CHAPTER I. PRE-RAILROAD TIMES.

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Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited Mrs. Brown, and
Mrs. Jones, and Deacon Twitchel's wife to take tea
with her on the afternoon of June second, A. D. 17 —.

When one has a story to tell, one is always puzzled
which end of it to begin at. You have a whole
corps of people to introduce that you know and your
reader doesn't; and one thing so presupposes another,
that, whichever way you turn your patchwork,
the figures still seem ill-arranged. The small item
which I have given will do as well as any other to
begin with, as it certainly will lead you to ask,
“Pray, who was Mrs. Katy Scudder?” — and this
will start me systematically on my story.

You must understand that in the then small seaport-town
of Newport, at that time unconscious of its
present fashion and fame, there lived nobody in those
days who did not know “the Widow Scudder.”

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In New England settlements a custon has obtained,
which is wholesome and touching, of ennobling
the woman whom God has made desolate, by a sort
of brevet rank which continually speaks for her as a
claim on the respect and consideration of the community.
The Widow Jones, or Brown, or Smith, is
one of the fixed institutions of every New England
village, — and doubtless the designation acts as a
continual plea for one whom bereavement, like the
lightning of heaven, has made sacred.

The Widow Scudder, however, was one of the
sort of women who reign queens in whatever society
they move; nobody was more quoted, more
deferred to, or enjoyed more unquestioned position
than she. She was not rich, — a small farm, with a
modest, “gambrel-roofed,” one-story cottage, was her
sole domain; but she was one of the much-admired
class who, in the speech of New England, are said
to have “faculty,” — a gift which, among that shrewd
people, commands more esteem than beauty, riches,
learning, or any other worldly endowment. Faculty
is Yankee for savoir faire, and the opposite virtue
to shiftlessness. Faculty is the greatest virtue, and
shiftlessness the greatest vice, of Yankee man and
woman. To her who has faculty nothing shall be
impossible. She shall scrub floors, wash, wring,
bake, brew, and yet her hands shall be small and
white; she shall have no perceptible income, yet
always be handsomely dressed; she shall have not a

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servant in her house, — with a dairy to manage, hired
men to feed, a boarder or two to care for, unheard-of
pickling and preserving to do, — and yet you commonly
see her every afternoon sitting at her shady
parlor-window behind the lilacs, cool and easy, hemming
muslin cap-strings, or reading the last new
book. She who hath faculty is never in a hurry,
never behindhand. She can always step over to
distressed Mrs. Smith, whose jelly won't come, —
and stop to show Mrs. Jones how she makes her
pickles so green, — and be ready to watch with
poor old Mrs. Simpkins, who is down with the
rheumatism.

Of this genus was the Widow Scudder, — or, as
the neighbors would have said of her, she that was
Katy Stephens. Katy was the only daughter of a
shipmaster, sailing from Newport harbor, who was
wrecked off the coast one cold December night, and
left small fortune to his widow and only child.
Katy grew up, however, a tall, straight, black-eyed
girl, with eyebrows drawn true as a bow, a foot
arched like a Spanish woman's, and a little hand
which never saw the thing it could not do, — quick
of speech, ready of wit, and, as such girls have a
right to be, somewhat positive withal. Katy could
harness a chaise, or row a boat; she could saddle
and ride any horse in the neighborhood; she could
cut any garment that ever was seen or thought of,
make cake, jelly, and wine, from her earliest years,

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in most precocious style; — all without seeming to
derange a sort of trim, well-kept air of ladyhood
that sat jauntily on her.

Of course, being young and lively, she had her
admirers, and some well-to-do in worldly affairs laid
their lands and houses at Katy's feet; but, to the
wonder of all, she would not even pick them up to
look at them. People shook their heads, and wondered
whom Katy Stephens expected to get, and
talked about going through the wood to pick up a
crooked stick, — till one day she astonished her
world by marrying a man that nobody ever thought
of her taking.

George Scudder was a grave, thoughtful young
man, — not given to talking, and silent in the
society of women, with that kind of reverential
bashfulness which sometimes shows a pure, unworldly
nature. How Katy came to fancy him
everybody wondered, — for he never talked to her,
never so much as picked up her glove when it fell,
never asked her to ride or sail; in short, everybody
said she must have wanted him from sheer wilfulness,
because he of all the young men of the neighborhood
never courted her. But Katy, having very
sharp eyes, saw some things that nobody else saw.
For example, you must know she discovered by
mere accident that George Scudder always was
looking at her. wherever she moved, though he
looked away in a moment, if discovered, — and that

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an accidental touch of her hand or brush of her
dress would send the blood into his cheek like the
spirit in the tube of a thermometer; and so, as
women are curious, you know, Katy amused herself
with investigating the causes of these little
phenomena, and, before she knew it, got her foot
caught in a cobweb that held her fast, and constrained
her, whether she would or no, to marry
a poor man that nobody cared much for but
herself.

George was, in truth, one of the sort who evidently
have made some mistake in coming into this
world at all, as their internal furniture is in no way
suited to its general courses and currents. He was
of the order of dumb poets, — most wretched when
put to the grind of the hard and actual; for if he
who would utter poetry stretches out his hand to a
gainsaying world, he is worse off still who is possessed
with the desire of living it. Especially is
this the case, if he be born poor, and with a dire
necessity upon him of making immediate efforts
in the hard and actual. George had a helpless
invalid mother to support; so, though he loved
reading and silent thought above all things, he put
to instant use the only convertible worldly talent
he possessed, which was a mechanical genius, and
shipped at sixteen as a ship-carpenter. He studied
navigation in the forecastle, and found in its calm
diagrams and tranquil eternal signs food for his

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thoughtful nature, and a refuge from the brutality
and coarseness of sea-life. He had a healthful,
kindly animal nature, and so his inwardness did
not ferment and turn to Byronic sourness and
bitterness; nor did he needlessly parade to everybody
in his vicinity the great gulf which lay between
him and them. He was called a good
fellow, — only a little lumpish, — and as he was
brave and faithful, he rose in time to be a shipmaster.
But when came the business of making
money, the aptitude for accumulating, George found
himself distanced by many a one with not half his
general powers.

What shall a man do with a sublime tier of
moral faculties, when the most profitable business
out of his port is the slave-trade? So it was in
Newport in those days. George's first voyage was
on a slaver, and he wished himself dead many a
time before it was over, — and ever after would
talk like a man beside himself, if the subject was
named. He declared that the gold made in it was
distilled from human blood, from mothers' tears,
from the agonies and dying groans of gasping,
suffocating men and women, and that it would sear
and blister the soul of him that touched it; in short,
he talked as whole-souled, unpractical fellows are
apt to talk about what respectable people sometimes
do. Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship,
with a procession of expectant sharks in its

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wake, is a missionary institution, by which closelypacked
heathens are brought over to enjoy the light
of the gospel.

So, though George was acknowledged to be a
good fellow, and honest as the noon-mark on the
kitchen floor, he let slip so many chances of making
money as seriously to compromise his reputation
among thriving folks. He was wastefully generous, —
insisted on treating every poor dog that
came in his way, in any foreign port, as a brother,—
absolutely refused to be party in cheating or
deceiving the heathen on any shore, or in skin of
any color, — and also took pains, as far as in him
lay, to spoil any bargains which any of his subordinates
founded on the ignorance or weakness of
his fellow-men. So he made voyage after voyage,
and gained only his wages and the reputation
among his employers of an incorruptibly honest
fellow.

To be sure, it was said that he carried out books
in his ship, and read and studied, and wrote observations
on all the countries he saw, which Parson
Smith told Miss Dolly Persimmon would really do
credit to a printed book; but then they never were
printed, or, as Miss Dolly remarked of them, they
never seemed to come to anything, — and coming
to anything, as she understood it, meant standing
in definite relations to bread and butter.

George never cared, however, for money. He

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made enough to keep his mother comfortable, and
that was enough for him, till he fell in love with
Katy Stephens. He looked at her through those
glasses which such men carry in their souls, and
she was a mortal woman no longer, but a transfigured,
glorified creature, — an object of awe and
wonder. He was actually afraid of her; her glove,
her shoe, her needle, thread, and thimble, her bonnet-string,
everything, in short, she wore or touched, became
invested with a mysterious charm. He wondered
at the impudence of men that could walk up
and talk to her, — that could ask her to dance with
such an assured air. Now he wished he were rich;
he dreamed impossible chances of his coming home
a millionnaire to lay unknown wealth at Katy's feet;
and when Miss Persimmon, the ambulatory dress-maker
of the neighborhood, in making up a new
black gown for his mother, recounted how Captain
Blatherem had sent Katy Stephens “'most the
splendidest India shawl that ever she did see,” he
was ready to tear his hair at the thought of his
poverty. But even in that hour of temptation he
did not repent that he had refused all part and lot
in the ship by which Captain Blatherem's money
was made, for he knew every timber of it to be
seasoned by the groans and saturated with the
sweat of human agony. True love is a natural
sacrament; and if ever a young man thanks God
for having saved what is noble and manly in his

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soul, it is when he thinks of offering it to the
woman he loves. Nevertheless, the India-shawl
story cost him a night's rest; nor was it till Miss
Persimmon had ascertained, by a private confabulation
with Katy's mother, that she had indignantly
rejected it, and that she treated the Captain
“real ridiculous,” that he began to take heart.
“He ought not,” he said, “to stand in her way
now, when he had nothing to offer. No, he would
leave Katy free to do better, if she could; he would
try his luck; and if, when he came home from the
next voyage, Katy was disengaged, why, then he
would lay all at her feet.”

And so George was going to sea with a secret
shrine in his soul, at which he was to burn unsuspected
incense.

But, after all, the mortal maiden whom he adored
suspected this private arrangement, and contrived —
as women will — to get her own key into the lock
of his secret temple; because, as girls say, “she
was determined to know what was there.” So, one
night, she met him quite accidentally on the seasands,
struck up a little conversation, and begged
him in such a pretty way to bring her a spotted
shell from the South Sea, like the one on his
mother's mantel-piece, and looked so simple and
childlike in saying it, that our young man very
imprudently committed himself by remarking, that,
“When people had rich friends to bring them all

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the world from foreign parts, he never dreamed of
her wanting so trivial a thing.”

Of course Katy “didn't know what he meant, —
she hadn't heard of any rich friends.” And then
came something about Captain Blatherem; and
Katy tossed her head, and said, “If anybody
wanted to insult her, they might talk to her about
Captain Blatherem,” — and then followed this, that,
and the other, till finally, as you might expect, out
came all that never was to have been said; and
Katy was almost frightened at the terrible earnestness
of the spirit she had evoked. She tried to
laugh, and ended by crying, and saying she hardly
knew what; but when she came to herself in her
own room at home, she found on her finger a ring of
African gold that George had put there, which she
did not send back like Captain Blatherem's presents.

Katy was like many intensely matter-of-fact and
practical women, who have not in themselves a bit
of poetry or a particle of ideality, but who yet worship
these qualities in others with the homage which
the Indians paid to the unknown tongue of the
first whites. They are secretly weary of a certain
conscious dryness of nature in themselves, and this
weariness predisposes them to idolize the man who
brings them this unknown gift. Naturalists say that
every defect of organization has its compensation,
and men of ideal natures find in the favor of women
the equivalent for their disabilities among men.

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Do you remember, at Niagara, a little cataract on
the American side, which throws its silver sheeny
veil over a cave called the Grot of Rainbows?
Whoever stands on a rock in that grotto sees himself
in the centre of a rainbow-circle, above, below,
around. In like manner, merry, chatty, positive,
busy, housewifely, Katy saw herself standing in a
rainbow-shrine in her lover's inner soul, and liked to
see herself so. A woman, by-the-by, must be very
insensible, who is not moved to come upon a higher
plane of being, herself, by seeing how undoubtingly
she is insphered in the heart of a good and noble
man. A good man's faith in you, fair lady, if you
ever have it, will make you better and nobler even
before you know it.

Katy made an excellent wife; she took home her
husband's old mother and nursed her with a dutifulness
and energy worthy of all praise, and made her
own keen outward faculties and deft handiness a
compensation for the defects in worldly estate.
Nothing would make Katy's black eyes flash
quicker than any reflections on her husband's
want of luck in the material line. “She didn't
know whose business it was, if she was satisfied.
She hated these sharp, gimlet, gouging sort of men
that would put a screw between body and soul for
money. George had that in him that nobody understood.
She would rather be his wife on bread
and water than to take Captain Blatherem's house

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carriages, and horses, and all, — and she might have
had 'em fast enough, dear knows. She was sick of
making money when she saw what sort of men
could make it,” — and so on. All which talk did
her infinite credit, because after all she did care,
and was naturally as proud and ambitious a little
minx as ever breathed, and was thoroughly grieved
at heart at George's want of worldly success; but,
like a nice little Robin Redbreast, she covered up
the grave of her worldliness with the leaves of true
love, and sung a “Who cares for that?” above it.

Her thrifty management of the money her husband
brought her soon bought a snug little farm
and put up the little brown gambrel-roofed cottage
to which we directed your attention in the first of
our story. Children were born to them; and George
found, in short intervals between voyages, his home
an earthly paradise. He was still sailing, with the
fond illusion, in every voyage, of making enough to
remain at home, — when the yellow fever smote him
under the line, and the ship returned to Newport
without its captain.

George was a Christian man; — he had been one
of the first to attach himself to the unpopular and
unworldly ministry of the celebrated Dr. Hopkins,
and to appreciate the sublime ideality and unselfishness
of those teachings which then were awakening
new sensations in the theological mind of New England.
Katy, too, had become a professor with her

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husband in the same church, and her husband's
death in the midst of life deepened the power of her
religious impressions. She became absorbed in religion,
after the fashion of New England, where
devotion is doctrinal, not ritual. As she grew older,
her energy of character, her vigor and good judgment,
caused her to be regarded as a mother in
Israel; the minister boarded at her house, and it
was she who was first to be consulted in all matters
relating to the well-being of the church. No woman
could more manfully breast a long sermon, or bring
a more determined faith to the reception of a difficult
doctrine. To say the truth, there lay at the bottom
of her doctrinal system this stable corner-stone, —
“Mr. Scudder used to believe it, — I will.” And
after all that is said about independent thought, isn't
the fact, that a just and good soul has thus or thus
believed, a more respectable argument than many
that often are adduced? If it be not, more's the
pity, — since two thirds of the faith in the world is
built on no better foundation.

In time, George's old mother was gathered to her
son, and two sons and a daughter followed their
father to the invisible, — one only remaining of the
flock, and she a person with whom you and I, good
reader, have joint concern in the further unfolding
of our story

CHAPTER II. THE KITCHEN.

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As I before remarked, Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited
company to tea. Strictly speaking, it is necessary
to begin with the creation of the world, in order
to give a full account of anything. But, for popular
use, something less may serve one's turn, and therefore
I shall let the past chapter suffice to introduce
my story, and shall proceed to arrange my scenery
and act my little play, on the supposition that you
know enough to understand things and persons.

Being asked to tea in our New England in the
year 17— meant something very different from the
same invitation in our more sophisticated days. In
those times, people held to the singular opinion that
the night was made to sleep in; they inferred it
from a general confidence they had in the wisdom
of Mother Nature, supposing that she did not put
out her lights and draw her bed-curtains and hush
all noise in her great world-house without strongly
intending that her children should go to sleep; and
the consequence was, that very soon after sunset the
whole community very generally set their faces

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bedward, and the tolling of the nine-o'clock evening-bell
had an awful solemnity in it, announcing the end
of all respectable proceedings in life for that day.
Good society in New England in those days very
generally took its breakfast at six, its dinner at
twelve, and its tea at six. “Company tea,” however,
among thrifty, industrious folk, was often
taken an hour earlier, because each of the invitées
had children to put to bed, or other domestic cares
at home; and, as in those simple times people were
invited because you wanted to see them, a tea-party
assembled themselves at three and held session till
sundown, when each matron rolled up her knitting-work
and wended soberly home.

Though Newport, even in those early times, was
not without its families which affected state and
splendor, rolled about in carriages with armorial emblazonments,
and had servants in abundance to
every turn within-doors, yet there, as elsewhere in
New England, the majority of the people lived with
the wholesome, thrifty simplicity of the olden time,
when labor and intelligence went hand in hand in
perhaps a greater harmony than the world has ever
seen.

Our scene opens in the great, old-fashioned kitchen,
which, on ordinary occasions, is the family dining
and sitting-room of the Scudder family I know
fastidious moderns think that the working-room
wherein are carried on the culinary operations of a

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“Then let the last loud trumpet sound,
And bid the dead arise!
Awake, ye nations under ground!
Ye saints, ascend the skies!”
The sunbeam through the window-curtain fell on his silver
hair, and they that looked beheld his face as it were the face
of an angel; he had gotten a sight of the city whose foundation
is jasper, and whose every gate is a separate pearl.

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wood-fire; across the room ran a dresser, on which
was displayed great store of shining pewter dishes
and plates, which always shone with the same mysterious
brightness; and by the side of the fire, a
commodious wooden “settee,” or settle, offered repose
to people too little accustomed to luxury to ask
for a cushion. Oh, that kitchen of the olden times,
the old, clean, roomy New England kitchen! — who
that has breakfasted, dined, and supped in one has
not cheery visions of its thrift, its warmth, its coolness?
The noon-mark on its floor was a dial that
told off some of the happiest days; thereby did we
right up the short-comings of the solemn old clock
that tick-tacked in the corner, and whose ticks
seemed mysterious prophecies of unknown good yet
to arise out of the hours of life. How dreamy the
winter twilight came in there, — when as yet the
candes were not lighted, — when the crickets chirped
around the dark stone hearth, and shifting tongues
of flame flickered and cast dancing shadows and elfish
lights on the walls, while grandmother nodded
over her knitting-work, and puss purred, and old
Rover lay dreamily opening now one eye and then
the other on the family group! With all our ceiled
houses, let us not forget our grandmothers' kitchens!

But we must pause, however, and back to our
subject-matter, which is in the kitchen of Mrs. Katy
Scudder, who has just put into the oven, by the fireplace,
some wondrous tea-rusks, for whose

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composition she is renowned. She has examined and pronounced
perfect a loaf of cake, which has been
prepared for the occasion, and which, as usual, is
done exactly right. The best room, too, has been
opened and aired, — the white window-curtains saluted
with a friendly little shake, as when one says,
“How d'ye do?” to a friend; — for you must know,
clean as our kitchen is, we are genteel, and have
something better for company. Our best room in
here has a polished little mahogany tea-table, and
six mahogany chairs, with claw talons grasping
balls; the white sanded floor is crinkled in curious
little waves, like those on the seabeach; and right
across the corner stands the “buffet,” as it is called,
with its transparent glass doors, wherein are displayed
the solemn appurtenances of company tea-table.
There you may see a set of real China
teacups, which George bought in Canton, and had
marked with his and his wife's joint initials, — a
small silver cream-pitcher, which has come down
as an heirloom from unknown generations, — silver
spoons and delicate China cake-plates, which have
been all carefully reviewed and wiped on napkins of
Mrs. Scudder's own weaving.

Her cares now over, she stands drying her hands
on a roller-towel in the kitchen, while her only
daughter, the gentle Mary, stands in the doorway
with the afternoon sun streaming in spots of flickering
golden light on her smooth pale-brown hair,—

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a petite figure in a full stuff petticoat and white
short gown, she stands reaching up one hand and
cooing to something among the apple-blossoms, —
and now a Java dove comes whirring down and
settles on her finger, — and we, that have seen pictures,
think, as we look on her girlish face, with its
lines of statuesque beauty, on the tremulous, halfinfantine
expression of her lovely mouth, and the
general air of simplicity and purity, of some old
pictures of the girlhood of the Virgin. But Mrs.
Scudder was thinking of no such Popish matter, I
can assure you, — not she! I don't think you could
have done her a greater indignity than to mention
her daughter in any such connection. She had
never seen a painting in her life, and therefore was
not to be reminded of them; and furthermore, the
dove was evidently, for some reason, no favorite, —
for she said, in a quick, imperative tone, “Come,
come, child! don't fool with that bird, — it's high
time we were dressed and ready,” — and Mary,
blushing, as it would seem, even to her hair, gave
a little toss, and sent the bird, like a silver fluttering
cloud, up among the rosy apple-blossoms. And
now she and her mother have gone to their respective
little bedrooms for the adjustment of their
toilettes; and while the door is shut and nobody
hears us, we shall talk to you about Mary.

Newport at the present day blooms like a flowergarden
with young ladies of the best ton, — lovely

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girls, hopes of their families, possessed of amiable
tempers and immensely large trunks, and capable
of sporting ninety changes of raiment in thirty days
and otherwise rapidly emptying the purses of distressed
fathers, and whom yet travellers and the
world in general look upon as genuine specimens of
the kind of girls formed by American institutions.

We fancy such a one lying in a rustling silk
négligée, and, amid a gentle generality of rings,
ribbons, puffs, laces, beaux, and dinner-discussion,
reading our humble sketch; — and what favor shall
our poor heroine find in her eyes? For though her
mother was a world of energy and “faculty,” in
herself considered, and had bestowed on this one
little lone chick all the vigor and all the care and all
the training which would have sufficed for a family
of sixteen, there were no results produced which
could be made appreciable in the eyes of such
company. She could not waltz or polk, or speak
bad French, or sing Italian songs; but, nevertheless,
we must proceed to say what was her education and
what her accomplishments.

Well, then, she could both read and write fluently
in the mother-tongue. She could spin both on the
little and the great wheel; and there were numberless
towels, napkins, sheets, and pillow-cases in the
household store that could attest the skill of her
pretty fingers. She had worked several samplers
of such rare merit that they hung framed in

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different rooms of the house, exhibiting every variety and
style of possible letter in the best marking-stitch.
She was skilful in all sewing and embroidery, in all
shaping and cutting, with a quiet and deft handiness
that constantly surprised her energetic mother, who
could not conceive that so much could be done with
so little noise. In fact, in all household lore she was
a veritable good fairy; her knowledge seemed unerring
and intuitive; and whether she washed or
ironed, or moulded biscuit or conserved plums, her
gentle beauty seemed to turn to poetry all the prose
of life.

There was something in Mary, however, which
divided her as by an appreciable line from ordinary
girls of her age. From her father she had inherited
a deep and thoughtful nature, predisposed to moral
and religious exaltation. Had she been born in
Italy, under the dissolving influences of that sunny
dreamy clime, beneath the shadow of cathedrals,
and where pictured saints and angels smiled in
clouds of painting from every arch and altar, she
might, like fair St. Catherine of Siena, have seen
beatific visions in the sunset skies, and a silver dove
descending upon her as she prayed; but, unfolding
in the clear, keen, cold New England clime, and
nurtured in its abstract and positive theologies, her
religious faculties took other forms. Instead of lying
entranced in mysterious raptures at the foot of
altars, she read and pondered treatises on the Will,

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and listened in rapt attention, while her spiritual
guide, the venerated Dr. Hopkins, unfolded to her
the theories of the great Edwards on the nature of
true virtue. Womanlike, she felt the subtile poetry
of these sublime abstractions which dealt with such
infinite and unknown quantities, — which spoke of
the universe, of its great Architect, of man, of angels,
as matters of intimate and daily contemplation;
and her teacher, a grand-minded and simple-hearted
man as ever lived, was often amazed at
the tread with which this fair young child walked
through these high regions of abstract thought, —
often comprehending through an ethereal clearness
of nature what he had laboriously and heavily reasoned
out; and sometimes, when she turned her
grave, childlike face upon him with some question
or reply, the good man started as if an angel had
looked suddenly out upon him from a cloud. Unconsciously
to himself, he often seemed to follow
her, as Dante followed the flight of Beatrice, through
the ascending circles of the celestial spheres.

When her mother questioned him, anxiously, of
her daughter's spiritual estate, he answered, that she
was a child of a strange graciousness of nature,
and of a singular genius; to which Katy responded
with a woman's pride, that she was all her father
over again. It is only now and then that a matter-of-fact
woman is sublimated by a real love; but if
she is, it is affecting to see how impossible it is for

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

death to quench it; for in the child the mother feels
that she has a mysterious and undying repossession
of the father.

But, in truth, Mary was only a recast in feminine
form of her father's nature. The elixir of the spirit
that sparkled within her was of that quality of
which the souls of poets and artists are made; but
the keen New England air crystalizes emotions into
ideas, and restricts many a poetic soul to the necessity
of expressing itself only in practical living.

The rigid theological discipline of New England
is fitted to produce rather strength and purity than
enjoyment. It was not fitted to make a sensitive
and thoughtful nature happy, however it might ennoble
and exalt.

The system of Dr. Hopkins was one that could
have had its origin in a soul at once reverential and
logical — a soul, moreover, trained from its earliest
years in the habits of thought engendered by monarchical
institutions. For although he, like other
ministers, took an active part as a patriot in the
Revolution, still he was brought up under the
shadow of a throne, and a man cannot ravel out
the stitches in which early days have knit him.
His theology was, in fact, the turning to an invisible
Sovereign of that spirit of loyalty and unquestioning
subjugation which is one of the noblest capabilities
of our nature. And as a gallant soldier
renounces life and personal aims in the cause of his

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

king and country, and holds himself ready to be
drafted for a forlorn hope, to be shot down, or help
make a bridge of his mangled body, over which the
more fortunate shall pass to victory and glory, so he
regarded himself as devoted to the King Eternal,
ready in His hands to be used to illustrate and build
up an Eternal Commonwealth, either by being sacrificed
as a lost spirit or glorified as a redeemed one,
ready to throw not merely his mortal life, but his immortality
even, into the forlorn hope, to bridge with
a never-dying soul the chasm over which white-robed
victors should pass to a commonwealth of glory and
splendor whose vastness should dwarf the misery of
all the lost to an infinitesimal.

It is not in our line to imply the truth or the falsehood
of those systems of philosophic theology which
seem for many years to have been the principal outlet
for the proclivities of the New England mind,
but as psychological developments they have an intense
interest. He who does not see a grand side to
these strivings of the soul cannot understand one of
the noblest capabilities of humanity.

No real artist or philosopher ever lived who has
not at some hours risen to the height of utter self-abnegation
for the glory of the invisible. There
have been painters who would have been crucified
to demonstrate the action of a muscle, — chemists
who would gladly have melted themselves and all
humanity in their crucible, if so a new discovery

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

might arise out of its fumes. Even persons of mere
artistic sensibility are at times raised by music,
painting, or poetry to a momentary trance of self-oblivion,
in which they would offer their whole being
before the shrine of an invisible loveliness. These
hard old New England divines were the poets of
metaphysical philosophy, who built systems in an
artistic fervor, and felt self exhale from beneath
them as they rose into the higher regions of
thought. But where theorists and philosophers
tread with sublime assurance, woman often follows
with bleeding footsteps; — women are always
turning from the abstract to the individual, and
feeling where the philosopher only thinks.

It was easy enough for Mary to believe in self-
renunciation, for she was one with a born vocation
for martyrdom; and so, when the idea was put to
her of suffering eternal pains for the glory of God
and the good of being in general, she responded to
it with a sort of sublime thrill, such as it is given to
some natures to feel in view of uttermost sacrifice.
But when she looked around on the warm, living
faces of friends, acquaintances and neighbors, viewing
them as possible candidates for dooms so fearfully
different, she sometimes felt the walls of her
faith closing round her as an iron shroud, — she
wondered that the sun could shine so brightly, that
lowers could flaunt such dazzling colors, that sweet
airs could breathe, and little children play, and youth

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

love and hope, and a thousand intoxicating influences
combine to cheat the victims from the thought
that their next step might be into an abyss of horrors
without end. The blood of youth and hope was
saddened by this great sorrow, which lay ever on her
heart, — and her life, unknown to herself, was a
sweet tune in the minor key; it was only in prayer,
or deeds of love and charity, or in rapt contemplation
of that beautiful millennial day, which her
spiritual guide most delighted to speak of, that the
tone of her feelings ever rose to the height of joy.

Among Mary's young associates was one who
had been as a brother to her childhood. He was
her mother's cousin's son, — and so, by a sort of
family immunity, had always a free access to her
mother's house. He took to the sea, as the most
bold and resolute young men will, and brought
home from foreign parts those new modes of
speech, those other eyes for received opinions and
established things, which so often shock established
prejudices, — so that he was held as little better
than an infidel and a castaway by the stricter religious
circles in his native place. Mary's mother,
now that Mary was grown up to woman's estate,
looked with a severe eye on her cousin. She
warned her daughter against too free an association
with him, — and so — We all know what
comes to pass when girls are constantly warned
not to think of a man. The most conscientious

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

and obedient little person in the world, Mary resolved
to be very careful. She never would think
of James, except, of course, in her prayers; but as
these were constant, it may easily be seen it was
not easy to forget him.

All that was so often told her of his carelessness,
his trifling, his contempt of orthodox opinions, and
his startling and bold expressions, only wrote his
name deeper in her heart, — for was not his soul in
peril? Could she look in his frank, joyous face and
listen to his thoughtless laugh, and then think that
a fall from mast-head, or one night's storm, might—
Ah, with what images her faith filled the blank!
Could she believe all this and forget him?

You see, instead of getting our tea ready, as we
promised at the beginning of this chapter, we have
filled it with descriptions and meditations, — and
now we foresee that the next chapter will be equally
far from the point. But have patience with us; for
we can write only as we are driven, and never know
exactly where we are going to land.

CHAPTER III. THE INTERVIEW.

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

A quiet, maiden-like place was Mary's little
room. The window looked out under the overarching
boughs of a thick apple-orchard, now all
in a blush with blossoms and pink-tipped buds, and
the light came golden-green, strained through flickering
leaves, — and an ever-gentle rustle and whirr of
branches and blossoms, a chitter of birds, and an
indefinite whispering motion, as the long heads of
orchard-grass nodded and bowed to each other under
the trees, seemed to give the room the quiet hush of
some little side-chapel in a cathedral, where green
and golden glass softens the sunlight, and only the
sigh and rustle of kneeling worshippers break the stillness
of the aisles. It was small enough for a nun's
apartment, and dainty in its neatness as the waxen
cell of a bee. The bed and low window were
draped in spotless white, with fringes of Mary's own
knotting. A small table under the looking-glass
bore the library of a well-taught young woman of
those times. “The Spectator,” “Paradise Lost,”
Shakspeare, and “Robinson Crusoe,” stood for the

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

admitted secular literature, and beside them the
Bible and the works then published of Mr. Jonathan
Edwards. Laid a little to one side as if of
doubtful reputation, was the only novel which the
stricter people in those days allowed for the reading
of their daughters: that seven-volumed, trailing,
tedious, delightful old bore, “Sir Charles Grandison,” —
a book whose influence in those times was
so universal, that it may be traced in the epistolary
style even of the gravest divines. Our little heroine
was mortal, with all her divinity, and had an imagination
which sometimes wandered to the things of
earth; and this glorious hero in lace and embroidery,
who blended rank, gallantry, spirit, knowledge of the
world, disinterestedness, constancy, and piety, sometimes
stepped before her, while she sat spinning at
her wheel, till she sighed, she hardly knew why, that
no such men walked the earth now. Yet it is to be
confessed, this occasional raid of the romantic into
Mary's balanced and well-ordered mind was soon
energetically put to rout, and the book, as we have
said, remained on her table under protest, — protected
by being her father's gift to her mother during
their days of courtship. The small looking-glass
was curiously wreathed with corals and foreign
shells, so disposed as to indicate an artistic eye and
skilful hand; and some curious Chinese paintings
of birds and flowers gave rather a piquant and foreign
air to the otherwise homely neatness of the
apartment.

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

Here in this little retreat Mary spent those few
hours which her exacting conscience would allow
her to spare from her busy-fingered household-life
here she read and wrote and thought and prayed:—
and here she stands now, arraying herself for the
tea company that afternoon. Dress, which in our
day is becoming in some cases the whole of woman,
was in those times a remarkably simple affair.
True, every person of a certain degree of respectability
had state and festival robes; and a certain
camphor-wood brass-bound trunk, which was always
kept solemnly locked in Mrs. Katy Scudder's apartment,
if it could have spoken, might have given off
quite a catalogue of brocade satin and laces. The
wedding-suit there slumbered in all the unsullied
whiteness of its stiff ground broidered with heavy
knots of flowers; and there were scarfs of wrought
India muslin and embroidered crape, each of which
had its history, — for each had been brought into
the door with beating heart on some return voyage
of one who, alas, should return no more! The old
trunk stood with its histories, its imprisoned remembrances, —
and a thousand tender thoughts seemed
to be shaken out of every rustling fold of silk and
embroidery, on the few yearly occasions when all
were brought out to be aired, their history related,
and then solemnly locked up again. Nevertheless,
the possession of these things gave to the women
of an establishment a certain innate dignity, like

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

a good conscience; so that in that larger portion
of existence commonly denominated among them
“every day,” they were content with plain stuff
and homespun. Mary's toilette, therefore, was
sooner made than those of Newport belles of the
present day; it simply consisted in changing her
ordinary “short gown and petticoat” for another
of somewhat nicer materials, — a skirt of India
chintz and a striped jacconet short-gown. Her
hair was of the kind which always lies like satin;
but, nevertheless, girls never think their toilette
complete unless the smoothest hair has been shaken
down and rearranged. A few moments, however,
served to braid its shining folds and dispose them
in their simple knot on the back of the head; and
having given a final stroke to each side with her
little dimpled hands, she sat down a moment at
the window, thoughtfully watching where the afternoon
sun was creeping through the slats of the
fence in long lines of gold among the tall, tremulous
orchard-grass, and unconsciously she began
warbling, in a low, gurgling voice, the words of a
familiar hymn, whose grave earnestness accorded
well with the general tone of her life and education: —

There was a swish and rustle in the orchard-grass,
and a tramp of elastic steps; then the branches

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

were brushed aside, and a young man suddenly
emerged from the trees a little behind Mary. He
was apparently about twenty-five, dressed in the
holiday rig of a sailor on shore, which well set off
his fine athletic figure, and accorded with a sort
of easy, dashing, and confident air which sat not
unhandsomely on him. For the rest, a high forehead
shaded by rings of the blackest hair, a keen,
dark eye, a firm and determined mouth, gave the
impression of one who had engaged to do battle
with life, not only with a will, but with shrewdness
and ability.

He introduced the colloquy by stepping deliberately
behind Mary, putting his arms round her
neck, and kissing her.

“Why, James!” said Mary, starting up, and
blushing. “Come, now!”

“I have come, haven't I?” said the young man,
leaning his elbow on the window-seat and looking
at her with an air of comic determined frankness,
which yet had in it such wholesome honesty that
it was scarcely possible to be angry. “The fact is,
Mary,” he added, with a sudden earnest darkening
of the face, “I won't stand this nonsense any
longer. Aunt Katy has been holding me at arm's
length ever since I got home; and what have I
done? Haven't I been to every prayer-meeting
and lecture and sermon, since I got into port, just
as regular as a psalm-book? and not a bit of a word

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

could I get with you, and no chance even so much
as to give you my arm. Aunt Kate always comes
between us and says, `Here, Mary, you take my
arm.' What does she think I go to meeting for,
and almost break my jaws keeping down the gapes?
I never even go to sleep, and yet I'm treated in
this way! It's too bad! What's the row? What's
anybody been saying about me? I always have
waited on you ever since you were that high.
Didn't I always draw you to school on my sled?
didn't we always use to do our sums together?
didn't I always wait on you to singing-school?
and I've been made free to run in and out as if I
were your brother; — and now she is as glum and
stiff, and always stays in the room every minute
of the time that I am there, as if she was afraid
I should be in some mischief. It's too bad!”

“Oh, James, I am sorry that you only go to
meeting for the sake of seeing me; you feel no
real interest in religious things; and besides, mother
thinks now I'm grown so old, that — Why,
you know things are different now, — at least, we
mustn't, you know, always do as we did when we
were children. But I wish you did feel more interested
in good things.”

“I am interested in one or two good things,
Mary, — principally in you, who are the best I
know of. Besides,” he said quickly, and scanning
her face attentively to see the effect of his words,

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

“don't you think there is more merit in my sitting
out all these meetings, when they bore me
so confoundedly, than there is in your and Aunt
Katy's doing it, who really seem to find something
to like in them? I believe you have a sixth
sense, quite unknown to me; for it's all a maze,—
I can't find top, nor bottom, nor side, nor up,
nor down to it, — it's you can and you can't, you
shall and you sha'n't, you will and you won't,” —

“James!”

“You needn't look at me so. I'm not going to
say the rest of it. But, seriously, it's all anywhere
and nowhere to me; it don't touch me, it don't
help me, and I think it rather makes me worse;
and then they tell me it's because I'm a natural
man, and the natural man understandeth not the
things of the Spirit. Well, I am a natural man,—
how's a fellow to help it?”

“Well, James, why need you talk everywhere
as you do? You joke, and jest, and trifle, till it
seems to everybody that you don't believe in anything.
I'm afraid mother thinks you are an infidel.
but I know that can't be; yet we hear of all sorts
of things that you say.”

“I suppose you mean my telling Deacon Twitchel
that I had seen as good Christians among the
Mahometans as any in Newport. Didn't I make
him open his eyes? It's true, too!”

“In every nation, he that feareth God and

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

worketh righteousness is accepted of Him,” said Mary;
“and if there are better Christians than we are
among the Mahometans, I am sure I'm glad of it.
But, after all, the great question is, `Are we Christians
ourselves?' Oh, James, if you only were a
real, true, noble Christian!”

“Well, Mary, you have got into that harbor,
through all the sandbars and rocks and crooked
channels; and now do you think it right to leave
a fellow beating about outside, and not go out to
help him in? This way of drawing up, among you
good people, and leaving us sinners to ourselves,
isn't generous. You might care a little for the
soul of an old friend, anyhow!”

“And don't I care, James? How many days
and nights have been one prayer for you! If I
could take my hopes of heaven out of my own
heart and give them to you, I would. Dr. Hopkins
preached last Sunday on the text, `I could
wish myself accursed from Christ for my brethren,
my kinsmen'; and he went on to show how we
must be willing to give up even our own salvation,
if necessary, for the good of others. People
said it was hard doctrine, but I could feel my
way through it very well. Yes, I would give my
soul for yours; I wish I could.”

There was a solemnity and pathos in Mary's
manner which checked the conversation. James
was the more touched because he felt it all so real,

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

from one whose words were always yea and nay
so true, so inflexibly simple. Her eyes filled with
tears, her face kindled with a sad earnestness, and
James thought, as he looked, of a picture he
had once seen in a European cathedral, where
the youthful Mother of Sorrows is represented,

James had thought he loved Mary; he had admired
her remarkable beauty, he had been proud
of a certain right in her before that of other young
men, her associates; he had thought of her as the
keeper of his home; he had wished to appropriate
her wholly to himself; — but in all this there had
been, after all, only the thought of what she was
to be to him; and, for this poor measure of what
he called love, she was ready to offer, an infinite
sacrifice.

As a subtile flash of lightning will show in a
moment a whole landscape, tower, town, winding
stream, and distant sea, so that one subtile ray of
feeling seemed in a moment to reveal to James
the whole of his past life; and it seemed to him
so poor, so meagre, so shallow, by the side of that
childlike woman, to whom the noblest of feelings

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

were unconscious matters of course, that a sort of
awe awoke in him; like the Apostles of old, he
“feared as he entered into the cloud”; it seemed
as if the deepest string of some eternal sorrow had
vibrated between them.

After a moment's pause, he spoke in a low and
altered voice: —

“Mary, I am a sinner. No psalm or sermon
ever taught it to me, but I see it now. Your
mother is quite right, Mary; you are too good for
me; I am no mate for you. Oh, what would you
think of me, if you knew me wholly? I have
lived a mean, miserable, shallow, unworthy life.
You are worthy, you are a saint, and walk in
white! Oh, what upon earth could ever make you
care so much for me?”

“Well, then, James, you will be good? Won't
you talk with Dr. Hopkins?”

“Hang Dr. Hopkins!” said James. “Now, Mary,
I beg your pardon, but I can't make head or tail
of a word Dr. Hopkins says. I don't get hold of it,
or know what he would be at. You girls and women
don't know your power. Why, Mary, you are
a living gospel. You have always had a strange
power over us boys. You never talked religion
much, but I have seen high fellows come away
from being with you as still and quiet as one feels
when one goes into a church. I can't understand
all the hang of predestination, and moral ability

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

and natural ability, and God's efficiency, and man's
agency, which Dr. Hopkins is so engaged about; but
I can understand you, — you can do me good!”

“Oh, James, can I?”

“Mary, I'm going to confess my sins. I saw,
that, somehow or other, the wind was against me
in Aunt Katy's quarter, and you know we fellows
who take up the world in both fists don't like to
be beat. If there's opposition, it sets us on. Now
I confess I never did care much about religion,
but I thought, without being really a hypocrite,
I'd just let you try to save my soul for the sake
of getting you; for there's nothing surer to hook
a woman than trying to save a fellow's soul. It's
a dead-shot, generally, that. Now our ship sails
to-night, and I thought I'd just come across this
path in the orchard to speak to you. You know
I used always to bring you peaches and juneatings
across this way, and once I brought you a ribbon.”

“Yes, I've got it yet, James.”

“Well, now, Mary, all this seems mean to me,—
mean, to try and trick and snare you, who are
so much too good for me. I felt very proud this
morning that I was to go out first mate this time,
and that I should command a ship next voyage.
I meant to have asked you for a promise, but I
don't. Only, Mary, just give me your little Bible,
and I'll promise to read it all through soberly, and

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

see what it all comes to. And pray for me; and
if, while I'm gone, a good man comes who loves
you, and is worthy of you, why, take him, Mary,—
that's my advice.”

“James, I am not thinking of any such things;
I don't ever mean to be married. And I'm glad
you don't ask me for any promise, — because it
would be wrong to give it; mother doesn't even
like me to be much with you. But I'm sure all
I have said to you to-day is right; I shall tell her
exactly all I have said.”

“If Aunt Katy knew what things we fellows are
pitched into, who take the world headforemost, she
wouldn't be so selfish. Mary, you girls and women
don't know the world you live in; you ought to be
pure and good; you are not tempted as we are. You
don't know what men, what women, — no, they're
not women! — what creatures, beset us in every
foreign port, and boarding-houses that are gates
of hell; and then, if a fellow comes back from all
this and don't walk exactly straight, you just draw
up the hems of your garments and stand close to
the wall, for fear he should touch you when he
passes. I don't mean you, Mary, for you are different
from most; but if you would do what you
could, you might save us. — But it's no use talking,
Mary. Give me the Bible; and please be kind
to my dove, — for I had a hard time getting him
across the water, and I don't want him to die.”

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

If Mary had spoken all that welled up in her
little heart at that moment, she might have said
too much; but duty had its habitual seal upon her
lips. She took the little Bible from her table and
gave it with a trembling hand, and James turned
to go. In a moment he turned back, and stood
irresolute.

“Mary,” he said, “we are cousins; I may never
come back; you might kiss me this once.”

The kiss was given and received in silence, and
James disappeared among the thick trees.

“Come, child,” said Aunt Katy, looking in, “there
is Deacon Twitchel's chaise in sight, — are you
ready?”

“Yes, mother.”

CHAPTER IV. THEOLOGICAL TEA.

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

At the call of her mother, Mary hurried into
the “best room,” with a strange discomposure of
spirit she had never felt before. From childhood,
her love for James had been so deep, equable, and
intense, that it had never disturbed her with thrills
and yearnings; it had grown up in sisterly calmness,
and, quietly expanding, had taken possession
of her whole nature, without her once dreaming
of its power. But this last interview seemed to
have struck some great nerve of her being, — and
calm as she usually was, from habit, principle, and
good health, she shivered and trembled, as she
heard his retreating footsteps, and saw the orchard-grass
fly back from under his feet. It was as if
each step trod on a nerve, — as if the very sound
of the rustling grass was stirring something living
and sensitive in her soul. And, strangest of all, a
vague impression of guilt hovered over her. Had
she done anything wrong? She did not ask him
there; she had not spoken love to him; no, she

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

had only talked to him of his soul, and how she
would give hers for his, — oh, so willingly! — and
that was not love; it was only what Dr. Hopkins
said Christians must always feel.

“Child, what have you been doing?” said Aunt
Katy, who sat in full flowing chintz petticoat and
spotless dimity short-gown, with her company knitting-work
in her hands; “your cheeks are as red
as peonies. Have you been crying? What's the
matter?”

“There is the Deacon's wife, mother,” said Mary,
turning confusedly, and darting to the entry-door.

Enter Mrs. Twitchel, — a soft, pillowy little elderly
lady, whose whole air and dress reminded
one of a sack of feathers tied in the middle with
a string. A large, comfortable pocket, hung upon
the side, disclosed her knitting-work ready for operation;
and she zealously cleansed herself with a
checked handkerchief from the dust which had
accumulated during her ride in the old “one-hoss
shay,” answering the hospitable salutation of Katy
Scudder in that plaintive, motherly voice which
belongs to certain nice old ladies, who appear to
live in a state of mild chronic compassion for the
sins and sorrows of this mortal life generally.

“Why, yes, Miss Scudder, I'm pretty tol'able.
I keep goin', and goin'. That's my way. I's
a-tellin' the Deacon, this mornin', I didn't see how
I was to come here this afternoon; but then I did

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

want to see Miss Scudder and talk a little about
that precious sermon, Sunday. How is the Doctor?
blessed man! Well, his reward must be great
in heaven, if not on earth, as I was a-tellin' the
Deacon; and he says to me, says he, `Polly, we
mustn't be man-worshippers.' There, dear,” (to
Mary,) “don't trouble yourself about my bonnet;
it a'n't my Sunday one, but I thought 'twould do.
Says I to Cerinthy Ann, `Miss Scudder won't
mind, 'cause her heart's set on better things.' I
always like to drop a word in season to Cerinthy
Ann, 'cause she's clean took up with vanity and
dress. Oh, dear! oh, dear me! so different from
your blessed daughter, Miss Scudder! Well, it's
a great blessin' to be called in one's youth, like
Samuel and Timothy; but then we doesn't know
the Lord's ways. Sometimes I gets clean discouraged
with my children, — but then ag'in I don't
know; none on us does. Cerinthy Ann is one of
the most master hands to turn off work; she takes
hold and goes along like a woman, and nobody
never knows when that gal finds the time to do
all she does do; and I don't know nothin' what
I should do without her. Deacon was saying, if
ever she was called, she'd be a Martha, and not a
Mary; but then she's dreadful opposed to the doctrines.
Oh, dear me! oh, dear me! Somehow they
seem to rile her all up; and she was a-tellin' me
yesterday, when she was a-hangin' out clothes, that

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

she uever should get reconciled to Decrees and
'Lection, 'cause she can't see, if things is certain,
how folks is to help 'emselves. Says I, `Cerinthy
Ann, folks a'n't to help themselves; they's to submit
unconditional.' And she jest slammed down
the clothes-basket and went into the house.”

When Mrs. Twitchel began to talk, it flowed a
steady stream, as when one turns a faucet, that
never ceases running till some hand turns it back
again; and the occasion that cut the flood short
at present was the entrance of Mrs. Brown.

Mr. Simeon Brown was a thriving ship-owner of
Newport, who lived in a large house, owned several
negro-servants and a span of horses, and affected
some state and style in his worldly appearance.
A passion for metaphysical Orthodoxy had drawn
Simeon to the congregation of Dr. Hopkins, and
his wife of course stood by right in a high place
there. She was a tall, angular, somewhat hardfavored
body, dressed in a style rather above the
simple habits of her neighbors, and her whole air
spoke the great woman, who in right of her thousands
expected to have her say in all that was
going on in the world, whether she understood it
or not.

On her entrance, mild little Mrs. Twitchel fled
from the cushioned rocking-chair, and stood with
the quivering air of one who feels she has no business
to be anywhere in the world, until Mrs.

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

Brown's bonnet was taken and she was seated,
when Mrs. Twitchel subsided into a corner and
rattled her knitting-needles to conceal her emotion.

New England has been called the land of equality;
but what land upon earth is wholly so? Even
the mites in a bit of cheese, naturalists say, have
great tumblings and strivings about position and
rank; he who has ten pounds will always be a
nobleman to him who has but one, let him strive
as manfully as he may; and therefore let us forgive
meek little Mrs. Twitchel for melting into
nothing in her own eyes when Mrs. Brown came
in, and let us forgive Mrs. Brown that she sat
down in the rocking-chair with an easy grandeur,
as one who thought it her duty to be affable and
meant to be. It was, however, rather difficult for
Mrs. Brown, with her money, house, negroes, and
all, to patronize Mrs. Katy Scudder, who was one
of those women whose natures seem to sit on
thrones, and who dispense patronage and favor by
an inborn right and aptitude, whatever be their
social advantages. It was one of Mrs. Brown's
trials of life, this secret, strange quality in her
neighbor, who stood apparently so far below her
in worldly goods. Even the quiet, positive style
of Mrs. Katy's knitting made her nervous; it was
an implication of independence of her sway; and
though on the present occasion every customary
courtesy was bestowed, she still felt, as she always

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

did when Mrs. Katy's guest, a secret uneasiness.
She mentally contrasted the neat little parlor, with
its white sanded floor and muslin curtains, with
her own grand front-room, which boasted the then
uncommon luxuries of Turkey carpet and Persian
rug, and wondered if Mrs. Katy did really feel as
cool and easy in receiving her as she appeared.

You must not understand that this was what
Mrs. Brown supposed herself to be thinking about;
oh, no! by no means! All the little, mean work
of our nature is generally done in a small dark
closet just a little back of the subject we are
talking about, on which subject we suppose ourselves
of course to be thinking; — of course we
are thinking of it; how else could we talk about
it?

The subject in discussion, and what Mrs. Brown
supposed to be in her own thoughts, was the last
Sunday's sermon on the doctrine of entire Disinterested
Benevolence, in which good Doctor Hopkins
had proclaimed to the citizens of Newport
their duty of being so wholly absorbed in the general
good of the universe as even to acquiesce in
their own final and eternal destruction, if the
greater good of the whole might thereby be accomplished.

“Well, now, dear me!” said Mrs. Twitchel,
while her knitting-needles trotted contentedly to
the mournful tone of her voice, — “I was tellin'

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

the Deacon, if we only could get there! Sometimes
I think I get a little way, — but then ag'in
I don't know; but the Deacon he's quite down, —
he don't see no evidences in himself. Sometimes
he says he don't feel as if he ought to keep his
place in the church, — but then ag'in he don't know.
He keeps a-turnin' and turnin' on't over in his
mind, and a-tryin' himself this way and that way;
and he says he don't see nothin' but what's selfish,
no way.

“'Member one night last winter, after the Deacon
got warm in bed, there come a rap at the
door; and who should it be but old Beulah Ward,
wantin' to see the Deacon? — 'twas her boy she sent,
and he said Beulah was sick and hadn't no more
wood nor candles. Now I know'd the Deacon had
carried that crittur half a cord of wood, if he had
one stick, since Thanksgivin', and I'd sent her two
o' my best moulds of candles, — nice ones that
Cerinthy Ann run when we killed a crittur; but
nothin' would do but the Deacon must get right
out his warm bed and dress himself, and hitch up
his team to carry over some wood to Beulah.
Says I, `Father, you know you'll be down with
the rheumatis for this; besides, Beulah is real
aggravatin'. I know she trades off what we send
her to the store for rum, and you never get no
thanks. She expects, 'cause we has done for her,
we always must; and more we do more we may

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

do.' And says he to me, says he, `That's jest the
way we sarves the Lord, Polly; and what if He
shouldn't hear us when we call on Him in our
troubles?' So I shet up; and the next day he
was down with the rheumatis. And Cerinthy Ann,
says she, `Well, father, now I hope you'll own
you have got some disinterested benevolence,' says
she; and the Deacon he thought it over a spell,
and then he says, `I'm 'fraid it's all selfish. I'm
jest a-makin' a righteousness of it.' And Cerinthy
Ann she come out, declarin' that the best folks
never had no comfort in religion; and for her part
she didn't mean to trouble her head about it, but
have jest as good a time as she could while she's
young, 'cause if she was 'lected to be saved she
should be, and if she wa'n't she couldn't help it,
any how.”

“Mr. Brown says he came on to Dr. Hopkins's
ground years ago,” said Mrs. Brown, giving a nervous
twitch to her yarn, and speaking in a sharp,
hard, didatic voice, which made little Mrs. Twitchel
give a gentle quiver, and look humble and apologetic.
“Mr. Brown's a master thinker; there's
nothing pleases that man better than a hard doctrine;
he says you can't get 'em too hard for him.
He don't find any difficulty in bringing his mind
up; he just reasons it out all plain; and he says,
people have no need to be in the dark; and that's
my opinion. `If folks know they ought to come

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

up to anything, why don't they?' he says; and I
say so too.”

“Mr. Scudder used to say that it took great
afflictions to bring his mind to that place,” said
Mrs. Katy. “He used to say that an old papermaker
told him once, that paper that was shaken
only one way in the making would tear across the
other, and the best paper had to be shaken every
way; and so he said we couldn't tell, till we had
been turned and shaken and tried every way,
where we should tear.”

Mrs. Twitchel responded to this sentiment with
a gentle series of groans, such as were her general
expression of approbation, swaying herself backward
and forward; while Mrs. Brown gave a sort
of toss and snort, and said that for her part she
always thought people knew what they did know,—
but she guessed she was mistaken.

The conversation was here interrupted by the
civilities attendant on the reception of Mrs. Jones,—
a broad, buxom, hearty soul, who had come on
horseback from a farm about three miles distant.

Smiling with rosy content, she presented Mrs.
Katy a small pot of golden butter, — the result of
her forenoon's churning.

There are some people so evidently broadly and
heartily of this world, that their coming into a
room always materializes the conversation. We
wish to be understood that we mean no

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

disparaging reflection on such persons; — they are as
necessary to make up a world as cabbages to make
up a garden; the great healthy principles of cheerfulness
and animal life seem to exist in them in
the gross; they are wedges and ingots of solid,
contented vitality. Certain kinds of virtues and
Christian graces thrive in such people as the first
crop of corn does in the bottom-lands of the Ohio
Mrs. Jones was a church-member, a regular churchgoer,
and planted her comely person plump in
front of Dr. Hopkins every Sunday, and listened
to his searching and discriminating sermons with
broad, honest smiles of satisfaction. Those keen
distinctions as to motives, those awful warnings
and urgent expostulations, which made poor Deacon
Twitchel weep, she listened to with great,
round, satisfied eyes, making to all, and after all,
the same remark, — that it was good, and she liked
it, and the Doctor was a good man; and on the
present occasion, she announced her pot of butter
as one fruit of her reflections after the last discourse.

“You see,” she said, “as I was a-settin' in the
spring-house, this mornin', a-workin' my butter, I
says to Dinah, — `I'm goin' to carry a pot of this
down to Miss Scudder for the Doctor, — I got so
much good out of his Sunday's sermon.' And
Dinah she says to me, says she, — `Laws, Miss
Jones, I thought you was asleep, for sartin!'

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

But I wasn't; only I forgot to take any caraway-seed
in the mornin', and so I kinder missed it;
you know it 'livens one up. But I never lost
myself so but what I kinder heerd him goin' on,
on, sort o' like, — and it sounded all sort o' good;
and so I thought of the Doctor to-day.”

“Well, I'm sure,” said Aunt Katy, “this will be
a treat; we all know about your butter, Mrs. Jones.
I sha'n't think of putting any of mine on table
to-night, I'm sure.”

“Law, now don't!” said Mrs. Jones. “Why,
you re'lly make me ashamed, Miss Scudder. To
be sure, folks does like our butter, and it always
fetches a pretty good price, — he's very proud on't.
I tell him he oughtn't to be, — we oughtn't to be
proud of anything.”

And now Mrs. Katy, giving a look at the old
clock, told Mary it was time to set the tea-table;
and forthwith there was a gentle movement of
expectancy. The little mahogany tea-table opened
its brown wings, and from a drawer came forth
the snowy damask covering. It was etiquette, on
such occasions, to compliment every article of the
establishment successively, as it appeared; so the
Deacon's wife began at the table-cloth.

“Well, I do declare, Miss Scudder beats us all
in her table-cloths,” she said, taking up a corner
of the damask, admiringly; and Mrs. Jones forth
with jumped up and seized the other corner.

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

“Why, this 'ere must have come from the Old
Country. It's 'most the beautiflest thing I ever
did see.”

“It's my own spinning,” replied Mrs. Katy, with
conscious dignity. “There was an Irish weaver
came to Newport the year before I was married,
who wove beautifully, — just the Old-Country patterns, —
and I'd been spinning some uncommonly
fine flax then. I remember Mr. Scudder used to
read to me while I was spinning,” — and Aunt
Katy looked afar, as one whose thoughts are in
the past, and dropped out the last words with a
little sigh, unconsciously, as if speaking to herself.

“Well, now, I must say,” said Mrs. Jones, “this
goes quite beyond me. I thought I could spin
some; but I sha'n't never dare to show mine.”

“I'm sure, Mrs. Jones, your towels that you had
out bleaching, this spring, were wonderful,” said
Aunt Katy. “But I don't pretend to do much
now,” she continued, straightening her trim figure.
“I'm getting old, you know; we must let the
young folks take up these things. Mary spins
better now than I ever did. Mary, hand out those
napkins.”

And so Mary's napkins passed from hand to
hand.

“Well, well,” said Mrs. Twitchel to Mary, “it's
easy to see that your linen-chest will be pretty full
by the time he comes along; won't it, Miss Jones?”

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

— and Mrs. Twitchel looked pleasantly facetious,
as elderly ladies generally do, when suggesting
such possibilities to younger ones.

Mary was vexed to feel the blood boil up in
her cheeks in a most unexpected and provoking
way at the suggestion; whereat Mrs. Twitchel
nodded knowingly at Mrs. Jones, and whispered
something in a mysterious aside, to which plump
Mrs. Jones answered, — “Why, do tell! now I
never!”

“It's strange,” said Mrs. Twitchel, taking up her
parable again, in such a plaintive tone that all
knew something pathetic was coming, “what mistakes
some folks will make, a-fetchin' up girls.
Now there's your Mary, Miss Scudder, — why, there
a'n't nothin' she can't do; but law, I was down to
Miss Skinner's, last week, a-watchin' with her, and
re'lly it 'most broke my heart to see her. Her
mother was a most amazin' smart woman; but
she brought Suky up, for all the world, as if she'd
been a wax doll, to be kept in the drawer, — and
sure enough, she was a pretty creetur, — and now
she's married, what is she? She ha'n't no more
idee how to take hold than nothin'. The poor
child means well enough, and she works so hard
she most kills herself; but then she is in the suds
from mornin' till night, — she's one the sort whose
work's never done, — and poor George Skinner's
clean discouraged.”

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

“There's everything in knowing how,” said Mrs
Katy. “Nobody ought to be always working; it's
a bad sign. I tell Mary, — `Always do up your
work in the forenoon.' Girls must learn that. I
never work afternoons, after my dinner-dishes are
got away; I never did and never would.”

“Nor I, neither,” chimed in Mrs. Jones and Mrs.
Twitchel, — both anxious to show themselves clear
on this leading point of New England housekeeping.

“There's another thing I always tell Mary,” said
Mrs. Katy, impressively. “`Never say there isn't
time for a thing that ought to be done. If a thing
is necessary, why, life is long enough to find a
place for it. That's my doctrine. When anybody
tells me they can't find time for this or that, I
don't think much of 'em. I think they don't know
how to work, — that's all.'”

Here Mrs. Twitchel looked up from her knitting,
with an apologetic giggle, at Mrs. Brown.

“Law, now, there's Miss Brown, she don't know
nothin' about it, 'cause she's got her servants to
every turn. I s'pose she thinks it queer to hear
us talkin' about our work. Miss Brown must have
her time all to herself. I was tellin' the Deacon
the other day that she was a privileged woman.”

“I'm sure, those that have servants find work
enough following 'em 'round,” said Mrs. Brown, —
who, like all other human beings, resented the

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

implication of not having as many trials in life as
her neighbors. “As to getting the work done up
in the forenoon, that's a thing I never can teach
'em; they'd rather not. Chloe likes to keep her
work 'round, and do it by snacks, any time, day
or night, when the notion takes her.”

“And it was just for that reason I never would
have one of those creatures 'round,” said Mrs.
Katy. “Mr. Scudder was principled against buying
negroes, — but if he had not been, I should not
have wanted any of their work. I know what's
to be done, and most help is no help to me. I
want people to stand out of my way and let me
get done. I've tried keeping a girl once or twice,
and I never worked so hard in my life. When
Mary and I do all ourselves, we can calculate everything
to a minute; and we get our time to sew
and read and spin and visit, and live just as we
want to.”

Here, again, Mrs. Brown looked uneasy. To
what use was it that she was rich and owned
servants, when this Mordecai in her gate utterly
despised her prosperity? In her secret heart she
thought Mrs. Katy must be envious, and rather
comforted herself on this view of the subject, —
sweetly unconscious of any inconsistency in the
feeling with her views of utter self-abnegation just
announced.

Meanwhile the tea-table had been silently

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

gathering on its snowy plateau the delicate china, the
golden butter, the loaf of faultless cake, a plate of
crullers or wonders, as a sort of sweet fried cake
was commonly called, — tea-rusks, light as a puff,
and shining on top with a varnish of egg, — jellies
of apple and quince quivering in amber clearness,—
whitest and purest honey in the comb, — in short,
everything that could go to the getting-up of a
most faultless tea.

“I don't see,” said Mrs. Jones, resuming the
gentle pæans of the occasion, “how Miss Scudder's
loaf-cake always comes out jest so. It don't rise
neither to one side nor t'other, but jest even all
'round; and it a'n't white one side and burnt the
other, but jest a good brown all over; and it don't
have no heavy streak in it.”

“Jest what Cerinthy Ann was sayin', the other
day,” said Mrs. Twitchel. “She says she can't
never be sure how hers is a-comin' out. Do what
she can, it will be either too much or too little;
but Miss Scudder's is always jest so. `Law,' says
I, `Cerinthy Ann, it's faculty, — that's it; — them
that has it has it, and them that hasn't — why,
they've got to work hard, and not do half so well,
neither.'”

Mrs. Katy took all these praises as matter of
course. Since she was thirteen years old, she had
never put her hand to anything that she had not
been held to do better than other folks, and

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

therefore she accepted her praises with the quiet repose
and serenity of assured reputation; though, of course,
she used the usual polite disclaimers of “Oh, it's
nothing, nothing at all; I'm sure I don't know how
I do it, and was not aware it was so good,” — and
so on. All which things are proper for gentlewomen
to observe in like cases, in every walk of
life.

“Do you think the Deacon will be along soon?”
said Mrs. Katy, when Mary, returning from the
kitchen, announced the important fact, that the
tea-kettle was boiling.

“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Twitchel. “I'm a-lookin'
for him every minute. He told me, that he and
the men should be plantin' up to the eight-acre
lot, but he'd keep the colt up there to come down
on; and so I laid him out a clean shirt, and says
I, `Now, Father, you be sure and be there by five,
so that Miss Scudder may know when to put her
tea a-drawin'.' — There he is, I believe,” she added,
as a horse's tramp was heard without, and, after
a few moments, the desired Deacon entered.

He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, low, sinewy,
thin, with black hair showing lines and patches of
silver. His keen, thoughtful, dark eye marked the
nervous and melancholic temperament. A mild and
pensive humility of manner seemed to brood over
him, like the shadow of a cloud. Everything in
his dress, air, and motions indicated punctilious

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

exactness and accuracy, at times rising to the point
of nervous anxiety.

Immediately after the bustle of his entrance had
subsided, Mr. Simeon Brown followed. He was a
tall, lank individual, with high cheek-bones, thin,
sharp features, small, keen, hard eyes, and large
hands and feet.

Simeon was, as we have before remarked, a
keen theologian, and had the scent of a hound for
a metaphysical distinction. True, he was a man
of business, being a thriving trader to the coast
of Africa, whence he imported negroes for the
American market; and no man was held to understand
that branch of traffic better, — he having,
in his earlier days, commanded ships in the business,
and thus learned it from the root. In his
private life, Simeon was severe and dictatorial.
He was one of that class of people who, of a
freezing day, will plant themselves directly between
you and the fire, and there stand and argue to
prove that selfishness is the root of all moral evil.
Simeon said he always had thought so; and his
neighbors sometimes supposed that nobody could
enjoy better experimental advantages for understanding
the subject. He was one of those men
who suppose themselves submissive to the Divine
will, to the uttermost extent demanded by the
extreme theology of that day, simply because they
have no nerves to feel, no imagination to conceive

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

what endless happiness or suffering is, and who
deal therefore with the great question of the salvation
or damnation of myriads as a problem of
theological algebra, to be worked out by their inevitable
x, y, z

But we must not spend too much time with our
analysis of character, for matters at the tea-table
are drawing to a crisis. Mrs. Jones has announced
that she does not think “he” can come this afternoon,
by which significant mode of expression she
conveyed the dutiful idea that there was for her
but one male person in the world. And now Mrs.
Katy says, “Mary, dear, knock at the Doctor's
door and tell him that tea is ready.”

The Doctor was sitting in his shady study, in
the room on the other side of the little entry.
The windows were dark and fragrant with the
shade and perfume of blossoming lilacs, whose
tremulous shadow, mingled with spots of afternoon
sunlight, danced on the scattered papers of a great
writing-table covered with pamphlets and heavily-bound
volumes of theology, where the Doctor was
sitting.

A man of gigantic proportions, over six feet in
height, and built every way with an amplitude
corresponding to his height, he bent over his writing,
so absorbed that he did not hear the gentle
sound of Mary's entrance.

“Doctor,” said the maiden, gently, “tea is ready.”

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

No motion, no sound, except the quick racing
of the pen over the paper.

“Doctor! Doctor!” — a little louder, and with
another step into the apartment, — “tea is ready.”

The Doctor stretched his head forward to a paper
which lay before him, and responded in a low
murmuring voice, as reading something.

“Firstly, — if underived virtue be peculiar to the
Deity, can it be the duty of a creature to have
it?”

Here a little waxen hand came with a very
gentle tap on his huge shoulder, and “Doctor, tea
is ready,” penetrated drowsily to the nerve of his
ear, as a sound heard in sleep. He rose suddenly
with a start, opened a pair of great blue eyes
which shone abstractedly under the dome of a
capacious and lofty forehead, and fixed them on
the maiden, who by this time was looking up
rather archly, and yet with an attitude of the most
profound respect, while her venerated friend was
assembling together his earthly faculties.

“Tea is ready, if you please. Mother wished
me to call you.”

“Oh! — ah! — yes! — indeed!” he said, looking
confusedly about, and starting for the door, in his
study-gown.

“If you please, Sir,” said Mary, standing in his
way, “would you not like to put on your coat
and wig?”

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

The Doctor gave a hurried glance at his study-gown,
put his hand to his head, which, in place
of the ample curls of his full-bottomed wig, was
decked only with a very ordinary cap, and seemed
to come at once to full comprehension. He smiled
a kind of conscious, benignant smile, which adorned
his high cheek-bones and hard features as sunshine
adorns the side of a rock, and said, kindly, “Ah,
well, child, I understand now; I'll be out in a
moment.”

And Mary, sure that he was now on the right
track, went back to the tea-room with the announcement
that the Doctor was coming.

In a few moments he entered, majestic and
proper, in all the dignity of full-bottomed, powdered
wig, full, flowing coat, with ample cuffs, silver
knee- and shoe-buckles, as became the gravity
and majesty of the minister of those days.

He saluted all the company with a benignity
which had a touch of the majestic, and also of
the rustic in it; for at heart the Doctor was a
bashful man, — that is, he had somewhere in his
mental camp that treacherous fellow whom John
Bunyan anathematizes under the name of Shame.
The company rose on his entrance; the men bowed
and the women curtsied, and all remained standing
while he addressed to each with punctilious
decorum those inquiries in regard to health and
well-being which preface a social in erview. Then,

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

at a dignified sign from Mrs. Katy, he advanced
to the table, and, all following his example, stood,
while, with one hand uplifted, he went through a
devotional exercise which, for length, more resembled
a prayer than a grace, — after which the company
were seated.

“Well, Doctor,” said Mr. Brown, who, as a
householder of substance, felt a conscious right to
be first to open conversation with the minister,
“people are beginning to make a noise about your
views. I was talking with Deacon Timmins the
other day down on the wharf, and he said Dr.
Stiles said that it was entirely new doctrine, —
entirely so, — and for his part he wanted the good
old ways.”

“They say so, do they?” said the Doctor, kindling
up from an abstraction into which he seemed
to be gradually subsiding. “Well, let them. I
had rather publish new divinity than any other,
and the more of it the better, — if it be but true.
I should think it hardly worth while to write, if I
had nothing new to say.”

“Well,” said Deacon Twitchel, — his meek face
flushing with awe of his minister, — “Doctor, there's
all sorts of things said about you. Now the other
day I was at the mill with a load of corn, and
while I was a-waitin', Amariah Wadsworth came
along with his'n; and so while we were waitin'
he says to me, `Why they say your minister is

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

gettin' to be an Armenian '; and he went on
a-tellin' how old Ma'am Badger told him that
you interpreted some parts of Paul's Epistles clear
on the Arminian side. You know Ma'am Badger's
a master-hand at doctrines, and she's 'most
an uncommon Calvinist.”

“That does not frighten me at all,” said the
sturdy Doctor. “Supposing I do interpret some
texts like the Arminians. Can't Arminians have
anything right about them? Who wouldn't rather
go with the Arminians when they are right, than
with the Calvinists when they are wrong?”

“That's it, — you've hit it, Doctor,” said Simeon
Brown. “That's what I always say. I say,
`Don't he prove it? and how are you going to
answer him?' That gravels 'em.”

“Well,” said Deacon Twitchel, “Brother Seth,—
you know Brother Seth, — he says you deny
depravity. He's all for imputation of Adam's sin,
you know; and I have long talks with Seth about
it, every time he comes to see me; and he says,
that, if we did not sin in Adam, it's givin' up the
whole ground altogether; and then he insists you're
clean wrong about the unregenerate doings.”

“Not at all, — not in the least,” said the Doctor,
promptly.

“I wish Seth could talk with you sometime,
Doctor. Along in the spring, he was down helpin'
me to lay stone fence, — it was when we was

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

fencin' off the south-pastur' lot, — and we talked
pretty nigh all day; and it re'lly did seem to me
that the longer we talked, the sotter Seth grew.
He's a master-hand at readin'; and when he heard
that your remarks on Dr. Mayhew had come out,
Seth tackled up o' purpose and come up to Newport
to get them, and spent all his time, last winter,
studyin' on it and makin' his remarks; and I
tell you, Sir, he's a tight fellow to argue with.
Why, that day, what with layin' stone wall and
what with arguin' with Seth, I come home quite
beat out, — Miss Twitchel will remember.”

“That he was!” said his helpmeet. “I 'member,
when he came home, says I, `Father, you seem
clean used up'; and I stirred 'round lively like,
to get him his tea. But he jest went into the
bedroom and laid down afore supper; and I says
to Cerinthy Ann, `That's a thing I ha'n't seen
your father do since he was took with the typhus.'
And Cerinthy Ann, she said she knew 'twa'n't anything
but them old doctrines, — that it was always
so when Uncle Seth come down. And after tea
Father was kinder chirked up a little, and he and
Seth sot by the fire, and was a-beginnin' it ag'in,
and I jest spoke out and said, — `Now, Seth, these
'ere things doesn't hurt you; but the Deacon is
weakly, and if he gets his mind riled after supper,
he don't sleep none all night. So,' says I, `you'd
better jest let matters stop where they be; 'cause,'

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

says I, `'twon't make no difference, for to-night,
which on ye's got the right on't; — reckon the
Lord 'll go on his own way without you; and we
shall find out, by'm-by, what that is.'”

“Mr. Scudder used to think a great deal on
these points,” said Mrs. Katy, “and the last time
he was home he wrote out his views. I haven't
ever shown them to you, Doctor; but I should be
pleased to know what you think of them.”

“Mr. Scudder was a good man, with a clear
head,” said the Doctor; “and I should be much
pleased to see anything that he wrote.”

A flush of gratified feeling passed over Mrs.
Katy's face; — for one flower laid on the shrine
which we keep in our hearts for the dead, is worth
more than any gift to our living selves.

We will not now pursue our party further, lest
you, reader, get more theological tea than you
can drink. We will not recount the numerous
nice points raised by Mr. Simeon Brown and adjusted
by the Doctor, — and how Simeon invariably
declared, that that was the way in which he
disposed of them himself, and how he had thought
it out ten years ago.

We will not relate, either, too minutely, how
Mary changed color and grew pale and red in
quick succession, when Mr. Simeon Brown incidentally
remarked, that the “Monsoon” was going
to set sail that very afternoon, for her three-years'

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

voyage. Nobody noticed it in the busy amenities,—
the sudden welling and ebbing of that one poor
little heart-fountain.

So we go, — so little knowing what we touch
and what touches us as we talk! We drop out
a common piece of news, — “Mr. So-and-so is
dead, — Miss Such-a-one is married, — such a ship
has sailed,” — and lo, on our right hand or our
left, some heart has sunk under the news silently,—
gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without
even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang.
And this — God help us! — is what we call living!

CHAPTER V. THE LETTER.

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

Mary returned to the quietude of her room.
The red of twilight had faded, and the silver moon,
round and fair, was rising behind the thick boughs
of the apple-trees. She sat down in the window,
thoughtful and sad, and listened to the crickets.
whose ignorant jollity often sounds as mournfully
to us mortals as ours may to superior beings.
There the little hoarse, black wretches were scraping
and creaking, as if life and death were invented
solely for their pleasure, and the world were
created only to give them a good time in it. Now
and then a little wind shivered among the boughs
and brought down a shower of white petals which
shimmered in the slant beams of the moonlight;
and now a ray touched some tall head of grass,
and forthwith it blossomed into silver, and stirred
itself with a quiet joy, like a new-born saint just
awakening in paradise. And ever and anon came
on the still air the soft eternal pulsations of the
distant sea, — sound mournfulest, most mysterious

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

of all the harpings of Nature. It was the sea, —
the deep, eternal sea, — the treacherous, soft, dreadful,
inexplicable sea; and he was perhaps at this
moment being borne away on it, — away, away, —
to what sorrows, to what temptations, to what
dangers, she knew not. She looked along the old,
familiar, beaten path by which he came, by which
he went, and thought, “What if he never should
come back?” There was a little path through
the orchard out to a small elevation in the pasture
lot behind, whence the sea was distinctly visible,
and Mary had often used her low-silled window
as a door when she wanted to pass out
thither; so now she stepped out, and, gathering
her skirts back from the dewy grass, walked thoughtfully
along the path and gained the hill. Newport
harbor lay stretched out in the distance, with the
rising moon casting a long, wavering track of silver
upon it; and vessels, like silver-winged moths,
were turning and shifting slowly to and fro upon
it, and one stately ship in full sail passing fairly
out under her white canvas, graceful as some
grand, snowy bird. Mary's beating heart told her
that there was passing away from her one who
carried a portion of her existence with him. She
sat down under a lonely tree that stood there, and,
resting her elbow on her knee, followed the ship
with silent prayers, as it passed, like a graceful
cloudy dream, out of her sight.

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

Then she thoughtfully retraced her way to her
chamber; and as she was entering, observed in
the now clearer moonlight what she had not seen
before, — something white, like a letter, lying on
the floor. Immediately she struck a light, and there,
sure enough, it was, — a letter in James's handsome,
dashing hand; and the little puss, before
she knew what she was about, actually kissed it,
with a fervor which would much have astonished
the writer, could he at that moment have been
clairvoyant. But Mary felt as one who finds, in
the emptiness after a friend's death, an unexpected
message or memento; and all alone in the white,
calm stillness of her little room her heart took
sudden possession of her. She opened the letter
with trembling hands, and read what of course we
shall let you read. We got it out of a bundle of
old, smoky, yellow letters, years after all the parties
concerned were gone on the eternal journey beyond
earth.

“My dear Mary, —

“I cannot leave you so. I have about two hundred
things to say to you, and it's a shame I could
not have had longer to see you; but blessed be ink
and paper! I am writing and seeing to fifty things
besides; so you mustn't wonder if my letter has
rather a confused appearance.

“I have been thinking that perhaps I gave you

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

a wrong impression of myself, this afternoon. I
am going to speak to you from my heart, as if I
were confessing on my death-bed. Well, then, I
do not confess to being what is commonly called a
bad young man. I should be willing that men of
the world generally, even strict ones, should look
my life through and know all about it. It is only
in your presence, Mary, that I feel that I am bad
and low and shallow and mean, because you represent
to me a sphere higher and holier than any
in which I have ever moved, and stir up a sort of
sighing and longing in my heart to come towards
it. In all countries, in all temptations, Mary, your
image has stood between me and low, gross vice.
When I have been with fellows roaring drunken,
beastly songs, — suddenly I have seemed to see you
as you used to sit beside me in the singing-school,
and your voice has been like an angel's in my ear,
and I have got up and gone out sick and disgusted.
Your face has risen up calm and white and still,
between the faces of poor lost creatures who know
no better way of life than to tempt us to sin. And
sometimes, Mary, when I have seen girls that, had
they been cared for by good pious mothers, might
have been like you, I have felt as if I could cry
for them. Poor women are abused all the world
over; and it's no wonder they turn round and revenge
themselves on us.

“No, I have not been bad, Mary, as the world

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

calls badness. I have been kept by you. But do
you remember you told me once, that, when the
snow first fell and lay so dazzling and pure and
soft, all about, you always felt as if the spreads
and window-curtains that seemed white before were
not clean? Well, it's just like that with me. Your
presence makes me feel that I am not pure, — that
I am low and unworthy, — not worthy to touch the
hem of your garment. Your good Dr. Hopkins
spent a whole half-day, the other Sunday, trying
to tell us about the beauty of holiness; and he
cut, and pared, and peeled, and sliced, and told us
what it wasn't, and what was like it, and wasn't;
and then he built up an exact definition, and fortified
and bricked it up all round; and I thought to
myself that he'd better tell 'em to look at Mary
Scudder, and they'd understand all about it. That
was what I was thinking when you talked to me
for looking at you in church instead of looking
towards the pulpit. It really made me laugh in
myself to see what a good little ignorant, unconscious
way you had of looking up at the Doctor,
as if he knew more about that than you did.

“And now as to your Doctor that you think so
much of, I like him for certain things, in certain
ways. He is a great, grand, large pattern of a
man, — a man who isn't afraid to think, and to
speak anything he does think; but then I do believe,
if he would take a voyage round the world

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

in the forecastle of a whaler, he would know more
about what to say to people than he does now;
it would certainly give him several new points to
be considered. Much of his preaching about men
is as like live men as Chinese pictures of trees
and rocks and gardens, — no nearer the reality than
that. All I can say is, `It isn't so; and you'd
know it, Sir, if you knew men.' He has got what
they call a system, — just so many bricks put together
just so; but it is too narrow to take in all
I see in my wanderings round this world of ours.
Nobody that has a soul, and goes round the world
as I do, can help feeling it at times, and thinking,
as he sees all the races of men and their ways,
who made them, and what they were made for.
To doubt the existence of a God seems to me
like a want of common sense. There is a Maker
and a Ruler, doubtless; but then, Mary, all this
invisible world of religion is unreal to me. I can
see we must be good, somehow, — that if we are
not, we shall not be happy here or hereafter. As
to all the metaphysics of your good Doctor, you
can't tell how they tire me. I'm not the sort of
person that they can touch. I must have real
things, — real people; abstractions are nothing to
me. Then I think that he systematically contradicts
on one Sunday what he preaches on another
One Sunday he tells us that God is the immediate
efficient Author of every act of will; the next

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

he tells us that we are entire free agents. I see
no sense in it, and can't take the trouble to put
it together. But then he and you have something
in you that I call religion, — something that makes
you good. When I see a man working away on
an entirely honest, unworldly, disinterested pattern,
as he does, and when I see you, Mary, as I said
before, I should like at least to be as you are,
whether I can believe as you do or not.

“How could you so care for me, and waste on
one so unworthy of you such love? Oh, Mary,
some better man must win you; I never shall and
never can; but then you must not quite forget
me; you must be my friend, my saint. If, through
your prayers, your Bible, your friendship, you can
bring me to your state, I am willing to be brought
there, — nay, desirous. God has put the key of my
soul into your hands.

“So, dear Mary, good-by! Pray still for your
naughty, loving

Mary read this letter and re-read it, with more
pain than pleasure. To feel the immortality of a
beloved soul hanging upon us, to feel that its only
communications with Heaven must be through us,
is the most solemn and touching thought that can
pervade a mind. It was without one particle of
gratified vanity, with even a throb of pain, that

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

she read such exalted praises of herself from one
blind to the glories of a far higher loveliness.

Yet was she at that moment, unknown to herself,
one of the great company scattered through
earth who are priests unto God, — ministering between
the Divine One, who has unveiled himself
unto them, and those who as yet stand in the
outer courts of the great sanctuary of truth and
holiness. Many a heart, wrung, pierced, bleeding
with the sins and sorrows of earth, longing to depart,
stands in this mournful and beautiful ministry,
but stands unconscious of the glory of the
work in which it waits and suffers. God's kings
and priests are crowned with thorns, walking the
earth with bleeding feet, and comprehending not
the work they are performing.

Mary took from a drawer a small pocket-book,
from which dropped a lock of black hair, — a glossy
curl, which seemed to have a sort of wicked, wilful
life in every shining ring, just as she had often
seen it shake naughtily on the owner's head. She
felt a strange tenderness towards the little wilful
thing, and, as she leaned over it, made in her
heart a thousand fond apologies for every fault and
error.

She was standing thus when Mrs. Scudder entered
the room to see if her daughter had yet retired.

“What are you doing there, Mary?” she said,

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

as her eye fell on the letter. “What is it you are
reading?”

Mary felt herself grow pale; it was the first time
in her whole life that her mother had asked her a
question that she was not from the heart ready to
answer. Her loyalty to her only parent had gone
on even-handed with that she gave to her God;
she felt, somehow, that the revelations of that afternoon
had opened a gulf between them, and the
consciousness overpowered her.

Mrs. Scudder was astonished at her evident embarrassment,
her trembling, and paleness. She was
a woman of prompt, imperative temperament, and
the slightest hesitation in rendering to her a full,
outspoken confidence had never before occurred in
their intercourse. Her child was the core of her
heart, the apple of her eye; and intense love is
always near neighbor to anger; there was, therefore,
an involuntary flash from her eye and a
heightening of her color, as she said, — “Mary,
are you concealing anything from your mother?”

In that moment, Mary had grown calm again.
The wonted serene, balanced nature had found its
habitual poise, and she looked up innocently, though
with tears in her large, blue eyes, and said, —

“No, mother, — I have nothing that I do not
mean to tell you fully. This letter came from
James Marvyn he came here to see me this afternoon.”

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

“Here? — when? I did not see him”

“After dinner. I was sitting here in the window,
and suddenly he came up behind me through
the orchard-path.”

Mrs. Katy sat down with a flushed cheek and a
discomposed air; but Mary seemed actually to bear
her down by the candid clearness of the large, blue
eye which she turned on her, as she stood perfectly
collected, with her deadly pale face and a brilliant
spot burning on each cheek.

“James came to say good-by. He complained
that he had not had a chance to see me alone
since he came home.”

“And what should he want to see you alone
for?” said Mrs. Scudder, in a dry, disturbed tone.

“Mother, — everybody has things at times which
they would like to say to some one person alone,”
said Mary.

“Well, tell me what he said.”

“I will try. In the first place, he said that he
always had been free, all his life, to run in and
out of our house, and to wait on me like a
brother.”

“Hum!” said Mrs. Scudder; “but he isn't your
brother, for all that.”

“Well, then, he wanted to know why you were
so cold to him, and why you never let him walk
with me from meetings or see me alone, as he often
used to. And I told him why, — that we were

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

not children now, and that you thought it was not
best; and then I talked with him about religion,
and tried to persuade him to attend to the concerns
of his soul, and I never felt so much hope
for him as I do now.”

Aunt Katy looked skeptical, and remarked, — “If
he really felt a disposition for religious instruction,
Dr. Hopkins could guide him much better than
you could.”

“Yes, — so I told him, and I tried to persuade
him to talk with Dr. Hopkins; but he was very
unwilling. He said, I could have more influence
over him than anybody else, — that nobody could
do him any good but me.”

“Yes, yes, — I understand all that,” said Aunt
Katy, — “I have heard young men say that before,
and I know just what it amounts to.”

“But, mother, I do think James was moved very
much, this afternoon. I never heard him speak so
seriously; he seemed really in earnest, and he
asked me to give him my Bible.”

“Couldn't he read any Bible but yours?”

“Why, naturally, you know, mother, he would
like my Bible better, because it would put him in
mind of me. He promised faithfully to read it all
through.”

“And then, it seems, he wrote you a letter.”

“Yes, mother.”

Mary shrank from showing this letter, from the

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

natural sense of honor which makes us feel it indelicate
to expose to an unsympathizing eye the
confidential outpourings of another heart; and then
she felt quite sure that there was no such intercessor
for James in her mother's heart as in her
own. But over all this reluctance rose the determined
force of duty; and she handed the letter in
silence to her mother.

Mrs. Scudder took it, laid it deliberately in her
lap, and then began searching in the pocket of her
chintz petticoat for her spectacles. These being
found, she wiped them, accurately adjusted them,
opened the letter and spread it on her lap, brushing
out its folds and straightening it, that she
might read with the greater ease. After this she
read it carefully and deliberately; and all this while
there was such a stillness, that the sound of the
tall varnished clock in the best room could be
heard through the half-opened door.

After reading it with the most tiresome, torturing
slowness, she rose, and laying it on the table
under Mary's eye, and pressing down her finger on
two lines in the letter, said, “Mary, have you told
James that you loved him?”

“Yes, mother, always. I always loved him, and
he always knew it.”

“But, Mary, this that he speaks of is something
different. What has passed between —”

“Why, mother, he was saying that we who were

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

Christians drew to ourselves and did not care for
the salvation of our friends; and then I told him
how I had always prayed for him, and how I
should be willing even to give up my hopes in
heaven, if he might be saved.”

“Child, — what do you mean?”

“I mean, if only one of us two could go to
heaven, I had rather it should be him than me,”
said Mary.

“Oh, child! child!” said Mrs. Scudder, with a
sort of groan, — “has it gone with you so far as
this? Poor child! — after all my care, you are in
love with this boy, — your heart is set on him.”

“Mother, I am not. I never expect to see him
much, — never expect to marry him or anybody
else; — only he seems to me to have so much more
life and soul and spirit than most people, — I think
him so noble and grand, — that is, that he could be
if he were all he ought to be, — that, somehow,
I never think of myself in thinking of him, and
his salvation seems worth more than mine; — men
can do so much more! — they can live such splendid
lives! — oh, a real noble man is so glorious!”

“And you would like to see him well married,
would you not?” said Mrs. Scudder, sending, with
a true woman's aim, this keen arrow into the midst
of the cloud of enthusiasm which enveloped her
daughter. “I think,” she added, “that Jane Spencer
would make him an excellent wife”

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

Mary was astonished at a strange, new pain that
shot through her at these words. She drew in her
breath and turned herself uneasily, as one who had
literally felt a keen dividing blade piercing between
soul and spirit. Till this moment, she had never
been conscious of herself; but the shaft had torn
the veil. She covered her face with her hands;
the hot blood flushed scarlet over neck and brow;
at last, with a beseeching look, she threw herself
into her mother's arms.

“Oh, mother, mother, I am selfish, after all!”

Mrs. Scudder folded her silently to her heart, and
said, “My daughter, this is not at all what I wished
it to be; I see how it is; — but then you have been
a good child; I don't blame you. We can't always
help ourselves. We don't always really know how
we do feel. I didn't know, for a long while, that
I loved your father. I thought I was only curious
about him, because he had a strange way of treating
me, different from other men; but, one day, I
remember, Julian Simons told me that it was reported
that his mother was making a match for
him with Susan Emery, and I was astonished to
find how I felt. I saw him that evening, and the
moment he looked at me I saw it wasn't true; all
at once I knew something I never knew before, —
and that was, that I should be very unhappy if
he loved any one else better than me. But then,
my child, your father was a different man from

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

James; — he was as much better than I was as
you are than James. I was a foolish, thoughtless
young thing then. I never should have been any
thing at all, but for him. Somehow, when I loved
him, I grew more serious, and then he always
guided and led me. Mary, your father was a wonderful
man; he was one of the sort that the world
knows not of; — sometime I must show you his
letters. I always hoped, my daughter, that you
would marry such a man.”

“Don't speak of marrying, mother. I never shall
marry.”

“You certainly should not, unless you can marry
in the Lord. Remember the words, `Be ye not
unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For
what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?
and what communion hath light with
darkness? and what concord hath Christ with Belial?
or what part hath he that believeth with an
infidel?'”

“Mother, James is not an infidel.”

“He certainly is an unbeliever, Mary, by his own
confession; — but then God is a Sovereign and hath
mercy on whom he will. You do right to pray for
him; but if he does not come out on the Lord's
side, you must not let your heart mislead you. He
is going to be gone three years, and you must try
to think as little of him as possible; — put your
mind upon your duties, like a good girl, and God

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

will bless you. Don't believe too much in your
power over him; — young men, when they are in
love, will promise anything, and really think they
mean it; but nothing is a saving change, except
what is wrought in them by sovereign grace.”

“But, mother, does not God use the love we
have to each other as a means of doing us good?
Did you not say that it was by your love to father
that you first were led to think seriously?”

“That is true, my child,” said Mrs. Scudder,
who, like many of the rest of the world, was surprised
to meet her own words walking out on a
track where she had not expected them, but was
yet too true of soul to cut their acquaintance because
they were not going the way of her wishes.
“Yes, all that is true; but yet, Mary, when one
has but one little ewe lamb in the world, one is
jealous of it. I would give all the world, if you
had never seen James. It is dreadful enough for a
woman to love anybody as you can, but it is more
to love a man of unsettled character and no religion.
But then the Lord appoints all our goings;
it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps; —
I leave you, my child, in His hands.” And, with
one solemn and long embrace, the mother and
daughter parted for the night.

It is impossible to write a story of New England
life and manners for a thoughtless, shallow-minded
person If we represent things as they are, their

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

intensity, their depth, their unworldly gravity and
earnestness, must inevitably repel lighter spirits, as
the reverse pole of the magnet drives off sticks and
straws.

In no other country were the soul and the spiritual
life ever such intense realities, and everything
contemplated so much (to use a current New England
phrase) “in reference to eternity.” Mrs. Scudder
was a strong, clear-headed, practical woman.
No one had a clearer estimate of the material and
outward life, or could more minutely manage its
smallest item; but then a tremendous, eternal future
had so weighed down and compacted the
fibres of her very soul, that all earthly things were
but as dust in comparison to it. That her child
should be one elected to walk in white, to reign
with Christ when earth was a forgotten dream, was
her one absorbing wish; and she looked on all the
events of life only with reference to this. The way
of life was narrow, the chances in favor of any
child of Adam infinitely small; the best, the most
seemingly pure and fair, was by nature a child of
wrath, and could be saved only by a sovereign decree,
by which it should be plucked as a brand
from the burning. Therefore it was, that, weighing
all things in one balance, there was the sincerity of
her whole being in the dread which she felt at the
thought of her daughter's marriage with an unbeliever.

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

Mrs. Scudder, after retiring to her room, took her
Bible, in preparation for her habitual nightly exercise
of devotion, before going to rest. She read
and re-read a chapter, scarce thinking what she was
reading, — aroused herself, — and then sat with the
book in her hand in deep thought. James Marvyn
was her cousin's son, and she had a strong feeling
of respect and family attachment for his father.
She had, too, a real kindness for the young man,
whom she regarded as a well-meaning, wilful youngster;
but that he should touch her saint, her Mary,
that he should take from her the daughter who was
her all, really embittered her heart towards him.

“After all,” she said to herself, “there are three
years, — three years in which there will be no letters,
or perhaps only one or two, — and a great deal
may be done in three years, if one is wise”; — and
she felt within herself an arousing of all the shrewd
womanly and motherly tact of her nature to meet
this new emergency.

CHAPTER VI. THE DOCTOR.

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

It is seldom that man and woman come together
in intimate association, unless influences are
at work more subtile and mysterious than the subjects
of them dream. Even in cases where the
strongest ruling force of the two sexes seems out
of the question, there is still something peculiar
and insidious in their relationship. A fatherly old
gentleman, who undertakes the care of a sprightly
young girl, finds, to his astonishment, that little
Miss spins all sorts of cobwebs round him. Grave
professors and teachers cannot give lessons to their
female pupils just as they give them to the coarser
sex, and more than once has the fable of “Cadenus
and Vanessa” been acted over by the most
unlikely performers.

The Doctor was a philosopher, a metaphysician,
a philanthropist, and in the highest and most earnest
sense a minister of good on earth. The New
England clergy had no sentimental affectation of
sanctity that segregated them from wholesome

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

human relations; and consequently our good Doctor
had always resolved, in a grave and thoughtful
spirit, at a suitable time in his worldly affairs, to
choose unto himself a helpmeet. Love, as treated
of in romances, he held to be a foolish and profane
matter, unworthy the attention of a serious
and reasonable creature. All the language of poetry
on this subject was to him an unknown tongue.
He contemplated the entrance on married life somewhat
in this wise: — That at a time and place
suiting, he should look out unto himself a woman
of a pleasant countenance and of good repute, a
zealous, earnest Christian, and well skilled in the
items of household management, whom, accosting
as a stranger and pilgrim to a better life, he should
loyally and lovingly entreat, as Isaac did Rebekah,
to come under the shadow of his tent and be a
helpmeet unto him in what yet remained of this
mortal journey. But straitened circumstances, and
the unsettled times of the Revolution, in which he
had taken an earnest and zealous part, had delayed
to a late bachelorhood the fulfilment of this resolution.

When once received under the shadow of Mrs.
Scudder's roof, and within the provident sphere of
her unfailing housekeeping, all material necessity
for an immediate choice was taken away; for he
was exactly in that situation dearest to every scholarly
and thoughtful man, in which all that

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

pertained to the outward life appeared to rise under
his hand at the moment he wished for it, without
his knowing how or why.

He was not at the head of a prosperous church
and society, rich and well-to-do in the world, — but,
as the pioneer leader of a new theology, in a country
where theology was the all-absorbing interest,
he had to breast the reaction that ever attends the
advent of new ideas. His pulpit talents, too, were
unattractive. His early training had been all logical,
not in the least æsthetic; for, like the ministry
of his country generally, he had been trained
always to think more of what he should say than
of how he should say it. Consequently, his style,
though not without a certain massive greatness,
which always comes from largeness of nature, had
none of those attractions by which the common
masses are beguiled into thinking. He gave only
the results of thought, not its incipient processes;
and the consequence was, that few could follow
him. In like manner, his religious teachings were
characterized by an ideality so high as quite to
discourage ordinary virtue.

There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God
has placed in human affections, tender instincts,
symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which
the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she
goes, till she outgrows the human, and changes,
as she rises, into the image of the divine. At the

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

very top of this ladder, at the threshold of paradise,
blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade
where the soul knows self no more, having learned,
through a long experience of devotion, how blest it
is to lose herself in that eternal Love and Beauty
of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but
the dim type, the distant shadow. This highest
step, this saintly elevation, which but few selectest
spirits ever on earth attain, to raise the soul to
which the Eternal Father organized every relation
of human existence and strung every cord of human
love, for which this world is one long discipline,
for which the soul's human education is constantly
varied, for which it is now torn by sorrow,
now flooded by joy, to which all its multiplied
powers tend with upward hands of dumb and ignorant
aspiration, — this Ultima Thule of virtue
had been seized upon by our sage as the all of
religion. He knocked out every round of the ladder
but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless
splendor, said to the world, “Go up thither
and be saved!”

Short of that absolute self-abnegation, that unconditional
surrender to the Infinite, there was
nothing meritorious, — because, if that were commanded,
every moment of refusal was rebellion.
Every prayer, not based on such consecration, he
held to be an insult to the Divine Majesty; — the
reading of the Word, the conscientious conduct of

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

life, the performance of the duties of man to man,
being, without this, the deeds of a creature in
conscious rebellion to its Eternal Sovereign, were
all vitiated and made void. Nothing was to be
preached to the sinner, but his ability and obligation
to rise immediately to this height.

It is not wonderful that teaching of this sort
should seem to many unendurable, and that the
multitude should desert the preacher with the cry,
“This is an hard saying; who can hear it?” The
young and gay were wearied by the dryness of
metaphysical discussions which to them were as
unintelligible as a statement of the last results of
the mathematician to the child commencing the
multiplication table. There remained around him
only a select circle, — shrewd, hard thinkers, who
delighted in metaphysical subtilties, — deep-hearted,
devoted natures, who sympathized with the unwordly
purity of his life, his active philanthropy
and untiring benevolence, — courageous men, who
admired his independence of thought and freedom
in breasting received opinion, — and those unperceiving,
dull, good people who are content to go
to church anywhere as convenience and circumstance
may drift them, — people who serve, among
the keen feeling and thinking portion of the world,
much the same purpose as adipose matter in the
human system, as a soft cushion between the nerves
of feeling and the muscles of activity.

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

There was something affecting in the pertinacity
with which the good Doctor persevered in saying
his say to his discouraging minority of hearers.
His salary was small; his meeting-house, damaged
during the Revolutionary struggle, was dilapidated
and forlorn, — fireless in winter, and in summer
admitting a flood of sun and dust through those
great windows which formed so principal a feature
in those first efforts of Puritan architecture.

Still, grand in his humility, he preached on, —
and as a soldier never asks why, but stands at
apparently the most useless post, so he went on
from Sunday to Sunday, comforting himself with
the reflection that no one could think more meanly
of his ministrations than he did himself. “I am
like Moses only in not being eloquent,” he said,
in his simplicity. “My preaching is barren and
dull, my voice is hard and harsh; but then the
Lord is a Sovereign, and may work through me.
He fed Elijah once through a raven, and he may
feed some poor wandering soul through me.”

The only mistake made by the good man was
that of supposing that the elaboration of theology
was preaching the gospel. The gospel he was
preaching constantly, by his pure, unworldly living,
by his visitations to homes of poverty and sorrow,
by his searching out of the lowly African slaves,
his teaching of those whom no one else in those
days had thought of teaching, and by the grand

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

humanity, outrunning his age, in which he protested
against the then admitted system of slavery
and the slave-trade. But when, rising in the pulpit,
he followed trains of thought suited only to
the desk of the theological lecture-room, he did it
blindly, following that law of self-development by
which minds of a certain amount of fervor must
utter what is in them, whether men will hear or
whether they will forbear.

But the place where our Doctor was happiest
was his study. There he explored, and wandered,
and read, and thought, and lived a life as wholly
ideal and intellectual as heart could conceive.

And could Love enter a reverend doctor's study,
and find his way into a heart empty and swept
of all those shreds of poetry and romance in which
he usually finds the material of his incantations?
Even so; — but he came so thoughtfully, so reverently,
with so wise and cautious a footfall, that
the good Doctor never even raised his spectacles
to see who was there. The first that he knew,
poor man, he was breathing an air of strange and
subtile sweetness, — from what paradise he never
stopped his studies to inquire. He was like a
great, rugged elm, with all its lacings and archings
of boughs and twigs, which has stood cold and
frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky, forgetful
of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly
content in its naked strength and crystalline

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

definiteness of outline. But in April there is a rising
and stirring within the grand old monster, — a whispering
of knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing
ethereally from bough to bough with a warm and
gentle life; and though the old elm knows it not,
a new creation is at hand. Just so, ever since
the good man had lived at Mrs. Scudder's, and
had the gentle Mary for his catechumen, a richer
life seemed to have colored his thoughts, — his
mind seemed to work with a pleasure as never
before.

Whoever looked on the forehead of the good
Doctor must have seen the squareness of ideality
giving marked effect to its outline. As yet ideality
had dealt only with the intellectual and invisible,
leading to subtile refinements of argument and
exalted ideas of morals. But there was lying in
him, crude and unworked, a whole mine of those
artistic feelings and perceptions which are awakened
and developed only by the touch of beauty.
Had he been born beneath the shadow of the great
Duomo of Florence, where Giotto's Campanile rises
like the slender stalk of a celestial lily, where varied
marbles and rainbow-glass and gorgeous paintings
and lofty statuary call forth, even from childhood,
the soul's reminiscences of the bygone glories of
its pristine state, his would have been a soul as
rounded and full in its sphere of faculties as that
of Da Vinci or Michel Angelo. But of all that

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

he was as ignorant as a child; and the first revelation
of his dormant nature was to come to him
through the face of woman, — that work of the
Mighty Master which is to be found in all lands
and ages.

What makes the love of a great mind something
fearful in its inception is, that it is often the unsealing
of a hitherto undeveloped portion of a large
and powerful being; the woman may or may not
seem to other eyes adequate to the effect produced,
but the man cannot forget her, because with her
came a change which makes him forever a different
being. So it was with our friend. A woman
it was that was destined to awaken in him all
that consciousness which music, painting, poetry
awaken in more evenly developed minds; and it
is the silent breathing of her creative presence that
is even now creating him anew, while as yet he
knows it not.

He never thought, this good old soul, whether
Mary were beautiful or not; he never even knew
that he looked at her; nor did he know why it
was that the truths of his theology, when uttered
by her tongue, had such a wondrous beauty as
he never felt before. He did not know why it
was, that, when she silently sat by him, copying
tangled manuscript for the press, as she sometimes
did, his whole study seemed so full of some divine
influence, as if, like St. Dorothea, she had worn

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

in her bosom, invisibly, the celestial roses of paradise.
He recorded honestly in his diary what marvellous
freshness of spirit the Lord had given him,
and how he seemed to be uplifted in his communings
with heaven, without once thinking from the
robes of what angel this sweetness had exhaled.

On Sundays, when he saw good Mrs. Jones
asleep, and Simeon Brown's hard, sharp eyes, and
Deacon Twitchel mournfully rocking to and fro,
and his wife handing fennel to keep the children
awake, his eye glanced across to the front gallery,
where one earnest young face, ever kindling with
feeling and bright with intellect, followed on his
way, and he felt uplifted and comforted. On Sunday
mornings, when Mary came out of her little
room, in clean white dress, with her singing-book
and psalm-book in her hands, her deep eyes solemn
from recent prayer, he thought of that fair and
mystical bride, the Lamb's wife, whose union with
her Divine Redeemer in a future millennial age
was a frequent and favorite subject of his musings;
yet he knew not that this celestial bride, clothed
in fine linen, clean and white, veiled in humility
and meekness, bore in his mind those earthly features.
No, he never had dreamed of that! But
only after she had passed by, that mystical vision
seemed to him more radiant, more easy to be conceived.

It is said, that, if a grape-vine be planted in the

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

neighborhood of a well, its roots, running silently
underground, wreathe themselves in a network
around the cold, clear waters, and the vine's putting
on outward greenness and unwonted clusters
and fruit is all that tells where every root and
fibre of its being has been silently stealing. So
those loves are most fatal, most absorbing, in
which, with unheeded quietness, every thought and
fibre of our life twines gradually around some
human soul, to us the unsuspected wellspring of
our being. Fearful it is, because so often the vine
must be uprooted, and all its fibres wrenched away;
but till the hour of discovery comes, how is it
transfigured by a new and beautiful life!

There is nothing in life more beautiful than that
trance-like quiet dawn which precedes the rising
of love in the soul. When the whole being is
pervaded imperceptibly and tranquilly by another
being, and we are happy, we know not and ask
not why, the soul is then receiving all and asking
nothing. At a later day she becomes self-conscious,
and then come craving exactions, endless
questions, — the whole world of the material comes
in with its hard counsels and consultations, and
the beautiful trance fades forever.

Of course, all this is not so to you, my good
friends, who read it without the most distant idea
what it can mean; but there are people in the
world to whom it has meant and will mean much,

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

and who will see in the present happiness of our
respectable friend something even omnious and
sorrowful.

It had not escaped the keen eye of the mother
how quickly and innocently the good Doctor was
absorbed by her daughter, and thereupon had come
long trains of practical reflections.

The Doctor, though not popular indeed as a
preacher, was a noted man in his age. Her deceased
husband had regarded him with something
of the same veneration which might have been
accorded to a divine messenger, and Mrs. Scudder
had received and kept this veneration as a precious
legacy. Then, although not handsome, the Doctor
had decidedly a grand and imposing appearance.
There was nothing common or insignificant about
him. Indeed, it had been said, that, when, just
after the declaration of peace, he walked through
the town in the commemorative procession side
by side with General Washington, the minister,
in the majesty of his gown, bands, cocked hat,
and full flowing wig, was thought by many to be
the more majestic and personable figure of the
two.

In those days, the minister united in himself all
those ideas of superior position and cultivation
with which the theocratic system of the New England
community had invested him. Mrs. Scudder's
notions of social rank could reach no higher than

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

to place her daughter on the throne of such preeminence.

Her Mary, she pondered, was no common girl.
In those days, it was a rare thing for young persons
to devote themselves to religion or make any
professions of devout life. The church, or that
body of people who professed to have passed
through a divine regeneration, was almost entirely
confined to middle-aged and elderly people, and
it was looked upon as a singular and unwonted
call of divine grace when young persons came forward
to attach themselves to it. When Mary,
therefore, at quite an early age, in all the bloom
of her youthful beauty, arose, according to the
simple and impressive New England rite, to consecrate
herself publicly to a religious life, and to
join the company of professing Christians, she
was regarded with a species of deference amounting
even to awe. Had it not been for the childlike,
unconscious simplicity of her manners, the
young people of her age would have shrunk away
from her, as from one entirely out of their line of
thought and feeling; but a certain natural and
innocent playfulness and amiable self-forgetfulness
made her a general favorite.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Scudder knew no young man
whom she deemed worthy to have and hold a heart
which she prized so highly. As to James, he stood
at double disadvantage, because, as her cousin's

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

son, he had grown up from childhood under her
eye, and all those sins and iniquities into which
gay and adventurous youngsters will be falling had
come to her knowledge. She felt kindly to the
youth; she wished him well; but as to giving him
her Mary! — the very suggestion made her dislike
him. She was quite sure he must have tried to
beguile her, — he must have tampered with her
feelings, to arouse in her pure and well-ordered
mind so much emotion and devotedness as she
had witnessed.

How encouraging a Providence, then, was it that
he was gone to sea for three years! — how fortunate
that Mary had been prevented in any way
from committing herself with him! — how encourageing
that the only man in those parts, in the least
fitted to appreciate her, seemed so greatly pleased
and absorbed in her society! — how easily might
Mary's dutiful reverence be changed to a warmer
sentiment, when she should find that so great a
man could descend from his lofty thoughts to think
of her!

In fact, before Mrs. Scudder had gone to sleep
the first night after James's departure, she had settled
upon the house where the minister and his
young wife were to live, had reviewed the window-curtains
and bed-quilts for each room, and glanced
complacently at an improved receipt for wedding-cake
which might be brought out to glorify a certain
occasion!

CHAPTER VII. THE FRIENDS AND RELATIONS OF JAMES.

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

Mr. Zebedee Marvyn, the father of James, was
the sample of an individuality so purely the result
of New England society and education, that he
must be embodied in our story as a representative
man of the times.

He owned a large farm in the immediate vicinity
of Newport, which he worked with his own
hands and kept under the most careful cultivation.
He was a man past the middle of life, with a
white head, a keen blue eye, and a face graven
deeply with the lines of energy and thought. His
was one of those clearly-cut minds which New
England forms among her farmers, as she forms
quartz crystals in her mountains, by a sort of gradual
influence flowing through every pore of her
soil and system.

His education, properly so called, had been merely
that of those common schools and academies with
which the States are thickly sown, and which are
the springs of so much intellectual activity. Here

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

he had learned to think and to inquire, — a process
which had not ceased with his school-days. Though
toiling daily with his sons and hired man in all the
minutiæ of a farmer's life, he kept an observant
eye on the field of literature, and there was not a
new publication heard of which he did not immediately
find means to add to his yearly increasing
stock of books. In particular was he a well-read
and careful theologian, and all the controversial
tracts, sermons, and books, with which then, (as
ever since,) New England abounded, not only lay
on his shelves, but had his pencilled annotations,
queries, and comments thickly scattered along their
margins. There was scarce an office of public
trust which had not at one time or another
been filled by him. He was deacon of the church,
chairman of the school-committee, justice of the
peace, had been twice representative in the State
legislature, and was in permanence a sort of adviser-general
in all cases between neighbor and
neighbor. Among other acquisitions, he had gained
some knowledge of the general forms of law, and
his advice was often asked in preference to that
of the regular practitioners.

His dwelling was one of those large, square,
white, green-blinded mansions, cool, clean, and
roomy, wherein the respectability of New England
in those days rejoiced. The windows were shaded
by clumps of lilacs; the deep yard with its white

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

fence inclosed a sweep of clean, short grass, and
a few fruit-trees. Opposite the house was a small
blacksmith's-shed, which, of a wet day, was sparkling
and lively with bellows and ringing forge,
while Mr. Zebedee and his sons were hammering
and pounding and putting in order anything that
was out of the way in farming-tools or establishments.
Not unfrequently the latest scientific work
or the last tractate of theology lay open by his
side, the contents of which would be discussed
with a neighbor or two as they entered; for, to
say the truth, many a neighbor, less forehanded
and thrifty, felt the benefit of this arrangement of
Mr. Zebedee, and would drop in to see if he
“wouldn't just tighten that rivet,” or “kind o' ease
out that 'ere brace,” or “let a feller have a turn
with his bellows, or a stroke or two on his anvil,”—
to all which the good man consented with a
grave obligingness. The fact was, that, as nothing
in the establishment of Mr. Marvyn was often
broken or lost or out of place, he had frequent
applications to lend to those less fortunate persons,
always to be found, who supply their own lack of
considerateness from the abundance of their neighbors.

He who is known always to be in hand, and
always obliging, in a neighborhood, stands the
chance sometimes of having nothing for himself
Mr. Zebedee reflected quietly on this subject,

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

taking it, as he did all others, into grave and orderly
consideration, and finally provided a complete set
of tools, which he kept for the purpose of lending;
and when any of these were lent, he told the next
applicant quietly, that the axe or the hoe was already
out, and thus he reconciled the Scripture
which commanded him “to do good and lend”
with that law of order which was written in his
nature.

Early in life Mr. Marvyn had married one of the
handsomest girls of his acquaintance, who had
brought him a thriving and healthy family of children,
of whom James was the youngest. Mrs. Marvyn
was, at this time, a tall, sad-eyed, gentle-mannered
woman, thoughtful, earnest, deep-natured,
though sparing in the matter of words. In all her
household arrangements, she had the same thrift
and order which characterized her husband; but
hers was a mind of a finer and higher stamp than
his.

In her bedroom, near by her work-basket, stood
a table covered with books, — and so systematic
were her household arrangements, that she never
any day missed her regular hours for reading. One
who should have looked over this table would have
seen there how eager and hungry a mind was hid
behind the silent eyes of this quiet woman. History,
biography, mathematics, volumes of the encyclop
ædia, poetry, novels, all alike found their

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

time and place there, — and while she pursued her
household labors, the busy, active soul within travelled
cycles and cycles of thought, few of which
ever found expression in words. What might be
that marvellous music of the Miserere, of which
she read, that it convulsed crowds and drew groans
and tears from the most obdurate? What might
be those wondrous pictures of Raphael and Leonardo
da Vinci? What would it be to see the
Apollo, the Venus? What was the charm that
enchanted the old marbles, — charm untold and inconceivable
to one who had never seen even the
slightest approach to a work of art? Then those
glaciers of Switzerland, that grand, unapproachable
mixture of beauty and sublimity in her mountains! —
what would it be to one who could see
it? Then what were all those harmonies of which
she read, — masses, fugues, symphonies? Oh, could
she once hear the Miserere of Mozart, just to know
what music was like! And the cathedrals, what
were they? How wonderful they must be, with
their forests of arches, many-colored as autumnwoods
with painted glass, and the chants and anthems
rolling down their long aisles! On all these
things she pondered quietly, as she sat often on
Sundays in the old staring, rattle-windowed meeting-house,
and looked at the uncouth old pulpit,
and heard the choir faw-sol-la-ing or singing fuguing
tunes; but of all this she said nothing.

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

Sometimes, for days, her thoughts would turn
from these subjects and be absorbed in mathematical
or metaphysical studies. “I have been following
that treatise on Optics for a week, and never
understood it till to-day,” she once said to her husband.
“I have found now that there has been a
mistake in drawing the diagrams. I have corrected
it, and now the demonstration is complete. Dinah,
take care, that wood is hickory, and it takes only
seven sticks of that size to heat the oven.”

It is not to be supposed that a woman of this
sort was an inattentive listener to preaching so
stimulating to the intellect as that of Dr. Hopkins.
No pair of eyes followed the web of his reasonings
with a keener and more anxious watchfulness
than those sad, deep-set, hazel ones; and as she was
drawn along the train of its inevitable logic, a close
observer might have seen how the shadows deepened
over them. For, while others listened for the
clearness of the thought, for the acuteness of the
argument, she listened as a soul wide, fine-strung,
acute, repressed, whose every fibre is a nerve, listens
to the problem of its own destiny, — listened
as the mother of a family listens, to know what
were the possibilities, the probabilities, of this mysterious
existence of ours to herself and those dearer
to her than herself.

The consequence of all her listening was a history
of deep inward sadness. That exultant joy,

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

or that entire submission, with which others seemed
to view the scheme of the universe, as thus unfolded,
did not visit her mind. Everything to her
seemed shrouded in gloom and mystery; and that
darkness she received as a token of unregeneracy,
as a sign that she was one of those who are destined,
by a mysterious decree, never to receive the
light of the glorious gospel of Christ. Hence,
while her husband was a deacon of the church,
she, for years, had sat in her pew while the sacramental
elements were distributed, a mournful spectator.
Punctilious in every duty, exact, reverential,
she still regarded herself as a child of wrath, an
enemy to God, and an heir of perdition; nor could
she see any hope of remedy, except in the sovereign,
mysterious decree of an Infinite and Unknown
Power, a mercy for which she waited with the sickness
of hope deferred.

Her children had grown up successively around
her, intelligent and exemplary. Her eldest son was
mathematical professor in one of the leading colleges
of New England. Her second son, who
jointly with his father superintended the farm, was
a man of wide literary culture and of fine mathematical
genius; and not unfrequently, on winter
evenings, the son, father, and mother worked together,
by their kitchen fireside, over the calculations
for the almanac for the ensuing year, which
the son had been appointed to edit.

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

Everything in the family arrangements was
marked by a sober precision, a grave and quiet
self-possession. There was little demonstrativeness
of affection between parents and children, brothers
and sisters, though great mutual love and confidence.
It was not pride, nor sternness, but a
sort of habitual shamefacedness, that kept far back
in each soul those feelings which are the most
beautiful in their outcome; but after a while, the
habit became so fixed a nature, that a caressing
or affectionate expression could not have passed
the lips of one to another without a painful awkwardness.
Love was understood, once for all, to
be the basis on which their life was built. Once
for all, they loved each other, and after that, the
less said, the better. It had cost the woman's
heart of Mrs. Marvyn some pangs, in the earlier
part of her wedlock, to accept of this once for all
in place of those daily outgushings which every
woman desires should be like God's loving-kindnesses,
“new every morning;” but hers, too, was
a nature strongly inclining inward, and, after a few
tremulous movements, the needle of her soul settled,
and her life-lot was accepted, — not as what
she would like or could conceive, but as a reasonable
and good one. Life was a picture painted in
low, cool tones, but in perfect keeping; and though
another and brighter style might have pleased better,
she did not quarrel with this.

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

Into this steady, decorous, highly-respectable circle
the youngest child, James, made a formidable
irruption. One sometimes sees launched into a
family-circle a child of so different a nature from
all the rest, that it might seem as if, like an aerolite,
he had fallen out of another sphere. All the
other babies of the Marvyn family had been of
that orderly, contented sort, who sleep till it is convenient
to take them up, and while awake suck
their thumbs contentedly and look up with large,
round eyes at the ceiling when it is not convenient
for their elders and betters that they should
do anything else. In farther advanced childhood,
they had been quiet and decorous children, who
could be all dressed and set up in chairs, like so
many dolls, of a Sunday morning, patiently awaiting
the stroke of the church-bell to be carried out
and put into the wagon which took them over the
two-miles' road to church. Possessed of such tranquil,
orderly, and exemplary young offshoots, Mrs.
Marvyn had been considered eminent for her “faculty”
in bringing up children.

But James was destined to put “faculty,” and
every other talent which his mother possessed, to
rout. He was an infant of moods and tenses, and
those not of any regular verb. He would cry of
nights, and he would be taken up of mornings,
and he would not suck his thumb, nor a bundle
of caraway-seed tied in a rag and dipped in sweet

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

milk, with which the good gossips in vain endeavored
to pacify him. He fought manfully with his
two great fat fists the battle of babyhood, utterly
reversed all nursery maxims, and reigned as baby
over the whole prostrate household. When old
enough to run alone, his splendid black eyes and
glossy rings of hair were seen flashing and bobbing
in every forbidden place and occupation.
Now trailing on his mother's gown, he assisted
her in salting her butter by throwing in small contributions
of snuff or sugar, as the case might be;
and again, after one of those mysterious periods
of silence which are of most ominous significance
in nursery experience, he would rise from the demolition
of her indigo-bag, showing a face ghastly
with blue streaks, and looking more like a gnome
than the son of a respectable mother. There was
not a pitcher of any description of contents left
within reach of his little tiptoes and busy fingers
that was not pulled over upon his giddy head
without in the least seeming to improve its steadiness.
In short, his mother remarked that she was
thankful every night when she had fairly gotten
him into bed and asleep; James had really got
through one more day and killed neither himself
nor any one else.

As a boy, the case was little better. He did not
take to study, — yawned over books, and cut out
moulds for running anchors when he should have

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been thinking of his columns of words in four
syllables. No mortal knew how he learned to
read, for he never seemed to stop running long
enough to learn anything; and yet he did learn
and used the talent in conning over travels, seavoyages,
and lives of heroes and naval commanders
Spite of father, mother, and brother, he seemed to
possess the most extraordinary faculty of running
up unsavory acquaintances. He was hale-fellow
well-met with every Tom and Jack and Jim and
Ben and Dick that strolled on the wharves, and
astonished his father with minutest particulars of
every ship, schooner, and brig in the harbor, together
with biographical notes of the different
Toms, Dicks, and Harrys by whom they were
worked.

There was but one member of the family that
seemed to know at all what to make of James,
and that was their negro servant, Candace.

In those days, when domestic slavery prevailed
in New England, it was quite a different thing
in its aspects from the same institution in more
southern latitudes. The hard soil, unyielding to
any but the most considerate culture, the thrifty,
close, shrewd habits of the people, and their untiring
activity and industry, prevented, among the
mass of the people, any great reliance on slave
labor.

Added to this, there were from the very first,

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in New England, serious doubts in the minds of
thoughtful and conscientious people in reference
to the lawfulness of slavery; this scruple prevented
many from availing themselves of it, and
proved a restraint on all, so that nothing like
plantation-life existed, and what servants were
owned were scattered among different families, of
which they came to be regarded and to regard
themselves as a legitimate part and portion. Slavery
was something foreign, grotesque, and picturesque
in a life of the most matter-of-fact sameness;
it was even as if one should see clusters
of palm-trees scattered here and there among Yankee
wooden meeting-houses, or open one's eyes
on clumps of yellow-striped aloes growing among
hardhack and huckleberry bushes in the pastures.

Mr. Marvyn, as a man of substance, numbered
two or three in his establishment, among whom
Candace reigned chief. The presence of these
tropical specimens of humanity, with their wide,
joyous, rich, physical abundance of nature, and
their hearty abandon of outward expression, was a
relief to the still clear-cut lines in which the picture
of New England life was drawn, that an
artist must appreciate.

No race has ever shown such infinite and rich
capabilities of adaptation to varying soil and circumstances
as the negro. Alike to them the
snows of Canada, the hard, rocky land of New

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England, with its set lines and orderly ways, or
the gorgeous profusion and loose abundance of the
Southern States. Sambo and Cuffy expand under
them all. New England yet preserves among her
hills and valleys the lingering echoes of the jokes
and jollities of various sable worthies, who saw
alike in orthodoxy and heterodoxy, in Dr. This-side
and Dr. That-side, only food for more abundant
merriment; — in fact, the minister of those
days not unfrequently had his black shadow, a
sort of African Boswell, who powdered his wig,
brushed his boots, defended and patronized his
sermons, and strutted complacently about as it
through virtue of his blackness he had absorbed
every ray of his master's dignity and wisdom. In
families, the presence of these exotics was a godsend
to the children, supplying from the abundant
outwardness and demonstrativeness of their nature
that aliment of sympathy so dear to childhood,
which the repressed and quiet habits of New England
education denied. Many and many a New
Englander counts among his pleasantest early recollections
the memory of some of these genial creatures,
who by their warmth of nature were the first
and most potent mesmerizers of his childish mind.

Candace was a powerfully built, majestic black
woman, corpulent, heavy, with a swinging majesty
of motion like that of a ship in a ground-swell.
Her shining black skin and glistening white teeth

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were indications of perfect physical vigor which
had never known a day's sickness; her turban, of
broad red and yellow bandanna stripes, had even
a warm tropical glow; and her ample skirts were
always ready to be spread over every childish
transgression of her youngest pet and favorite,
James.

She used to hold him entranced long winter-evenings,
while she sat knitting in the chimneycorner,
and crooned to him strange, wild African
legends of the things that she had seen in her
childhood and early days, — for she had been stolen
when about fifteen years of age; and these
weird, dreamy talks increased the fervor of his
roving imagination, and his desire to explore the
wonders of the wide and unknown world. When
rebuked or chastised, it was she who had secret
bowels of mercy for him, and hid doughnuts in
her ample bosom to be secretly administered to
him in mitigation of the sentence that sent him
supperless to bed; and many a triangle of pie,
many a wedge of cake, had conveyed to him surreptitious
consolations which his more conscientious
mother longed, but dared not, to impart. In
fact, these ministrations, if suspected, were winked
at by Mrs. Marvyn, for two reasons: first, that
mothers are generally glad of any loving-kindness
to an erring boy, which they are not responsible
for; and second, that Candace was so set in her

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ways and opinions that one might as well come
in front of a ship under full sail as endeavor to
stop her in a matter where her heart was engaged.

To be sure, she had her own private and special
quarrels with “Massa James” when he disputed
any of her sovereign orders in the kitchen,
and would sometimes pursue him with uplifted
rolling-pin and floury hands when he had snatched
a gingernut or cookey without suitable deference
or supplication, and would declare, roundly, that
there “never was sich an aggravatin' young un.”
But if, on the strength of this, any one else ventured
a reproof, Candace was immediately round
on the other side: — “Dat ar' chile gwin' to be
spiled, 'cause dey's allers a-pickin' at him; — he's
well enough, on'y let him alone.”

Well, under this miscellaneous assortment of
influences, — through the order and gravity and
solemn monotone of life at home, with the unceasing
tick-tack of the clock forever resounding
through clean, empty-seeming rooms, — through the
sea, ever shining, ever smiling, dimpling, soliciting,
like a magical charger who comes saddled and
bridled and offers to take you to fairyland, —
through acquaintance with all sorts of foreign, outlandish
ragamuffins among the ships in the harbor, —
from disgust of slow-moving oxen, and longdrawn,
endless furrows round the fifteen-acre lot

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— from misunderstandings with grave elder brothers,
and feeling somehow as if, he knew not why,
he grieved his mother all the time just by being
what he was and couldn't help being, — and,
finally, by a bitter break with his father, in which
came that last wrench for an individual existence
which some time or other the young growing
mind will give to old authority, — by all these
united, was the lot at length cast; for one evening
James was missing at supper, missing by the
fireside, gone all night, not at home to breakfast,—
till, finally, a strange, weird, most heathenishlooking
cabin-boy, who had often been forbidden
the premises by Mr. Marvyn, brought in a letter,
half-defiant, half-penitent, which announced that
James had sailed in the “Ariel” the evening before.

Mr. Zebedee Marvyn set his face as a flint, and
said, “He went out from us because he was not
of us,” — whereat old Candace lifted her great
floury fist from the kneading-trough, and, shaking
it like a large snowball, said, “Oh, you go 'long,
Massa Marvyn; ye'll live to count dat ar' boy for
de staff o' your old age yet, now I tell ye; got
de makin' o' ten or'nary men in him; kittles dat's
full allers will bile over; good yeast will blow out
de cork, — lucky ef it don't bust de bottle. Tell
ye, der's angels has der hooks in sich, and when
de Lord wants him dey'll haul him in safe and

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sound.” And Candace concluded her speech by
giving a lift to her whole batch of dough and
flinging it down in the trough with an emphasis
that made the pewter on the dresser rattle.

This apparently irreverent way of expressing her
mind, so contrary to the deferential habits studiously
inculcated in family discipline, had grown to
be so much a matter of course to all the family
that nobody ever thought of rebuking it. There
was a sort of savage freedom about her which
they excused in right of her having been born
and bred a heathen, and of course not to be expected
to come at once under the yoke of civilization.
In fact, you must all have noticed, my
dear readers, that there are some sorts of people
for whom everybody turns out as they would for
a railroad-car, without stopping to ask why; and
Candace was one of them.

Moreover, Mr. Marvyn was not displeased with
this defence of James, as might be inferred from
his mentioning it four or five times in the course
of the morning, to say how foolish it was, — wondering
why it was that Candace and everybody
else got so infatuated with that boy, — and ending,
at last, after a long period of thought, with
the remark, that these poor African creatures often
seemed to have a great deal of shrewdness in
them, and that he was often astonished at the
penetration that Candace showed.

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At the end of the year James came home,
more quiet and manly than he had ever been
before, — so handsome with his sunburnt face, and
his keen, dark eyes, and glossy curls, that half the
girls in the front gallery lost their hearts the first
Sunday he appeared in church. He was tender
as a woman to his mother, and followed her with
his eyes, like a lover, wherever she went; he
made due and manly acknowledgments to his
father, but declared his fixed and settled intention
to abide by the profession he had chosen; and he
brought home all sorts of strange foreign gifts for
every member of the household. Candace was
glorified with a flaming red and yellow turban of
Moorish stuff, from Mogadore, together with a
pair of gorgeous yellow morocco slippers with
peaked toes, which, though there appeared no
call to wear them in her common course of life,
she would put on her fat feet and contemplate
with daily satisfaction. She became increasingly
strengthened thereby in the conviction that the
angels who had their hooks in Massa James's
jacket were already beginning to shorten the line.

CHAPTER VIII. WHICH TREATS OF ROMANCE.

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There is no word in the English language
more unceremoniously and indefinitely kicked and
cuffed about, by what are called sensible people,
than the word romance. When Mr. Smith or
Mr. Stubbs has brought every wheel of life into
such range and order that it is one steady, daily
grind, — when they themselves have come into the
habits and attitudes of the patient donkey, who
steps round and round the endlessly turning wheel
of some machinery, then they fancy that they
have gotten “the victory that overcometh the
world.”

All but this dead grind, and the dollars that
come through the mill, is by them thrown into
one waste “catch-all” and labelled romance. Perhaps
there was a time in Mr. Smith's youth, — he
remembers it now, — when he read poetry, when
his cheek was wet with strange tears, when a little
song, ground out by an organ-grinder in the
street, had power to set his heart beating and

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bring a mist before his eyes. Ah, in those days
he had a vision! — a pair of soft eyes stirred him
strangely; a little weak hand was laid on his
manhood, and it shook and trembled; and then
came all the humility, the aspiration, the fear, the
hope, the high desire, the troubling of the waters
by the descending angel of love, — and a little
more and Mr. Smith might have become a man,
instead of a banker! He thinks of it now, sometimes,
as he looks across the fireplace after dinner
and sees Mrs. Smith asleep, innocently shaking
the bouquet of pink bows and Brussels lace that
waves over her placid red countenance.

Mrs. Smith wasn't his first love, nor, indeed,
any love at all; but they agree reasonably well.
And as for poor Nellie, — well, she is dead and
buried, — all that was stuff and romance. Mrs.
Smith's money set him up in business, and Mrs.
Smith is a capital manager, and he thanks God
that he isn't romantic, and tells Smith Junior not
to read poetry or novels, and to stick to realities.

“This is the victory that overcometh the world,”—
to learn to be fat and tranquil, to have warm
fires and good dinners, to hang your hat on the
same peg at the same hour every day, to sleep
soundly all night, and never to trouble your head
with a thought or imagining beyond.

But there are many people besides Mr. Smith
who have gained this victory, — who have stran

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gled their higher nature and buried it, and built
over its grave the structure of their life, the better
to keep it down.

The fascinating Mrs. T., whose life is a whirl
between ball and opera, point-lace, diamonds, and
schemings of admiration for herself, and of establishments
for her daughters, — there was a time,
if you will believe me, when that proud, worldly
woman was so humbled, under the touch of some
mighty power, that she actually thought herself
capable of being a poor man's wife. She thought
she could live in a little, mean house on no-matter-what-street,
with one servant, and make her
own bonnets and mend her own clothes, and
sweep the house Mondays, while Betty washed, —
all for what? All because she thought that there
was a man so noble, so true, so good, so highminded,
that to live with him in poverty, to be
guided by him in adversity, to lean on him in
every rough place of life, was a something nobler,
better, purer, more satisfying, than French
laces, opera-boxes, and even Madame Roget's best
gowns.

Unfortunately, this was all romance, — there was
no such man. There was, indeed, a person of
very common, self-interested aims and worldly nature,
whom she had credited at sight with an unlimited
draft on all her better nature; and when
the hour of discovery came, she awoke from her

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dream with a start and a laugh, and ever since
has despised aspiration, and been busy with the
realities of life, and feeds poor little Mary Jane,
who sits by her in the opera-box there, with all
the fruit which she has picked from the bitter tree
of knowledge. There is no end of the epigrams
and witticisms which she can throw out, this
elegant Mrs. T., on people who marry for love,
lead prosy, worky lives, and put on their best cap
with pink ribbons for Sunday. “Mary Jane shall
never make a fool of herself;” but, even as she
speaks, poor Mary Jane's heart is dying within
her at the vanishing of a pair of whiskers from
an opposite box, — which whiskers the poor little
fool has credited with a résumé drawn from her
own imaginings of all that is grandest and most
heroic, most worshipful in man. By-and-by, when
Mrs. T. finds the glamour has fallen on her daughter,
she wonders; she has “tried to keep novels
out of the girl's way, — where did she get these
notions?”

All prosaic, and all bitter, disenchanted people
talk as if poets and novelists made romance. They
do, — just as much as craters make volcanoes, —
no more. What is romance? whence comes it?
Plato spoke to the subject wisely, in his quaint
way, some two thousand years ago, when he said,
“Man's soul, in a former state, was winged and
soared among the gods and so it comes to pass,

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that, in this life, when the soul, by the power of
music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her
remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a struggling
and a pricking pain as of wings trying to
come forth, — even as children in teething.” And
if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed
thus gravely of the romantic part of our
nature, whence comes it that in Christian lands
we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the
whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and
opera-singers?

Let us look up in fear and reverence and say,
“God is the great maker of romance. He, from
whose hand came man and woman, — HE, who
strung the great harp of Existence with all its
wild and wonderful and manifold chords, and attuned
them to one another, — HE is the great Poet
of life.” Every impulse of beauty, of heroism
and every craving for purer love, fairer perfection,
nobler type and style of being than that which
closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim,
daily walk of life, is God's breath, God's impulse,
God's reminder to the soul that there is something
higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained.

Therefore, man or woman, when thy ideal is
shattered, — as shattered a thousand times it must
be, — when the vision fades, the rapture burns out,
turn not away in skepticism and bitterness, saying,
“There is nothing better for a man than that

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he should eat and drink,” but rather cherish the
revelations of those hours as prophecies and foreshadowings
of something real and possible, yet to
be attained in the manhood of immortality. The
scoffing spirit that laughs at romance is an apple
of the Devil's own handing from the bitter tree of
knowledge; — it opens the eyes only to see eternal
nakedness.

If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating
friendship, — a boundless worship and belief in some
hero of your soul, — if ever you have so loved, that
all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations
have gone down like drift-wood before a river
flooded with new rain from heaven, so that you
even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your
whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering
before the feet of another, and all for nothing,—
if you awoke bitterly betrayed and deceived, still
give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse
of heaven. The door now shut will open again.
Rejoice that the noblest capability of your eternal
inheritance has been made known to you; treasure
it, as the highest honor of your being, that ever
you could so feel, — that so divine a guest ever
possessed your soul.

By such experiences are we taught the pathos,
the sacredness of life; and if we use them wisely,
our eyes will ever after be anointed to see what
poems, what romances, what sublime tragedies lie

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around us in the daily walk of life, “written not
with ink, but in fleshy tables of the heart.” The
dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter
in it for more smiles, more tears, more intense excitement,
than ever were written in story or sung
in poem; the reality is there, of which the romancer
is the second-hand recorder.

So much of a plea we put in boldly, because
we foresee grave heads beginning to shake over
our history, and doubts rising in reverend and discreet
minds whether this history is going to prove
anything but a love-story, after all.

We do assure you, right reverend Sir, and you,
most discreet Madam, that it is not going to prove
anything else; and you will find, if you will follow
us, that there is as much romance burning
under the snow-banks of cold Puritan preciseness
as if Dr. Hopkins had been brought up to attend
operas instead of metaphysical preaching, and Mary
had been nourished on Byron's poetry instead of
“Edwards on the Affections.”

The innocent credulities, the subtle deceptions,
that were quietly at work under the grave, white
curls of the Doctor's wig, were exactly of the kind
which have beguiled man in all ages, when near the
sovereign presence of her who is born for his destiny; —
and as for Mary, what did it avail her that
she could say the Assembly's Catechism from end
to end without tripping, and that every habit of

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her life beat time to practical realities, steadily as
the parlor clock? The wildest Italian singer or
dancer, nursed on nothing but excitement from her
cradle, never was more thoroughly possessed by the
awful and solemn mystery of woman's life than
this Puritan girl.

It is quite true, that, the next morning after
James's departure, she rose as usual in the dim
gray, and was to be seen opening the kitchen-door
just at the moment when the birds were giving
the first little drowsy stir and chirp, — and that she
went on setting the breakfast-table for the two
hired men, who were bound to the fields with the
oxen, — and that then she went on skimming cream
for the butter, and getting ready to churn, and
making up biscuit for the Doctor's breakfast, when
he and they should sit down together at a somewhat
later hour; and as she moved about, doing
all these things, she sung various scraps of old
psalm-tunes; and the good Doctor, who was then
busy with his early exercises of devotion, listened,
as he heard the voice, now here, now there, and
thought about angels and the Millennium. Solemnly
and tenderly there floated in at his open
study-window, through the breezy lilacs, mixed with
low of kine and bleat of sheep and hum of early
wakening life, the little silvery ripples of that singing,
somewhat mournful in its cadence, as if a
gentle soul were striving to hush itself to rest.

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The words were those of the rough old version of
the Psalms then in use: —


“Truly my waiting soul relies
In silence God upon;
Because from him there doth arise
All my salvation.”
And then came the busy patter of the little footsteps
without, the moving of chairs, the clink of
plates, as busy hands were arranging the table;
and then again there was a pause, and he thought
she seemed to come near to the open window of
the adjoining room, for the voice floated in clearer
and sadder: —

The tone of life in New England, so habitually
earnest and solemn, breathed itself in the grave
and plaintive melodies of the tunes then sung in
the churches; and so these words, though in the
saddest minor key, did not suggest to the listening
ear of the auditor anything more than that
pensive religious calm in which he delighted to

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repose. A contrast indeed they were, in their melancholy
earnestness, to the exuberant carollings of
a robin, who, apparently attracted by them, perched
himself hard by in the lilacs, and struck up such
a merry roulade as quite diverted the attention of
the fair singer; — in fact, the intoxication breathed
in the strain of this little messenger, whom God
had feathered and winged and filled to the throat
with ignorant joy, came in singular contrast with
the sadder notes breathed by that creature of so
much higher mould and fairer clay, — that creature
born for an immortal life.

But the good Doctor was inly pleased when she
sung, — and when she stopped, looked up from his
Bible wistfully, as missing something, he knew not
what; for he scarce thought how pleasant the little
voice was, or knew he had been listening to
it, — and yet he was in a manner enchanted by it,
so thankful and happy that he exclaimed with fervor,
“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;
yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

So went the world with him, full of joy and
praise, because the voice and the presence wherein
lay his unsuspected life were securely near, so
certainly and constantly a part of his daily walk
that he had not even the trouble to wish for them.
But in that other heart how was it? — how with
the sweet saint that was talking to herself in
psalms and hymns and spiritual songs?

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The good child had remembered her mother's
parting words the night before, — “Put your mind
upon your duties,” — and had begun her first conscious
exercise of thought with a prayer that grace
might be given her to do it. But even as she
spoke, mingling and interweaving with that golden
thread of prayer was another consciousness, a life
in another soul, as she prayed that the grace of
God might overshadow him, shield him from temptation,
and lead him up to heaven; and this prayer
so got the start of the other, that, ere she was
aware, she had quite forgotten self, and was feeling,
living, thinking in that other life.

The first discovery she made, when she looked out
into the fragrant orchard, whose perfumes steamed
in at her window, and listened to the first chirping
of birds among the old apple-trees, was one
that has astonished many a person before her; it
was this: she found that all that had made life
interesting to her was suddenly gone. She herself
had not known, that, for the month past, since
James came from sea, she had been living in an
enchanted land, — that Newport harbor, and every
rock and stone, and every mat of yellow seaweed
on the shore, that the two-mile road between the
cottage and the white house of Zebedee Marvyn,
every mullein-stalk, every juniper-tree, had all had
a light and a charm which were suddenly gone.
There had not been an hour in the day for the

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last four weeks that had not had its unsuspected
interest, — because he was at the white house, because,
possibly, he might be going by, or coming
in; nay, even in church, when she stood up to
sing, and thought she was thinking only of God,
had she not been conscious of that tenor voice
that poured itself out by her side? and though
afraid to turn her head that way, had she not felt
that he was there every moment, — heard every
word of the sermon and prayer for him? The
very vigilant care which her mother had taken to
prevent private interviews had only served to increase
the interest by throwing over it the veil of
constraint and mystery. Silent looks, involuntary
starts, things indicated, not expressed, — these are
the most dangerous, the most seductive aliment
of thought to a delicate and sensitive nature. If
things were said out, they might not be said
wisely, — they might repel by their freedom, or disturb
by their unfitness; but what is only looked
is sent into the soul through the imagination,
which makes of it all that the ideal faculties
desire.

In a refined and exalted nature, it is very seldom
that the feeling of love, when once thoroughly
aroused, bears any sort of relation to the
reality of the object. It is commonly an enkindling
of the whole power of the soul's love for
whatever she considers highest and fairest; it is,

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in fact, the love of something divine and unearthly,
which, by a sort of illusion, connects
itself with a personality. Properly speaking, there
is but One true, eternal Object of all that the
mind conceives, in this trance of its exaltation.
Disenchantment must come, of course; and in a
love which terminates in happy marriage, there is
a tender and gracious process, by which, without
shock or violence, the ideal is gradually sunk in
the real, which, though found faulty and earthly,
is still ever tenderly remembered as it seemed
under the morning light of that enchantment.

What Mary loved so passionately, that which
came between her and God in every prayer, was
not the gay, young, dashing sailor, — sudden in
anger, imprudent of speech, and, though generous
in heart, yet worldly in plans and schemings, —
but her own ideal of a grand and noble man, —
such a man as she thought he might become.
He stood glorified before her, an image of the
strength that overcomes things physical, of the
power of command which controls men and circumstances,
of the courage which disdains fear, of
the honor which cannot lie, of constancy which
knows no shadow of turning, of tenderness which
protects the weak, and, lastly, of religious loyalty
which should lay the golden crown of its perfected
manhood at the feet of a Sovereign Lord
and Redeemer. This was the man she loved, and

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with this regal mantle of glories she invested the
person called James Marvyn; and all that she saw
and felt to be wanting she prayed for with the
faith of a believing woman.

Nor was she wrong; — for, as to every leaf and
every flower there is an ideal to which the growth
of the plant is constantly urging, so is there an
ideal to every human being, — a perfect form in
which it might appear, were every defect removed
and every characteristic excellence stimulated to
the highest point. Once in an age, God sends to
some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false
imagining, an unreal character, but, looking through
all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us
the divine ideal of our nature, — loves, not the
man that we are, but the angel that we may be.
Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of
prophecy, — like the mother of St. Augustine, who,
in the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of
her son, beheld him in a vision, standing, clothed
in white, a ministering priest at the right hand
of God, — as he has stood for long ages since.
Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us this
resurrection form of the friends with whom we
daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity,
we should follow them with faith and reverence
through all the disguises of human faults and
weaknesses, “waiting for the manifestation of the
sons of God.”

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But these wonderful soul-friends, to whom God
grants such perception, are the exceptions in life;
yet sometimes are we blessed with one who sees
through us, as Michel Angelo saw through a
block of marble, when he attacked it in a divine
fervor, declaring that an angel was imprisoned
within it; and it is often the resolute and delicate
hand of such a friend that sets the angel
free.

There be soul-artists, who go through this world,
looking among their fellows with reverence, as
one looks amid the dust and rubbish of old shops
for hidden works of Titian and Leonardo, and,
finding them, however cracked or torn or painted
over with tawdry daubs of pretenders, immediately
recognize the divine original, and set themselves
to cleanse and restore. Such be God's real
priests, whose ordination and anointing are from
the Holy Spirit; and he who hath not this enthusiasm
is not ordained of God, though whole
synods of bishops laid hands on him.

Many such priests there be among women; —
for to this silent ministry their nature calls them,
endowed, as it is, with fineness of fibre, and a
subtile keenness of perception outrunning slowfooted
reason; — and she of whom we write was
one of these.

At this very moment, while the crimson wings
of morning were casting delicate reflections on

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tree, and bush, and rock, they were also reddening
innumerable waves round a ship that sailed
alone, with a wide horizon stretching like an eternity
around it; and in the advancing morning
stood a young man thoughtfully looking off into
the ocean, with a book in his hand, — James Marvyn, —
as truly and heartily a creature of this
material world as Mary was of the invisible and
heavenly.

There are some who seem made to live; — life
is such a joy to them, their senses are so fully en
rapport with all outward things, the world is so
keenly appreciable, so much a part of themselves,
they are so conscious of power and victory in the
government and control of material things, — that
the moral and invisible life often seems to hang
tremulous and unreal in their minds, like the pale,
faded moon in the light of a gorgeous sunrise.
When brought face to face with the great truths
of the invisible world, they stand related to the
higher wisdom much like the gorgeous, gay Alcibiades
to the divine Socrates, or like the young
man in Holy Writ to Him for whose appearing
Socrates longed; — they gaze, imperfectly comprehending,
and at the call of ambition or riches
turn away sorrowing.

So it was with James; — in the full tide of
worldly energy and ambition, there had been forming
over his mind that hard crust, that skepticism

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of the spiritual and exalted, which men of the
world delight to call practical sense; he had been
suddenly arrested and humbled by the revelation
of a nature so much nobler than his own that he
seemed worthless in his own eyes. He had asked
for love; but when such love unveiled itself, he
felt like the disciple of old in the view of a diviner
tenderness, — “Depart from me, for I am a
sinful man.”

But it is not often that all the current of a
life is reversed in one hour; and now, as James
stood on the ship's deck, with life passing around
him, and everything drawing upon the strings
of old habits, Mary and her religion recurred to
his mind as some fair, sweet, inexplicable vision.
Where she stood he saw; but how he was ever
to get there seemed as incomprehensible as how
a mortal man should pillow his form on sunset
clouds.

He held the little Bible in his hand as if it
were some amulet charmed by the touch of a
superior being; but when he strove to read it, his
thoughts wandered, and he shut it, troubled and
unsatisfied. Yet there were within him yearnings
and cravings, wants never felt before, the beginning
of that trouble which must ever precede the
soul's rise to a higher plane of being.

There we leave him. We have shown you

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now our three different characters, each one in its
separate sphere, feeling the force of that strongest
and holiest power with which it has pleased our
great Author to glorify this mortal life.

CHAPTER IX. WHICH TREATS OF THINGS SEEN.

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

As, for example, the breakfast. It is six o'clock,—
the hired men and oxen are gone, — the breakfast-table
stands before the open kitchen-door,
snowy with its fresh cloth, the old silver coffee-pot
steaming up a refreshing perfume, — and the Doctor
sits on one side, sipping his coffee and looking
across the table at Mary, who is innocently
pleased at the kindly beaming in his placid blue
eyes, — and Aunt Katy Scudder discourses of
housekeeping, and fancies something must have
disturbed the rising of the cream, as it is not so
thick and yellow as wont.

Now the Doctor, it is to be confessed, was apt
to fall into a way of looking at people such as
pertains to philosophers and scholars generally, that
is, as if he were looking through them into the
infinite, — in which case his gaze became so earnest
and intent that it would quite embarrass an
uninitiated person; but Mary, being used to this
style of contemplation, was only quietly amused,

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and waited till some great thought should loom
up before his mental vision, — in which case she
hoped to hear from him.

The good man swallowed his first cup of coffee
and spoke: —

“In the Millennium, I suppose, there will be
such a fulness and plenty of all the necessaries
and conveniences of life, that it will not be necessary
for men and women to spend the greater
part of their lives in labor in order to procure a
living. It will not be necessary for each one to
labor more than two or three hours a day, — not
more than will conduce to health of body and
vigor of mind; and the rest of their time they
will spend in reading and conversation, and such
exercises as are necessary and proper to improve
their minds and make progress in knowledge.”

New England presents probably the only example
of a successful commonwealth founded on a
theory, as a distinct experiment in the problem of
society. It was for this reason that the minds of
its great thinkers dwelt so much on the final solution
of that problem in this world. The fact of
a future Millennium was a favorite doctrine of the
great leading theologians of New England, and
Dr. Hopkins dwelt upon it with a peculiar partiality.
Indeed, it was the solace and refuge of
his soul, when oppressed with the discouragements
which always attend things actual, to dwell upon

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and draw out in detail the splendors of this perfect
future which was destined to glorify the
world.

Nobody, therefore, at the cottage was in the
least surprised when there dropped into the flow
of their daily life these sparkling bits of ore,
which their friend had dug in his explorations of
a future Canaan, — in fact, they served to raise the
hackneyed present out of the level of mere commonplace.

“But how will it be possible,” inquired Mrs.
Scudder, “that so much less work will suffice in
those days to do all that is to be done?”

“Because of the great advance of arts and sciences
which will take place before those days,”
said the Doctor, “whereby everything shall be performed
with so much greater ease, — also the great
increase of disinterested love, whereby the skill
and talents of those who have much shall make
up for the weakness of those who have less.

“Yes,” — he continued, after a pause, — “all the
careful Marthas in those days will have no excuse
for not sitting at the feet of Jesus; there will be
no cumbering with much serving; the Church
will have only Maries in those days.”

This remark, made without the slightest personal
intention, called a curious smile into Mrs.
Scudder's face, which was reflected in a slight
blush from Mary's, when the crack of a whip and

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the rattling of wagon-wheels disturbed the conversation
and drew all eyes to the door.

There appeared the vision of Mr. Zebedee Marvyn's
farm-wagon, stored with barrels, boxes, and
baskets, over which Candace sat throned triumphant,
her black face and yellow-striped turban
glowing in the fresh morning with a hearty, joyous
light, as she pulled up the reins, and shouted
to the horse to stop with a voice that might have
done credit to any man living.

“Dear me, if there isn't Candace!” said Mary.

“Queen of Ethiopia,” said the Doctor, who
sometimes adventured a very placid joke.

The Doctor was universally known in all the
neighborhood as a sort of friend and patron-saint
of the negro race; he had devoted himself to
their interests with a zeal unusual in those days.
His church numbered more of them than any in
Newport; and his hours of leisure from study
were often spent in lowliest visitations among
them, hearing their stories, consoling their sorrows,
advising and directing their plans, teaching
them reading and writing, and he often drew
hard on his slender salary to assist them in their
emergencies and distresses.

This unusual condescension on his part was
repaid on theirs with all the warmth of their
race; and Candace, in particular, devoted herself
to the Doctor with all the force of her being

[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]

There was a legend current in the neighborhood,
that the first efforts to catechize Candace were
not eminently successful, her modes of contemplating
theological tenets being so peculiarly from
her own individual point of view that it was hard
to get her subscription to a received opinion. On
the venerable clause in the Catechism, in particular,
which declares that all men sinned in Adam
and fell with him, Candace made a dead halt: —

“I didn't do dat ar', for one, I knows. I's got
good mem'ry, — allers knows what I does, — nebber
did eat dat ar' apple, — nebber eat a bit ob
him. Don't tell me!”

It was of no use, of course, to tell Candace of
all the explanations of this redoubtable passage,—
of potential presence, and representative presence,
and representative identity, and federal headship.
She met all with the dogged, —

“Nebber did it, I knows; should 'ave 'membered,
if I had. Don't tell me!”

And even in the catechizing class of the Doctor
himself, if this answer came to her, she sat black
and frowning in stony silence even in his reverend
presence.

Candace was often reminded that the Doctor
believed the Chatechism, and that she was differing
from a great and good man; but the argument
made no manner of impression on her, till,
one day, a far-off cousin of hers, whose condition

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under a hard master had often moved her compassion,
came in overjoyed to recount to her how,
owing to Dr. Hopkins's exertions, he had gained
his freedom. The Doctor himself had in person
gone from house to house, raising the sum for his
redemption; and when more yet was wanting,
supplied it by paying half his last quarter's limited
salary.

“He do dat ar'?” said Candace, dropping the
fork wherewith she was spearing doughnuts. “Den
I'm gwine to b'liebe ebery word he does!”

And accordingly, at the next catechizing, the
Doctor's astonishment was great when Candace
pressed up to him, exclaiming, —

“De Lord bress you, Doctor, for opening de
prison for dem dat is bound! I b'liebes in you
now, Doctor. I's gwine to b'liebe every word you
say. I'll say de Catechize now, — fix it any way
you like. I did eat dat ar' apple, — I eat de
whole tree, an' swallowed ebery bit ob it, if you
say so.”

And this very thorough profession of faith was
followed, on the part of Candace, by years of the
most strenuous orthodoxy. Her general mode of
expressing her mind on the subject was short and
definitive.

“Law me! what's de use? I's set out to b'liebe
de Catechize, an' I'm gwine to b'liebe it, — so!”

While we have been telling you all this about

[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]

her, she has fastened her horse, and is swinging
eisurely up to the house with a basket on either
arm.

“Good morning, Candace,” said Mrs. Scudder.
“What brings you so early?”

“Come down 'fore light to sell my chickens an'
eggs, — got a lot o' money for 'em, too. Missy
Marvyn she sent Miss Scudder some turkey-eggs,
an' I brought down some o' my doughnuts for de
Doctor. Good folks must lib, you know, as well
as wicked ones,” — and Candace gave a hearty, unctuous
laugh. “No reason why Doctors shouldn't
hab good tings as well as sinners, is dere?” — and
she shook in great billows, and showed her white
teeth in the abandon of her laugh. “Lor' bress ye
honey, chile!” she said, turning to Mary, “why
ye looks like a new rose, ebery bit! Don't wonder
somebody was allers pryin' an' spyin' about here!”

“How is your mistress, Candace?” said Mrs.
Scudder, by way of changing the subject.

“Well, porly, — rader porly. When Massa Jim
goes, 'pears like takin' de light right out her eyes.
Dat ar' boy trains roun' arter his mudder like a
cosset, he does. Lor', de house seems so still
widout him! — can't a fly scratch his ear but it
starts a body. Missy Marvyn she sent down, an'
says, would you an' de Doctor an' Miss Mary
please come to tea dis arternoon.”

“Thank your mistress, Candace,” said Mrs.

[figure description] Page 142.[end figure description]

Scudder; “Mary and I will come, — and the Doctor,
perhaps,” looking at the good man, who had relapsed
into meditation, and was eating his breakfast
without taking note of anything going on.
“It will be time enough to tell him of it,” she
said to Mary, “when we have to wake him up to
dress; so we won't disturb him now.”

To Mary the prospect of the visit was a pleasant
one, for reasons which she scarce gave a definite
form to. Of course, like a good girl, she had
come to a fixed and settled resolution to think of
James as little as possible; but when the path of
duty lay directly along scenes and among people
fitted to recall him, it was more agreeable than
if it had lain in another direction. Added to this,
a very tender and silent friendship subsisted between
Mrs. Marvyn and Mary; in which, besides
similarity of mind and intellectual pursuits, there
was a deep, unspoken element of sympathy.

Candace watched the light in Mary's eyes with
the instinctive shrewdness by which her race seem
to divine the thoughts and feelings of their superiors,
and chuckled to herself internally. Without
ever having been made a confidante by any party,
or having a word said to or before her, still the
whole position of affairs was as clear to her as
if she had seen it on a map. She had appreciated
at once Mrs. Scudder's coolness, James's devotion,
and Mary's perplexity, — and inly resolved,

[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]

that, if the little maiden did not think of James
in his absence, it should not be her fault.

“Laws, Miss Scudder,” she said, “I's right glad
you's comin'; 'cause you hasn't seen how we's
kind o' splendified since Massa Jim come home.
You wouldn't know it. Why, he's got mats from
Mogadore on all de entries, and a great big 'un
on de parlor; and ye ought to see de shawl he
brought Missus, an' all de cur'us kind o' tings to
de squire. 'Tell ye, dat ar' boy honors his fader
and mudder, ef he don't do nuffin else, — an' dats
de fus' commandment wid promise, Ma'am; an'
to see him a-settin' up ebery day in prayer-time,
so handsome, holdin' Missus's han', an' lookin'
right into her eyes all de time! Why, dat ar'
boy is one of de 'lect, — it's jest as clare to me;
and de 'lect has got to come in, — dat's what I
say. My faith's strong, — real clare, 'tell ye,” she
added, with the triumphant laugh which usually
chorused her conversation, and turning to the Doctor,
who, aroused by her loud and vigorous strain,
was attending with interest to her.

“Well, Candace,” he said, “we all hope you
are right.”

“Hope, Doctor! — I don't hope, — I knows. 'Tell
ye, when I pray for him, don't I feel enlarged?
'Tell ye, it goes wid a rush. I can feel it gwine
up like a rushin', mighty wind. I feels strong
I do.”

[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]

“That's right, Candace,” said the Doctor, “keep
on; your prayers stand as much chance with God
as if you were a crowned queen. The Lord is
no respecter of persons.”

“Dat's what he a'n't, Doctor, — an' dere's where
I 'gree wid him,” said Candace, as she gathered
her baskets vigorously together, and, after a sweeping
curtsy, went sailing down to her wagon, full
laden with content, shouting a hearty “Good
mornin', Missus,” with the full power of her
cheerful lungs, as she rode off.

As the Doctor looked after her, the simple,
pleased expression with which he had watched her
gradually faded, and there passed over his broad,
good face a shadow, as of a cloud on a mountain-side.

“What a shame it is,” he said, “what a scandal
and disgrace to the Protestant religion, that
Christians of America should openly practice and
countenance this enslaving of the Africans! I
have for a long time holden my peace, — may the
Lord forgive me! — but I believe the time is coming
when I must utter my voice. I cannot go
down to the wharves or among the shipping,
without these poor dumb creatures look at me so
that I am ashamed, — as if they asked me what
I, a Christian minister, was doing, that I did not
come to their help. I must testify.”

Mrs. Scudder looked grave at this earnest

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

announcement; she had heard many like it before,
and they always filled her with alarm, because— —
Shall we tell you why?

Well, then, it was not because she was not a
thoroughly indoctrinated anti-slavery woman. Her
husband, who did all her thinking for her, had
been a man of ideas beyond his day, and never
for a moment countenanced the right of slavery
so far as to buy or own a servant or attendant
of any kind; and Mrs. Scudder had always followed
decidedly along the path of his opinions
and practice, and never hesitated to declare the
reasons for the faith that was in her. But if any
of us could imagine an angel dropped down out
of heaven, with wings, ideas, notions, manners,
and customs all fresh from that very different
country, we might easily suppose that the most
pious and orthodox family might find the task of
presenting him in general society and piloting him
along the courses of this world a very delicate
and embarrassing one. However much they might
reverence him on their own private account, their
hearts would probably sink within them at the
idea of allowing him to expand himself according
to his previous nature and habits in the great
world without. In like manner, men of high, unworldly
natures are often reverenced by those who
are somewhat puzzled what to do with them
practically.

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

Mrs. Scudder considered the Doctor as a superior
being, possessed by a holy helplessness in all
things material and temporal, which imposed on
her the necessity of thinking and caring for him,
and prevising the earthly and material aspects of
his affairs.

There was not in Newport a more thriving and
reputable business at that time than the slave-trade.
Large fortunes were constantly being turned
out in it, and what better providential witness of
its justice could most people require?

Besides this, in their own little church, she reflected
with alarm, that Simeon Brown, the richest
and most liberal supporter of the society, had
been, and was then, drawing all his wealth from
this source; and rapidly there flashed before her
mind a picture of one and another, influential
persons, who were holders of slaves. Therefore,
when the Doctor announced, “I must testify,” she
rattled her tea-spoon uneasily, and answered, —

“In what way, Doctor, do you think of bearing
testimony? The subject, I think, is a very difficult
one.”

“Difficult? I think no subject can be clearer.
If we were right in our war for liberty, we are
wrong in making slaves or keeping them.”

“Oh, I did not mean,” said Mrs. Scudder, “that it
was difficult to understand the subject; the right
of the matter is clear, but what to do is the thing.”

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

“I shall preach about it,” said the Doctor; “my
mind has run upon it some time. I shall show
to the house of Judah their sin in this matter.”

“I fear there will be great offence given,” said
Mrs. Scudder. “There's Simeon Brown, one of
our largest supporters, — he is in the trade.”

“Ah, yes, — but he will come out of it, — of
course he will, — he is all right, all clear. I was
delighted with the clearness of his views the other
night, and thought then of bringing them to bear
on this point, — only, as others were present, I deferred
it. But I can show him that it follows
logically from his principles; I am confident of
that.”

“I think you'll be disappointed in him, Doctor;—
I think he'll be angry, and get up a commotion,
and leave the church.”

“Madam,” said the Doctor, “do you suppose
that a man who would be willing even to give
up his eternal salvation for the greatest good of
the universe could hesitate about a few paltry
thousands that perish in the using?”

“He may feel willing to give up his soul,” said
Mrs. Scudder, naïvely, “but I don't think he'll
give up his ships, — that's quite another matter, —
he won't see it to be his duty.”

“Then, Ma'am, he'll be a hypocrite, a gross
hypocrite, if he won't,” said the Doctor. “It is
not Christian charity to think it of him. I shall

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

call upon him this morning and tell him my intentions.”

“But, Doctor,” exclaimed Mrs. Scudder, with a
start, “pray, think a little more of it. You know
a great many things depend on him. Why! he
has subscribed for twenty copies of your `System
of Theology.' I hope you'll remember that.”

“And why should I remember that?” said the
Doctor, — hastily turning round, suddenly enkindled,
his blue eyes flashing out of their usual
misty calm, — “what has my `System of Theology'
to do with the matter?”

“Why,” said Mrs. Scudder, “it's of more importance
to get right views of the gospel before
the world than anything else, is it not? — and if,
by any imprudence in treating influential people,
this should be prevented, more harm than good
would be done.”

“Madam,” said the Doctor, “I'd sooner my system
should be sunk in the sea than it should be
a millstone round my neck to keep me from my
duty. Let God take care of my theology; I
must do my duty.”

And as the Doctor spoke, he straightened himself
to the full dignity of his height, his face kindling
with an unconscious majesty, and, as he
turned, his eye fell on Mary, who was standing
with her slender figure dilated, her large blue eye
wide and bright, in a sort of trance of solemn

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

feeling, half smiles, half tears, — and the strong,
heroic man started, to see this answer to his
higher soul in the sweet, tremulous mirror of womanhood.
One of those lightning glances passed
between his eyes and hers which are the freemasonry
of noble spirits, — and, by a sudden impulse,
they approached each other. He took both her
outstretched hands, looked down into her face
with a look full of admiration, and a sort of
naïve wonder, — then, as if her inspired silence
had been a voice to him, he laid his hand on her
head, and said, —

“God bless you, child! `Out of the mouth of
babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength
because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still
the enemy and the avenger!'”

In a moment he was gone.

“Mary,” said Mrs. Scudder, laying her hand on
her daughter's arm, “the Doctor loves you!”

“I know he does, mother,” said Mary, innocently;
“and I love him, — dearly! — he is a noble,
grand man!”

Mrs. Scudder looked keenly at her daughter.
Mary's eye was as calm as a June sky, and she
began, composedly, gathering up the teacups.

“She did not understand me,” thought the
mother.

CHAPTER X. THE TEST OF THEOLOGY.

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

The Doctor went immediately to his study and
put on his best coat and his wig, and, surmounting
them by his cocked hat, walked manfully out
of the house, with his gold-headed cane in his
hand.

“There he goes!” said Mrs. Scudder, looking
regretfully after him. “He is such a good man!—
but he has not the least idea how to get along
in the world. He never thinks of anything but
what is true; he hasn't a particle of management
about him.”

“Seems to me,” said Mary, “that is like an
Apostle. You know, mother, St. Paul says, `In
simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly
wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had
our conversation in the world.”

“To be sure, — that is just the Doctor,” said
Mrs. Scudder; “that's as like him as if it had
been written for him. But that kind of way,
somehow, don't seem to do in our times; it won't

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

answer with Simeon Brown, — I know the man.
I know just as well, now, how it will all seem to
him, and what will be the upshot of this talk, if
the Doctor goes there! It won't do any good; if
it would, I would be willing. I feel as much desire
to have this horrid trade in slaves stopped as
anybody; your father, I'm sure, said enough about
it in his time; but then I know it's no use trying.
Just as if Simeon Brown, when he is making his
hundreds of thousands in it, is going to be persuaded
to give it up! He won't, — he'll only turn
against the Doctor, and won't pay his part of the
salary, and will use his influence to get up a
party against him, and our church will be broken
up and the Doctor driven away, — that's all that
will come of it; and all the good that he is
doing now to these poor negroes will be overthrown, —
and they never will have so good a
friend. If he would stay here and work gradually,
and get his System of Theology printed, —
and Simeon Brown would help at that, — and
only drop words in season here and there, till
people are brought along with him, why, by-and-by
something might be done; but now, it's just
the most imprudent thing a man could undertake.”

“But, mother, if it really is a sin to trade in
slaves and hold them, I don't see how he can
help himself. I quite agree with him. I don't

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

see how he came to let it go so long as he
has.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Scudder, “if worst comes to
worst, and he will do it, I, for one, shall stand by
him to the last.”

“And I, for another,” said Mary.

“I would like him to talk with Cousin Zebedee
about it,” said Mrs. Scudder. “When we
are up there this afternoon, we will introduce the
conversation. He is a good, sound man, and the
Doctor thinks much of him, and perhaps he may
shed some light upon this matter.”

Meanwhile the Doctor was making the best of
his way, in the strength of his purpose to test the
orthodoxy of Simeon Brown.

Honest old granite boulder that he was, no
sooner did he perceive a truth than he rolled after
it with all the massive gravitation of his being,
inconsiderate as to what might lie in his way; —
from which it is to be inferred, that, with all his
intellect and goodness, he would have been a very
clumsy and troublesome inmate of the modern
American Church. How many societies, boards,
colleges, and other good institutions, have reason
to congratulate themselves that he has long been
among the saints!

With him logic was everything, and to perceive
a truth and not act in logical sequence from it a
thing so incredible, that he had not yet enlarged

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

his capacity to take it in as a possibility. That
a man should refuse to hear truth, he could understand.
In fact, he had good reason to think
the majority of his townsmen had no leisure to
give to that purpose. That men hearing truth
should dispute it and argue stoutly against it, he
could also understand; but that a man could
admit a truth and not admit the plain practice
resulting from it was to him a thing incomprehensible.
Therefore, spite of Mrs. Katy Scudder's discouraging
observations, our good Doctor walked
stoutly and with a trusting heart.

At the moment when the Doctor, with a silent
uplifting of his soul to his invisible Sovereign,
passed out of his study, on this errand, where
was the disciple whom he went to seek?

In a small, dirty room, down by the wharf, the
windows veiled by cobwebs and dingy with the
accumulated dust of ages, he sat in a greasy,
leathern chair by a rickety office-table, on which
was a great pewter inkstand, an account-book,
and divers papers tied with red tape.

Opposite to him was seated a square-built individual, —
a man of about forty, whose round head,
shaggy eyebrows, small, keen eyes, broad chest,
and heavy muscles showed a preponderance of
the animal and brutal over the intellectual and
spiritual. This was Mr. Scroggs, the agent of a
rice-plantation, who had come on, bringing an

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

order for a new relay of negroes to supply the
deficit occasioned by fever, dysentery, and other
causes, in their last year's stock.

“The fact is,” said Simeon, “this last ship-load
wasn't as good a one as usual; we lost more
than a third of it, so we can't afford to put them
a penny lower.”

“Ay,” said the other, — “but then there are so
many women!”

“Well,” said Simeon, “women a'n't so strong,
perhaps, to start with, — but then they stan' it
out, perhaps, in the long run, better. They're
more patient; — some of these men, the Mandingoes,
particularly, are pretty troublesome to manage.
We lost a splendid fellow, coming over, on
this very voyage. Let 'em on deck for air, and
this fellow managed to get himself loose and
fought like a dragon. He settled one of our men
with his fist, and another with a marlinspike that
he caught, — and, in fact, they had to shoot him
down. You'll have his wife; there's his son, too,—
fine fellow, fifteen year old by his teeth.”

“What! that lame one?”

“Oh, he a'n't lame! — it's nothing but the cramps
from stowing. You know, of course, they are
more or less stiff. He's as sound as a nut.”

`Don't much like to buy relations, on account
of their hatching up mischief together,” said Mr.
Scroggs.

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

“Oh, that's all humbug! You must keep 'em
from coming together, anyway. It's about as broad
as 'tis long. There'll be wives and husbands and
children among 'em before long, start 'em as you
will. And then this woman will work better for
having the boy; she's kinder set on him; she jabbers
lots of lingo to him, day and night.”

“Too much, I doubt,” said the overseer, with a
shrug.

“Well, well, — I'll tell you,” said Simeon, rising.
“I've got a few errands up-town, and you just
step over with Matlock and look over the stock;—
just set aside any that you want, and when I
see 'em all together, I'll tell you just what you
shall have 'em for. I'll be back in an hour or two.”

And so saying, Simeon Brown called an underling
from an adjoining room, and, committing his
customer to his care, took his way up-town, in a
serene frame of mind, like a man who comes
from the calm performance of duty.

Just as he came upon the street where was
situated his own large and somewhat pretentious
mansion, the tall figure of the Doctor loomed in
sight, sailing majestically down upon him, making
a signal to attract his attention.

“Good morning, Doctor,” said Simeon.

“Good morning, Mr. Brown,” said the Doctor.
“I was looking for you. I did not quite finish
the subject we were talking about at Mrs.

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

Scudder's table last night. I thought I should like to
go on with it a little.”

“With all my heart, Doctor,” said Simeon, not
a little flattered. “Turn right in. Mrs. Brown
will be about her house-business, and we will have
the keeping-room all to ourselves. Come right in.”

The “keeping-room” of Mr. Simeon Brown's
house was an intermediate apartment between the
ineffable glories of the front-parlor and that court
of the gentiles, the kitchen; for the presence of
a large train of negro servants made the latter
apartment an altogether different institution from
the throne-room of Mrs. Katy Scudder.

This keeping-room was a low-studded apartment,
finished with the heavy oaken beams of the
wall left full in sight, boarded over and painted.
Two windows looked out on the street, and another
into a sort of court-yard, where three black
wenches, each with a broom, pretended to be
sweeping, but were, in fact, chattering and laughing,
like so many crows.

On one side of the room stood a heavy mahogany
sideboard, covered with decanters, labelled
Gin, Brandy, Rum, etc., — for Simeon was held to
be a provider of none but the best, in his housekeeping.
Heavy mahogany chairs, with crewel
coverings, stood sentry about the room; and the
fireplace was flanked by two broad arm-chairs
covered with stamped leather.

[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]

On ushering the Doctor into this apartment,
Simeon courteously led him to the sideboard.

“We mus'n't make our discussions too dry,
Doctor,” he said. “What will you take?”

“Thank you, Sir,” said the Doctor, with a
wave of his hand, — “nothing this morning.”

And depositing his cocked hat in a chair, he
settled himself into one of the leathern easy-chairs,
and, dropping his hands upon his knees,
looked fixedly before him, like a man who is
studying how to enter upon an inwardly absorbing
subject.

“Well, Doctor,” said Simeon, seating himself
opposite, sipping comfortably at a glass of rum-and-water,
“our views appear to be making a
noise in the world. Everything is preparing for
your volumes; and when they appear, the battle
of New Divinity, I think, may fairly be considered
as won.”

Let us consider, that, though a woman may
forget her first-born, yet a man cannot forget his
own system of theology, — because therein, if he
be a true man, is the very elixir and essence of
all that is valuable and hopeful to the universe;
and considering this, let us appreciate the settled
purpose of our friend, whom even this tempting
bait did not swerve from the end which he had
in view

“Mr. Brown,” he said, “all our theology is as

[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]

a drop in the ocean of God's majesty, to whose
glory we must be ready to make any and every
sacrifice.”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Brown, not exactly comprehending
the turn the Doctor's thoughts were
taking.

“And the glory of God consisteth in the happiness
of all his rational universe, each in his proportion,
according to his separate amount of being;
so that, when we devote ourselves to God's glory,
it is the same as saying that we devote ourselves
to the highest happiness of his created universe.

“That's clear, Sir,” said Simeon, rubbing his
hands, and taking out his watch to see the time.

The Doctor hitherto had spoken in a laborious
manner, like a man who is slowly lifting a heavy
bucket of thought out of an internal well.

“I am glad to find your mind so clear on this
all-important point, Mr. Brown, — the more so as
I feel that we must immediately proceed to apply
our principles, at whatever sacrifice of worldly
goods; and I trust, Sir, that you are one who at
the call of your Master would not hesitate even
to lay down all your worldly possessions for the
greater good of the universe.”

“I trust so, Sir,” said Simeon, rather uneasily,
and without the most distant idea what could be
coming next in the mind of his reverend friend.

“Did it never occur to you, my friend,” said

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

the Doctor, “that the enslaving of the African
race is a clear violation of the great law which
commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, —
and a dishonor upon the Christian religion, more
particularly in us Americans, whom the Lord hath
so marvellously protected, in our recent struggle
for our own liberty?”

Simeon started at the first words of this address,
much as if some one had dashed a bucket
of water on his head, and after that rose uneasily,
walking the room and playing with the seals of
his watch.

“I — I never regarded it in this light,” he said.

“Possibly not, my friend,” said the Doctor, —
“so much doth established custom blind the minds
of the best of men. But since I have given
more particular attention to the case of the poor
negroes here in Newport, the thought has more
and more labored in my mind, — more especially
as our own struggles for liberty have turned my
attention to the rights which every human creature
hath before God, — so that I find much in
my former blindness and the comparative dumbness
I have heretofore maintained on this subject
wherewith to reproach myself; for, though I have
borne somewhat of a testimony, I have not given
it that force which so important a subject required.
I am humbled before God for my neglect,
and resolved now, by His grace, to leave no

[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]

stone unturned till this iniquity be purged away
from our Zion.”

“Well, Doctor,” said Simeon, “you are certainly
touching on a very dark and difficult subject,
and one in which it is hard to find out the
path of duty. Perhaps it will be well to bear it
in mind, and by looking at it prayerfully some
light may arise. There are such great obstacles
in the way, that I do not see at present what
can be done; do you, Doctor?”

“I intend to preach on the subject next Sunday,
and hereafter devote my best energies in the
most public way to this great work,” said the
Doctor.

“You, Doctor? — and now, immediately? Why,
it appears to me you cannot do it. You are the
most unfit man possible. Whosever duty it may
be, it does not seem to me to be yours. You
already have more on your shoulders than you
can carry; you are hardly able to keep your
ground now, with all the odium of this new theology
upon you. Such an effort would break up
your church, — destroy the chance you have to
do good here, — prevent the publication of your
system.”

“If it's nobody's system but mine, the world
won't lose much, if it never be published; but if
it be God's system, nothing can hinder its appearing.
Besides, Mr. Brown, I ought not to be one

[figure description] Page 161.[end figure description]

man alone. I count on your help. I hold it as
a special providence, Mr. Brown, that in our own
church an opportunity will be given to testify to
the reality of disinterested benevolence. How glorious
the opportunity for a man to come out and
testify by sacrificing his worldly living and business!
If you, Mr. Brown, will at once, at whatever
sacrifice, quit all connection with this detestable
and diabolical slave-trade, you will exhibit a
spectacle over which angels will rejoice, and which
will strengthen and encourage me to preach and
write and testify.”

Mr. Simeon Brown's usual demeanor was that
of the most leathery imperturbability. In calm
theological reasoning, he could demonstrate, in the
dryest tone, that, if the eternal torment of six
bodies and souls were absolutely the necessary
means for preserving the eternal blessedness of
thirty-six, benevolence would require us to rejoice
in it, not in itself considered, but in view of
greater good. And when he spoke, not a nerve
quivered; the great mysterious sorrow with which
the creation groaneth and travaileth, the sorrow
from which angels veil their faces, never had
touched one vibrating chord either of body or
soul; and he laid down the obligations of man to
unconditional submission in a style which would
have affected a person of delicate sensibility much
like being mentally sawn in sunder. Benevolence,

[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]

when Simeon Brown spoke of it, seemed the
grimmest and unloveliest of Gorgons; for his
mind seemed to resemble those fountains which
petrify everything that falls into them. But the
hardest-shelled animals have a vital and sensitive
part, though only so large as the point of a needle;
and the Doctor's innocent proposition to
Simeon, to abandon his whole worldly estate for
his principles, touched this spot.

When benevolence required but the acquiescence
in certain possible things which might be
supposed to happen to his soul, which, after all,
he was comfortably certain never would happen,
or the acquiescence in certain suppositious sacrifices
for the good of that most intangible of all
abstractions, Being in general, it was a dry, calm
subject. But when it concerned the immediate
giving-up of his slave-ships and a transfer of business,
attended with all that confusion and loss
which he foresaw at a glance, then he felt, and
felt too much to see clearly. His swarthy face
flushed, his little blue eye kindled, he walked up
to the Doctor and began speaking in the short,
energetic sentences of a man thoroughly awake
to what he is talking about.

“Doctor, you're too fast. You are not a practical
man, Doctor. You are good in your pulpit;—
nobody better. Your theology is clear; — nobody
can argue better. But come to practical

[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]

matters, why, business has its laws, Doctor. Ministers
are the most unfit men in the world to talk
on such subjects; it's departing from their sphere;
they talk about what they don't understand. Besides,
you take too much for granted. I'm not
sure that this trade is an evil. I want to be convinced
of it. I'm sure it's a favor to these poor
creatures to bring them to a Christian land. They
are a thousand times better off. Here they can
hear the gospel and have some chance of salvation.”

“If we want to get the gospel to the Africans,”
said the Doctor, “why not send whole ship-loads
of missionaries to them, and carry civilization and
the arts and Christianity to Africa, instead of stirring
up wars, tempting them to ravage each other's
territories, that we may get the booty? Think
of the numbers killed in the wars, — of all that
die on the passage? Is there any need of killing
ninety-nine men to give the hundredth one the
gospel, when we could give the gospel to them
all? Ah, Mr. Brown, what if all the money spent
in fitting out ships to bring the poor negroes here,
so prejudiced against Christianity that they regard
it with fear and aversion, had been spent in sending
it to them, Africa would have been covered
with towns and villages, rejoicing in civilization
and Christianity?”

“Doctor, you are a dreamer,” replied Simeon,

[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]

“an unpractical man. Your situation prevents
your knowing anything of real life.”

“Amen! the Lord be praised therefor!” said
the Doctor, with a slowly increasing flush mounting
to his cheek, showing the burning brand of a
smouldering fire of indignation.

“Now let me just talk common-sense, Doctor,—
which has its time and place, just as much as
theology; — and if you have the most theology, I
flatter myself I have the most common-sense; a
business-man must have it. Now just look at
your situation, — how you stand. You've got a
most important work to do. In order to do it,
you must keep your pulpit, you must keep our
church together. We are few and weak. We are
a minority. Now there's not an influential man
in your society that don't either hold slaves or
engage in the trade; and if you open upon this
subject as you are going to do, you'll just divide
and destroy the church. All men are not like
you; — men are men, and will be, till they are
thoroughly sanctified, which never happens in this
life, — and there will be an instant and most unfavorable
agitation. Minds will be turned off
from the discussion of the great saving doctrines
of the gospel to a side issue. You will be turned
out, — and you know, Doctor, you are not appreciated
as you ought to be, and it won't be easy
for you to get a new settlement; and then

[figure description] Page 165.[end figure description]

subscriptions will all drop off from your book, and
you won't be able to get that out; and all this
good will be lost to the world, just for want of
common-sense.”

“There is a kind of wisdom in what you say,
Mr. Brown,” replied the Doctor, naïvely; “but I
fear much that it is the wisdom spoken of in
James, iii. 15, which `descendeth not from above,
but is earthly, sensual, devilish.' You avoid the
very point of the argument, which is, Is this a
sin against God? That it is, I am solemnly convinced;
and shall I `use lightness? or the things
that I purpose do I purpose according to the
flesh, that with me there should be yea, yea, and
nay, nay?' No, Mr. Brown, immediate repentance,
unconditional submission, these are what I
must preach as long as God gives me a pulpit to
stand in, whether men will hear or whether they
will forbear.”

“Well, Doctor,” said Simeon, shortly, “you can
do as you like; but I give you fair warning, that
I, for one, shall stop my subscription, and go to
Dr. Stiles's church.”

“Mr. Brown,” said the Doctor, solemnly, rising,
and drawing his tall figure to its full height, while
a vivid light gleamed from his blue eye, “as to
that, you can do as you like; but I think it my
duty, as your pastor, to warn you that I have
perceived, in my conversation with you this

[figure description] Page 166.[end figure description]

morning, such a want of true spiritual illumination
and discernment as leads me to believe that you
are yet in the flesh, blinded by that `carnal mind'
which `is not subject to the law of God, neither
indeed can be.' I much fear you have no part
nor lot in this matter, and that you have need,
seriously, to set yourself to search into the foundations
of your hope; for you may be like him
of whom it is written, (Isaiah, xliv. 20,) `he feedeth
on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him
aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is
there not a lie in my right hand?'”

The Doctor delivered this address to his man
of influence with the calmness of an ambassador
charged with a message from a sovereign, for
which he is no otherwise responsible than to
speak it in the most intelligible manner; and
then, taking up his hat and cane, he bade him
good morning, leaving Simeon Brown in a tumult
of excitement which no previous theological discussion
had ever raised in him.

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