silly, cracked-brain girl, or perhaps an unsuccessful angler
in matrimonial waters; he seems to think that there is no
use teaching you, because you will throw down all, and
run for the first man that beckons to you. That sort of
presumption is insufferable to me.”

“Oh, well, Carrie, you know those old Doctors, they get a
certain jog-trot way of arranging human life; and then
men that are happily married are in such bliss, and such
women-worshipers that they cannot make up their mind
that anybody they care about should not enter their paradise.”

“I do not despise their paradise,” said Caroline; “I think
everybody most happy that can enter it. I am thankful
to see that they can. I am delighted and astonished every
day at beholding the bliss and satisfaction with which really
nice, pretty girls take up with the men they do, and I think
it all very delightful; but it's rather hard on me that, since
I can't have that, I mustn't have anything else.”

“After all, Caroline, is not your dissatisfaction with the
laws of nature?”

“Not exactly; I won't quarrel with the will that made me
a woman, not in my deepest heart. Neither being a woman
do I want to be unwomanly. I would not, if I could, do
as Georges Sand did, put on men's clothes and live a man's
life. Anything of that sort in a woman is very repulsive
and disgusting to me. At the same time, I do think that
the customs and laws of society might be modified so as to
give to women who do not choose to marry, independent
position and means of securing home and fortune. Marriage
never ought to be entered on as a means of support.
It seems to me that our sex are enough weighted by nature,
and that therefore all the laws and institutions of society
ought to act in just the contrary direction, and tend to hold
us up—to widen our way, to encourage our efforts, because
we are the weaker party, and need it most. The world
is now arranged for the strong, and I think it ought to be
re-arranged for the weak.”

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

I paused, and pondered all that she had been saying.

“My mother—” I began.

“Now, please don't quote your mother to me. I know
what she would say. If two angels were sent down from
Heaven, the one to govern an empire, and the other to
sweep the streets, they would not wish to change with
each other; it is perhaps true.

“But then, you see, that is only possible because they
are angels. Your mother has got up somewhere into that
region, but I am down in the low lands, and must do the best
I can on my plane. I can conceive of those moral heights
where one thing is just as agreeable as another, but I have
not yet reached them. Besides, you know Jacob wrestled
with his angel, and was commended for it; and I think we
ought to satisfy ourselves by good, strong effort that our
lot is of God. If we really cannot help ourselves, we may
be resigned to it as His will.”

“Caroline,” I said, “if you might have exactly what you
want, what would it have been?”

“In the first place, then, exactly the same education with
my brothers. I hear of colleges now, somewhere far out
west, where a brother and sister may go through the same
course together; that would have suited me. I am impatient
of half-education. I am by nature very thorough
and exact. I want to be sure of doing whatever I undertake
as well as it can be done. I don't want to be flattered
and petted for pretty ignorance. I don't want to
be tolerated in any half way, slovenly work of any kind
because I am a woman. When I have a thorough general
education, I then want to make professional studies. I have
a great aptitude for medicine. I have a natural turn for the
care of sick, and am now sent for far and near as one of
the best advisers and watchers in case of sickness. In that
profession I don't doubt I might do great good, be very
happy, have a cheerful home of own, and a pleasant life-work;
but I don't want to enter it half taught. I want to

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be able to do as good work as any man's; to be held to
the same account, and receive only what I can fairly win.”

“But, Caroline, a man's life includes so much drudgery.”

“And does not mine? Do you suppose that the care of
all the house and dairy, the oversight of all my father's
home affairs, is no drudgery? Much of it is done with my
own hands, because no other work than mine can content
me. But when you and I went to school together, it was
just so: you know I worked out my own problems and made
my own investigations. Now all that is laid aside; at least,
all my efforts are so hap-hazard and painfully incomplete,
that it is discouraging to me.”

“But would not your father consent?”

“My father is a man wedded to the past, and set against
every change in ideas. I have tried to get his consent
to let me go and study, and prepare myself to do something
worth doing, but he is perfectly immovable. He says
I know more now than half the women, and a great deal
too much for my good, and that he cannot spare me. At
twenty-one he makes no further claim on any of my brothers;
their minority comes to an end at a certain period—
mine, never.”

We were walking in the moonlight up and down under
the trees by the house. Caroline suddenly stopped.

“Cousin,” she said, “if you succeed; if you get to be what
I hope you will—high in the world, a prosperous editor—
speak for the dumb, for us whose lives burn themselves
out into white ashes in silence and repression.”

“I will,” I said.

“You will write to me; I shall rejoice to hear of the
world through you—and I shall rejoice in your success,” she
added.

“Caroline,” I said, “do you give up entirely wrestling
with the angel?”

“No; if I did, I should not keep up. I have hope from
year to year that something may happen to bring things to
my wishes; that I may obtain a hearing with papa; that his
sense of justice may be aroused; that I may get Uncle

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

Jacob to do something besides recite verses and compliment
me; that your mother may speak for me.”

“You have never told your heart to my mother?”

“No; I am very reticent, and these adoring wives have
but one recipe for all our troubles.”

“I think, Caroline, that her's is a wide, free nature, that
takes views above the ordinary level of things, and that she
would understand and might work for you. Tell her what
you have been telling me.”

“You may, if you please. I will talk with her afterward
perhaps she will do something for me.”

p467-136 CHAPTER XI. WHY DON'T YOU TAKE HER?

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THE next day I spoke to my uncle Jacob of Caroline's
desire to study, and said that some way ought to
be provided for taking her out of her present
confined limits.

He looked at me with a shrewd, quizzical expression, and
said: “Providence generally opens a way out for girls as
handsome as she is. Caroline is a little restless just at
present, and so is getting some of these modern strong-minded
notions into her head. The fact is, that our region
is a little too much out of the world; there is nobody around
here, probably, that she would think a suitable match for
her. Caroline ought to visit, now, and cruise about a little
in some of the watering-places next summer, and be seen.
There are few girls with a finer air, or more sure to make
a sensation. I fancy she would soon find the right sphere
under these circumstances.”

“But does it not occur to you, uncle, that the very idea
of going out into the world, seeking to attract and fall in
the way of offers of marriage, is one from which such a spirit
as Caroline's must revolt? Is there not something essentially
unwomanly in it—something humiliating? I know,
myself, that she is too proud, too justly self-respecting,
to do it. And why should a superior woman be condemned
to smother her whole nature, to bind down all her faculties,
and wait for occupation in a sphere which it is unwomanly
to seek directly, and unwomanly to accept when
offered to her, unless offered by the one of a thousand for
whom she can have a certain feeling?”

“To tell the truth,” said my uncle, looking at me again,
“I always thought in my heart that Caroline was just the

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

proper person for you—just the woman you need—brave,
strong, and yet lovely; and I don't see any objection in the
way of your taking her.”

Elderly people of a benevolent turn often get a matter-of-fact
way of arranging the affairs of their juniors that is
sufficiently amusing. My uncle spoke with a confidential
air of good faith of my taking Caroline as if she had been
a lot of land up for sale. Seeing my look of blank embarrassment,
he went on:

“You perhaps think the relationship an objection, but I
have my own views on that subject. The only objection
to the intermarriage of cousins is one that depends entirely
on similarity of race peculiarities. Sometimes cousins
inheriting each from different races, are physiologically as
much of diverse blood as if their parents had not been
related, and in that case there isn't the slightest objection
to marriage. Now, Caroline, though her father is your
mother's brother, inherits evidently the Selwyn blood.
She's all her mother, or rather her grandmother, who was a
celebrated beauty. Caroline is a Selwyn, every inch, and
you are as free to marry her as any woman you can meet.”

“You talk as if she were a golden apple, that I had nothing
to do but reach forth my hand to pick,” said I. “Did it
never occur to you that I couldn't take her if I were to try?”

“Well, I don't know,” said Uncle Jacob, looking me over
in a manner which indicated a complimentary opinion.
“I'm not so sure of that. She's not in the way of seeing
many men superior to you.”

“And suppose that she were that sort of woman who did
not wish to marry at all?” said I.

My uncle looked quizzical, and said, “I doubt the existence
of that species.”

“It appears to me,” said I, “that Caroline is by nature so
much more fitted for the life of a scholar than that of an
ordinary domestic woman, that nothing but a most absorbing
and extraordinary amount of personal affection would
ever make the routine of domestic life agreeable to her.

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

She is very fastidious and individual in her tastes, too, and
the probabilities of her finding the person whom she could
love in this manner are very small. Now it appears to me
that the taking for granted that all women, without respect
to taste or temperament, must have no sphere or opening
for their faculties except domestic life, is as great an
absurdity in our modern civilization as the stupid custom of
half-civilized nations, by which every son, no matter what
his character, is obliged to confine himself to the trade of
his father. I should have felt it a hardship to be condemned
always to be a shoemaker if my father had been
one.”

“Nay,” said my uncle, “the cases are not parallel. The
domestic sphere of wife and mother to which woman is
called, is divine and god-like; it is sacred, and solemn, and
no woman can go higher than that, and anything else to
which she devotes herself, falls infinitely below it.”

“Well, then,” said I, “let me use another simile. My father
was a minister, and I reverence and almost adore the ideal
of such a minister, and such a ministry as his was. Yet it
would be an oppression on me to constrain me to enter into
it. I am not adapted to it, or fitted for it. I should make
a failure in it, while I might succeed in a lower sphere.
Now it seems to me that just as no one should enter the
ministry as a means of support or worldly position, but
wholly from a divine enthusiasm, so no woman should enter
marriage for provision, or station, or support; but simply
and only from the most purely personal affection. And my
theory of life would be, to have society so arranged that
independent woman shall have every facility for developing
her mind and perfecting herself that independent man
has, and every opportunity in society for acquiring and
holding property, for securing influence, and position, and
fame, just as man can. If laws are to make any difference
between the two sexes, they ought to help, and not to
hinder the weaker party. Then, I think, a man might feel
that his wife came to him from the purest and highest

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

kind of love—not driven to him as a refuge, not compelled
to take him as a dernier resort, not struggling and striving
to bring her mind to him, because she must marry somebody,—
but choosing him intelligently and freely, because he
is the one more to her than all the world beside.”

“Well,” said my uncle, regretfully, “of course I don't
want to be a matchmaker, but I did hope that you and
Caroline would be so agreed; and I think now, that if you
would try, you might put these notions out of her head, and
put yourself in their place.”

“And what if I had tried, and become certain that it was
of no use?”

“You don't say she has refused you!” said my uncle, with
a start.

“No, indeed!” said I. “Caroline is one of those women
whose whole manner keeps off entirely all approaches of
that kind. You may rely upon it, uncle, that while she
loves me as frankly and truly and honestly as ever sister
loved a brother, yet I am perfectly convinced that it is
mainly because I have kept myself clear of any misunderstanding
of her noble frankness, or any presumption
founded upon it. Her love to me is honest comradeship,
just such as I might have from a college mate, and there
is not the least danger of its sliding into anything else.
There may be an Endymion to this Diana, but it certainly
won't be Harry Henderson.”

“H'm!” said my uncle. “Well, I'm afraid then that she
never will marry, and you certainly must grant that a
woman unmarried remains forever undeveloped and incomplete.”

“No more than a man,” said I. “A man who never
becomes a father is incomplete in one great resemblance to
the divine being. Yet there have been men with the element
of fatherhood more largely developed in celibacy than
most are in marriage. There was Fénelon, for instance,
who was married to humanity. Every human being that
he met held the place of a child in his heart. No individual

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experience of fatherhood could make such men as he more
fatherly. And in like manner there are women with more
natural motherhood than many mothers. Such are to be
found in the sisterhoods that gather together lost and orphan
children, and are their mothers in God. There are natures
who do not need the development of marriage; they know
instinctively all it can teach them. But they are found only
in the rarest and highest regions.”

“Well,” said my uncle, “for every kind of existence in
creation God has made a mate, and the eagles that live on
mountain tops, and fly toward the sun, have still their
kindred eagles. Now, I think, for my part, that if Fénelon
had married Madame Guyon, he would have had a richer
and a happier life of it, and she would have gone off into
fewer vagaries, and they would have left the Church some
splendid children, who might, perhaps, have been born
without total depravity. You see these perfected specimens
owe it to humanity to perpetuate their kind.”

“Well,” said I, “let them do it by spiritual fatherhood
and motherhood. St. Paul speaks often of his converts
as those begotten of him—the children of his soul; a thousand-fold
more of them there were, than there could have
been if he had weighted himself with the care of an individual
family. Think of the spiritual children of Plato and
St. Augustine!”

“This may be all very fine, youngster,” said my uncle,
“but very exceptional; yet for all that, I should be sorry
to see a fine woman like Caroline withering into an old
maid.”

“She certainly will,” said I, “unless you and mother
stretch forth your hands and give her liberty to seek her
destiny in the mode in which nature inclines her. You
will never get her to go husband-hunting. The mere idea
suggested to her of exhibiting her charms in places of resort,
in the vague hope of being chosen, would be sufficient to
keep her out of society. She has one of those independent
natures to which it is just as necessary for happiness that

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

she should make her own way, and just as irksome to
depend on others, as it is for most young men. She has a
fine philosophic mind, great powers of acquisition, a curiosity
for scientific research; and her desire is to fit herself
for a physician,—a sphere perfectly womanly, and in which
the motherly nature of woman can be most beautifully
developed. Now, help her with your knowledge through
the introductory stages of study, and use your influence
afterward to get her father to give her wider advantages.”

“Well, the fact is,” said my uncle, “Caroline is a splendid
nurse; she has great physical strength and endurance,
great courage and presence of mind, and a wonderful
power of consoling and comforting sick people. She has
borrowed some of my books, and seemed to show a considerable
acuteness in her remarks on them. But somehow the
idea that a lovely young woman should devote herself to
medicine, has seemed to me a great waste, and I never
seriously encouraged it.”

“Depend upon it,” said I, “Caroline is a woman who will
become more charming in proportion as she moves more
thoroughly and perfectly in the sphere for which nature
has adapted her. Keep a great, stately, white swan shut up
in a barn-yard and she has an ungainly gait, becomes
morose, and loses her beautiful feathers; but set her free
to glide off into her native element and all is harmonious
and beautiful. A superior woman, gifted with personal
attractions, who is forgetting herself in the enthusiasm of
some high calling or profession, never becomes an old
maid; she does not wither; she advances as life goes on,
and often keeps her charms longer than the matron exhausted
by family cares and motherhood. A charming
woman, fully and happily settled and employed in a life-work
which is all in all to her, is far more likely to be
attractive and to be sought than one who enters the ranks of
the fashionable waiters on Providence.”

“Well, well,” said my uncle, “I'll think of it. The fact is,
we fellows of three-score ought to be knocked on the head

[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]

peaceably. We have the bother of being progressive all
through our youth, and by the time we get something
settled, up comes your next generation and begins kicking
it all over. It's too bad to demolish the house we spend
our youth in building just when we want rest, and don't
want the fatigue of building over.”

“For that matter,” said I, “the modern ideas of woman's
sphere were all thought out and expressed in the Greek
mythology ages and ages ago. The Greeks didn't fit every
woman to one type. There was their pretty, plump little
Aphrodite, and their godlike Venus de Milo; there was
Diana—the woman of cold, bright, pure physical organization,—
independent, free, vigorous. There was Minerva, the
impersonation of the purely intellectual woman, who neither
wished nor sought marriage. There was Juno, the house-keeper
and domestic queen, and Ceres, the bread-giver and
provider. In short, the Greeks conceived a variety of
spheres of womanhood; but we, in modern times, have
reduced all to one—the vine that twines, and the violet hid
in the leaves; as if the Victoria Regia hadn't as good a right
to grow as the daisy, and as if there were not female oaks
and pines as well as male!”

“Well, after all,” he said, “the prevalent type of sex
through nature, is that of strength for man and dependence
for woman.”

“Nay,” said I; “if you appeal to nature in this matter of
sex, there is the female element in grand and powerful forms,
as well as in gentle and dependent ones. The she-lion and
tiger are more terrible and untamable than the male. The
Greek mythology was a perfect reflection of nature, and
clothed woman with majesty and power as well as with
grace; how splendid those descriptions of Homer are,
where Minerva, clad in celestial armor, leads the forces of
the Greeks to battle! What vigor there is in their impersonation
of the Diana; the woman strong in herself, scorning
physical passion, and terrible to approach in the radiant
majesty of her beauty, striking with death the vulgar

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curiosity that dared to profane her sanctuary! That was the
ideal of a woman, self-sufficient, victorious, and capable of
a grand, free, proud life of her own, not needing to depend
upon man. The Greeks never would have imagined such
goddesses if they had not seen such women, and our modern
civilization is imperfect if it does not provide a place and
sphere for such types of womanhood. It takes all sorts of
people to make up a world, and there ought to be provision,
toleration, and free course for all sorts.”

“Well, youngster,” said my uncle, “I think you'll write
tolerable leaders for some radical paper, one of these days,
but you fellows that want to get into the chariot of the sun
and drive it, had better think a little before you set the
world on fire. As for your Diana, I thank Heaven she isn't
my wife, and I think it would be pretty cold picking with
your Minerva.”

“Permit me to say, uncle, that in this `latter day glory' that
is coming, men have got to learn to judge women by some
other standard than what would make good wives for them,
and acknowledge sometimes a femininity existing in and for
itself. As there is a possible manhood complete without
woman, so there is a possible womanhood complete without
man.”

“That's not the Christian idea,” said my uncle.

“Pardon me,” I replied, “but I believe it is exactly what
St. Paul meant when he spoke of the state of celibacy, in
devotion to the higher spiritual life, as being a higher state
for some men and women than marriage.”

“You are on dangerous ground there,” said my uncle, “you
will run right into monastic absurdity.”

“High grounds are always dangerous grounds,” said I,
“full of pitfalls and precipices, yet the Lord has persisted in
making mountains, precipices, pitfalls, and all, and being
made they may as well be explored, even at the risk of
breaking one's neck. We may as well look every question
in the face, and run every inquiry to its ultimate.”

“Go it then,” said my uncle, “and joy go with you; the

[figure description] Page 121.[end figure description]

chariot of the sun is the place for a prospect! Up with you
into it, my boy, that kind of driving is interesting; in fact,
when I was young, I should have liked it myself, but if
you don't want to kick up as great a bobbery as Phæton did,
you'd better mind his father's advice: spare the whip, and
use the reins with those fiery horses of the future.”

“But, now,” said I, “as the final result of all this, will
you help Caroline?”

“Yes, I will; soberly and seriously, I will. I'll drive over
there and have a little talk with the girl, as soon as you're
gone.”

“And, uncle,” said I, “if you wish to gain influence with
her, don't flatter nor compliment; examine her, and appoint
her tasks exactly as you would those of a young man in
similar circumstances. You will please her best so; she is
ready to do work, and make serious studies; she is of a thorough,
earnest nature, and will do credit to your teaching.”

“What a pity she wasn't born a boy,” said my uncle,
under his breath.

“Well, let you and me do what we can,” said I, “to bring
in such a state of things in this world that it shall no longer
be said of any woman that it was a pity not to have been
born a man.”

Subsequently I spoke to my mother on the same subject
and gave her an account of my interview with Caroline.

I think that my mother, in her own secret heart, had cherished
very much the same hopes for me that had been expressed
by Uncle Jacob. Caroline was an uncommon person,
the star of the little secluded neighborhood, and my mother
had seen enough of her to know that, though principally
absorbed in the requirements of a very hard domestic sphere
she possessed an uncommon character and great capabilities.
Between her and my mother, however, there had been
that silence which often exists between two natures, both
sensitive and both reticent, who seem to act as non-conductors
to each other. Caroline stood a little in awe of the

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moral and religious force of my mother, and my mother
was a little chilled by the keen intellectualism of Caroline.

There are people that cannot understand each other
without an interpreter, and it is not unfrequently easier for
men and women to speak confidentially to each other than
to their own sex. There are certain aspects in which each
sex is sure of more comprehension than from its own. I
served, in this case, as the connecting wire of the galvanic
battery to pass the spark of sympathetic comprehension
between these two natures.

My mother was one of those women naturally timid, reticent,
retiring, encompassed by physical diffidence as with a
mantle—so sensitive that, even in an argument with me,
the blood would flush into her cheeks—yet, she had withal
that deep, brooding, philosophical nature, which revolves all
things silently, and with intensest interest, and comes to
perfectly independent conclusions in the irresponsible liberty
of solitude. How many times has this great noisy world
been looked out on, and silently judged by these quiet,
thoughtful women of the Virgin Mary type, who have never
uttered their magnificat till they uttered it beyond the veil!
My mother seemed to be a woman in whom religious faith
had risen to that amount of certainty and security, that she
feared no kind of investigation or discussion, and had no
prejudices or passionate preferences. Thus she read the
works of the modern physical philosophical school with a
tranquil curiosity, and a patient analysis, apparently enjoying
every well-turned expression, and receiving with interest,
and weighing with deliberation every record of experiments,
and every investigation of facts. Her faith in her
religion was so perfect that she could afford all these explorations,
no more expecting her Christian hopes to fall,
through any discoveries of modern science, than she expected
the sun to cease shining on account of the contradictory
theories of astronomers. They who have lived in communion
with God have a mode of evidence unknown to

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philosophers; a knowledge at first hand. In the same manner,
the wideness of Christian charity gave my mother a most
Catholic tolerance for natures unlike her own.

“I have always believed in the doctrine of vocations,” she
said, as she listened to me; “it is one of those points where
the Romish church has shown a superior good sense in discovering
and making a place for every kind of nature.”

“Caroline has been afraid to confide in you, lest you should
think her struggles to rise above her destiny, and her dissatisfaction
with it, irreligious.

“Far from it,” said my mother; “I wholly sympathize with
her; people don't realize what it is to starve faculties; they
understand physical starvation, but the slow fainting and
dying of desires and capabilities for want of anything to
feed upon, the withering of powers for want of exercise, is
what they do not understand. This is what Caroline is condemned
to, by the fixed will of her father, and whether any
mortal can prevail with him, I don't know.”

“You might, dear mother, I am sure.”

“I doubt it; he has a manner that freezes me. I think
in his hard, silent, interior way, he loves me, but any argument
addressed to him, any direct attempt to change his
opinions and purpose only makes him harder.”

“Would it not, then, be her right to choose her course
without his consent—and against it” My mother sat with
her blue eyes looking thoughtfully before her

“There is no point,” she said slowly, “that requires more
careful handling, to discriminate right from wrong, than the
limits of self-sacrifice. To a certain extent it is a virtue,
and the noblest one, but there are rights of the individual
that ought not to be sacrificed; our own happiness has its
just place, and I cannot see it to be more right to suffer injustice
to one's self than to another, if one can help it. The
individual right of self-assertion of child against parent is
like the right of revolution in the State, a difficult one to
define, yet a real one. It seems to me that one owes it to
God, and to the world, to become all that one can be, and to

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do all that one can do, and that a blind, unreasoning authority
that forbids this is to be resisted by a higher law. If I
would help another person to escape from an unreasoning
tyranny, I ought to do as much for myself.”

“And don't you think,” said I, “that the silent self-abnegation
of some fine natures has done harm by increasing in
those around them the habits of tyranny and selfishness?”

“Undoubtedly,” said my mother, “many wives make their
husbands bad Christians, and really stand in the way of their
salvation, by a weak, fond submission, and a sort of morbid
passion for self-sacrifice—really generous and noble men are
often tempted to fatal habits of selfishness in this way.”

“Then would it not be better for Caroline to summon
courage to tell her father exactly how she feels and views
his course and hers?”

“He has a habit,” said my mother, “of cutting short any
communication from his children that doesn't please him,
by bringing down his hand abruptly and saying, `No more
of that, I don't want to hear it.' With me he accomplishes
the same by abruptly leaving the room. The fact is,” said
my mother, after a pause, “I more than suspect that he set
his foot on something really vital to Caroline's life, years ago,
when she was quite young.”

“You mean an attachment?”

“Yes. I had hoped that it had been outgrown or superseded,
probably it may be, but I think she is one of the sort
in which such an experience often destroys all chance for
any other to come after it.”

“Were you told of this?”

“I discovered it by an accident, no matter how. I was
not told, and I know very little, yet enough to enable me to
admire the vigor with which she has made the most of life,
the cheerfulness and thoroughness with which she has
accepted hard duties. Well,” she added, after a pause, “I
will talk with Caroline, and we will see what can be done,
and then,” she added, “we can carry the matter to a higher
One, who understands all, and holds all in his hands.”

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My mother spoke with a bright assured force of this
resort, sacred in every emergency.

This was the last night of my stay at home, the next day
I was to start for my ship to go to Europe. I sat up late writing
to Caroline, and left the letter in my mother's hands.

p467-149 CHAPTER XII. I LAY THE FIRST STONE IN MY FOUNDATION.

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MY story now opens in New York, whither I am come
to seek my fortune as a maker and seller of the
invisible fabrics of the brain.

During my year in Europe I had done my best to make myself
known at the workshops of different literary periodicals,
as a fabricator of these airy wares. I tried all sorts
and sizes of articles, from grave to gay, from lively to
severe, sowing them broadcast in various papers, without
regard to pecuniary profit, and the consequence was that
I came back to New York as a writer favorably known,
who had made something of a position. To be sure my
foot was on the lowest round of the ladder, but it was on
the ladder, and I meant to climb.

“To climb — to what?” In the answer a man gives to
that question lies the whole character of his life-work. If
to climb be merely to gain a name, and a competence, a
home, a wife, and children, with the means of keeping them
in ease and comfort, the question, though beset with difficulties
of practical performance, is comparatively simple.
But if in addition to this a man is to build himself up after
an ideal standard, as carefully as if he were a temple to
stand for eternity; if he is to lend a hand to help that great
living temple which God is perfecting in human society,
the question becomes more complicated still.

I fear some of my fair readers are by this time impatient
to see something of “my wife.” Let me tell them for their
comfort that at this moment, when I entered New York on a
drizzly, lonesome December evening she was there, fair as a
star, though I knew it not. The same may be true of you,

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young man. If you are ever to be married, your wife is
probably now in the world; some house holds her, and
there are mortal eyes at this hour to whom her lineaments
are as familiar as they are unknown to you. So much for
the doctrine of predestination.

But at this hour that I speak of, though the lady in question
was a living and blessed fact, and though she looked
on the same stars, and breathed the same air, and trod daily
the same sidewalk with myself, I was not, as I perceive, any
the wiser or better for it at this particular period of my existence.

In fact, though she was in a large part the unperceived
spring and motive of all that I did, yet at this particular
time I was so busy in adjusting the material foundations of
my life that the ideas of marrying and giving in marriage
were never less immediately in my thoughts. I came into
New York a stranger. I knew nobody personally, and I had
no time for visiting.

I had been, in the course of my wanderings, in many
cities. I had lingered in Paris, Rome, Florence, and Naples,
and, with the exception of London, I never found a place so
difficult to breathe the breath of any ideality, or any enthusiasm,
or exaltation of any description, as New York.
London, with its ponderous gloom, its sullen, mammoth,
aristocratic shadows, seems to benumb, and chill, and freeze
the soul; but New York impressed me like a great hot furnace,
where twig, spray, and flower wither in a moment,
and the little birds flying over, drop down dead. My first
impulse in life there was to cover, and conceal, and hide in
the deepest and most remote caverns of my heart anything
that was sacred, and delicate, and tender, lest the flame
should scorch it. Balzac in his epigrammatic manner has
characterized New York as the city where there is “neither
faith, hope, nor charity,” and, as he never came here, I suppose
he must have taken his impressions from the descriptions
of unfortunate compatriots, who have landed strangers
and been precipitated into the very rush and whirl of its

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grinding selfishness, and its desperate don't-care manner of
doing things. There is abundance of selfishness and hardness
in Paris, but it is concealed under a veil of ideality.
The city wooes you like a home, it gives you picture-galleries,
fountains, gardens, and grottoes, and a good natured
lounging population, who have nothing to do but make
themselves agreeable.

I must confess that my first emotion in making my way
about the streets of New York, before I had associated
them with any intimacy or acquaintances, was a vague
sort of terror, such as one would feel at being jostled
among cannibals, who on a reasonable provocation wouldn't
hesitate to skin him and pick his bones. There was such
a driving, merciless, fierce “take-care-of-yourself, and devil
take the hindmost” air, even to the drays and omnibuses,
and hackmen, that I had somewhat the feeling of being in
an unregulated menagerie, not knowing at what moment
some wild beast might spring upon me. As I became more
acquainted in the circles centering around the different
publications, I felt an acrid, eager, nipping air, in which it
appeared to me that everybody had put on defensive armor
in regard to his own innermost and most precious feelings,
and like the lobster, armed himself with claws to seize and
to tear that which came in his way. The rivalry between
great literary organs was so intense, and the competition so
vivid, that the offering of any flower of fancy or feeling to
any of them, seemed about as absurd as if a man should
offer a tea-rose bud to the bawling, shouting hackman that
shake their whips and scream at the landing.

Everything in life and death, and time and eternity,
whether high as Heaven, or deep as hell, seemed to be
looked upon only as subject matter for advertisement, and
material for running a paper. Hand out your wares!
advertise them and see what they will bring, seemed to
be the only law of production, at whose behest the most
delicate webs and traceries of fancy, the most solemn and
tender mysteries of feeling, the most awful of religious

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emotions came to have a trademark and market value! In
short, New York is the great business mart, the Vanity
Fair of the world, where everything is pushed by advertising
and competition, not even excepting the great moral
enterprise of bringing in the millennium; and in the first
blast and blare of its busy, noisy publicity and activity, I
felt my inner spirits shrink and tremble with dismay.
Even the religion of this modern century bears the deep
impress of the trade-mark, which calendars its financial
value.

I could not but think what the sweet and retiring Galilean,
who in the old days was weary and worn with the
rush of crowds in simple old Palestine, must think if he
looks down now, on the way in which his religion is advertised
and pushed in modern society. Certain it is, if it be
the kingdom of God that is coming in our times, it is coming
with very great observation, and people have long since forgot
the idea that they are not to say “Lo, here!” and “Lo,
there!” since that is precisely what a large part of the
world are getting their living by doing.

These ideas I must confess bore with great weight on
my mind, as I had just parted from my mother, whose last
words were that whatever else I did, and whether I gained
anything for this life or not, she trusted that I would live
an humble, self-denying, Christian life. I must own that
for the first few weeks of looking into the interior management
of literary life in New York, the idea at times often
seemed to me really ludicrous. To be humble, yet to seek
success in society where it is the first duty to crow from
morning till night, and to praise, and vaunt, and glorify, at
the top of one's lungs, one's own party, or paper, or magazine,
seemed to me sufficiently amusing. However, in conformity
with a solemn promise made to my mother, I lost
no time in uniting myself with a Christian body, of my
father's own denomination, and presented a letter from the
Church in Highland to the brethren of the Bethany Church.

And here I will say that for a young man who wants

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shelter, and nourishment and shade for the development of
his fine moral sensibilities, a breakwater to keep the waves
of materialism from dashing over and drowning his higher
life, there is nothing better, as yet to be found, than a union
with some one of the many bodies of differing names and
denominations calling themselves Christian Churches. A
Christian Church, according to the very best definition of
the name ever yet given, is a congregation of faithful men,
in which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments
duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance; and
making due allowance for all the ignorance, and prejudice,
and mistakes, and even the willful hypocrisy, which, as
human nature is, must always exist in such connections, I
must say that I think these Churches are the best form of
social moral culture yet invented, and not to be dispensed
with till something more fully answering the purpose has
been tested for as long a time as they.

These are caravans that cross the hot and weary sands of
life, and while there may be wrangling and undesirable
administration at times within them, yet, after all, the pilgrim
that undertakes alone is but a speck in the wide desert,
too often blown away, and withering like the leaf before the
wind.

The great congregation of the Bethany on Sabbath days,
all standing up together and joining in mighty hymn-singing,
though all were outwardly unknown to me, seemed to
thrill my heart with a sense of solemn companionship, in
my earliest and most sacred religious associations. It was
a congregation largely made up of young men, who like
myself were strangers, away from home and friends, and
whose hearts, touched and warmed by the familiar sounds,
seemed to send forth magnetic odors like the interlocked
pine trees under the warm sunshine of a June day.

I have long felt that he who would work his brain for
a living, without premature wear upon the organ, must have
Sunday placed as a sacred barrier of entire oblivion, so far
as possible, of the course of his week-day cares. And what

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oblivion can be more complete than to rise on the wings of
religious ordinance into the region of those diviner faculties
by which man recognizes his heirship to all that is in God?

In like manner I found an oasis in the hot and hurried
course of my week-day life, by dropping in to the weekly
prayer-meeting. The large, bright, pleasant room seemed
so social and home-like, the rows of cheerful, well-dressed,
thoughtful people, seemed, even before I knew one of them,
fatherly, motherly, brotherly, and sisterly, as they joined
with the piano in familiar hymn-singing, while the pastor
sat among them as a father in his family, and easy social
conversation went on with regard to the various methods
and aspects of the practical religious life.

To me, a stranger, and naturally shy and undemonstrative,
this socialism was in the highest degree warming and
inspiring. I do not mean to set the praise of this Church
above that of a hundred others, with which I might have
become connected, but I will say that here I met the types
of some of those good old-fashioned Christians that Hawthorne
celebrates in his “Celestial Railroad,” under the
name of Messrs. “Stick to the Right,” and “Foot it to
Heaven,” men better known among the poor and afflicted
than in fashionable or literary circles, men who, without
troubling their heads about much speculation, are footing
it to Heaven on the old, time-worn, narrow way, and carrying
with them as many as they can induce to go.

Having thus provided against being drawn down and
utterly swamped in the bread-and-subsistence struggle that
was before me, I sought to gain a position in connection
with some paper in New York. I had offers under consideration
from several of them. The conductors of “The
Moral Spouting Horn” had conversed with me touching
their projects, and I had also been furnishing letters for the
“Great Democracy,” and one of the proprietors had invited
me to a private dinner, I suppose for the purpose of
looking me over and trying my paces before he concluded
to purchase me.

[figure description] Page 132.[end figure description]

Mr. Goldstick was a florid, middle-aged man, with a
slightly bald head, an easy portliness of manner, and that
air of comfortable patronage which men who are up in
the world sometimes carry towards' young aspirants. It
was his policy and his way to put himself at once on a footng
of equality with them, easy, jolly, and free; justly
thinking that thereby he gained a more unguarded insight
into the inner citadel of their nature, and could see in the
easy play of their faculties just about how much they could
be made to answer his purposes. I had a chatty, merry dinner
of it, and found all my native shyness melting away
under his charming affability. In fact, during the latter
part of the time, I almost felt that I could have told him
anything that I could have told my own mother. What
did we not talk about that is of interest in these stirring
times? Philosophy, history, science, religion, life, death,
and immortality—all received the most graceful off-hand
treatment, and were discussed with a singular unanimity
of sentiment—that unanimity which always takes place
when the partner in a discussion has the controlling purpose
to be of the same mind as yourself. When, under the warm
and sunny air of this genial nature, I had fully expanded,
and confidence was in full blossom, came the immediate
business conversation in relation to the paper.

“I am rejoiced,” said Mr. Goldstick, “in these days of
skepticism to come across a young man with real religious
convictions. I am not, I regret to say, a religious professor
myself, but I appreciate it, Mr. Henderson, as the element
most wanting in our modern life.”

Here Mr. Goldstick sighed and rolled up his eyes, and took
a glass of wine.

I felt encouraged in this sympathetic atmosphere to unfold
to him my somewhat idealized views of what might be
accomplished by the daily press, by editors as truly under
moral vows and consecrations, as the clergymen who ministered
at the altar.

He caught the idea from me with enthusiasm, and went

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on to expand it with a vigor and richness of imagery, and to
illustrate it with a profusion of incidents, which left me far
behind him, gazing after him with reverential admiration.

“Mr. Henderson,” said he, The Great Democracy is not
primarily a money-making enterprise—it is a great moral
engine; it is for the great American people, and it contemplates
results which look to the complete regeneration of
society.”

I ventured here to remark that the same object had been
stated to me by the Moral Spouting Horn.

His countenance assumed at once an expression of intense
disgust.

“Is it possible,” he said, “that the charlatan has been trying
to get hold of you? My dear fellow,” he added, drawing
near to me with a confidential air, “of course I would
be the last man to infringe on the courtesies due to my
brethren of the press, and you must be aware that our present
conversation is to be considered strictly confidential.”

I assured him with fervor that I should consider it so.

“Well, then,” he said, “between ourselves, I may say that
The Moral Spouting Horn is a humbug. On mature reflection,”
he added, “I don't know but duty requires me to go
farther, and say, in the strictest confidence, you understand,
that I consider The Moral Spouting Horn a swindle.'

Here it occurred to me that the same communication had
been made in equal confidence, by the proprietor of The
Moral Spouting Horn in relation to The Great Democracy.
But, much as I was warmed into confidence by the genial
atmosphere of my friend, I had still enough prudence to
forbear making this statement.

“Now,” said he, “my young friend, in devoting yourself
to the service of The Great Democracy you may consider
yourself as serving the cause of God and mankind in ways
that no clergyman has an equal chance of doing. Beside
the press, sir, the pulpit is effete. It is, so to speak,” he
added, with a sweep of the right hand, “nowhere. Of course
the responsibilities of conducting such an organ are

[figure description] Page 134.[end figure description]

tremendous, tremendous,” he added, reflectively, as I looked
at him with awe; “and that is why I require in my writers,
above all things, the clearest and firmest moral convictions.
Sir, it is a critical period in our history; there is an amount
of corruption in this nation that threatens its dissolution;
the Church and the Pulpit have proved entirely inadequate
to stem it. It rests with the Press.”

There was a solemn pause, in which nothing was heard but
the clink of the decanter on the glass, as he poured out
another glass of wine.

“It is a great responsibility,” I remarked, with a sigh.

“Enormous!” he added, with almost a groan, eyeing me
sternly. “Consider,” he went on, “the evils of the tremendously
corrupted literature which is now being poured
upon the community. Sir, we are fast drifting to destruction,
it is a solemn fact. The public mind must be aroused
and strengthened to resist; they must be taught to discriminate;
there must be a just standard of moral criticism
no less than of intellectual, and that must be attended to
in our paper.”

I was delighted to find his views in such accordance with
my own, and assured him I should be only too happy to do
what I could to forward them.

“We have been charmed and delighted,” he said, “with
your contributions hitherto; they have a high moral tone
and have been deservedly popular, and it is our desire to
secure you as a stated contributor in a semi-editorial capacity,
looking towards future developments. We wish that
it were in our power to pay a more liberal sum than we can
offer, but you must be aware, Mr. Henderson, that great
moral enterprises must always depend, in a certain degree,
on the element of self-sacrifice in its promoters.”

I reflected, at this moment, on my father's life, and assented
with enthusiasm—remarking that “if I could only get
enough to furnish me with the necessaries of life I should
be delighted to go into the glorious work with him, and
give to it the whole enthusiasm of my soul.”

[figure description] Page 135.[end figure description]

“You have the right spirit, young man,” he said. “It is
delightful to witness this freshness of moral feeling.” And
thus, before our interview was closed, I had signed a contract
of service to Mr. Goldstick, at very moderate wages,
but my heart was filled with exulting joy at the idea of the
possibilities of the situation.

I was young, and ardent; I did not, at this moment, want
to make money so much as to make myself felt in the
great world. It was the very spirit of Phæton; I wanted
to have a hand on the reins, and a touch of the whip, and
guide the fiery horses of Progress.

I had written stories, and sung songs, but I was not quite
content with those; I wanted the anonymous pulpit of the
Editor to speak in, the opportunity of being the daily invisible
companion and counselor of thousands about their
daily paths. The offer of Mr. Goldstick, as I understood it,
looked that way, and I resolved to deserve so well of
him by unlimited devotion to the interests of the paper,
that he should open my way before me.

p467-159 CHAPTER XIII. BACHELOR COMRADES.

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I SOON became well acquainted with my collaborators
on the paper. It was a pleasant surprise to
be greeted in the foreground by the familiar face
of Jim Fellows, my old college class-mate.

Jim was an agreeable creature, born with a decided genius
for gossip. He had in perfection the faculty which phrenologists
call individuality. He was statistical in the very
marrow of his bones, apparently imbibing all the external
facts of every person and everything around him, by a kind
of rapid instinct. In college, Jim always knew all about
every student; he knew all about everybody in the little
town where the college was situated, their name, history,
character, business, their front door and their back door
affairs. No birth, marriage, or death ever took Jim by surprise;
he always knew all about it long ago.

Now, as a newspaper is a gossip market on a large scale,
this species of talent often goes farther in our modern literary
life than the deepest reflection or the highest culture.

Jim was the best-natured fellow breathing; it was impossible
to ruffle or disturb the easy, rattling, chattering
flow of his animal spirits. He was like a Frenchman in his
power of bright, airy adaptation to circumstances, and determination
and ability to make the most of them.

“How lucky!” he said, the morning I first shook hands
with him at the office of the Great Democracy; “you are
just on the minute; the very lodging you want has been
vacated this morning by old Styles; sunny room—south
windows—close by here—water, gas, and so on, all correct;
and, best of all, me for your opposite neighbor.”

I went round with him, looked, approved, and was settled

[figure description] Page 137.[end figure description]

at once, Jim helping me with all the good-natured handiness
and activity of old college days. We had a rattling,
gay morning, plunging round into auction-rooms, bargaining
for second-hand furniture, and with so much zeal did
we drive our enterprise, seconded by the co-labors of a charwoman
whom Jim patronized, that by night I found myself
actually settled in a home of my own, making tea in Jim's
patent bachelor tea-kettle, and talking over his and my
affairs with the freedom of old cronies. Jim made no scruple
in inquiring in the most direct manner as to the terms
of my agreement with Mr. Goldstick, and opened the subject
succinctly, as follows:

“Now, my son, you must let your old grandfather advise
you a little about your temporalities. In the first
place; what's Old Soapy going to give you?”

“If you mean Mr. Goldstick,” said I—

“Yes,” said he, “call him `Soapy' for short. Did he
come down handsomely on the terms?”

“His offers were not as large as I should have liked; but
then, as he said, this paper is not a money-making affair,
but a moral enterprise, and I am willing to work for less.”

“Moral grandmother!” said Jim, in a tone of unlimited
disgust. “He be—choked, as it were. Why, Harry Henderson,
are your eye-teeth in such a retrograde state as that?
Why, this paper is a fortune to that man; he lives in a
palace, owns a picture gallery, and rolls about in his own
carriage.”

“I understood him,” said I, “that the paper was not
immediately profitable in a pecuniary point of view.”

“Soapy calls everything unprofitable that does not yield
him fifty per cent. on the money invested. Talk of moral
enterprise! What did he engage you for?”

I stated the terms.

“For how long?”

“For one year.”

“Well, the best you can do is to work it out now. Never
make another bargain without asking your grandfather.

[figure description] Page 138.[end figure description]

Why, he pays me just double; and you know, Harry, I
am nothing at all of a writer compared to you. But then,
to be sure, I fill a place you've really no talent for.”

“What is that?”

“General professor of humbug,” said Jim. “No sort of
business gets on in this world without that, and I'm a real
genius in that line. I made Old Soapy come down, by
threatening to `rat,' and go to the Spouting Horn, and they
couldn't afford to let me do that. You see, I've been up
their back stairs, and know all their little family secrets.
The Spouting Horn would give their eye-teeth for me. It's
too funny,” he said, throwing himself back and laughing.

“Are these papers rivals?” said I.

“Well, I should `rayther' think they were,” said he, eyeing
me with an air of superiority amounting almost to contempt.
“Why, man, the thing that I'm particularly valuable for is,
that I always know just what will plague the Spouting
Horn folks the most. I know precisely where to stick a pin
or a needle into them; and one great object of our paper is
to show that the Spouting Horn is always in the wrong.
No matter what topic is uppermost, I attend to that, and
get off something on them. For you see, they are popular,
and make money like thunder, and, of course, that isn't to
be allowed. “Now,” he added, pointing with his thumb upward,
“overhead, there is really our best fellow—Bolton.
Bolton is said to be the best writer of English in our
day; he's an A No. 1, and no mistake; tremendously educated,
and all that, and he knows exactly to a shaving what's
what everywhere; he's a gentleman, too; we call him the
Dominie. Well, Bolton writes the great leaders, and fires
off on all the awful and solemn topics, and lays off the politics
of Europe and the world generally. When there's a
row over there in Europe, Bolton is magnificent on editorials.
You see, he has the run of all the rows they have had
there, and every bobbery that has been kicked up since the
Christian era. He'll tell you what the French did in 1700

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this, and the Germans in 1800 that, and of course he prophesies
splendidly on what's to turn up next.”

“I suppose they give him large pay,” said I.

“Well, you see, Bolton's a quiet fellow and a gentleman—
one that hates to jaw—and is modest, and so they keep him
along steady on about half what I would get out of them
if I were in his skin. Bolton is perfectly satisfied. If I
were he, I shouldn't be, you see. I say, Harry, I know
you'd like him. Let me bring him down and introduce
him,” and before I could either consent or refuse, Jim rattled
up stairs, and I heard him in an earnest, persuasive
treaty, and soon he came down with his captive.

I saw a man of thirty-three or thereabouts, tall, well
formed, with bright, dark eyes, strongly-marked features,
a finely-turned head, and closely-cropped black hair. He
had what I should call presence—something that impressed
me, as he entered the room, with the idea of a superior kind
of individuality, though he was simple in his manners,
with a slight air of shyness and constraint. The blood
flushed in his cheeks as he was introduced to me, and there
was a tremulous motion about his finely-cut lips, betokening
suppressed sensitiveness. The first sound of his voice, as he
spoke, struck on my ear agreeably, like the tones of a fine
instrument, and, reticent and retiring as he seemed, I felt
myself singularly attracted toward him.

What impressed me most, as he joined in the conversation
with my rattling, free and easy, good-natured neighbor,
was an air of patient, amused tolerance. He struck me as
a man who had made up his mind to expect nothing and ask
nothing of life, and who was sitting it out patiently, as one
sits out a dull play at the theater. He was disappointed
with nobody, and angry with nobody, while he seemed to
have no confidence in anybody. With all this apparent
reserve, he was simply and frankly cordial to me, as a newcomer
and a fellow-worker on the same paper.

“Mr. Henderson,” he said, “I shall be glad to extend to
you the hospitalities of my den, such as they are. If I can

[figure description] Page 140.[end figure description]

at any time render you any assistance, don't hesitate to use
me. Perhaps you would like to walk up and look at my
books? I shall be only too happy to put them at your disposal.”

We went up into a little attic room whose walls were literally
lined with books on all sides, only allowing space for
the two southerly windows which overlooked the city.

“I like to be high in the world, you see,” he said, with a
smile.

The room was not a large one, and the center was occupied
by a large table, covered with books and papers. A cheerful
coal-fire was burning in the little grate, a large leather arm-chair
stood before it, and, with one or two other chairs,
completed the furniture of the apartment. A small, lighted
closet, whose door stood open on the room, displayed a pallet
bed of monastic simplicity.

There were two occupants of the apartment who seemed
established there by right of possession. A large Maltese
cat, with great, golden eyes, like two full moons, sat gravely
looking into the fire, in one corner, and a very plebeian,
scrubby mongrel, who appeared to have known the hard
side of life in former days, was dozing in the other.

Apparently, these genii loci were so strong in their sense
of possession that our entrance gave them no disturbance.
The dog unclosed his eyes with a sleepy wink as we came
in, and then shut them again, dreamily, as satisfied that all
was right.

Bolton invited us to sit down, and did the honors of his
room with a quiet elegance, as if it had been a palace instead
of an attic. As soon as we were seated, the cat sprang
familiarly on the table and sat down cosily by Bolton, rubbing
her head against his coat-sleeve.

“Let me introduce you to my wife,” said Bolton, stroking
her head. “Eh. Jenny, what now?” he added, as she seized
his hands playfully in her teeth and claws. “You see, she
has the connubial weapons,” he said, “and insists on being
treated with attention; but she's capital company. I read

[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]

all my articles to her, and she never makes an unjust criticism.”

Puss soon stepped from her perch on the table and ensconced
herself in his lap, while I went round examining
his books.

The library showed varied and curious tastes. The books
were almost all rare.

“I have always made a rule,” he said, “never to buy a
book that I could borrow.”

I was amused, in the course of the conversation, at the
relations which apparently existed between him and Jim
Fellows, which appeared to me to be very like what might
be supposed to exist between a philosopher and a lively
pet squirrel—it was the perfection of quiet, amused tolerance.

Jim seemed to be not in the slightest degree under constraint
in his presence, and rattled on with a free and easy
slang familiarity, precisely as he had done with me.

“What do you think Old Soapy has engaged Hal for?”
he said. “Why, he only offers him—” Here followed the
statement of terms.

I was annoyed at this matter-of-fact way of handling
my private affairs, but on meeting the eyes of my new
friend I discerned a glance of quiet humor which re-assured
me. He seemed to regard Jim only as another form of the
inevitable.

“Don't you think it is a confounded take-in?” said Jim.

“Of course,” said Mr. Bolton, with a smile, “but he will
survive it. The place is only one of the stepping-stones.
Meanwhile,” he said, “I think Mr. Henderson can find other
markets for his literary wares, and more profitable ones.
I think,” he added, while the blood again rose in his cheeks,
“that I have some influence in certain literary quarters,
and I shall be happy to do all that I can to secure to him
that which he ought to receive for such careful work as
his. Your labor on the paper will not by any means take
up your whole power or time.”

p467-165

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“Well,” said Jim, “the fact is the same all the world over—
the people that grow a thing are those that get the
least for it. It isn't your farmers, that work early and late,
that get rich by what they raise out of the earth, it's the
middlemen and the hucksters. And just so it is in literature;
and the better a fellow writes, and the more work he
puts into it, the less he gets paid for it. Why, now, look
at me,” he said, “perching himself astride the arm of a
chair, “I'm a genuine literary humbug, but I'll bet you
I'll make more money than either of you, because, you see,
I've no modesty and no conscience. Confound it all, those
are luxuries that a poor fellow can't afford to keep. I'm
a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, but I'm just the sort
of fellow the world wants, and, hang it, they shall pay
me for being that sort of fellow. I mean to make it shell
out, and you see if I don't. I'll bet you, now, that I'd write
a book that you wouldn't, either of you, be hired to write,
and sell one hundred thousand copies of it, and put the
money in my pocket, marry the handsomest, richest, and
best educated girl in New York, while you are trudging on,
doing good, careful work, as you call it.”

“Remember us in your will,” said I.

“Oh, yes, I will,” he said. “I'll found an asylumfor decayed
authors of merit—a sort of literary `Hotel des Invalides.”'

We had a hearty laugh over this idea, and, on the whole,
our evening passed off very merrily. When I shook hands
with Bolton for the night, it was with a silent conviction of
an interior affinity between us.

It is a charming thing in one's rambles to come across a
tree, or a flower, or a fine bit of landscape that one can
think of afterward, and feel richer for their its in the
world. But it is more when one is in a strange place, to
come across a man that you feel thoroughly persuaded is,
somehow or other, morally and intellectually worth exploring.
Our lives tend to become so hopelessly commonplace,
and the human beings we meet are generally so much one
just like another, that the possibility of a new and peculiar

BOLTON'S ASYLUM.
"Halloo, Bolton!" said I. "Have you got a foundling hospital here?" [figure description] Image of Harry and Bolton standing in a living room looking down at three children huddled together by a fireplace. One child is sitting in a chair holding onto an infant while the other looks on. There is a small dog sitting on its hind legs begging Harry for a treat.[end figure description]

[figure description] Blank Page.[end figure description]

[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]

style of character in an acquaintance is a most enlivening
one.

There was something about Bolton both stimulating and
winning, and I lay down less a stranger that night than I
had been since I came to New York.

p467-169 CHAPTER XIV. HAPS AND MISHAPS.

[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]

I ENTERED upon my new duties with enthusiasm,
and produced some editorials, for which I was
complimented by Mr. Goldstick.

“That's the kind of thing wanted!” he said; “a firm, moral
tone, and steady religious convictions; that pleases the old
standards.”

Emboldened by this I proceeded to attack a specific abuse
in New York administration, which had struck me as needing
to be at once righted. If ever a moral trumpet ought to have
its voice, it was on this subject. I read my article to Bolton;
in fact I had gradually fallen into the habit of referring myself
to his judgment.

“It is all perfectly true,” he remarked, when I had finished,
while he leaned back in his chair and stroked his cat,
“but they never will put that into the paper, in the world.”

“Why!” said I, “if ever there was an abuse that required
exposing, it is this.”

“Precisely!” he replied.

“And what is the use,” I went on, “of general moral
preaching that is never applied to any particular case?”

“The use,” he replied calmly, “is that that kind of preaching
pleases everybody, and increases subscribers, while the
other kind makes enemies, and decreases them.”

“And you really think that they won't put this article in?'
said I.

“I'm certain they won't,” he replied. “The fact is this paper
is bought up on the other side. Messrs. Goldstick and Co.
have intimate connection with Messrs. Bunkam and Chaffem,
who are part and parcel of this very affair.”

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

I opened my mouth with astonishment. “Then Goldstick
is a hypocrite,” I said.

“Not consciously,” he answered, calmly.

“Why!” said I, “you would have thought by the way he
talked to me that he had nothing so much at heart as the
moral progress of society, and was ready to sacrifice everything
to it.”

“Well,” said Bolton, quietly, “did you never see a woman
who thought she was handsome, when she was not? Did
you never see a man who thought he was witty, when he
was only scurrilous and impudent? Did you never see people
who flattered themselves they were frank, because they
were obtuse and impertinent? And cannot you imagine
that a man may think himself a philanthropist, when he is
only a worshiper of the golden calf? That same calf,” he
continued, stroking his cat till she purred aloud, “has the
largest Church of any on earth.”

“Well,” said I, “at any rate I'll hand it in.”

“You can do so,” he replied, “and that will be the last
you will hear of it. You see, I've been this way before you,
and I have learned to save myself time and trouble on these
subjects.”

The result was precisely as Bolton predicted.

“We must be a little careful, my young friend,” said Mr.
Goldstick, “how we handle specific matters of this kind;
they have extended relations that a young man cannot be
expected to appreciate, and I would advise you to confine
yourself to abstract moral principles; keep up a high moral
standard, sir, and things will come right of themselves.
Now, sir, if you could expose the corruptions in England it
would have an admirable moral effect, and our general line
of policy now is down on England.”

A day or two after, however, I fell into serious disgrace.
A part of my duties consisted in reviewing the current literature
of the day; Bolton, Jim, and I, took that department
among us, and I soon learned to sympathize with the teatasters,
who are said to ruin their digestion by an incessant

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

tasting of the different qualities of tea. The enormous
quantity and variety of magazines and books that I had to
“sample” in a few days brought me into such a state of
mental dyspepsia, that I began to wish every book in the
Red Sea. I really was brought to consider the usual pleasant
tone of book notices in America to be evidence of a
high degree of Christian forbearance. In looking over my
share, however, I fell upon a novel of the modern, hot, sensuous
school, in which glowing coloring and a sort of religious
sentimentalism were thrown around actions and principles
which tended directly to the dissolution of society.
Here was exactly the opportunity to stem that tide of corruption
against which Mr. Goldstick so solemnly had warned
me. I made the analysis of the book a text for exposing
the whole class of principles and practices it inculcated, and
uttering my warning against corrupt literature; I sent it
to the paper, and in it went. A day or two after Mr. Goldstick
came into the office in great disorder, with an open
letter in his hand.

“What's all this?” he said; “here's Sillery and Peacham,
blowing us up for being down on their books, and threatening
to take away their advertising from us.”

Nobody seemed to know anything about it, till finally the
matter was traced back to me.

“It was a corrupt book, Mr. Goldstick,” said I, with
firmness, “and the very object you stated to me was to
establish a just moral criticism.”

“Go to thunder! young man,” said Mr. Goldstick, in a
tone I had never heard before. “Have you no discrimination?
are you going to blow us up? The Great Democracy,
sir, is a great moral engine, and the advertising of this
publishing house gives thousands of dollars yearly towards
its support. It's an understood thing that Sillery and
Peacham's books are to be treated handsomely.”

“I say, Captain,” said Jim, who came up behind us at this
time, “let me manage this matter; I'll straighten it out; Sillery
and Peacham know me, and I'll fix it with them.”

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

“Come! Hal, my boy!” he said, hooking me by the arm,
and leading me out.

We walked to our lodgings together. I was gloriously
indignant all the way, but Jim laughed till the tears rolled
down his cheeks.

“You sweet babe of Eden,” said he, as we entered my
room, “do get quiet! I'll sit right down and write a letter
from the Boston correspondent on that book, saying that
your article has created a most immense sensation in the
literary circles of Boston, in regard to its moral character,
and exhort everybody to rush to the book-store and see for
themselves. Now, `hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,'
while I do it.”

“Why, do you mean to go to Boston?” said I.

“Only in spirit, my dear. Bless you! did you suppose
that the Boston correspondents, or any other correspondents,
are there, or anywhere else in fact, that they profess to be?
I told you that I was the professor of humbug. This little
affair lies strictly in my department.”

“Jim!” said I, solemnly, “I don't want to be in such a
network of chicanery.”

“Oh, come, Hal, nobody else wants to be just where they
are, and after all, it's none of your business; you and Bolton
are great moral forty-pounders. When we get you pointed
the right way for the paper you can roar and fire away at
your leisure, and the moral effect will be prodigious. I'm
your flying-artillery—all over the field everywhere, pop, and
off again; and what is it to you what I do? Now you see,
Hal, you must just have some general lines about your
work; the fact is, I ought to have told you before. There's
Sillery and Peacham's books have got to be put straight
along: you see there is no mistake about that; and when you
and Bolton find one you can't praise honestly, turn it over
to me. Then, again, there's Burill and Bangem's books
have got to be put down. They had a row with us last
year, and turned over their advertising to the Spouting
Horn. Now, if you happen to find a bad novel among their

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

books show it up, cut into it without mercy; it will give you
just as good a chance to preach, with your muzzle pointed
the right way, and do exactly as much good. You see there's
everything with you fellows in getting you pointed right.”

“But,” said I, “Jim, this course is utterly subversive of
all just criticism. It makes book notices good for nothing.”

“Well, they are not good for much,” said Jim reflectively.
“I sometimes pity a poor devil whose first book has
been all cut up, just because Goldstick's had a row with his
publishers. But then there's this comfort—what we run
down, the Spouting Horn will run up, so it is about as broad
as it is long. Then there's our Magazines. We're in with
the Rocky Mountains now—we've been out with them for a
a year or two and cut up all their articles. Now you see we
are in, and the rule is, to begin at the beginning and praise
them all straight through, so you'll have plain sailing there.
Then there's the Pacific—you are to pick on that all you
can. I think you had better leave that to me. I have a
talent for saying little provoking things that gall people,
and that they can't answer. The fact is, the Pacific has got
to come down a little, and come to our terms, before we are
civil to it.”

“Jim Fellows”—I began,

“Come, come, go and let off to Bolton, if you have got
anything more to say;” he added, “I want to write my
Boston letter. You see, Hal, I shall bring you out with
flying colors, and get a better sale for the book than if you
hadn't written.

“Jim,” said I, “I'm going to get out of this paper.”

“And pray, my dear Sir, what will you get into?”

“I'll get into one of the religious papers.”

Jim upon this leaned back, kicked up his heels, and
laughed aloud. “I could help you there,” he said. “I do
the literary for three religious newspapers now. These
solemn old Dons are so busy about their tweedle-dums and
tweedle-dees of justification and election, baptism and
church government, that they don't know anything about

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

current literature, and get us fellows to write their book
notices. I rather think that they'd stare if they should read
some of the books that we puff up. I tell you, Christy's
Minstrels are nothing to it. Think of it, Hal,—the solemn
Holy Sentinel with a laudatory criticism of Dante Rosetti's
“Jenny” in it—and the Trumpet of Zion with a commendatory
notice of Georges Sand's novels.” Here Jim laughed
with a fresh impulse. “You see the dear, good souls are
altogether too pious to know anything about it, and so we
liberalize the papers, and the publishers make us a little
consideration for getting their books started in religious
circles.”

“Well, Jim,” said I, “I want to just ask you, do you think
this sort of thing is right?”

“Bless your soul now!” said Jim, “if you are going to
begin with that, here in New York, where are you going to
end—`Where do you 'spect to die when you go to?'—as the
old darkey said.”

“Well,” said I, “would you like to have Dante Rosetti's
“Jenny” put into the hands of your sister or younger brother,
recommended by a religious newspaper?”

“Well, to tell the truth, Hal, I didn't write those notices.
Bill Jones wrote them. Bill's up to anything. You know
every person in England and this country have praised
Dante Rosetti, and particularly “Jenny,” and religious papers
may as well be out of the world as out of fashion,—and so
mother she bought a copy for a Christmas present to sister
Nell. And I tell you if I didn't get a going over about it!”

“I showed her the article in the Holy Sentinel, but it didn't
do a bit of good. She made me promise I wouldn't write it
up, and I never have. She said it was a shame. You see
mother isn't up to the talk about high art, that's got up
now a days about Dante Rosetti and Swinburne, and those.
I thought myself that “Jenny” was coming it pretty strong,—
and honest now, I never could see the sense in it. But then
you see I am not artistic. If a fellow should tell a story of
that kind to my sister, I should horsewhip him, and kick

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

him down the front steps. But he dresses it up in poetry,
and it lies around on pious people's tables, and nobody dares
to say a word because it's “artistic.” People are so afraid
they shall not be supposed to understand what high art is,
that they'll knuckle down under most anything. That's the
kind of world we live in. Well! I didn't make the world
and I don't govern it. But the world owes me a living, and
hang it! it shall give me one. So you go up to Bolton, and
leave me to do my work; I've got to write columns, and then
tramp out to that confounded water-color exhibition, because
I promised Snooks a puff,—I shan't get to bed till
twelve or one. I tell you it's steep on a fellow now.”

I went up to Bolton, boiling, and bubbling and seething,
with the spirit of sixteen reformers in my veins. The
scene, as I opened the door, was sufficiently tranquilizing.
Bolton sat reading by the side of his shaded study-lamp,
with his cat asleep in his lap; the ill-favored dog, before
mentioned, was planted by his side, with his nose upturned,
surveying him with a fullness of doggish adoration and
complacency, which made his rubbishly shop-worn figure
quite an affecting item in the picture. Crouched down on
the floor in the corner, was a ragged, unkempt, freckledfaced
little boy, busy doing a sum on a slate.

“Ah! old fellow,” he said, as he looked up and saw me.
“Come in; there, there, Snubby,” he said to the dog, pushing
him gently into his corner; “let the gentleman sit down.
You see you find me surrounded by my family,” he said.
“Wait one minute,” he added, turning to the boy in the
corner, and taking his slate out of his hand, and running
over the sum. “All right, Bill. Now here's your book.”
He took a volume of the Arabian Nights from the table, and
handed it to him, and Bill settled himself on the floor, and
was soon lost in “Sinbad the Sailor.” He watched him a
minute or two, and then looked round at me, with a smile.
“I wouldn't be afraid to bet that you might shout in that
fellow's ear and he wouldn't hear you, now he is fairly in
upon that book. Isn't it worth while to be able to give such

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

perfect bliss in this world at so small an expense? I've lost
the power of reading the Arabian Nights, but I comfort myself
in seeing this chap.”

“Who is he?” said I.

“Oh, he's my washerwoman's boy. Poor fellow. He has
hard times. I've set him up in selling newspapers. You
see, I try now and then to pick up one grain out of the heap
of misery, and put it into the heap of happiness, as John
Newton said.”

I was still bubbling with the unrest of my spirit, and
finally overflowed upon him with the whole history of my
day's misadventures, and all the troubled thoughts and
burning indignations that I had with reference to it.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “take it easy. We have to
accept this world as a fait accompli. It takes some time
for us to learn how little we can do to help or to hinder.
You cannot take a step in the business of life anywhere
without meeting just this kind of thing; and one part of
the science of living is to learn just what our own responsibility
is, and to let other people's alone. The fact is,” he
said, “the growth of current literature in our times has
been so sudden and so enormous that things are in a
sort of revolutionary state with regard to it, in which it
is very difficult to ascertain the exact right. For example,
I am connected with a paper which is simply and purely, at
bottom, a financial speculation; its owners must make
money. Now, they are not bad men as the world goes—
they are well-meaning men—amiable, patriotic, philanthropic—
some of them are religious; they, all of them,
would rather virtue would prevail than vice, and good
than evil; they, all of them, would desire every kind of
abuse to be reformed, and every good cause to be forwarded,
that could be forwarded without a sacrifice of their
main object. As for me, I am not a holder or proprietor.
I am simply a servant engaged by these people for a certain
sum. If I should sell myself to say what I do not think, or

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

to praise what I consider harmful, to propitiate their favor,
I should be a dastard. They understand perfectly that I
never do it, and they never ask me to. Meanwhile, they
employ persons who will do these things. I am not responsible
for it any more than I am for anything else which goes
on in the city of New York. I am allowed my choice
among notices, and I never write them without saying, to
the best of my ability, the exact truth, whether literary
or in a moral point of view. Now, that is just my stand,
and if it satisfies you, you can take the same.”

“But,” said I, “It makes me indignant, to have Goldstick
talk to me as he did about a great self-denying moral enterprise—
why, that man must know he's a liar.”

“Do you think so?” said he. “I don't imagine he does.
Goldstick has considerable sentiment. It's quite easy to
get him excited on moral subjects, and he dearly loves to
hear himself talk—he is sincerely interested in a good number
of moral reforms, so long as they cost him nothing;
and when a man is working his good faculties, he is generally
delighted with himself, and it is the most natural
thing in the world, to think that there is more of him
than there is. I am often put in mind of that enthusiastic
young ruler that came to the Saviour, who had
kept all the commandments, and seemed determined to be
on the high road to saintship. The Saviour just touched
him on this financial question, and he wilted in a minute.
I consider that to be still the test question, and there are a
good many young rulers like him, who don't keep all the
commandments.”

“Your way of talking,” said I, “seems to do away with
all moral indignation.”

He smiled, and then looked sadly into the fire—“God help
us all,” he said. “We are all struggling in the water together
and pulling one another under—our best virtues are
such a miserable muddle—and then—there's the beam in
our own eye.”

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

There was a depth of pathos in his dark eyes as he spoke,
and suddenly a smile flashed over his features, and looking
around, he said—

p467-179 CHAPTER XV. I MEET A VISION.

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

“I SAY, Hal, do you want to get acquainted with
any of the P. G.'s here in New York? If you
do, I can put you on the track.”

“P. G.'s?” said I, innocently.

“Yes; you know that's what Plato calls pretty girls. I
don't believe you remember your Greek. I'm going out this
evening where there's a lot of 'em—splendid house on Fifth
avenue—lots of tin—girls gracious. Don't know which of'
em I shall take yet. Don't you want to go with me and
see?”

Jim stood at the looking-glass brushing his hair and arranging
his necktie.

“Jim Fellows, you are a coxcomb,” said I.

“I don't know why I shouldn't be,” said he. “The girls
fairly throw themselves at one's head. They are up to all
that sort of thing. Besides, I'm on the lookout for my fortune,
and it all comes in the way of business. Come, now,
don't sit there writing all the evening. Come out, and let
me show you New York by gaslight.”

“No,” said I; “I've got to finish up this article for the
Milky Way. The fact is, a fellow must be industrious to
make anything, and my time for seeing girls isn't come yet.
I must have something to support a wife on before I look
round in that direction.”

“The idea, Harry, of a good-looking fellow like you, not
making the most of his advantages! Why, there are nice
girls in this city that could help you up faster than all the
writing you can do these ten years. And you sitting, moiling
and toiling, when you ought to be making some lovely
woman happy!”

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

“I shall never marry for money, Jim, you may depend
upon that.”

“Bah, bah, black sheep,” said Jim. “Who is talking
about marrying for money? A fine girl is none the worse
for fifty thousand dollars, and I can give you a list of
twenty that you can go round among until you fall in love,
and not come amiss anywhere, if it's falling in love that
you want to do.”

“Oh, come, Jim,” said I, “do finish your toilet and be off
with yourself if you are going. I don't blame a woman who
marries for money, since the whole world has always agreed
to shut her out of any other way of gaining an independence.
But for a man, with every other avenue open to him, to
mouse about for a rich wife, I think is too dastardly for
anything.”

“That would make a fine point for a paragraph,” said Jim,
turning round to me, with perfect good humor. “So I advise
you to save it for the moral part of the paper. You see, if
you waste too much of that sort of thing on me, your mill
may run low. It's a deuced hard thing to keep the moral
agoing the whole year, you'll find.”

“Well,” said I, “I am going to try to make a home for a
wife, by good, thorough work, done just as work ought to be
done; and I have no time to waste on society in the meanwhile.”

“And when you are ready for her,” said Jim, “I suppose
you expect to receive her per `Divine Providence' Express,
ticketed and labeled, and expenses paid. Or, may be she'll
be brought to you some time by genii, as the Princess of
China was brought to the Prince of Tartary, when he was
asleep. I used to read about that in the Arabian tales.”

I give this little passage of my conversation with Jim, because
it is a pretty good illustration of the axiom, that “It
is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.” When we
have announced any settled purpose or sublime intention,
in regard to our future course of life, it seems to be the
delight of fortune to throw us directly into circumstances in

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

which we shall be tempted to do what we have just declared
we never will do, and the fortunes of our lives turn upon
the most inconsiderable hinges.

Mine turned upon an umbrella.

The next morning I had business in the very lowermost
part of the city, and started off without my umbrella; but
being weather-wise, and discerning the face of the sky,
I went back to my room and took it. It was one of those
little pet objects of vertu, to which a bachelor sometimes
treats himself in lieu of domestic luxuries. It had a finelycarved
handle, which I bought in Dieppe, and which caused
it to be peculiar among all the umbrellas in New York.

It was one of those uncertain, capricious days that mark
the coming in of April, when Nature, like a nervous beauty,
doesn't seem to know her own mind, and laughs one moment
and cries the next with a perplexing uncertainty.

The first part of the morning the amiable and smiling
predominated, and I began to regret that I had encumbered
myself with the troublesome precaution of an umbrella
while tramping around down town. In this mood of mind
I sat at Fulton Ferry waiting the starting of the Bleecker
street car, when suddenly the scene was enlivened
to my view by the entrance of a young lady, who happened
to seat herself exactly opposite to me.

Now, as a writer, an observer of life and manners, I
had often made quiet studies of the fair flowers of modern
New York society as I rode up and down in the cars.
In no other country in the world, perhaps, has a man the
opportunity of being vis-à-vis with the best and most cultured
class of young women in the public conveyances. In
England, this class are veiled and secluded from gaze by
all the ordinances and arrangements of society. They go
out only in their own carriage; they travel in reserved
compartments of the railway carriages; they pass from
these to reserved apartments in the hotels, where they are
served apart in family privacy as much as in their own
dwellings. In France, a still stricter régime watches over the
young, unmarried girl, who is kept in the shade of an almost

[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]

served apart in family privacy as much as in their own
dwellings. In France, a still stricter régime watches over the
young, unmarried girl, who is kept in the shade of an almost
conventual seclusion till marriage opens the doors of her
prison. The young American girl, however, of the better
and of the best classes, is to be met and observed everywhere.
She moves through life with the assured step of a
princess, too certain of her position and familiar with her
power even to dream of a fear. She looks on her surroundings
from above with the eye of a mistress, and expects, of
course, to see all things give way before her, as in our republican
society they generally do.

During the few months I had spent in New York I had
diligently kept out of society. The permitted silent acquaintance
with my fair countrywomen which I gained
while riding up and down the street conveyances, became,
therefore, a favorite and harmless source of amusement.
Not an item in the study escaped me, not a feather in that
rustling and wonderful plumage of fashion that bore them
up, was unnoted. I mused on styles, and characteristics,
and silently wove in my own mind histories to correspond
with the various physiognomies I studied. Let not the
reader imagine me staring point blank, with my mouth
open, at all I met. The art of noting without appearing to
note, of seeing without seeming to see, was one that I cultivated
with assiduity.

Therefore, without any impertinent scrutiny, satisfied
myself of the fact that a feminine presence of an unusual
kind and quality was opposite to me. It was, at first glance,
one of the New York princesses of the blood, accustomed to
treading on clouds and breathing incense. There was a
quiet savoir faire and self-possession as she sat down on her
seat, as if it were a throne; and there was a species of repressed
vitality and decision in all her little involuntary
movements that interested me as live things always do
interest, in proportion to their quantum of life. We all are
familiar with the fact that there are some people, who, let

[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]

them sit still as they may, and conduct themselves never so
quietly, nevertheless impress their personality on those
around them, and make their presence felt. An attraction
of this sort drew my eyes toward my neighbor. She was a
young lady of medium height, slender and elastic figure,
features less regularly beautiful than piquant and expressive.
I remarked a pair of fine dark eyes the more from the
contrast with a golden crêpe of hair. The combination of
dark eyes and lashes with fair hair, always produces effect
of a striking character. She was attired as became a
Fifth Avenue princess, who has the world of fashion at her
feet,—yet, to my thinking, as one who had chosen and
adapted her material with an eye of taste. A delicate
cashmere was folded carelessly round her shoulders, and
her little hands were gloved with a careful nicety of fit;
and dangling from one finger was a toy purse of gold and
pearl, in which she began searching for the change to pay
her fare. I saw, too, as she investigated, an expression of
perplexity, slightly tinged with the ludicrous, upon her face.
I perceived at a glance the matter. She was surveying a
ten-dollar note with a glance of amused vexation, and vainly
turning over her little purse for the smaller change or
tickets available in the situation. I leaned forward and
offered, as gentlemen generally do, to take her fare and
pass it forward. With a smile of apology she handed me
the bill, and showed the little empty purse. “Allow me
to arrange it,” I said. She smiled and blushed. I passed up
the ticket necessary for the occasion, returned her bill,
bowed, and immediately looked another way with sedulous
care.

It requires an extra amount of discretion and delicacy
to make it tolerable to a true lady to become in the smallest
degree indebted to a gentleman who is a stranger. I was
aware that my fair vis-à-vis was inwardly disturbed at
having inadvertently been obliged to accept from me even
so small an obligation as a fare ticket; but as matters were,
there was no help for it. On the whole, though I was sorry

[figure description] Blank Page.[end figure description]

THE UMBRELLA.
"Before a very elegant house in Fifth Avenue my unknown alighted,
and the rain still continuing, there was an excuse for my still attending
her up the steps." [figure description] Image of Harry walking down Fifth Avenue with a beautiful woman. He is protecting her from the rain with his umbrella.[end figure description]

p467-186 [figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

for her, I could not but regard the incident as a species of
good luck for myself. We rode along—perhaps each of us
conscious at times of being attentively considered by the
other, until the cars turned up Park Row before the Astor
House; she signalled the conductor to stop, and got out.
Here it was that the beneficent intentions of the fates, in
causing me to bring my umbrella, were made manifest.

Just as the car started again, came one of those sudden
gushes of rain with which perverse April delights to ruffle
and discompose unwary passengers. It was less a decent,
decorous shower, than a dash of water by the bucketful.
Immediately I jumped out and stepped to the side of my
gentle neighbor, begging her to allow me to hold my umbrella
over her, and see her in safety across Broadway. She
meant to have stopped at one or two places, she said, but it
rained so she would thank me to put her into a Fifth
Avenue stage. So we went together, threading our way
through rushing and trampling carriages, horses, and cars,—
a driving storm above, below, and around, which seemed
to throw my fair princess entirely upon my protection for
a few moments, till I had her safe in the up-town omnibus.
As it was my route, also, I, too, entered, and by this time
feeling a sort of privilege of acquaintance, arranged the
fare for her, and again received a courteous and apologetic
acknowledgment. Before a very elegant house in Fifth
Avenue my unknown alighted, and the rain still continuing,
there was an excuse for my attending her up the steps,
and ringing the door-bell for her.

We were kept waiting in this position several minutes,
when she very gracefully expressed her thanks for my
kindness, and begged that I would walk in.

Surprised and pleased, I excused myself on plea of engagements,
but presented her with my card, and said I
would do myself the pleasure of calling at another time.

With a little laugh and blush she handed me a card from
the tiny pearl and gold case, on which was engraved “Eva
Van Arsdel,” and in the corner, “Wednesdays.”

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

“We receive on Wednesdays, Mr. Henderson,” she said,
“and mamma will be so happy to make your acquaintance.”

Here the door opened, and my fairy princess vanished
from view, with a parting vision of a blush, smile, and bow,
and I was left outside with the rain and the mud and the
dull, commonplace grind of my daily work.

The house, as I noted it, was palatial in its aspect,
Clear, large windows, which seemed a single sheet of
crystal, gave a view of banks of flowering hyacinths,
daffodils, crocuses, and roses, curtained in by misty falls of
lace drapery. Evidently it was one of those Circean regions
of retreat, where the lovely daughters of fashionable
wealth in New York keep guard over an eternal lotuseater's
paradise; where they trend on enchanted carpets,
move to the sound of music, and live among flowers and
odors a life of blissful ignorance of toil or care.

“To what purpose,” I thought to myself, “should I call
there, or pursue the vision into its own regions? æneas
might as well try to follow Venus to the scented regions
above Idalia, where her hundred altars forever burn, and
her flowers never die.”

But yet I was no wiser and no older than other men at
three-and-twenty, and the little card which I had placed
in my vest pocket seemed to diffuse an agreeable, electric
warmth, which constantly reminded me of its presence
there. I took it out and looked at it. I spelled the name
over, and dwelt on every letter. There was so much positive
character in the little lady,—such a sort of spicy, racy
individuality, that the little I had seen of her was like reading
the first page of an enchanting romance, and I could
not repress a curiosity to go on with it. To-day was Monday;
the reception day was Wednesday. Should I go?

Prudence said, “No; you are a young man with your way
to make; you are self-dependent; you are poor; you have
no time to spend in helping rich idle people to hunt butterflies,
and string rose-leaves, and make dandelion-chains.
If you set your foot over one of those enchanted thresholds,

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

where wealth and idleness rule together, you will be bewildered,
enervated, and spoiled for any really high or severe
task-work; you will become an idler, a dangler; the
power of sustained labor and self-denial will depart from
you, and you will run like a breathless lackey after the
chariot of wealth and fashion.”

On the other hand, as the little bit of enchanted pasteboard
gently burned in my vest pocket, it said:

“Why should you be rude? It is incumbent on you as a
gentleman to respond to the invitation so frankly given.
Besides, the writer who aspires to influence society must
know society; and how can one know society unless one
studies it? A hermit in his cell is no judge of what is
going on in the world. Besides, he does not overcome the
world who runs away from it, but he who meets it bravely.
It is the part of a coward to be afraid of meeting wealth and
luxury and indolence on their own grounds. He really conquers
who can keep awake, walking straight through the
enchanted ground; not he who makes a detour to get
round it.'

All which I had arrayed in good set terms as I rode back
to my room, and went up to Bolton to look up in his library
the authorities for an article I was getting out on the Domestic
Life of the Ancient Greeks. Bolton had succeeded in
making me feel so thoroughly at home in his library that
it was to all intents and purposes as if it were my own.

As I was tumbling over the books that filled every corner,
there fell out from a little niche a photograph, or
rather ambrotype, such as were in use in the infancy of the
art. It fell directly into my hand, so that taking it up it
was impossible not to perceive what it was, and I recognized
in an instant the person. It was the head of my
cousin Caroline, not as I knew her now, but as I remembered
her years ago, when she and I went to the Academy
together.

It is almost an involuntary thing, on such occasions, to
exclaim, “Who is this?” But Bolton was so very reticent a

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

being that I found it extremely difficult to ask him a personal
question. There are individuals who unite a great winning
and sympathetic faculty with great reticence. They
make you talk, they win your confidence, they are interested
in you, but they ask nothing from you, and they tell you
nothing. Bolton was all the while doing obliging things
for me and for Jim, but he asked nothing from us; and
while we felt safe in saying anything in the world before
him, and while we never felt at the moment that conversation
flagged, or that there was any deficiency in sympathy
and good fellowship on his part, yet upon reflection
we could never recall anything which let us into the interior
of his own life-history.

The finding of this little memento impressed me, therefore,
oddly,—as if a door had suddenly been opened into a
private cabinet where I had no right to look, or an open
letter which I had no right to read had been inadvertently
put into my hands. I looked round on Bolton, as he sat
quietly bending over a book that he was consulting, with
his pen in hand and his cat at his elbow; but the question I
longed to ask stuck fast in my throat, and I silently put
back the picture in its place, keeping the incident to ponder
in my heart. What with the one pertaining to myself, and
with the thoughts suggested by this, I found myself in a disturbed
state that I determined to resist by setting myself
a definite task of so many pages of my article.

In the evening, when Jim came in, I recounted my adventure
and showed him the card.

He surveyed it with a prolonged whistle. “Good now!”
he said; “the ticket sent by the Providence Express. I
see—”

“Who are these Van Arsdels, Jim?”

“Upper tens,” said Jim, decisively. “Not the oldest Tens,
but the second batch. Not the old Knickerbocker Vanderhoof,
and Vanderhyde, and Vanderhorn set that Washy
Irving tells about,—but the modern nobs. Old Van Arsdel
does a smashing importing business—is worth his millions

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

—has five girls, all handsome—two out—two more to come
out, and one strong-minded sister who has retired from
the world, and isn't seen out anywhere. The one you saw
was Eva; they say she's to marry Wat Sydney,—the greatest
match there is going in New York. How do you say—shall
you go, Wednesday?”

“Do you know them?”

“Oh, yes. Alice Van Arsdel is a splendid girl, and we are
good friends, and I look in on them sometimes just to
give them the light of my countenance. They are always
after me to lead the German in their parties; but I've given
that up. Hang it all! it's too steep on a fellow that has to
work all day, with no let up, to be kept dancing till daylight
with those girls. It don't pay!”

“I should think not,” said I.

“You see,” pursued Jim, “these girls have nothing under
heaven to do, and when they've danced all night, they go to
bed and sleep till till eleven or twelve o'clock the next day
and get their rest; while we fellows have to be up and in
our offices at eight o'clock next morning. The fact is, it
may do for once or twice, but it knocks a fellow up pretty
fast. It's a bad thing for the fellows; they get to taking
wine and brandy and one thing or another to keep up, and
the Devil only knows what comes of it.”

“And are these Van Arsdels in that frivolous set?” said I.

“Well, you see they are not really frivolous, either;
they are nice girls, well educated, graduated at the Universal
Thingumbob College, where they teach girls everything
that ever has been heard of, before they are seventeen.
And then they have lived in Paris, and lived in Germany,
and lived in Italy, and picked up all the languages; so
that when they have anything to say they have a choice of
four languages to say it in.”

“And have they anything to say worth hearing in any of
the four?” said I.

“Well, yes, now, honor bright. There's Alice Van Arsdel:
she's ambitious as the devil, but, after all, a good,

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

warmhearted girl under it—and smart! there's no doubt of that.”

“And this lady?” said I, fingering the card.

“Eva? Well, she's had a great run; she's killing, as they
say, and she's pretty—no denying that; and, really, there's
a good deal to her,—like the sponge cake at the bottom of
the trifle, you know, with a good smart flavor of wine and
spice.”

“And she's engaged to— whom did you say?”

“Wat Sydney.”

“And what sort of a man is he?”

“What sort? why, he's a rich man; owns all sorts of
things,—gold mines in California, and copper mines in Lake
Superior, and salt works, and railroads. In fact, the thing
is to say what he doesn't own. Immense head for business,—
regular steel-trap to deal with,—has the snap of a pike.”

“Pleasing prospect for a domestic companion,” said I.

“Oh, as to that, I believe Wat is good-hearted enough to
his own folks. They say he is very devoted to his old
mother and a parcel of old maid aunts, and as he's rich, it's
thought a great virtue. Nobody sings my praises, I notice,
because I mind my mammy and Aunt Sarah. You see it
takes a million-power solar microscope to bring out fellows'
virtues.”

“Is the gentleman handsome?”

“Well, if he was poor, nobody would think much of
his looks. If he had, say, a hundred thousand or two, he
would be called fair to middling in looks. As it is, the girls
rave about him. He's been after Eva now for six months,
and the other girls are ready to tear her eyes out. But the
engagement hasn't come out yet. I think she's making up
her mind to him.”