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Title: The scrap book, Volume 2, No. 2
Author: Various
Release date: November 9, 2023 [eBook #72075]
Language: English
Original publication: New York City: The Frank A. Munsey Company, 1906
Credits: Richard Tonsing, hekula03, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCRAP BOOK, VOLUME 2, NO. 2 ***
THE SCRAP BOOK
Vol. II. OCTOBER, 1906. No. 2.
HOW TO LIVE WELL.
BY GEORGE WASHINGTON.
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well
tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant
of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity
before it is entitled to the appellation. Let your heart feel for the
afflictions and distresses of every one, and let your hand give in
proportion to your purse; remembering always the estimation of the
widow’s mite, that it is not every one that asketh that deserveth
charity; all, however, are worthy of the inquiry, or the deserving may
suffer. Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men, any more than
fine feathers make fine birds. A plain, genteel dress is more admired,
and obtains more credit, than lace and embroidery, in the eyes of the
judicious and sensible.—_From a Letter to His Nephew, Bushrod
Washington, 1783._
The Latest Viewpoints of Men Worth While
Lady Ward Discusses Female Suffrage in New Zealand—C. F. Birdseye
Shows That the Scope of College Fraternities is Widening—Professor
Borgerhoff Points Out Merits of Esperanto—Mormon Elder Says It
Costs $1,500 to Save a Soul—President Faunce Believes Public
Schools Will Supply Antidote for War—Dr. Louis Elkino Writes of
German Methods in Fight for Commercial Supremacy—Bernard Shaw Says
Americans Are Children in Business—Queen Margherita on Race
Suicide—Charles F. Pidgin Finds Boston a Big Debtor—Lord Roberts
Wants Rifle-Shooting Made a National Sport.
_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
HOW FEMALE SUFFRAGE WORKS IN NEW ZEALAND.
Even Maori Women Vote, But Only Men Hold Office—Lack of Servants Keeps
Fair Sex Home.
What about woman in New Zealand? We are arguing for and against woman
suffrage in the United States with almost as much theory and as little
practical knowledge of the proposed conditions as was the case thirty
years ago. Some of us are positive in the conviction that the right to
vote would unsex the sex—would harden motherhood and sisterhood into a
sedulous mannishness.
Others believe that womanly intuitions would soften the sheer
practicality of politics and induce gentleness where roughness has
ruled. And for a dozen years we need only have looked to the Antipodes
to learn how woman suffrage might work out in practise.
Lady Ward, wife of the premier of New Zealand, during a recent visit to
the United States, said to a representative of the New York _Tribune_
that the women of New Zealand, despite their participation in colonial
politics, are very feminine. She added:
Sometimes women do speak at political meetings, but it generally turns
out afterward that they are visiting Americans, or perhaps English
women. No, we don’t sit on juries, and we don’t run for Parliament.
The law would have to be changed before we could do so, but I don’t
believe we want to. Perhaps some time in the future it will come to
that, but I think it will be a long time.
We did have a mayoress once in a town in the northern part of the
colony, but no one seems inclined to repeat the experiment. In fact,
we are very busy with our domestic affairs, and are quite content for
the present to leave the management of public affairs to the men.
The women of New Zealand place their homes before every other
consideration, and their domestic problems are just as serious as
those of any other country. Our young women would rather be
stenographers than domestic servants, and we have not found any way of
getting on without servants.
But don’t imagine that we are not interested in politics and that we
don’t vote. There isn’t a woman in New Zealand who doesn’t know every
member of Parliament either by sight or by reputation, and there isn’t
one who can’t talk intelligently about political questions. Out on the
farms and in the villages it is just the same as in the cities, and it
makes life very much more interesting.
No matter whom you meet, you will always find one subject of common
interest. People here don’t seem to be much interested in politics,
and even your men don’t vote, I am told. Isn’t it strange? Perhaps it
is because our country is smaller that we take so much more interest
in its affairs.
Our elections are most interesting events, and the women do a great
deal of electioneering, just as they do in England. But they don’t do
much speechmaking, except among themselves. Political afternoon teas
are a favorite method of winning over doubtful women voters.
What becomes of the babies when the mothers are out electioneering?
Why, I really don’t know. I suppose there is always some kind-hearted
woman to take care of them. Perhaps the women take care of one
another’s babies. I never heard of any difficulties of that kind.
Do the native women vote? Yes, certainly. Every woman over twenty-one
votes. The only qualification is a residence of twelve months in the
colony and three months in the electorate where the vote is cast. The
native women take just as much interest in politics as the white
women, and are thoroughly well posted in everything concerning native
affairs. We have an aboriginal population of forty thousand, and they
have their own representatives in Parliament.
Women in New Zealand have the more time for politics because they do not
carry the burden of charitable work. The charities there are subsidized
by the State.
WIDENING SCOPE OF COLLEGE FRATERNITIES.
C. F. Birdseye Believes They Bring Undergraduates More Under Influence
of Alumni.
The American college fraternity has become a farce, educational and
social, intellectual and moral, so great that even but few fraternity
leaders appreciate it. At more than one college, chapter-houses have
done away with the need of dormitories. As colleges have grown larger
and more unwieldy, and the members of the faculties have been less
frequently in personal touch with their students, the fraternities have
in no slight degree taken the place of the old small-college units,
alumni now influencing the undergraduates through their fraternities,
much as the professors used to.
Writing in the _Outlook_, Clarence F. Birdseye points out that our
college fraternities are to-day great educational influences:
The pick of our alumni in wealth and influence are fraternity men. If
a tithe of this power can be turned back into the lives of the
undergraduates to supplement the efforts of the faculties, we can do
much to restore individualism.
Neither college nor fraternity conditions are at present ideal. They
are often bad, and there is real foundation for all complaints. Unless
promptly checked, the evils will grow far worse and more difficult to
root out. This question must be studied by its friends, and the reform
must come from the fraternity alumni; for the fraternities can be
awakened and developed, but not driven, nor driven out.
Like every other historical, educational, or social question, this
must be studied carefully and with open minds by many alumni and from
different standpoints, so as to cover widely divergent conditions in
institutions that may be universities or colleges, rich or poor, large
or small, old and conservative or recent and radical, public or
private, at the North, South, East, or West, and therefore governed by
widely different religious, social, educational, and political
influences.
Wide Distribution of Chapters.
The wide distribution of its various chapters adds greatly to the
perspective and corrective power of every fraternity, and makes it an
ideal instrument for wisely investigating and righting undergraduate
conditions at the same time in widely scattered institutions.
The true fraternity alumnus can mold the lives and motives of his
younger brothers. In most colleges the fraternities are so strong that
if we can change the atmosphere of the fraternity houses, which for
four years are the undergraduates’ homes, we can change the whole
undergraduate situation.
The fraternity alumni have contributed hundreds of thousands of
dollars for housing and otherwise helping the undergraduates. Every
fraternity has many loyal and devoted graduates who willingly give
time or money or both to the true interests of their younger brothers,
and whose word is law to them.
The character of the influence of each chapter depends largely on the
local alumni, strengthened, guided, and impelled by a strong central
organization. Why not apply modern business principles and systematic
organization to this all-important problem?
Atmosphere of Chapter-House.
We have one thousand seven hundred fraternity chapters in three
hundred and sixty-three of our institutions of higher learning as
_foci_ from which the good influences might constantly and powerfully
radiate. There has been too much tendency to make the fraternity the
end and not the means.
The alumni have not realized that the atmosphere of the chapter-house
determines the character of the chapter’s influence on its individual
members, and that the ultimate responsibility for this atmosphere is
on the alumni. If we would make this atmosphere permanently good, we
must appreciate that the alumni are the permanent and the
undergraduates the transient body—completely changing every three
years; and the seniors, the governing body, every year.
We, as the permanent body, have no right to furnish our undergraduates
with fine and exclusive homes, and then shirk responsibility for the
future conduct and influence of those homes.
The proper government of a chapter is a strict one, with the power in
the hands of the upper classmen, especially the seniors, who are in
turn held strictly accountable to alumni who are in constant touch
with the situation and personally acquainted with every undergraduate
and his work and needs.
Where such conditions are continuous, the chapter’s success is
assured, and the effect on the undergraduates is highly beneficial.
The fraternities, through strong central organizations, must make
these conditions prevalent and continuous in every chapter. This has
long been the theory, but the practise has been poor.
Correction of Waste.
The fraternities, with their numerous chapters in different
institutions, have the best possible opportunities for the
investigation and correction of the wastes and for the enforcement of
economies in college life.
No one can measure the waste and lack of economy, to the college, the
fraternity, the community, the family, or the individual, of a failure
in college life, from whatever cause it comes.
It is criminal that we have not studied these wastes in our colleges
as we have in our factories, railroads, and other great industries,
and that we have allowed the pendulum to swing so far to the other
side, and have not long ago returned it to its mean, and found
educational influences to replace the small units of the earlier
colleges.
Mr. Birdseye maintains, in conclusion, that it is for the fraternities
to devote their wealth and influence to improve undergraduate
conditions, incite their men to the best work, and prevent the wastes
which result from a failure in college lives.
THE LATEST IDEA OF A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE.
Professor Borgerhoff Points Out Some of the Merits of the Latest
Invention, Esperanto.
In the preface to his famous dictionary Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote:
“Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs
of ideas.” If that be true, it is not strange that man should so
constantly seek to improve the instrument. We have the selective process
by which worn-out words and idioms are dropped into the limbo of
archaism and new coinages come into use. Then we have the attempts to
supply new languages, ready-made. There was Volapük; and now comes
Esperanto.
Professor J. L. Borgerhoff, of the Western Reserve University, sets
forth in the Atlanta _Constitution_ the claims of Esperanto as a
world-language. After brief reference to former candidate languages, he
says:
The latest attempt, and the one which bids fair to be final, is
Esperanto, so called by its author, Dr. Zamenhof, a Russian physician,
who under this pseudonym published scientific articles before he
became famous as the inventor of an artificial language.
Zamenhof, like his predecessors in the same field, was struck by the
useless wealth of idioms that divide the inhabitants of the earth and
make international relations so difficult, while at the same time they
are a prolific source of misunderstanding and enmity among the
nations.
He was also convinced that the reason why the existing universal
languages had failed in their purpose was that they were too
difficult—almost as difficult as the natural ones. The cause of their
difficulty lay in the grammar, which was too intricate, and in the
vocabulary, which was far too varied. He forthwith composed a grammar
which was simplicity itself; this he did by setting aside all rules
not strictly needed for the construction of a logical sentence and by
eliminating all exceptions. The few remaining grammatical principles
may be learned in half an hour.
His next concern was the vocabulary. What makes the acquisition of a
foreign vocabulary so hard to students is the variety of roots, the
great number of different words. To take an instance from English, to
express the various ideas suggested by the one conception of death, we
have: dead, to die, deadly, and deathly, mortal, to kill, to murder,
to assassinate, to suicide, to commit homicide, etc. What a cumbersome
luxury of roots, and how discouraging to the foreigner who wishes to
learn this language!
Number of Roots Reduced.
And yet English is one of the easiest of all European tongues. How to
reduce this number of roots was the great problem before Zamenhof. He
therefore took one out of a number, and by means of a system of
suffixes and prefixes he made this one root do duty for all the
others.
In this manner the Esperanto dictionary contains only about two
thousand roots, yet they are sufficient to form, by means of
derivation, a vocabulary large enough for all purposes.
But what makes matters simpler still, he chose his two thousand roots
in such a manner that they appear familiar to all educated persons of
European civilization, by selecting first those terms which are
already in universal usage, like sport, toilet, train; then by taking
words common to two or three leading languages, and finally by adding
to these a small number of roots not international, but picked out
judiciously from various idioms, so that any one, be he Slav, Teuton,
or Latin, finds that Esperanto has a familiar appearance.
The suffixes number about thirty and the prefixes half a dozen; they
have well defined meanings, and once they are known any person
provided with a list of the simple roots can compose his own
vocabulary almost _ad libitum_, so that the finest shades of meaning
may be expressed to a nicety.
I should say that the most remarkable feature about Esperanto, and one
which no natural idiom possesses to such a degree, is this power of
forming new words once the key-word is given, and it should be
remembered that in the majority of instances this key-word is already
known.
Simplicity a Striking Feature.
The second striking feature is the simplicity and regularity of the
whole grammatical scheme; thus are placed within easy reach two
essential parts of a language—the vocabulary, and the very simple
device whereby this vocabulary may be made to express all ideas
clearly.
To take again the word “death” as an example: the key-word is “mort”
(which we have in the English mortal). Remembering that in Esperanto
all nouns end in “o,” all adjectives in “a,” adverbs in “e,”
infinitives in “i”; that contraries are formed by prefixing “mal”;
that the prefix “sen” means without; that the suffix “ant” marks the
agent (corresponding to the English “ing”), and that the suffix “ig”
means to cause, we get from the above root: morto, death; morta,
mortal; morti, to die; morte, mortally; mortano, the dying man;
mortanta, dying; mortigi, to cause death, or kill; mortigo, murder;
mortiganto, murderer; mortiga, death-dealing; malmorta, living;
senmorta, Immortal; senmorto, immortality, etc.
The conjugation of verbs, which is the great stumbling-block in the
study of all natural languages, presents no difficulty whatever in
Esperanto. In the first place, there are no irregular verbs; secondly,
there is only one ending for each tense; thirdly, the number of tenses
is reduced to a strict minimum, mainly past, present, future, and
conditionally.
The infinitive of all verbs ends in “t”; the present always in “as”;
the past always in “is”; the conditional always in “us”; these endings
are the same in the singular and the plural.
To sum up, Esperanto is the easiest of all languages; all that is
needed to read and write it is a familiarity with the few grammatical
principles, most of which have been explained above, a knowledge of
the thirty-odd suffixes and the half-dozen prefixes alluded to, and a
dictionary giving the two thousand roots, many of which most of us
know already.
Any one with the merest smattering of Latin and German and a knowledge
of English can write a letter in Esperanto practically from the start;
in fact, a person with a knack for languages can do so without this
previous knowledge if provided with a dictionary.
As for speaking it, that is, of course, a matter of practise. It is
easy enough, yet practise for a couple of months is indispensable to
become fluent. Those interested should form a club and meet for the
purpose of conversing. The pronunciation is as easy as the rest of the
language.
Is this artificial language to come into real use? Professor Borgerhoff
shows us that it is at least spreading rapidly. In June, 1905, there was
only a handful of Esperantists in America. One year later there were
fifty clubs, mostly in colleges. Paris offers about twenty free public
courses. All over Europe the language has hundreds of thousands of
adherents. Three thousand Esperantists, representing fifteen different
countries, attended the congress at Boulogne-sur-Mer, in August, 1905.
THE CASH COST OF CONVERTING A SOUL.
Mormons Figure That It Amounts to $1,500, While Volunteers of America
Find That $5 Will Do.
The Mormons appear to spend more money to secure a single convert than
any other sect. Elder Ellsworth, of the Chicago Mormon Mission, told the
Chicago _Inter-Ocean_ that his church expended probably fifteen hundred
dollars for each convert. The statement came out in connection with the
_Inter-Ocean’s_ inquiry into the cash cost of saving souls in Chicago.
The Mormon figures were highest; the figures of the Volunteers of
America—five dollars a convert—were lowest. It is patent that the
average cost of conversion is much higher to-day than it used to be.
The Rev. George Soltau, a well-known evangelist, at work in Chicago,
said to the _Inter-Ocean’s_ representative:
Twenty-two years ago the cost of soul-saving was infinitesimal. A
picture of heaven, a few passages from the Scripture, a prayer, and a
request were sufficient—a few cents, in fact, and our task was
accomplished. To-day people have no leisure. They have no time to
listen to what preachers have to say. They read cheap literature,
which, as a rule, is antagonistic to evangelization.
Present Facts in a Commercial Way.
Religious phraseology doesn’t work. We have to present our facts in a
commercial way. We don’t relish it, but we have to move with the
times. We content ourselves with the fact that, after all, true
religion is transacting business with God and with heaven.
General education has made it much more difficult to convert the
people and to conduct a campaign of evangelization. The people are
provided with so many methods of occupying their time and thought that
there is no longer any possibility of getting individuals to come to a
church to fill in a spare hour as they used to do so readily.
This fact has been demonstrated to me again and again, and forced home
when I find myself in places where I used to hold meetings with five
or six hundred people in attendance and where now I find difficulty in
getting together an audience of twenty or thirty people.
A minister of to-day is also familiar with the fact that the Bible no
longer occupies the place of authority in the minds of the people that
it used to. And when a preacher has to prove the truth of his only
authority it is a bad tendency on the part of the people.
It is the same as if a lawyer, when he appeared in court to plead his
case, were obliged to prove the truth of the Constitution, which is
the fundamental law. On the other hand, the evangelist himself hasn’t
the slightest doubt of the authority of his message, while he knows
his hearers have.
Education and Evangelism.
Asked whether, in his opinion, the education which had proved
detrimental to evangelism was a bad thing for the people themselves, Mr.
Soltau replied:
It is both good and bad. It is good in that it develops the minds and
gives the people something to think about, and it is bad in that it
diminishes their fear and reverence for the Scriptures.
Culture has undermined faith largely. It has destroyed the foundations
on which faith used to rest; not that the foundations are one whit
injured, but the building of character has been shifted to other
foundations, namely, those of human opinion, research, discovery, and
creed untested by what was supposed to be divine revelation.
Modern thought has infected universally the people with doubt upon all
that was supposed to be established fact. And it has given nothing in
its place except speculation and private opinion, so that every man is
practically his own God to do and think as he chooses.
The production of literature—scientific, historical, and fictional—is
so enormous as to demand the spare time of every one to read it. The
pulpit and the pew, the magazine reader and the newspaper reader, have
been infected with the German rationalism and philosophy, which has
dared to assert itself as of higher authority than the Scriptures.
Authority has been destroyed, there is no court of appeal above human
reason. That being so, there is nothing to correct human reason and
bring it back to its old bearings. We have to evangelize people who
have little or no substratum of Bible knowledge, and have no
cultivated faith in any one but themselves.
The enormous wealth and rapid development of the material resources of
the country have opened up innumerable outlets for the energies of
mind and body, and the possibilities of getting rich have absorbed
every one almost, so that the dollar has first and last place in the
people’s minds. It is almost impossible to dislodge it. The altered
conditions of civilization have destroyed simplicity of living and of
thinking, hence there is no room or time for spiritual things.
The Average Churchgoer.
The low level of spirituality attained by the average church member
disgusts the man of the world, who sees no distinct advantage in
religion beyond possibly a social one. The average Christian thinks
only of his personal safety and has no concern for his neighbor. His
is mainly a selfish religion, and such poor samples are abroad of what
God is supposed to do that the successful business man, who knows how
he feels about results, discounts such enormously, and looks upon the
whole thing as beneath his notice.
Democracy has produced lawlessness enormously. It begins in the
family, where parental control is at a big discount. The grown boy
gets his way at any cost to others’ business.
He has learned to ignore law and authority from the beginning. The
laws of the community are evaded, then the laws of the State, then of
the Federal government. He believes he is a law unto himself. There is
no law of God to need his attention. There is no God to trouble about.
The book of God is never read. The day of God is utterly ignored. The
future life does not concern him, so he needs no Gospel, no mission,
no Saviour, no prayer, and the whole thing is gone.
The dollar values everything. How much happiness, how much pleasure,
how much for himself.
Mr. Soltau, however, does not think that the Bible has lost its power.
None of the modern intellectual and worldly developments satisfy the
secret cravings of the soul.
EDUCATION PRESCRIBED AS ANTIDOTE FOR WAR.
President Faunce Believes the Spirit of Perpetual Peace Is Lurking in
Public Schools.
Since the majority of evils spring from ignorance, education is the
surest safeguard of virtue. It is a strong perversity that continues
against a real understanding of the truth.
If war is an evil—moral, economic—as both economists and moralists
generally admit, the hope of universal peace rests upon education. For
that reason the suggestions made by President H. P. Faunce, of Brown
University, in a speech at New Haven, carry the greater weight. He said:
No great movement is permanent until placed on an educational basis.
Whatever enters the public mind through the schools enters as sunshine
and rain into the fiber of the oak. A world-wide movement is now in
progress, having as its object not the reformation of human nature,
not the disbanding of all armies and navies, but simply the
establishment of a better means than war for the settling of the
disputes that must occur as long as the nations endure.
Already great results have been accomplished. Arbitration has been
substituted for war in the majority of the cases. War is now the
exception, not the rule, in case of international quarrel. It is not
true that “in time of peace we must prepare for war,” but rather that
in time of peace, we must prepare to make war impossible.
There is a growing appreciation throughout the world of the
irrationality and futility of war. We have come to realize that the
simultaneous discharge of pistols at fifty paces is no more likely to
establish justice than the tossing of pennies or the throwing of the
dice.
When the duelist became absurd, dueling was dead. The time is surely
coming when the international duel will seem, in the face of
international opinion, an utterly stupid way of settling differences.
What can we do in the public schools? We can inculcate the broad
principle that rational men, when they differ, should appeal to reason
and not to force. Already our schoolboys do this in athletics. They
are accustomed to accept the decisions of umpires and referees without
whining or complaint. The athletic field is a direct training for
arbitration on a large scale.
We can teach in our schools that peace hath her victories no less
renowned than war. We are learning to exalt a new type of heroism—the
heroism of the social settlement of the city missionary, of the men
and women who are devoting their lives to the uplifting of social
conditions in the heart of our great cities. This newer heroism must
be taught in our public schools.
We can inculcate the brotherhood of man in every class in our schools,
and in every study that is taught. We can show that racial antagonisms
are baseless and brutal. Each of the various races makes its own
contribution to modern civilization. The last address of John Hay was
an appeal for this point of view; for earnest endeavor on the part of
all men and women in responsible positions to inculcate the method of
arbitration as a substitute for the utilities of war.
GERMANY’S FIGHT FOR COMMERCIAL SUPREMACY.
Study of Other Nations’ Needs and Mastery of Their Languages Give Her
Advantages.
If the rise of the United States to a position of first importance has
been the great phenomenon of the last decade, the tremendous strides
made by Germany in commerce and industry should be placed only second in
importance. The reasons in the one case cannot be the reasons in the
second; whence the value of a descriptive analysis of the German
advance, such as the article by Dr. Louis Elkino, which appeared in a
recent number of the _Fortnightly Review_. He writes:
If I were asked to say what has contributed most to Germany’s
progress, I should unhesitatingly mention the development of
patriotism in its best sense in the individual, and, though this
historic fact cannot be proved by the usual methods of the
statisticians, we know beyond doubt that the nation has come to work
together as a firm and united organization.
His conclusions on the importance of education were:
There can no longer be any doubt that Germany’s industrial advance is
mainly due to the extent and thoroughness with which technical
education is being conducted. Briefly stated, the secret of the
pronounced success of the technical colleges in the Fatherland lies in
the fact that they have kept pace with the ever-increasing scope of
all branches of science in general, and, to the same extent, with the
ever-increasing demands of the present-day industrial enterprises upon
scientific investigation and research.
And, in addition, the number of subjects and sciences taught is
constantly being added to, while, on the other hand, the harmonious
blending of the practical with the theoretical has greatly furthered
the development of the scientific spirit in all its essential details.
Another important cause is the great pains taken to master foreign
languages.
German firms are competing strongly with British firms in markets
which, at one time, were almost entirely in the hands of British
merchants, and this is not surprising, for the British representative,
as a rule, has little or no knowledge of the language of the country
in which he travels for orders, while the German is able to speak it
fluently. It is extraordinary that British firms should continue to
send abroad representatives who can speak no other language but their
own.
Efficiency of method is not the least of the main contributory factors.
It is thoroughness which, perhaps more than anything else, Germans
have to thank for their present happy state of abounding prosperity.
It has enabled Germany to overcome one crisis after another in
commerce and finance, inasmuch as it helps to the discovery of where
the weakness lies. Economists teach that small concerns cannot exist
side by side with large ones when they are in competition, but this is
disproved in the world of German enterprise. The small firms flourish
almost equally with the large ones; like the great trusts, they are
able, when they wish, to sell cheaply in foreign markets. Both employ
the same methods. This partly explains how it is that, though there
has been a concentration of wealth and of enterprise into the hands of
a limited number of people, a vast amount of money has been
distributed more or less evenly into the hands of the population of
the country as a whole.
“AMERICANS PERFECT CHILDREN IN BUSINESS.”
Bernard Shaw Says Our Stratum of Romanticism Prevents Us from Knowing
the Real Thing.
George Bernard Shaw is never afraid to express an opinion on any
subject, and apparently he is never at a loss for the opinion. The other
day he expressed his views on business, saying:
The most striking peculiarity about business men is that I have never
met one who understands the slightest thing about business.
Business men have certain set, conventional methods. Propose to them a
way of doing business that departs from their usual method, and
although the new way may mean more profit, they will not accept it
unless forced to, and even then they believe they are being swindled.
My own way of doing business is perhaps novel, but it is neither harsh
nor unfair. But it is novel, and therefore the men I deal with object
to it, although they themselves are the gainers by doing things my way
and not the way in which they are used. Yet they regard me with
suspicion. It is very much as if you offered a man five dollars for
doing something for which he had previously been in the habit of
receiving a dollar, and having him denounce you as a swindler.
Not content with generalities, Mr. Shaw went on to discuss Englishmen
and Americans as business men.
In making an agreement with an Englishman, you may be sure of one
thing: if it is not entirely to his advantage he will not keep it.
An Englishman, when he wants a house, or money, or anything else,
knows that in order to get what he wants he has to sign something. He
does not care what he signs as long as he gets what he wants. After he
obtains the money or the house, or whatever else he stood in need of,
if he finds the agreement he signed disagreeable, he will denounce the
man who holds it as a knave or a scoundrel and as one who is trying to
take unfair advantage of him.
In my own experience with Englishmen, the terms of my agreements,
satisfactory at the time of signing, have afterward proved irksome.
They would then come to me and say: “Surely, Mr. Shaw, you cannot
expect to hold us to such outrageous terms”; and when I would point to
the agreements bearing their signature, they would retort: “Surely,
Mr. Shaw, you are a gentleman!”
After all, the Jew is the only man who knows what he is signing, and
will keep absolutely to his agreement.
Americans are perfect children In business. They have a stratum of
romanticism that prevents them from knowing what business really is.
This childish, romantic spirit impels them to be doing things, to cut
somebody out, to do something that nobody else has done, or to do a
greater thing than anybody else has ever done. Accidents, of course,
will happen, and sometimes they make money. But the percentage of
failures in America is something terrible. We never hear of these.
Every attention is centered on the conspicuous few who have made
success.
Shall we apply to Mr. Shaw the words of Horace,
Aliena negotia curo
Excussus propriis,
which, being interpreted, is: “I attend to the business of other people,
having lost my own?” It were fairer, perhaps, to say that, in his rôle
of witty playwright, everybody’s business is Mr. Shaw’s.
QUEEN MARGHERITA ON THE SPHERE OF WOMAN.
She Abhors “Race Suicide,” and Condemns the So-Called “Emancipation” of
Her Sex.
The Dowager Queen Margherita of Italy has been expressing her
disapproval of “race suicide” with no less frankness than President
Roosevelt. Not often is a queen interviewed; less often is a royal
interview more than a collection of perfunctory phrases, polite, but
insignificant. Yet Queen Margherita has been saying:
A childless family is incomplete. There is a poetry and a pathos about
childhood which appeal to every right-hearted woman. Most women,
though they may not be able to put this idea into words, feel it. They
have the maternal instinct. Hence the remoteness of race suicide.
Women show their intellectuality by rearing healthy and great
children, just as much as they do by writing books or painting
pictures. The wife who deliberately refuses to bring children into the
world must have something wrong with her moral make-up.
I am very pleased to know that there is a movement in the United
States in favor of large families, and that President Roosevelt has
put himself upon record as favoring them. European women have begun to
look for light to their sisters of the United States.
On the subject of woman’s “emancipation” Queen Margherita is equally
outspoken:
I am absolutely opposed to any extravagant theories of what is called
the emancipation of women. In whatever condition of life a woman may
be placed, her first duty is the negative one of not giving up the
qualities that distinguish her sex. Above all, she should guard
against developing the trait of men. A blending of ancient reserve
with modern independence would give us the ideal woman.
BIG BURDEN OF DEBT CARRIED BY BOSTONIANS.
Statistics Show That Ten Per Cent of Them Owe for Food, Rent, Clothing,
and Funeral Expenses.
Charles F. Pidgin, chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of
Labor, has been inquiring into the question of debt. Statistics issued
by the Bureau show that at least ten per cent of the residents of Boston
are in debt for their food, rent, clothing, furniture, and for funeral
and other expenses. These people are thus partly supported by others.
Mr. Pidgin says:
Debt has gained such a hold upon the people of to-day that the only
sure way to decrease the number of people who owe money, not only for
extravagances but for sustenance, seems to be to begin with the
children, and devise some scheme by which thrift may be taught in the
public schools. The generation which is growing up should be taught to
have a horror of indebtedness, and how to earn money, how to save it,
and how to spend it wisely.
The effect of intemperance is taught in the public schools. Why should
there not be some sort of course of study that will show the effect of
indebtedness on a person’s life and character?
The children nowadays do not, as a rule, know the value of money. When
they want spending money they go to their parents and ask for it. When
it is gone they ask for more. Neither the parents nor the children in
most cases know how much money goes in this way, and the youngsters
are not called upon to exercise judgment in spending the money.
The little newsboys on the street work hard for their money. They know
the value of every cent, and that they must save for a rainy day.
If other children were taught to earn a little, instead of having it
always given to them, they would make better citizens and would know
how far a dollar should go.
If parents who give their children money when they ask for it would,
instead, give them a stated sum each week or month for spending money,
and make it an object for them to save it, it would go a long way
toward prejudicing them against debt.
I believe in allowances for children, and for wives, too, for that
matter. It makes them responsible for a certain sum, and nearly always
they will take a certain pride in making it go as far as possible.
Chief Watts, of the Boston police, does not think that debt is a cause
of crime. He says:
I never heard of any one stealing to pay their debts, and although
being in debt may have an influence on a certain class of
criminals—such as shoplifters and embezzlers—I do not think that it
has any influence on the general run of crime.
So far as suicide and murders are concerned, I can’t recall a case of
suicide where the person had been worrying about debt, neither can I
recall a murder that debt had anything to do with.
It’s girls, not debt, that cause murders and suicides—not that I blame
the women; I should not want to be understood that way—but
love-affairs are generally the cause of police records along those
lines. Men seldom get desperate from debt. I believe that the general
tendency of every one is to pay his debts if he has half a chance.
It was a Massachusetts sage—Emerson—who wrote:
Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!
WANTS RIFLE-SHOOTING MADE NATIONAL SPORT.
Lord Roberts Believes Patriotism Should Cause It to Take Its Place With
Golf and Cricket.
Lord Roberts has been pleading for the instruction of all able-bodied
citizens of England in rifle-shooting. He says, in the London _Express_:
The rifle is our national weapon of to-day, but unhappily neither law
nor custom enjoins that the manhood of our country should learn its
use. Cricket and football are our national pastimes; why should we not
make rifle-shooting another?
Rifle-shooting is a sport—a game attractive enough in itself; and
every marksman should bear in mind that in learning how to shoot he is
fitting himself as a member of a great empire to take up arms for the
defense of his country. Rifle-shooting should be at once a national
pastime and a patriotic duty.
The reasons for this suggestion are not few. “Bobs” proceeds to make the
most of his case, for he goes on to say:
The American authorities, in the recently published rules for the
“promotion of rifle practise,” gave it as their opinion that, “in
estimating the military efficiency of a soldier, if we consider ten
points as a standard of perfection, at least eight of these points are
skill in rifle shooting,” and with that opinion I quite agree.
If, then, the scheme which I have been strenuously advocating for some
time past is carried to a successful conclusion, we shall be a nation
whose manhood will be for practical purposes all efficient soldiers—an
efficiency, moreover, that can be obtained without the least
interference with industrial or professional pursuits.
But for the whole scheme to be successful, it is desirable that boys,
youths, and men should be given a certain amount of military training
and instruction in the use of the rifle.
It is, I am aware, urged against my proposals that they are little
short of conscription. I have frequently asserted before that I am
altogether opposed to conscription as being totally inapplicable to an
army the greater part of which must always be serving abroad.
Surely there is all the difference in the world between a nation,
every man of which is obliged to serve in the ranks of the regular
army and perform while in those ranks all the onerous duties of a
regular soldier during times of peace and for small wars, as is the
case on the Continent, and a nation which, while maintaining a regular
army for foreign service, asks every man to undergo such a training as
will fit him to take a useful part in a great national emergency when
every true Briton would be, in point of fact, certain to volunteer,
and only the shirkers, the unpatriotic, and the disloyal would be
content to remain passive.
The people of this country should identify themselves with the army
and take an intelligent interest in what the army has to do, and not
regard it as something quite outside the national life; and this they
would certainly do if military training became universal and rifle
shooting a national pursuit.
We need not be afraid that such training and a generally acquired
efficiency with the rifle would result in a spirit of militarism that
would make us anxious for war. I believe, and would I could persuade
haters of militarism to believe, that there is no surer guarantee of
peace than to be prepared for war; and if every able-bodied man is
prepared to play the part of the strong man armed, his own and his
country’s goods will remain at peace.
Those who cry out for greater military efficiency and those who argue
that less attention should be given to the things of war are seeking by
opposite means the same result—the abolishment for all time of “that mad
game the world so loves to play.”
What the Big Newspaper Writers Are Saying
Napoleonic Theory of the Relations of Man’s Stature and
Genius—Iconoclasts vs. American Traditions—Time is Ripe for a
Substitute for the Saloon—The Cash Value Placed by Law on the Life
of a Man—Manual Labor Makes New Converts—Girard a Shining Model
for Philanthropists—Advantages Resulting From Wealth’s Marriage
Into “the Working Classes”—Does a Stepmother Make a Good
Mother?—American Stomachs Are Not Deteriorating—Influence of Hate
on the Efficiency of Armies—Early Risers on the Defensive.
_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
RELATIONS OF A MAN’S STATURE AND GENIUS.
Evidence Produced to Disprove Napoleon’s Theory That Short Men Are the
More Intellectual.
What is the height of genius? How do its physical inches correspond with
its altitude of mind and soul? These questions are a subject of curious
inquiry with the Boston _Herald_.
Napoleon the Great, a short man, surrounded himself with a staff of
short men. He did not care to look like a pygmy among his subordinates.
Doubtless vanity contributed to his preference for few inches. He said
of General Kléber: “He has all the qualities and defects of a tall man.”
Napoleon would not only have agreed with Lombroso that great men are
short men, but he went further than that; he altered the stature of
Frederick the great, of Alexander, of Cæsar, to suit himself. He
always insisted that they were short men, but the chroniclers of their
times tell us otherwise.
The chroniclers of Napoleon’s time seem to have been struck by his own
fancy, for they made him as short as they conveniently could. His old
friend Bourrienne wrote Napoleon’s height as five feet two inches.
Constant put it at five feet one inch. But, after all, these were old
French measures.
Captain Maitland’s testimony is more to the point. It was to Captain
Maitland that Napoleon surrendered on board the Bellerophon. Maitland
measured him and recorded the fallen conqueror’s height as five feet
seven inches, English. That, by the way, is half an inch more than the
stature of Lord Roberts.
The Test of Figures.
But the Napoleonic theory does not bear the test of figures.
Intellectual power in its varied manifestations is not found at its
utmost strength in small men only. It takes men as it finds them—tall
and short, thin and plump—and it seems to rather like height.
Thackeray was six feet four inches. So was Fielding. Scott, Walt
Whitman, and Tennyson were six-footers. Goethe, the elder Dumas,
Robert Burns, and Longfellow were five feet ten inches. J. M. Barrie
is only five feet five inches, and Kipling only five feet six inches.
Edwin A. Abbey has the same height as Barrie; so has Alma-Tadema.
Lord Curzon is six feet one inch, George Westinghouse is over six feet
two inches, Andrew Carnegie is five feet four and a half inches,
President Roosevelt is five feet nine inches. Mr. Gladstone was five
feet nine inches. Sir Henry Irving was an inch taller.
Edmund Burke and Oliver Cromwell were five feet ten and a half inches,
which, by the way, is the height of the present Prime Minister of
England, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Wellington was half an inch
taller than Napoleon.
That trio of great admirals—Nelson, Blake, and Sydney Smith—were a
little under five feet six inches. Bismarck was a tall man, but not so
tall as George Washington, who was six feet three inches. Sargent, the
great painter, is six feet; Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, and Ruskin were
six-footers.
Disraeli and Dickens were five feet nine inches, which is also the
stature of Sir William Crookes. Sir Oliver Lodge is six feet three
inches, Marconi five feet ten and a half inches.
Emerson, Hans Andersen, Wordsworth, Bunyan, Audubon, Corot, Moltke,
Millet, Gounod, Lord Clive, and Lord Brougham were tall men. So were
Humboldt and Helmholtz. Lord Kelvin is five feet seven inches, Lord
Reay six feet two inches. Conan Doyle is six feet one inch, Anthony
Hope three inches shorter. All these figures give the stature of the
men in their boots.
King Edward is five feet eight and a half inches, the Kaiser just an
inch shorter. The Mikado is five feet six inches, the King of Italy
five feet two inches. The Czar’s height is the same as the Kaiser’s.
Leopold, King of the Belgians, is six feet five inches.
Americans Taller Than Englishmen.
Peter the Great was six feet eight and a half Inches. Abraham Lincoln
was just under six feet two inches, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Richard
Burton six feet. Alfred de Musset, Froude, Puvis de Chavannes,
Poussin, Lessing. Schiller, Lamartine, and Sterne were tall men. W. S.
Gilbert is over six feet.
It would be possible to lengthen this list to the point of
tediousness. But the more the subject is examined, the farther away we
get from the Napoleonic theory. Nature has a pretty wide range in
these matters, and she makes the most of it.
When it comes to averages, figures prepared by the anthropometric
committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
indicate that the average stature of the male adults of England is
five feet seven inches and seven-eighths, although the professional
and commercial classes show “a mean height of from two to three inches
above this, and the laboring classes an inch or two below.” The Scotch
and Irish are a little taller, and the Welsh a little shorter than the
English.
The average for the United States is said to be taller than the
English—a fact which implies neither genius nor the lack of it.
AMERICAN TRADITIONS AND THE ICONOCLASTS.
Persons Who Hew Too Close to the Line of History Get Little Thanks for
Their Pains.
Iconoclasts have been busy with American history for a good many years.
They have cut the props from under more than one valued tradition. In
the interest of literal fact they have destroyed much that is
imaginatively valuable. Too often the one can be gained only by loss of
the other, and it is not easy to decide which vantages most. At least
there is some ground for nourishing tradition.
H. J. Haskell praised the “researchers” in a recent article in the
_Independent_. The Chicago _Inter-Ocean_ makes reply, saying:
Mr. Haskell cites as a correction of “important errors in the
viewpoint” “the proof that the Revolution was not the result of
conscious tyranny and oppression on the part of the British
Government.”
Well, who now cares whether it was or was not? What difference does it
make either way in the relations of the American and British peoples
and their governments? Those relations are determined by present
interests and future hopes.
We know our forefathers were right, and we do not care whether their
opponents were right from their own viewpoint or not. Englishmen who
count know that their forefathers blundered egregiously, and do not
care whether they were conscientious or not in their folly.
It may be true—it probably is—that Weems fabricated outright the
cherry-tree story about George Washington. But what difference does
that make? The story simply imputed to Washington the boy the known
character of Washington the man. It hurt no one, and it has inspired
millions of American boys, by setting before them the example of a man
whose greatness and goodness none could question, to be true rather
than false, even when it was hard to tell the truth.
The “Rehabilitation” of Burr.
A great deal is said about the “rehabilitation” of Aaron Burr. But
what is the effect of it all? To show that Burr was not technically a
traitor? The courts said so long ago, and, despite personal opinions,
the verdict was accepted as the law in practise. In trying doubly to
prove Burr no traitor, the rehabilitators have proved him a
blackmailing filibusterer—a man who lacked the courage to conquer a
State, but sought to steal one—a man whose ambition and effort it was
to play the part of
A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole.
And put it in his pocket!
A great deal is also said of the evidence from his own diary of the
“hollowness” and the “double dealing” of President Polk in his conduct
toward Mexico. What is really proved by this evidence is that James K.
Polk was not a cheap opportunist, waiting to be forced to act by
situations created by others, but foresaw those situations and was
ready to take advantage of them for the expansion of his country and
the increase of its power.
To discover that James K. Polk was never taken by surprise, and that
all his great political acts were purposed and planned for long in
advance, does not degrade him, but exalts his character by proving its
conscious strength. It lifts James K. Polk out of the Gladstone class
and puts him at least on the borders of the Bismarck class of
statesmanship.
Game Not Worth the Candle.
And of what earthly or heavenly importance is it to any human soul to
know that the Pilgrims did not actually land in a body on Plymouth
Rock on a certain day? Or that the old stone tower at Newport is not
what Longfellow suggested, a relic of the Northmen, but merely
Governor Arnold’s windmill?
Or that the Spanish settlers in America treated the Indians, on the
whole, more humanely than did the English? Or that, if the Americans’
powder had not run out and they had been able to hold Bunker Hill,
they would probably have been captured the next day?
With all their labor and kicking up of dust, and the personal
notoriety they get by it, the “researchers” whom Mr. Haskell praises
have not changed the main and abiding conceptions of our history at
all. Their game seems hardly worth the candles consumed at it.
Truth is the first aim of the historian. History has been characterized
as a pack of lies, generally agreed to by its makers.
“Anything but history,” said Horace Walpole, “for history must be
false.”
The business of the scientific historian is to examine all witnesses,
hear all the evidences, and get at the exact facts, even though they
make ancient reputations tumble.
And yet we cannot but ask with Wordsworth:
Those old credulities, to nature dear,
Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock
Of History?
TIME IS RIPE FOR SALOON’S SUBSTITUTE.
After Three Months’ Abstinence, San Francisco Finds That It Has Lost Its
Old-Time Thirst.
San Francisco, after its terrific shake-up, dropped the liquor business
temporarily. The man in control foresaw the dangers of alcohol to a
homeless community.
After three months saloons were permitted to open. What was the effect?
A simultaneous rush for the swinging doors? Not at all. People seemed to
have got out of the way of drinking; and this was true in spite of the
fact that, during the period of “enforced abstinence,” they could always
get liquor from outside the city limits, if they wanted it.
The San Francisco _Chronicle_ says:
Liquor drinking is with most people not the gratification of an
appetite, but a mere habit. There is no liquor and few wines which
taste good. Even the toper who takes his whisky straight washes the
taste out of his mouth with water as quickly as he can.
With a comparatively few there is a real craving for liquor, or at
least for its stimulating effects, but the vast majority of those who
drink in saloons do so merely because in the poverty of their
intellects they know no other way of manifesting good fellowship
toward friends whom they meet. So the drink habit is formed, which, in
some cases, degenerates into dissipation and the drunkard’s craving.
But even the classes which contain most of our hard drinkers seem
really to care little for whisky, for they are not resorting to the
saloons in any such number as was expected. Some seem to have formed
the buttermilk or some similar habit, and have no inclination to
return to the saloon—doubtless greatly to the happiness of their wives
and the comfort of their children.
Habit, Not Appetite.
Whether this will last we do not know. Probably not. Mankind is
gregarious, and the only public roof under which men may gather for
the free enjoyment of a pipe and a friendly chat is the roof of the
saloon. Therefore they will go to the saloon, and keep going until
society tempts them away with something at least equally attractive.
They can go to the Young Men’s Christian Association, but they don’t
want to. They will not be allowed to light their pipes, put their feet
on the table, lean back in their chairs and blow smoke-rings to the
ceiling.
Not even the public libraries do anything to draw men from the
saloons. They must be “decorous,” take off their hats, and be silent.
They don’t want to. Every public library should have a smoking-room
where ordinary conversation is allowed. It will not disturb those who
are reading. If it does they can go to other rooms.
The fact that it is habit and not appetite that is to be dealt with is
the psychological basis of the so-called Gothenberg plan. On that plan
all the saloons of a city are conducted by a corporation, whose
members receive as dividends only a fixed, moderate interest on the
investment, all profits above that going, in some form, to the public.
There is no “bar.”
The Gothenberg Plan.
Customers sit at a table and their liquor is served to them. All
saloons must keep “soft drinks” and give them at least as much
prominence as is given to strong drinks. Under no circumstances is any
attendant to have any interest in the sales of liquor, although in
some cases he is allowed a commission on soft drinks and other
refreshments.
No one is permitted to get intoxicated on the premises. There is no
attempt to compel men to abstain. There is a continual temptation to
do so. The army canteen was based on this theory, and was a most
useful institution until some misguided women abolished it and drove
the soldiers to debauchery. Nothing else was to be expected, or was
expected, by the experienced.
The experience of this city proves that the drink habit is not
difficult to overcome—not, however, by coercion, but by temptation.
And men cannot be tempted to any extent by any efforts which have the
missionary or altruistic flavor. Men wish to assemble in public places
where there is entire freedom as to dress and appearance, and where
there is no danger that anybody will solicit them to become better
men. They are not only willing, but desire, to spend something for the
“good of the house” and their own entertainment.
If society will provide them with such a place a good many will go
there in preference to a saloon. If, at the same time, all saloons are
abolished, they will speedily content themselves with such substitutes
as we have suggested.
All of which would seem to support the theory that the saloon is “the
poor man’s club.”
HOW LAW APPRAISES THE LIFE OF A MAN.
Legal Decisions Indicate That His Cash Value Begins to Deteriorate When
He Is Twenty-Five.
What is the value of a man? What is his average physical value, measured
in dollars and cents? We hear it said that in partly civilized countries
human life is cheap. We are told that the great movements typified by
the American and French revolutions have raised the value of the
individual. Can we get these comparisons into an arithmetical table?
Summarizing the statements of another journal, the Saint Louis
_Globe-Democrat_ says:
After looking over legal decisions in the various States, _Bench and
Bar_, a publication devoted to affairs of the law, estimates that at
ten years of age a boy of the laboring class is worth two thousand and
sixty-one dollars and forty-two cents; at fifteen, four thousand two
hundred and sixty-three dollars and forty-six cents; at twenty-five,
five thousand four hundred and eighty-eight dollars and three cents;
from which time the decline is steady, a man of seventy, by this legal
decision scale, rating at only seventeen dollars and thirteen cents.
By the same practical method of computation, one eye is worth five
thousand dollars; one leg, fifteen thousand dollars; two legs,
twenty-five thousand dollars; one arm, ten thousand dollars; one hand,
six thousand dollars; one finger, one thousand five hundred dollars;
and permanent disability, twenty-five thousand dollars. This is merely
an average as far as decisions have been examined.
One of the candidates on the Democratic State ticket, who was crippled
for life while an employee on a Missouri railroad, fought his case
through the courts for nearly ten years, gained it several times, but
finally received nothing. So practise varies as well as theory.
The estimates of the value of a man’s life are based upon an idea not of
his value to himself, but of his value to others. The figures in
individual cases would vary greatly with reference to whether or not the
person’s death caused hardship to others who had been dependent on him.
The value of a man to himself is unimportant after he is dead. His value
to society at large cannot be considered in a cash estimate, since that
kind of value often depends upon other than physical resources. His
value to those who look to him for support can alone be estimated on the
material side.
DOES HATE INCREASE EFFICIENCY OF ARMIES?
Southern Newspaper Takes Issue With an English Naval Critic Who Avers
That It Does.
E. T. Jane, the English naval critic, says the reason the Japanese
defeated the Russians was that the Japanese hated the Russians and
longed to kill them, whereas the Russian soldiers felt no consuming
hatred against their ant-like enemies. The Columbia (South Carolina)
_State_ takes issue with the theory, as follows:
Mr. Jane is wrong, both as to his facts and as to his theory. First as
to his facts:
The Japanese did not hate the Russians. They fought with tremendous
fury at times, but it was a calculated fury, never a whirlwind of
blind passion. Never for a single moment in the long struggle did they
show such fury as to lose sight of the essential principle of modern
warfare, complete self-protection. Nor did they show any passion on
the field of battle, such as slaughtering wounded men, or mutilating
the dead; yet the Russians were guilty of both atrocities.
When Russian prisoners were taken to Japan they were treated with so
much consideration and kindness that they were happier than they had
been within their own lines in Manchuria. Witness, again, the
magnanimous and truly magnificent treatment accorded Stoessel and his
garrison and Rojestvensky and his captured officers and men.
The Bravest Are the Tenderest.
Not from the beginning to the close of the war did the Japanese
exhibit any hatred of the Russians. They fought like knights, like
bushi—
The knightliest of the knightly race,
That since the days of old,
Have kept the lamp of chivalry
Alight in hearts of gold.
And considering Mr. Jane’s theory, that hate makes a good fighter, it
is as false to-day as it was in the heyday of chivalry. The poet is
right in his view that “the bravest are the tenderest, the loving are
the daring.”
The old British idea, inherited from the teachings of Nelson and his
half-corsair predecessors, that an Englishman “should hate a Frenchman
like the devil,” is a sentiment that could well have had its origin in
the place to which Nelson went for his sprightly imagery.
The best fighters of the world to-day are the men who can remain cool,
unperturbed, unblinded by passion in the midst of battle. This is
necessary in order that they may see straight and shoot straight; it
is necessary in order that they may be able to protect themselves from
the shot and shell of the enemy.
Contrary to the Scientific Theory.
It is conceivable that a warrior of the olden time might have been a
bit more effective when rushing furious with hate into the ranks of
his foe and laying about him with short-sword, or falchion, or
claymore; although even in such case the cool-headed warrior was
generally able to meet and overcome the raging brute. To maintain that
hate makes a good soldier is to challenge the scientific theory of
warfare.
Hate has never made a man more efficient in any good cause, and in
very few bad ones. Browning says of Dante that he “loved well because
he hated,” but Dante “hated wickedness that hinders loving.” No mere
hate adds anything to a man’s efficiency. It saps his real strength by
misdirecting it and spending it on the air in blind fury; it poisons
and corrodes the heart and mind.
Chaucer says that “hate is old wrath”; it is, therefore, a
demoralizing and debasing passion, weakening alike to body and the
mind. The recklessness it inspires on the battle-field or in the daily
struggles of life is ineffective against the coolness, deliberateness,
and resourcefulness of the passionless fighter.
EARLY RISERS PUT ON THE DEFENSIVE.
Philadelphia Writer Says Only the Lower Animals Go to Bed and Get Up
With the Sun.
The delightful Elia, who is the closest personal friend one may find in
all literature, exposed certain fallacies once and for all to the
satisfaction of those who are whimsically inclined. However, since not
all minds have the whimsical turn, the fallacies continue to bob up from
time to time with a vitality that is suspiciously Antæan.
Consider the proverb: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man
healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Any schoolboy will tell you that this is
not so; and yet the fallacious statement persists—parents still preach
it; aged money-makers explain their success by it.
Says the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_:
The very early riser is usually an opinionated individual, and it is
likely that his habit of early rising is his only claim to
distinction. More poetry has been written about eventide than the
dawn. This is quite conclusive, for poets are sensible folk and not
much given to the folly of early rising.
Some good literary work has been done in the early hours, but this is
exceptional. Sir Walter Scott, it is said, wrote the most of his
romances before breakfast; but a multitude of authors have produced
immortal works by the light of the midnight oil without smelling of
it.
Wilson Denounced Them.
Early risers descant rapturously upon the delicious freshness of the
morning air and other delights which it is reported can be enjoyed
about sunrise, against which may be offset the loveliness of the dying
day, the deepening shadows of the twilight, and the charm of
moonlight. The glories of the dawn rest in rumor only to the most of
us, and must be taken on faith. The suffrages of the majority are for
the sunset, and the majority rules in the Republic.
John Wesley wrote an excellent sermon on early rising. Doddridge took
pride in the fact that he was at work at five in the morning; but the
famous Doctor Wilson (Christopher North) scouted the whole brood of
sunrise workers in a lengthy essay, which is the comfort and solace of
all lazy and normal people.
Wilson refused to take it for granted that early rising is a virtuous
habit, or that early risers are a particularly meritorious set.
“I object to both clauses of the bill,” says the courageous dissenter.
“Early risers are generally milksop spoonies, ninnies with broad,
unmeaning faces and groset eyes, cheeks odiously rosy, and with great
calves to their legs.”
One of Primitive Man’s Habits.
This indictment was written in Scotland. Matters may not be quite so
disgraceful here. Wilson questioned the motives of his fellow
countrymen who sally forth at an impossibly early hour, and suggested
that their ambition is merely to get an omnivorous appetite for
breakfast.
“Let no knavish prig purse up his mouth and erect his head when he
meets an acquaintance who goes to bed and rises at a gentlemanly
hour.”
The lower orders of creation go to bed and rise with the sun.
Primitive man probably had this vicious habit. Civilization has
gradually reduced the ranks of early risers to the healthy and
vigorous persons who purvey ice and milk with much clatter when they
ought to be abed. The length of human life is increasing, and this is
due to late rising. There can be no doubt about it. The sun rises
hereabouts at this season [July] at 4:30 A.M., and few there be who
have the nerve to witness the phenomenon.
MANUAL LABOR IS MAKING NEW CONVERTS.
Men Who Have Won Their Way With Their Brains Now Give Their Hands a
Chance.
Men of standing are more willing to work with their hands than they used
to be. The new love for outdoor life may be in part responsible; as also
the growing interest in art-craft, and a steady reaction against the
“machine-made.” In any event manual work has been acquiring new dignity.
The Saint Paul _Dispatch_ says that until within a few years we were so
bent on emphasizing the intellectual that the manual had no honor.
To a certain appreciable extent this is changing. Men are interested
to-day in seeing how much they can do for themselves. It is not alone
that the art-craft movement has been inaugurated. We speak of a very
much more intimate and amateurish thing than that.
It is that men are resuming the ax and hammer for the little common
duties. They are making things for the house instead of calling in the
casual carpenter. Younger men still in school are employing their
vacation with carpenter work.
It is no longer quite so respectable to spend a college long-vacation
canvassing for books. It is now entirely respectable to offer one’s
services to a carpenter and be employed in some concrete service which
shall at the summer’s end have a visible aspect.
This is a genuine triumph, and will work toward the accomplishment of
that balancing of functions which has been much disturbed of late.
Now that men have reformed, we wonder if a similar development can be
expected of women. There has been the drift in woman work away from
the work of the hand to that of the mind.
School teaching has been a pervading ambition, and housework has been
an evil from which only the most skilled failed of escape. In essence,
one is no less worthy an employment than the other; each has certain
philanthropic aspects which should appeal equally to women. But one
has been exalted and the other debased because of the manual work, the
esteem of the work of the hands.
There is a slightly detectable drift back toward manual labor,
although much less apparent than in men’s work. But at least there has
been discovered a science of household economics, and concrete
exemplification of this science may secure recognition.
It will probably be long before women of colleges during the summer
vacations may with impunity, social impunity, go into the hotels or
the private kitchens, to work, as college men are going into the
carpenter shop.
Why there should be this invidious distinction we do not know, since,
so far as we can judge, it is quite as noble to feed mankind as to
provide shelter. But the evolution will be worth watching and
assisting.
A SHINING MODEL FOR PHILANTHROPISTS.
Farsightedness of Stephen Girard Made His Bequests the Most Valuable in
the Country.
The death of Russell Sage and the problem of the distribution of his
millions were the subject of much comment, some of which led naturally
to editorial reminiscence. The Saint Louis _Globe-Democrat_ reverts to
the case of Stephen Girard, who, proportionately to the amount of his
possessions, was probably his country’s greatest benefactor in the way
of public bequests.
When Stephen Girard died in Philadelphia, in 1831, he was easily the
richest man in the United States, the estate he disposed of amounting
to seven million dollars. By will, he gave one hundred and forty
thousand dollars to relatives (he was a childless widower), a number
of bequests to employees, ninety-six thousand dollars to organized
charities, three hundred thousand dollars to the State of Pennsylvania
for internal improvements, and certain property in Louisiana to the
city of New Orleans for public improvements.
The residue, amounting to over six million dollars, was bestowed on
the city of Philadelphia, chiefly for the erection and maintenance of
a college to accommodate not fewer than three hundred white male
orphans, and the courts have construed a fatherless boy to be an
orphan.
Put City in Charge of Work.
Mr. Girard put the city in charge of this work, and since 1869 it has
been managed by a board of trustees appointed by the courts. Under its
care the value of the Girard estate has increased to thirty-two
million five hundred and fifty thousand dollars, three-fourths of
which is productive real estate, with the remainder in choice cash
assets.
Girard College, with its seventeen buildings, occupies forty acres.
Its pupils at present number one thousand four hundred and
eighty-three, and up to the present time it has fed, clothed, and
educated seven thousand seven hundred boys, fitting them to step at
once into active pursuits. This work will go on through the centuries
with increasing resources.
Girard had a striking version of what wealth is for. He was a natural
money-maker from his first commercial venture. He enjoyed the shaping
of business and making it pay. He was no easy mark, but, giving others
their due, exacted his own. His public spirit was highly developed, an
inborn trait.
As a banker in the period of the second war with England, Girard
personally saved the credit of the national credit more than once. He
served Philadelphia many years in various official capacities,
including that of councilman. Large internal improvements appealed to
him strongly, and he was among the foremost in advocating and
subscribing to them.
Set No Value on Wealth.
Girard set no value upon wealth, except as a means to accomplish
worthy ends, and these were more to him than his money, or even his
life.
In the year 1793, when Philadelphia lost a sixth of its population by
yellow fever, and most of its citizens had fled, Girard personally
took the inside management of a pest-house, ignoring all other
business for two months. In one hundred days of that autumn the
burials in the city exceeded four thousand.
At forty years of age Girard had only a competence, and wrote to a
friend: “I do not value fortune. The love of labor is my highest
ambition. I observe with pleasure that you have a numerous family and
that you are in possession of an honest fortune. This is all a wise
man has a right to wish for.”
Yet in the next forty years, largely through the fluctuations of
values caused by war, he honestly and usefully accumulated seven
million dollars, and devoted it to an everlasting mission of
beneficence to his fellow men. He wrote that “Labor is the price of
life, its happiness, its everything. To rest is to rust.”
Long-Headed In His Views.
He was long-headed in his views. More than a century ago his advice
for a large city was: “Build high, as there is only one ground rent.”
He would have none but solid construction.
A farm near the city was his place of recreation. On his journeys
there his lunch was under the seat, and on his return the space was
occupied with milk and butter for his domestic use. But he spent a
great deal of money on the introduction of rare plants and fine
cattle. He steadily declared that no man should be an idler on his
money, and he kept his word.
It is well said of him that “The spirit of work made him active; the
spirit of justice made him exact; the spirit of trade made him rich;
the spirit of duty made him brave; the spirit of patriotism made him
generous; and the spirit of love made him great.”
As a credit mark on the side of a vast fortune Girard is conspicuous,
and he fully succeeded in not dying rich, for he gave all to his
fellow citizens, making sure that it would be safeguarded for that
purpose forever.
Girard was a strange character. Penurious about small things,
disagreeable in his personality, he was generous, beneficent, and
public-spirited in a large way.
WHEN THE RICH MAN MARRIES A POOR GIRL
A Writer Asserts That Wealth’s Marriage Into the “Working Classes” Will
Benefit the Race.
It is not altogether increasing newspaper sensationalism that indicates
a larger number of marriages between rich men and poor girls. There are,
it seems safe to say, more and more such marriages.
The judge does not always ride sadly away and leave Maud Müller raking
hay. Frequently he departs only to get a marriage license and return
post-haste. And Maud drops her rake right gladly and directs the way to
the nearest justice of the peace.
Says the New York _Medical Journal_:
Marriages are constantly occurring in the United States between young
men of great wealth and young women engaged in earning their own
living; but, despite the familiarity of the phenomenon, no such
marriage ever fails to cause apparently astonished comment, and, above
all, copious newspaper gossip.
In Europe, where those who have inherited wealth are taught and really
believe that they are of superior clay to the class of inherited
poverty, and the latter assent to the teaching, such alliances may
well cause a slight shock, diluted perhaps with some pleasure at the
condescension of the man.
In our country, however, where one family can hardly have the pas of
another by a single century, astonishment is ridiculous and out of
place. Few of our richest men are idle, and their work differs only in
magnitude from that of the poor.
If we grant that a century of idleness can enervate a family, a
marriage into the “working classes” can only be beneficial. Stock must
be enriched from time to time from near the soil.
Advocates of highly restricted interbreeding are fond of pointing to
the race-horse as a superior product of their principles. A
race-horse, however, is a poor creature from the point of view of
usefulness; he is a beautiful specialized bundle of nerves, and
requires more coddling than a healthy human baby.
Interbreeding does not work out well in the human species; the haughty
Austrian aristocracy, which considers the nobility of France and
England as upstarts, and ostracizes any member who marries into a
family much younger than the Cæsars, is not as a class strong and
healthy.
It is from Austria in great measure that our circuses secure their
giants and midgets, and many other of the various “freaks,” objects of
interest certainly, but hardly of pride.
Intellectually, we do not think that the statesmen of Austria, Spain,
and Russia are the equals of those of France and the United States,
while the English commoners have given a remarkable account of
themselves.
We should be disposed to applaud the good sense of any rich young
American who married a beautiful girl of poor but decent antecedents,
in spite of the fact that such marriages depend upon unreasoning
sexual attraction, like the great majority of marriages. As it is, we
can only note the care Nature takes of a race, however heedless she
may be of the individual.
DOES A STEPMOTHER MAKE A GOOD MOTHER?
Considerable Discussion Is Provoked by Vice-Chancellor Pitney’s
Assertion That She Does Not.
Vice-chancellor Pitney, of New Jersey, passing on an application to have
two children taken from their divorced mother and placed in charge of
their stepmother, is reported to have said:
I never knew of a stepmother who was a good mother. There may be such
instances on record, but I know of none, and I have had some
experience.
Naturally, the Vice-Chancellor has been strongly controverted. Thus the
New York _World_ says:
The stepmother of fiction has a sharp face and a sharp tongue, and
rarely misses an opportunity to wound sensitive young souls.
But the stepmother of fact is usually quite a different person.
Certain individuals of scientific habits who have dabbled in the
domestic relations believe that it would be better for most children
if they could be brought up by stepmothers instead of mothers.
The stepmother generally has all the maternal instinct that any
healthy child needs, while she is not likely to be a victim of the
delusion that her stepchildren are so much better than other people’s
children that it is an impenetrable mystery why they do not die young.
But, of course, there are stepmothers and stepmothers, and doubtless
the woman who makes a poor stepmother would make a poor mother if she
had children of her own.
As a popular prejudice the aversions to stepmothers has little more
basis in fact than the aversion to mothers-in-law. Most men, in spite
of the professional humorists, are on excellent terms with their
mothers-in-law, and most women who have married daughters are
excessively fond of their sons-in-law. At its best the mother-in-law
joke was never a very good joke. Its humor consists largely in its not
being true.
Vice-Chancellor Pitney may know a good deal about the kind of
stepmothers who get into court, but the opinion of Abraham Lincoln
about stepmothers is more valuable, because he was brought up by one.
The Macon (Georgia) _Telegraph_ indicates why stepmothers may do better
for children than a mother can.
The one defect in the God-like mother love is the inability to view
her offspring with an impartial eye, and see them as others see them.
And it would be far from a bold estimate to venture that the majority
of men who get into trouble in later life turn their thoughts back at
such times to an irresponsible childhood when a devoted and indulgent
mother’s love stood between them and the penalties of all childish
misdeeds.
The stepmother, on the other hand, endowed, as a rule, with the
maternal affection that springs eternal in the woman’s breast, but
unblinded by the other’s bias for the children of her flesh, more
frequently approaches her often thankless task, governed by a sense of
duty, rather than by affection merely, and many have there been as a
result, both men and women, Vice-Chancellor Pitney’s dictum to the
contrary notwithstanding, to rise up and call the stepmother blessed.
AMERICAN STOMACHS AS STRONG AS OF OLD.
Refutation of Statement That Our Ancestors Were Wont to Dine on Pork and
Doughnuts.
One English historian began to write a history of the United States,
from the adoption of the Constitution to the fall of the Republic. The
battle of Gettysburg stopped him.
Professor John Mason Tyler, of Amherst, lecturing at the University of
Chicago, said that climate had been the principal cause of America’s
phenomenal development, and that climate ultimately would cause its
degeneracy.
The Baltimore _American_ argues against Professor Tyler, as follows:
Says the frenzied prophet: “Americans one hundred years ago lived on
pork and doughnuts to a great extent. Before going to bed they were
not satisfied unless they ate a large piece of mince-pie. We say
to-day, ‘What a barbarous bill of fare!’ We, who can’t stand anything
stronger than tea and crackers.”
In this lively sketch that, in a breath, spans a century and grasps
unerringly the social and culinary philosophy of a people, the learned
professor has done credit to the environment of his lecture. The
doughnut philosophy here propounded is worthy to rank with the potato
philosophy of an economic school that has long gone into extinction,
while the dire predictions it made are embalmed in the history of
intellectual errors.
The notion of a doughnut and salt pork diet, with a hunk of mince-pie
as a nightcap, is a gentle evolution in social fiction. The American
palate of a hundred years ago was as susceptible to the temptation of
fried chicken and apple cider as it is to-day.
If the Amherst teacher could sit down to the cuisine upon which the
Americans of a hundred years ago dined, he would be apt to revise his
estimate of it as a “barbarous diet.” If he does not believe this, let
him peruse a colonial cook-book, but with the warning that thereafter
the diet of the present day will appear flaccid and unprofitable.
As to the charge that we of this age coddle our palates with tea and
crackers, let the anemic professor speak for himself. The healthy
American digestion tackles fearlessly canvasback duck, diamondback
terrapin, and Welsh rarebit, highly condimented and in complemental
relation with beverages more exhilarating, though, perhaps, less
deadly, than tea, and his slumber makes no record of a wrecking of the
American constitution by nightmares or disturbing physical emotions.
The breakdown of the American nation is conditional upon the collapse
of the American constitution, then long after Macaulay’s solitary New
Zealander seats himself on a broken span of London Bridge to view the
débris of the English nation, the Stars and Stripes will still be
waving over the American “constitution.”
In the meanwhile, some consolation may be derived from the fact that
the American type of soldier is the finest the world affords. Darwin
drew attention to the fact that the European in the American army
tended to conform to the American type in stature and vigor under the
influence of the American climate.
LOVE IN A COTTAGE.
Just a century ago, in 1806, was born Nathaniel Parker Willis, in
Portland, Maine. Willis was a fellow townsman of Longfellow, but while
the latter finally made his way to Boston and Cambridge, Willis found
New York the most congenial residence. There he was successively
editor of the _Mirror_, the _Corsair_, and the _Home Journal_,
enlivening their pages with an inexhaustible supply of witty,
well-timed, and sometimes brilliant prose and verse. He was the first
American to write _vers de société_ that deserved preservation, and
that were at once light, amusing, and in good taste.
Willis affected an extreme elegance in dress, manner, and
surroundings. He pretended to write amid rare flowers, with old vines
beside him, and to use an amber penholder in the summer to cool his
palm. Those who disliked this display of foppery were wont to explain
the initials of his name as representing “Namby-Pamby.” But with all
his superficial frivolity, Willis was a man of genuine talent. His
early poems were quite as popular as Longfellow’s. He was the first
American author to make a good living wholly by his pen. He discovered
and gave substantial aid to many younger men of genius, among them
James Russell Lowell and Bayard Taylor, and he first drew the
attention of his countrymen to the great gifts of Thackeray, long
before “Vanity Fair” had been written, and while the future novelist
was still known only as a writer for the English magazines. He even
engaged Thackeray to contribute a series of papers from Paris to the
New York _Corsair_—this as far back as 1838. Willis also, in his own
letters from Europe, created a model for all foreign correspondents
since that time; and his collected epistles, “Pencilings by the Way,”
still remain the most vivid sketches in existence of the men and women
who were famous when Victoria first became queen.
The little poem here reprinted is one of the light, half-mocking
productions, which its author wrote to amuse his urban public. It
voices the sentiment of the young-man-about-town in the New York of
the early fifties. Perhaps the best comment upon it is the fact that
Willis himself, whenever he could possibly do so, was accustomed to
leave the city and enjoy the rustic pleasures of his own country-house
at Idlewild on the Hudson.
BY NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.
They may talk of love in a cottage,
And bowers of trellised vine,
Of nature bewitchingly simple,
And milkmaids half divine;
They may talk of the pleasure of sleeping
In the shade of a spreading tree,
And a walk in the fields at morning,
By the side of a footstep free!
But give me a sly flirtation
By the light of a chandelier—
With music to play in the pauses,
And nobody very near;
Or a seat on a silken sofa,
With a glass of pure old wine,
And mama too blind to discover
The small white hand in mine.
Your love in a cottage is hungry;
Your vine is a nest for flies;
Your milkmaid shocks the Graces,
And simplicity talks of pies!
You lie down to your shady slumber
And wake with a bug in your ear,
And your damsel that walks in the morning
Is shod like a mountaineer.
True love is at home on a carpet,
And mightily likes his ease;
And true love has an eye for a dinner,
And starves beneath shady trees.
His wing is the fan of a lady;
His foot’s an invisible thing;
And his arrow is tipped with a jewel,
And shot from a silver string.
Exhumations of Noted Persons.
BY E. B. MITCHELL.
Curiosity and a Frenzied Spirit of Vengeance the Principal Causes for
the Desecration of the Tombs of the Great—Dead Pope Placed on Trial—A
Skeleton Crowned as Queen.
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Good Frend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To digg the Dust enclosed Heare:
Blest be ye Man yt spares thes stones
And Curst be he yt moves my bones.
_Epitaph on Shakespeare’s Tomb._
Possibly, on account of this epitaph which Shakespeare had inscribed
above his grave in the church of Stratford-on-Avon and which it would
need a bold man to disregard now, the ashes of the great dramatist have
been more fortunate than those of many distinguished men. Despite our
inherent horror of disturbing the dead and our respect for the grave as
consecrated ground, changed conditions, and, in some cases, mere
curiosity, have made the list of celebrities whose bones have been moved
a long one.
History shows that in securing immunity for one’s grave, neither the
lapse of centuries nor past greatness is of any avail. It is on record
that in the chaos of the end of the ninth century a pope had the body of
his predecessor dug from the tomb, dressed it in its pontifical
vestments, and had it tried and condemned by a synod. The hideous
mockery terminated only when the mutilated body was thrown into the
Tiber.
Dead Pope on Trial.
This scene, which marks the lowest point to which civil war and anarchy
in Rome reduced the papacy, took place in February or March of 897.
About eleven months before, Pope Formosus had died after a stormy
pontificate of five years. He was followed to the grave in fifteen days
by his successor. Then Stephen VI seated himself in the chair of St.
Peter. Stephen belonged to the faction opposed to Formosus’s ally,
Arnulf of Germany. Party feeling and party hatred ran high. The men
temporarily in power had injuries to avenge, and Stephen, in a fit of
almost insane fury, determined to try his predecessor.
On what charge the dead Formosus was actually tried is not now very
clear—probably this detail was never considered of much importance.
Stephen summoned a synod, dragged the corpse out of the grave, dressed
it in its full pontifical robes and himself presided over the court. He
made no pretence of being an impartial judge, however. Paying no
attention to the trembling deacon to whom had been assigned the hopeless
task of defending the dead Pope, Stephen turned savagely on the corpse.
“Why hast thou in thy ambition usurped the Apostolic Seat, who wast
previously only Bishop of Portus?” he demanded.
The synod played out its part in the wretched farce. Formosus was
convicted and solemnly deposed. The vestments were torn from the body of
the dead pontiff, the three fingers of the right hand used in bestowing
the benediction were cut off and the mummy, hauled through the streets
by the mob, was thrown into the Tiber. A few months later Stephen was
strangled in his palace.
Equally brutal was the treatment given to Cromwell’s body when the
Restoration brought Charles II back to England and the cavaliers to
power. Cromwell had directed that his interment be in Westminster Abbey,
and every effort was made to have his funeral as impressive as that of
any crowned king. The attempt, however, was not altogether successful.
In his famous diary John Evelyn notes:
Cromwell’s Body Hanged.
“It was the joyfullest funeral that ever I saw, for there were none that
cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with as barbarous noise,
drinking, and taking tobacco in the streets.”
On the eve of January 30, 1661, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and the
regicide Bradshaw were dug from their graves. The next day they were
dragged to Tyburn and hanged with their faces to Westminster Hall, where
they had sentenced Charles to death. The corpses were buried at the foot
of the gallows, where Connaught Square is now, and the heads, impaled on
pikes, remained for years above the entrance of Westminster Hall.
After many years a high wind carried the head of the Lord Protector
down. A soldier made off with it, and in 1779 it was on exhibition in
Old Bond Street. A private family is now in possession of the ghastly
relic—the features so well preserved that the large wart over one eye
which was so noticeable in life is still plainly visible.
Wyclif’s Bones Burned.
The bones of Wyclif were treated in much the same way by the Council of
Constance, in 1414, though there was, in his case, more of ceremony and
less of mere hatred. The remains of the English reformer were burned and
the ashes thrown into a brook, which, of course, ultimately emptied into
the ocean.
“Thus,” says one writer, “the ashes of Wyclif are the emblem of his
doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”
But it is not always the enemies of the dead who disturb their bones.
There is no more remarkable tradition than the crowning of the dead
Queen Inez de Castro when her lord, young Pedro, ascended the throne of
Portugal in the fourteenth century. The death of Inez, murdered by the
command of her father-in-law, Alfonso XII, had been avenged by Don
Pedro, but the torture of the assassins did not satisfy the prince.
Queen’s Skeleton Crowned.
The tradition is to the effect, it is said, that when Pedro came to the
throne a few years later, he had the bones of Inez taken from the grave,
placed upon a magnificent throne, robed in royal purple, and crowned
queen of Portugal. To the skeleton the courtiers did homage, one after
another kissing the fleshless hand in which the scepter had been thrust.
Then, lying in her rich robes, her crown upon her grinning skull, in a
chariot drawn by twenty coal-black mules and with a funeral cortège
which extended several miles, the skeleton of Inez was driven to the
royal abbey of Alcobaca, where the bones were reinterred.
Even then, however, the dead queen was not to be left in peace. In 1810
the French troops broke into the abbey of Alcobaca, destroyed the
magnificent monument which Pedro had erected, and tore open the coffin.
The yellow hair of the queen was cut from the skull and preserved in
reliquaries.
Reburial of Napoleon.
Like those of Inez, the bones of Napoleon were buried a second time with
all the pomp and ceremony that a great nation could devise. The body of
the great emperor was originally buried under a weeping willow in a
secluded hollow among the rocks of Saint Helena. With the Revolution of
1830, however, came a change in the political situation, and this made
it possible for the remains of the conqueror to be removed from the
lonely island-grave to the magnificent tomb under the dome of the Hôtel
des Invalides.
The body was exhumed at midnight on the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Napoleon’s arrival at Saint Helena. For nine hours the engineers labored
to dig away the earth from the vault, to remove the solid masonry and to
lift the heavy slab which covered the sarcophagus. Within a triple
coffin of tin, lead, and mahogany lay the emperor, dressed in white
waistcoat and breeches, black cravat, long boots and cocked hat, with
the cloak he wore at Marengo spread over his feet.
Body of André Disinterred.
The year that Napoleon died the body of Major John André was taken back
to England. André had been buried in a field close to the spot where he
had been hanged as a spy, and the grave was marked by two small cedars
and by a peach-tree planted at its head. Some of the newspapers had
declared that “any honor paid Major André’s remains was casting an
imputation on General Washington and the officers who tried him.” Such
logic as this had so stirred some ultra-patriotic citizens of Tappan
that when Mr. Buchanan, the British consul in New York, arrived there to
exhume the body quite a crowd was prepared to express its emphatic
disapproval.
Argument being obviously of no avail, Buchanan told the little mob that
it was an Irish custom to drink spirits before visiting a grave and that
this custom he always observed. In a few minutes the crowd was too much
occupied with the Irish custom to annoy Buchanan and the consul
proceeded with his task.
The lid of the coffin was found to be broken and the roots of the
peach-tree had entwined themselves completely around the skull. The
bones were taken to a house near by, whence warned of rumors that the
body would be flung into the river, Buchanan was obliged to carry off
the coffin like a thief in the night, driving twenty-four miles to New
York.
Corpse of Paul Jones Identified.
The recovery of the body of John Paul Jones is still fresh in the public
mind. Unearthed after a protracted search in an abandoned Paris
cemetery, the features and body were so well preserved that there could
be no doubt of the identity. Once this was established, the transfer of
the body from French to American soil was made the occasion of a solemn
ceremony, in the course of which five hundred. American bluejackets
marched through the streets of Paris.
The remains of Jones, André, and Napoleon were exhumed in order that
they might be buried again with greater honor. In Westminster Abbey mere
accident or curiosity has several times disturbed the rest of the famous
dead.
The body of Ben Jonson has been especially unfortunate. Having obtained
a grant of “eighteen inches of square ground” in the Abbey, the poet was
said to have been buried there in an upright position with the famous
epitaph, “O Rare Ben Jonson,” over his head. In 1849 a new grave was
being dug close by when loose sand poured in and the clerk saw:
“The two leg-bones of Jonson fixed bolt upright in the sand as though
the body had been buried in the upright position, and the skull came
rolling down among the sand, from a position above the leg-bones, to the
bottom of the newly made grave. There was still hair upon it and it was
of a red color.”
Pope’s Skull in Museum.
Another poet has suffered in much the same manner. The skull of
Alexander Pope is now in a private museum. On some occasion the coffin
was opened and a phrenologist gave two hundred and fifty dollars to the
sexton to be allowed to take the skull home overnight. In the morning
another skull was substituted and the poet’s deposited in the
phrenologist’s museum.
Against the curiosity of science there is no safeguard. Recently Kaiser
Wilhelm had the grave of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle opened again,
this time for the purpose of photographing the fabrics in which the hero
was wrapped. Against this violation of the sepulcher Jules Claretie, in
an article written for the Paris _Figaro_ and translated for the Boston
_Transcript_, has protested vigorously. Claretie says:
After such combats, labors, and mighty thoughts, he dreamed of repose,
like the poet Moses. Repose! There is none in this world for the
illustrious dead. We waken them through mere curiosity.
At Charlemagne’s Tomb.
Charlemagne’s grandsons believed that they were heirs to his glory
because for a moment they looked upon his skeleton or exposed his
remains to view.
Otho first opened the sepulcher. Cornélius has depicted that fantastic
scene in a celebrated fresco. Frederick Barbarossa followed Otho’s
example. He stood alive before the corpse. On his stone throne, he
contemplated the emperor, with huge hand grasping the scepter and the
globe.
Then the dead Charlemagne was torn from his marble resting-place; his
skull and the bones of his arms went to enrich the treasure of the
cathedral crypt. The throne became sacred in the eyes of emperors, and
Charlemagne—mutilated and dismembered—was partially restored to his
marble vault.
Barbarossa was more fortunate; he was drowned in the Cydnus, and no
one could profane his body.
Another emperor—Napoleon, in 1804—wanted in his turn to behold the
fantom. Bareheaded and preceded by Duroc, the emperor contemplated the
sacred bones.
“So this is he who was master of the world!”
And Napoleon, deeply moved, turned toward Canon Camus.
“Pray, Monsieur l’Abbé; pray for France, whose greatness Charlemagne
founded.”
Then, when the stone had been replaced, Napoleon vouchsafed the
“fantom emperor” a renewal of slumber.
Removed Emperor’s Shrouds.
Victor Hugo, while walking through Aix-la-Chapelle, complained even
then of the innumerable violations to which the great Charlemagne’s
tomb had been subjected.
“Some day,” said he, “I suppose that a pious and holy thought will
enter the mind of some king or emperor. Charlemagne’s remains will be
taken from the chest where the sacristans put them and again laid in
his tomb.
“What is left of his bones will be religiously reassembled. He will
regain his Byzantine vault, his bronze doors, and his marble armchair
with its fourteen plates of gold, and the kneeling visitor will be
enabled to behold, gleaming vaguely in the darkness, that fantom—crown
on head and orb in hand—that once was Charlemagne.”
Well, no such thing was accomplished. Once more the dignitaries of the
empire have assembled to open a coffin. The two shrouds that enveloped
Charlemagne have been removed—those Oriental fabrics that some calif
had sent to the emperor—and since, as the telegraphic despatches say,
“the light was not sufficient to operate,” they have been sent to a
Friedrichstrasse photographer, who will find light enough, egad!
Voltaire and Rousseau.
We have dug up Richelieu, opened Bossuet’s tomb, disturbed the great
Napoleon’s coffin. A few years ago I saw the sarcophagi of Voltaire
and Rousseau opened at the Panthéon. I saw the skull of the author of
“Candide” passed from hand to hand; I saw men’s finger-nails scratch
away its reddish coating (probably due, as Monsieur Berthelot told us,
to the sublimate that had preserved the corpse).
In his leaden coffin, with arms crossed upon his breast, I saw the man
who had written “The Social Contract”; I saw the onlookers—indifferent
or curious—poke their fingers into the empty sockets now bereft of
those eyes that had once gazed upon Madame de Warrens, or try to
snatch from a jaw-bone—“as a souvenir, monsieur!”—one of those teeth
that had touched cherries picked In Madame Gallet’s company.
I was present at that Dance of Death which men call “an historical
exhumation.” And the inevitable photographer was there at the
Panthéon, just as at Aix-la-Chapelle. Great men’s bones are hustled
about, their skulls are pried into and weighed, as if, forsooth, some
sparkle of genius could be got out of them!
Edward the Confessor.
Other kings than Charlemagne have had their slumbers broken. Since the
coffin of Edward the Confessor was placed, on January 6, 1066, before
the high altar of Westminster Abbey it has been opened for one purpose
or another three times. Venerated as the last lineal descendant of
Cedric, Edward was buried in his full regalia, the crown on his head,
the gold crucifix in his hand, and the pilgrim’s ring, said to have
belonged to St. John, on his finger.
It was thus that the body was found when Bishop Gundulf opened the
coffin thirty years later and plucked a hair from the dead king’s long
white beard. The coffin was opened again when Edward was canonized in
1163, and the body of the saint was then found to be in complete
preservation.
Abbot Laurence, however, was harder to satisfy than Gundulf. From the
dead man’s finger he took the ring of St. John, depositing it in the
abbey treasury as a relic, and the vestments in which the corpse was
wrapped were made into three magnificent copes. Another century passed
and then Henry III had the coffin opened, when he removed it to the east
of the high altar, where it has since remained.
Identifying Dead Kings.
Equally troubled has been the repose of Edward I, “The Hammer of the
Scots.” When the old warrior died in 1307, he ordered that his flesh
should be boiled and his bones carried at the head of an English army
until Scotland should be conquered. Though this wish was calmly
disregarded, one custom which antiquarians have been at a loss to
explain, may be in some way connected with it. Until the overthrow of
Richard III on Bosworth Field ended the Plantagenet rule, the tomb of
Edward I was opened every two years and the cerecloth renewed. With the
Tudors this strange rite fell into disuse.
For three hundred years the body of Edward was left in the tomb in
peace. Then the Society of Antiquarians opened the coffin in 1771. The
king was lying in his royal robes, the “long shanks” from which he
derived his nickname, covered with a cloth of gold. Six feet two inches
was the dead man’s height. Lean and straight as he was, Edward I must
have been an imposing figure.
Only two other kings of England—James I and Charles I—have been exhumed.
Their coffins were opened for the purpose of identification. James had
the body of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, taken from Fotheringay to
Westminster but, on the whole, the royal family of England has been
little disturbed.
French Royal Tombs Robbed.
Not so the French. For three days in the Reign of Terror a Paris mob
raged in the abbey church of St. Denis, which for centuries was the
chosen burying-place of the French kings. In this sanctuary of the Old
Régime the mob respected nothing. The silk robes were torn from the
bodies of Hugues Capet, Philip the Hardy, and Philip the Fair.
A handful of gray dust, all that was left of Pepin, the father of
Charlemagne, was flung to the wind, and one after another, Capetians,
Valois, and Bourbons were dragged from the tomb and tumbled into a
trench. On the pavement, one eye-witness says, rolled the heads of Louis
XII and Francis I, of Marshal Turenne and of the great Constable
Duguesclin.
For a short time the corpse of Henry IV, the most popular of all the
long line of French kings, was respected. Embalmed with the best Italian
skill, and so well preserved that the two fatal dagger wounds in the
chest were still plainly visible, the body lay untouched for two days.
Then some one shouted that Henry, like all the rest, had deceived the
people, and his body, too, was flung into the trench.
After the Restoration an attempt was made to return the royal bodies to
their tombs, but it was not altogether successful.
St. Swithin’s Troubled Rest.
If one passes from secular history to the legends of the saints, the
exhumations become innumerable. It is, tradition asserts, on account of
an attempt to remove the body of St. Swithin that we owe the prediction:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ’twill rain na mair.
St. Swithin, chiefly notable for his mildness and humility, ordered that
he should not be buried in his cathedral of Winchester, but in a “vile
and unworthy place” among the common people in the churchyard. This the
monks could not bring themselves to consider right, and on one July 15,
they attempted to move the body of the bishop into the cathedral. But on
that day and for forty days thereafter it rained so hard that they
finally recognized in the weather the anger of the saint and abandoned
their idea.
Apparently, however, the good saint changed his mind half a century or
so later, for his remains were then brought into the cathedral and,
instead of manifesting any displeasure, two hundred miraculous cures
were credited to him in ten days.
THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD.
Despite All the Advantages That Have Resulted from Modern Invention,
Artists, Architects, and Engineers of the Present Time Are Dwarfed by
Those Who Wrought the Marvels of Ancient and Medieval Days.
There are two groups of “wonders of the world,” the first belonging to
the period which we distinguish by the term antiquity, and the second to
the Middle Ages. Considering the lack of facilities for building in the
earlier period, it seems that the wonders of antiquity are much more
remarkable than those of the medieval age; but these are stupendous
marvels also, and deserve their fame, every one.
The Pyramids of Egypt rank first, being the oldest as well as the most
permanent things which man has ever built. They are situated in middle
Egypt, and there are now in existence some seventy-five; of this
number there are some which are crumbling into shapeless masses, but
the group of Ghizeh, which is the most important, stands in sturdy and
unyielding strength.
The Pyramids are the tombs of Egypt’s dead kings, and date back to the
Fourth Dynasty—about three thousand years before Christ. The largest
covers an area of nearly thirteen acres, was originally four hundred
and eighty-one feet high, and had a length on each side, at the base,
of seven hundred and fifty-five feet.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built by Nebuchadnezzar for his
queen, Amytis, and their site has been located at the northern end of
the city. They consisted of a series of terraces rising to a
considerable height, and laid out as a park; it is probable that such
gardens would have been near to or adjoining the king’s palace, but
whether or not they were has not as yet been discovered. The reign of
Nebuchadnezzar was about 600 B.C.
The Tomb of Mausolus, King of Caria, at Halicarnassus, was built about
352 B.C. From this great monument, built by the king’s widow,
Artemisia, as a memorial to him, the word mausoleum of our common
speech is derived. The tomb seems to have been preserved up to the
twelfth century, but earthquakes probably started its ruin soon after
this, and the stones from it have been used in many other buildings,
so that now even its general appearance can only be guessed at.
The Temple of Diana, at Ephesus, was built at the public charge,
though King Crœsus is believed to have contributed largely to it. It
was one hundred and sixty-four by three hundred and forty-two and a
half feet, and the height of its columns was fifty-five feet. It was
begun in the sixth century before Christ, and one hundred and twenty
years are said to have elapsed before it was completed. It was the
seat of the worship of the goddess Diana.
The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of Helios, the sun-god, which was
made from the spoils left by Demetrius when the city was successfully
defended against him, after a long siege. Its construction occupied
the artist twelve years. It stood near the harbor, but not across the
entrance, as was at one time supposed. It was erected about 280 B.C.,
and thrown down by an earthquake some sixty-six years later. Its
height was something over one hundred feet.
The Statue of Jupiter at Olympia was the work of the greatest sculptor
of ancient Greece, Phidias by name, who was born about 490 B.C. This
heroic figure was about forty-two feet high, and represented the god
seated on a throne. It was made of ivory and gold.
The Pharos of Egypt was begun under Ptolemy I, and was finished by his
son about 282 B.C. It was a lofty tower, built on the eastern
extremity of the rocky island from which it took its name, and was the
great lighthouse at the entrance to the harbor of Alexandria. The
light was furnished by a beacon-fire on its summit. Its height was
four hundred and fifty feet, and the light could be seen at a distance
of one hundred miles.
The Palace of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, is also
mentioned as one of the wonders of the ancient world, though the
preference is given to the Pharos of Egypt by the best authorities.
This palace was cemented with gold.
The wonders of the Middle Ages seem quite modern compared with the
marvels of the ancient world, long since crumbled into dust.
The Colosseum of Rome heads the later list. This was built by
Vespasian, and dedicated by his son Titus, in 80 A.D. According to a
document of the fourth century, this great amphitheater seated
eighty-seven thousand persons, its dimensions being six hundred and
seventeen by five hundred and twelve feet. It was the scene of the
bloody sports in which the Romans delighted, and of the martyrdom of
many of the early Christians.
The Catacombs of Rome, the earliest burial places of the Christians,
are outside the city walls, within a radius of three miles; they were
excavated wherever the soil was suitable for such tunneling, but were
not secretly made, as the old tradition would have us believe. Their
length has been estimated variously at from three hundred and fifty to
eight hundred miles, and the number of dead which they contain is from
six to seven millions.
The Great Wall of China was built by the founder of the Tsin dynasty,
in 256 B.C. Its length was once more than one thousand two hundred and
fifty miles, and it is the largest defensive work in the world, being
thirty-five feet high and twenty-one feet thick. It follows an
irregular course, marking the northern boundary of the empire, and is
not deflected by natural obstacles. There are towers at frequent
intervals, presumably for lookout.
Stonehenge is the most remarkable example of the ancient stone circles
and stands, a magnificent ruin, on Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire,
southern England. It is at least as early as the Bronze Age, according
to the most modern research, and that was from 2000 to 1800 B.C. From
the arrangement of the stones with reference to the sun, It is
believed to have had some connection with sun worship.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the most remarkable of these slanting
campaniles, though not by any means the only one. It was begun in 1174
and finished in 1350. Its height is one hundred and eighty-one feet,
and it is fifty-one and a half feet in diameter at the base. It
inclines thirteen feet eight inches toward the south. The opinion
prevails now that the slant is intentional in all these leaning
towers, though the reason for it is not clear.
The Porcelain Tower of Nanking, which was erected early in the
fifteenth century, was an octagonal structure, faced with variegated
porcelain. Lamps and bells were hung from it. It was destroyed by the
Taipings in 1853, but many miniatures of it are in existence in
various parts of the world.
The Mosque of St. Sophia, in Constantinople, is one of the most
magnificent edifices in the world. It was begun by Justinian in A.D.
532 and was completed in five years. Originally it was named the
Church of St. Sophia. Its walls were decorated with beautiful mosaics,
which have been partly effaced or partly covered with inscriptions
from the Koran. It was converted into a mosque by Mohammed II, in
1453, and four minarets were added, while the golden cross was
replaced by the crescent. Its dome is one hundred and five feet in
diameter and one hundred and eighty-four feet high inside.
IRON IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES.
Original Find Was in North Carolina, While the First Attempt to
Manufacture It Was Made in Virginia in 1619.
Iron is, fortunately, the most abundant of metals as well as the most
useful, and is to be found in almost all parts of the world.
The first recorded find was in North Carolina in 1585, while the first
effort to manufacture it was made in Virginia in 1619.
The works were destroyed by Indians in 1622. The next attempt was at
Lynn, Massachusetts, where a blast furnace was started in 1643, which
produced some “sow” iron in 1645, and where a forge was built in 1648.
Bog-ore was generally used in New England in colonial days.
The first export of iron (bar) to England was made in 1717, and the
first pig-iron in 1728. Up to 1720, Massachusetts was the chief seat
of the iron industry in the colonies. In the year 1750, Pennsylvania
became the leading iron-producing colony.
The Harp of a Thousand Strings.
A Quaint Specimen of the Sermons Preached by Itinerant Exhorters in the
South in the Middle of the Last Century—Now Almost Forgotten, It Had the
Whole Country Laughing Fifty Years Ago.
The droll little sketch entitled “The Harp of a Thousand Strings”
appeared many years ago in a New Orleans newspaper. While Joshua S.
Morris is generally credited with the authorship, the claims of others
have been advanced from time to time, and the authorship appears to be
almost as cloudy as the identity of the writers of “Laugh and the
World Laughs With You,” “Casey at the Bat,” and “If I Should Die
To-Night.”
But, however cloudy may be the identity of the author, there is no
suggestion of haziness about the humor which invests the sketch
itself. “The Harp of a Thousand Strings” had scarcely more than
attained the dignity of print when it was pounced upon by nearly every
elocutionist and chronic story-teller in the country. Hundreds of
newspapers reprinted it, and in England it was frequently quoted as an
admirable example of American humor.
All this popularity was too much for it, however. Gorged with
prosperity, it lay down to a Rip Van Winkle slumber from which it has
just been awakened for the readers of THE SCRAP BOOK. Like Rip Van
Winkle, “The Harp of a Thousand Strings” finds that during its long
sleep one of its old friends has passed away. This Is the quaint old
exhorter who, combining business with theology, was so common in the
South half a century ago. Sometimes he was a pedler, a patent medicine
man, a lightning-rod agent, or, like the old fellow pictured in the
sketch, a Mississippi flat-boat captain in search of a cargo, or with
liquor to sell.
I may say to you, my brethring, that I am not an edicated man, an’ I am
not one of them as believes that edication is necessary for a Gospel
minister, for I believe the Lord edicates His preachers jest as He wants
’em to be edicated; an’ although I say it that oughtn’t to say it, yet
in the State of Indianny, whar I live, thar’s no man as gets bigger
congregations nor what I gits.
Thar may be some here to-day, my brethring, as don’t know what
persuasion I am uv. Well, I must say to you, my brethring, that I’m a
Hard-shell Baptist. Thar’s some folks as don’t like the Hard-shell
Baptists, but I’d rather have a hard shell as no shell at all.
You see me here to-day, my brethring, dressed up in fine clothes; you
mout think I was proud, but I am not proud, my brethring, and although
I’ve been a preacher of the Gospel for twenty years, an’ although I’m
capting of the flat-boat that lies at your landing, I’m not proud, my
brethring.
I am not gwine to tell edzactly whar my tex may be found; suffice to
say, it’s in the leds of the Bible, and you’ll find it somewhar between
the first chapter of the book of Generations and the last chapter of the
book of Revolutions, and ef you’ll go and search the Scriptures, you’ll
not only find my tex thar, but a great many other texes as will do you
good to read, and my tex, when you shall find it, you shall find it to
read thus:
“And he played on a harp uv a thousand strings, sperits uv jest men made
perfeck.”
My text, my brethring, leads me to speak of sperits. Now, thar’s a great
many kinds of sperits in the world—in the fuss place, thar’s the sperits
as some folks call ghosts, and thar’s the sperits of turpentine, and
thar’s the sperits as some folks call liquor, an’ I’ve got as good an
artikel of them kind of sperits on my flat-boat as ever was fotch down
the Mississippi River; but thar’s a great many other kinds of sperits,
for the tex says, “He played on a harp uv a _t-h-o-u-s_-and strings,
sperits uv jest men made perfeck.”
But I tell you the kind uv sperits as is meant in the tex is FIRE.
That’s the kind uv sperits as is meant in the tex, my brethring. Now,
thar’s a great many kinds of fire in the world. In the fuss place,
there’s the common sort of fire you light your cigar or pipe with, and
then thar’s foxfire and camphire, fire before you’re ready, and fire and
fall back, and many other kinds uv fire, for the tex says, “He played on
the harp uv a _thous_and strings, sperits of jest men made perfeck.”
But I’ll tell you the kind of fire as is meant in the tex, my
brethring—it’s HELL FIRE, an’ that’s the kind uv fire as a great many uv
you’ll come to, ef you don’t do better nor what you have been doin’—for
“He played on a harp uv a _thous_and strings, sperits uv jest men made
perfeck.”
Now, the different sorts of fire in the world may be likened unto the
different persuasions of Christians in the world. In the first place, we
have the Piscapalions, an’ they are a high-sailin’ and highfalutin’ set,
and they may be likened unto a turkey buzzard that flies up into the
air, and he goes up, and up, and up, till he looks no bigger than your
fingernail, and the fust thing you know, he cums down, and down, and
down, and is a-fillin’ himself on the carkiss of a dead hoss by the side
of the road, and “He played on a harp uv a _thous_and strings, sperits
uv jest men made perfeck.”
And then thar’s the Methodis, and they may be likened unto the squirril
runnin’ up into a tree, for the Methodis beleeves in gwine on from one
degree of grace to another, and finally on to perfection, and the
squirril goes up and up, and up and up, and he jumps from limb to limb,
and branch to branch, and the fust thing you know he falls, and down he
cums kerflumix, and that’s like the Methodis, for they is allers fallen
from grace, ah! and “He played on a harp uv a _thous_and strings,
sperits of jest men made perfeck.”
And then, my brethring, thar’s the Baptist, ah! and they have been
likened unto a ’possum on a ’simmon tree, and thunders may roll and the
earth may quake, but that ’possum clings thar still, ah! and you may
shake one foot loose, and the other’s thar, and you may shake all feet
loose, and he laps his tail around the limb, and clings, and he clings
furever, for “He played on the harp uv a _thous_and strings, sperits uv
jest men made perfeck.”
[Sidenote: A Startling Summons.]
An error for which nervousness may have been responsible, was that made
by the boy who was told to take the Bishop’s shaving water to him one
morning and cautioned to answer the Bishop’s inquiry “Who’s there,” by
saying, “The boy, my Lord.” Whether from nervousness or not, the boy
managed to transpose the words of this sentence with ludicrous effect,
and the Bishop was surprised and perhaps alarmed to hear in response to
his inquiry the answer, “The Lord, my boy.”
The Effects of Music on Animals.
A Pigeon Was One of Mozart’s Most Appreciative Auditors—Cats, Mice, and
Cows Have Performed Queer Antics When Under the Influence of Strains
from Violins and Pianos.
The power of music is growing to be recognized by physicians in the
treatment of certain diseases. Its effect upon animals is very marked,
sometimes for good and in other instances for quite the opposite, though
it is not always easy to know just which is the case.
A writer in _Harper’s Magazine_ half a century ago gave some results of
personal observation of animals under the influence of music. These
observations are interesting and amusing, and would seem to show beyond
a doubt that animals may be quite as fond of sweet sounds as man.
The sensibility of animals to music will hardly be questioned in the
present day, when the manners and habits of all animated nature are so
thoroughly observed and studied.
We no longer doubt the dictum of the poet, who sings, “Music hath
charms to soothe the savage breast”; and, therefore, it is not so much
in corroboration of his assertion, as in illustration of a fact so
interesting and pleasing in itself, that we are about to bring to the
notice of the reader some few instances of animal love of music which
are too well authenticated to admit of a doubt, and some of which are
the records of our personal observation and experience.
Mozart and His Pigeon.
One of the German biographers of Mozart makes mention of a tame
pigeon, which was the companion and pet of that extraordinary genius
when a child. The bird, when at liberty, would never leave the side of
the young composer while he was playing any instrument, and had to be
caught and confined in his cage to prevent him from following his
little favorite from room to room.
Whenever the boy came into the presence of the pigeon, the latter
manifested the utmost uneasiness until he began to play; if the door
of the cage were opened, the bird would fly to the violin and peck at
the strings, or to the harpsichord and jump and flutter on the keys,
and would not be pacified until the child sat down to play, when it
would perch quietly on his shoulder, and sit there for hours almost
without moving a feather.
Cats have a species of undelightful music of their own, performed, as
we all know, at unseasonable hours on the leads, house-tiles, and
garden-walls of our dwellings. Puss’s performances are generally too
chromatic for ears not feline, and we humans are given to disconcert
their concertos with a shower from the water-jug, or anything else
that comes to hand, when their untimely carols rouse us from our
sleep.
In revenge, puss is generally as indifferent to the sublimest strains
of the human voice or cunningly played instrument as any post can
possibly be, and prefers the untuneful scream of the cat’s-meat man to
the noblest compositions of Beethoven.
Cats Have Musical Ears.
Still, as if nature was determined to assert the triumph of harmony
over every living thing, now and then a cat turns up who has a genuine
musical ear, and will manifest unequivocal satisfaction and delight at
harmonious combinations of sound.
We once owned a cat who would listen complacently to music by the hour
together, always accompanying it with a gentle purring—who would leave
her hunting-ground in garden or cellar whenever music was going on in
parlor or drawing-room—who would scratch at the door, and croon and
mew to be let in, and would resent a prolonged exclusion by certain
expressive displays of disapprobation. When admitted, she would leap
on the piano, and attempt, after the New Zealand fashion of expressing
regard, to rub noses with the performer.
An old friend of ours reports another instance, which is perhaps still
more remarkable. He was in the habit, most evenings in the week, of
spending an hour or two at the piano after the studious labors of the
day.
His pet cat, though as a kitten indifferent to music, grew to like it,
and regularly led the way to the piano when the business of the
tea-table was done. Here she took post on a chair, and listened
gravely during the whole performance. When it ceased, and the
instrument was closed, she would return to the rug, or to his knee,
and sleep out the rest of the evening.
A Feline Paderewski.
Not so, however, if the piano was left open; in that case, puss leaped
on the keys and pawed a performance of her own, in which she showed an
extreme partiality for the treble notes, and something like alarm at
the big bass ones, when she happened to give them an extra vigorous
kick with her heels. In fact, a rousing discord would frighten her off
the keys, but she would return again and soothe her feelings by a
gentle pattering among the upper notes.
These exploits she repeated whenever the piano was left open, and
whether she had auditors or not; so that it became necessary to close
the instrument or exclude the cat from the room in order to insure a
moment’s quietness. If by any chance her master spent the evening from
home, puss showed her disappointment and dissatisfaction by
restlessness and ill-temper.
Twenty-five years ago the writer was one of a joint-stock proprietary
who owned a boat on an inland river, winding through a retired and
picturesque tract of country. There were seven of us, all being either
singers or players of instruments; and in this boat it was our custom
to spend an occasional leisure hour in musical voyagings up and down
the river. To many an old English melody on these occasions did the
moss-covered rocks and precipitous banks return harmonious echoes.
A Dancing Cow.
We made strange acquaintances on those long voyages, up a stream
navigated by no other keel than ours, and, among other natural
curiosities, we fell in with a musical cow. This creature, a small,
cream-colored specimen of the Alderney breed, suckled her calf, along
with a dozen other vaccine mothers, in a meadow which sloped down to
the river’s brink.
Whenever we turned the bend of the river, “with our voices in tune as
the oars kept time,” and the meadow came in sight, there we were sure
to see the white cow, standing up to the shoulders in the water,
whither she had advanced to meet us, her neck stretched out and her
dripping nose turned toward the boat.
As we skirted the meadow, she kept pace with us on the bank,
testifying her delight by antics of which no cow in her senses would
have been thought capable. She would leap, skip, roll on her back,
rear on her hind legs, and then hurl them aloft in the air like a
kicking horse—now rushing into the water to look at us nearer, now
frisking off like a kitten at play.
When she came to the meadow-fence, she dashed through it furiously
into the next field, and so on through the next fence, and the next
after that. The fourth being railed, she would turn it by wading the
river, and was only prevented from following us farther by a steep,
precipitous bank which stopped her progress.
After these mad gambols, she always returned to her calf, first
saluting us with a long, plaintive kind of bellow, by way of farewell.
Violin Charms a Snake.
At this period it was that, rescuing a fine snake from some ignorant
boys who were about to kill it, under the notion that it was venomous,
but who were glad to sell it for twopence, we carried the slippery
creature home, and assigned him a lodging in a small wicker basket,
filled with moss and suspended by a single string from a hook in the
ceiling of our bachelor’s snuggery.
The reptile grew to know us, and to welcome us in his way, by gliding
his cold coil across our face and temples when we brought him fresh
moss, or tempted him with food, which, by the way, he would never
take. It was by accident only that we discovered his musical
predilections.
One evening, while marching the room to the sound of our old violin,
with which it was our custom to beguile an occasional hour, we caught
sight of what seemed a monstrous python threatening us from aloft. It
was the shadow of our pet snake, projected by the single candle on the
table to the arched ceiling above, and magnified to formidable looking
dimensions.
The fellow was hanging out of the basket almost by the tip of his
tall, and, with his head stretched toward us, was following our
motions as we walked up and down the room.
We remembered the snake-charmers, and conceived at once that it was
the music which had brought him out; and so it proved, as we had
opportunity of certifying by repeated experiments. Whenever he heard
the violin he came out, and always with his head in the direction of
the sound, as if anxious to reach it. When taken from the basket and
hung around the neck, he lay limp and as if lifeless while the music
lasted, and did not immediately recover when it had ceased.
One day, on finding that he made no appearance at the call of the
violin, we reached down the basket and found him gone. Whether he had
fallen out by accident while hanging by his tall, or taken the leap on
purpose, there was no knowing; but he had disappeared, and we saw him
no more, though a few weeks after his departure we found his skin,
turned inside out, behind a box placed against the wall.
Dogs Are Discriminating.
Dogs, judging from the conduct of the generality of them, may be
regarded as indifferent to music, as they are noticed neither to seek
nor shun it, as a general rule. Being remarkably docile, however, they
may be, and are, taught to discriminate tunes, and to dance to violin,
pipe, and drum in a manner that indicates plainly enough their
appreciation of musical time at least.
Some dogs grind organs at the command of their unfeeling exhibitors;
and though they always set about the business with a serious face,
that may be no proof that they dislike music.
Our own dog—a cross between a Scotch and a Skye terrier—is affected in
an extraordinary way by the notes of the harmonium, and chooses to
post himself close to the instrument while it is playing. So long as
the music runs below a certain pitch all is well; but touch a single
note above that, and he prepares to join in the performance himself.
A Tuneful Terrier.
If a shrill note is prolonged above a minim, he points his nose in the
air, at an angle of about forty degrees, and, elongating his body in a
straight line from the nostrils to the tail, pitches precisely the
same note, which he will go on sounding as long as you please. The
inference generally drawn is that he dislikes it, and that the notes
to which he thus responds are painful to him. To us that is not so
clear, since, though the door be open, and he has the run of the whole
house, he never shows the least disposition to make his escape. Who
shall say that it is not a luxury to him?
The point is doubtful, at least; and we shall give him the benefit of
the doubt, and acquit him of the charge, which we deem odious, of
disrelishing music.
We shall close the present sketch by a remarkable instance of the love
of music exemplified in the conduct of a party of mice who had
obtained surreptitious admission at a public concert. Thus it runs:
“Soon after Miss Hay had commenced her first song, the party occupying
the front seats saw a mouse sauntering leisurely up and down, close to
the skirting of the platform on which she was singing. As the song
proceeded, the mouse stood spellbound. A lady tried to drive it away
by shaking her concert-bill at it; but the little animal had lost its
fear of man, and would not retire.
Appreciative Mice.
“At the conclusion of the piece the mouse vanished, but reappeared,
bringing with it a companion when the next song commenced. At the end
of song the second the two mice retreated to their hole, but made
their third appearance on the boards when the singing was again
renewed.
“Eventually, six or seven mice came out regularly with every song, and
retired when the music ceased. While the melodious tones filled the
apartment all attempts to drive away the mice were vain. These most
timid members of the animal kingdom were too fascinated to be in
terror of the human family, who actually filled the room; and though a
fiftieth part of the means used to drive them away would, under
ordinary circumstances, have sufficed, they now stood, or slowly
glided, so entranced by the melody which pervaded the room that they
were heedless of the presence of their natural enemies.
“How naturalists may explain this phenomenon we know not, nor shall we
swell this article by attempting a solution.”
The paragraph concluded by giving the names of several respectable
individuals who witnessed the singular phenomenon, and who were
willing to testify to the truth of the report.
The Discovery of America.
BY WASHINGTON IRVING.
In accordance with its policy of presenting to its readers each month
articles that have to do with the history and characteristics of the
month itself, THE SCRAP BOOK herewith reprints the most entertaining
account that has been written of what is, without question, the most
memorable incident of the month of October—the discovery of America by
Christopher Columbus. It is from the pen of Washington Irving, the first
great man of letters produced in the New World.
In the course of a period of travel in Europe, Irving went to Madrid,
Spain, in 1826. There a post as attaché of the United States Legation
was offered to him by Alexander H. Everett, then our minister to the
Spanish court. This offer was accepted. Mr. Everett suggested that
Irving make a translation from the Spanish of Navarrete’s “Voyages of
Columbus.” The suggestion appealed to Irving, but he had scarcely more
than addressed himself to his task when the idea occurred to him to
write an original work on the subject. He searched the Spanish archives
for new material and worked so zealously that in July, 1827, he was able
to place the completed manuscript in the hands of John Murray, the
famous English publisher, who brought out the work, in three volumes, in
1828.
In order that the sketch here given may be the better appreciated by
persons who have allowed the earlier incidents of Columbus’s memorable
voyage to escape their memories, it may be well to say that with funds
supplied by Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Spain, Columbus
sailed from Palos, Spain, on August 3, 1492. The expedition consisted of
the Santa Maria, a decked ship, with a crew of fifty men, and commanded
by Columbus in person; and of two caravels—the Pinta, with thirty men,
commanded by Martin Pinzon, and the Niña, with twenty-four men, under
Vicente Yañez Pinzon, a brother of Martin. Columbus had the rank of
admiral. The total number of men on the three vessels was one hundred
and twenty. Owing to an accident to the rudder of the Pinta, the
expedition was compelled to put in at the Canary Islands on August 9th.
On September 6th the vessels again weighed anchor and sailed westward
into the mysterious “Ocean Sea.”
The situation of Columbus was daily becoming more and more critical. In
proportion as he approached the regions where he expected to find land,
the impatience of his crews augmented. The favorable signs which
increased his confidence were derided by them as delusive; and there was
danger of their rebelling, and obliging him to turn back when on the
point of realizing the object of all his labors. They beheld themselves
with dismay, still wafted onward, over the boundless wastes of what
appeared to them a mere watery desert surrounding the habitable world.
What was to become of them should their provisions fail? Their ships
were too weak and defective even for the great voyage they had already
made, but if they were still to press forward, adding at every moment to
the immense expanse behind them, how should they ever be able to return,
having no intervening port where they might victual and refit?
In this way they fed each other’s discontents, gathering together in
little knots, and fomenting a spirit of mutinous opposition; and when we
consider the natural fire of the Spanish temperament and its impatience
of control, and that a great part of these men were sailing on
compulsion, we cannot wonder that there was imminent danger of their
breaking forth into open rebellion and compelling Columbus to turn back.
In their secret conferences they exclaimed against him as a desperado,
bent, in a mad fantasy, upon doing something extravagant to render
himself notorious. What were their sufferings and dangers to one
evidently content to sacrifice his own life for the chance of
distinction? What obligations bound them to continue on with him, or
when were the terms of their agreement to be considered as fulfilled?
They had already penetrated unknown seas, untraversed by a sail, far
beyond where man had ever before ventured. They had done enough to gain
themselves a character for courage and hardihood in undertaking such an
enterprise and persisting in it so far. How much farther were they to go
in quest of a merely conjectured land? Were they to sail on until they
perished, or until all return became impossible? In such case they would
be the authors of their own destruction.
On the other hand, should they consult their safety, and turn back
before too late, who would blame them? Any complaints made by Columbus
would be of no weight; he was a foreigner without friends or influence;
his schemes had been condemned by the learned and discountenanced by
people of all ranks. He had no party to uphold him, and a host of
opponents whose pride of opinion would be gratified by his failure. Or,
as an effectual means of preventing his complaints, they might throw him
into the sea, and give out that he had fallen overboard while busy with
his instruments contemplating the stars—a report which no one would have
either the inclination or the means to controvert.
Columbus was not ignorant of the mutinous disposition of his crew; but
he still maintained a serene and steady countenance, soothing some with
gentle words, endeavoring to stimulate the pride or avarice of others,
and openly menacing the refractory with signal punishment should they do
anything to impede the voyage.
On the 25th of September the wind again became favorable, and they were
able to resume their course directly to the west. The airs being light
and the sea calm, the vessels sailed near to each other, and Columbus
had much conversation with Martin Alonzo Pinzon on the subject of a
chart, which the former had sent three days before on board of the
Pinta. Pinzon thought that, according to the indications of the map,
they ought to be in the neighborhood of Cipango and the other islands
which the admiral had therein delineated.
Columbus partly entertained the same idea, but thought it possible that
the ships might have been borne out of their track by the prevalent
currents, or that they had not come so far as the pilots had reckoned.
He desired that the chart might be returned, and Pinzon, tying it to the
end of a cord, flung it on board to him.
While Columbus, his pilot, and several of his experienced mariners were
studying the map and endeavoring to make out from it their actual
position, they heard a shout from the Pinta, and, looking up, beheld
Martin Alonzo Pinzon mounted on the stern of his vessel, crying:
“Land! land! Señor, I claim my reward!”
He pointed at the same time to the southwest, where there was indeed an
appearance of land at about twenty-five leagues’ distance.
Upon this Columbus threw himself on his knees and returned thanks to
God; and Martin Alonzo repeated the _Gloria in Excelsis_, in which he
was joined by his own crew and that of the admiral.
The seamen now mounted to the masthead or climbed about the rigging,
straining their eyes in the direction pointed out. The conviction became
so general of land in that quarter, and the joy of the people so
ungovernable, that Columbus found it necessary to vary from his usual
course and stand all night to the southwest.
The morning light, however, put an end to all their hopes, as to a
dream. The fancied land proved to be nothing but an evening cloud, and
had vanished in the night. With dejected hearts they once more resumed
their western course, from which Columbus would never have varied but in
compliance with their clamorous wishes.
For several days they continued on with the same propitious breeze,
tranquil sea, and mild, delightful weather. The water was so calm that
the sailors amused themselves with swimming about the vessel. Dolphins
began to abound, and flying fish, darting into the air, fell upon the
decks. The continued signs of land diverted the attention of the crews
and insensibly beguiled them onward.
On the 1st of October, according to the reckoning of the pilot of the
admiral’s ship, they had come five hundred and eighty leagues west since
leaving the Canary Islands. The reckoning which Columbus showed the crew
was five hundred and eighty-four, but the reckoning which he kept
privately was seven hundred and seven. On the following day the weeds
floated from east to west, and on the third day no birds were to be
seen.
The crews now began to fear that they had passed between islands, from
one to the other of which the birds had been flying. Columbus had also
some doubts of the kind, but refused to alter his westward course. The
people again uttered murmurs and menaces, but on the following day they
were visited by such flights of birds, and the various indications of
land became so numerous, that from a state of despondency they passed to
one of confident expectation.
Eager to obtain the promised pension, the seamen were continually giving
the cry of land, on the least appearance of the kind. To put a stop to
these false alarms, which produced continual disappointment, Columbus
declared that should any one give such notice, and land not be
discovered within three days afterward, he should thenceforth forfeit
all claim to the reward.
On the evening of the 6th of October Martin Alonzo Pinzon began to lose
confidence in their present course, and proposed that they should stand
more to the southward. Columbus, however, still persisted in steering
directly west. Observing this difference of opinion in a person so
important in his squadron as Pinzon, and fearing that chance or design
might scatter the ships, he ordered that, should either of the caravels
be separated from him, it should stand to the west, and endeavor as soon
as possible to join company again. He directed, also, that the vessels
should keep near to him at sunrise and sunset, as at these times the
state of the atmosphere is most favorable to the discovery of distant
land.
On the morning of the 7th of October, at sunrise, several of the
admiral’s crew thought they beheld land away to the west, but so
indistinctly that no one ventured to proclaim it, lest he should be
mistaken, and forfeit all chance of the reward: the Niña, however, being
a good sailor, pressed forward to ascertain the fact.
In a little while a flag was hoisted at her masthead, and a gun
discharged, being the preconcerted signals for land. New joy was
awakened throughout the little squadron, and every eye was turned to the
west. As they advanced, however, their cloud-built hopes faded away, and
before evening the fancied land had again melted into air.
The crews now sank into a degree of dejection proportioned to their
recent excitement; but new circumstances occurred to arouse them.
Columbus, having observed great flights of small field-birds going
toward the southwest, concluded they must be secure of some neighboring
land, where they would find food and a resting-place. He knew the
importance which the Portuguese voyagers attached to the flight of
birds, by following which they had discovered most of their islands.
He had now come seven hundred and fifty leagues, the distance at which
he had computed to find the island of Cipango; as there was no
appearance of it, he might have missed it through some mistake in the
latitude. He determined, therefore, on the evening of the 7th of
October, to alter his course to the west-southwest—the direction in
which the birds generally flew—and continue that direction for at least
two days.
After all, it was no great deviation from his main course, and would
meet the wishes of the Pinzons, as well as be inspiriting to his
followers generally.
For three days they stood in this direction, and the farther they went
the more frequent and encouraging were the signs of land. Flights of
small birds of various colors, some of them such as sing in the fields,
came flying about the ships, and then continued toward the southwest,
and others were heard also flying by in the night. Tunny fish played
about the smooth sea, and a heron, a pelican, and a duck were seen, all
bound in the same direction. The herbage which floated by was fresh and
green, as if recently from land, and the air, Columbus observed, was as
sweet and fragrant as April breezes in Seville.
All these, however, were regarded by the crews as so many delusions
beguiling them on to destruction; and when on the evening of the third
day they beheld the sun go down upon a shoreless ocean, they broke forth
into turbulent clamor. They exclaimed against this obstinacy in tempting
fate by continuing on into a boundless sea. They insisted upon turning
homeward and abandoning the voyage as hopeless.
Columbus endeavored to pacify them by gentle words and promises of large
rewards; but finding that they only increased in clamor, he assumed a
decided tone. He told them that it was useless to murmur; the expedition
had been sent by the sovereigns to seek the Indies, and, happen what
might, he was determined to persevere until, by the blessing of God, he
should accomplish the enterprise.
Columbus was now at open defiance with his crew, and his situation
became desperate. Fortunately the manifestations of the vicinity of land
were such on the following day as no longer to admit a doubt. Besides a
quantity of fresh weeds, such as grow in rivers, they saw a green fish
of a kind which keeps about rocks; then a branch of thorn with berries
on it, and recently separated from the tree, floated by them; then they
picked up a reed, a small board, and, above all, a staff artificially
carved.
All gloom and mutiny now gave way to sanguine expectation, and
throughout the day each one was eagerly on the watch, in hopes of being
the first to discover the long-sought-for land.
In the evening, when, according to invariable custom on board of the
admiral’s ship, the mariners had sung the _Salve Regina_, or vesper hymn
to the Virgin, he made an impressive address to his crew. He pointed out
the goodness of God in thus conducting them by soft and favoring breezes
across a tranquil ocean, cheering their hopes continually with fresh
signs, increasing as their fears augmented, and thus leading and guiding
them to a promised land.
He now reminded them of the orders he had given on leaving the
Canaries—that, after sailing westward seven hundred leagues, they should
not make sail after midnight. Present appearances authorized such a
precaution. He thought it probable they would make land that very night;
he ordered, therefore, a vigilant lookout to be kept from the
forecastle, promising to whomsoever should make the discovery a doublet
of velvet in addition to the pension to be given by the sovereigns.
The breeze had been fresh all day, with more sea than usual, and they
had made great progress. At sunset they had stood again to the west, and
were plowing the waves at a rapid rate, the Pinta keeping the lead, from
her superior sailing. The greatest animation prevailed throughout the
ships; not an eye was closed that night.
As the evening darkened, Columbus took his station on the top of the
castle or cabin on the high poop of his vessel, ranging his eye along
the dusky horizon, and maintaining an intense and unremitting watch.
About ten o’clock he thought he beheld a light glimmering at a great
distance. Fearing his eager hopes might deceive him, he called to Pedro
Gutierrez, gentleman of the king’s bedchamber, and inquired whether he
saw such a light; the latter replied in the affirmative.
Doubtful whether it might not yet be some delusion of the fancy,
Columbus called Rodrigo Sanchez, of Segovia, and made the same inquiry.
By the time the latter had ascended the round-house the light had
disappeared. They saw it once or twice afterward in sudden and passing
gleams—as if it were a torch in the bark of a fisherman, rising and
sinking with the waves, or in the hand of some person on shore borne up
and down as he walked from house to house.
So transient and uncertain were these gleams that few attached any
importance to them; Columbus, however, considered them as certain signs
of land, and, moreover, that the land was inhabited.
They continued their course until two in the morning, when a gun from
the Pinta gave the joyous signal of land. It was first descried by a
mariner named Rodrigo de Triana; but the reward was afterward adjudged
to the admiral for having previously perceived the light.
The land was now clearly seen about two leagues distant, whereupon they
took in sail and laid to, waiting impatiently for the dawn.
The thoughts and feelings of Columbus In this little space of time must
have been tumultuous and intense. At length, in spite of every
difficulty and danger, he had accomplished his object. The great mystery
of the ocean was revealed; his theory, which had been the scoff of
sages, was triumphantly established; he had secured to himself a glory
durable as the world itself.
It is difficult to conceive the feelings of such a man at such a moment,
or the conjectures which must have thronged upon his mind as to the land
before him, covered with darkness. That it was fruitful was evident from
the vegetables which floated from its shores.
He thought, too, that he perceived the fragrance of aromatic groves. The
moving light he had beheld proved it to be the residence of man. But
what were its inhabitants? Were they like those of the other parts of
the globe, or were they some strange and monstrous race, such as the
imagination was prone in those times to give to all remote and unknown
regions? Had he come upon some wild island far in the Indian Sea, or was
this the famed Cipango itself, the object of his golden fancies?
A thousand speculations of the kind must have swarmed upon him, as, with
his anxious crews, he waited for the night to pass away; wondering
whether the morning light would reveal a savage wilderness, or dawn upon
spicy groves, and glittering fanes, and gilded cities, and all the
splendors of Oriental civilization.
ORIGIN OF POPULAR GAMES.
Dice-Shaking, Chess, and Polo Rank As Patriarchs, While Ping-Pong and
Basket-Ball May be Said to Be Only Fledgelings Just Out of the
Incubator—Football Was Taken to England by the Romans.
Few nations are able to boast of such a great variety of games as are
played in Great Britain and the United States. In many cases the
Anglo-Saxon has been responsible for the preservation of games which are
now almost unknown in the countries in which they had their origin. Some
of these forms of diversion are older than the Roman Empire, while
others, like ping-pong and basket-ball, are of recent invention.
=BASEBALL= holds undisputed sway as the American national game. It is
founded on the old English game of rounders, and for almost a century
it has been known in the Eastern States in various forms.
=BASKET-BALL= is unique, inasmuch as it was the invention of one man,
and was completed at a single sitting. In 1891, in the course of a
lecture at the Young Men’s Christian Association in Plainfield,
Massachusetts, the lecturer spoke of the mental processes of
invention, and used a game, with its limitations and necessities, as
an illustration. James Naismith, who was a member of the class, worked
out basket-ball that same night as an ideal game to meet the case. It
was presented the next day in the lecture-room and put in practise
with the aid of the members of the gymnasium. From there it spread to
other branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association and
subsequently to athletic clubs and the general public.
=BILLIARDS= is believed by some to have been brought from the East by
the Crusaders, while others claim an English origin for it and find it
allied to the game of bowls. Still others assert that the French
developed it from an ancient German game. It seems pretty certain that
the first person to give form and rule to the game was an artist,
named Henrique Devigne, who lived in the reign of Charles IX. One
writer sees in billiards the ancient game of paille-maille played on a
table instead of on the ground, and this is indeed a very reasonable
assumption.
=BOWLS=, or bowling, is one of the most popular and ancient of English
pastimes, its origin being traceable to the twelfth century. It was
held in such disfavor for years that laws were enacted against it and
it was an illegal pursuit. Alleys were built, however, as it could not
be played out-of-doors during the winter, and the game flourished in
spite of opposition. In the beginning of the eighteenth century greens
began to increase, while the alleys were rigorously and absolutely
suppressed. It soon became a royal game, and no gentleman’s place was
complete without a bowling-green.
=CHECKERS= is said by some to be a very old game, while others declare
it to be of comparatively modern origin. Whence it came is absolutely
unknown. The game is also called draughts, and there are many
varieties of it—Chinese, English, Polish, Spanish, Italian, and
Turkish. It is also found among the native tribes of the interior of
New Zealand.
=CHESS= always has been the subject of more dispute, so far as its
origin is concerned, than any other game. It is probably the most
ancient as well as the most intellectual of games, and it is played
all over the world. The belief which is most generally accepted is
that it came from the Hindoos, and the most conservative estimate
places its age at one thousand years. Some persons, however, claim an
age of from four to five thousand years for it. Its basis is the art
of war, and the Hindoo name for it, _chaturanga_, means the four
“angas” or members of an army which are given in Hindoo writings as
elephants, horses, chariots, and foot-soldiers.
=CRICKET= is the national game of Englishmen, and seems always to have
been played in Britain. The first mention of it is found in a
manuscript of the thirteenth century. The name comes from the Saxon
_cric_ or _cryc_, a crooked stick—an obvious reference to the bat with
which it is played. Wherever the English have colonized, the game is
played, and in many of the British possessions it has become popular
with the natives, notably in New Zealand.
=CROQUET= is said to have been derived from paille-maille, or mall,
which was played in Languedoc in the thirteenth century. Mall was very
popular in England at the time of the Stuarts. No other game has had
such fluctuations of fortune as croquet, as it sunk into oblivion by
the end of the eighteenth century, yet was revived during the middle
of the nineteenth, and assumed almost the popularity of a national
game.
=CURLING= has been popular in North Britain for the last three
centuries, and is regarded as a Scottish game. It is possible that
some of the Flemish merchants brought it into the country toward the
close of the sixteenth century, but however that may be, it owes its
development to the Scotch, and is now decidedly the national game of
Scotland.
=DICE= are said by some to have had their origin in occult sources,
but more reasonably they are ascribed to Psalmedes, of Greece, B.C.
1244. Those exhumed at Thebes are identical with those used to-day,
and the games played with them are the simplest and most widely known
games of chance in the world.
=FOOTBALL= was undoubtedly introduced into England by the Romans, and
is, therefore, older than the national game of cricket. Varieties of
it may be found in many parts of the world. It is known in the
Philippines and through the Polynesian Islands, among the Eskimos, the
Faroe Islands, and even by the Maoris of New Zealand. The Greeks also
played it.
=GOLF= is popularly supposed to have its origin In Scotland, but there
seems to be good reason for believing that it came from Holland. The
name itself is undoubtedly of German or Dutch extraction, and an
enactment of James I of England, bearing date 1618, refers to a
considerable importation of golf-balls from Holland, and at the same
time places a restriction upon this extravagant use, in a foreign
country, of the coin of the realm.
=LACROSSE= is the national ball-game of Canada. It came from the
aboriginal red men, who doubtless played it for many centuries before
the discovery of the New World. Different tribes played it in
different ways, and it was usually very rough. The name was given to
it by the French Canadians, who saw the resemblance between the curved
netted stick used in playing it and a bishop’s crozier or _crosse_.
=PING-PONG= is really table-tennis, and had its origin in that game.
Its immense popularity lasted only a brief space of time, and its
greatest vogue was in France and America.
=POKER= is probably a development of _il frusso_, an Italian game of
the fifteenth century. A similar game called _primiera_ was played in
Italy in the sixteenth century, and thence journeyed into Spain. In
France this became _ambigu_, and later appeared in England under the
name of brag. Poker is distinctly an American game, and seems to have
descended more directly from the game of brag than from any of the
others.
=POLO= is of Eastern origin, and has been a favorite pastime in
Persia, Tatary, and the frontiers of India from prehistoric times. The
name of the game varies with the district, and the rules are not the
same on minor points, though they are substantially alike on the main
issues. China and Japan also have a game closely resembling the
Persian sport.
=POOL AND PYRAMIDS= are both a form of billiards, and their origin
from the same source is apparent.
=SHUFFLEBOARD= probably comes from the same source as quoits, curling,
and bowling. It was immensely popular in England during the reign of
Henry VIII. Subsequently it was one of the games forbidden by law
because it turned the people from the practise of archery.
=TENNIS= is pronounced the oldest of all the existing ball-games. It
is impossible to give its origin, but it was played in Europe during
the Middle Ages, in the parks or ditches of the feudal castles. It was
at first the pastime of kings and nobles, but later it grew popular
with all classes. The French took it from the Italians and the English
from the French.
=WHIST= undoubtedly is derived from the old game of trumps, which has
a purely English lineage. There is no record of the origin of this
game nor of its development into ruff-and-honors, which was the parent
of whist. The earliest reference to it is believed to be in a sermon
of Latimer’s, about the year 1529. The name probably is derived from
the “hist” or “silence” which close attention to play demands of the
players.
THE WORLD’S GREAT OPERAS.[1]
=Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman—No. 3.=
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Footnote 1:
This series began in THE SCRAP BOOK for August. Single copies, 10c.
[Sidenote: =The Flying Dutchman.=]
Ten weeks after the production of “Rienzi,” the Dresden Theater produced
Wagner’s new opera, “The Flying Dutchman,” which had been composed in
seven weeks after the completion of “Rienzi.” Much to the surprise of
Wagner and his friends, “The Flying Dutchman” met with a cold reception,
and served to slam shut in Wagner’s face the door of popularity which
“Rienzi” had opened. The work was inadequately staged and sung; but a
more effective cause of its failure lay in the fact that it was a new
kind of opera, whose method the public did not understand.
Wagner had begun to apply his theory of leading motives, or reminiscent
melodies. These motives are phrases of a few notes rendered by the
orchestra, each of which symbolizes a character, a psychological mood,
or an event of dramatic weight.
While listening to the story which the orchestra is telling, one may
without difficulty foretell the entrance of a character, the approach of
doom, or the fateful result of an action. From these motives, modulated
through strange keys and sung by instruments of differing colors, the
scores of Wagner’s late operas, from “Die Meistersinger” on, were in
their entirety composed.
❧ ❧ ❧
[Sidenote: =Wagner.=]
Wagner received his idea for “The Flying Dutchman” from a dramatic
episode in his own life. At the time of the production of his opera,
“The Novice of Palermo,” he was living beyond his means in Russia, in
the town of Riga.
The failure of his opera left him heavily in debt, and the importunities
of creditors decided him to escape in disguise from Russian territory.
Minna, his wife, masqueraded as the wife of a lumberman, who took her as
far as Pillau, in north Prussia, to which place Wagner was assisted by a
different route. From that seaport he embarked with his wife, an opera
and a half, a diminutive purse, and a Newfoundland dog, on a
sailing-vessel to London, and thence to Paris.
Before leaving Riga, Wagner had read the legend of the Flying Dutchman,
who was condemned to sail forever till the love of a faithful woman
should release him from this curse. Among the wild storms of Wagner’s
own voyage, in the wild romance of the passage through Northern fiords,
he became obsessed by the story.
Perhaps it was not only the charm of the music of the sea and the lilt
of the sailor’s songs which inspired him, but also his own heart’s
craving for a cessation from wandering, and a home blessed by peace.
❧ ❧ ❧
[Sidenote: =Argument.=]
When the curtain rises we gaze on a wide storm-tossed ocean; the ship of
the Norwegian mariner, _Daland_, lies at anchor near shore. Presently
the sails of the _Flying Dutchman’s_ vessel emerge, blood-red, from the
blackness of the storm. The _Dutchman_ steps ashore, for another term of
seven years is past, and he is free to seek once more on earth the love
of a faithful woman, whose devotion shall save him from the curse of
wandering.
When _Daland_ reappears on deck he sees the _Dutchman_ and greets him,
although he is a stranger, with open-hearted cordiality. The _Dutchman_
begs asylum for a few days in _Daland’s_ home, a few miles away,
offering _Daland_ in return a share of the treasures he has amassed. To
this _Daland_ consents.
“Have you a daughter?” asks the _Dutchman_.
“A beautiful daughter named Senta,” _Daland_ answers.
Then, with the precipitancy characteristic of all Wagner’s lovers, the
_Dutchman_ cries:
“Let her be my wife!”
_Daland_, gazing on the treasures which the _Dutchman_ has shown him,
joyously gives his permission.
The second act shows us a room in _Daland’s_ house, where _Senta’s_
friends are sitting before wheels, gaily singing and spinning. _Senta_
herself sits apart, gazing sentimentally at a portrait over the door—the
portrait of the _Flying Dutchman_.
The gay song of her friends irritates her, and she bids them cease.
“Then sing us a better song yourself!” they cry.
_Senta_ accepts the challenge, and sings the ballad of “The Flying
Dutchman.” At its close she jumps up and cries that she will be the
woman to save the suffering mariner.
A few minutes later _Daland_ enters, accompanied by the _Dutchman_.
_Senta’s_ eyes leap away from her father to the man beside him.
Speechless and immobile she stares at the face of her dreams.
“Father, who is this stranger?” she breathes.
And _Daland_ whispers that he is a rich mariner who has come to woo her,
and whom she must favor.
_Daland_ then leaves them alone. For long moments they stare at each
other, while the passion of love for the first time fills the
_Dutchman’s_ heart, and _Senta_ sees her fancies take form in reality.
When _Daland_ returns, _Senta_ has plighted her faith in the arms of her
long-desired lover.
The third act presents the sea again. Two ships lie at anchor. That of
_Daland_, which is gay with lights and movement, and the fantom ship of
the _Dutchman_, dark and silent. Suddenly the sea, calm elsewhere,
begins to rise about the ship of the _Flying Dutchman_.
Tongues of light shriek about its masts, a storm howls, the crew
appears, and in satanic strains taunt the captain because he has not
even yet found a faithful woman. Then suddenly the sea subsides, and
darkness and silence again cover the ship.
_Senta_ comes out of the door of her house, accompanied by a suitor,
Erik. _Erik_ pleads with her not to marry the _Dutchman_, but to renew
that affection for himself which she must, he says, formerly have felt.
He reminds her of an occasion when she stood, her arm about his neck,
her hand in his.
The _Dutchman_ has drawn near, quite unperceived by either one of them,
and has heard this tale. Ignorant of _Senta’s_ passion for himself, and
now believing her to be but a mere flirt, he rushes forward, crying,
“Farewell, Senta!” Then, pointing to the anchored ship, whose blood-red
sails are being hoisted, he cries:
“I am the Flying Dutchman!”
As he leaps on board, the vessel moves out of the harbor. _Senta_ runs
to a rock, from which she plunges after her lover into the sea.
As she does so, the curse is lifted, the fantom ship falls apart, and
_Senta_ and the _Flying Dutchman_ together arise transfigured from the
waves.
A NATION WITHOUT A LANGUAGE.
Despite Their Intense Patriotism, the Swiss Borrow Their “Mother-Tongue”
from Three Other Countries—A Polyglot Parliament.
The Swiss constitute that curious anomaly, a nation without a language,
and in this they are alone among all the peoples of the world. This is
all the more remarkable when their intense patriotism is considered, and
their really wonderful love of country.
The official languages are German, French, and Italian, these three
being the recognized “mother-tongue” of the majority of the inhabitants.
About three-fourths of the people speak German, while the remainder
divide four other languages among them—mainly French and Italian—the
languages varying, as a rule, according to the proximity of the people
to each country whose tongue they speak.
Public documents and notices are printed in both the French and German
languages. In the Swiss National Parliament the members make their
speeches either in French or German, for nearly all the members
understand both these languages.
The orders of the President are translated by an official interpreter
and furnished to the newspapers in both languages.
Three, Seven, and Thirteen.
Strange Persistence in Nature of These Mystic Numbers, Each of Which Has
Ever Been Regarded as Deeply Significant by the Various Races at
Different Periods of History, and Especially in Religious Observance.
Superstition of some sort or other has been attached to certain numbers
from time immemorial, but the numbers three, seven, and thirteen have
been particularly favored, and three and seven have figured very
prominently in mythology, scriptural history, and elsewhere. Three is
called the perfect number, seven is regarded as lucky, and thirteen as
unlucky.
It was Pythagoras who termed three the “perfect number,” because it
expressed “the beginning, the middle, and the end,” signifying a perfect
whole.
On this account he made it a symbol of the Deity, and the “Holy Trinity”
is now, and doubtless will be always, the most potent symbol of
Christianity. The world was supposed to be under the rule of three gods:
Jupiter (heaven), Neptune (sea), and Pluto (Hades). Jove is represented
carrying three-forked lightning. Neptune carries a trident, and Pluto is
accompanied by a three-headed dog.
Divides Things Into Three Parts.
There are three Fates, three Furies, and three Graces. The Harpies are
three in number; there are three Sibylline books, and the fountain in
Mysia, from which Hylas drew water, was presided over by three nymphs.
The pythoness sat on a tripod; the Muses are three times three. Both Man
and the World are threefold—the former, body, soul, and spirit; the
latter, earth, sea, and air. The enemies of Man are the world, the
flesh, and the devil; the kingdoms of Nature are animal, vegetable, and
mineral. The cardinal colors are red, yellow, and blue.
In almost all countries new laws have to pass three bodies. In the
United States, State laws pass the Assembly, the State Senate, and the
Governor. Federal laws pass the House of Representatives, the Senate,
and the President. In England there are the Commons, the Lords, and the
King to be reckoned with.
Concerning the church there were the “Three Chapters,” otherwise three
books on the subject of the Incarnation and the two natures of Christ,
which caused a great controversy during the reign of Justinian and the
popedom of Vigilius. In 553 these books were condemned by the General
Council at Constantinople. One was written by Theodore, of Mopsuestia;
one by Theodoret, of Cyprus; and the third by Ibas, Bishop of Edessa.
It was the “three bishoprics” of France that passed to the German rule
after the Franco-Prussian War. They were Metz, Verdun, and Lorraine,
each of which was once under the lordship of a bishop. In early days the
churches were usually provided with what was known as a “three decker.”
This structure consisted of the clerk’s desk, the reading-desk, and the
pulpit, one above the other. Then again, Epiphany or Twelfth Day is
sometimes known as “Three Kings’ Day,” as it is supposed to commemorate
the visit of the three kings, or wise men, to the infant Jesus.
The three estates of the realm are the nobility, the clergy, and the
commonalty in England, the sovereign being in a class by himself. One of
the collects in the English prayer-books thanks God for preserving “the
king and the three estates of the realm.” It was Burke who designated
the press of the country “the fourth estate.”
Mention must also be made of the “three R’s” of education: reading,
’riting, and ’rithmetic; and the Bible is composed of three parts: Old
Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha.
The Holiness of Seven.
Seven always has been a holy number, and that may be why it is
considered lucky. The creation occupied seven days; there are seven
spirits before the throne of God. There are seven days in the week;
seven divisions of the Lord’s Prayer; seven ages in the life of man; and
the just are supposed to fall “seven times a day.”
The moon has seven phases, every seventh year was sabbatical for the
Jews, and seven times seven years was the “jubilee.” The three great
feasts of the Jews lasted seven days, and seven weeks elapsed between
the first and the second of these.
Levitical purifications lasted seven days. In the Bible are mentioned
seven candlesticks, seven trumpets, seven stars, and seven horns. The
Lamb had seven eyes. Ten times seven Israelites went into Egypt, and the
exile lasted ten times seven years. There were ten times seven elders,
and Pharaoh, in his dream, saw seven ears of corn and seven kine.
The bibles or sacred books of the world are seven in number: the Bible
of the Christians; the Eddas of the Scandinavians; the Five Kings of the
Chinese; the Koran of the Mohammedans; the Tri Pitikes of the Buddhists;
the three Vedas of the Hindus; and the Zendavesta of the Persians.
Incidentally, the Koran dates from the seventh century.
The seven churches of Asia were founded in the following cities:
Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.
Strangely enough, each of these churches, which were founded by the
Apostles themselves, are now Mohammedan, and the cities in which they
stand, with the exception of Smyrna, are more or less insignificant.
Before the throne of God stand seven angels. They are Michael, Gabriel,
Lamael, Raphael, Zachariel, Anael, and Oriphel. The Deity is endowed
with seven spirits: the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Understanding,
the Spirit of Counsel, the Spirit of Power, the Spirit of Righteousness,
the Spirit of Knowledge, and the Spirit of Divine Awfulness.
In the life of the Virgin Mary there were Seven Joys and Seven Sorrows.
The former were the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the
Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple, the finding of
Christ among the Doctors, and the Assumption. The sorrows were: Simeon’s
Prophecy, the Flight into Egypt, the unexplained absence of Christ, the
Betrayal, the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, and the
Ascension, when Mary was left alone. In the picture “Our Lady of Dolors”
she is represented with her breast pierced with seven swords emblematic
of her seven sorrows.
Seven Men Who Did Wonders In Chivalry.
The Seven Champions of Christendom were: St. George, of England, who was
imprisoned seven years; St. Denys, of France, who lived seven years in
the form of a hart; St. James, of Spain, who was dumb for seven years
out of love for a Jewess; St. Anthony, of Italy, who was released from
his enchanted sleep by St. George’s sons, who quenched seven lamps; St
Andrew, of Scotland, who delivered six ladies who had lived seven years
as white swans; St. David, of Wales, who was released from a seven
years’ enchanted sleep by St. George; and St. Patrick, of Ireland.
The Seven Sages of Greece and their mottoes were: Solon, of Athens:
“Know thyself.” Chilo, of Sparta: “Consider the end.” Thales, of
Miletos: “Who hateth suretyship is sure.” Bias, of Priene: “Most men are
bad.” Cleobulos, of Lindos: “The golden mean,” or “Avoid extremes.”
Pittacos, of Mitylene: “Seize time by the forelock.” And Periander, of
Corinth: “Nothing is impossible to industry.”
How the Old Alchemists Relied on Seven.
There are seven bodies in alchemy, each having its planet. They are:
gold, the sun; silver, the moon; iron, Mars; quicksilver, Mercury; lead,
Saturn; tin, Jupiter; and copper, Venus.
The Seven Deadly Sins are pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, avarice,
and sloth; while the Seven Virtues are faith, hope, charity, prudence,
justice, fortitude, and temperance.
Ancient teaching had it that the soul of a man was composed of seven
properties, each under the influence of a planet, thus: fire animates,
earth gives the sense of feeling, speech is gained from water, air gives
taste, sight comes from mist, flowers give hearing, and the south wind
gives smelling. Here are the seven senses, and then, too, as the boys at
school are fond of saying, there are seven holes in one’s head: two
ears, two eyes, two nostrils, and the mouth.
The Seven Sleepers were seven youths of Ephesus who fled from
persecution to a cave and slept therein for many years. Their names were
Constantine, Dionysius, John, Maximian, Malchus, Martinian, and
Serapion.
There are two groups of Seven Wonders of the World. The antique group
consisted of the Pyramids, Babylon’s Hanging Gardens, Mausolus’s Tomb,
the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Colossus of Rhodes, Jupiter’s Statue
by Phidias, the Pharos of Egypt, and the Palace of Cyrus (which was
cemented with gold).
The seven wonders of the Middle Ages were the Colosseum, the Catacombs
at Alexandria, the Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, the Leaning Tower of
Pisa, the Porcelain Tower of Nankin, and the Mosque of St. Sophia at
Constantinople.
The Origin of “Unlucky Thirteen.”
Thirteen is regarded as unlucky by a great many people who claim that
they are not superstitious about other things, and there are thousands
of tales of unfortunate occurrences supposedly due to that number.
The origin of the superstition is very generally supposed to be the
“Last Supper,” at which the Lord and His Twelve Apostles were present.
As a matter of history, the belief in the “hoodoo” antedates
Christianity by centuries. Norse mythology deemed it unlucky to sit down
thirteen at a banquet table, because at such a feast in the Valhalla,
Loki, the spirit of evil and the god of strife, once intruded. Balder,
the god of peace, was killed by the blind war-god Hoder, at the
instigation of Loki.
The Turks so dislike the number that the word indicating it has become
almost expurged from their vocabulary. The Italians never use it in
making up their lotteries, and in Paris no house bears the number; and
there is in existence there a profession the members of which make their
living attending dinner parties in order to make the fourteenth at
table.
At a discussion of superstitions recently one young man ventured the
remark that he knew of hundreds of buildings in New York that had no
thirteenth story.
“How is that?” he was asked.
“They are only twelve stories high,” was the reply.
Nevertheless, there are several skyscrapers in the metropolis in which
the number thirteen is skipped both in numbering the floors and in
numbering the rooms. The Kuhn-Loeb Building, at the corner of Pine and
William Streets, is an example, and the building at the corner of
William and Wall Streets has a twelfth floor and a fourteenth floor, but
no floor in between.
THE STORY OF THE KILKENNY CATS.
Hessian Soldiers, Stationed in Ireland, Were Responsible for One of the
Most Desperate Battles in History.
For more than a century the Kilkenny cats, which “fought until there was
nothing left of them but their tails,” have been regarded as the most
quarrelsome creatures of which there is any record.
Various accounts of their memorable encounter have appeared from time to
time, but the version which is given the most credence is that offered
by a writer in the _Irish Nation_. This story is as follows:
The story has been so long current that it has become a proverb—“as
quarrelsome as the Kilkenny cats”; two of the cats in which city are
asserted to have fought so long and so ferociously that naught was
found of them but their tails.
The facts are these: During the rebellion which occurred in Ireland in
1798, Kilkenny was garrisoned by a regiment of Hessian soldiers, whose
custom it was to tie together, in one of their barrack-rooms, two cats
by their respective tails, and then throw them face to face across a
line generally used for drying clothes. The cats naturally became
infuriated, and scratched each other in the abdomen until death ensued
to one or both of them.
The officers were made acquainted with the barbarous acts of cruelty,
and resolved to put an end to them. For this purpose an officer was
ordered to inspect each barrack-room daily and report its state. The
soldiers, determined not to lose the daily torture of the cats,
generally employed one of their comrades to watch the approach of
their officer.
On one occasion he neglected his duty, and the officer was heard
ascending the stairs while the cats were undergoing their customary
torture. One of the troopers seized a sword from the armrack and with
a single blow divided the tails of the cats.
The cats escaped through the open windows of the room, which was
entered instantly afterward by the officer, who inquired what was the
cause of the two bleeding cat’s tails being suspended on the line, and
was told in reply that “two cats had been fighting in the room; that
it was found impossible to separate them, and they fought so
desperately that they had devoured each other up, with the exception
of their two tails.”
DEAR HANDS.
Of the gems reprinted in THE SCRAP BOOK, our readers have received none
more gladly than Mrs. Susan Marr Spalding’s “Fate,” which appeared in
our first issue. Her name was then given as “Spaulding,” an error which
we take this occasion to correct.
Few who read the poem in the March SCRAP BOOK were aware that Mrs.
Spalding was still living. It is many years since “Fate” first appeared.
The author’s fame, while amply justified by many other poems, has been
permitted to rest upon that single earlier product, and the author
herself has been lost sight of. Since “Fate” appeared, however, she has
written much that is worthy of long remembrance.
Mrs. Spalding has been living with a friend, Mrs. Louise P. Sargent, of
West Medford, Massachusetts, who writes of her, saying: “She is a
helpless invalid, but so sweet and helpful that her influence radiates
through a large circle.” Many friends sent her the March SCRAP BOOK, and
she said:
“I am growing tired of ‘Fate.’ Why don’t they copy some of the sonnets,
which are surely as deserving?”
Mrs. Spalding’s later poems, while perhaps no one of them strikes so
vital a tone as “Fate,” are of high merit. We reprint from “The Wings of
Icarus,” published by Roberts Brothers in 1892, the following fine
sonnet:
BY SUSAN MARR SPALDING.
Roughened and worn with ceaseless toil and care,
No perfumed grace, no dainty skill had these;
They earned for whiter hands a jeweled ease,
And kept the scars unlovely for their share.
Patient and slow, they had the will to bear
The whole world’s burdens, but no power to seize
The flying joys of life, the gifts that please,
The gold and gems that others find so fair.
Dear hands, where bridal jewel never shone,
Whereon no lover’s kiss was ever pressed,
Crossed in unwonted quiet on the breast—
I see, through tears, your glory newly won;
The golden circlet of life’s work well done,
Set with the shining pearl of perfect rest.
FROM THE COUNTRY PRESS.
Joys and Sorrows That Flit With the Flies Into Rural Editorial
Sanctums—A Denial of Matrimonial Intent, the Tale of a Dog, and a Little
Gossip That May be Useful at Quilting Parties.
AN ANNOUNCEMENT.
Miss May Tybell says she ain’t engaged to anybody, and that she won’t
be, there being too much foolishness in Link already.—_Henderson
(Nebraska) Tribune._
ROUGH ON THE COLT.
While Elwood Gardner was caring for a colt in the stable Thursday he
reared and kicked him in the stomach, hurting him so badly that he is
not able to do anything.—_Coldwater (Michigan) Courier._
THEIR EQUIPMENT.
The correspondent, as well as the entire town and county, extend the
best wishes and success to this happy pair. There is not the least doubt
in any mind that they will succeed socially as well as financially, as
each has an unequivocal sense of ubiquity.—_Wapello (Iowa) Republican._
LOST AND WON AD.
Lost—By Miss Susie Holbert, Saturday night, among the Sir Knights and
the Daughters of St. Marace Tabernacle, No. 10, money tied in a
handkerchief. Failure to return the money has caused some feelings. Miss
Holbert won first prize in the U. M. P. J. J. M. Whist Club.—_Lawrence
(Kansas) Gazette._
A REMARKABLE COINCIDENCE.
They tell of a North Atchison woman who was preserving cherries when the
preacher called. She couldn’t leave her work, so he was called to the
kitchen, and she watched her preserves while he talked, and stirred them
in a quiet, religious way while he offered a prayer. The prayer and the
preserves were done at the same time.—_Atchison Globe._
A SEQUATCHIE MYSTERY.
Wonder what George Marson is doing over here riding muleback. He passed
by here Sunday with his two-story collar on and with both hands in his
pocket up to his elbows, with his feet lying between the mule’s ears. He
had his shoes shined and he did not want to get them soiled. His mule
was so small that his feet would drag.—_Sequatchie (Tennessee) News._
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.
Don’t sneak in at a ball game. Up at Salina last week a fellow borrowed
a boat, crossed the river, got his feet wet and muddy, climbed up the
bank, tore a five-dollar pair of pants on the underbrush, got poison-ivy
all over his face, slipped up to the game in the park from the rear—all
this but to find out that no admission was charged to the
game.—_Marquette (Kansas) Tribune._
THE WORM TURNS.
The lady (?) who yesterday called the attention of another to our
patched breeches, whereat they both laughed so heartily, is informed
that a new pair will be purchased when her husband’s bill is settled. It
has been due nearly a year. Don’t criticise a printer’s dress too
closely while you are wearing silks with money due him. Tell your
husband to send us twenty dollars and seventy-three cents, and save the
cost of an entire suit.—_Swainsboro Forest._
THE KIND OF DOG IT WAS.
The following notice has been published in a northern Peninsula paper by
a French-Canadian:
“Loosed. One dawg. Been loose him bout three weeks. Him white dawg
almost white with him tail cut off close next to her body. Anybody find
her bring him to me. I belong to him and shall give good rewards for the
same. Black spot on him nose about size fifty cents or dollar piece,
Canada money or United States all the same. For yours truly with
anxious, Felix Carno, hind side of Methody Church about three blocks in
the house up-stairs with green painting.”—_Exchange._
Van Nesten and the Burglar.
BY W. S. ROGERS.
The wind blew and blew. It flapped across the river and disported itself
up through the town, shaking and tearing at things—gates, chimneys, and
wire-hung smokestacks. It shrieked and roared through alleys and around
corners, and at last it careened up Main Street, on the very stroke of
midnight. There it contended with an uncertain-minded person, whom it
found trying to navigate.
This was Mr. Chester Van Nesten, and he was supposed (by himself only,
for no one else on earth knew anything at all about it) to be going
somewhere. Not home, however, for Mr. Van Nesten was opposed to going
home in dark and windy weather at twelve o’clock at night. “M’ dear,”
he had said impressively when he thought of home, “lodge
meet’n—in-itiation—unfit s’ciety la’ies!” And that, several times
repeated, seemed to clinch the argument.
Having formed a resolution not to go to his home until such time as the
streets and buildings, which whirled about him so erratically, should
find themselves once more in their proper positions, he decided to go to
his office and there spend the night.
At length, after a series of wonderful tacks, he succeeded in steering
up to the darkened building in which were situated the offices of the
firm of Hidgepit & Van Nesten.
Pausing before the stairway entrance of the old building, Mr. Van Nesten
rattled at the door-knob.
“Locked!” he muttered as he fumbled uncertainly in his pockets.
The keys were forthcoming in due time, and then, in a spasmodic manner,
he applied himself to the task of opening the door. He succeeded. Then,
closing the door after him, he slouched and stumbled along till he
encountered a staircase. Mr. Van Nesten paused to rest and consider this
staircase, and then, breathing very hard, he clutched an invisible
bannister and began by painful degrees to ascend.
Hidgepit & Van Nesten’s office was on the second floor, near the center
of the building. Hidgepit & Van Nesten’s composing-room being in front
and Hidgepit & Van Nesten’s bindery in the rear. Mr. Van Nesten arrived
at last at the office. He stumbled in and endeavored to light the gas.
But he had no matches—none—and after solemnly expressing appreciation of
this mystery, he groped about in the dark for a time, thumping himself
uncertainly against things, till he found a certain small
leather-covered couch or lounge that reposed in a corner of the room
with its head against a big iron safe. Mr. Van Nesten, breathing audible
relief, sat down to rest.
His father-in-law and senior partner, Mr. Hidgepit, owned this lounge,
and was in the habit of reclining on it daily (Sundays excepted) after
lunch, while he meditated and encouraged digestion.
Van Nesten was very well satisfied, then, and sat quite still for a few
moments while he contemplated the equity of things. He removed his coat
and hat, but, finding no place to put them, he held them for a moment
and then flung them from him. He endeavored to consider the iniquity of
his coat and hat—and it ended by his head falling forward again, and
then he dropped completely over and went sound asleep on the couch.
Some hours later Mr. Van Nesten awoke—a little gradually—in confusion
and with reluctance. But a blinding stream of light was in his eyes and
a figure—a grotesque and crouching figure, with a strip of black cloth
across its face—was before him. This he became more or less vaguely
aware of, and then came the pressure of something cold and hard against
his right temple. He flashed wide awake in an instant—and perfectly,
perfectly sober.
“Don’t move,” said the burglar. And Mr. Van Nesten didn’t. The burglar
ran a deft hand over him to detect the presence of possible fire-arms,
and then he stepped back.
“Get up!” he said sharply.
Van Nesten stood up. He was a young man, of good physique, and now that
the first shock was over, did not feel greatly afraid. He looked
steadfastly at the eyes which showed through the holes in the black
mask. The burglar regarded him steadily, his pistol in his hand. He was
taking stock of the situation.
“You belong here?” he demanded at last.
“I do,” said Van Nesten.
“Then”—the pistol was raised to a level with the young man’s head—“you
open that safe!”
Van Nesten winced. It is no light matter to look into the muzzle of a
big revolver. He experienced a quick impulse to duck—to fend his face—to
dodge and run, but he controlled himself and remained perfectly quiet.
“Don’t say you can’t!”
The burglar’s tone was threatening.
“I won’t, though!” said Van Nesten. He was surprised at his own quiet,
firm tones. “I won’t, though!” he repeated.
The silence then was electrical. The two men, tense as steel, stood
glaring at each other.
“You won’t!” The burglar’s attitude seemed to be more tense. “You
won’t!”
“I would—to save my life,” said Van Nesten, “but it’s not necessary. If
you kill me you’ll have murder as well as house-breaking to answer
for—besides being no nearer to getting the safe open. And it might make
a noise,” he added.
The burglar stood for an unpleasant, concentrated moment, and then he
seemed to grow a little less intense. He relaxed and uttered a curse.
“Throw up your hands!” he snapped.
“I’ll do that,” said Van Nesten, and he did.
The burglar put down his lantern and produced from his pocket a piece of
stout cord. He leaped into a chair. “Come here!” he said, with vicious
curtness. “Backwards!”
Van Nesten, turning about, endeavored to comply.
“Hands together!” said the burglar, when he had him satisfactorily
stationed. Van Nesten’s hands came together; and the burglar rapidly
wound round and round them at the wrists with an end of his cord. The
cold nozzle of his revolver pressed lightly against Van Nesten’s neck.
“No monkey business!” the intruder cautioned by way of general
admonition, as he drew it away. And then he tied Van Nesten’s hands.
He stepped down from the chair then and directed Van Nesten to climb up
in his place. Then he bound the young man’s ankles together. He was a
strong burglar and he bound them exceedingly well.
This done, he backed off and regarded his work. Van Nesten stood with
his back to him, in a perfectly helpless position. He could not even get
to the floor without severe risk of injury. The burglar walked round and
faced him.
“I ain’t going to gag you,” he growled. “You understand if you make a
noise what it will be—a personal risk to me? You understand that?”
“I understand,” said Van Nesten. “That’s the reason I’m tied. It won’t
be necessary to gag me.”
The burglar grunted.
“It’s also unnecessary to keep me standing up here,” went on Van Nesten
boldly. “Take hold of my elbow,” he said, “and steady me so I can jump
down.”
The burglar glared at him an instant in amazement, and then suddenly
jerked himself forward and seized him by the arm.
“Jump!” he said roughly.
When Van Nesten came down to the floor again the burglar gave him a
whirl about, and pushed him over into the chair. They regarded one
another steadily, then the burglar turned away.
“Keep your face shut now, will you?” he said, and went to pick up his
lantern again.
He approached the big iron safe as a man approaches his chosen work. Van
Nesten watched him making his arrangements—inspecting, tapping, and
fingering about—as deftly, accurately, and readily as a skilful artisan.
He never paused for an instant and his tools seemed ready to his hand.
Finally he prepared something with a few sharp clicks, and then he
dropped down to his knees and began to work—drilling.
Van Nesten did not at all enjoy his situation, but the pain from his
thongs soon gave way to a numbness, and then he did not suffer so much.
The only sound for several moments was the dull grind of the burglar’s
drill.
Suddenly the burglar stopped his work and began to snuff at the air. He
laid down his tools and raised his face toward the ceiling.
“By God!” he cried excitedly, and sprang to his feet. “What’s this
smoke?”
Van Nesten not only smelled it, but saw that it was pouring into the
room through the open door.
“This place is afire!” said the burglar.
Like a flash Van Nesten’s mind went back and he remembered himself
drunkenly ascending those stairs and lighting matches to try and find
the way. He remembered now that when he had entered the office there had
been no match left in his pocket. He gave a great wrench at his
thongs—but they held him fast. Van Nesten groaned.
The burglar was down on the floor again, gathering up his implements. He
was defter and quicker now than ever, and Van Nesten, in a cold sweat,
sat watching him.
The burglar’s tools clinked and jingled together as he stowed them away.
Then he suddenly leaped to his feet and faced Van Nesten.
“Shoot me—strangle me—do something!” cried Van Nesten. “For God’s sake
don’t leave me here like this!”
But the burglar had not hesitated an instant. His hand had been in his
pocket even as he rose from the floor, and a knife gleamed as he
advanced with a rush.
“Stab me, then!” said Van Nesten wildly. “Stab me, then! Don’t leave me
here to roast!”
“What!” cried the burglar. He recoiled from those words as suddenly as
if he had been hit. An upward motion tore the mask from his face, and
aghast he glared at Van Nesten.
“My God, man!” he said “what you think I am?”
The rising smoke eddied between them.
But the burglar recovered himself almost instantly.
“You’re scart,” he said, “and I don’t blame you.”
With two deft strokes of his knife he severed the cords that bound Van
Nesten’s hands and feet. Then he stepped back and thrust the knife in
his pocket.
“It’s up to you,” he said. “How are we going to get out of here?”
Van Nesten passed a hand across his forehead and staggered to his feet.
He stepped to the door and the burglar quickly followed.
“Wait!” said Van Nesten. He flashed the burglar’s lantern up and down
the hall. It was thoroughly full of smoke. His quickening mind took in
the whole situation.
“Come on!” he said.
He took the burglar by the hand and led him swiftly through the hall.
“Up?” asked the burglar.
Van Nesten opened a door and they passed out into the bindery among
stitching-machines and great stacks of unfolded paper.
“Good thing you brought this lantern!” remarked Van Nesten, leading
swiftly on. They encountered another hallway and more smoke, then a
flight of stairs, which they mounted two steps at a time.
“Can you open a door?” asked Van Nesten, when a locked one barred their
way. The burglar grunted and applied himself, while Van Nesten held the
light. Neither spoke, but hot clouds of smoke were coming up faster and
faster, and the sound of a crackling roar was beneath them. The fire was
coming on with a rush.
The door opened, and they burst into Greddin’s paper-box factory, full
of combustibles.
“This way!” cried Van Nesten, taking the burglar’s hand again. They ran
through tangled aisles of machinery, tables, and benches, the thick
smoke all about them. Then Van Nesten reached a window and he and the
burglar seized it together and threw it up. Shouts and the sounds of
confusion in the street came up to them now, and in the distance clanged
the gong of an approaching fire-engine. But there was no time to lose.
“Go ahead!” said Van Nesten. “It’s one at a time now.”
Then the burglar, with his head and shoulders through the window, drew
back, white and shaking.
“My God!” he exclaimed, “have we got to jump across there?”
It was a perfectly easy leap of five feet to the roof of the next
building, with a twenty-four inch drop to make it certain. “I can’t do
it!” the burglar groaned.
Van Nesten stared at him, appalled at his sudden fright. “You’re crazy!”
he cried. “It’s perfectly easy. Go on, man! Be quick!”
The burglar clutched the window-sill, looking out with wild eyes.
“I can’t!” he muttered despairingly. “I was always this way. I can’t do
it!”
“You’ve got to!” said Van Nesten. “By God! I’ll throw you over!”
But the burglar shrank away. His nerve was utterly gone.
“Save yourself,” he said. “It’s no use. I’ll never make it!”
Van Nesten glared about him. Then he cried:
“Quick, man, your knife! Some belting!” He leaped to the top of an
embossing-machine which stood near the window and seized hold of the
two-inch leather belt which connected with its overhead shafting. The
burglar had his knife ready and thrust it up to him. Van Nesten slashed
at the belt, and it fell in twain. He leaped to the floor, bearing an
end of it with him.
“Fasten it here—quick!” Van Nesten said, circling a projecting piece of
the heavy machine. “When I jump across throw me the other end of it. You
can cross on that.”
Van Nesten clambered to the window-frame and made his leap. His feet
crunched on the gravel roof of the next building.
“Come on! That belt!” he cried, rushing back to the edge of the roof.
“Come on!”
The burglar had already thrown it. It curled in a twisted mass at Van
Nesten’s feet, and he seized it up and retreated back on the roof with
the end of it. In vain he looked for a place to fasten it—hither and
thither he darted, and the burglar, his white face showing through the
smoke, his crouching body pressed down upon the window-frame, watched
him.
Van Nesten wrapped the belt around his body and stretched it taut. There
were twenty feet or more of it, and though the leverage would be against
him, he could, by keeping to the far end of it, easily sustain the
burglar’s weight for a distance of five feet from the window-frame on
which it rested.
“I’ve got you!” cried Van Nesten. “Come on!”
The burglar crept up on the window-sill, his feet curled beneath him.
Slowly, slowly his hand led out along the piece of belting—he reached to
the center and part of the space that lay between him and safety, but
still, distrusting, despairing, he clung to the window-ledge. Then he
lurched suddenly forward, and swung by his hands over the abyss.
Van Nesten, braced as he was, took a step forward under the quick
strain. The belt sagged, and the burglar sunk to a level with the roof.
Its cornice was almost in his face. Terror was upon him as he hung, and
he could not move. Then the belt slipped: Van Nesten could not hold it.
The burglar gasped and clutched at the edge of the roof. Van Nesten,
tangled in the belting, thought that he had fallen, and he hurried
forward. The white face was beneath him and his own wild eyes stared
into it.
Van Nesten, breathing heavily, bent over and took the burglar by the
wrists. Terror now was upon them both. Slowly Van Nesten drew up the
burglar who hung inert. It was not till his waist had passed the point
of safety that the burglar exerted himself. Then he made a sudden
frantic effort, and, wrenching himself free from Van Nesten, he crawled
out upon the roof.
He lay flat for a moment from sheer exhaustion, then he sat up.
“By God!” said the burglar, passing his hands over his face, “I don’t
want nothing more like that.”
Van Nesten, feeling suddenly weak, had sat down also. Now he turned
toward the burglar and burst out laughing.
The burglar gave Van Nesten a quick look.
“What’s to do with you and me?” he asked.
Van Nesten remained cheerful.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Say,” he immediately added, “got anything you
want to burn up? The firemen’ll be here in about a minute, you know.”
The burglar took the hint. He stood up and cast certain things through
the window to the room they had just left.
“Chuck that gun over there, too,” said Van Nesten, with just an
authoritative twang to his voice. The burglar, giving him another quick
look, complied.
The burglar stood a little awkwardly.
“Well, let’s get out of here,” said Van Nesten, springing up. “It’s
getting hot.”
Together they traveled over the roof toward the fire-escape.
ORIGIN OF “THE MARSEILLAISE.”
The Romantic Circumstances Attending the Writing of France’s National
Anthem By a Young Artillery Officer.
Probably no national hymn has ever roused the frenzy of patriotic
enthusiasm which always attends the singing of “The Marseillaise.” The
bloody deeds of the French Revolution were all accompanied to the music
of this inspiring song, and curiously enough, it seems to fire the
hearts of the people when they are actuated by widely different motives.
The origin of the song is interesting and would seem to indicate that it
was indeed an inspiration in the true sense of the word. Lamartine gives
the story in his “Histoire des Girondins.”
In the garrison of Strasburg was quartered a young artillery officer,
named Rouget de Lisle, a native of Louis de Salnier, in the Jura. He
had a great taste for music and poetry, and often entertained his
comrades during their long and tedious hours in the garrison. Sought
after for his musical and poetical talent, he was a frequent and
familiar guest at the house of one Dietrich, an Alsatian patriot,
Mayor of Strasburg.
The winter of 1792 was a period of great scarcity at Strasburg. The
house of Dietrich was poor, his table was frugal, but a seat was
always open to Rouget de Lisle.
One day there was nothing but bread and some slices of smoked ham on
the table. Dietrich, regarding the young officer, said to him, with
sad serenity:
“Abundance fails at our boards; but what matters that, if enthusiasm
fails not at our civic _fêtes_, nor courage in the hearts of our
soldiers? I have still a last bottle of wine in my cellar. Bring it,”
said he to one of his daughters, “and let us drink France and Liberty!
Strasburg should have its patriotic solemnity. De Lisle must draw from
these last drops one of those hymns which raise the soul of the
people.”
The wine was brought and drank, after which the officer departed. The
night was cold. De Lisle was thoughtful. His heart was moved, his head
heated. He returned staggering to his solitary room and slowly sought
inspiration—sometimes in the fervor of his citizen soul, and anon on
the keys of his instrument, composing now the air before the words,
and then the words before the air. He sung all, and wrote nothing, and
at last, exhausted, fell asleep with his head resting on his
instrument, and awoke not till daybreak.
The music of the night returned to his mind like the impression of a
dream. He wrote it, and ran to Dietrich, whom he found in the garden
digging winter lettuces. The wife and daughters of the old man were
not up. Dietrich awoke them, and called in some friends, all as
passionate as himself for music, and able to execute the composition
of De Lisle. At the first stanza, cheeks grew pale; at the second,
tears flowed; and at the last the delirium of enthusiasm burst forth.
The wife of Dietrich, his daughters, himself, and the young officer,
threw themselves, crying, into each other’s arms.
The hymn of the country was found. Executed some days afterward in
Strasburg, the new song flew from city to city, and was played by all
the popular orchestras. Marseilles adopted it to be sung at the
commencement of the sittings of the clubs, and the Marseillaise spread
it through France, singing it along the public roads. From this came
the name of “Marseillaise.”
THE LAKE OF THE DISMAL SWAMP.
While Thomas Moore held a minor appointment in Bermuda, early in the
last century, he visited the United States, and there found material for
several well-known poems. His imagination was greatly struck by what he
heard of the Dismal Swamp, which at that time was a vast morass more
than forty miles in length and twenty-five miles in width, extending
from Virginia into North Carolina, and having in the midst of it a
stagnant lake to which few had ever penetrated. Many strange stories
were told of this gloomy swamp, with its dark recesses in which savage
animals and loathsome serpents lurked, and where, according to the
legends of the country-people, unearthly sights had at times been seen.
Moore’s genius gave to one of these legends a poetical form in the lines
which are here reprinted and which were long extremely popular. It may
be mentioned as a matter of interest that the Dismal Swamp has in recent
years been in part reclaimed by drainage, and that a canal now crosses
it, thus destroying its old-time mystery and romance.
BY THOMAS MOORE.
“They made her grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where all night long, by a firefly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.
“And her firefly lamp I soon shall see,
And her paddle I soon shall hear;
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress-tree
When the footstep of death is near!”
Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds—
His path was rugged and sore,
Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds,
Through many a fen, where the serpent feeds.
And man never trod before!
And when on earth he sunk to sleep,
If slumber his eyelids knew,
He lay where the deadly vine doth weep
Its venomous tear, and nightly steep
The flesh with blistering dew!
And near him the she-wolf stirred the brake,
And the copper-snake breathed in his ear,
Till he starting cried, from his dream awake,
“O when shall I see the dusky Lake,
And the white canoe of my dear?”
He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright
Quick over its surface played—
“Welcome,” he said, “my dear one’s light!”
And the dim shore echoed for many a night
The name of the death-cold maid!
Till he hollowed a boat of the birchen bark,
Which carried him off from the shore;
Far he followed the meteor spark,
The wind was high and the clouds were dark,
And the boat returned no more.
But oft, from the Indian hunter’s camp,
This lover and maid so true
Are seen, at the hour of midnight damp,
To cross the Lake by a firefly lamp,
And paddle their white canoe!
OLD-TIME LIVING EXPENSES.
Figures Which Must Convince the $10-a-Week Clerk That He Came Too
Late—Had He Flourished in England Several Centuries Ago He Might Have
Cut as Wide a Swath as a Present-Day Millionaire.
It makes the ordinary, hard-working householder envious to see the
luxurious display of fortune’s favorites. He finds it hard enough
struggle to get the necessaries of life without any of its delicacies,
and to keep the cost within his income. Nor can he look back into the
days of long ago for consolation. It only increases his discomfiture to
compare his expense account with those of his ancestors.
If a man had a quarter in his pocket in the days of the Plantagenets,
for instance, he could keep his family well supplied for a week. With
that amount of money he could smile at the butcher, bow openly to the
grocer, and look the rest of the world as squarely in the face as did
the village blacksmith.
If he lived in England seven hundred years ago and wished to regale
his family on mutton, he could buy the finest of fat sheep for
twenty-four cents, which would almost allow him to give a banquet on a
pennyworth of mutton. A cow was more expensive, but one dollar and a
half would buy the best he could find in the market, while for a fat
hog he need only part with eighty cents.
In the fourteenth century, two cents would buy a pair of chickens, and
a nickel for a goose fit to grace any Christmas dinner-table, and a
penny would purchase a dozen new-laid eggs; while for two cents the
brewer was compelled by law to sell three gallons of beer, the
equivalent of forty-eight glasses.
Wheat sometimes fell as low as forty cents a quarter, though after a
great storm, or In a time of “grievous famine,” it would rise as high
as four and five dollars a quarter. Still, at these prices a good many
pounds of bread could be bought for a penny.
Pasture and arable lands were ridiculously cheap—two cents an acre for
the former and twelve cents an acre for the latter being considered a
fair annual rental. Draft-horses were a drug on the market at
seventy-two cents each, and oxen at one dollar and twenty cents. In
the days of the second Henry fifty dollars would have equipped a farm
with three draft-horses, half a dozen oxen, twenty cows, and two
hundred sheep, leaving a balance of two dollars toward the payment of
the rent—about five dollars a year.
As for labor, three cents a day was deemed good wages for an ordinary
laborer, and even at harvest-time four cents a day was the highest sum
expected.
House rent was so absurdly small that the Lord Mayor of London paid
only four dollars and eighty cents a year to his landlord; and the
Chancellor, with an annual salary of one hundred and ninety-two
dollars, seemed poorer than many a cook of our own time. When a father
sent his son to a university six centuries ago, four cents a day was
considered a comfortable allowance, with a margin for such luxuries as
wine at eight or twelve cents a gallon.
Twenty-four dollars a year was a munificent salary in those days. It
was the exact sum paid to the assistant clerk of Parliament, and more
than the average priest, with cure of souls, received; while the
pension allowed by Edward III to his apothecary was only twelve cents
a day, and King Edward IV’s allowance to his daughter was but four
dollars and eighty cents a week, with an additional two hundred and
forty-seven dollars and sixty cents a year for the maintenance of her
eight servants.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth prices were still exceedingly modest,
and, it is only fair to add, wages low in proportion. From a household
book of 1589 we take the following typical prices: Beef, two and a
half cents a pound; a neck of mutton, twelve cents; twenty-eight
pounds of veal and a shoulder of mutton, fifty-six cents; cheese, four
cents a pound; wheat, three dollars and eighty-four cents a quarter
ton.
The Story of Anthracite.
Though a Company Was Organized in 1792 to Market “Stone Coal,” As Late
as 1817 a Man Who Sold Some was Charged With Swindling by
Philadelphians, Who Where Unable to Make it Burn.
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Coal is such a commonplace article that few people take the trouble to
find out what it is and how it came into use. The average householder’s
thoughts about coal are mainly confined to questions of price.
One picks up, of course, such interesting facts as that the United
States burns three hundred and fifty million tons a year, at a cost to
consumers of about seven hundred million dollars. In this estimate all
grades of anthracite and bituminous coal are included. One wonders how
long the visible supply will last, and whether the men who in future
generations are to take up the work begun by Edison and other
experimenters will find a new source of practical heat-supply in time to
prevent a protracted “cold spell” when the coal gives out.
One is troubled, too, by the relations between miner and operator, and
is worried when he learns that the great strike of 1902, for example,
involved a total loss to workers, operators, railroads, and business men
of about one hundred and fifty million dollars.
But all these matters are problems of the day—mere seconds on the clock
of Nature. If we look back over so brief a gap as one hundred and
fifteen years, we shall see the discovery of anthracite in America.
In 1791 a hunter, named Philip Ginther, lived on the eastern slopes of
the mountains which are drained by the Lehigh River. Late one afternoon
he found himself at the summit of Sharp Mountain. A storm was coming up,
and Ginther broke into a run, for his home was some distance away.
Stumbling over the roots of a fallen tree, he kicked up a black stone,
and noticed that the soil in which the tree had grown was mingled with
similar specimens of an unusual formation.
Now Ginther had heard that there was “stone coal” in the mountains, so
he picked up the stumbling-block which had checked his course, and
carried it home with him and gave it to Colonel Jacob Weiss, who lived
near the site of the present Mauch Chunk. Colonel Weiss sent the
specimen to Philadelphia, where it fell into the hands of Charles Cist,
a printer, who recognized it as anthracite and advised Colonel Weiss to
buy the land where the coal had been found.
To get the land was easy, for the region was wild and remote from the
easier connections of civilization. Colonel Weiss bought from the
government several thousand acres, and organized in 1792 the Lehigh Coal
Mine Company. His associates included Robert Morris (the well-known
financier), John Nicholson, Charles Cist, and J. Anthony Morris.
In May, 1792, an expedition—four laborers, with a member of the company
to direct them—set out to open and work the mine. It was found that a
great bed of anthracite lay quite near the surface. The company quarried
several tons of the coal.
The question now was how to dispose of the product. The anthracite was
there in vast quantity, ready to be pilfered from old Earth; but many
miles of forest and mountain separated the mine from the nearest market.
Moreover, people were dubious as to the burning value of anthracite, and
wood was still plentiful, and—well, like other new products, anthracite
had to prove its usefulness before it would be accepted.
After a few weeks the laborers were discharged. Colonel Weiss carried
lumps of coal in his saddle-bags and induced a few of the blacksmiths of
near-by settlements to try it; but there was no general tendency to
adopt the new fuel.
The Pennsylvania Legislature, in 1798, chartered a company to improve
the navigation of the Lehigh River. The work was completed in 1802, but
although the removal of obstructions and the building of wing-dams were
something of an improvement, the river was still likely to prove rude to
voyagers. The coal company, however, resumed its quarrying, and built a
fleet of arks which, during high water in the spring of 1803, were
loaded with coal and sent down the stream. Four of the six arks were
wrecked; two reached Philadelphia. But when the Philadelphians tried to
burn the coal, they had no success with it, and the Lehigh Coal Mine
Company abandoned its efforts to introduce a fuel so unlucky.
In 1810 coal was found near Pottsville, and blacksmiths used it
successfully. A Philadelphia chemist, after making a careful analysis,
announced that the heating power of anthracite was extraordinary.
Colonel George Shoemaker, who had dug up coal on his lands near
Pottsville, loaded eight or ten wagons in 1817, and took the caravan to
Philadelphia. Inasmuch as he guaranteed that the “stones” would burn, he
succeeded in disposing of his stock; but now, as formerly, the
Philadelphians failed to get any heat from their purchases—except the
heat of their tempers, which led them to secure a warrant for the arrest
of Colonel Shoemaker on the charge of swindling. He escaped to
Pottsville by making a detour, and meantime the Fairmount nail-works,
which had bought several tons of the anthracite, hit accidentally upon
the way to make it burn.
The proprietor and several of his men had spent a morning vainly trying
to fire up a furnace with the coal. They had raked, stirred, poked, and
used blowers, but the stuff refused to burn. Noon came, and the men shut
the furnace door and went to their dinner. When they came back they
found the furnace red hot. The closed door had solved the draft problem.
The way to make anthracite burn was to shut it in the furnace and let it
alone.
In a few years more the coal industry became established. The Lehigh
company reentered the field. They shipped 365 tons In 1820, 1,000 tons
in 1821, and 2,240 in 1822. By 1830 their annual production was more
than 41,000 tons; by 1840 it was 225,000 tons; by 1850, 722,000 tons. Up
to 1847 the company got all its coal from its open quarry on the summit
of Sharp Mountain. Boats carried the coal down the Lehigh.
To get the product from the mine to the river, a railway, nine miles
long, was built in 1827. Excepting a track laid in the quarries at
Quincy, Massachusetts, this was the first railway to be operated in the
New World. Mules drew the cars to the summit; gravity carried them down.
The little black stone which the good people of Philadelphia rejected in
1792 has become the keystone of all our industries.
WHY MARCH 4TH IS INAUGURATION DAY.
The Principal Reason for the Selection of This Date Was the Curious Fact
That It Seldom Falls on Sunday.
There have been many objections raised to the date upon which the
Presidents of the United States are inaugurated, chief among them being
the usually inclement weather which prevails so early in the spring.
The first President Harrison contracted the cold which caused his death,
soon after he assumed office, at the ceremonies attending his
inauguration; and anxiety is always expressed lest the unhappy incident
should be repeated. There was a reason for choosing that date, however,
which very few persons have ever heard of.
When the day was fixed upon the 4th of March, It was because that date
seldom occurred on Sunday. But three times during our history has the
inauguration day fallen on that day. The first was the second
inaugural of James Monroe, the fifth President, March 4, 1821; the
second was when Zachary Taylor was made President, March 4, 1849; the
third was the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes, on March 4, 1877.
This will happen three times during each century, or one year after
every seven leap years. Except when passing from one century to
another, there is a slight variation, as will be observed in the
following dates of the past and future inaugurations, of the first two
centuries of the republic:
March 4 1821
March 4 1849
March 4 1877
March 4 1917
March 4 1945
March 4 1973
The Beginnings of Stage Careers.[2]
BY MATTHEW WHITE, JR.
EIGHTH INSTALMENT.
A Series of Papers That Will Be Continued from Month to Month and
Include All Players of Note.
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Footnote 2:
Began March SCRAP BOOK. Single copies, 10 cents.
NEW NAMES BROUGHT LUCK.
Margaret Illington and Grace Elliston First Sought Thespian Fame Under
Cognomens Now Almost Forgotten.
Although widely divergent in their personal appearance and methods of
acting, Grace Elliston and Margaret Illington, the first two _Mice_ in
“The Lion and the Mouse,” have one thing in common—each, after appearing
on the stage under one name for some time, changed it for another.
Miss Elliston, it will be remembered, created _Shirley Rossmore_ in the
original production of the well-known Klein play last autumn, while Miss
Illington went to Chicago later on in the second company, and made a big
hit in the part when the piece was tried in London. To take the ladles
in this order then—
Along about the middle or early nineties, a New York critic, in noticing
the appearance at the Casino of Frank Daniels in “The Wizard of the
Nile,” wound up his comments with these two sentences: “There were
others that were clever—and one little beauty of a maid whose eyes
played havoc with the audience. Her name is Grace Rutter, and she will
be a star some day.”
Mansfield Recognized Talent.
This “little beauty of a maid” was only in the chorus, and although she
has not yet fulfilled the strict letter of this prophecy, she has come
pretty close to it, and is yet young. Born in Bluff City, Tennessee, she
became interested in amateur theatricals and in a small way made her
first professional appearance at the old Lyceum Theater, Memphis, in
“Boccaccio.”
The experience was fascinating, and an offer from a traveling company
tempted her beyond her strength, and she went on the road, finally
reaching New York as a member of “The Dazzler” company.
At a benefit performance of some sort she recited. Richard Mansfield
happened to be present, saw promise in her work, and engaged her as a
member of his Garrick Theater stock company, then in its first season at
this house, which Mr. Mansfield had just taken over from Edward Harrigan
and renamed. But as it happened, it was also his last season there, and
Miss Rutter’s only opportunity was to do _Dodo_ in a burlesque of
“Trilby” called “Thrilby.”
Hoyt & McKee, who succeeded Mansfield in the control of the Garrick,
gave Miss Rutter a small part in Hoyt’s farce, “A Day and a Night,”
which, in turn, secured for her an opening with Daniels, and in due
course she was added to the musical comedy forces at Daly’s, where she
was seen in “The Geisha,” “The Circus Girl,” and other London
importations.
Chose Another Ladder to Climb.
But although she might be progressing all this while so far as salary
was concerned, the ambitions in Miss Rutter’s heart were not being at
all satisfied, and in the spring of 1899 she resolved to begin at the
foot of the ladder again and mount up the dramatic rather than the light
musical rounds.
After some casting about and a period of hope deferred, the ambitious
young woman obtained a chance to appear with Daniel Frohman’s stock
company at the old Lyceum. There she made her début in “His Excellency
the Governor.” She decided, however, that the old name was against her,
associating her as it did with musical work, so she appeared on the
house bill as “Grace Elliston.” Perhaps her most notable work at the
Lyceum was in the charming, fantastic curtain-raiser, “The Shades of
Night.”
She remained with the Lyceum company for another season, and then, at
the Criterion, created the leading part in that short-lived
dramatization, “The Helmet of Navarre.” When this mistake was laid away
on the upper shelf, minus camphor balls, Miss Elliston passed to
_Bonita_ in a big Academy of Music revival of “Arizona.” Her
Shakespearian aspirations were realized in 1903–’04, when she became
_Olivia_ in Viola Allen’s offering of “Twelfth Night.”
Manager Named His Future Wife.
It was in 1900 that patrons of James K. Hackett, in “The Pride of
Jennico,” saw that the part of the gipsy girl was played with much fire
and dash by a very young actress who was set down on the program as
Maude Light. Investigation shows this to be the real name of a
stage-struck young woman from Bloomington, Illinois, who, after some
very modest attempts in Chicago, had come to Daniel Frohman with her
dramatic aspirations. She was placed in a minor rôle with the Hackett
company, to be speedily promoted to _Michel_, the gipsy aforesaid, the
second important female part in the play. And it wasn’t long before she
was sometimes doing that of the _Princess_ herself, whenever Bertha
Galland was out of the cast. Her change of name was made at the request
of Mr. Frohman. It seemed that the other women were all using stage
_noms_, so when the matter was laid before her Miss Light expressed her
perfect willingness to fall in line.
“But what shall I call myself?” she inquired.
“I’ll make you up a name,” replied Mr. Frohman, and forthwith took her
native State, Illinois, and her home town, Bloomington, and out of the
two formed “Illington,” prefixing “Margaret” for euphony.
From the Hackett play Miss Illington passed to the stock company at
Daly’s, still under Mr. Frohman’s management, appearing as the _Maid_ in
“Frocks and Frills,” a small part which she made stand out vividly, and
at the same theater she did _Fleur de Lys_ in “Notre Dame.”
Succeeded Miss Loftus.
E. H. Sothern’s troupe next claimed Miss Illington’s services, and she
took Cecilia Loftus’s place as leading woman when that actress fell ill
and was obliged to leave the stage for the hospital.
In the autumn of the same year (1903) Miss Illington created the leading
part in that distinguished failure, “A Japanese Nightingale,” but during
the brief run of the piece she assumed a part attended with more
success—that of the wife of her manager, Daniel Frohman. It was
announced then that she would leave the stage at the end of the
“Nightingale” engagement, but, as so often happens in such cases, the
bridegroom proposes and the bride elects to please herself. So the very
next spring we found her as _Henriette_ in the all-star cast of “The Two
Orphans.” And last season she filled the title rôle in “Mrs.
Leffingwell’s Boots.”
For the coming winter Miss Illington is to be entrusted with the most
important part that has yet fallen to her—that of the leading lady with
John Drew in Pinero’s new play, “His House in Order”—a rôle created in
London with great success by Irene Van Brugh, who made such a hit here a
few years ago with John Hare in “The Gay Lord Quex.”
WOULDN’T STAY CURED.
Jane Wheatley Celebrated Her Recovery from First Attack of Stage Fever
By Falling Victim to a Second.
Although stock company work, with two performances a day and a weekly
change of bill, is an awful grind, it is also about the only way
nowadays in which the young player can obtain the necessary experience
to give him or her that versatility which broadens ability.
Take, for instance, the six weeks last spring when Jane Wheatley filled
an engagement in Providence as leading woman of the Albee stock company,
at Keith’s. During that period she was _Muriel_ in “The Second in
Command,” an English comedy; _Lucy_ in “The Dictator,” an American
farce; _Katherine_ in “If I Were King,” a romantic drama; _Phyllis_ in
the Goodwin-Elliott play, “When We Were Twenty-One”; _Marcelle_ in “The
Gay Parisians,” a lively farce from the French; and _Mary of Magdala_ in
the Scriptural play, “The Holy City.”
Of her work in the last-named part, a local critic wrote: “She carried
the rôle through from the moment of awakening from the scarlet bondage
with a spirit of reverence that was much more than mere acting, and had
applause been permitted she would have carried off all honors.”
Spent Allowance for Theater Tickets.
Miss Wheatley is a young woman who went on the stage from pure love of
it, starting In 1898 with a very lowly part In “The Christian.” She was
with Viola Allen for three seasons, and subsequently she played
prominent parts with Sadie Martinot. She followed Grace Filkins as _Lady
Airish_, in the support of Alice Fischer, in “The School for Husbands.”
The account she has furnished THE SCRAP BOOK of her start in the
profession is so very entertainingly written that I am giving it
herewith in her own words:
“While studying in Boston some years ago, every penny of my allowance
went for theater tickets, and the Hollis Street Theater was my favorite
haunt. My chum was an enthusiast on the subject, if ever there was one,
and I made a very good second. We had our respective favorites, and mine
was Miss Viola Allen. I always had hoped to meet her, and even thought
she might advise me or help me to a position on the stage. But how to
arrange a meeting?
“My chum (Kate) and I talked it over, and finally decided upon a plan of
action.
“Kate had gone to a boarding-school, somewhere in Canada, and had heard
much from the teachers about Miss Allen, who had been a former student
there. One of the teachers even suggested giving Kate a letter to Miss
Allen. These facts were all we had to introduce us, but I remember that
I was the timid one and Kate the fearless.
“After the matinée one day we summoned up courage and went to the stage
entrance, sent in our cards, and, with beating hearts, waited. Miss
Allen was then leading woman with the Empire stock company.
“In a few minutes a maid came out to us, and with cold politeness
inquired what we wanted.
Aid from Viola Allen.
“‘We wished to see Miss Allen,’ was our answer.
“I know now what a piece of effrontery it was on our part, for when an
actress has played a long part, and has only a short time before she has
to play it again, she is ready for only one thing, and that is rest.
However, Miss Allen was then, just as she always has been, kind, and
invited us to come another day—which we did; and this time we were
successful, for she saw us, and I remember how happy it made me.
“I remember the conversation, too; for she spoke of what was uppermost
in our minds—our ambitions. So encouraging was the interview with this
dear lady that when I finished my studies in Boston I wrote to her,
saying that I meant to start my professional career in the autumn, and
‘would she help me?’
“She did. In reply to my letter, she said there were no parts in her
play, ‘The Christian,’ except those requiring experience, but that some
characters would speak in chorus, and I would be welcome to such a part.
“I remember an illustration made frequently by Dr. Emerson at the
Emerson College. He pointed out to us that on the stage we were like
parts of a mosaic—alone we were nothing, but as a part of the whole,
each one in his place very necessary to the whole. I did not then
realize how very small was to be my part of the mosaic—its proportions
were exaggerated in my mind, and I had visions of myself in a dainty or
artistic costume, entering with two or three other young ladles, and
speaking in chorus, something as do the four daughters in ‘The Gay
Parisians.’
“I also remember Miss Allen’s apologetic remark about the salary. ‘The
money is nothing,’ she said.
“As for that part of it—money—it had never entered my mind. The
happiness of having the opportunity was enough; and to think of being
paid, actually paid, for simply doing what I loved to do! It was all
very beautiful.
Appalled by Reality.
“To skip rehearsals, which, needless to say, were a source of great
enjoyment, as it was all so new to me, the opening night in Albany came,
and there my troubles began.
“The ‘characters speaking in chorus’ formed a mob, and extra
supernumeraries were engaged for the night in Albany. It was a wild
enough mob; my pride suffered, and my toes, too, for both were trodden
upon. The damp cellar dressing-room with its many occupants, and the
harsh, severe directions of the stage manager—it was all so different
from what I had expected.
“In the course of the evening I found a lonely corner in the despised
cellar and wept long and bitterly. Was this the way to Fame? Could I
bridge these humiliations and discomforts? The goal seemed very far off,
and I remember repeating to myself:
“‘I’m cured! I’m cured!’
“However, I went on to Washington with the company. There I tried
another day of it, but conditions grew worse instead of better. During
the afternoon of the second day in Washington I packed my bag, walked to
the station, bought a ticket for New York, said nothing to any one of my
resolution, but wired my father to meet me, and got on the train, bound
for home.
Moth Again Seeks Flame.
“And oh, how glad I was to see my father, and he to see me! And how glad
he was that I was ‘cured’ of my desire to be an actress!
“Well, to make a long story short, I remained ‘cured’ only a short
time—two weeks, I think it was.
“A nice letter from Miss Allen, saying that she would keep my understudy
for me, enticed me to return when the company played in New York. I
refused to give up again, although those first tears were not the only
ones I had cause to shed during that long season.
“My reward came, however, for before the close of the theater year the
girl whose rôle I understudied left the cast, and they gave me her part
for the rest of the season. Miss Allen helped me herself to do justice
to it—even to rehearsing me after matinée, when she must have been very
tired.
“And it was in my beloved Boston, where I had first met her, that I
played my first part, and in her company, only the theater was the old
Boston Museum, not the Hollis Street.”
DANCED ON CHURCH STEPS.
Front of a Negro Place of Worship Was the Scene of Henry E. Dixey’s
Preparation for the Stage.
“The steps of a colored church near where I lived was my
practise-ground, and I was on the stage when I was eight.”
Thus spoke Henry E. Dixey, in his dressing-room at the Lyric, between
the acts of “The Man on the Box,” in response to my question about his
start in his stage career—a career that stands out more remarkably than
the majority. After achieving a reputation in a burlesque with which his
name became so closely identified that it was often used interchangeably
with his own, he went into Daly’s theater and played _Malvolio_ in
“Twelfth Night,” in a fashion to cover himself with glory. He has scored
high in the Gilbert & Sullivan operas, and is now a successful star in
high-class comedy.
Dixey’s real name is Dixon. He was born in Boston on January 6, 1859.
His parents had no connection with the theater, and had no idea that
Harry’s predilection for dancing was going to lead him there. When very
young he helped eke out the family income by becoming a cashboy in a
dry-goods store but he wasn’t a shining success at it. The part he liked
best was being sent on errands, which gave him an opportunity to collect
cronies about him and practise fancy steps on his improvised stage in
front of the African meeting-house, as aforesaid.
Failed to Serve Two Masters.
It didn’t take the dry-goods people long to “get on” to the
idiosyncrasies of their youthful employee, and in due course he lost his
job and was cooling his heels all day long on the sidewalk, most of the
time in the vicinity of the stage-door of the Howard Athenæum, then
under the management of the late John Stetson.
When Stetson was putting on “Under the Gaslight,” he needed a street
urchin, so he decided to give the little Dixon chap a chance to show
what he could do. The child introduced a song and dance, made an
instantaneous hit, and thus started on his career. His part was called
_Peanuts_, and he was retained at the Howard for small bits with James
S. Maffit and his partner, Bartholomew, in their pantomime work.
How he managed to pick up an education, with his head full of the stage,
is difficult to determine; but one has only to talk with Mr. Dixey to
know him for a man of keen intelligence and common sense. But his
parents continued to keep him under their eye in Boston until after
“Evangeline” was produced. Here he encountered his old friend, James S.
Maffit, again, as the _Lone Fisherman_. Crane was in the cast, too,
doing _Le Blanc_, the notary. Dixey was the forelegs of the famous
_Heifer_, the hind ones submitting to the direction of Richard Golden.
But during the tour of the famous piece Dixey did very many of the other
parts in the burlesque.
In the course of the early eighties John Stetson extended his field of
operations to New York, and set up a stock company at the Fifth Avenue
Theater. Dixey, as one of its leading members, created _Christopher
Blizzard_ in “Confusion.”
“Adonis” and Its Successors.
In New York he fell in with William F. Gill. Dixey had some of the ideas
for “Adonis.” Gill had more, and put them together in the shape of a
burlesque. They tried to get Dixey’s old friend and first manager,
Stetson, to bring it out at the Boston Globe. But he got cold feet on
the proposition, declaring that it was too expensive to mount. Rice took
it in hand, and after he had demonstrated the thing to be a success
Stetson wanted an interest in it, in exchange for which he was willing
to plank down twenty thousand dollars, but it was then too late.
“Adonis” ran at the Bijou in New York for more than three hundred
nights, and was afterward done in London.
“The Seven Ages,” built on the same lines, was a frightful frost, if a
thing can be said to be so when done in a temperature of one hundred and
three degrees, which Mr. Dixey avers the thermometer registered at the
old Standard in the early—and last—nights of the piece.
After “The Seven Ages”—Daly’s for Dixey, and in this connection I want
to quote from an interview the actor gave to a writer for the New York
_Dramatic Mirror_ some ten years ago.
“Do you know,” he said, “that I really was the first _Svengali_ on the
stage? In ‘The Tragedy Rehearsed’ I introduced a little Trilby
burlesque, where Miss Rehan was hypnotized into singing ‘Ben Bolt.’ That
was the very earliest stage use of Miss O’Ferrall.
“Afterward I went to Augustin Daly and proposed that he should dramatize
‘Trilby,’ have Miss Rehan play the character, and let me do _Svengali_.
It would have revolutionized things at Daly’s. But he pooh-poohed me,
and wouldn’t listen to the idea. Instead, he put on ‘A Bundle of Lies,’
where I had a fifteen-line part. The play was a fearful frost.”
Takes Dark View of Future.
Just previous to the death of Stuart Robson, Dixey made a big success as
_David Garrick_ in the play “Oliver Goldsmith,” which Augustus Thomas
wrote for Robson; then, by way of striking variety, Dixey went to London
in a Casino review, “The Whirl of the Town,” which failed to please
England.
A few years later, when Charles Frohman imported Barrie’s “Little Mary”
to the Empire, puzzling New York by the play written around the stomach,
Dixey was the _Earl of Carlton_.
Dixey, by the by, does not believe in stock companies, and is rather
pessimistic as to the future of our stage, in the way of the supply of
actors.
“Where are they coming from?” he said to me the other night, in the
course of his chat about his own start in the business. “What training
do they get under the present system to fit them for any work out of a
set groove into which chance and the powers that be happen to drop them?
Suppose, for example, you are a young man who has done good work in
amateur theatricals, and with a ‘pull’ in the shape of a letter of
introduction to a big New York manager. You are also straight and tall
and would make a presentable appearance on the stage.
“Well, you have your interview with the big manager of to-day. He looks
you over, presses a button, and to the obsequious underling who answers
the summons, he says: ‘Put this gentleman in the juvenile part in Number
Three company of “Mrs. Prettytoes’ Shoestrings.”’
“You are elated at first at getting a job, but you find later on that
‘Mrs. Prettytoes’ Shoestrings’ has long since exhausted its drawing
powers in the big cities, and is billed for six months through the
one-night stands of Texas and Arkansas. You play the same part for all
that period, and the next season maybe you will receive a rôle exactly
on the same lines when, if you are lucky, week stands may replace the
single night stops.
Where Are Actors to Come From?
“And so it goes. Because you look the character you are assigned to it,
and you never have an opportunity to show what you can do in the way of
versatility, and consequently you never grow. Again I repeat, Where are
the big actors in the next generation to come from?
“How about the stars of to-day? Were they not nearly all of them shining
marks twenty years ago, having been cultivated under the old order of
things? The only show a man has nowadays outside of the few cheap stock
companies, to play more than one part a season, is when the first play
put out fails.
“How different this was around Civil War times, when your star traveled
from town to town and the companies in the various theaters were obliged
to be up in the various plays he put out? Our cities were so small then
that the same people had to be counted on to support a week’s
engagement, so the bill had to be changed nightly. Twenty years from now
I wonder who will be the stars, how many of them there will be, and—save
the mark!—to what artistic merit will they attain?”
In a sense Mr. Dixey is himself a victim of the system he deplores. His
season in “The Man on the Box” having been so successful, his manager
has secured the dramatic rights to Cyrus Townsend Brady’s novel.
“Richard the Brazen,” which will give Dixey a part on very similar lines
to the conscienceless _Lieutenant Worburton_ he enacts in the Harold
MacGrath story.
THE ROMANCE OF HALLOWE’EN.
Old Superstitions and Observances to Which the Scotch Still Cling
Tenaciously—Ceremonies That Accompanied Lighting of Hallow Fires—How
Lassies Compel Spirits to Reveal Natures of Those Who Are to Wed Them.
Like almost all of the Christian festivals, Hallowmas, or All Saints
day, is associated with an ancient pagan celebration of great antiquity,
and from this older rite many of its curious and singular observances
are derived. Hallowe’en is the vigil of the feast of All Saints, and the
custom of its elaborate observance is general everywhere, though its
greatest development has been reached in Scotland.
Modern practise has largely omitted what was at one time the most
important part of Hallowe’en ritual—that is, the lighting of bonfires at
nightfall by each household. From this practise the relationship that it
bears to the older Druidical festival of Samuin is apparent. This was a
great occasion in the days of the ancient pagan worship, and all the
hearths were on this day rekindled from the sacred fire.
Indeed, sacred fires seem to have been a part of the various forms of
worship of many nations. The Germanic people had their fires, as well as
the Celtic, so the custom was not wholly Druidical, but from the Druids
came most of the superstitions that now cluster around the eve of the
Christian festival.
Origin of the Feast.
The feast of All Saints was introduced very early by the Christian
Church because of the impossibility of keeping a separate day for
every saint. In the fourth century, when the persecutions of the
Christians had ceased, the first Sunday after Easter was appointed by
the Greek Church as the day for commemorating the martyrs generally.
In the Church of Rome a like festival was introduced about 610 A.D.,
this being the time when the old heathen Panthéon was consecrated to
Mary and all the martyrs.
The real festival of All Saints, however, was first regularly
instituted by Pope Gregory IV, in 835, and appointed for the first day
of November. It was admitted into England about 870, and probably
about the same time into Ireland and Scotland. The festival is common
to the Roman Catholic, English, and Lutheran branches of the Church.
The leading idea of Hallowe’en is that it is the time of all others
when supernatural influences are strong, and charms, therefore, will
not fail to work. Spirits, both good and evil, walk abroad on this one
mysterious night, and divination attains its highest power. All who
choose may avail themselves of the privileges of the occasion with the
certainty that their questions will be answered.
Prying into the Future.
Nuts furnish the principal means of reading the secrets of the future,
and in some parts of England the night is known as “nutcrack night.”
The nuts are cracked and eaten, as well as being made the oracles of
the occasion, and apples also are used in the games and for
divination.
The poet Burns, in the notes to his poem, “Hallowe’en,” speaks of the
passion which human nature has had, in all ages, for prying into the
future—particularly unenlightened human nature; yet it is not always
the ignorant who indulge in the Hallowe’en pranks. It is by the
peasantry in the west of Scotland, however, that the night is regarded
with sincere veneration and believed to be truly great with meaning.
Burns gives some of the spells and charms whereby the lassies test
their fate. Among these customs are the pulling stalks of corn, the
blue clue, and eating an apple before the glass. He also mentions
sowing hemp-seed, “to winn three wechts o’naethings,” “to fathom the
stack three times,” “to dip your left shirt-sleeve in a burn where
three lairds’ lands meet,” and, finally, a curious process “with three
luggies or dishes.”
Another writer tells of fagots made of heath, broom, and dressings of
flax tied upon a pole. These are lighted and then carried upon the
shoulders of some one who runs around the village, attended by a
crowd. Weird effects are produced on a dark night, when numbers of
these fagots are blazing at the same time.
Still another writer tells of the custom of collecting the ashes from
the bonfire when the fire has burned out. They are carefully gathered
into the form of a circle, and a stone for every person of the several
families interested in the fire is put into this magic pile. If any
stone is injured or moved next morning it signifies that the person
represented by that stone is “fey,” and will not live a twelve-month
from that day.
Kindling the Hallow Fire.
In the days when the “hallow fire” was kindled, various magic
ceremonies preceded its lighting. These exorcised the demons and
witches and rendered them powerless. When the ceremonies were
finished, the fire was lighted and carefully guarded by the men of the
family from the depredations of certain societies which were formed,
sometimes through pique and at other times for fun alone, for the
purpose of scattering these fires. The attack and defense were often
“conducted with art and fury.”
The first ceremony of Hallowe’en was pulling the kail (stalk). By its
shape and size the young women determined the figure and size of their
future husbands, while any “yird,” or earth, sticking to the roots
meant fortune. The taste of the “custoc,” or heart of the stalk,
showed the temper and disposition, and finally the stems or “runts”
are placed above the door, and the Christian name of the person whom
Fate sends first through the door gives the name of the gentleman.
In an old book of the early part of the sixteenth century there is a
passage as follows:
“We rede in olde tyme good people wolde on All Halowen daye bake brade
and dele it for all crysten soules.”
This refers to the ancient custom of the poor going “a-souling,” or
asking for money which they earned by fasting for the souls of the
alms-givers and his kinsfolk. Presumably the “brede” was not eaten
until the day after.
In some places these loaves were called “sau’mas loaves”—soul-mass—and
were kept in the house for luck. Bakers gave them to their customers,
and thus they resembled the Good-Friday bread and cross-buns.
The vigil and ringing of bells all night long upon All Hallows was
abolished under Henry VIII, but, in spite of this, half a century
later, under Elizabeth, a special injunction forbade all superfluous
ringing of bells. Evidently the laws were not enforced then any more
than now, and the nerves of the people were tried as they are in these
days. It is our doorbells, however, not church-bells, that keep us on
edge, with the small boy at the button.
A Collector’s Bequest.
“My wish is that my Drawings, my Prints, my Curiosities, my Books—in a
word these things of art which have been the joy of my life—shall not be
consigned to the cold tomb of a museum, and subjected to the stupid
glance of the careless passer-by; but I require that they shall all be
dispersed under the hammer of the Auctioneer, so that the pleasure which
the acquiring of each one of them has given me shall be given again, in
each case, to some inheritor of my own tastes.”—_From the Will of Edmond
de Goncourt._
A LETTER FROM CHRIST.
TWO INTERESTING DOCUMENTS, RECOGNIZED AS AUTHENTIC, THAT BEAR UPON THE
LIFE OF THE SAVIOUR.
The Greek Church preserves a very interesting tradition which seems to
rest upon some evidence which many Biblical scholars accept as quite
convincing. The tradition relates that while Christ was working His
miracles in Palestine the report of His divine power spread throughout
Asia Minor until it reached the ears of Abgar, the Prince of Edessa in
Mesopotamia. Abgar was afflicted with leprosy; and at last, in his
despair, he is said to have written a letter to Christ beseeching Him
to journey to Edessa and heal the prince of his disease. To this
appeal the legend says that Christ dictated a reply by the hand of St.
Thomas the Apostle, and that after the crucifixion St. Thomas sent
Thaddeus, one of the Seventy, to Edessa, where he cured Abgar, who,
with all his subjects, became converted to Christianity.
The tradition is very old, and is believed among the Eastern
Christians. It is first found recorded by the Greek writer, Eusebius,
in his “Ecclesiastical History,” written about the year 330. Eusebius
gives copies of both letters. It was not until the year 494 that the
Roman Church declared the letter of Christ to be fictitious. The Greek
Church has never made any such declaration. Among those scholars who
have accepted the letters as authentic are Tillemont and the German
theologian Welte. The following is a translation of the two documents:
ABGAR TO JESUS CHRIST.
“Abgar, Prince of Edessa, to Jesus, the merciful Saviour, who has
appeared in the country of Jerusalem, greeting. I have been informed of
the prodigies and cures wrought by you without the use of herbs or
medicines, and by the efficacy of your words alone. I am told that you
enable cripples to walk; that you force devils from the bodies
possessed; that there is no disease, however incurable, which you do not
heal; and that you restore the dead to life. These wonders convince me
that you are some god descended from heaven, or that you are the Son of
God. For this reason, I have taken the liberty of writing this letter to
you, beseeching you to come to see me, and to cure me of the
indisposition under which I have so long labored. I understand that the
Jews persecute you, murmur at your miracles, and plan your destruction.
I have here a beautiful and pleasant city which, though it be not very
large, will be sufficient to supply you with every thing that is
necessary.”
JESUS CHRIST TO ABGAR.
“You are happy, Abgar, thus to have believed in me without having seen
me; for it is written of me, that they who shall see me will not believe
in me, and that they who have never seen me shall believe and be saved.
As to the desire you express in receiving a visit from me, I must tell
you that all things for which I am come must be fulfilled in the country
where I am. When this is done, I must return to Him who sent me. And
when I am departed hence, I will send to you one of my disciples, who
will cure you of the disease of which you complain, and give life to you
and to those that are with you.”
Valuable Secrets Lost to Men.
Fame and Fortune Await Those Who Rescue from Oblivion’s Great
Storage-House Bits of Knowledge That Enabled Old-Time Workmen to Obtain
Results That Cannot be Duplicated To-day.
The nineteenth century was distinctively a century of invention. Whether
the twentieth is destined to rival it by making discoveries that will
rank with steam, electricity, wireless telegraphy, the harvester and the
typewriter it is now too soon to say. It is safe to predict, however,
that if by any series of fortunate chances it should earn the right to
be called a “century of rediscovery,” it would win the gratitude of
posterity, and fortune as well as fame would be the portion of men who
might reclaim for mankind some remarkable secrets that were well known
to the civilized world many centuries ago.
In Oblivion’s great storage-house are thousands of bits of knowledge
which were possessed by many men when the world was much younger than it
is to-day. But they have been so thoroughly forgotten by mankind that
they are now referred to as lost secrets, as difficult to rediscover as
those which lurk in the mystical notes of a Stradivarius violin.
Art of Egyptian Embalmers.
Thousands of years ago, for instance, the Egyptians used to embalm the
bodies of their dead kings and nobility so perfectly that the bodies
are in wonderful preservation to-day, as may be seen at the British
Museum. Clever as we are in this age, we cannot do the same. The
valuable secret is lost, and modern science cannot recover the lost
knowledge. We can, of course, and we do, embalm bodies; but only for
temporary preservation, and, comparatively speaking, in a most
unsatisfactory manner.
Bodies which are embalmed nowadays will not be preserved for more than
a few years at most; very many of the bodies the Egyptians embalmed
before the birth of Christ are still so perfect that the lines of
their faces are as clearly marked as when they were first embalmed.
Sheffield turns out the finest, hardest, and most perfect steel the
world produces; but even Sheffield cannot produce a sword-blade to
compare with those the Saracens made and used hundreds of years ago,
and the Saracens never possessed the machinery we have nor had the
advantage of knowing so much about metals as we are supposed to know.
A huge fortune awaits the man who discovers the secret which enabled
the Saracens to make sword-blades so keen and hard that they could cut
in two most of the swords used in our army to-day.
French Paste Diamonds.
There are a dozen different methods of making artificial diamonds, but
none of the stones produced by these methods can compare with those
made of old French paste, the secret of which is lost. So perfect were
paste diamonds that it was difficult for even a person with expert
knowledge of diamonds to tell that they were artificially produced,
whereas most of the modern artificial diamonds can easily be detected,
and their durability is nothing like so great as the old paste
diamonds; indeed, good paste diamonds are now almost as valuable as
real diamonds.
Probably not one out of every ten thousand buildings standing in all
parts of the world and built by modern masons will still be standing
five hundred years hence. We do not know how to put stones and bricks
together as the ancients did, and consequently the buildings we raise
nowadays are really mere temporary structures, and will be in ruins
when the ancient buildings of Greece and Italy, which were built
thousands of years ago, are in as good condition as they are now.
The secret is not in the bricks or the stone, but in the cement and
mortar, neither of which essentials can we make as the ancients made
them.
In modern buildings the cement and mortar are the weakest points; in
the buildings which the Romans and Greeks raised thousands of years
ago the cement and mortar are the strongest points, and hold good
while the very stones they bind together crumble away with age. We
cannot, with all our science, make such cement and mortar, and
therefore we cannot build such buildings as the ancients raised.
Wonderful Ancient Dyes.
Chemistry, one might Imagine, is the science which has, perhaps, made
the greatest strides during the last five or six decades. Yet modern
chemists cannot compound such dyes as were commonly used when the
great nations of to-day were still unborn. Now and again it happens
that searchers after antiquities come across fragments of fabrics
which were dyed thousands of years ago, and they are astonished by the
wonderful richness of the colors of the cloths, which, despite their
age, are brighter and purer than anything we can produce.
Modern artists buy their colors ready made, and spend large sums of
money on pigments with which to color their canvases. The pictures of
modern artists will be colorless when many of the works of ancient
masters are as bright as they are to-day. Just as the secret of dyeing
has been lost, so has the secret of preserving the colors of artists’
paints. Yet the secret was known to every ancient artist, for they all
mixed their own colors.
Formula for Durable Ink.
How to make durable ink Is another great secret we have lost. Look at
any letter five or ten years old and you will probably notice that the
writing has faded to a brown color and is very indistinct. Go to any
big museum, and you will find ancient manuscripts, the writing of
which is as black and distinct as if the manuscript were written the
day before yesterday.
The secret of glass blowing and tinting is not yet entirely lost;
there are still a few men who can produce glass-work equal to that
which the ancients turned out hundreds of years ago.
But the average glass manufacturer cannot produce anything that could
at all compare with some of the commoner articles the Egyptians, and,
later, the founders of Venice manufactured; and those who still hold
the ancient secret guard it so closely that it will probably die with
them and be added to the long list of things in which our ancestors
beat us hollow.
THE WORLD’S HARVEST SEASONS.
There Is Not a Month in the Year That Does Not Find Several Nations
Sending Reapers Into Fields of Golden Grain.
There is a procession of seed-time, blossom, and fruit around the globe
which never ends. It is harvest-time on the earth at every time of year,
just as there is always sunlight shining somewhere and always darkness
somewhere else.
January sees harvest ended in most districts in Australia and New
Zealand, while the people of Chile and other countries of southern
South America are just beginning to reap the fruits of their toil.
Upper Egypt and India begin and continue harvest through the months of
February and March.
April enlarges the number with harvest in Syria, Cyprus, coast of
Egypt, Mexico, Cuba, Persia, and Asia Minor.
May is a busy time in Central Asia, Persia, Algeria, Morocco, southern
Texas, Florida, China, and Japan.
June calls forth the harvest in California, Oregon, southern United
States, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Rumania, Turkey, Danubian
States, southern France, Greece, and Sicily.
July sees harvest in England, Nebraska, Switzerland, Iowa, Illinois,
Indiana, Minnesota, Upper Canada, northern France, Germany, Austria,
and Poland.
August continues the gathering in the British Isles, France, Germany,
Belgium, Holland, Manitoba, Lower Canada, Denmark, and Russia.
September rules northern Scotland, southern parts of Sweden and
Norway, as well as the cold islands of the North Sea.
October is the harvest month for corn in America and for hardy
vegetables in northern Sweden, Norway, and Ireland.
In November harvest times begin in South Africa, Patagonia, and South
Australia.
AS SEEN BY THE DREAMER.
While Champions of the Strenuous Life Are Fulfilling Their Destiny By
Winning Fame and Fortune, Another Sort of Fellow Is Getting Just As Much
Satisfaction By Contemplating Things That Don’t Exist.
THE CRY OF THE DREAMER.
By John Boyle O’Reilly.
I am tired of planning and tolling
In the crowded hives of men;
Heart-weary of building and spoiling.
And spoiling and building again.
And I long for the dear old river,
Where I dreamed my youth away;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a toiler dies in a day.
I am sick of the showy seeming,
Of a life that is half a lie;
Of the faces lined with scheming
In the throng that hurries by
From the sleepless thoughts’ endeavor
I would go where the children play;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a thinker dies in a day.
I can feel no pride, but pity
For the burdens the rich endure;
There is nothing sweet in the city
But the patient lives of the poor.
Oh, the little hands too skilful,
And the child-mind choked with weeds!
The daughter’s heart grown wilful,
And the father’s heart that bleeds!
No, no! from the street’s rude bustle,
From trophies of mart and stage,
I would fly to the woods’ low rustle
And the meadow’s kindly page.
Let me dream as of old by the river,
And be loved for the dream alway;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a toiler dies in a day.
GIVE ME MY DREAMS.
By A. J. Waterhouse.
Give me my dreams. All else is naught,
At price of pain success is bought;
We struggle upward but to fall;
The prize we grasp but holds us thrall;
The lips that cheer us through the years
Some day smile not for all our tears;
We build awhile, we know not what,
And the toiler is forgot.
Give me my dreams.
Give me my dreams. A child am I
Who stands In darkness but to sigh,
Until a hand doth backward roll
The gray, damp mists about my soul,
And then—oh, dream of dreams that cheers—
They come, the loved of other years,
And voices whisper soft and low
The loving words of long ago.
Give me my dreams.
Give me my dreams. Oh, little maid,
With whom of old I laughed and played.
They say the ivy loves to creep
Above the grave where now you sleep;
They say the robin’s song no more
Can wake you as it did of yore.
What matter? Still In dreams you creep
Unto my side a tryst to keep.
Give me my dreams.
Give me my dreams. All else is dross.
But still I count it little loss,
For yet in dreams the bright stars burn
As in the years to which I turn;
White hands reach to me through the mist,
By lips I loved my lips are kissed;
And all life’s fields are love aglow.
As they were once, oh, long ago—
Give me my dreams.
_Los Angeles Herald._
THE PORT O’ DREAMS.
It is just beyond the sky-line
With its poppy-fields of rest
Where day’s storm-bewildered shallop
Drops its anchor in the west,
Where a silent sea of saffron
Stretches inland toward the streams
That go glimmering down the valleys
Of the purple port o’ dreams.
In the far-off gloom behind it
Earth’s dusky bound’ry lies,
And a step beyond its outpost
The hills of heaven rise;
So near that in the glory
Of their mystic haze it seems
That the dear dead walk beside us
In the peaceful port o’ dreams.
Oh, strange and wondrous country.
Hiding close the goals of life,
Who wins to thee brings courage
For the long, dull march’s strife,
And the prisoner of living
Hope’s freedom pledge redeems
In thine endless, boundless radiance.
Oh, blissful port o’ dreams.
We have called thee Heart’s Desire,
Or the Island of the Blest,
And the Land of Finished Stories,
Oh, dreamland in the west.
Yet every heart’s the bound’ry
Of thy soul-reposing beams—
Art thou hope or love or heaven,
Oh, happy port o’ dreams?
Sail away, oh, weary-hearted,
To the bayous of release,
Leave the drums o’ life behind you
At the harbor bar of peace.
Come to anchor off the headlands
Where the light of heaven gleams
In the haven where ye would be
Past the purple port o’ dreams.
_Army and Navy Journal._
THE DREAMER.
By Leon C. Prince.
Self-robbed victim, of will and purpose rid,
Slave of the beckoning fantom, oblivious
Of the talent lying hid;
Knowing a store of varied fact,
But not the art that transmutes
Aspiration into act;
Dreamer, thy vague and hopeless quest
Makes thee, of friends, the secret mock; of men of deed,
The tragic jest.
_New York Sun._
WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES SIX.
By McLandburgh Wilson.
I hold a modest clerkship this side the river Styx,
Also a cheap alarm-clock to waken me at six.
I dream I dwell in marble halls
Worth millions cool in cash;
Huge diamonds glitter on the walls
Where precious jewels flash;
A stranger wants to buy the place,
I take his offer up apace—
The
Clock
Strikes
Six!
I put ten dollars on a horse,
They say he cannot win;
Like lightning round the muddy course
I watch him swiftly spin.
A thousand if he keeps the pace!
Hurrah! My horse has won the race—
The
Clock
Strikes
Six!
The game is poker, and I hold
Three aces in my hand;
The jackpot, brimming full of gold,
Contains a fortune grand.
I draw a card with stolid face;
Behold, it is the other ace—
The
Clock
Strikes
Six!
A girl with eyes of heaven’s blue
Looks tenderly in mine.
The world seems made for just us two,
The pleasure is divine.
I hold her fast in my embrace,
I stoop to kiss her lovely face—
The
Clock
Strikes
Six!
Small wonder that when fortune plays me such scurvy tricks
I curse the cheap alarm-clock that wakens me at six.
_New York Times._
HEART OF THE FIRE.
From the heart of the fire does the vision rise,
It is good to sit in the afterglow,
While some one’s hand in your big one lies
And nobody there to know,
Ah, golden gleaming its many towers,
The palace ye build, ye twain.
Where two shall dwell thro’ the love-lit hours
In a golden castle in Spain.
Who is it laughs in the dusk behind?
Who lurks in the shadows there?
Will the years that are coming to you be kind
And the end of the dream be fair?
Ah! boy and girl, with the love-lit eyes!
Will the faith and the love remain
When only a crumbling ruin lies—
Your fallen castle in Spain?
_Sydney Bulletin._
Major Namby.
BY WILKIE COLLINS.
Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) was distinguished chiefly for his tendency
to confront his readers with a startling and apparently inexplicable
situation, and then by a process of analysis, which, at times, was
worthy of Poe, effect a solution of the mystery in a manner that left
one amazed by the very simplicity of it all. Shortly after the death
of Mr. Collins, the London _Spectator_ thus described his method:
“He was a literary chess-player of the first force, with power of
carrying his plan right through the game and making every move tell.
His method was to introduce a certain number of characters, set before
them a well-defined object, such as the discovery of a secret, the
revindication of a fortune, the tracking of a crime, or the
establishment of a doubted marriage, and then bring in other
characters to resist or counterplot their efforts. Each side makes
moves, almost invariably well-considered and promising moves; the
countermoves are equally good; the interest goes on accumulating till
the looker-on—the reader is always placed in that attitude—is rapt out
of himself by strained attention; and then there is a sudden and
totally unexpected mate.”
But Collins had a lighter side. Nearly all his characters were
invested with some degree of humor—a humor which could not forbear
flashing into some of the novelist’s darker scenes. “The Stolen
Letter,” which appeared in the June number of THE SCRAP BOOK, affords
an example of the manner in which Collins was wont to blend humor and
mystery. In “Major Namby,” which is printed herewith, we have a clever
character-sketch in which humor is seen to be the dominant element.
I am a single lady—single, you will please to understand, entirely
because I have refused many excellent offers. Pray don’t imagine from
this that I am old. Some women’s offers come at long intervals, and
other women’s offers come close together. Mine came remarkably close
together—so, of course, I cannot possibly be old. Not that I presume to
describe myself as absolutely young, either; so much depends on people’s
points of view. I have heard female children of the ages of eighteen or
nineteen called young ladies. This seems to me to be ridiculous—and I
have held that opinion, without once wavering from it, for more than ten
years past. It is, after all, a question of feeling; and, shall I
confess it? I feel so young!
I live in the suburbs, and I have bought my house. The major lives in
the suburbs, next door to me, and _he_ has bought his house. I don’t
object to this, of course. I merely mention it to make things straight.
Major Namby has been twice married. His first wife—dear, dear! how can I
express it? Shall I say, with vulgar abruptness, that his first wife had
a family? And must I descend into particulars, and add that they are
four in number, and that two of them are twins? Well, the words are
written; and if they will do over again for the same purpose, I beg to
repeat them in reference to the second Mrs. Namby (still alive), who has
also had a family, and is—no, I really cannot say is likely to go on
having one.
There are certain limits in a case of this kind, and I think I have
reached them. Permit me simply to state that the second Mrs. Namby has
three children at present. These, with the first Mrs. Namby’s four, make
a total of seven. The seven are composed of five girls and two boys. And
the first Mrs. Namby’s family all have one particular kind of
constitution, and the second Mrs. Namby’s family all have another
particular kind of constitution.
Let me explain once more that I merely mention these little matters, and
that I don’t object to them.
My complaint against Major Namby is, in plain terms, that he transacts
the whole of his domestic business in his front garden. Whether it
arises from natural weakness of memory, from total want of a sense of
propriety, or from a condition of mind which is closely allied to
madness of the eccentric sort, I cannot say; but the major certainly
does, sometimes partially and sometimes entirely, forget his private
family matters, and the necessary directions connected with them, while
he is inside the house, and does habitually remember them, and repair
all omissions by bawling through his windows at the top of his voice, as
soon as he gets outside the house.
It never seems to occur to him that he might advantageously return
indoors, and there mention what he has forgotten in a private and proper
way. The instant the lost idea strikes him—which it invariably does,
either in his front garden or in the roadway outside his house—he roars
for his wife, either from the gravel walk or over the low wall, and (if
I may use so strong an expression) empties his mind to her in public,
without appearing to care whose ears he wearies, whose delicacy he
shocks, or whose ridicule he invites.
If the man is not mad, his own small family fusses have taken such
complete possession of all his senses that he is quite incapable of
noticing anything else, and perfectly impenetrable to the opinions of
his neighbors. Let me show that the grievance of which I complain is no
slight one, by giving a few examples of the general persecution that I
suffer, and the occasional shocks that are administered to my delicacy,
at the coarse hands of Major Namby.
We will say it is a fine, warm morning. I am sitting in my front room,
with the window open, absorbed over a deeply interesting book. I hear
the door of the next house bang; I look up, and see the major descending
the steps into his front garden.
He walks—no, he marches—half way down the front garden path, with his
head high in the air and his chest stuck out, and his military cane
fiercely flourished in his right hand. Suddenly he stops, stamps with
one foot, knocks up the hinder part of the brim of his extremely curly
hat with his left hand, and begins to scratch at that singularly
disagreeable-looking roll of fat, red flesh in the back of his neck
(which scratching, I may observe, in parentheses, is always a sure sign,
in the case of this horrid man, that a lost domestic idea has suddenly
come back to him).
He waits a moment in the ridiculous position just described, then wheels
round on his heel, looks up at the first-floor window, and, instead of
going back into the house to mention what he has forgotten, bawls out
fiercely from the middle of the walk:
“Matilda!”
I hear his wife’s voice—a shockingly shrill one; but what can you expect
of a woman who has been seen, over and over again, in a slatternly
striped wrapper, as late as two o’clock in the afternoon?—I hear his
wife’s voice answer from inside the house:
“Yes, dear.”
“I said it was a south wind.”
“Yes, dear.”
“It isn’t a south wind.”
“Lor’, dear.”
“It’s a sou’east. I won’t have Georgina taken out to-day. (Georgina is
one of the first Mrs. Namby’s family, and they are all weak in the
chest.) Where’s nurse?”
“Here, sir.”
“Nurse, I won’t have Jack allowed to run. Whenever that boy perspires he
catches cold. Hang up his hoop. If he cries, take him into my
dressing-room and show him the birch-rod. Matilda?”
“Yes, dear.”
“What the devil do they mean by daubing all that grease over Mary’s
hair? It’s beastly to see it—do you hear?—beastly! Where’s Pamby?”
(Pamby is the unfortunate workwoman who makes and mends the family
linen.)
“Here, sir.”
“Pamby, what are you about now?”
No answer. Pamby, or somebody else, giggles faintly. The major
flourishes his cane in a fury.
“Why the devil don’t you answer me? I give you three seconds to answer
me, or leave the house. One—two—three. Pamby! what are you about now?”
“If you please, sir, I’m doing something——”
“What?”
“Something particular for baby, sir.”
“Drop it directly, whatever it is. Nurse!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mind the crossings. Don’t let the children sit down if they’re hot.
Don’t let them speak to other children. Don’t let them get playing with
strange dogs. Don’t let them mess their things. And above all, don’t
bring Master Jack back in a perspiration. Is there anything more before
I go out?”
“No, sir.”
“Matilda! Is there anything more?”
“No, dear.”
“Pamby! Is there anything more?”
“No, sir.”
Here the domestic colloquy ends, for the time being. Will any sensitive
person—especially a person of my own sex—please to imagine what I must
suffer as a delicate single lady, at having all these family details
obtruded on my attention, whether I like it or not, in the major’s
rasping martial voice, and in the shrill answering screams of the women
inside? It is bad enough to be submitted to this sort of persecution
when one is alone; but it is far worse to be also exposed to it—as I am
constantly—in the presence of visitors, whose conversation is
necessarily interrupted, whose ears are necessarily shocked, whose very
stay in my house is necessarily shortened by Major Namby’s unendurably
public way of managing his private concerns.
Only the other day, my old, dear, and most valued friend, Lady
Malkinshaw, was sitting with me, entering at length into the interesting
story of her second daughter’s unhappy marriage engagement, and of the
dignified manner in which the family ultimately broke it off.
For a quarter of an hour or so our interview continued to be
delightfully uninterrupted. At the end of that time, however, just as
Lady Malkinshaw, with the tears in her eyes, was beginning to describe
the effect of her daughter’s dreadful disappointment on the poor, dear
girl’s mind and looks, I heard the door of the major’s house bang as
usual, and, looking out of the window in despair, saw the major himself
strut half way down the walk, stop, scratch violently at his roll of red
flesh, wheel round so as to face the house, consider a little, pull his
tablets out of his waistcoat pocket, shake his head over them, and then
look up at the front windows, preparatory to bawling as usual at the
degraded female members of his household.
Lady Malkinshaw, quite ignorant of what was coming, happened, at the
same moment, to be proceeding with her pathetic story, in these terms:
“I do assure you, my poor, dear girl behaved throughout with the heroism
of a martyr. When I had told her of the vile wretch’s behavior, breaking
it to her as gently as I possibly could; and when she had a little
recovered I said to her——”
(“Matilda!”)
The major’s rasping voice sounded louder than ever, as he bawled out
that dreadful name just at the wrong moment. Lady Malkinshaw started as
if she had been shot. I put down the window in despair; but the glass
was no protection to our ears—Major Namby can roar through a brick wall.
I apologized—I declared solemnly that my next door neighbor was mad—I
entreated Lady Malkinshaw to take no notice, and to go on. That sweet
woman immediately complied.
I burn with indignation when I think of what followed. Every word from
the Nambys’ garden (which I distinguish below by parentheses) came, very
slightly muffled by the window, straight into my room, and mixed itself
up with her ladyship’s story in this inexpressibly ridiculous and
impertinent manner:
“Well,” my kind and valued friend proceeded, “as I was telling you, when
the first natural burst of sorrow was over, I said to her——”
“Yes, dear Lady Malkinshaw,” I murmured encouragingly.
“I said to her——”
(“By jingo, I’ve forgotten something! Matilda, when I made my memorandum
of errands, how many had I to do?”)
“‘My dearest, darling child,’ I said——”
(“Pamby, how many errands did your mistress give me to do?”)
“I said, ‘My dearest, darling child——’”
(“Nurse, how many errands did your mistress give me to do?”)
“‘My own love,’ I said——”
(“Pooh! pooh! I tell you, I had four errands to do, and I’ve only got
three of ’em written down. Check me off, all of you—I’m going to read my
errands.”)
“‘Your own proper pride, love,’ I said, ‘will suggest to you——’”
(“Gray powder for baby.”)
—“‘the necessity of making up your mind, my angel, to——’”
(“Row the plumber for infamous condition of back kitchen sink.”)
“‘to return all the wretch’s letters, and——’”
(“Speak to the haberdasher about patching Jack’s shirts.”)
“‘all his letters and presents, darling. You need only make them up into
a parcel, and write inside——’”
(“Matilda! is that all?”)
—“‘and write inside——’”
(“Pamby! is that all?”)
—“‘and write inside——’”
(“Nurse! is that all?”)
“‘I have my mother’s sanction for making one last request of you. It is
this——’”
(“What have the children got for dinner to-day?”)
—“it is this: return me my letters, as I have returned yours. You will
find inside——”
(“A shoulder of mutton and onion sauce? And a devilish good dinner,
too.”)
The coarse wretch roared out those last shocking words cheerfully, at
the top of his voice. Hitherto, Lady Malkinshaw had preserved her temper
with the patience of an angel; but she began—and who can wonder?—to lose
it at last.
“It is really impossible, my dear,” she said, rising from her chair, “to
continue any conversation while that very intolerable person persists in
talking to his family from his front garden. No! I really cannot go on—I
cannot, indeed.”
Just as I was apologizing to my sweet friend for the second time, I
observed, to my great relief (having my eyes still on the window), that
the odious major had apparently come to the end of his domestic business
for that morning, and had made up his mind at last to relieve us of his
presence. I distinctly saw him put his tablets back in his pocket, wheel
round again on his heel, and march straight to the garden gate.
I waited until he had his hand on the lock to open it; and then, when I
felt that we were quite safe, I informed dear Lady Malkinshaw that my
detestable neighbor had at last taken himself off, and, throwing open
the window again to get a little air, begged and entreated her to oblige
me by resuming the charming conversation.
“Where was I?” inquired my distinguished friend.
“You were telling me what you recommended your poor darling to write
inside your inclosure,” I answered.
“Ah, yes—so I was. Well, my dear, she controlled herself by an admirable
effort, and wrote exactly what I told her. You will excuse a mother’s
partiality, I am sure—but I think I never saw her look so lovely, so
mournfully lovely, I should say, as when she was writing those last
lines to the man who had so basely trifled with her. The tears came into
my eyes as I looked at her sweet, pale cheeks; and I thought to
myself——”
(“Nurse! which of the children was sick, last time, after eating onion
sauce?”)
He had come back again!—the monster had come back again, from the very
threshold of the garden gate, to shout that unwarrantable, atrocious
question in at his nursery window!
Lady Malkinshaw bounced off her chair at the first note of his horrible
voice, and changed toward me instantly—as if it had been my fault—in the
most alarming and most unexpected manner. Her ladyship’s face became
awfully red; her ladyship’s head trembled excessively; her ladyship’s
eyes looked straight into mine with an indescribable fierceness.
“Why am I thus insulted?” inquired Lady Malkinshaw, with a slow and
dignified sternness which froze the blood in my veins. “What do you mean
by it?” continued her ladyship, with a sudden rapidity of utterance that
quite took my breath away.
Before I could remonstrate with my friend for visiting her natural
irritation on poor, innocent me, before I could declare that I had seen
the major actually open his garden gate to go away, the provoking
brute’s voice burst in on us again.
“Ha, yes?” we heard him growl to himself in a kind of shameless domestic
soliloquy. “Yes, yes, yes—Sophy was sick, to be sure. Curious. All Mrs.
Namby’s stepchildren have weak chests and strong stomachs. All Mrs.
Namby’s own children have weak stomachs and strong chests. _I_ have a
strong stomach _and_ a strong chest. Pamby!”
“I consider this,” continued Lady Malkinshaw, literally glaring at me in
the fulness of her indiscriminate exasperation—“I consider this to be
unwarrantable and unladylike. I beg to know——”
“Where’s Bill?” burst in the major from below, before she could add
another word. “Matilda! Nurse! Pamby! where’s Bill? I didn’t bid Bill
good-by—hold him up at the window, one of you.”
“My dear Lady Malkinshaw,” I remonstrated, “why blame _me_? What have I
done?”
“Done?” repeated her ladyship. “Done? All that is most unfriendly, most
unwarrantable, most unladylike, most——”
“Ha! ha! ha-a-a-a!” roared the major, shouting her ladyship down, and
stamping about the garden in fits of fond paternal laughter. “Bill, my
boy, how are you? There’s a young Turk for you! Pull up his frock—I want
to see his jolly legs——”
Lady Malkinshaw screamed and rushed to the door. I sank into a chair,
and clasped my hands in despair.
“Ha! ha! ha-a-a-a! What calves the dog’s got! Pamby! look at his calves.
Aha! bless his heart, his legs are the model of his father’s! The Namby
build, Matilda; the Namby build, every inch of him! Kick again,
Bill—kick out, like mad. I say, ma’am! I beg your pardon, ma’am——”
_Ma’am?_ I ran to the window. Was the major actually daring to address
Lady Malkinshaw, as she passed indignantly, on her way out, down my
front garden? He was! The odious monster was pointing out his—his, what
shall I say?—his _undraped_ offspring to the notice of my outraged
visitor.
“Look at him, ma’am. If you’re a judge of children, look at him. There’s
a two-year-older for you! Ha! ha! ha-a-a-a! Show the lady your legs,
Bill—kick out for the lady, you dog, kick out!”
THE WORLD’S MOST REMARKABLE STREETS.
While Europe Has the Most Aristocratic, the Cleanest, and the Most
Beautiful, the United States Has the Highest and the Most Wealthy.
There is always interest in the superlative. The biggest things, the
smallest things, the ugliest and the most graceful are important only
when compared with the rest of their kind. Every city in the world has
its attractive roads and streets as well as its ugly ones.
The highest street in the world is Main Street, In Denver; the richest
is Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the widest is Market Street, in
Philadelphia; and the shortest is the Rue Blé in Paris.
The dirtiest street is that of Tchangsti, in Nankin; the cleanest is
the Via Castile, in Seville, Spain; the most aristocratic one is
Grosvenor Place, in London; the most beautiful is the Avenue des
Champs Elysées, Paris. The narrowest street is the Via Sol, Havana,
Cuba, which has a width of only forty-two inches.
Little Glimpses of the 19th Century.[3]
The Great Events in the History of the Last One Hundred Years, Assembled
so as to Present a Nutshell Record.
_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Footnote 3:
Began March SCRAP BOOK. Single copies, 10 cents.
EIGHTH DECADE.
POPULATION—Washington, D. C., 109,199; Chicago, 298,977; New York
(including boroughs now forming Greater New York), 1,469,045; New York
(Manhattan), 942,292; London, 3,251,804; United States, 38,558,371;
Great Britain and Ireland, 31,672,678. World population,
1,310,000,000.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, except that in Spain Amadeus
is made king, and in France Napoleon III falls with the empire.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1871=]
In the United States, a great fire in Chicago destroys a large portion
of the city; property loss, one hundred and ninety million five hundred
and twenty-six thousand dollars; several hundred people are killed, and
over one hundred thousand are rendered homeless; area burned, three and
a half square miles. In the same month, October, vast fires rage in
northern Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, with appalling loss of
life. A commission of British and American statesmen meets In Washington
and frames a treaty with reference to the claims of the United States
against Great Britain for damage done during the Civil War by the
Confederate cruiser Alabama and other Confederate vessels built and
equipped in English ports; by terms of treaty the question is submitted
to a board of arbitration to convene at Geneva next year. In New York,
the corrupt Tweed ring is broken up, and its head, William M. Tweed,
arrested and held in two million dollars bail. Under authority of
Congress, President Grant takes steps to promote improvement in the
Civil Service; he appoints a commission under George W. Curtis (see
1873). An act of Congress creates the Centennial Commission representing
all States and Territories: it is authorized to prepare for a great
international exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876, in celebration of the
nation’s centennial anniversary. Passage of the Force Bill to suppress
the “Kuklux Klan” in the South. Death of George Ticknor, American writer
and philologist; Alice and Phœbe Cary, poets; Robert Anderson, American
soldier, the defender of Fort Sumter. Immigration, 321,350; exports,
$442,820,178.
In England, the system of purchasing commissions and promotions in the
army is abolished, and also the requirements of religious tests in the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Russia gives notice that she will
no longer be held by the treaty made after the Crimean War, under which
she abrogated naval rights in the Black Sea; England and other powers
acquiesce. Death of Sir John Herschel, astronomer, and of George Grote,
historian and philosopher.
In France, the siege of Paris is ended by capitulation and armistice,
pending formation of a government to negotiate peace with the victorious
Germans. A National Assembly, selected by popular vote, meets at
Bordeaux and selects M. Thiers as “executive head” of the Republic with
a coalition cabinet representing the several factions. M. Thiers
negotiates peace by which Germany annexes Alsace, except the city of
Belfort, and a part of Lorraine (Treaty of Frankfort); indemnity to
Germany, one billion dollars; German troops to occupy France pending its
final payment. M. Thiers now made President of the French Republic.
Meantime, civil war breaks out in Paris, and the Commune is established
with a reign of bloodshed, cruel reprisals, and wanton destruction of
property; burning of the Tuileries, the Louvre, Hôtel de Ville, and
leveling of the Vendôme Column; barbarous murder of the hostages,
including Archbishop Darboy. Commune is finally quelled after
bombardment, assault, and capture of city by French Government troops;
leaders of Commune executed; lives lost during the conflict, fourteen
thousand. The Mont Cenis tunnel is opened for traffic, thus piercing the
barrier of the Alps between France and Italy. Death of Auber, French
composer.
In Spain, Minister Serrano having resigned, King Amadeus first appoints
Zorilla and then Sagasta in his place. The excellent qualities of King
Amadeus fail to compensate for his being a foreigner, while his honesty
of purpose alienates him from all political factions. Meantime, the
Alfonsists and Carlists organize their hostility and raise standard of
war. In Germany, William I triumphantly returns to Berlin, after having
been proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the palace of Versailles (see
France). The first Reichstag of the new German Empire is formally
opened. In Italy, the seat of government is transferred from Florence to
Rome, the first Italian Government in Rome for many centuries. In
Mexico, Juarez is again elected President, but by a small majority,
owing to large following developed by General Diaz as a rival candidate.
Diaz party in rebellion over result (see 1872). In Africa, Stanley,
heading the New York _Herald_ expedition, finds Livingstone and relieves
his wants.
RULERS—United States, Ulysses S. Grant, President; Great Britain,
Queen Victoria; France, L. Thiers, President; Spain, Amadeus; Germany,
William I; Russia, Alexander II; Italy, Victor Emmanuel; Austria,
Francis Joseph; Pope, Pius IX.
POPULATION—Washington, D. C., 109,199; New York (including boroughs
now forming Greater New York), 1,469,045; New York (Manhattan),
942,292; Chicago, 298,977; London, 3,351,804; United States,
38,558,371; Great Britain and Ireland, 31,672,678. World population,
estimated at 1,310,000,000.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1872=]
In the United States, a general epidemic prevails among horses; business
seriously crippled by it, and great financial loss. In Boston, a great
fire destroys the business portion of the city; loss, seventy million
dollars. General U. S. Grant, Republican, is reelected President; Henry
Wilson, Vice-President; defeated candidate, Horace Greeley (Liberal
Republican and Democratic parties). Congressional investigation of the
Credit Mobilier corporation in connection with the building of the
Pacific Railway; great scandal developed from the discovery that much of
the Credit Mobilier stock is owned by members of Congress. The Geneva
arbitrators award fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars damages
to the United States for depredations committed during Civil War by
Confederate cruisers built or equipped in England; and the Emperor of
Germany arbitrates in favor of the United States in its contention with
Great Britain for ownership of the San Juan Islands, between Washington
Territory and Vancouver Island. Death of William H. Seward, American
statesman; Horace Greeley, famous American journalist and editor; James
Gordon Bennett, founder of the New York _Herald_; and Professor S. F. B.
Morse, American inventor and father of the telegraph. Important
inventions; the duplex telegraph perfected by Stearns; George
Westinghouse, Jr., produces improved air-brake for trains (see 1869);
Lyall Invents the “positive motion loom.” Immigration, 404,806; exports,
$444,177,586.
In England, Stanley returns and publishes “How I Found Livingstone.”
Deaths of Poole, English dramatist; Charles Lever, Irish novelist; Sir
John Bowring, linguist and social politician. In France, the seat of
government is transferred from Versailles to Paris. The government
revokes the proscription of the Orleans and Bourbon princes. Death of
Gautier, French novelist and essayist.
In Spain, Serrano again assumes ministry, but resigns because King
Amadeus declines to encourage civil war by taking the aggressive against
the Alfonsists and Carlists. Amadeus’s courage and coolness is exhibited
strikingly amid conspiracies that surround him and warnings and attempts
to assassinate him; but being surrounded by traitorous ministers and
generals, with the army disorganized and rule in Spain under a
constitution appearing to be impossible, the king at length decides to
abdicate (see 1873). In Germany, the meeting in Berlin of the Emperors
of Germany, Russia, and Austria establishes the “league of the three
emperors” (Drelkaiserbund), thus assuring the peace of Europe and
emphasizing the German capital as the pivot of European policy. Death of
Feuerbach, German philosopher. In Mexico, a civil War is begun by
General Diaz and his partisans, but it is ended by the sudden death of
President Juarez from apoplexy. Lerdo de Tajada, Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court, assumes the Presidency; is subsequently elected, and
tranquillity is restored.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, with the exception that in
Sweden Charles XV dies, and is succeeded by his son as Oscar II.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1873=]
A great commercial panic, originating in the New York stock market,
sweeps the country (September 18 called the “Second Black Friday”). In
New York City, the stock exchange is closed, and the clearing house
suspends temporarily. Congress drops the standard silver dollar of four
hundred and twelve and one-half grains from the list of coins. Death of
Chief Justice Chase, American statesman and jurist; Agassiz, American
scientist. General Ulysses S. Grant is again inaugurated President.
Congress raises the salaries of its members and of officers of the
government (act repealed 1874; called the “salary grab”). In New York
City, the Brooklyn Suspension Bridge is begun. Great Britain pays to the
United States fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars, the award
under the Alabama claims. Alexander H. Stephens returns to Congress.
Congress establishes one-cent postal cards. Spanish authorities capture
an American steamer, the Virginius, suspected of conveying men and arms
to Cuba; thirty Americans executed; great indignation and excitement
throughout the United States; Spain tenders apology and surrenders
vessel and surviving prisoners; indemnity paid (1875), eighty thousand
dollars. Steady growth of the “Grangers” as a political factor. Congress
refuses to make further appropriation for continuing work of the Civil
Service Commission (see 1874). Organization of the “Farmers’ Alliance,”
a cooperative agricultural society. Important inventions: the automatic
self-binding harvester and the Janney automatic car-coupler.
Immigration, 459,893; exports, $522,479,922.
In England, home rule for Ireland is agitated for the first time as an
issue in politics and efforts are made to form a compact, well-guided
Irish party in Parliament to press demand for legislative independence;
the Irish Land League is organized. Gladstone endeavors to establish an
Irish university on a non-sectarian basis, but finds the project
unpopular and resigns. Disraeli declines to take the government, owing
to personnel of House of Commons, and Gladstone resumes office. Death of
Dr. Livingstone (in Africa), African explorer; Sir Edwin Landseer,
English artist; Sir H. Holland, English physician and author; John S.
Mill, English philosopher and economist.
In France, the last instalment of the billion-dollar war indemnity to
Germany is paid, and all German troops are withdrawn from French soil.
President Thiers, wearied of the controversies of seven political
parties in the Chamber and the intrigues and hostility of the
monarchists, tenders his resignation, which is accepted by a small
majority in the assembly: great dismay and regret among the people at
large. General MacMahon, favored by the monarchists, is elected
President by the assembly; the Duc de Broglie, grandson of Mme. de
Staël, is made Prime Minister. The monarchist majority negotiates with
the Comte de Chambord, heir of the Bourbon kings (the so-called Henry
V), who declines the throne, however, rather than govern under a
constitution or “abandon the Bourbon White Flag for the Revolutionary
Tri-Color.” The royalists now feel constrained to accept the Republic as
the most feasible form of government for the time being, and gradually
cooperate in strengthening it. Deaths of ex-Emperor Napoleon III, in
exile; Balrot, French statesman; Guizot and Michelet, French historians.
In Germany, Baron Liebig, the great German chemist, dies, and also A.
Rothschild, Hebrew banker (one of the five brothers), and Von Raumer,
German historian. In Spain, King Amadeus communicates his abdication to
the Cortes and leaves Spain, respected by the better class for chivalric
bearing and honesty, but hated by masses because a foreigner. The Cortes
now declares in favor of a republic, with Figueras as President, and
Castelar foreign minister; but insurrections occur, and a new Ministry
is formed. Castelar is made President amid such chaos that he proclaims
temporary military rule. Insurrections of the Carlists, Alfonsists, and
Communists are suppressed.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, except that in Spain Amadeus
abdicates and a republic is proclaimed; Figueras, President, and later
Castelar, military dictator; in France M. Thiers resigns Presidency,
and is succeeded by General MacMahon.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1874=]
In the United States, the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River at
Saint Louis is formally opened. In New York City, the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children is organized. In Germantown,
Pennsylvania, Charlie Ross, aged four years, is kidnaped from his
father’s home (has never been found). Death of Ezra Cornell, founder of
Cornell University; ex-President Fillmore; Charles Sumner, American
statesman and politician. Important inventions: the quadruplex telegraph
(Edison); twine binder for harvesters (Gorham); the practical
barbed-wire machine (Glidden and Vaughan). Immigration, 313,339;
exports, $586,283,040.
In England, owing to a reaction against Liberal measures, Gladstone
appeals to the country, promising abolition of the income tax and other
tax reductions, but the national elections result favorably for the
Conservatives; Gladstone resigns and Disraeli forms new government.
Termination of the celebrated Tichborne trial, the longest known in
England. In Spain, the Cortes votes a “lack of confidence,” and Castelar
resigns. The military, however, disperse the Cortes, and a military
dictatorship is formed under Marshal Serrano; European powers, except
Russia, recognize his government; the warfare against the Carlists and
Alfonsists is prosecuted with indifferent success. Finally army
officers, led by General Campos, declare for Alfonso, son of ex-Queen
Isabella (deposed); Serrano resigns, and a ministerial regency notifies
Isabella of the elevation of her son to the throne.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, except that in Spain Serrano
succeeds Castelar as dictator.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1875=]
In the United States, two rival State governments in Louisiana maintain
civil war and distract the State and nation (see 1877). Passage of new
Civil Rights Bill (see 1883). Congress provides for the gradual
resumption of specie payments; act becomes effective, 1879. Death of
Henry Wilson, Vice-President of the United States; ex-President Andrew
Johnson, and John C. Breckenridge. In Massachusetts, the Hoosac Tunnel
is opened to traffic. In Louisiana, Captain Eads begins the work of
deepening the channel of the South Pass of the Mississippi River, and in
New York City the work of excavation under the dangerous reef of Hell
Gate is completed; forty-seven thousand four hundred and sixty-one cubic
yards of rock removed (see 1876). In Massachusetts, centenary
celebrations of the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill are held. Many
government officials indicted for connection with the swindles of the
“whisky ring.” Important inventions: illuminating gas made from water
(Lowe); ice machine; sulphuric acid plant; cash-carriers for stores
(Brown); artificial ice skating-rinks (Gamgee). Immigration, 227,498;
exports, $513,442,711.
In England, the shares of the Suez Canal owned by the Khedive of Egypt
(amounting to nearly one-half interest) are purchased for four million
pounds, in order that England may protect her interests in the route to
India; the money is advanced by the Rothschilds. Departure of polar
expedition under Captain Nares (see 1876). Death of Arthur Helps,
English essayist and dramatist.
In France, the Constitution of the Republic is finally adjusted, and a
parliamentary body established (Senate and Chamber of Deputies);
Gambetta is leader of the “Left” or Republican division. Death of
Quinet, French author. In Turkey, the provinces of Bosnia and
Herzegovina revolt against the intolerable abuses of Turkish rule under
Abdul Aziz. In Germany, civil marriage legalized throughout the empire.
In Spain, the Bourbons regain power, Alfonso, son of Isabella II, being
crowned king under title of Alfonso XII. Canovas del Castillo is made
regent, and prosecutes attempts to suppress the Carlists.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, except that in Spain Alfonso
XII becomes king.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1876=]
In the United States, this, the centennial year of national existence,
is opened with a general celebration all over the country. Visit of Dom
Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, and the empress. The great national
Centennial Exhibition of arts and industries opens in Fairmount Park,
Philadelphia, and surpasses all previous world’s fairs of every land.
Massacre of General Custer and two hundred and seventy-six men of the
Seventh Cavalry by the Sioux Indians under Sitting Bull, near the Little
Big Horn River, Montana. Appearance of the Greenback party. Rutherford
B. Hayes (Republican) elected President, and William A. Wheeler
Vice-President. Defeated candidate, Samuel J. Tilden (Democrat). The
result is held to be doubtful, owing to existence of dual governments in
Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, and a complication in
Oregon; decision is referred to Electoral Commission appointed by
Congress; decision for Mr. Hayes, March, 1877. In New York City, the
first wire is stretched between the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, and
the blowing up and removal of part of the great reef at Hell Gate is
successfully accomplished. Colorado is admitted to Statehood. Death of
A. T. Stewart, New York merchant. In Brooklyn, New York, the burning of
the Brooklyn Theater causes a loss of over three hundred lives
(performance, Kate Claxton in “The Two Orphans”). Important inventions:
the articulating telephone (Professor Alexander Graham Bell); hydraulic
dredges (Bowers and others); machinery for making cigarettes;
photography by electric light (Vander Weyde); the electric pen (Edison);
steam-feed for saw-mill carriages; cable cars introduced (Hallidie).
Commercial failures for year, 9,092; liabilities, $191,117,786.
Immigration, 169,986; exports, $540,384,671.
In England, Disraeli secures passage of an act conferring upon Queen
Victoria the title of Empress of India. News of the unspeakable
atrocities committed under Turkish misrule in Bulgaria creates great
excitement and indignation, but Disraeli, distrustful of Russian designs
on Turkish territory, endeavors to adhere to a policy of
non-interference. Gladstone, emerging from retirement, denounces Turkish
oppression, condemns Disraeli’s inaction, and urges that the Ottoman
Government “be turned out of Europe, bag and baggage.” A conference of
great powers is held at Constantinople, England being represented by
Lord Salisbury. Turkey rejects proposals of the congress, and Russia
declares war as champion of the Christian Church (Greek).
In France, President MacMahon, as a political experiment, but against
inclination, selects M. Jules Simon, Republican, from the ranks of the
“Left” as Prime Minister in place of De Broglie, resigned. M. Simon
organizes a new cabinet. Death of Aurore Dudevant (“George Sand”),
French novelist. In Spain, the Carlists are at last subdued; Don Carlos
escapes to France. A newly elected Cortes adopts new constitution
providing for legislative bodies controlled by popular vote, also for
freedom of the press, religion, and unions.
In Turkey, a conspiracy costs the sultan his throne, and, shortly after,
his life; he is succeeded by Neurad V, and he in turn by Abdul Hamid II.
Revolt extends to Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; massacres of native
Christians, pillage and destruction of valuable property. European
powers remonstrate and urge reforms. Turks suppress revolt in Bulgaria,
using measures of extreme cruelty and authorizing massacres by the
Bashi-Bazouks (semi-organized banditti). In Germany, the movement is
begun which ultimately results in transference of railroads to ownership
of the separate states. Death of Ehrenberg, German naturalist. In
Mexico, a rebellion breaks out and Diaz joins it, forcing President
Lerdo into exile. Diaz becomes provisional President.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1877=]
In the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes is inaugurated President. The
conflict in Louisiana between rival State governments is settled by the
President in favor of Nicholls’s government (Democratic). President
Hayes withdraws last of Federal troops from the South. Pennsylvania and
West Virginia suffer from great railway strike and riots; in Pittsburgh,
much property is destroyed and many lives are lost; freight and
passenger service demoralized, and militia has to quell riot; strike
unsuccessful. Death of Brigham Young, religionist and head of the Mormon
Church. The “trade dollar” ceases to be a legal tender. Execution of
John D. Lee, convicted of complicity in the Mountain Meadow Massacre
(1857). Ex-President Grant sails from New York upon a tour around the
world. Death of J. L. Motley, American historian. Manifestations in
California against the immigration and the labor of the Chinese (see
1888); much general agitation this year over the rights of labor.
Important inventions: the phonograph (Edison); the gas-engine (Otto);
the Sawyer-Man electric lamp; transmitter for telephone (Berliner);
carbon microphone (Edison); discovery of the two satellites of planet
Mars (Hall). Immigration, 141,857; exports, $602,475,220.
In England, a war feeling develops against Russia; jealousy and alarm
felt over her conquests in Turkey; origin of “jingoism.” A fleet is sent
through the Dardanelles as a “demonstration” against Russia. Some
disaffected burghers of the Transvaal (the South African Republic)
invite England to annex their country. This is formally accomplished,
and the annexation persisted in by England despite much controversy in
Parliament (see 1880).
In France, M. Simon, being reproached by the President for radical
tendencies, resigns as Prime Minister, together with the Cabinet. The
President challenges criticism by dissolving the Chamber of Deputies and
appealing to a national election, but a strong Republican majority is
returned. Death of ex-President Thiers, French patriot and statesman. A
French physicist, M. Cailletet, accomplishes the liquification of
oxygen, hydrogen, and other gases; Pictet, in Switzerland, does the
same. Invention of the Jablochkoff electric candle, and the chain and
sprocket device for bicycles.
In Turkey, the Porte rejects the proposals of the conference at
Constantinople, including its demands for the protection of Christian
provinces, and Russia declares war against Turkey, announcing herself as
the defender and protector of the Christians. Russian troops enter
Rumania and cross the Danube; they capture Nicopolis and garrison, but
at Plevna the heroic defense of the garrison of Turks against nearly two
hundred thousand Russians and Rumanians lasts five months, the Russians
failing entirely to carry the place by assault. The garrison of forty
thousand men finally surrenders because of famine, and Turkish
resistance collapses. In Mexico, General Porfirio Diaz is proclaimed
constitutional President by the Mexican Congress, for term ending 1880.
In Italy, Schiaparelli (astronomer) discovers the “canals” of Mars.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, except that in the United
States Rutherford B. Hayes succeeds Ulysses S. Grant as President.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1878=]
In the United States, a great yellow fever epidemic spreads through the
Southern States. Congress passes, over the President’s veto, the
Bland-Allison Silver Bill, requiring the purchase monthly by the
Secretary of the Treasury of between two and four million dollars’ worth
of silver bullion for coinage (repealed, 1890). The silver dollar of
four hundred and twelve and one-half grains is made a legal tender.
Edison produces a perfected electric light for general use. Death of
William Cullen Bryant, American poet, and of Bayard Taylor, American
poet, essayist, and traveler. Important inventions: the carbon filament
for incandescent electric lamp (Edison); Sholes’s typewriter perfected
by E. Remington & Sons; the yielding spinning spindle bearing and the
Gessner cloth-finishing press; gelatine emulsion dry plate introduced.
Immigration, 138,469; exports, $694,865,766.
In England, protest is made by Disraeli against the Russo-Turkish treaty
of San Stefano, and English diplomacy and firmness forces Russian
consent to a congress of the five great powers at Berlin for settlement
of terms. The Berlin congress cedes Island of Cyprus to England as her
share of the spoils of the Russo-Turkish War, and yields to other
demands of England. Disraeli returns from the congress, having brought
back “peace with honor” and secured a great diplomatic triumph for
England; height of Disraeli’s power. He and Bismarck the two greatest
men in the world at this time (see 1881–1884). The Ameer of Afghanistan
having rebuffed a British diplomatic mission, a force of English troops
invades the country. Flight and death of the Ameer, Shere Ali; his son
and successor, Yakoub Khan, submits to English treaty terms (see 1879).
Death of Princess Alice.
In France, a great international exhibition is held in Paris. In
Germany, the Congress of Berlin meets under the presidency of Prince
Bismarck and modifies and revises the treaty terms of Russia with
Turkey. Death of Petermann, German geographer. In Italy, King Victor
Emmanuel and Pope Pius IX die within a few days of each other. At the
last the Pope generously forgets their strife and differences, and sends
the viaticum (eucharist) to the dying king. Victor Emmanuel is succeeded
by his son, Humbert I; the Pope is succeeded by Cardinal Pecci, as Leo
XIII. Rise of Crispi to prominence and power in the Italian Cabinet. In
Mexico, under President Diaz, a stronger and abler government begins to
develop; his consolidation of power secures domestic peace (see 1880).
In Chile, a serious dispute arises with Bolivia and Peru with reference
to northern boundary line (see 1879).
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, except that in Italy Victor
Emmanuel is succeeded by Humbert I; Pope Pius IX is succeeded by
Cardinal Pecci, as Leo XIII.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1879=]
In the United States, James Gordon Bennett, proprietor of the New York
_Herald_, proffers the government a ship, the Jeannette, for a voyage of
Arctic exploration via Bering Strait; offer accepted, and the Jeannette
sails from San Francisco. Specie payments are resumed. Death of William
Lloyd Garrison, noted abolitionist and reformer, and of Caleb Cushing,
statesman, jurist, and diplomat. Quinine placed on free list.
Publication of Henry George’s “Progress and Poverty,” advocating the
“single tax” theory. Captain Eads completes the improvements assuring
better navigation of lower Mississippi. Important inventions: Lee
magazine rifle; blasting gelatine (Nobel), an explosive more powerful
than dynamite or gunpowder; “Standard” bicycle perfected. Immigration.
177,826; exports, 710,439,441.
In Afghanistan, the British resident at Kabul, Sir Louis Cavagnari, is
murdered; the British forces prepare to renew the campaign. An
expedition sent against the Zulus in Southeast Africa for repeated
attacks on British settlers. Zulus subdued, and their chief, Cetywayo,
captured. The Prince Imperial of France killed by Zulus while serving in
English cavalry.
In France, President MacMahon, disapproving of certain changes in the
army corps, resigns and the Senate and Chamber elect M. Jules Grévy
(Republican) as his successor. Gambetta succeeds Grévy as president of
the Chamber of Deputies, and Waddington becomes Prime Minister. M. Jules
Ferry, Minister of Education, begins an agitation to exclude the Jesuits
and all “unauthorized orders” from teaching in France; much bitter
agitation. The Bonapartist cause suffers by the death of the young
prince imperial. In Germany, great economic changes are wrought by
Bismarck, including notable increase in tariff. In Sweden, news received
that Nordenskjöld, Arctic explorer, had reached the Northeast Passage.
In Chile, war against Bolivia and Peru declared; naval struggle watched
with world-wide interest as being the first between modern iron-clads;
Chilean fleet victorious; Bolivian and Peruvian army almost annihilated
at Dolores (see 1880).
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, except that in France
President MacMahon is succeeded by Jules Grévy.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
[Sidenote: =1880=]
In the United States, owing to a deadlock between Ulysses S. Grant and
James G. Blaine, the Republican National Convention nominates a “dark
horse,” James A. Garfield, who is elected President, with Chester A.
Arthur Vice-President; defeated candidates, Winfield S. Hancock and
William H. English, Democrats. Popular vote. 4,454,416 to 4,444,952;
electoral vote, 214 to 155. Samuel J. Tilden had declined the Democratic
nomination. Important inventions: the magnetic ore concentrator
(Edison); hammerless gun (Greener); spinning spindle (Rabbeth); the
“Rover” bicycle (Starley), the first of the “safeties.” Public debt
reduced to $1,915,594,813; commerce, $14,760,000,000; immigration,
457,257; exports $835,638,658 (nearly double that of 1871).
In England, unpopularity of the Zulu and Afghan wars, depression of
trade, and bad harvests develop dissatisfaction with Disraeli’s
government, and the elections for a new Parliament result in Liberal
victory; Disraeli resigns, and Gladstone, the “Grand Old Man,” again
becomes Prime Minister. The Transvaal revolts against English régime and
proclaims restoration of free Republic (see 1881).
In France, a general amnesty is proclaimed toward all political exiles,
Including those who had been Communists. The first annual celebration of
the fall of the Bastile (July 14). Suppression of the Jesuit schools,
and restrictions passed upon religious orders. France annexes the
Society Islands. Invention of the electric storage battery (Faure). In
Germany, the great Cathedral of Cologne, begun in the year 1248, is
completed. Diplomatic relations are renewed between Germany and the
Papal See. In Afghanistan, a British force is defeated at Maiwand, but
General Roberts retrieves the situation by his march to Kandahar.
Abdurrahman, nephew of Shere Ali, is installed as ameer, and the
insurrection raised by a rival claimant, Ayoub Khan, suppressed. In
Mexico, Diaz’s term as President ends, and he is peaceably succeeded by
Manuel Gonzalez (see 1884). In Chile, the United States Minister
succeeds in bringing about negotiations for peace between Chile and
Bolivia and Peru (see 1881). In Spain, the Cortes passes a law for the
gradual abolition of slavery in Cuba during the next eight years.
RULERS—The same as previous year.
POPULATION—Washington, D. C., 147,293; New York (including boroughs
now forming Greater New York), 1,935,367; New York (Manhattan),
1,206,299; Chicago, 503,185; London, 3,834,194; United States,
50,155,783; Great Britain and Ireland, 34,868,648. World population,
estimated at 1,433,000,000.
Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself,
and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none
the worse nor the better for being praised.—=Marcus Aurelius.=
(121–180.)
FROM THE LIPS OF ANANIAS.
These Little Tales Illustrate How a Good Lie, Well Told, Is Far More
Honest Than That Polite But Hypocritical Invention Which Is Known as
“Fiction Founded on Fact.”
A FISHERMAN’S REVENGE.
Enos Wilson, an enthusiastic fisherman from Brockton, Massachusetts, who
is here on his spring vacation, is receiving the congratulations of his
friends.
While out fishing in a canoe lately Enos got a bite from a dogfish. The
dogfish bit the bottom out of the canoe and also carried away a portion
of Mr. Wilson’s trousers.
This so enraged the doughty fisherman that he threw away his rod and
line, and, jumping into the water, swam after the fish, overtaking it
and holding it under the water until it was drowned.
The dogfish weighed nineteen and a quarter pounds on its own scales. It
was a fresh-water dogfish and very vicious.—_Boston Post._
FELINE INGENUITY.
Short—I thought you were going to drown that cat?
Long—Well, they say a cat has nine lives, but this one has twenty, I
think. Why, I actually put that cat into a tub of water and tied a brick
round its neck; and what do you think?
Short—Goodness knows.
Long—Well, this morning when I went to look at the tub the cat had
swallowed all the water and was sitting on the brick.—_Answers._
AN UNLIMITED EXPRESS.
“Trains in the South travel awfully slow,” said Robert Hathaway, of
Atlanta, at the Plankinton House, “but it’s a base libel to say that
conductors will stop trains to accommodate passengers who wish to pick
flowers by the wayside.
“I was riding on a Central Georgia train about forty miles out in
Campbell County, when the train came to a standstill. I could tell the
train had stopped because I was looking out of the window at the time.
“When the conductor came through I asked the cause of the stop, and
found it was a cow on the track. We started up, and had rumbled along
several miles when it came to another stop.
“‘What’s the matter now,’ I called to the conductor, out of the window,
‘another cow?’
“‘Naw,’ he said disgustedly, ‘same cow.’”—_Milwaukee Sentinel._
A STORY IN STONE.
A Yankee traveling in England listened for some time to a crowd of men
talking together about the wonders they had seen in other lands. While
others expressed surprise at what they heard, the Yankee remained
passive, and he even yawned when others were working up to a high pitch
of excitement. At length one of the travelers said to him:
“Have you anything in your country so superior and so much more
wonderful that you could tell about?”
“Waal, I just have,” drawled the Yankee. “There’s hundreds of more
wonderful things over in Ameriky that we don’t pay no heed to.”
“Do you mean Niagara Falls and the Mammoth Cave and such things?” said
one.
“Pshaw! We don’t count caves, nor waterfalls, nor burning mountains, nor
boiling springs, though we can beat creation in such things. Say, did
any of you fellows hear of the petrified forest in Arizony?—hundreds of
thousands of acres of stone forests!”
“And the trees standing?”
“The trees standing? Waal, I should say so; and not only standing, but
all in leaf and some of ’em in blossom, and others, again, full of nuts
and other fruit, all turned into stone, mind you.”
“And I suppose there were birds in the trees?” sneered one.
“Birds! Yes, sir, no end of birds, all of the most beautiful plumage and
all turned into stone. Even the nests in the trees and the eggs in them
were petrified in the most wonderful manner you ever saw. I see some of
you fellows doubt me. Waal, all I have to say is that what I am telling
you is true, and I’ll bet any sum on it and take you there to prove it.
I’ll tell you what I saw last time I was in the petrified forest. There
was a hunter who must have been in the forest when the petrification
took place, for he was petrified, too, and there he stood as straight as
you please, with a petrified gun on his shoulder a-taking aim at a
petrified bird. Why, the whole thing was so natural that you could see
the shot and smoke coming out of the muzzle of the——”
“I’ve got you there!” interrupted the Englishman. “The law of
gravitation would have brought down the smoke and the shot.”
“So it would,” said the Yankee, “but the funny thing about it was that
the law of gravitation was petrified, too, and so the blamed thing could
not work.”—_Tit-Bits._
A PEACH PUP.
“Speaking about dogs,” said Representative Beidler, of Ohio, “I suppose
I have the most intelligent fox-terrier in the country, and he’s only a
puppy yet.
“The other day he spilled his milk, and I cuffed his ears and chucked
him out of the window. Next day he spilled his milk again, and I cuffed
his ears again and chucked him out of the window. The next day, after he
had spilled his milk again, he cuffed his ears and went and jumped out
the window.”—_New York World._
THE EMERGENCY AND THE MAN.
“Some people deal with graft about the way a farmer in northern
Pennsylvania dealt with an emergency,” said Mayor Weaver, of
Philadelphia.
“This farmer called on a neighbor very early one morning. The latter,
although much surprised at receiving such an early call, did not forget
his hospitality.
“‘Come in, Jake, and set down,’ he said cordially.
“‘I don’t know’s I ought,’ said Jake, but after a little more persuasion
he went. About fifteen minutes were consumed in miscellaneous discussion
of crops, when breakfast was ready.
“‘Set by, Jake, and hev a bite ter eat,’ invited the still hospitable
farmer.
“‘Now, act’ly, Silas, I don’t know’s I orter stay so long. Ye see,
’taint’s though I didn’t ’preciate yer kindness, but my roof’s afire,
and I cum over ter borrer a ladder.’”—_New York Times._
WHERE TWO CLIMATES MEET.
A “digger” from California, eulogizing the climate, said:
“There’s a mountain there—the Sawyer Nevady, they call it—with a valley
on each side of it, the one hot, the other cold. Well, get on the top of
that mountain with a double-barreled gun, and you can, without moving,
kill summer or winter game, just as you will.”
“What! Have you ever tried it?” asked one of his auditors.
“Tried! Often—and would have done pretty well but for one thing.”
“Well, what was that?”
“I wanted a dog that would stand both climates. The last dog I had froze
his tail while huntin’ on the summer side. He didn’t get entirely out of
the winter side, you know, sir.”—_Old scrap book._
STRETCHING IT.
An American visiting Dublin told some startling stories about the height
of some of the New York buildings. An Irishman who was listening stood
it as long as he could, and then queried:
“Ye haven’t seen our newest hotel, have ye?”
The American thought not.
“Well,” said the Irishman, “it’s so tall that we had to put the two top
stories on hinges.”
“What for?” asked the American.
“So we could let ’em down till the moon went by,” said Pat.—_Exchange._
A piece ov satire, tew be beneficial, should be so rendered that every
man who reads it or hears it shall say to himself, “That iz just,
bekause it hits every boddy but me.”—=Josh Billings.=
? ? ? WHY ? ? ?
=WHY= was the sandwich so called?
=BECAUSE= the Earl of Sandwich (1718—1792) on one occasion, not wishing
to leave his place at the gaming-table, called a waiter and ordered some
slices of bread with ham between them to be brought to him, so that he
could go on playing without interruption. To this combination his
friends gave his name.
* * * * *
=WHY= is a certain kind of paper called “foolscap”?
=BECAUSE= Oliver Cromwell substituted a fool’s cap and bells in
water-mark for the royal arms granted by Charles I with certain
privileges in manufacturing paper. When the “Rump” Parliament was
prorogued this water-mark was removed, but the paper of the size of the
Parliamentary Journal, seventeen by fourteen inches, still bears the
name.
* * * * *
=WHY= are elephants afraid of mice?
=BECAUSE= mice strongly resemble a little animal known as the chacana,
which feeds on a small berry especially liked by the elephant. Chacanas
live in the ground after the manner of prairie-dogs, under the bushes,
and are often trampled upon by elephants. In their fright the little
animals run up the tubes of the elephants’ trunks, their long, sharp
claws catch in the flesh, and they cannot be ejected. An agonizing death
is almost invariably the consequence to the elephant.
* * * * *
=WHY= is noon the traditional and fashionable hour for wedding
ceremonies?
=BECAUSE= the hour became the customary one in England many years since,
for the reason that the bridegroom could not be relied upon to be sober
any later in the day than twelve o’clock. It was naturally desirable
that he should be responsible for his promises, and unless he was in a
state of perfect sobriety this could not be. Hence the precaution of a
noonday wedding.
* * * * *
=WHY= is the first period of married life known as “the honeymoon”?
=BECAUSE= of an ancient custom in the northern nations of Europe. The
bride and bridegroom, for a month after the wedding, drank a wine made
from honey as their principal form of nourishment. It was called the
honey-month or moon.
* * * * *
=WHY= is the fee given to a servant called a “tip”?
=BECAUSE= the letters which compose the word are the initials of “to
insure promptness,” an inscription on the money boxes which used to be
in every tavern. Into these the traveler dropped his coin, and the
staff, as a whole, shared the benefit. This custom still prevails in
some places, but in the United States we give the fee to the particular
individual who serves us.
* * * * *
=WHY= do we say “Uncle Sam” when referring to the United States?
=BECAUSE= the initials “U. S.” were once believed by a few workmen to
refer to “Uncle Sam” Wilson who was government inspector, at Troy, in
1812. When the war began, Elbert Anderson, a New York contractor, bought
a large quantity of beef, pork, and pickles for the army. These were
inspected by Wilson and marked E. A., U. S., meaning Elbert Anderson,
for the United States. After discovering that the letters did not apply
to Wilson, the men still kept up the “Uncle Sam” as a joke. These same
men carried it into the army and from there it got into print. From that
time the term has been used for the United States.
* * * * *
=WHY= do we speak of the “near” and “off” horse?
=BECAUSE= in the days when the driver walked beside the horses his
position was always at the left, with his right arm next the team.
Therefore, in driving a pair, the horse on the left was nearer than the
one on the right. The “near” horse is always the one on the left.
* * * * *
=WHY= do the stars twinkle?
=BECAUSE= their light passes through variously heated and moving
currents of air which act as a refractor. Much twinkling foretells bad
weather, because it denotes that these aerial currents are more
disturbed than usual.
DEATH THE LEVELER.
James Shirley (1596–1666), the author of this poem, of which the last
two lines are very famous, was a contemporary of Shakespeare, whom,
however, he survived by many years. Originally a schoolmaster, he
became a dramatic writer and composed both tragedies and comedies
which form a link between the Elizabethan plays and those which were
produced after the Restoration. He wrote few poems, yet these few are
characterized by forcible imagery and a vigorous, manly cast of
thought.
BY JAMES SHIRLEY.
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armor against fate:
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Scepter and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill:
But their strong nerves at last must yield;
They tame but one another still:
Early or late
They stoop to fate,
And must give up their murmuring breath
When they, pale captives, creep to death.
The garlands wither on your brow.
Then boast no more your mighty deeds:
Upon death’s purple altar now
See where the victor-victim bleeds;
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb:
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust.
ALL KINDS OF THINGS.
The Tomb of Eve—How Our Northern Boundaries Are Indicated—Big Fees
Kings and Queens Have to Pay to Physicians—Eating in Days When
Forks Were Unknown—Why We Call an Old Story a “Chestnut”—Queer
Mix-Ups of Twins—Shorthand in Use Two Thousand Years Ago—Great
Distances Walked by the Average Man in a Life-Time—Misnomers in
Common Use.
_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
TRADITIONAL TOMB OF MOTHER OF HUMAN RACE.
MOHAMMEDANS ITS CUSTODIANS.
It is in Arabia, and Bedouins Are the Most Regular Visitors to the
Mosque Above It.
The tomb of Eve, the mother of the human race, is located, according to
tradition, not far from the burial place of Mohammed, on the Arabian
coast of the Red Sea.
Every year, as the sacred season of the Hejaz comes around, hundreds of
thousands of devout Mohammedans disembark at the little harbor of Jiddah
intent on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Journeying with these, a correspondent
of the New York _Herald_ made the trip across the Red Sea from Suakim to
the shrine venerated by Christian and Islamite alike—the legendary tomb
of the first woman. He writes of it as follows:
The country presents a very sterile appearance, there being but little
vegetation. A few date palms are dotted about, and away to the west,
in the direction of Mecca, groups of stunted acacia-trees render the
prospect less barren. The approach to the tomb is up a sandy slope,
rising about two hundred feet above the town.
The grave itself is one hundred and sixty feet long and five feet
wide, and is surrounded by a stone wall four feet high, covered with
chunam. In the center of it rises a small dome-crowned mosque, wherein
pilgrims assemble to say their prayers. The mosque is in charge of
some dervishes, who have plenty to do in keeping it clear of the
crowds of beggars who assemble and clamor for backsheesh.
Inside the mosque is perfectly plain, except that in the center is
erected an altar. This stands about three feet high, and is covered
with curtains. The curtains being drawn aside, disclose a black stone
let into the floor.
This stone is supposed to lie directly over the tomb of Eve, and is
polished like marble by the kisses of the faithful. It is by no means
permitted to every pilgrim to place his lips on this sacred spot, but
by a liberal amount of backsheesh and the presence of the consular
kavasses I was permitted the honor, and, accordingly, the curtain was
drawn, and on hands and knees I paid homage to our legendary mother.
The stone which is treated with so much honor is a very curious one,
evidently meteoric, and is supposed, like the Kaaba at Mecca, to have
been specially sent down from heaven for its present use.
I had a long chat with the chief custodian of the tomb, who told me
that the office had been in the family for generations. He said that
the most regular visitors to the shrine are the Bedouins, who, in
their yearly wanderings through the Arabian desert, rarely fail to
visit Eve’s tomb. I asked him if there was any legend as to why Eve
was supposed to be buried there, but he knew none, and asked:
“Where else would she be buried except on this sacred soil?”
It is certainly curious that legendary lore should select spots so
distant from each other for the graves of our first parents. While Eve
rests on the shores of the Red Sea, Adam is popularly supposed to lie
buried under the forest-clad slopes of Adam’s Peak, in Ceylon.
On my way back to Jiddah I asked my companions if they supposed the
grave represented the stature of Eve, and they said, “Surely.”
HOW WE MARK OUR NORTHERN BOUNDARIES.
IRON PILLARS SET IN WILDERNESS.
Mounds of Earth, Granite Shafts, and Metal Tablets Also Indicate
Southern Limit of British Territory.
Nearly all the boundaries of the United States are formed by the easy,
irregular lines of waterways. The artificial marking of a country the
size of this would seem a gigantic task, and fortunately it was not
necessary all the way around.
Along the northwestern border, however, there is a vast distance where
something of the sort was required, although it is doubtful if many
persons have ever heard of it.
A glance at the map of the United States shows that its boundary
adjoining Canada follows, the larger part of the distance, an
irregular water-line formed by the Great Lakes and their outlets.
Thence from the Lake of the Woods, on the north of Minnesota, a more
direct course is taken through the wilderness and over the mountains
of the wild West to the Pacific Coast.
This boundary between the countries is marked at regular intervals by
pillars of wood and iron, earth mounds, or stone cairns.
Beginning at the Lake of the Woods, cast iron pillars have been placed
alternately by the English and our government, one mile apart, until
reaching the Red Valley River.
Those set by our neighbor were brought from over the ocean, while ours
were made in Detroit. They are a hollow casting of a pyramidal form,
eight feet in height, having a base eight inches square and octagon
flange one inch in thickness, with a top four inches square,
surmounted by a solid cap.
Into these hollow posts are fitted well-seasoned cedar joists, with
spikes driven through apertures made for that purpose in the casting.
One-half of the length of the pillars are firmly imbedded in the
ground, so that the inscriptions on their sides, in raised letters two
inches high, face the north and south, the first reading, “Convention
of London,” the latter “October 20th, 1818.”
Beyond the Red River, earth mounds and stone cairns, seven feet by
eight, generally denote the boundary line. Whenever wooden posts are
used, they are of the same height as the iron pillars and painted red
above the ground.
Through forests a clearing has been made a rod wide, so that the
course is plainly indicated. Where bodies of water are crossed,
monuments of stone have been raised several feet above high tide.
Over the mountains, shafts of granite, like grim sentinels, guard the
way. Altogether the fixing of the boundary marks was expensive, but it
was well done.
WHAT IT COSTS FOR ROYALTY TO BE ILL.
PHYSICIANS CHARGE LARGE FEES.
More Than One Hundred Thousand Dollars Divided Among Medical Men Who
Attended King Edward.
That old bugbear, the doctor’s bill, is really something worth while—to
the doctor—when the patient happens to be a king. Of all the things a
man has to pay, there is probably nothing he really grudges quite as
much as this.
Let the ordinary mortal take heart, however, after reading the fees
which royalty pays—and presumably pays without a murmur.
For his four weeks’ attendance at Sandringham, prior to the recovery
of the king from typhoid fever, in 1871, Sir William Gull received
fifty thousand dollars. Twice this amount was paid to Sir Morell
Mackenzie for his treatment of the late Emperor Frederick.
The doctors who attended Queen Victoria in her last illness received
two thousand guineas each; while Dr. Lapponi’s skill in removing a
cyst from the Pope’s side a few years ago was recompensed with two
thousand five hundred dollars. Dr. Dinsdale, for his journey to Saint
Petersburg and vaccination of the Empress Catharine II, received fifty
thousand dollars as his fee, twenty-five thousand dollars for
traveling expenses, and a life pension of two thousand five hundred
dollars a year.
The fees of the physicians who attended King Edward during the illness
which preceded his coronation amounted to more than one hundred
thousand dollars.
BEFORE THE FORK WAS THOUGHT OF.
FINGERS DID WORK THOROUGHLY.
The Elegance of Dinner Parties and the
Daintiness of the Hands Must Have
Suffered Considerably, However.
Fingers were made before forks and used instead of forks until a
comparatively recent period; indeed it is evident that forks have not
even now superseded them altogether, though there is no doubt about
there being a great improvement in the manner of eating since the days
when the fork was unknown.
The Greeks and Romans, as well as other ancient nations, knew nothing of
any such implement, and meat was commonly prepared in stews. Eating was
hardly a dainty operation under such circumstances, and we should
probably find ourselves overcome with disgust if we were obliged to take
a meal in the company of our ancestors of even three hundred years ago.
Each man had his own knife, and at dinner seized the joint with his
hand and cut off what he wished. The dish was then passed on to the
next, who did the same. The knife then cut up the portions into small
pieces, which were put into the mouth by the fingers of the hand
unoccupied by the knife.
In many parts of Spain, at present, drinking-glasses, spoons, and
forks are rarities; and in taverns in many countries, particularly in
some towns in France, knives are not placed on the table, because it
is expected that each person has one of his own—a custom which the
French seem to have retained from the old Gauls; but, as no person
will any longer eat without forks, landlords are obliged to furnish
these together with plates and spoons.
None of the sovereigns of England had forks till the reign of Henry
VIII. All, high and low, used their fingers. Hence in the royal
household there was a dignitary called the ewery, who, with a set of
subordinates, attended at the meals with basins, water, and towels.
The office of the ewery survived after forks came partially into
fashion.
About the first royal personage who is known to have had a fork was
Queen Elizabeth; but, although several were presented to her, it is
doubtful whether she used them on ordinary occasions.
Forks were employed only by the higher classes in the middle of the
seventeenth century. About the period of the Revolution (1688) few
English noblemen had more than a dozen forks of silver, along with a
few of iron or steel. At length, for general use steel forks became an
article of manufacture at Sheffield. At first they had but two prongs;
and it was only in later times that the three-pronged kind were made.
As late as the early part of the eighteenth century table-forks were
kept on so small a scale by the country inns in Scotland (and perhaps
in some parts of England) that it was customary for gentlemen
traveling to carry with them a portable knife and fork in a shagreen
case. The general introduction of silver forks into Great Britain is
quite recent. It can be dated no further back than the termination of
the French War in 1814.
WHY AN OLD STORY IS CALLED A “CHESTNUT.”
PHRASE ORIGINATED ON STAGE.
According to Joseph Jefferson, It Was
First Used In the Old Melodrama,
“The Broken Sword.”
The reason why a hoary old joke should be a “chestnut,” instead of a
butternut or a hickory nut, may have puzzled some persons who have used
the word.
The late Joseph Jefferson gave the following account of the origin of
the term, and this explanation may be relied upon, for the famous actor
was an excellent authority on subjects on which he spoke and wrote:
In an old melodrama by William Dillon, called “The Broken Sword,” are
two parts—_Count Xavier_ and his servant _Pablo_. The Count is a sort
of Münchausen, fond of telling stories of his exploits. He tells one:
“Once I entered the forests of Colloway, when suddenly, from the
boughs of a cork-tree——’
“Chestnut, count,” interrupted Pablo.
“Cork-tree,” said the count.
“A chestnut,” reiterated Pablo. “I should know as well as you, for I
have heard you tell the story twenty-seven times.”
William Warren, who had played _Pablo_ often, was at a men’s dinner
once when a gentleman told a story whose age and originality were far
beyond any doubt.
“Chestnut,” murmured Warren. “I should know as well as you, for I have
heard you tell it twenty-seven times.”
The guests took up the expression, and from that I believe comes the
origin of the term.
HOW NATURE JOKES WITH HER CHILDREN.
MARVELOUS LIKENESS OF TWINS.
Some Cases of Mistaken Identity, Which
Involved Their Victims and Others
in Complications.
The cases of mistaken identity which occur in real life are only another
proof of the old adage that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Even
Shakespeare, in his “Comedy of Errors,” stretching the probabilities to
the utmost limit with the twin brothers and their twin servants, did not
equal the facts in a marriage celebrated not long since in Paris.
Two bridegrooms, so exactly alike as to be indistinguishable from each
other except by differences in attire, and two brides of whom exactly
the same was true, were attended by two “best men” who were modern
dromios.
Alphonse and Gabriel Chanteau, the bridegrooms, were distinguished
from each other in their twin babyhood by means of a pink ribbon tied
around the arm of Alphonse. Now that they have reached man’s estate
Alphonse wears a red waistcoat and Gabriel a white one.
Genevieve and Susanne Renaud, twin sisters who have become Mesdames
Chanteau, are living realizations of _Girofle-Girofla_ in the French
comic opera of that name. Their differentiation in the eyes of their
friends is accomplished by the aid of Genevieve’s red corsage and the
white one worn by Susanne.
As to the grooms’ “best men,” Gustave and Maurice Freunzer, also
twins, who are cousins of the Messrs. Chanteau, they are as much alike
as the proverbial two peas.
Knowing their marvelous resemblance, these twins will undoubtedly keep
themselves happily “sorted out”; but the case of a woman in Vienna who
was imposed upon to the extent of actually marrying the wrong man has
the element of tragedy rather than comedy.
This woman, who was of the lower middle class, married a man whom she
took to be Herr Weiss, her fiancé, returning from a year’s absence in
America to make her his wife. In less than a month he robbed her of
her savings and then suddenly disappeared.
A month later she received a letter from America regretting that the
writer had been too ill to return at the time agreed, but stating that
he was about to sail, and that immediately on his arrival would fulfil
his promise by leading her to the altar. The letter was signed
“Herrmann Weiss.”
The poor woman’s worst fears were realized when, on her
correspondent’s arrival, she recognized that she had been victimized
by an impostor. It subsequently transpired that the genuine Herrmann
Weiss had, while in America, foregathered with his double, who had
ascertained sufficient of the former’s history and prospects to enable
him to carry out with success his scheme of deception and robbery.
When Claude Bonnat, a baker of Marseilles, was in hiding from the
police, who held a warrant for his arrest on a serious charge, he
managed to communicate with an acquaintance, one Leriot, who in every
respect was his exact double, and conjured him, on the strength of
their old friendship, to promise that, should any misfortune befall
him, he would by impersonating him keep from the young woman to whom
he was engaged the knowledge of her lover’s shame. Leriot gave his
promise, which sat but lightly on his conscience, as one to be kept or
broken as whim might direct.
However, when Bonnat a day or two later fell into the hands of
justice, Leriot sought out the young woman, of whom he had no previous
knowledge, with the result that his susceptible heart was so touched
that he entered into the fulfilment of his promise with surprising
zeal. So well, indeed, did he enact the rôle of Bonnat that he in a
short while espoused the latter’s fiancée. The couple led a life of
complex happiness, which was in no wise dimmed when, some years later,
on the convict’s release, the wife first discovered the fraud of which
she had been the victim.
SHORTHAND IS MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS OLD.
USED AT THE TRIAL OF CATILINE.
Development of the System Was Due
Especially to Tiro, a Slave, in the
First Century B.C.
Shorthand is so closely associated with the hurry and rush of modern
business that it is startling to think of it having been in use among
the ancient Greeks and Romans. Yet there seems to be no doubt that the
orations of Cicero were committed to paper with as much skill and
rapidity as the modern stenographer can boast.
Just how old the system of abbreviated writing is which the ancient
Greeks called tachygraphy, it is impossible to say. Xenophon is believed
to have used it in taking notes of the lectures of Socrates, which would
take it back to the fifth century before Christ. This is disputed by
some authorities, but there seems to be no doubt about its use in the
first century. A writer in the Chicago _Tribune_ gives some interesting
facts about it.
The development of shorthand was due especially to Marcus Tullius
Tiro. Born in Latium in 103 B.C., Tiro, who was a slave, was brought
up with Cicero, who was some years his junior. Freed, he became
Cicero’s secretary, and in this capacity aided him greatly. In the
famous trial of Catiline (63 B.C.) the stenographic rapidity of Tiro
was at its height.
In the first century before Christ a discourse of Cato Uticensis,
according to Plutarch, was taken down by shorthand reporters.
Early in the third century Anno Domino is found the term semeiograph
(stenographic character), used by the Greek orator, Flavius
Philostratus.
Origen, of Alexandria (185–254 A.D.), noted his sermons down in
shorthand, and Socrates, the ecclesiastical historian of the fourth
century, said that parts of the sermons of St. John Chrysostom were
preserved by the same process.
The shorthand that they used was a form of writing in which each word
was represented by a special sign. The letters of the alphabet, with
modifications, connected so as to admit of great rapidity of
execution, formed the elements of these characters.
Manilius, who was a contemporary of Cicero, Vergil, and Horace, mentions
it in verse. He says:
In shorthand skilled, where little marks comprise
Whole words, a sentence in a single letter lies,
And while the willing hand its aid affords,
Prevents the tongue to fix the falling words.
DISTANCE WALKED DURING A LIFETIME.
MAN MIGHT GIRDLE THE GLOBE.
Some Cover the Length of the Earth’s
Belt Several Times in the Ordinary
Span of Three Score Years.
The greatest things of the world reduced to the unit which, many times
multiplied, goes to compose them, do not seem great at all.
The sum of all the money on earth would be made up of just so many
pennies, and a penny is an insignificant coin. In just the same way the
distance around the earth is very great, yet it is numbered in miles,
and a mile is not much of a walk.
For instance, how far will a man walk in a lifetime? It is a little
difficult to fix the average mileage per day of the average man. Some
men are fond of walking. Others ride a bicycle or patronize the
trolley-cars. But it is safe to say that every man walks two miles a
day, if only in stirring about his room or office.
If a man lives to be thirty years old he will walk twenty-one thousand
nine hundred miles. The three-miles-a-day man will cover thirty-two
thousand eight hundred and fifty. The man who believes in a daily
constitutional of five miles will walk fifty-four thousand seven
hundred and fifty miles. The circumference of the earth is twenty-four
thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine miles. If a man walks two miles
a day he will find, after he has walked for thirty years, he would
still have some distance to walk in order to complete the circuit of
the globe.
Walking three miles a day he will go around the world once and have a
neat margin besides. The five-miles-a-day man will walk around twice
and have a few thousand-odd miles to his credit.
At forty this man will have made three trips, and at sixty his
pedometer will indicate one hundred and nine thousand five hundred
miles, which means that he will have walked around the earth four
times and he will still have about two thousand miles to the good on
the fifth trip.
MISNOMERS WHICH ARE COMMONLY USED.
WRONG IDEAS CONVEYED IN NAMES.
Some Are Unblushing Contradictions,
While Others Might be Classed With
the Milder White Lie.
Custom and usage have made the misapplication of some words so familiar
that they have lost their original meaning and now signify quite the
opposite. The word “slave,” for instance, is a striking example of this
fact. The Slavi were a tribe which once dwelt on the banks of the
Dneiper and derived their name from “slav,” which means noble or
illustrious. In the later days of the Roman Empire vast numbers of them
spread over Europe in the condition of captive servants, and the name of
the tribe came to mean the lowest state of servitude—the very antithesis
of its original sense.
Some of our commonest expressions are misnomers which seem to be
absolutely unaccountable, yet we shall probably go on using them to the
end of time.
Irish stew is a dish unknown in Ireland.
Kid gloves are not made of kid, but of lambskin or sheepskin.
German silver is not silver at all, nor of German origin, but has been
used in China for centuries.
Dutch clocks are of German manufacture.
Baffin’s Bay is not a bay.
Turkish baths are unknown to the Turks.
There are no leaves in Vallombrosa, Milton to the contrary
notwithstanding.
Turkey rhubarb should be called Russian rhubarb, as it is a Russian
monopoly.
Why are turkeys so called? They do not come from Turkey.
Titmouse is a bird.
Sealing-wax contains no wax.
Shrew-mouse is no mouse.
Rice-paper is not made of rice or the rice plant.
Catgut should be sheepgut.
Blind worms have eyes and can see.
Cleopatra’s needles should be named after Thothmes III.
* * * * *
And so, I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our
age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed
material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organize
our knowledge, to systematize our reading, to save, out of the
relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest—this
is a necessity unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at
last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up
is in the infinity of knowledge to know nothing. To read the first book
we come across in the wilderness of books is to learn nothing. To turn
over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent
to all that is good.—=Frederic Harrison.= (1831– .) Essay on the
“Choice of Books.” 1886.
Cooks’ Caps and Coronets.
True Stories of Members of the European Nobility Who Were Domestic
Servants Before or After Fortune Smiled Upon Them—Several Society
Leaders Came from the Kitchen.
Extremes often meet, and probably nothing better illustrates this than
the many instances that exist of the elevation of persons of lowly birth
to positions of great dignity and importance, while many others who have
been delicately nurtured and enjoyed the highest culture have been
forced to resort to the humblest forms of hard labor in order to earn
the bread which they would eat.
Wicked little Cupid is responsible for many of the former cases, for he
dearly loves a joke, and frequently has it at the expense of the rank
and traditional glory of some ancient house and name. The world has
always been rather democratic when love has stepped in, and some of the
great personages of history have contracted alliances which might have
been expected to turn things topsy-turvy, yet nothing has been seriously
ruffled.
In Paris one of the most influential and popular leaders of society is
the Baroness de Waru, the wife of the only son and heir of the
multimillionaire president of the Orleans Railroad Company. Her blonde
beauty is of the most ethereal kind, and her dainty person is
distinguished by so much aristocratic elegance that no one to look at
her would ever dream that her father had begun his career as a mere
stable-boy, who, in the service of the last reigning Duke of Parma,
was promoted from one post to another until he blossomed forth as a
general, a baron, and as Prime Minister of the Duchy of Parma, besides
being decorated with the grand crosses of most of the orders of
chivalry of Europe.
Chambermaid Became Lady Mayoress.
Lady Evans, who, several years ago, as Lady Mayoress of London, was
dispensing magnificent hospitality at the Mansion House to crowned
heads and royal personages, foreign as well as English, was a
chambermaid at the Oak Hotel, at Sevenoaks, in Kent, when her husband
first met and married her. Her father was a village plumber, and her
mother, until the date of her own marriage, was a cook and general
servant.
On the Continent there is no more ancient or illustrious family than
that of Kinsky, the chief of which bears the title of Prince of the
Holy Roman Empire. Two of its most distinguished members—the Counts
Eugene and Octavius, both of them Privy Councilors of the Emperor and
Knights of the Golden Fleece—married domestic servants, Eugene taking
his wife from the laundry, while the Countess Octavius Kinsky was
formerly the chambermaid at a small inn.
The Countess Octavius has rendered herself very obnoxious to her
husband’s family by her grasping propensities. But the late Countess
Eugene, the ex-washerwoman of Ischal, was a singularly charming woman,
universally beloved at Vienna, and, although she never asked for a
presentation at court, the names of quite a number of members of the
imperial family figured on her visiting list.
Lady Hawkins Was a Cook.
The widowed Princess Alexander of Battenberg, whose husband at one
time ruled over Bulgaria, may likewise be said to have sprung from the
kitchen, her father having been the valet and her mother the cook of
the old Austrian General de Martini. Yet in spite of this parentage,
Princess Alexander is treated as a sister-in-law by the similarly
widowed Princess Henry of Battenberg, who is a daughter of Queen
Victoria. The late queen showed great kindness and consideration
toward Princess Alexander of Battenberg, acknowledging her as a
kinswoman.
The second wife of the late Lord Bramwell had originally been his
cook, while Lady Hawkins, who is the better half of the eminent
English judge of that name, and the aunt by marriage of “Anthony
Hope,” the novelist, was originally a housemaid, as was also the widow
of the “Grand Old Man” of Australia, Sir Henry Parkes.
King Joachim of Naples, from whom the entire princely house of Murat
is descended, began life at the close of the last century as a mere
stable-boy, while the first Prince Kutusoff, founder of the grand
Russian family of that name, achieved his greatness a hundred years
ago by the skill which he displayed as the valet and barber to Czar
Paul, a monarch whose own great-grandmother, Empress Catherine, was
the chambermaid of a village inn, where she first attracted the
attention of Peter the Great, who ultimately married her.
Earl Served as Porter.
That the prejudice which formerly existed in exalted circles against
menial occupation is rapidly disappearing is abundantly proved by the
number of titled personages who are content to take at meal-time their
place, not at the table of the master of the house, but at that of the
domestics in the servants’ hall.
Thus in the course of a civil suit against Sir Charles Nugent it came
out that he was earning his livelihood as a groom, while Lady Nugent
was taking in washing. Yet the Nugents are among the most ancient and
illustrious of all the grand houses of the nobility of Europe, some of
their members being princes of the Austrian Empire, while the head of
the family is the Earl of Westmeath.
Here in this country Lord Drummond, the grandson and heir of the
British Earl of Perth and the French Duke of Melfort, died several
years ago while occupying a menial position—that of door-porter in the
establishment of one of the proprietors of the great New York daily
newspapers; and the writer can remember having found, a few years ago,
Prince Benjamin Rohan, who by virtue of his birth is the titular
cousin of every crowned head in Europe, and is descended in a direct
line from Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade, and
the first Crusader King of Jerusalem, serving as a waiter in one of
the smaller restaurants in Second Avenue, New York City.
Sir Thomas Echlin, head of the ancient house of Echlins, which has
been settled in Ireland since the reign of King James I, and whose
baronetcy is nearly three hundred years old, recently was employed on
the Dublin police force in the humble capacity of an ordinary “bobby”
at six dollars a week, and was formerly footman in a London family.
One of the last things that Lord Beaconsfield did before his death was
to obtain from the queen a pension of five hundred dollars a year for
the widow of the late Lord Kingsland, whom, in spite of her rank as a
peeress of the realm, he had discovered earning a bare living as a
washerwoman in a large family at Kensington.
Lord Kingsland, prior to his accession to this ancient peerage, had
been a waiter in a Dublin hotel, but on becoming a lord, through the
death of his uncle, abandoned this calling and preferred to rely upon
his wife’s earnings at the washtub.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Happiness.]
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the
object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild goose chase, and is never
attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that
we have caught happiness without dreaming of it, but likely enough it is
gone the moment we say to ourselves, “Here it is!” like the chest of
gold that treasure-seekers find.... There is something more awful in
happiness than in sorrow,—the latter being earthly and finite, the
former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that
spirits still embodied may well tremble at it.—Nathaniel Hawthorne.
IN STREET AND GRAND-STAND.
Familiar Sounds That Enter the Windows of City Flats and Put Sleep to
Flight, or, on Baseball Fields, Cause the Voice of the Umpire to Seem
Like a Penny Whistle in a Company of Fog-horns.
THE OLD HAND-ORGAN.
By W. D. Nesbit.
The old hand-organ in the street
Has not the gaudy gold and gilt
The new ones have—but, oh, the sweet
Old tunes it plays with limping lilt!
“The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls,”
“Jim Crow,” and “Annie Laurie,” too—
And, answering its bugle-calls,
The old times rise for me and you.
“Then You’ll Remember Me,” it plays—
And straight our memories go back
Through all the dead years’ mellow haze,
With frequent pause along the track.
And then we see the grass-grown streets,
The orchards gleaming in the sun,
Where crooning bees seek out the sweets
And shadows o’er the grasses run.
We see the flash of merry eyes;
We see the gleam of old-time smiles;
And, ere the old-time music dies.
We live again the old-time whiles.
We walk the pathway in the lane.
And day-dream as we used to then,
For on the rippling old refrain
The old times come to life again.
Play, old hand-organ, in the street!
Play every song we used to sing,
And let our hearts in cadence beat
With each glad memory they bring.
Play, in your halting, careless way,
The fine old tunes that softly tell
Of every God-made happy day
In those old times we love so well.
_Baltimore American._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
THE STREET MINSTREL.
By S. E. Kiser.
His hands are soiled, his throat is bare,
His face is streaked with dirt and thin,
And many a slip is in the air
He plays upon his violin;
A sadness dwells within his eyes,
The shoes are ragged on his feet,
And scoffers stop to criticise
The little minstrel in the street.
Thereby the curb he plays away,
Where flakes float past and winds blow chill,
And maybe, as the critics say,
He lacks the tutored artist’s skill;
But now and then a little strain,
Played faultlessly and soft and sweet,
Floats up from where he stands out there—
The little minstrel in the street.
Say, ragged little minstrel, why
Must people listen but to hear
The false note, ever passing by
The strain that rises soft and clear?
Oh, it were well with us if we
Might in our own ways sound the sweet
And faultless notes as oft as he—
The little minstrel in the street.
_Chicago Record-Herald._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
A CONFESSION.
I’ve been down to the city, an’ I’ve seen the ‘lectrlc lights,
The twenty-story bulldin’s an’ the other stunnin’ sights;
I’ve seen th’ trolley-cars a-rushin’ madly down the street,
An’ all the place a-lookin’ like a fairyland complete.
But I’d rather see the big trees that’s a-growin’ up to home,
An’ watch the stars a-twinklin’ in the blue an’ lofty dome;
An’ I’d rather hear the wind that goes a-singin’ past the door
Than the traffic of the city, with its bustle an’ its roar.
I reckon I’m peculiar, an’ my tastes is kind o’ low;
But what’s the use denyin’ things that certainly is so?
I went up to a concert, an’ I heard the music there;
It sounded like angelic harps a-floatin’ through the air.
Yet spite of all its glory an’ the gladness an’ acclaim,
If I stopped to think a minute, I was home-sick jes’ the same;
An’ I couldn’t help confessing though it seems a curious thing,
That I’d rather hear a robin sweetly pinin’ in the spring.
_Washington Star._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
THE ORGAN-GRINDER.
Beside the curb, out in the street,
The organ-grinder stands,
With stubbles on his swarthy face,
And very dirty hands,
And, while you curse him, plays away
Like twenty German bands.
The ragtime airs you gaily hummed
A year or two ago
Forth from the box he wheels around
In jangling torrents flow—
The waltzes always hard and fast,
The marches mild and slow.
I often think Pandora must
Have chanced along one day,
And opened up the box the first
Poor dago had to play,
And thus ungraciously let all
But discord get away.
_Chicago Times._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
PICKLES.
The rain and snow were falling fast,
As through a down-east village passed
A youth who chalked with great display,
Upon a barrel in his sleigh,
“Pickles to sell.”
His cheeks were blue, and red his nose,
His ears and feet were nearly froze,
And tears of cold bedimmed his sight.
But still he yelled with all his might,
“Pickles to sell.”
As on he went, a maiden bold
Came out and asked him what he sold;
The youth looked up with winning smile,
And said with voice as soft as ILE,
“Pickles.”
“Oh, tell me!” cried the maid divine;
“Say, tell me are they in the brine?”
“Nay,” said the youth, “that sort don’t pay,”
Quite vexed, he heard the maiden say,
“Such Pickles!”
That one so sweet should speak so tart
(The word went deep into his heart);
That she should crush his hopes so flat,
And scorn his smiles, or worse than that,
“His Pickles.”
Away he drove, through wind and rain;
They tried to stop his course in vain.
By asking what he had to sell;
He wouldn’t stop but only yelled,
“Pickles.”
“Don’t drive so fast,” an old man said;
“That worn-out nag is nearly dead.”
“His shoes are off,” another cried;
With shout of scorn the youth replied,
“Oh, Pickles!”
“For mercy’s sake don’t cross the creek!
That wooden bridge is awful weak!”
The youth dashed on his headlong way.
And only turned his head to say,
“Oh, Pickles!”
The night was dark, the wind was cold,
The pickle boy was brave and bold;
He never stopped or checked his flight,
And soon the sleigh was lost to sight,
Pickles and all.
Next morn, two little wandering Jews
Came into town and brought the news;
Down in the drift a corpse they found,
While far and near were scattered round,
The Pickles.
_Old scrap book._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
“FR-R-RAISH PEANUTS.”
Who is this man of mighty voice
Who bids all human kind rejoice—
Who visits bleacher and grand-stand
With roasted rapture in his hand?
“Peanuts! Fr-r-raish peanuts!”
Who, when the umpire shouts: “Play ball!”
Hears with disdain the feeble call.
And whose own stentor-modeled lungs
Drown out the noise of many tongues?
“Peanuts! Fr-r-raish peanuts!”
Who stirs the circumambient air
And moves his optics here and there
To find the man who cries: “Here, boy.
Give me one sack of roasted joy”?
“Peanuts! Fr-r-raish peanuts!”
Who hastens onward with his wares
While every individual glares
Who lacks the necessary price;
Who cuts a mighty slab of ice?
“Peanuts! Fr-r-raish peanuts!”
And when we seek our restless beds
With goober goblins in our heads,
What is the awful cry that seems
To be the burden of our dreams?
“Peanuts! Fr-r-raish peanuts!”
_Baltimore News._
Relative Power of the World’s Navies.
In the Matter of Tonnage the United States Occupies Fourth Place on the
List, Being More Than a Million and a Quarter Tons Behind Great
Britain—Ships Now Building Will Give Us Third Place.
The navies of the world represent a tremendous amount of money as well
as power. It now seems to be generally admitted that being prepared for
war is the best way of insuring peace. If this is true, there would seem
to be very little likelihood of war among any of the great nations of
the world. They are all pretty well prepared to back up any arguments
which they may find themselves forced into by a display of force.
Our own latest appropriation includes thirteen and a quarter millions of
dollars for a battle-ship and three torpedo-boat-destroyers, with a
million’s worth of “subsurface, submersible or submarine boats.” The
battle-ship is to be of the British Dreadnaught class—a monster of
nineteen thousand tons displacement.
Japan is building one of thirteen thousand one hundred and fifty tons,
and Germany has increased the tonnage of some of her ships heretofore
authorized to eighteen thousand each.
Commenting upon this the New York _Sun_ says:
The Russian-Japanese War convinced the naval experts of the world that
the big battle-ship must be the principal weapon of marine combatants,
and the effects of the lesson may be seen wherever national ships are
building.
Leaving out of consideration all vessels more than twenty years old,
except such as have been rebuilt or rearmed, all vessels authorized
but not begun, all transports, colliers, repair ships, torpedo depot
ships, converted merchant vessels, yachts, vessels of less than one
thousand tons, except torpedo-boats, and all torpedo-boats of less
than fifty tons, the tables prepared at the office of naval
intelligence show the strength of the eight greatest marine powers
last fall:
GREAT BRITAIN.
Tons. Tons.
Built 1,673,338 Building 234,660
FRANCE.
Built 619,675 Building 181,283
GERMANY.
Built 466,084 Building 121,978
UNITED STATES.
Built 388,519 Building 313,278
JAPAN.
Built 321,131 Building 106,740
ITALY.
Built 266,728 Building 73,700
RUSSIA.
Built 244,601 Building 131,094
AUSTRIA.
Built 122,756 Building 21,200
Were the vessels now in course of construction all completed, the
order in which the powers stand in this table would be changed by the
transposition of the positions of Germany and the United States and of
those occupied by Russia and Italy.
Comparing the personnel of these navies, it is shown that the United
States, with one thousand three hundred and seventy commissioned
officers of all ranks in the sea-going corps, has actually fewer than
any power except Austria, which has eight hundred and fifty-one, and
in proportion to tonnage stands at the bottom of the list, having only
1.95 commissioned officers to each one thousand tons of her war-ship
tonnage built and building.
Great Britain has 2.52 officers to every one thousand tons, France
3.58, Germany 3.48, Italy 4.60, and Austria 5.91. It is not
practicable to give the proportions for Russia and Japan, owing to the
conditions created by their recent struggle.
In midshipmen and cadets the United States leads all the nations save
Great Britain, both absolutely and relatively, with one thousand and
fifty-four in the service, or 1.49 to each one thousand tons.
In nothing is the tremendous size of the British navy shown more
impressively than the figures of her enlisted men. Of these, exclusive
of marines, she has ninety-five thousand two hundred and sixty-three,
but there are only 49.93 men to each one thousand tons, while the
United States with thirty-seven thousand men has 52.70, Germany with
thirty-five thousand one hundred and thirteen has 59.71, and France
with fifty-two thousand one hundred and fifty-three has 65.10.
Great Britain and the United States are the only powers that maintain
aboard ship enlisted men other than bluejackets, and it is the
intention of Great Britain to replace all her marine officers
gradually by naval officers. No navy has a grade corresponding exactly
to the British and American warrant officer, the nearest approximation
of it being the chief petty officers of the other navies.
The United States has no engineer corps, and Great Britain is
amalgamating her engineer corps with the line. The other nations all
maintain the distinction which existed in our navy until the adoption
of the Roosevelt personnel law.
Neither Japan nor Italy maintains chaplains, and many British
chaplains are naval instructors.
NIX’S MATE LIGHT IN BOSTON HARBOR.
The Story of an Island Which Disappeared and the Curious Old Legend of
the Spot Now Marked by This Interesting Beacon.
As a person enters Boston Harbor by the main ship channel, having
threaded his way between Lovell’s Island and Gallup’s Island, and just
before passing between Long Island and Deer Island, he sees at his left
a unique monument marking a dangerous ledge and shoal. So peculiar is
its appearance that every stranger is sure to ask, “What is that?” To
this some local wiseacre promptly responds, “Nix’s Mate”; but usually he
cannot explain its meaning or even spell the name correctly.
The “Mate” is a massive piece of copper-riveted masonry, forty feet
square and twelve feet high (with stairs on one side), upon whose top
rises a black wooden pyramid, twenty feet high. Two hundred years ago,
where this weird pyramid now stands, there was a fertile island of
twelve acres, furnishing excellent grazing, and called, in
consequence, Green Island. So much is history. A curious old book,
long out of print,[4] has woven the legend of the name into a pleasing
romance, which in brief is as follows:
Footnote 4:
Nix’s Mate: an Historical Romance of America, by the author of
“Athenia of Damascus,” etc. In two volumes. Published by Samuel
Colman, No. VIII Astor House, Broadway, 1839.
When Sir William Phips made his celebrated expedition to the Spanish
Main in 1687, under the auspices of the Duke of Albemarle, in which he
recovered some millions of sunken gold and enriched himself for life,
he was accompanied by one Captain Nix and his first mate, Edward
Fitzvassal. As the first expedition was so wonderfully successful,
Captain Nix went out on another search and raised another precious
cargo from the bottom of the deep. But on his return the crew of his
vessel, the Dolphin, mutinied, under the leadership of the mate, and
turned pirates.
Captain Nix and six others were set adrift early in the year 1689, in
an open boat, and left to their fate. After incredible hardships they
reached land, only to be captured by savages. Toward spring they
escaped in a canoe, and finally landed on Green Island, June 1, 1689.
They contrived to reach Boston Town, and there they found the Dolphin
and Fitzvassal, too, who had assumed the name of Captain Nix.
Fitzvassal was tried for piracy, convicted, and sentenced to be
executed on Green Island on June 5. But for some service which he had
rendered to the colony while bearing his assumed name he was pardoned
by the governor (Bradstreet). Before the news of the pardon reached
him, however, he took a fatal dose of poison.
He was buried on Green Island, and his sole mourner was an Indian maid
and sibyl who had loved him. She prophesied that the island would wash
away, and her prediction was fulfilled: little by little, the earth
slid off the rock into the sea, and now nothing remains but a
dangerous ledge upon which stands the curious beacon—Nix’s Mate.
Achievements of Famous Invalids.
Some of the Most Distinguished Workers in the Fields of Literature and
Music Have Won Their Triumphs While Defying Disease—Many Examples of
Extraordinary Longevity.
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Ill health and infirmity do not always prevent the accomplishment of
great things, and the list of invalids who have been famous for
excelling in their chosen field is long and brilliant. Naturally such
persons usually have been restricted to the quieter pursuits. Literature
seems to have been the field wherein most of them have found congenial
occupation, though there have been great invalids in other professions,
also.
The long battle of Robert Louis Stevenson against the malady which
finally conquered him, is well known to every one. He traveled about,
from place to place, searching for the spot where he could hope to live
at least long enough to do some of the work which it lay in him to do,
until, at last, in the Samoan Islands, in the South Seas, he found the
haven for which he had been searching. There the heroic struggle went on
for the four last years of his life, and there he was buried high on the
peak of Mount Væa, above his island home.
Probably no famous writer suffered for a longer period than did
Alexander Pope, who was stricken, when only a child of ten, with a
malady which deformed his body and robbed him of health and comeliness,
leaving him to forty-six years of invalidism. His constant study and
work, combined with this physical infirmity, made his life “one long
disease.”
Carlyle, Heine, and Keats.
Thomas Carlyle was a chronic dyspeptic, and suffered, all his life, the
torments which only those unfortunates, who are victims of this disease,
can comprehend. The bitterness of some of his writings which were
published after his death may surely be excused when this is considered,
for the chronic dyspeptic is generally understood to develop, in spite
of himself, a gloomy view of life.
Heinrich Heine, the great German lyric poet, was the victim, during the
last twelve years of his life, of relentless disease. He bore his
dreadful sufferings so patiently that he appears in a nobler light than
ever before during his life. His hearing was bad, his sight was dim, and
his legs were paralyzed, yet he wrote some of his most wonderful songs
during the long watches of sleepless nights, lying on his
“mattress-grave.” He described his condition as “a grave without rest,
death without the privileges of the departed,” yet he was never so
many-sided as during this period. He produced humorous pieces, political
songs, and the tenderest poems. He kept at his work as long as he could
hear and speak, his last words being “paper and pencil.”
John Keats, while on a tour of the English Lakes, contracted a throat
trouble which developed into consumption. He continued to write, though
he failed rapidly in health, and his last volume contains some of his
best poems.
Mrs. Browning and the Brontës.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was confined to her room for seven years, but
was restored to something like a normal state of health before her
marriage. The long period of illness was partly caused by the death of
her brother, of whom she was extremely fond, and many times her life was
despaired of. She wrote in spite of sickness, however, and produced some
excellent verse. All her life she struggled against a naturally weak
constitution and she worked under difficulties.
Count Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet, was another whose life from
childhood was made melancholy by impaired health. In his case it was
largely the result of the energy with which he gave himself up to study,
when he was only a child, thus undermining an already delicate
constitution. He was the victim of a perpetual melancholy, and he
wandered to and fro in Italy, always the prey of ceaseless physical
tortures, which prevented him from accepting any permanent position that
might have relieved the constant and pressing need of money. He attained
distinction as a philologist and was offered a university professorship
in Germany by Bunsen, but was unable to accept it because of his
infirmity.
The three gifted Brontë sisters were all in wretched health. Emily and
Anne died within a year of each other, leaving Charlotte to a lonely
life of sorrow and heartache. She worked on, in spite of all, with
indomitable energy and courage, and the genius of the woman is all the
more remarkable when one realizes that her sufferings were both physical
and mental. Her work came from an aching heart as well as from a weak
and ill body. One short year of happiness was hers at the end, when she
became the wife of the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, curate under her father, who
had long loved her.
Parkman and Prescott.
Francis Parkman, the American historian, is an illustrious example of
heroic perseverance in the face of great difficulties. He selected as
his life work the writing of the history of the rise and fall of the
French power in America. He began a most exhaustive research which
carried him west into the Black Hills, where the hardships he endured
broke down his health and left him a semi-invalid for the rest of his
life.
He kept at his appointed task, though fourteen years elapsed between the
first part of his work and the second. To occupy the time which his
health would not permit him to devote to the greater work, he took up
the study of horticulture, in which he grew so proficient that he
published a book on roses and was made professor of horticulture in the
Harvard Agricultural School.
From 1865 to 1892 he brought out the various parts necessary to complete
his great work. During all of this time, however, his health was so
precarious that he depended almost entirely upon dictation instead of
his pen, and his material was collected for him by hired copyists. The
story of his struggle is regarded as one of the most heroic in the
history of literature.
William Hickling Prescott was another historian whose labors were made
difficult by infirmity. While he was at Harvard he lost the sight of one
eye by an accident, and the other was so affected that he was obliged to
pass several months in a darkened room. The sight was partly restored,
but he could never use it in any trying work, nor more than a little
while each day, and he suffered constantly with it and from the
apprehension which it occasioned.
With the aid of secretaries and readers he set to work, determined to
prepare himself for literature, as more active fields were closed to
him. He wrote some himself, in spite of his affliction, using a writing
frame designed especially for the blind—and he produced work which
placed him in the ranks with the most brilliant historians.
Famous Musicians and Poets.
Chopin, the great modern master of pianoforte composition, was unable,
because of lack of physical strength, to play some of his own works as
he would have them played. A trip to England, of only eleven days’
duration, was enough to develop the latent consumption which was in his
family, and from this time on he worked under the advancing ravages of
the disease, though he lived twelve years before finally succumbing to
its onslaught. Many times during this period he was reported at death’s
door.
Handel became blind seven years before his death, yet continued his work
and accompanied one of his oratorios upon the organ only eight days
before his death.
Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott both were lame from a deformed foot, but
suffered no inconvenience from the infirmity. Milton became blind and
Beethoven was deaf from about his thirtieth year. He faced the pathetic
situation with the brave resolve: “I will grapple with fate; it shall
never drag me down.” His life was lived along these lines, and never did
his courage falter or his fortitude give way, though the affliction to a
musician was almost the greatest he could suffer.
Methuselahs Laughed at Doctors.
Some of the modern Methuselahs have been persons who were given up by
the doctors to fill an early grave. Surely this fact, taken in
connection with the many examples that there are of the great things
which invalids have accomplished, ought to bring the champions of
euthanasia up short. Perhaps it is too much to expect that anything will
stop the man who is once thoroughly launched on this delusive line of
thought, but for the sake of the timorous who are not, perhaps, as
rugged in health as the men who advocate this “simple and humane”
reform, the following examples of men and women, not famous, who have
attained to a “green old age” in spite of being in an apparently
hopeless condition, are quoted. They are taken from a paper written by
E. H. Von den Eynden, of Antwerp, and published there in 1882, under the
title “Singularités Macrobiologiques”—(Curiosities of Long Life).
Adèle Lambotte died at Liege in 1763, aged one hundred and one years.
She was scarcely thirty-two inches in height, and so crippled in her
legs and feet that from infancy she was compelled to walk on crutches.
In 1774 there lived at Château Neuf, in Thimerais, France, a certain
demoiselle Thierree. At the time, she was over forty years old, and an
invalid, forever taking medicines. A contemporary describes her
graphically thus:
“A few tufts of grisly hair, two squinting eyes, lost in the multitude
of wrinkles and hanging folds of skin that stood for nose and cheeks,
and with a head in perpetual oscillation.”
She lived in the open air, strolling from point to point in all sorts
of wind and weather. She enjoyed an income amounting to about one
thousand dollars, and some of her friends made her a proposition to
transfer their property to her providing she would pay them a certain
annuity and devise the property back to them at her death.
The bargain was made, and faithfully kept, as far as the annuity was
concerned, yet so skilfully did she manage affairs that she soon had
an income of two thousand dollars over and above all expenditures. Her
friends meanwhile imagined that they had made a good bargain, as her
physician had assured them that she “could never see the return of the
swallows next spring.”
The swallows came and went, and came and went again, and they got
impatient, and in some way the “old mamselle” found it out. Then she
set herself to live in earnest. She wept for Louis XVI, lived through
and detested the Revolution, saw the funerals of Bonaparte and Charles
X, and lived through the barricades of 1830.
Finally, in 1835, she died, aged one hundred and five years, lacking
part of a month. On making an inventory of her affairs her executor
found upward of four hundred linen chemises, each made with her own
hands, not one of which had ever been worn. Her revenue, at the time
of her death, was two hundred thousand dollars.
The people who made the bargain had died one after another, the last
one more than forty years before her demise.
Remarkable Centenarians.
In 1699 the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences recorded the death of
a man, aged one hundred years, whose spinal column consisted of one
single bone, the intermediate cartilages having ossified.
About the middle of the seventeenth century there was carried in
solemn procession and hung up before the shrine of Notre Dame de
Liesse an enormous vesical calculus, on which was engraved the
following legend:
“This stone was removed from François Annibal d’Etrées, duke and peer,
Grand Marshal of France, by the grace of God through the intercession
of the Blessed Virgin, September 15, 1654.”
The grand marshal was eighty-two years old when the terrible operation
was performed. It gave him a new lease of life, as he did not die
until 1675, more than twenty years afterward, aged one hundred and two
years and a few months.
A poor girl, daughter of a retainer of the Château de Colemberg, near
Boulogne, named Nicole Mare, was born deformed, and, besides having a
withered forearm, was so humpbacked that she stood less than four feet
high. With all this, she lived to the age of one hundred and ten
years. Her occupation was herding cattle, and it is said that the only
food she ever tasted was bread and milk.
Sick for One Hundred Years.
The celebrated Fontanelle, who, it is said, never enjoyed a well day
in his life, and whose constitution was so frail that the least
exposure made him ill, yet lived within less than one month of one
hundred years.
M. Le Fermy, a peasant of the village of Saint-Justin, near
Mont-de-Marsan, France, died in his native village September 13, 1714,
aged one hundred and ten years and two months. All his life he was
regarded as a feeble man. The note recording his death says:
“He was married five times, _although_ he lived soberly and was
regarded as weakly.”
In 1760, at Graessans, in the diocese of Saint-Papoul, France, died a
woman whose age is recorded as one hundred and thirteen years and one
month. She died of asthma, with which she had suffered for forty-five
years.
The Benedictine monk, Brother N. Graillet, of the Abbey of Calvary, at
La Fère, France, died in the abbey in 1763, aged one hundred and two
years. He had entered the abbey in his thirtieth year, in ill-health
and disappointed in life. “For seventy-two years, although always
feeble, he obeyed every rule of the abbey, and was always first in
filling the functions of the community,” is his record.
Pierre Foucault, a native of Abbéville, died in that place in 1766,
aged one hundred and fifteen years. Up to the age of fifty his health
had been very precarious, and during the years between fifty and sixty
“he suffered many maladies.” After that he recovered his usual health
and lived fifty-five years. His father died aged one hundred and two,
and his grandfather was accidentally killed while hunting, at the age
of eighty-seven.
Had Many Diseases.
Madame Ristori, probably an ancestress of the celebrated artiste, died
at Empoi—a village in Tuscany—in 1767, aged one hundred and ten years.
Her whole life was passed in frightful poverty and hardship. She was
an invalid nearly her whole life, and had, besides, almost every
disease that can be named, at one or another period of her existence.
Marguerite Couppéc, widow of Richard Couppéc, died at Rouen in 1769.
The baptismal register at Caux, where she was born in 1654, shows
conclusively that she was one hundred and fifteen years old at death.
“All her life,” says her tombstone, “she lived in poverty and illness,
having had many most violent diseases, notwithstanding which she was
most laborious, being always occupied as long as her hands could
work.”
A REQUIEM.
By Robert Louis Stevenson.
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
_Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill._
WHAT THEY LAUGH AT ABROAD.
Wit and Humor of the Foreign Jokesmiths, Culled from French, German, and
Italian Periodicals, and Translated for “THE SCRAP BOOK.”
NO CAUSE FOR ALARM.
Young Doctor—Do you think the visitor is really a patient? I am afraid
that he is a creditor.
Servant—Well, I heard him groaning. If he isn’t ill he must have a
very big bill to collect.—_Fliegende Blätter._
A WELL REGULATED LIFE.
Reporter (to old man)—How come you to be so hale and hearty at ninety?
Old Man—Regularity, sir. I have gone on a spree regularly
every Sunday, since I was twenty. There is nothing like
regularity.—_Fliegende Blätter._
ON THEIR HONEYMOON.
She—Oh, George, I want all these people to know that I am married to
you.
He—Well, my dear, you had better carry the dress-suit case and the
umbrellas.—_Le Rire._
LOVE OF COUNTRY.
Several men were chatting together. One of them, a Greek, was praising
his country.
“Greece,” said he, “is the most beautiful land in the world. The blue
heavens laugh perennially over Greece.”
“Why, that’s nothing,” said a Hungarian, “the whole world laughs over
Hungary.”—_Jugend._
THE CASE AND THE EXCEPTION.
Doctor (to maid)—I am Dr. Curewell. They have just telephoned me to
come here immediately. How is the patient?
Maid—Oh, doctor, you have arrived too late! My master died not five
minutes ago.
Doctor—Well, never mind. In this case, at least, nobody can say that I
was the cause of death.—_Le Rire._
AT THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE.
The Lady—Now, remember, please, I want a very good maid and one that
is absolutely discreet.
The Proprietor—You can be perfectly sure of the maid I am going to
send you. She has been five years at a telephone switch-board.—_Le
Sourire._
AT THE DUMA.
The Delegates—We demand equal rights, liberty, and absolute pardon for
political offenders.
The Czar—Peace, peace, my people! All of you that are not executed
will be pardoned.
The Delegates—Huzzah! Long live the Little Father.—_Il Fischietto._
IMPUDENCE.
Peggy—Only to think of it, my dear, we were entirely alone, and he had
the audacity to kiss me.
Lucy—I suppose you were furious; weren’t you?
Peggy—I should say so! I was furious every single time he did it.—_Le
Sourire._
KEPT HIS PROMISE.
She (weeping)—Five years ago, as a bride, you promised to love me for
an eternity, and here we are on the verge of divorce.
He—Well, the past five years have seemed like an eternity.—_Fliegende
Blätter._
GREAT PRESS OF BUSINESS.
Father—Do you know, sir, that I actually _saw_ you embrace my
daughter?
Suitor—I beg your pardon, sir. The truth is, I was so frightfully busy
at the time that I failed to notice you. I sincerely hope you will
forgive me.—_Le Sourire._
FISHING.
She—You don’t love me any more. I know it. I feel it.
He—But, pet, I assure you, I adore you.
She—No, no, no! No man can love a woman with such old clothes as
mine.—_Le Rire._
The Bell of Kuang Sai.
BY EDWARD W. GILBERT.
_An original story written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
“They are ghouls, and their king it is who tolls.”
“Heaven born, forbear anger; in one little half-hour, or an hour at
most, the bearers shall be here, and we will go forward with the speed
of dragons. In the meantime, I will place a rug for the Presence to sit
upon, and give him fire that he may drink tobacco.”
Jarvis assented with a sulky grunt, tossed Chen, his Chinese runner, a
cigar, and lay on his back smoking and staring up into the dark hollow
of the great bell suspended on a stone tripod.
“After labor it is good to lie at ease and smoke, especially when the
Presence, who is my father and mother, bestows such tobacco. If the
Heaven Born desires, I will tell him the tale of the great bell under
which we lie. I have permission? Thus runs the tale:
“Kublai-Chan, Lord of the Earth, desired greatly to leave a memory such
as no other king should ever equal, and after much thought he called
Kuang Sai, the great artist in all metals, and commanded:
“‘Let there be cast for me a great bell, such as never earth or heaven
saw, of the finest metal, bossed with angels and demons, and so great
that the sound thereof shall reach to the utmost border of my kingdom,
that all may hear, and, hearing, know that in Kambalu reigns the king,
and, knowing, tremble and obey him.’
“And Kuang Sai prostrated himself nine times, and said: ‘My lord wills
it, and it is done.’
“And he called his master metal-workers, journeymen and apprentices, and
took from the king’s treasury gold and silver and copper and fine bronze
for the casting, and he took clay and wax and modeled the bell—great,
beautifully formed; round the lip of it, lilies and pomegranate; round
the body of it, the angels and devils of air and sound, with waving hair
and garments, like sound-made flesh; the loops by which it was to hang,
two imperial dragons.
“And when all was ready he made the mold, and his men lit the fires, and
for two days labored they at the melting, casting into the pot the gold
and silver and copper and fine bronze. And when it was melted with
fervent heat, his master founder, the strong man, struck out the plug
from the crucible, and let the red hot metal flow into the mold. Four
days waited the cooling; then they broke the mold—and the great bell was
flawed.
“And again he made the mold and melted the metal, and again cast it, and
again it was flawed. And again and again, and yet again, and always the
great bell was flawed, and must be broken and re-melted.
“Then Kuang Sai offered sacrifice to his gods, and his master
metal-workers, journeymen and apprentices, according to their several
degree, also offered sacrifice to their gods; and again they cast it,
and again it was flawed.
“Two score times they cast it—and always the flaw. Kuang Sai grew thin
and pale; he ate not, nor slept; for his honor laid in that casting—and
always the flaw.
“He offered sacrifice to the high gods, the middle, and the less; to the
lords of earth, air, sea, and sky; to all demons and rulers of the upper
and under worlds; to gods and godlings. He prayed in all temples; he
gave food and garments to the poor; he consulted all priests; he leaked
rice and silver to all. The priests grew fat and sleek; an innumerable
multitude of beggars lay at the gate of Kuang Sai; and still, when he
cast the bell—the flaw.
“And on a day he was summoned to the footstool of the great Chan. He
made the nine prostrations according to ritual, and waited; and
presently, soft and low, the great Kublai-Chan spoke thus:
“‘Kuang Sai, I have given thee all things to make my bell, yet still
thou hast failed after three score trials, whereby I am lacking my bell,
and my honor is diminished. If in three more trials I have not my bell,
you shall die the death of a thousand slices, and your house and all
therein perish by fire. I have said it. You have my permission to
depart.’
“Kuang Sai departed full of fear. That night he went to the little
Temple of Forbidden Things, and paid the blind priest of that temple to
call up by name the powers of air, water, fire, and earth, and ask which
of the lords of all things he had offended, that he might make his peace
and cast his bell.
“He sat at the foot of the naked altar, while the priest cast dust upon
his head and called upon the high gods, the middle, and the less, by
name—each by his name, title, dignity, and degree. He called upon all
gods of city and field, of trees and fountains, great and small; and
they answered not. Then he called on the demons and lords of particular
things, of metals and tools, of trades and crafts.
“And when he called on the Lord of Bells, came the runner of the Lord of
Bells—a demon terrible to behold, red in color, bristling with hair,
short and broad of stature, squat and paunchy of figure, long of arm,
wide-mouthed, and having three eyes.
“‘Kuang Sai,’ said he (and his voice was like the rolling of a great
bell), ‘you have made sacrifice to all gods, but you have forgotten the
great Lord of Bells.’
“At the name all the temple gongs boomed without being struck of hands.
“‘Therefore is he mocked of his fellows; and therefore, before he will
suffer you to cast the king’s bell, my lord demands your most precious
treasure. At the next founding, when the metal leaps red hot for the
casting, bring your daughter’ (here Kuang Sai cried aloud and fell down
with his face in the dust of the temple floor) ‘arrayed as a bride, and
before the metal flows give her to the Lord of Bells; so shall the
casting be good. If not, remember that the death of a thousand slices is
long, for without this sacrifice never will my lord suffer you to cast
that bell.’
“And he disappeared, making noises like a bell.
“Kuang Sai went forth, staggering, and all night he walked and thought;
and at morn he said ‘No,’ and went to the casting—and again the flaw.
And he sat dumb and motionless and ground his teeth, and again said
‘No,’ and went to the casting—and again the flaw.
“Excellency, all that a man has, down to his skin, will he give for his
life; and near to me is my shirt, but nearer my skin; and if the third
casting failed he died in agony and his name was blotted out. There be
men who would have died, but living among pictures and statues and
singing men and women does not breed the courage that says ‘Then I can
die.’
“On the day of the last casting, what time the pot bubbled full of red
hot metal, over which floated light clouds of heat, came Kuang Sai,
leading by the hand his little daughter, Fen Sai, blooming as a white
water-lily, tripping on her little pearl-embroidered shoes, chattering
and laughing in her father’s face.
“They came to the scaffold over the mouth of the great melting-pot, and
as they came the master founder, the strong man, cried: ‘Master, behold
the casting waits.’
“And Kuang Sai suddenly caught up his little daughter and cast her into
the molten metal. Once she cried, very awful to hear—once, and no more;
for or ever she touched the metal the fierce heat licked her up as a
drop of wine is dried on a hot stone. And as she fell, one of her little
shoes dropped off onto the scaffold.
“‘To the casting,’ said Kuang Sai, and the strong man struck out the
plug of the crucible, and the metal, glowing red and green and golden,
flowed into the mold. Four days waited they the cooling, and they broke
the mold—and behold, the great bell, perfect, flawless, the wonder of
the world for ages; the bell under which we now lie.
“And Kublai-Chan said:
“‘Let Kuang Sai be clothed in the imperial yellow; give to him the
mandarin’s crystal button, and write on a tablet at my palace gate, in
letters of vermilion: “Kuang Sai, the Incomparable Artificer, Whom the
King Delights to Honor.”’
“And they clothed Kuang Sai and bowed down before him, giving him due
honor according to command.
“Then masons built the stone pillars and hung the great bell, and on a
day came Kublai-Chan to ring it for the first time, and with him, at his
right hand, Kuang Sai, whom he delighted to honor.
“And when all things were prepared, Kublai-Chan, the great king, drew
back the striking-beam with all force, and rang the great bell, and
sound came forth, deep, sweet, and full as the voices of the gods.
“Far, far away spread the circles of sound, even to the edge of the
kingdom. The multitudes gathered around and fell down before that voice
in rows, as corn before the reaper. The farmer in the field heard and
fell down before the voice of the king’s bell. At the edge of the
kingdom the Tatar heard it, and checked his horse, wondering.
“And little by little the sound rippled down again to silence, but as
the sound died there came a buzzing and whispering inside the bell, and
it grew and grew sharper and louder, into a second peal—clear, sharp,
cutting the heart like a knife—the scream of a woman in pain, fright,
and horror beyond measure.
“Kublai-Chan covered his lips with his hand, for kings should not be
seen to tremble. His guards, strong men, red-haired, tigers nourished by
blood, looked on each other with white faces, and Kuang Sai, in his
robes of honor, crouched and scrabbled in the dirt with his fingers and
whispered and driveled.
“They led him away, and all his life long he had no more the light of
reason, but sat and mowed and muttered and laughed foolishly, except
when the king’s bell rang, and then he would fall and lie with his mouth
in the dust.
“Behold! in an auspicious hour here come the bearers. Shall we walk to
meet them? My tale has eaten up the waiting. But Heaven Born doubts its
truth. Before we go, I will ring the great bell for him.”
Chen caught the suspended beam by which Chinese bells are rung, swung
it, and struck the shining side of the bell, and the deep boom echoed
over the flat plain. It was truly a tremendous sound, and justified the
belief that it could be heard to the confines of the kingdom, and
gradually the rippling circles of sound died down to silence.
Jarvis, standing with his hands in his belt, was forming his lips to
say, ‘But where’s the scream?’ when Chen raised his hand for silence,
and then, within the arch of the great bell, began a buzzing, like
bees—a little sound, like trickling water or the roaring in a shell; and
this thread of sound grew and gathered till suddenly there pealed out,
full-throated, the cry of a woman in agony of body and soul—a sound to
dream of and wake at night with your teeth on edge.
“That, excellency,” said Chen, “is Fen Sai crying for her shoe.”
Jarvis answered nothing, but he walked faster toward the coming bearers,
and though the sun was hot on his back, his bones felt cold.
* * * * *
Man could direct his ways by plain reason and support his life by
tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavor, and brightness,
and laughter, and performers, to enliven the days of man’s pilgrimage,
and to charm his pained steps over the burning marl.—Sidney Smith.
(1771–1845.)
HOHENLINDEN.
AN IMPRESSIVE POEM INSPIRED BY THE DEFEAT OF THE AUSTRIANS BY THE FRENCH
IN DECEMBER, 1800.
Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) is one of those writers who composed many
elaborate works, yet whose fame rests wholly upon three or four short
poems which have become classic. Among these is “Hohenlinden,” written
immediately after the battle of that name, fought on December 3, 1800,
between the French, under Moreau, and the Archduke John, in command of
the Austrian army.
It was one of the most hotly contested battles of the Napoleonic wars,
and was decided by the valor of Marshal Ney, the Austrians being
routed with a loss of twenty thousand men. The battle made a profound
impression in England, and inspired Campbell to dash off these
stirring lines, which in the speed of their composition and their
martial spirit remind one of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.”
BY THOMAS CAMPBELL.
On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay th’ untrodden snow;
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.
But Linden saw another sight,
When the drum beat, at dead of night,
Commanding fires of death to light
The darkness of her scenery.
By torch and trumpet fast arrayed,
Each horseman drew his battle-blade,
And furious every charger neighed,
To join the dreadful revelry.
Then shook the hills with thunder riven,
Then rushed the steed to battle driven,
And louder than the bolts of heaven
Far flashed the red artillery.
But redder yet that light shall glow
On Linden’s hills of stainèd snow,
And bloodier yet the torrent flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.
’Tis morn, but scarce yon level sun
Can pierce the war-clouds, rolling dun,
Where furious Frank and fiery Hun
Shout in their sulph’rous canopy.
The combat deepens. On, ye brave,
Who rush to glory or the grave!
Wave, Munich! all thy banners wave,
And charge with all thy chivalry!
Few, few shall part where many meet!
The snow shall be their winding-sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier’s sepulcher.
NEW FRIENDS ON OLD PLATES.
The Grist That Now Comes to the Breakfast Mill Indicates That Men Soon
Will Be Able to Dine Sumptuously on Cereals Which Have Been Reduced to
the Constituency of Mere Mental Suggestion.
THE NEW FOOD.
I hear the scientist in grief
With all the strength he has moan—
“Why will the public feed on beef?
Why don’t they take to plasmon?
Give up your pork and venison, too,
Give up your lamb and mutton;
There’s in a penn’orth—nay, it’s true—
Enough to gorge a glutton.
“Its natural organic salt,
Its nutritive albumen
Will make the sick sound, heal the halt,
And make the palsied new men.
And it fulfils my dearest wish—
O sing its praises louder!—
You need no knife or plate or dish,
You take it in a powder.
“Buy it, and see your means expand,
You’ll spend less and you’ll waste less—
It saves the cost of cooking—and
I guarantee it tasteless,
And think as it new strength instils
And with new health you throb, you’ll
Soon take your alcohol in pills
And breakfast in a globule.”
But though for food be plasmon fit,
Its praise in me quicken
Such cravings that the thought of it
Makes me feel famine-stricken.
And think you then my meal shall be
On plasmon?—Fiddle-faddle!
The simple sirloin still for me,
And now and then the saddle!
_St. James’s Gazette._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
THE HEALTH-FOOD MAN.
By Aloysius Coll.
His eyes are balls of polished steel;
His lungs are sponges dried;
His blood is bouillon-concentrate
In veins of leather hide.
His muscles creak like pulley ropes
When hurried into play;
His hair is like piano chords—
Some chords are lost, they say.
His heart’s a little globe of punk—
A house of constant gloom,
For love can never burn within,
Because there isn’t room.
His appetite has dwindled down
To fit his little food.
Till fruit is “water in a poke”
And bread is “so much wood.”
Hot apple-tarts and pumpkin-pies—
He reads of them aghast:
And waffles brown and chicken-stew
Are “terrors of the past.”
And, smiling, from his vest he slips
A tiny box of tin,
With capsules brown and pellets pink
All rattling within.
Then, with a gulp, he swallows down
His dinner from the can—
This product of the health-food school,
The Concentrated Man!
_What to Eat._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
’TWAS EXCELSIOR.
The shades of night were falling fast
As down the café aisle there passed
A girl who bore what looked like rice,
Yet called she it by this device—
“Excelsior!”
“’Tis not ‘Sawdusto,’ she explained,
“Nor ‘Mat in Middlings,’ hulled and grained,
Nor yet ‘Near-Fodder,’ nor ‘Chew-Chew’—
This breakfast food is something NEW—
“Excelsior!”
_Boston Post._
REMEDIES WORSE THAN DISEASE.
Many Freak Medicines Which Were Used By the Ancients Are Paralleled By
Gruesome Compounds That Are Inflicted To-Day on Patients in China and
Some Parts of Europe—A Wonderful Lotion for Bald Heads.
The most unsavory concoctions of the modern pharmacy are as the nectar
of the gods when compared with the medicines of ancient times. It would
seem that physicians in those days taxed their ingenuity to its utmost
to invent the gruesome horrors which they prescribed.
Certainly the fiends who were usually supposed to be the cause of
sickness must have been a courageous lot of chaps if they withstood the
doses they were treated to.
What would one think nowadays of a doctor who prescribed the blood
from a black cat’s tail for skin troubles, live toads tied behind the
ear to stop bleeding, or powdered spiders as an unfailing remedy for
various diseases?
Mayerne, a French physician, who is said to have numbered among his
patients two French and three English sovereigns—Henry IV and Louis
XIII of France, and James I, Charles I, and Charles II of England—was
fond of dosing his patients with “pulverized human bones.”
A chief ingredient in his gout powder consisted of “raspings of a
human skull unburied.” In the composition of his celebrated “balsam of
bats” he employed “adders, bats, sucking whelps, earth-worms, hog’s
grease, the marrow of a stag, and the thigh-bone of an ox.”
Dr. Boleyn (of the same family as Queen Anne Boleyn), a physician in
the reign of Elizabeth, prescribed for a child suffering under a
certain nervous malady, “a small young mouse roasted.” The same doctor
stated that “snayles broken from the shelles and sodden in whyte wyne
with oyle and sugar are very holsome, because they be hoat and moist
for the straightness of the lungs and cold cough.”
Belief in the efficacy of charms and amulets was once universal with
the faculty, and precious stones were regarded as sovereign remedies.
The hyacinth and topaz hung about the neck or taken in drink were
certain “to resist sorrow and recreate the heart.” The sapphire was “a
great enemy to black choler,” and was believed to “free the mind and
mend manners.”
A certain kind of onyx was supposed to preserve the vigor and good
estate of the whole body. One physician went so far as to declare that
“in the body of a swallow there is a stone found called chelidonius,
which, if it be lapped in a fair cloth and tied to the right arm, will
cure lunatics, madmen, and make them amiable and merry.” Herbs were
also in great request, and daisy-tea was accounted a certain cure for
gout and rheumatism.
A formula for hair tonic which is given in the oldest book on medical
practise now known—a book written at Heliopolis, where Joseph once
served in the house of Potiphar—is described as a “means for
increasing the growth of the hair, prepared for Schesch, the mother of
Teta, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt.” Dogs’ teeth, overripe dates,
and asses’ hoofs were carefully cooked in oil and then grated.
As Teta lived before Cheops, this recipe for hair-oil is older than
the great pyramid at Gizeh, and is supposed to date back more than six
thousand years.
Three drops of the blood of an angry cat gave relief to the epileptic.
The heads of venomous serpents have held an important place in
medicine. A strong broth made from them and mixed with salt and spices
and one hundred other remedies was employed under the name of theriac
as a cure for every conceivable disease.
Curious survivals of this old belief in the efficacy of certain
reptiles and insects as cures for human ills occasionally come to
light, even in this advanced age. In New England, cobweb pills are
supposed to be good for the ague, and in the South a certain
knuckle-bone in a pig’s foot is a cure for rheumatism, if it be
carried in the pocket or worn suspended from a string around the neck.
The spider-web pill originated in China, where all species of insects
have certain positive or negative values in medicine.
Among the learned physicians of Pekin it is customary to give two or
three scorpions or spiders to a patient ill of fever.
In Ireland, the peasantry swallow small spiders alive to effect cures.
From these to the cobweb pill of the New England native was easy.
In Flanders, the live spider is fastened into the empty shell of a
walnut and worn around the neck of the patient. As the creature dies,
the fever decreases until it is gone entirely.
Among jewels, the ruby was considered good for derangements of the
liver, as well as for bad eyes.
The sapphire and emerald were credited with properties which rendered
them capable of influencing ophthalmic disorders, and there is a
superstitious belief that serpents are blinded by looking at the
latter stone.
Temperance advocates, if they have any regard for the beliefs of the
Greeks and Romans, might seriously consider the advisability of
distributing amethysts among drunkards, for it was supposed that these
stones prevented intoxication.
Most of our readers have no doubt heard of the precious jewel which
the toad carries in his brain-box, and so-called toad-stones, which
were in reality the teeth of fossil fish, were formerly worn in
finger-rings as a protection against poisons.
Although popularly supposed to be itself a deadly poison, the diamond
has from remote ages been credited with the power of protecting the
wearer from the evil effects of other poisons, a reputation which it
retained until comparatively recent times.
The superstitious use of jewels is not so intolerable to think of, and
certainly would be less offensive to practise, but it is evident that
the patient’s recovery during this period was owing to good luck
rather than to good management.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A KISS.
A German Lover’s Definition of the Contact of Lips Puts Modern
Lexicographers to Shame—How Monks Viewed It.
The dictionary informs the breathless seeker after truth that a kiss is
“a form of salutation expressed by the contact, with pressure, of the
lips”—which definition, though clear and concise, seems to leave
something to be desired.
Jonathan Swift testily remarks: “Lord! I wonder what fool it was that
first invented kissing”—and many more are the disgruntled speeches which
have been made by men and women ever since the art first became known on
earth.
It is probable that every mother’s son of us—and daughter, too—has some
sort of idea of what a kiss is, in spite of the reticence of the
language Solons, but it is doubtful if any one ever clothed the idea
more appropriately than the lover who in 1679 wrote the epistle from
which the following extract is taken. It is translated from the German.
What is a kiss? A kiss is, as it were, a seal expressing our sincere
attachment: the pledge of our future union; a dumb, but at the same
time audible, language of a living heart; a present, which at the same
time it is given is taken from us; the impression of an ardent
attachment on an ivory coral press; the striking of two flints against
one another; a crimson balsam for a love-wounded heart; a sweet bite
of the lip; an affectionate pinching of the mouth; a delicious dish
which is eaten with scarlet spoons; a sweetmeat which does not satisfy
hunger; a fruit which is planted and gathered at the same time; the
quickest exchange of questions and answers of two lovers; the fourth
degree of love.
The monks of the Middle Ages divided the kiss into fifteen distinct and
separate orders—the decorous, or modest kiss; the diplomatic, or kiss of
policy; the spying kiss, to ascertain if a woman has drunk wine; the
slave kiss; the kiss infamous—a church penance; the slipper kiss,
practised toward tyrants; the judicial kiss; the feudal kiss; the
religious kiss (kissing the cross); the academical kiss (or joining a
solemn brotherhood), the hand kiss; the Judas kiss; the medical kiss—for
the purpose of healing some sickness; the kiss of etiquette; the kiss of
love—the only real kiss.
How They Got On In The World.[5]
Brief Biographies of Successful Men Who Have Passed Through the Crucible
of Small Beginnings and Won Out.
_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Footnote 5:
Began March SCRAP BOOK. Single copies, 10 cents.
EIGHTH SERIES.
LONG REACH FOR A GAVEL.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Served Lengthy Apprenticeship
Before He Was Called to Preside.
Joseph G. Cannon, Speaker of the House of Representatives, recently
concluded a few words of advice to a writer investigating the condition
of affairs in the national government by saying: “I don’t know but that
I’d have you study twenty years before beginning to write.”
The advice was not given sarcastically. Cannon himself has gone about
his work thoroughly, systematically, and, to all appearances, slowly.
There has been nothing spectacular or hysterical about his progress, but
the amount of ground covered has been enormous. Every new work
undertaken has been based upon arduous and exhaustive preparation in
other work leading to it. As a result he has come from a clerkship in a
country store to the Speakership of Congress, and he has filled the
office ably in a stirring and momentous period.
Joseph G. Cannon is descended from Massachusetts Quakers who migrated
from the colony to North Carolina to escape persecution. His father was
left a penniless orphan in infancy, and two maiden Quaker women adopted
him and supported him until he was able to study medicine. The future
statesman was born in Guilford, North Carolina, in 1836, and as the
Quakers had protested persistently against slavery, the South became
unsafe for them, and many, Dr. Cannon’s family included, moved North.
The Cannons settled near the Wabash River, at Annapolis, Indiana.
Dr. Cannon was drowned when Joseph was fifteen years old. The doctor’s
eldest boy was in college, and the family decided to allow him to finish
his studies. The youngest was near-sighted, and was unable at that time
to find employment. Joseph, the second son, had shown self-reliance, and
had worked between school hours, so he was sent to work in the local
general store. The first year’s pay amounted to one hundred dollars.
At the age of twenty Joseph had earned a thousand dollars and saved five
hundred, and though his employers tried to persuade him to stay, and
even offered him a partnership, he left them to begin the study of law.
The trial of a slander suit he attended aroused in him a resistless
ambition to become a lawyer. The privations he must undergo to realize
his ambition were patiently endured. He took his five hundred dollars
and went to Terre Haute, where he entered the office of John P. Usher.
Office work for two years, supplemented by six months’ study in a
Cincinnati law school, fitted him for practise. Before he went to
Cincinnati he had never been in a large city, had never seen a theater,
and had heard but little music. The city broadened him, for there he
heard Moncure D. Conway and Horace Mann, and received a newer and truer
idea of the world. Practise in a large city was alluring, and for a time
he thought of settling in Cincinnati. Then he turned from it and located
at Tuscola, Illinois.
The first year he did not earn enough to pay his board bill. He could
not afford to keep a horse to ride the circuit as most of the other
lawyers did, so he tramped it over the prairies, picking up a little
business that gave him much work and scarcely any money. Farm truck,
grocery orders, and on one occasion a couple of cured hams, on another a
side of veal, on still another a pair of trousers much too large for
him, constituted some of his fees. Shortly after he started practise he
had an appointment with a prospective client. He waited until late in
the evening and the man did not come. Then, in desperation, he started
after him.
“Why didn’t you come to see me?” asked Cannon when he had found him.
“Oh,” said the man easily, “I forgot to tell you. I find I can pay more
than I expected, so I have hired another lawyer.”
The struggle Cannon underwent was a grim, hard one that called into play
all the sturdy qualities of his nature. Instead of souring him as it has
many other men, it increased in him a desire to help others who have the
same fight to make, and many a young man battling for a practise, or
facing the work of Congress for the first time, has received the benefit
of it.
“Uncle Joe really knows how to help a fellow,” said one of the young
lawyers to whom he had given a helping hand. “He’s been up against it
himself.”
The hardships of the first year of practise gave way in the second year
to better things, and Cannon was able to make a scant living and pay off
his debts. He went into politics, too, and stumped the county, getting
directly at the people, winning fame among them as well as winning the
regard of his party managers. He had a fairly good practise when he
decided to marry, and he built a four-room cottage at Tuscola.
His wife was an Ohio woman, and before going to their new home the two
went to Chicago to buy furniture for it. They selected Potter Palmer’s
department store as the best place, and were highly pleased with the
intelligence and skill of the young clerk who waited on them. His name
was Marshall Field. After spending part of the three hundred dollars
Cannon had with him, he proudly brought his wife home to the little
cottage.
“There, Mary,” he said as he walked her from one room to another, “I
don’t think a young couple could ask for a better start in life.”
His wife did all her own housework, and as he was State’s Attorney for
the district until 1868, and earned about fifteen hundred dollars a
year, they considered themselves prosperous. From 1868 to 1872 he built
up a private practise, and that paid him better. Besides, the
short-sighted brother had gone into banking, had taken Joseph’s money
for investment, and succeeded mightily.
In 1872 “Old Joe” Gillespie pushed Cannon forward for the Congressional
nomination, and Cannon not only won it, but was elected after a brisk
campaign. He has been in Congress, with the exception of one term, ever
since then.
Altogether, Mr. Cannon has served thirty-two years, and, according to
his own statement, it has cost him three hundred thousand dollars to
live during that time. The government has paid him one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. The rest came out of his private income. Nearly twenty
years of the time has been spent as a member of the Committee on
Appropriations. When the expenditures steadily increased Cannon was
taxed with extravagance.
“You think,” he said in reply, “that because I am chairman of the
Committee on Appropriations that it is my duty to make appropriations. I
tell you it is rather my duty to prevent them being made.”
During the period of his service Congress has spent nearly twelve
billion dollars. Since he has been Speaker it has spent nearly two
billion dollars, and he has fought down expenses constantly. It is a
staggering total, but the country that demanded such expenditures has
reached a wealth never attained by another nation, and the leading men
who ran the government and made the appropriations have been of giant
size. Cannon stands among the foremost.
Speaker Cannon is a poor man, as far as personal wealth is concerned,
and yet he is as happy as when he built the little four-room cottage for
his wife and with her began the upward fight that has landed him in a
supreme position in the national government.
A DEVELOPER OF CITIES.
Canadian Boundary Line Fails to Bisect the Sphere of Usefulness of a
Massachusetts Man.
Henry M. Whitney has crowded three or four great business careers into
his life, and each of them has resulted in good to the community in
which he operated. His father, General James S. Whitney, was fairly
prosperous, though there were then no capitalists and no rich men, as
rich men are reckoned to-day, in Conway, Massachusetts, where he lived.
Henry M. Whitney was born in Conway in 1839. He studied in the public
schools and at Williston Seminary until he was sixteen years old; then
he went to work in the Conway Savings Bank. When his father became
collector of the port of Boston, he went with him as a clerk, and later,
when the father entered the employ of the Metropolitan Steamship
Company, the son again went with him, still as a clerk.
His rise was neither rapid nor spectacular, but it was steady,
continuous, and solid. When General Whitney died in 1879 he was
president of the Metropolitan, and his son succeeded him in the office.
At forty years of age Henry M. Whitney was a fairly rich man, but known
to few people. The work that made his name known throughout the country
came afterward. He had begun to deal in suburban real estate in the
vicinity of Boston, and had picked Brookline as especially fitted for
development. It was a section much favored as a place of residence by
Boston business men, and as a first step in the development of his
holdings Whitney built, chiefly at his own expense, a magnificent
boulevard from the town to Boston. Over this the men who had offices in
the city were accustomed to drive daily, just as to-day they go in their
automobiles.
The development and extension of the trolley in the late eighties gave
Whitney another opportunity, and he built a trolley line from Brookline
to Boston. When he reached the city limits he found himself against a
stone wall.
The Boston horse-car companies would not allow him to transfer his
passengers without their paying another fare, and would make no
provisions for connections between the cars. They would not permit him
to get a franchise, and they ridiculed the idea that their own lines
would ever be operated by electricity. The Brookline line was sandbagged
and rendered worthless, for all it could offer passengers was a
pleasant, and, at the time, a novel ride to the Boston city line.
Whitney made several attempts to persuade the Boston companies to allow
him to use their tracks, and offered to stand part of the expense of
installing electric equipment. The offer was turned down, and the little
“West End” road still hung on the ragged edge.
Then Whitney went to work in another way. He quietly bought up the stock
of the various companies, and when at last matters came to a test he and
his friends were in control, and the “West End” entered Boston. Later it
gave its name to practically the whole Boston street railroad service.
As a first result of Whitney’s control and amalgamation of the Boston
streetcar lines, that city was among the earliest in the country to
benefit from an adequate trolley service.
In 1893 Whitney got control of the Cape Breton coal mines. Before then
the mines had dragged along, doing a fair business, but not advancing to
any extent. The people in Cape Breton did not have the money to develop
them, and the English capitalists in control were disinclined to advance
any money for the purpose.
Whitney saw a chance to push Cape Breton coal into new markets, and soon
the mines at Louisbourg and Glace Bay were doubling and trebling their
output, and Sydney and North Sydney became thriving ports. He had also
entered the gas business in Boston, and he began importing Cape Breton
coal for the gas and coke works at Everett, near Boston. Such an
increase in industry gave a tremendous impetus to Cape Breton, but it
was not until Whitney added steel, coke, and gas plants that Cape Breton
realized the full benefit of his work.
About the time Whitney entered the coal-mining industry, a fisherman had
come in with a killock so peculiar that it drew attention. Examination
showed that it was almost pure iron ore. He had found it near Belle
Isle, between Newfoundland and Labrador. Further search showed that
there were enormous deposits of excellent iron ore at Belle Isle.
The Sydneys had a good port and coal in abundance. Whitney made the
combination that has resulted in the building of the great iron works at
North Sydney. Fifteen years ago the two towns together did not have much
more than four thousand inhabitants. At present they have nearly five
times that number, and are thriving, growing cities, shipping enormous
quantities of coal, and the Dominion Iron and Steel Company at North
Sydney is regularly turning out twenty thousand tons of steel a month.
About three-fourths of this is steel rails, and the enormous development
of Canada’s railroad extension easily calls for much more than that.
Cape Breton is no longer a negligible section of the world, dependent on
its fisheries, the scanty farm produce that its stony soil yields, and
its mines slovenly managed and ill-developed. It is steadily growing
rich, and the workers are prosperous. Both of these conditions are
directly due to the foresight and management of Henry M. Whitney.
PEGGED ON TO FORTUNE.
The Career of a Future Governor Illustrates Soundness of the Adage:
“Cobbler, Stick to Thy Last.”
William L. Douglas, who stands well in the forefront of the American
shoe manufacturers, alone makes more shoes every year than were
manufactured in the entire country when he started to learn the
business.
Mr. Douglas was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1845, and when he
was five years old his father died. At seven he was apprenticed to a
shoemaker, and was put to pegging shoes. Practically every operation was
done by hand, though Howe’s sewing-machine was used by the more
progressive manufacturers for stitching the uppers. But the rest of the
work, fastening the soles included, was done by hand, and the larger
factories employed only a dozen or so men.
Douglas worked at the bench from six o’clock in the morning until
evening made it too dark to see where to drive his awl. At fifteen he
could make a shoe, from cutting the uppers and trimmings and preparing
the bottom stocks and heels to sandpapering the soles and blackening and
burnishing the edges and heels. Then he began to look around for easier
and more remunerative work.
The cotton mills of the State seemed to offer it, and he started in, as
bobbin-boy, to learn a new trade. He remained at it only a few years,
for he heard the glowing stories of how much skilled shoemakers were
needed in the West. When he was nineteen he went to Colorado, and after
working through a number of mining-camps he located at Denver and opened
a cobbling shop.
The prices he received for his work were big, but they were nearly
offset by the prices he had to pay to live, and he was forced to work
sometimes sixteen hours a day. He was of slight build, and the strain
began to tell on him to such an extent that he was forced to abandon the
business and return East.
By 1876 machinery had begun to revolutionize the shoe business, and
Massachusetts was making shoes for the whole country. Douglas had a few
hundred dollars, the savings of the long days in Colorado, and he began
manufacturing. He could not afford to buy all the machines necessary.
He commenced with three men, working himself. The little shop prospered
and grew. Before long it was sending out shoes all over the country. As
machinery was improved and a greater output became possible, the shop
increased its business and began to export shoes. From the original
output of forty-eight pairs of shoes a week it has grown to fifteen
thousand pairs a day, and the shoes are sent all over the world.
The making of shoes and the organization of a great Industry has not
absorbed Mr. Douglas’s whole attention. As a Democrat he has been a
member of the Massachusetts House and Senate, Mayor of Brockton, and in
1903 he was elected Governor of Massachusetts, though the State is
usually Republican. He worked during his campaign the way he worked in
business, putting in the number of hours a day necessary to complete the
task set, and he kept his political lieutenants working the same way. By
this means he became the first Democratic executive the State has had
since 1893, and he gave the people a business administration they liked.
It was Governor Douglas who settled the disastrous Fall River strike,
after a number of futile attempts had been made to bring about an
understanding, and his findings appealed to both sides, for the workers
knew he had once worked in the mill and the employers recognized his
acute business sense.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Fortune.]
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter
and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies
as she best pleases, being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her
own happy or unhappy condition. All external accessions receive taste
and color from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us not with
their heat, but our own, which they are adapted to cover and keep
in.—=Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.=
THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG.
Though the fame of Henry Kingsley (1830–1876) is eclipsed by that of
his elder brother, Charles, many critics have been bold enough to
predict that the time will come when the English-speaking world will
recognize the younger of these brothers as the greater writer. Henry
Kingsley, leaving Oxford without taking a degree, went to Australia
when he was twenty-three years old, and it was not until his return to
England, five years later, that he addressed himself to novel-writing.
His most popular books were “Geoffrey Hamlin” and “Ravenshoe.” He
wrote few poems, and of these “The Blackbird’s Song,” which is here
reprinted for the readers of THE SCRAP BOOK, probably is the best
known. It has the real lilt of the English blackbird, and this,
together with its quaint diction, gives to it a peculiar quality that
causes it to linger in the mind long after the book containing the
poem has been laid aside.
BY HENRY KINGSLEY.
Magdalen at Michael’s gate
Tirled at the pin;
On Joseph’s thorn sang the blackbird,
“Let her in! let her in!”
“Hast thou seen the wounds?” said Michael;
“Know’st thou thy sin?”
“It is evening, evening,” sang the blackbird,
“Let her in! let her in!”
“Yes, I have seen the wounds,
And I know my sin.”
“She knows it well, well, well,” sang the blackbird:
“Let her in! let her in!”
“Thou bringest no offerings,” said Michael,
“Naught save sin.”
And the blackbird sang, “She is sorry, sorry, sorry;
Let her in! let her in!”
When he had sung himself to sleep,
And night did begin,
One came and opened Michael’s gate,
And Magdalen went in.
LOVE IN FOUR CENTURIES.
A Collection of Verses Which Prove That However Great May Be the Changes
Wrought By Time on Other Products of Human Endeavor, the Art of
Expressing the “Grande Passion” Remains Immutable.
SWEET-AND-TWENTY.
By William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
Oh, mistress mine, where are you roaming?
Oh, stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low;
Trip no farther, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lover’s meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-Twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
GO, LOVELY ROSE.
By Edmund Waller (1605–1687).
Go, lovely Rose—
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.
Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired:
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.
Then die—that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
I PRITHEE SEND ME BACK MY HEART.
By Sir John Suckling (1609–1642).
I prithee send me back my heart,
Since I cannot have thine,
For if from yours you will not part,
Why, then, shouldst thou have mine?
Yet now I think on’t, let it lie;
To find it were in vain;
For thou’st a thief in either eye
Would steal it back again.
Why should two hearts in one breast lie,
And yet not lodge together?
O Love! where is thy sympathy,
If thus our breasts thou sever?
But love is such a mystery,
I cannot find it out;
For when I think I’m best resolved,
I then am in most doubt.
Then farewell care, and farewell wo,
I will no longer pine;
For I’ll believe I have her heart,
As much as she has mine.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
TO LUCASTA, ON GOING TO THE WARS.
By Richard Lovelace (1618–1658).
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkinde,
That from the nunnerie
Of thy chaste breast and quiet minde,
To warre and armes I flee.
True, a new mistress now I chase—
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith imbrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you, too, should adore;
I could not love thee, deare, so much,
Loved I not honor more.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
TO LADY ANNE HAMILTON.
By William Robert Spencer (1769–1834).
Too late I stay’d—forgive the crime!
Unheeded flew the hours;
How noiseless falls the foot of Time
That only treads on flowers!
What eye with clear account remarks
The ebbing of the glass,
When all its sands are diamond sparks,
That dazzle as they pass?
Oh, who to sober measurement
Time’s happy swiftness brings,
When birds of paradise have lent
Their plumage for his wings?
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
NOT OURS THE VOWS.
By Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866).
Not ours the vows of such as plight
Their troth in sunny weather,
While leaves are green and skies are bright,
To walk on flowers together.
But we have loved as those who tread
The thorny path of sorrow,
With clouds above, and cause to dread
Yet deeper gloom to-morrow.
That thorny path, those stormy skies,
Have drawn our spirits nearer,
And rendered us, by sorrow’s ties,
Each to the other dearer.
Love, born in hours of joy and mirth,
With mirth and joy may perish;
That to which darker hours gave birth
Still more and more we cherish.
It looks beyond the clouds of time,
And through death’s shadowy portal,
Made by adversity sublime,
By faith and hope immortal.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
THE GRAVE OF LOVE.
By Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866).
I dug, beneath the cypress shade,
What well might seem an elfin’s grave;
And every pledge in earth I laid,
That erst thy false affection gave.
I pressed them down the sod beneath;
I placed one mossy stone above;
And twined the rose’s fading wreath
Around the sepulcher of love.
Frail as thy love, the flowers were dead,
Ere yet the evening sun was set;
But years shall see the cypress spread,
Immutable as my regret.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
MUSIC, WHEN SOFT VOICES DIE.
By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose-leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
WHEN STARS ARE IN THE QUIET SKIES.
By Bulwer Lytton (1803–1873).
When stars are in the quiet skies,
Then most I pine for thee;
Bend on me then thy tender eyes,
As stars look on the sea!
For thoughts, like waves that glide by night,
Are stillest when they shine;
Mine earthly love lies hushed in light
Beneath the heaven of thine.
There is an hour when angels keep
Familiar watch o’er men,
When coarser souls are wrapped sleep—
Sweet spirit, meet me then!
There is an hour when holy dreams
Through slumber fairest glide;
And in that mystic hour it seems
Thou shouldst be by my side.
My thoughts of thee too sacred are
For daylight’s common beam:
I can but know thee as my star,
My angel, and my dream;
When stars are in the quiet skies,
Then most I pine for thee;
Bend on me then thy tender eyes,
As stars look on the sea!
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
TO HELEN.
By Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849).
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicæan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
QUEER WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY.
For Many Centuries Native Tribes of Africa Have Had Systems of
Communication Which Have Mystified White Travelers—Effective Use of
Tom-Toms, Gourds, and Ivory Horns Keeps Villages in Touch With Each
Other.
There is nothing new under the sun, not even the wireless telegraph. To
be sure, the system which has been in use for centuries among the savage
tribes in the heart of Africa bears no resemblance to our latest wonder,
but it is practical and effective, and its value has been proved many
times.
A French explorer seems to have been the first to describe it.
By means of this system news of important events in the interior of
the Sudan reaches all the trading ports on the coast in a very short
time, although there is no electric telegraph or telephone in the
interior.
The communication is made by means of various instruments, the most
commonly employed being horns, tom-toms, and whistles. The horns are
of solid ivory, made by hollowing out elephant’s tusks. The mouthpiece
is at the side. These trumpets are of all sizes, but the favorite ones
are very long and give seven distinct notes, produced by plugging the
mouth with corks of various sizes. The ordinary tom-tom is a hollow
log of wood, with a goatskin stretched over one end.
The following instance will illustrate the way in which this native
telegraph is employed. The post commander at Stanley Falls was
informed by a native of a neighboring village that a provision train
had been attacked by robbers two days before at a point one hundred
and eighty miles farther down the Congo. A week later the party
arrived and confirmed the story in part.
They had reached the scene of the alleged attack at the time reported,
but the shots which the natives had taken as indications of a conflict
with robbers had been fired at a herd of antelopes.
More recently, when an officer of the French Congo came to grief in
the rapids, the accident was reported the next morning at a village
one hundred and eighty-six miles distant.
Among the Bengala tribe a sort of xylophone is used with four notes,
by means of which the natives hold communication over great distances
In a kind of telegraphic language.
The Rev. C. A. Rideout, an African missionary, gives in the Kansas
City _Star_ an account of this method of communication over long
distances of sparsely settled country. He was working among the
Basutos when he discovered that the villages had means of conveying
messages from one chief to another, or transmitting the intelligence
of defeat or victory. Says Mr. Rideout:
“A large gourd is hollowed out and thoroughly dried. Then kid’s skin,
as hard and thin as parchment, is stretched across the hollow of the
gourd. When beaten with a padded drumstick this gives forth a sound
which can be distinctly heard at a distance of from five to eight
miles.
“In every village there is a class of men who are utilized as scouts.
Among these guards there are always two or three trained to the use of
the gourd drum. The code is practically an African Morse alphabet, and
is beaten on the drum in the open air.
“The sound is carried across the valleys and glens to the next
village, where it is interpreted by another guard. If the message is
for a distant part, he repeats it on his drum; and so it is carried
from village to village, with very little loss of time, until it
reaches the person for whom it is intended.
“I was granted the privilege of using the gourd telegraph system to
send messages to our mission workers, and often availed myself of it.
I don’t know a single instance where it failed to deliver its word
properly.
“During the Boer War we, who were hundreds of miles from the scene of
hostilities, got all the news with surprising rapidity, and I have
known of several instances where tidings came by the gourd air-line
hours ahead of the message by field-telegraph.
“Who first invented the system nobody knows. It has been in use for
centuries. There appears to be no difficulty in sending any kind of a
message, and I have known one to travel nearly one thousand miles.”
The Blind Sailor-Explorer.
BY MARY CAROLINE CRAWFORD.
Lieutenant James Holman Felt His Way ‘Round the World, Scaled Vesuvius,
Hunted Wild Animals, Was a Russian Prisoner, a Guest of Princes, and
Wrote His Own Experiences Though Sightless.
_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
We of the twentieth century are rather too prone to believe that such
remarkable cases of superiority to circumstance as are supplied by the
lives of Helen Keller and Thomas Stringer are peculiar to our own time
and country. Such, however, is not the case. Certainly no more
impressive instance of accomplishment under trying circumstances can
anywhere be found than in the travels and the accounts thereof credited
to Lieutenant James Holman, who died in London almost fifty years ago,
after a full and happy life. Not even the celebrated Baron von Humboldt
traveled so far or visited so many countries as did Holman; and von
Humboldt had his sight.
Holman offers an extraordinary example of what energy and perseverance
may accomplish. Driven out of the naval service of his country by the
complete extinction of his sight when twenty-five years of age, he found
himself with his youthful passion for travel still unsatisfied, and with
what might very probably be a long and dreary life before him. A naval
officer who had already seen service in England and America, he now
found himself forced to rearrange his life plans entirely. Almost
immediately he resorted to Edinburgh University for a term of study, but
even the pleasures of a cultivated mind could not reconcile him to a
life of inaction. Finding the post of Knight of Windsor, which had been
conferred upon him, intolerable, he obtained leave of absence, and
prepared to set out on his first journey of exploration.
For more than forty years the blind lieutenant kept continually on the
march. He traveled alone, for a valet, in his opinion, was a useless
incumbrance. Beginning his travels with a tour of France, Italy, Saxony,
Switzerland, and Holland, he next penetrated twenty-five hundred miles
beyond the Ural Mountains in Siberia. After returning to Europe, he
circumnavigated the globe, visited the west coast of Africa, the gold
mines in the Brazils, the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, and the
islands between that country and China. In 1840 he again left
England—this time to explore the Holy Land, and, incidentally, every
country touching the waters of the Mediterranean and adjacent seas.
Between these journeys it was Holman’s custom to expand into books the
journal notes he had made _en route_. The resulting volumes (formally
dedicated, by permission, “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty”) are
packed with shrewd comments upon men and manners, and with delightful
descriptions of travel. Through these books (now extremely rare) we are
enabled to-day to enter into the experiences of one of the most
interesting personalities of which the last century can boast.
“If my undertakings—for such they may without vanity be called—be
productive of no other benefit,” he says, “than that of proving to the
world how much may be done by a cheerful perseverance under a heavy
affliction—how great obstacles may be subdued by resolution—how the void
of sight may be peopled by an active mind, and the desert fertilized by
industry—how much hope exists even in the darkest page of life—and how
many resources against discontent and loneliness this beautiful and
varied world presents—I shall be content to think my labors have not
been altogether destitute of utility.” This rather labored though
earnest sentence does not, however, represent Holman at his best. His
earlier books are full of spontaneity. While still a young man he
derived as much pleasure from writing of his journeys as from making
them.
The manner in which the blind man lets us share his sensations makes his
work peculiarly interesting. After we have been wondering for a while
how he gets any fun out of the long, hard journeys in the dark, he
suddenly answers the question thus: “I must candidly admit that I have
derived little gratification from the external objects that presented
themselves, and am indebted to the resources of my own mind for the
interest I felt; and in particular the contemplation of future plans, as
well as the satisfactory progress I have already made with regard to my
present ones which others have so often deemed impracticable.”
The truth is that Holman experienced a boy’s delight in proving to his
friends that he could travel in safety and have a good time into the
bargain. “I find less difficulty and inconvenience in traveling among
strangers than people imagine, and prefer being left to my own
resources,” he says. “Habit has given me the power of acquiring, by a
kind of undefinable tact, as correct ideas of objects as the most
accurate description would give.”
Of course, humorous situations were of frequent occurrence. Once at
Bordeaux he heard water splashing at the side of the coach. This went on
for something like an hour before he discovered that the other
passengers, the better to insure their safety, had left the vehicle and
crossed on a ferry-boat, leaving him to float with the carriage on a
raft across the river Dordogne.
“I found that, while I supposed myself sitting in the coach office yard
at Bordeaux,” he narrates, “I had actually traveled four miles by water
without having entertained the least idea of such an adventure.”
In this same book Holman describes his custom of traveling with
leading-strings.
“Finding myself suffering from headache, which I attributed to want of
exercise,” he writes, “I made signs for the driver to stop that I might
get out of the coach and walk for a time; he was quite indisposed to
accommodate me until I manifested my intention of jumping out.
“He now thought well to stop his horses and proffer his assistance;
however, I refused it, and succeeded in finding the back part of the
coach, where I secured my hold by means of a piece of cord (which when
traveling I make a rule to carry always in my pocket), and which in the
present instance served me as a leading-string.
“I then followed in this way on foot for several miles, to the no small
amusement of the villagers, who laughed heartily and even shouted after
me.”
Upon reaching Rome, Holman went to the Vatican. He had hoped to be
allowed to examine the sculpture carefully with his hands, but this he
was not permitted to do, as soldiers were placed in each apartment to
prevent such violation.
“Had I been freely permitted to touch the marbles, I doubt not,” he
says, “that I might have been as highly gratified as those who saw, for
the sense of touch conveys to my mind as clear, or at least as
satisfactory, ideas of the form, and, I think I may add, the force of
expression, as sight does to others. I did occasionally examine them in
this way by stealth,” he adds, “when I was apprised that the soldiers’
backs were turned toward me.”
Holman was doubtless the only blind man who ever ascended Mount Vesuvius
and survived to record his impressions of the feat. “My friends
endeavored to dissuade me from this arduous undertaking,” he writes.
“and when after fully deciding upon the measure, I inquired in what way
it was customary for others to make the ascent, they replied: ‘Oh, they
could _see_ their way up.’
“‘Well, then,’ I retorted, ‘I have little doubt of being able to _feel_
mine.’”
The ground proved to be too hot under his feet, and the sulfurous vapors
too strong to allow the hardy Englishman to remain long on the summit,
but his guide satisfied him by directing his walking-cane toward the
flames, which shriveled the ferrule and charred the lower part. He
retained the cane as a memorial, and mentions the fact in his writings.
The most dangerous journeys ever undertaken by Holman were those into
the heart of Siberia, upon which he set out soon after his return from
his initial visit to Florence. He occupied himself on the way inland
studying the geography of Russia, tracing his intended itinerary with
his finger upon a raised map.
At the Academy of Art, in Saint Petersburg, he was more successful than
he had been at the Vatican in his endeavor to derive pleasure from the
sculpture. Of his experience with the Canova statue of Napoleon he
writes:
“The pedestal of this statue is so high that I could only reach the
knees of the figure; but this was sufficient to satisfy me of its
exquisite character. The kneepan, the heads of the bones of the leg, the
muscles that form the calf, the ankles, the contractions of the toes
(from the supposed weight of the body resting upon them) were all
inimitable, so beautifully had the chisel written its delineations on
the marble.
“My gratification on touching it was such that I could with difficulty
withdraw my hand; and had the leg been clothed with a real shoe and
stocking, and of a natural temperature, I might have imagined it real.”
In Moscow this undaunted sightseer walked to the Kremlin and “looked at”
the wonderful bell there by mounting to its top on a ladder. The better
to examine some of the mortars cast in 1694 by Peter the Great, he
coolly took off his coat and crept to the bottom of one, greatly to the
astonishment of the guide who accompanied him.
Holman’s own explanation of the way in which sightseeing of this sort
ministered to his pleasure is of decided interest.
“The various organs of sense,” he says, “are the mere instruments by
which the impressions of external objects are conveyed to the mind,
which then reasons upon and draws its inferences respecting the nature
of these objects. The conclusions thus arrived at are, consequently,
mere ideas.... It matters not through what senses the impression from
which these ideas are derived are transmitted. The reader will probably
now comprehend the manner in which I arrived at what perhaps may be
termed an ideal knowledge of the places I visit.
“Accompanied by an intelligent friend or guide, I examine every place of
interest—touch what I can and hear of all, and then, combining the
information thus gained with previously acquired knowledge of the
subject and some portion of imagination, a picture is produced
comprising in my mind a strong impression of reality, and answering the
purpose, to me, almost as well as if I had actually seen it.”
To follow Holman as he calmly discusses his own feelings concerning the
blindness which had come upon him is of decided psychological interest.
Suspense was particularly difficult for him to bear.
“Any irritation of this nature renders me the most anxious of mortals,”
he writes; “but let the excitement cease, no matter whether in an
agreeable manner or the reverse, and my mind at once regains its
tranquility so that I become comparatively comfortable.
“I then look back and smile at the previous storm, and wonder that it
has exerted so powerful an influence over me. For instance, with respect
to the one great affliction it has been my fate to suffer—the loss of
sight—my mind was, during the period of suspense in which I was long
detained as to the final result, in a state of excessive agitation and
distress; but no sooner was it ascertained that the visual fire was
quenched forever than it at once rose superior to misfortune and began
to seek for and to find occupation and consolation in a variety of
pursuits, among which the love of traveling, as the reader will
perceive, has not been the least prominent.”
The humors attending his odd position were by no means lost upon him.
“Recollecting that I am suffering from some deprivation,” he observes
with gentle irony, “people often mistake the sense and begin to shout at
me as if I were deaf; in short, this feeling is so general that almost
every one who is not intimately acquainted with me elevates his voice in
conversation.
“When I am desired to give my hand to examine anything by the touch,
they take it as if my sense of feeling were deficient, squeezing it
rudely, and pressing it forcibly on the object of examination, as if I
were about to ascertain the condition of a bird or beast; whereas my
sense of touch is most delicate, and all that I require is to pass the
hand lightly over the surface of the body, and then the result is both
pleasing and satisfactory.”
Occasionally, of course, this eager traveler made ludicrous mistakes.
Once, when he was being entertained in Siberia by a family of
distinction, he inquired from his friend what extraordinary animal it
was that was making the singular snoring sound on the other side of him,
which had for some time attracted his attention. The “animal” proved to
be one of the principal counselors of the town who had a peculiar
obstruction in his nasal organs which made him breathe with a wheezing
noise.
This Siberian journey was the one in which Holman especially delighted.
He had entered upon the arduous undertaking “with feelings heightened by
the recollections of interest formerly derived during eight years’
service on the coast of North America.” Oddly enough, he expected to
find a great similarity in the climate and productions of the two
countries. He was especially interested, moreover, in the primitive
simplicity and manners of the Russian and Tatar tribes.
Of the Russians, certainly, he learned a great deal during this journey.
His estimation of their character appears to be singularly shrewd, and,
for a blind man, wonderfully penetrating.
“Their natural quickness of mind and sensibility of feeling,” he says,
“gives them the appearance of being a cheerful, amiable, and
open-hearted people; but alas! under this exterior are concealed so much
disingenuousness and artful policy as to diminish materially, on closer
acquaintance, that estimation to which they would otherwise be justly
entitled.”
Seventy-five years before Kipling’s “Truce of the Bear” was penned,
another Englishman had perceived the close resemblance between the
ursine and the human—in Russia.
The way in which the traveler overcame the material difficulties of
journeying alone in a strange land is full of interest. He tells us that
he kept his money in various bags, each of which contained a definite
number of coins of different values. He was also provided with tea and
sugar, a teapot, cups, and all that was necessary for the afternoon
refreshment so dear to the English heart. Yet he did not spare himself
when he wished to cover a stipulated distance.
The man’s force of character was never put to a severer test than when
he was made a Russian state prisoner on suspicion of having assumed the
pose of “Blind Traveler” in order that he might spy more effectively
upon Russian politics.
The Czar had sent an aide-de-camp to arrest him and put him over the
frontier without loss of time. During the ensuing sledge journey, which
continued day and night for four thousand miles, and of which he was
himself compelled to bear the expense, Holman became utterly worn out.
Then he took matters into his own hands; he decided that he needed a
day’s rest, and told his courier-guards that he intended to take it. The
Czar’s representatives, including the Governor of Moscow, ordered
otherwise.
Holman defied them all—if he felt better next day, he would go with
them; but not before. A long and angry altercation followed, but in the
end he, a sightless stranger among bigoted enemies, won by sheer force
of moral strength. They finally left him a free man on the border of the
little republic of Cracow.
Of Holman’s seven books, the later volumes are considerably less
intimate and vivid than those written in the first flush of his triumph
over circumstances. Nevertheless his adventures and research among the
gold mines of South Africa, his description of an entertainment given
for him by a rajah of the East, his emotions as he climbed a mast for
the sake of exercise, and the thrill which came to him while hunting
elephants make reading of more than ordinary interest. The sailor’s keen
delight in a voyage, and the Englishman’s unfailing weakness for riding,
never deserted this extraordinary man. One of the best pen-pictures we
have of him, indeed, is astride a horse.
“At the English consul’s,” writes Francis Parkman from Girgenti, Sicily,
under the date, January, 1844, “I met a blind traveler, a Mr. Holman,
who has been over Siberia, New Holland, and other remote regions, for
the most part alone, and has written seven volumes of his travels.
Traveling, he told me, was a passion with him. He could not sit at home.
“I walked home with him through the streets, admiring his indomitable
energy. I saw him the next morning sitting on his mule, with the guide
he had hired. His strong frame, his manly face, his gray beard and
mustache, and his sightless eyeballs gave him quite a noble appearance.”
Lieutenant Holman died in his London chambers, July, 1857. He had never
married, so that the unpublished journals and other literary material
which survived him was not placed before the world as it probably would
have been had a devoted son survived him. Through a relative who settled
in Canada, however, the name and the fame of this remarkable man have
come down to us.
It is due to the courtesy of a member of Lieutenant Holman’s family, a
young artist, now in this country, that I am indebted for the intimate
details here given concerning this intrepid traveler.
THE LIGHT OF THE HARVEST MOON.
Its Brightness Enables Farmers to Gather in Their Crops During the
Night—The Natural Phenomena Which Make September “The Month of
Moonlight.”
September is “the month of moonlight.” Poets and impressionists at this
season of the year, have, from time immemorial, flooded the world with
harvest-moon imagery. Pictures of moonlight lovers strolling along
moonlit lanes, rowing on moonlit rivers, in moonlit boats, moonlight
gleaners and the harvest home have been painted over and over again in
word and color, but the why and wherefor of the extraordinary brilliance
of the Queen of Night during the period that she is known as the
“harvest moon” has been completely lost sight of by the great majority.
Those who observe the ordinary astronomical phenomena of daily
occurrence are familiar with the time variations in the moon’s rising
and setting. This is due to the direction of the moon’s apparent path
with reference to the horizon, of whatever place it is viewed from. Its
distance from the earth and its daily motion eastward in right
ascension.
For the first few days in every lunar month the moon rises or sets
twenty-three or twenty-four minutes later for three or four successive
evenings, after which the retardation varies from that time to an hour
and seventeen minutes, and sometimes more.
In the latitude of New York the maximum retardation is seventy-seven
minutes and the minimum is twenty-three.
When the retardation is a minimum at the time of the full moon, the
light is very powerful, and farmers have often taken advantage of the
practically all-night brilliancy for several days, to harvest their
grain. September 21 being the autumnal equinox and the full moon
occurring nearest that date being usually in the height of harvest
time, it is called the harvest-moon.
To understand the action of the causes which produce this phenomenon
it is necessary to remember that at the time of the autumnal equinox
the sun sets exactly in the west, and the southern half of the
ecliptic, or the sun’s apparent annual path in the sky, will then be
wholly above the horizon and the northern half entirely below; the
ecliptic, therefore, making the least possible angle with the horizon.
In high northern latitudes, as in Alaska, British Columbia, Norway and
Sweden and the north of Scotland, the moon’s path at such times is
almost parallel with the horizon, and for more than a week she rises
at very nearly the same time, giving the farmers ample light and time
to garner their crops.
THE SOWER.
A POEM IN WHICH A DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN POET AND DIPLOMAT EXPRESSED HIS
FEAR OF OLD WORLD INFLUENCES.
With the single exception of John Hay, no English-speaking poet has
been so distinguished as a student of the social and political phases
of national life as was James Russell Lowell (1819–1891). It is
doubtful whether the United States ever produced a poet who was more
truly national. His earlier verses were characterized by quaint Yankee
humor, and many were virile pictures of New England life. In his later
years, as a writer, editor, and lecturer, Lowell labored zealously to
bring the literature and culture of the New World to a plane as high
as that of the Old World. As a diplomat, he did more to cement the
friendship of Great Britain and the United States than any man had
done before. His official title, while in England, was that of United
States Minister to Great Britain, but a London newspaper bestowed upon
him another—“His Excellency the Ambassador of American Literature to
the Court of Shakespeare.”
But though Lowell was cosmopolitan in many of his tastes, he was
essentially a patriotic American. The great influx of foreigners and
foreign ideals into the United States oftentimes excited his
apprehension, and it was while under the influence of these fears that
he wrote “The Sower,” which is printed herewith.
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
I saw a Sower walking slow
Across the earth, from east to west;
His hair was white as mountain snow.
His head drooped forward on his breast.
With shriveled hands he flung his seed,
Nor ever turned to look behind;
Of sight or sound he took no heed;
It seemed he was both deaf and blind.
His dim face showed no soul beneath,
Yet in my heart I felt a stir,
As if I looked upon the sheath
That once had clasped Excalibur.
I heard, as still the seed he cast,
How, crooning to himself, he sung:
“I sow again the holy Past,
The happy days when I was young.
“Then all was wheat without a tare,
Then all was righteous, fair, and true;
And I am he whose thoughtful care
Shall plant the Old World in the New.
“The fruitful germs I scatter free,
With busy hand, while all men sleep;
In Europe now, from sea to sea,
The nations bless me as they reap.”
Then I looked back along his path,
And heard the clash of steel on steel,
Where man faced man, in deadly wrath,
While clanged the tocsin’s hurrying peal.
The sky with burning towns flared red,
Nearer the noise of fighting rolled,
And brothers’ blood, by brothers shed,
Crept, curdling, over pavements cold.
Then marked I how each germ of truth
Which through the dotard’s fingers ran
Was mated with a dragon’s tooth
Whence there sprang up an armed man.
I shouted, but he could not hear;
Made signs, but these he could not see;
And still, without a doubt or fear,
Broadcast he scattered anarchy.
Long to my straining ears the blast
Brought faintly back the words he sung:
“I sow again the holy Past,
The happy days when I was young.”
ELEVENTH HOUR PERFORMANCES.
Some Wonderful Achievements Wrought Against Time by Celebrated Men of
Genius Who Saved Critical Situations at the Last Minute—Phenomenal
Records by Artists and Composers.
The world of genius abounds with stories of marvelous achievements at
the last moment, especially the musical and artistic branch of it.
Strange though it may seem, some of the finest music and paintings have
been executed in a rush against time.
“There goes Leader, off to paint his dally picture,” was the usual
comment of his neighbors, upon seeing the artist leave his rooms early
in the morning with a canvas on his back. Although this may, perhaps,
have been a too flattering anticipation, it is a well-known fact that
on several occasions the academician produced a large picture within a
few hours.
Marvelous as is Benjamin Williams Leader’s rapidity with his brush, he
has a formidable rival in Solomon J. Solomon, A.R.A., who painted an
admirable life-size portrait of Israel Zangwill for the Academy
Exhibition within five hours of taking up his brush.
But neither Leader nor Solomon would dispute the honors of swift
workmanship with Sir Edwin Landseer. He had promised a picture for the
Spring Exhibition of the British Institution in 1845, but on the day
before the exhibition was to be opened all the hanging committee had
received was an empty frame, which was duly hung in the position of
honor.
As the prospect of the frame receiving a picture for the opening
seemed very slight, a member of the committee went to interview the
artist. He found Landseer standing in front of a bare canvas.
“That’s the picture I promised,” said Sir Edwin, pointing to the
canvas. “I haven’t touched it yet, but I will send it to the
institution to-night.”
A few hours later the completed picture was delivered, and may be seen
to-day in the National Gallery. This wonderful work of half a dozen
hours was none other than the universally admired “Cavalier’s Pets.”
Sir Arthur Sullivan composed the brilliant epilogue of the “Golden
Legend” in less than twenty-four hours. He sat down at nine o’clock
one evening to compose the overture to “Iolanthe,” and did not rise
from his desk until the last note was written at seven o’clock on the
following morning, while the overture to the “Yeoman of the Guard”
occupied him no more than twelve hours, both to compose and score.
It is told of Gaetano Donizetti that he wrote the instrumentation of
an entire opera within thirty hours. On the very morning on which
Gioacchino Antonio Rossini’s “Gazza Ladra” was to be produced not a
single note of the overture had been written, and the manager was in
despair. He sought out the lazy composer, locked him in one of the
rooms of La Scala, and declared he should have neither food nor
freedom until the overture was completed. Rossini set to work with a
will and to such purpose that the music was written and rehearsed
before the evening performance.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was equally as indolent and procrastinating as
Rossini. At twelve o’clock on the night before the production of “Don
Giovanni” the composer was making merry with a party of convivial
friends and had forgotten that the overture was unwritten. As he was
going to bed, in the early hours of the morning, his wife reminded him
of the fact that it was the day of production and that the overture
was not touched. He asked her to make him a bowl of punch and help
keep him awake, and sat down to his work as the light of dawn began to
stream through the window. He fell asleep, completely exhausted, and
slept soundly for a short time. At five o’clock he resumed his work,
and two hours later the overture was finished.
It is said that Herr Stehmann learned the entire part of the
_Wanderer_ in “Siegfried” in six hours; and on one occasion when Herr
Kraus, who was to have taken the leading rôle in Xaver Scharwenka’s
“Mataswinka,” was suddenly taken ill, Stehmann, who had never before
seen the part, mastered it so completely between the afternoon
rehearsal and the evening performance, that in both words and music he
was absolutely perfect.
Sidelights from Stageland.[6]
BY SECOND NIGHTER.
Little Tales of Idiosyncrasies, Adventures, and Misadventures That
Playgoers Are Not Supposed to See or Hear.
_Collected and written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Footnote 6:
Began March SCRAP BOOK. Single copies, 10 cents.
LASSOOED THE COMPLIMENT.
Slow Speech of a Stranger Caused Miss Morewin to Sacrifice
Conventionality on the Altar of Curiosity.
There must be times when actors are put in the embarrassing position of
hearing their work discussed in public places by people who have seen
the performance and are not aware that any of those who have taken part
in it are within ear-shot. And sometimes, when there is a wag in the
party, there are real dramatic moments in such episodes. Here is a case
in point that happened in New York not so very long ago.
A party of men were descending in the elevator on their way to lunch in
one of New York’s tallest skyscrapers. The car stopped at a floor and a
lady got on. The wag in the group of men instantly recognized her as
Louise Morewin, who plays the mother-in-law in “The Heir to the Hoorah,”
which he had seen a few nights before.
The car was pretty well crowded and the wag was so placed that in the
mirror he could see Miss Morewin’s face without being seen himself. And
the spirit of mischief entered his soul.
“Say, fellows,” he began, “you have all seen ‘The Heir to the Hoorah.’
What do you think of the mother-in-law?”
One and another expressed an opinion, more or less non-committal so far
as the playing of the part was concerned. But this did not satisfy the
wag. It must be remembered that the building is very tall and that it
requires some minutes for the elevator to reach the ground floor, so
after the other comments had been gathered in, there was still time for
a snapper.
“Well,” he remarked, “I saw the play the other night, and I think the
actress who plays that mother-in-law is——”
He inserted a pause for impressiveness, and Miss Morewin could stand no
more. Stepping around so that she faced him she broke out with:
“Well, what _do_ you think of her?”
“I think she is immense,” finished the wag, utterly unruffled, while his
friends, who had failed to recognize their fellow passenger, stood with
jaws dropped at the spectacle of the strange woman butting into their
conversation.
As for Miss Morewin, she smiled, flushed a little, and when the car
reached the street level, she hastily mingled with the throng and was
lost to sight.
THE MODEST CHORUS MAN.
Owners of Bass and Tenor Voices are Regarded As Necessary Evils by the
Producers of Musical Comedies.
We hear much of the chorus girl, but very little of the chorus man, who
is no doubt considered by the manager a necessary evil, inasmuch as
girls are not endowed, outside of dime museums at least, with bass and
tenor voices. I know one of the four chorus men who made an oasis of
deep tones in the blossoming garden of Weber & Fields’s girls, but he
soon was promoted from the ranks to a principal part and is now reaping
profits as a writer of comic songs.
He went into the business because he wanted to go on the stage, and
found this the easiest door to it. Why do other chorus men take up the
thing, I asked myself, and to find out, I proceeded to get acquainted
with two young fellows in the George M. Cohan company, where chorus work
is a very important feature of the proceedings.
“Why did you take up this line?” I asked outright of one fellow, a
big-boned chap who was formerly a cigarmaker in Chicago.
“Because I wanted to see the world,” he replied. “That’s the reason I
prefer one-night stands to long runs.”
“But you must run up against some hard ones in the way of dressing-rooms
among the small towns of the country,” I reminded him. And then I told
of some “Florodora” girls I had heard about who were each assigned a
chair on which to make their half-dozen or more changes of costume.
“Oh, exclaimed the former cigar-man, that’s nothing. I’ve had to dress
on the turn of a stairs, where the bend made an extra wide step.”
“How easy is it for a man to get into the chorus?” was my next query.
“If he has a good second bass or high tenor voice, it’s a cinch.”
I then discovered that physique counts more than it used to, not good
looks, for make-up will cover freckles or sallow skin, but a fellow must
be well-built, and know how to hold himself.
The other chap, also from Chicago, used to be in the electric business,
but with his brother he happened to belong to a lodge of the Order of
the Maccabees. They could both sing and dance, and at an entertainment
of the lodge did so in public. This put the stage bee in the head of the
younger, and through cheek and shameless recitations of utterly
fictitious engagements he had already filled, he procured a chance to do
_Pish-Tush_ in a “Mikado” company that stranded after two performances.
Prevarication, in fact, seems to be the order of the day in the
theatrical business, so that I cannot for the life of me make out why
one member of the profession should ever believe what the other says,
knowing the rule of the road, as it were, and what he would say himself
under similar circumstances.
This Earl Stanley (the grandiloquent stage name my second chorus friend
chose for himself) knew nothing about making-up and learned it by deftly
following the motions of the man he was assigned to dress with, who
actually remarked on the newcomer’s aptness in the art.
“You two fellows,” I observed, “were lucky to get an all-summer
engagement with ‘The Governor’s Son’ on the roof, after ‘George
Washington, Jr.,’ closed. All the chorus men were not held over, by a
long shot.”
“All the good ball players were,” replied Lisle, and then it came out
that Cohan is a baseball fiend, and to play good ball, all other things
being equal, assists a man in getting a job in his companies, each of
which sports its nine.
Oh, as to a chorus man’s pay, it ranges from eighteen to thirty dollars
a week, all costumes being furnished by the management.
RECALCITRANT BENEFACTOR.
Sarah Bernhardt Encountered Series of Failures While Trying to Reward
Man Who Befriended Her Family.
Last June Sarah Bernhardt sailed back to Paris after the most successful
season she ever had in America. She took her profits with her in gold,
too, and nobody should begrudge her the money, for, besides being a
great artist, she is a generous soul, and is not chary of passing her
good fortune on to others.
The following instance of this spirit of generosity is recorded by the
San Francisco _Call_, and vouched for as authentic by one of THE SCRAP
BOOK staff who has personal knowledge of the affair:
When Sarah Bernhardt was in the city some years ago she gave a
breakfast to some of her friends at the California Hotel. It was
served about noon, and there were but three persons present besides
herself.
In the midst of the repast a bell-boy knocked at the door and said
that there was a man down-stairs who refused to give his card and
insisted on coming up to see her.
“Let him come, then,” was her reply.
The bell-boy explained that he had the appearance of a tough-looking
tramp and might be crazy.
“Never mind his looks or his clothes, he may be a friend of mine,” was
the reply.
In a few minutes a man of about sixty or more entered the room. He was
very shabbily dressed, had not shaved for a week, and his shirt-front
was well garnished with tobacco-juice.
The instant Bernhardt saw him she gave an exclamation and bounded
forward. She threw herself upon his neck and covered his rough face
with kisses.
The man was Mr. Levi, a furrier, who died recently in this city. Many
of the _Call_ readers will remember his short, heavy figure as he used
to walk the streets with furs thrown over his shoulder, looking for
customers.
Bernhardt at once made a place at the table and began opening
champagne for her guest. She introduced him as an old friend from
Paris and explained that when she was a child and her family was in
straits Mr. Levi had cared for them all one winter and kept them from
absolute want.
Every few moments she would jump up, clasp him about the neck and kiss
him again and again. There was no acting about these embraces, she was
glad to see him, and she wanted no misunderstanding on that score.
Presently she asked him why he did not go back to Paris and see his
relatives. He answered, sadly, that he was not able.
“Oh, that is easily remedied,” she said, and a moment later she had
written out a check for fifteen hundred dollars and thrown it across
the table to him.
He picked it up, and when he saw the amount he broke down completely.
With the tears streaming down his cheeks he said:
“Sarah, I didn’t come here for charity, but just to see you a few
moments.”
He handed the check back across the table.
“Oh, not enough? I make it bigger.”
She wrote another check for two thousand dollars and threw it over to
him. He looked at the second check and merely said:
“Give me the other, Sarah.”
She smiled as she handed it to him, and then the old man did a
magnificently independent thing. He slowly placed the two checks
together, tore them into bits and handed the fragments back to the
madame.
“No, no, Sarah; no money. Just your gratitude; that is all I ever
wanted.”
Then she was at his side again, kissing his tears away and sobbing
herself. It was a very pathetic scene and one not easily forgotten by
those who witnessed it.
She said that she would “fix him yet” in that peculiar way of hers,
which always means that she intends to have her own will.
Some months later I was in San Francisco and met old Levi waddling
along the streets with his furs. He stopped me and said he wanted my
advice.
“I have just got a letter from Sarah,” he said, “and I don’t know what
the devil to do about it.”
He translated the letter as he read it, and it went something like
this, as near as I can recall it:
“You tore up the last check I gave you, which was very mean of you. I
was very angry at the way you treated my checks. No one else ever did
such a thing to me but you, and you make me angry every time I think
of you and your treatment of me. You humiliate me before strangers.
They must have thought that my checks were worthless, or you must have
thought so.
“I now enclose another and larger one. It is for twenty-five hundred
dollars of your American money and if that is not big enough send it
back and I will make it larger, but some check of some denomination
you must accept, and if I gave you all the money I ever earned it
would not repay you for the time years ago in Paris you saved me from
want. I shall expect you to come to Paris at once and be my guest.
Answer yes by cable and make us all happy. If you do not do this you
must never call on me again, as I shall refuse to receive you.
Affectionately,
“SARAH.”
“What shall I do?” asked the old man with tears in his eyes. “She is
bound to have her way. She always was that way as a child.”
“Better send the despatch and then cash the check and go to Paris.”
“I guess I’ll have to,” said the old man, and he started for the
telegraph office.
BETTER THEATER PROGRAMS
Innovation at Weber’s May Result in the Disappearance of Smudgy Blanket
Sheets in Other Playhouses.
When the late Clement Scott, the well-known English dramatic critic,
visited this country in 1900, he wrote his impressions of American
theaters for the London _Sketch_ and devoted his second paragraph to the
bill of the play. His comment ran as follows:
No fees for programs? I should think not, indeed! You find a huge
stack of them under your very nose, and you can take any number you
like, from one to one hundred. The difficulty Is to find the actual
program when you have possessed yourself of one of these bulky
pamphlets, for there is only a “halfpennyworth of program” amid “an
intolerable deal of sack” in the way of advertisements and facetiæ.
But Mr. Scott failed to mention the worst feature of the American
programs—the black smut left on the ladies’ gloves and the men’s
knuckles from the smudgy type with which they are printed. The sixpence
one must part with in order to become possessed of a London house-bill
is really not begrudged in exchange for the neat card, folded at the two
sides to make it convenient for the pocket and on which the most
prominent features are the details respecting the play you have come to
see.
In New York the program concession has been for years in the hands of a
big firm which has paid the theaters large sums for the privilege of
distributing bills of the play, and audiences have had to submit in
patience to what this monopoly was pleased to give them. But there is
hope ahead and Joe Weber deserves the credit for being the pioneer in a
worthy innovation to make theatergoing the all round pleasure it ought
to be.
Just before he closed the doors of his music hall for the summer, Mr.
Weber amazed his patrons by providing them with a _program de luxe_,
each enclosed in an oiled paper envelope, and printed in four colors on
heavy coated paper. To be sure, it consists of forty-two pages,
including the cover, but the bill of the play is in the exact center,
making it easy to find, and the advertisements are most attractively
displayed and illustrated.
The thing was got up by a firm of four hustling young men, who have
already thrown into a panic the older firm, causing them to announce for
this new season lithographed covers done in six colors. Whether as a
whole the thing will be as attractive as the Weber program remains to be
seen, but, in any case, the public are to be congratulated, for as the
spirit of competition has entered the field, audiences will reap the
benefit.
In London you buy your program from the young woman who shows you to
your seat, for whom this practical Clement Scott had no great liking. Of
this young woman Mr. Scott said:
I prefer the American “usher,” with the suave but determined manner,
to our haughty and flighty girls at home, who think it a condescension
to show you to your seat, the whereabouts of which they are usually as
ignorant of as you are yourself. In an American theater you are
marshaled to your seat with military regularity. In England you are at
the mercy of some Miss Tousle Head who, so far as her business is
concerned, is either insolently independent or sublimely ignorant.
CRITICS BAD WEATHERCOCKS.
Last Season’s Records Proved Inability of Newspaper Writers to Show How
Dramatic Winds Were Blowing.
Of what use are dramatic critics anyway? Brady’s attack on them from the
stage last winter was a mere pin-prick to the humiliation they must feel
as makers of public opinion in connection with “The Lion and the Mouse.”
When the play was brought out in New York last fall the comments were
almost universally adverse, yet the people took to the piece like ducks
to water, and it looks now as if it would run the year round at the
Lyceum. When it was tried in London, on the other hand, the reviews were
exceedingly favorable, and yet the thing lasted barely two weeks.
Take, for example, the London _Daily Telegraph_, which summed up its
report in these words: “To last night’s audience, let it be added, the
piece made evidently a very direct and forcible appeal, the applause at
the end of the third act, as on the final fall of the curtain, being of
the most tumultuous and enthusiastic description.”
The _Standard_ declared: “‘The Lion and the Mouse’ is a play to be
seen—it is imperfect and crude, but it is drama, strong, intense,
undeniable.”
The _Tribune_ even went so far in its praise that it felt constrained to
add: “As a sop to our national self-respect, however, we may remember
that the author, Charles Klein, hails originally from this side of the
Atlantic.”
PLAYHOUSE NOMENCLATURE.
The Names of Some Recently Christened Theaters Indicate a Painful Lack
of Propriety and Variety.
The announcement that David Belasco will manage the new theater to be
built in Forty-Fourth Street, and will call it the Stuyvesant, adds
another appropriately named house to the group that has been growing up
in New York of late years. The Hudson, the New Amsterdam, the
Knickerbocker, the Manhattan and the Astor are all indigenous of the
soil and are to be commended.
Liberty is not bad, although, to be sure, it would be more happily
situated in Philadelphia than in Gotham. The Quaker City is now to make
a needed departure from its run on street nomenclature by calling the
house now building the William Penn Theater.
Speaking of Pennsylvania, it was too bad Pittsburgh sank the historic
Duquesne in “Belasco”—all right in itself, but the name Belasco loses
its force as a distinctive title when duplicated too many times. Three
cities now have theaters of this title—New York, Washington, and
Pittsburgh.
And Shuberts, more’s the pity, will soon be as thick as huckleberries in
August. The house that should be known by this name is the Princess in
New York, which would thereby be exchanging a cognomen perfectly
inappropriate in America, for one that would much better stand over one
house in New York than over twenty elsewhere.
It is a thousand pities that the name Booth was suffered to vanish from
over a theater’s doors when Booth’s, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and
Twenty-Third Street, was pulled down. All that remains of it is a bust
of Shakespeare in the side wall of McCreery’s, on the latter
thoroughfare.
It is odd, too, when you come to think of it, that we have no
Shakespeare Theater. It is a pity Charles Frohman did not use this—or at
any rate Globe (the name of the house Shakespeare managed) rather than
Empire. This might better have been Republic, which, when the Empire was
opened in 1893, was still in the market, not having been affixed to the
theater which Hammerstein built later and very soon passed over to
Belasco. Another absolutely footless theater name in the United States
is Savoy. Garrick is good, and Criterion not bad.
WHAT MAKES A PLAY?
English Managers Tell of the Methods They Employ In Estimating Value of
Manuscripts.
Not long since the _Grand Magazine_, of London, held a symposium of
opinions from the leading English managers on the elements in a play
which determined their acceptance or rejection of it. It cannot be said
that the result may be read with much profit by the aspiring playwright.
Doubtless those managers who, according to a footnote, declined “for one
reason or another” to discuss the methods which governed their choice,
were wiser in their day and generation than those who did. For, after
all, it is a gamble. And what’s one man’s meat may be another’s poison.
Take, for example, the assertion of Frederick Harrison, of the London
Haymarket. He declares:
“I must be quite alone when I read a play, secure from interruption, and
read it through at a sitting, and rapidly. If it will not bear rapid
reading there is generally something wrong—incoherence of story,
clumsiness of dialogue, or something that detracts from the probability
of success for the play.”
Contrast this method with an incident vouched for in the _Dramatic
Mirror_ by the popular playwright Haddon Chambers, on his recent visit
to this country. Speaking of one of his most successful plays, he said:
“Mr. Beerbohm Tree had the piece three months before he ever looked at
it. Then, one day, I managed to read him the first two acts. The
following day he was slightly indisposed and very courteously put me
off. I saw him go into the Turkish bath, followed him, finished the
reading then and there, and had the work accepted.”
Lewis Waller, the actor-manager, practically gets no further in the
course of half a page report than telling the kind of play he does _not_
want—ordinary melodrama or a farcical comedy.
Frank Curzon, who rivals Charles Frohman in the number of theaters he
manages, and who is now a partner with James K. Hackett in “Mr.
Hopkinson” and other ventures in America, says, on the other hand:
“When I read a play, I do not care to which class it belongs. If it hits
me hard enough I produce it.”
The recipe for George Edwardes, the great musical comedy producer, is
first an idea that shall be simple in character but capable of
elaboration in a way that shall give striking opportunities to the
members of his company. Often the _locale_ or the background for the
piece is selected long before the plot is attached to it.
W. H. Kendal, who frequently used to visit us with his wife—a sister of
the late Tom Robertson, the teacup and saucer playwright—insists rather
indefinitely that the characters shall live before him and that their
story shall interest him.
Tom B. Davis, another musical comedy expert, in whose theater
“Florodora” was brought out, thinks that the plot is not of supreme
importance, but he wants the low comedian woven into the story in such a
way that when the lovers find themselves in a predicament the audience
shall know that it is he who will help them out. He also deems it
advisable that “a dramatic situation shall be led up to in the finale of
the first act, in which the baritone and the prima donna shall be the
central figures.”
Altogether, Mr. Davis is the most explicit in his rules of any of the
bunch, for of the two remaining entries for the _Grand’s_ symposium,
Fred Terry—who originally produced “Sunday”—sums up the order in which
the interesting factors in a play should be put as, first, Heart;
second, Heart; third, Heart, and Cyril Maude, the English _Little
Minister_, confines himself to the statement that he would not choose a
gloomy play.
WHO WOULD NOT BE A BOY?
All Things Considered, He Is a Lucky Little Mortal, Though Perhaps He
Does Not Always Realize It Until He Has Passed That Age “When Thought Is
Speech, and Speech Is Truth.”
THE BOY.
By W. H. Pierce.
I wouldn’t be a single thing on earth
Except a boy;
And it’s just an accident of birth
That I’m a boy;
And, goodness gracious! When I stop and think
That I once trembled on the very brink
Of making my appearance here a girl
It fairly makes my ears and eyebrows curl—
But I’m a boy.
Just think of all the jolly fun there is
When you’re a boy!
I tell you, you’re just full of business
When you’re a boy.
There’s fires to build in all the vacant lots.
Go swimmin’, tie the fellers’ clothes in knots,
Tie tin-cans on the tails of dogs—why, gee!
The days ain’t half as long as they should be
When you’re a boy.
There’s lots of foolish things that make you tired
When you’re a boy;
There’s heaps of grouchy men that can’t be hired
To like a boy;
There’s wood to chop at home, and coal to bring,
And “Here, do this—do that—the other thing!”
And, worse than all, there’s girls—oh, holy smoke!
Are they a crime, or are they just a joke
Upon a boy?
And then, there’s always somebody to jaw
When you’re a boy—
Somebody always laying down the law
To every boy;
“Pick up your coat; see where you’ve put your hat;
Don’t stone the dog, don’t tease the poor old cat;
Don’t race around the house”—why, suffrin’ Moses!
The only time you have to practise things like those is
When you’re a boy!
And yet, I don’t believe I’d change a thing
For any boy;
You’ve got to laugh, to cry, to work, to sing,
To be a boy;
With all his thoughtless noise and care less play,
With all his heartfelt trials day by day,
With all his boyish hopes and all his fears,
I’d like to live on earth a thousand years
And be a boy.
_Chicago Times-Herald._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
SONG OF THE MODERN ATONEMENT
By J. W. Foley.
Sumtimes i wisht i was a pirut so
i woodunt hafftoo go to skool uno
but fli mi skulankroasboans in the breez
ann berry awl mi treashur in the seez
neer sum lost iland ann sum uther day
ide kum ann dive fore it ann bare away
the spannish dubloons i had hidd ann ther
go back to the old town i livd in wenn
i was a boy ann settul down ann sho
um awl i am not prowd ur sweld uno.
then i wood bi the teecher a noo dres
fore she wood nede it badd enuf i gess
ann fownd a norfens hoam ann sel iskream
fore onley wott it kost ann it wood seam
a parradice on urth ann every day
ide give beafstake ann bukweet flower away
too awl the poor ann wenn thay past the hatt
ide dropp a hundered dollur bil in thatt
too maik the preecher gladd ann help him bi
owr way to thoas brite manshuns in the ski.
ann aftur wile i wood repent mi dedes
bi dooen things wich everybuddy nedes
ann spennden mi ilgoten welth to fownd
sum collidges with statchoos awl arownd
ann hayv a littul munney left soze i
woant be a popper wenn i kum too di.
then i wood urn foargivness fore mi past
ann be content to no thatt now at last
ime dooen good ann trien to atoan
fore dedes i did wile aftur welth aloan.
_Saturday Evening Post._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
ADAM: THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS A BOY.
Of all the men the world has seen
Since Time his rounds began,
There’s one I pity every day—
Earth’s first and foremost man;
Just think of all the fun he missed
By failing to enjoy
The dear delights of youthtime,
For—he never was a boy.
He never stubbed his naked toe
Against a root or stone,
He never with a pin-hook fished
For minnows all alone;
He never sought the bumblebee
Among the daisies coy,
Nor felt its business end,
Because—he never was a boy.
He never hookey played, nor tied
A bright and shining pail,
Down in the alley all alone,
To a trusting poodle’s tail.
And when he home from swimmin’ came,
His pleasure to destroy
No slipper interfered,
Because—he never was a boy.
He might remember splendid times
In Eden’s bowers—yet
He never acted _Romeo_
To a six-year _Juliet_.
He never sent a valentine
Intended to annoy
His good but maiden aunt,
Because—he never was a boy.
He never cut a kite string, no,
Nor hid an Easter egg;
He never spoiled his pantaloons
A playin’ mumbley-peg.
He never from the attic stole
A ‘coon-hunt to enjoy,
Nor found the “old man” waiting,
For—he never was a boy.
I pity him, why should I not?
I even drop a tear;
He never knew how much he missed;
He never will, I fear.
And always when those dear old days
My memories employ,
I pity him, earth’s only man
Who—never was a boy.
_Pittsburgh Dispatch._
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
THE BOY WHO LIVES NEXT DOOR.
By S. E. Kiser.
The boy who lives next door
Has freckles on his face;
His ears are red and hang
Away out into space,
And when I hear a dog ki-yi
And see it flee in terror, I
Can quickly guess the cause—
’Tis merely that one more
Poor little victim knows
A boy resides next door.
He runs across the lawn
I’ve nursed with jealous care,
And, in the summer-time,
Knocks down the flowers there!
It seems to give him pure delight
To yell around with all his might,
And every week or so
A pebble finds its way
Against a light of glass
For which I have to pay.
He has no teeth in front,
His hands are cracked and brown,
Twice he has nearly burned
Our summer kitchen down!
He calls to people, “Hey! Watch out!”
And when they jump he whoops about—
I used to think if God
Would take him from below
Up to the sky I’d try
To bravely bear the blow!
The little child whose love
Is all to me, one day
Was stricken suddenly
When I was far away—
The boy who lives next door forgot
To yell around, but ran and brought
The doctor to the bed,
And when I came, at last
Shrank from me with a look
Of pity as I passed!
The boy who lives next door
Brought in his tops and gun,
And pocketfuls of trash
To please our little one;
He played beside my darling’s bed,
Turned cartwheels, and stood on his head
And God was good to me—
Let’s wait awhile before
We utterly condemn
“The boy who lives next door!”
_Old scrap book._
FADS OF FAMOUS PEOPLE.
Some of the Follies of Which Men and Women of Genius Have Been
Guilty—Queen Elizabeth Was Profane, Queen Victoria Was Superstitious,
While Bacon, Dickens, and Longfellow Were Confirmed Dandies.
No man or woman is so strong as to be wholly free from weakness. If a
man occupies an humble sphere in life he usually is fortunate enough to
keep his fads and follies from becoming known beyond his own circle of
friends. If, on the other hand, he has attained sufficient distinction
in the world to be called “famous,” he must reconcile himself to seeing
the public in possession of all knowledge that has to do with his
personal peculiarities.
=Descartes= had a small garden where he spent all the hours not
devoted to mental labor.
=Queen Elizabeth= was very profane, and when angry would kick and cuff
her maids.
=Matthew Arnold’s= dogs, cat, and canary bird are mentioned dozens of
times in his poems.
=Domitian= spent his leisure in catching flies and piercing them
through with a needle.
=William the Conqueror= was immoderately devoted to dog-fighting and
bear-baiting.
=David=, the artist, when not painting, amused himself by scraping on
an old fiddle.
=Mirabeau= loved dogs, and had a famous pet, Chico, to which he was
much attached.
=Mrs. Radcliffe= ate raw pork before going to work on a particularly
thrilling chapter.
=Pierex=, after work hours, busied himself in arranging and caring for
his coins and medals.
=Washington= was devoted to fox-hunting, and in the season usually
hunted twice a week.
=Socrates= was fond of playing with children, and was often seen busy
with them at their games.
=Mme. de Staël= always carried a bit of a stick in her hand and played
with it as an aid to conversation.
=Blackmore=, the novelist, was fond of gardening, and spent in that
amusement all he made by writing.
=Leigh Hunt=, when tired out with work, found relaxation in riding to
and fro on the London omnibuses.
=Dumas=, père, disliked a noise in the house while he was writing, and
kept a pet buzzard in his room.
=Vincent=, the landscape painter, disliked violets, and always avoided
a field or garden where they grew.
=Prince Rupert=, the cavalryman, was fond of chemistry, and invented
the glass drops called by his name.
=Berlioz=, though so famous as a composer, could play no instrument
except the guitar, and that very badly.
=Hazlitt= was an enormous drinker of strong tea, which completely
upset his nerves and made him miserable.
=Tycho Brahe=, “the Wizard of the Golden Nose,” always became sick at
the stomach whenever he saw a fox.
=Herrick=, the poet, was fond of pigs as pets, and taught one to
follow him about and to drink beer out of a mug.
=Francis Bacon= was very fond of fine clothes, and spent much of his
leisure in devising new costumes for court occasions.
=Edward Fitzgerald= was a vegetarian, and believed that in adopting
such a diet he had, to quote his own words, found “the great secret of
it all.”
=Charles Dickens= was fond of wearing gaudy jewelry, and the clanking
of his numerous gold chains announced his coming while he was yet some
distance away.
=Henry W. Longfellow= had a weakness for flowered waistcoats, and he
possessed many of gorgeous pattern and color.
=Queen Victoria= of England shared the common superstition about salt.
She would reprimand any guest who was unfortunate enough to spill it,
and throughout the remainder of the meal she would be disturbed and in
ill-humor.
The House and the Brain.
BY E. BULWER LYTTON.
“The House and the Brain” has been called by many critics the most
powerful and appalling story of the supernatural ever written in the
English language. It appeared in 1859 in the pages of _Blackwood’s
Magazine_, where it was read by thousands with a fascinated horror.
Sir Edward Hamley said of it: “So elusive is the atmosphere of the
tale, so vivid the description of its terrifying appearances, and so
effective their connection with the agency of a malignant being
possessed of supernatural powers,” that many were half convinced of
its actuality. Soon after its appearance in _Blackwood’s_, a gentleman
wrote to the editor of that magazine: “For God’s sake tell me what
truth there is in this terrible story! My daughter has known no rest
or peace since reading it.”
Its author, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, was one who, like Scott, felt a
profound interest in the world of mystery. He believed in the occult
powers of nature and in the strange arts of those who sought to use
them. He himself “dived into wizard lore, equipped himself with
magical implements, and communed with mediums and spiritualists.” The
literature of alchemy and divination he studied with intense
eagerness. On one occasion he drew up what he called a “geomantic
figure,” by means of which he foretold the future of Disraeli. This
was before that brilliant personage was seriously regarded by his
associates; yet Bulwer Lytton accurately predicted his coming
political triumphs and the fact that he would be at some day Prime
Minister of England. After his famous ghost-story had appeared in
print, Bulwer Lytton saw that he had given to a short story an idea
too valuable for so slight a treatment. Therefore, when the tale was
subsequently reprinted, he suppressed the second half of it and made
the story end with the discovery of the secret chamber in the haunted
house. The latter part he made the basis of his weird and almost
equally powerful romance of mystery “A Strange Story” which was
published in 1862. This is constructed around the central notion that
there are arts which can indefinitely prolong human life; and in his
book the chief character is the human serpent, Margrave, infinitely
depraved, possessed of supernatural power and renewing his youth by
mystical arts so that he is ever young and capable of fresh evil even
at the end of centuries of his existence. The conception is no less
bold than fascinating, and it is worked out by its author in a
terrifying way. Yet nowhere does it attain to the pitch of horror and
to the power of affecting the human nerves which we find in the
earlier short story of which the original title was “The Haunters and
the Haunted.”
The story as printed here gives the complete text precisely as it was
first published in the pages of _Blackwood’s._
A friend of mine, who is a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me
one day, as if between jest and earnest, “Fancy! since we last met I
have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London.”
“Really haunted? and by what—ghosts?”
“Well, I can’t answer these questions; all I know is this: six weeks ago
I and my wife were in search of a furnished apartment. Passing a quiet
street, we saw on the window of one of the houses a bill, ‘Apartments
Furnished.’ The situation suited us; we entered the house, liked the
rooms, engaged them by the week, and left them the third day. No power
on earth could have reconciled my wife to stay longer; and I don’t
wonder at it.”
“What did you see?”
“Excuse me; I have no desire to be ridiculed as a superstitious dreamer,
nor, on the other hand, could I ask you to accept on my affirmation what
you would hold to be incredible, without the evidence of your own
senses. Let me only say this: it was not so much what we saw or heard
(in which you might fairly suppose that we were the dupes of our own
excited fancy, or the victims of imposture in others) that drove us
away, as it was an undefinable terror which seized both of us whenever
we passed by the door of a certain unfurnished room, in which we neither
saw nor heard anything; and the strangest marvel of all was that for
once in my life I agreed with my wife, silly woman though she be, and
allowed after the third night that it was impossible to stay a fourth in
that house.
“Accordingly, on the fourth morning I summoned the woman who kept the
house and attended on us, and told her that the rooms did not quite suit
us, and we would not stay out our week. She said dryly:
“‘I know why; you have stayed longer than any other lodger. Few ever
stayed a second night; none before you a third. But I take it that they
have been very kind to you.’
“‘They—who?’ I asked, affecting a smile.
“‘Why, they who haunt the house, whoever they are; I don’t mind them; I
remember them many years ago, when I lived in this house not as a
servant; but I know they will be the death of me some day. I don’t
care—I’m old and must die soon anyhow; and then I shall be with them,
and in this house still.’
“The woman spoke with so dreary a calmness that really it was a sort of
awe that prevented my conversing with her further. I paid for my week,
and too happy were I and my wife to get off so cheaply.”
“You excite my curiosity,” said I; “nothing I should like better than to
sleep in a haunted house. Pray give me the address of the one which you
left so ignominiously.”
My friend gave me the address; and when we parted I walked straight
toward the house thus indicated.
It is situated on the north side of Oxford Street, in a dull but
respectable thoroughfare. I found the house shut up; no bill on the
window, and no response to my knock. As I was turning away, a beer-boy,
collecting pewter pots at the neighboring areas, said to me, “Do you
want any one at that house, sir?”
“Yes; I heard it was to be let.”
“Let! Why, the woman who kept it is dead; has been dead these three
weeks; and no one can be found to stay there, though Mr. J—— offered
ever so much. He offered mother, who chars for him, one pound a week
just to open and shut the windows, and she would not.”
“Would not! and why?”
“The house is haunted; and the old woman who kept it was found dead in
her bed with her eyes wide open. They say the devil strangled her.”
“Pooh! You speak of Mr. J——. Is he the owner of the house?”
“Yes.”
“Where does he live?”
“In G—— Street, No. —.”
“What is he—in any business?”
“No, sir, nothing particular; a single gentleman.”
I gave the pot-boy the gratuity earned by his liberal information, and
proceeded to Mr. J—— in G—— Street, which was close by the street that
boasted the haunted house. I was lucky enough to find Mr. J—— at home;
an elderly man with intelligent countenance and prepossessing manners.
I communicated my name and my business frankly. I said I heard the house
was considered to be haunted; that I had a strong desire to examine a
house with so equivocal a reputation; that I should be greatly obliged
if he would allow me to hire it, though only for a night. I was willing
to pay for that privilege whatever he might be inclined to ask.
“Sir,” said Mr. J——, with great courtesy, “the house is at your service
for as short or as long a time as you please. Rent is out of the
question; the obligation will be on my side, should you be able to
discover the cause of the strange phenomena which at present deprive it
of all value. I cannot let it, for I cannot even get a servant to keep
it in order or answer the door.
“Unluckily, the house is haunted, if I may use that expression, not only
by night but by day; though at night the disturbances are of a more
unpleasant and sometimes of a more alarming character. The poor old
woman who died in it three weeks ago was a pauper whom I took out of a
workhouse; for in her childhood she had been known to some of my family,
and had once been in such good circumstances that she had rented that
house of my uncle. She was a woman of superior education and strong
mind, and was the only person I could ever induce to remain in the
house. Indeed, since her death, which was sudden, and the coroner’s
inquest, which gave it a notoriety in the neighborhood, I have so
despaired of finding any person to take charge of it, much more a
tenant, that I would most willingly let it rent free for a year to any
one who would pay its rates and taxes.”
“How long ago did the house acquire this character?”
“That I can scarcely tell you, but many years since; the old woman I
spoke of said it was haunted when she rented it, between thirty and
forty years ago. The fact is that my life has been spent in the East
Indies, and in the civil service of the East India Company.
“I returned to England last year, on inheriting the fortune of an uncle,
among whose possessions was the house in question. I found it shut up
and uninhabited. I was told that it was haunted, and no one would
inhabit it. I smiled at what seemed to me so idle a story.
“I spent some money in repainting and roofing it, added to its
old-fashioned furniture a few modern articles, advertised it, and
obtained a lodger for a year. He was a colonel retired on half pay. He
came in with his family, a son and a daughter, and four or five
servants; they all left the house the next day; and although they
deponed that they had all seen something different, that something was
equally terrible to all. I really could not in conscience sue, or even
blame, the colonel for breach of agreement.
“Then I put in the old woman I have spoken of, and she was empowered to
let the house in apartments. I never had one lodger who stayed more than
three days. I do not tell you their stories; to no two lodgers have
exactly the same phenomena been repeated. It is better that you should
judge for yourself than enter the house with an imagination influenced
by previous narratives; only be prepared to see and to hear something or
other, and take whatever precautions you yourself please.”
“Have you never had a curiosity yourself to pass a night in that house?”
“Yes; I passed, not a night, but three hours in broad daylight alone in
that house. My curiosity is not satisfied, but it is quenched. I have no
desire to renew the experiment. You cannot complain, you see, sir, that
I am not sufficiently candid; and unless your interest be exceedingly
eager and your nerves unusually strong, I honestly add that I advise you
_not_ to pass a night in that house.”
“My interest _is_ exceedingly keen,” said I; “and though only a coward
will boast of his nerves in situations wholly unfamiliar to him, yet my
nerves have been seasoned in such variety of danger that I have the
right to rely on them, even in a haunted house.”
Mr. J—— said very little more; he took the keys of the house out of his
bureau, and gave them to me; and, thanking him cordially for his
frankness and his urbane concession to my wish, I carried off my prize.
Impatient for the experiment, as soon as I reached home I summoned my
confidential servant—a young man of gay spirits, fearless temper, and as
free from superstitious prejudice as any one I could think of.
“F——,” said I, “you remember in Germany how disappointed we were at not
finding a ghost in that old castle which was said to be haunted by a
headless apparition? Well, I have heard of a house in London which, I
have reason to hope, is decidedly haunted. I mean to sleep there
to-night. From what I hear, there is no doubt that something will allow
itself to be seen or to be heard—something perhaps excessively horrible.
Do you think, if I take you with me, I may rely on your presence of
mind, whatever may happen?”
“Oh, sir; pray trust me!” said he, grinning with delight.
“Very well, then, here are the keys of the house; this is the address.
Go now, select for me any bedroom you please; and since the house has
not been inhabited for weeks, make up a good fire, air the bed well;
see, of course, that there are candles as well as fuel. Take with you my
revolver and my dagger—so much for my weapons—arm yourself equally well;
and it we are not a match for a dozen ghosts, we shall be but a sorry
couple of Englishmen.”
I was engaged for the rest of the day on business so urgent that I had
not leisure to think much on the nocturnal adventure to which I had
plighted my honor. I dined alone and very late, and while dining read,
as is my habit. The volume I selected was one of Macaulay’s essays. I
thought to myself that I would take the book with me; there was so much
of healthfulness in the style, and practical life in the subjects, that
it would serve as an antidote against the influences of superstitious
fancy.
Accordingly, about half-past nine I put the book into my pocket and
strolled leisurely toward the haunted house. I took with me a favorite
dog—an exceedingly sharp, bold, and vigilant bull-terrier, a dog fond of
prowling about strange ghostly corners and passages at night in search
of rats, a dog of dogs for a ghost.
It was a summer night, but chilly, the sky somewhat gloomy and overcast;
still there was a moon—faint and sickly, but still a moon—and if the
clouds permitted, after midnight it would be brighter.
I reached the house, knocked, and my servant opened with a cheerful
smile.
“All right, sir, and very comfortable.”
“Oh!” said I, rather disappointed; “have you not seen nor heard anything
remarkable?”
“Well, sir, I must own that I have heard something queer.”
“What?—what?”
“The sound of feet pattering behind me; and once or twice small noises
like whispers close at my ear; nothing more.”
“You are not at all frightened?”
“I! not a bit of it, sir!”
And the man’s bold look reassured me on one point, namely, that, happen
what might, he would not desert me.
We were in the hall, the street-door closed, and my attention as now
drawn to my dog. He had at first run in eagerly enough, but had sneaked
back to the door, and was scratching and whining to get out. After I had
patted him on the head and encouraged him gently, the dog seemed to
reconcile himself to the situation, and followed me and F—— through the
house, but keeping close at my heels, instead of hurrying inquisitively
in advance, which was his usual and normal habit in all strange places.
We first visited the subterranean apartments, the kitchen and other
offices, and especially the cellars, in which last were two or three
bottles of wine still left in a bin, covered with cobwebs, and
evidently, by their appearance, undisturbed for many years. It was clear
that the ghosts were not wine-bibbers.
For the rest, we discovered nothing of interest. There was a gloomy
little back-yard, with very high walls. The stones of this yard were
very damp; and what with the damp and what with the dust and smoke-grime
on the pavement, our feet left a slight impression where we passed.
And now appeared the first strange phenomenon witnessed by myself in
this strange abode.
I saw, just before me, the print of a foot suddenly form itself, as it
were. I stopped, caught hold of my servant, and pointed to it. In
advance of that footprint as suddenly dropped another. We both saw it. I
advanced quickly to the place; the footprint kept advancing before me; a
small footprint—the foot of a child; the impression was too faint
thoroughly to distinguish the shape, but it seemed to us both that it
was the print of a naked foot.
This phenomenon ceased when we arrived at the opposite wall, nor did it
repeat itself when we returned. We remounted the stairs and entered the
rooms on the ground floor—a dining-parlor, a small back-parlor, and a
still smaller third room that had probably been appropriated to a
footman—all still as death.
We then visited the drawing-rooms, which seemed fresh and new. In the
front room I seated myself in an armchair. F—— placed on the table the
candlestick with which he had lighted us. I told him to shut the door.
As he turned to do so, a chair opposite to me moved from the wall
quickly and noiselessly, and dropped itself about a yard from my own
chair, immediately fronting it.
“Why, this is better than the turning-tables,” said I laughing; and as I
laughed, my dog put back his head and howled.
F——, coming back, had not observed the movement of the chair. He
employed himself now in stilling the dog. I continued to gaze on the
chair, and fancied I saw on it a pale, blue, misty outline of a human
figure; but an outline so indistinct that I could only distrust my own
vision. The dog was now quiet.
“Put back the chair opposite to me,” said I to F——; “put it back to the
wall.”
F—— obeyed.
“Was that you, sir?” said he, turning abruptly.
“I—what?”
“Why, something struck me. I felt it sharply on the shoulder, just
here.”
“No,” said I; “but we have jugglers present, and though we may not
discover their tricks, we shall catch _them_ before they frighten _us_.”
We did not stay long in the drawing-rooms; in fact, they felt so damp
and so chilly that I was glad to get to the fire up-stairs. We locked
the doors of the drawing-rooms—a precaution which, I should observe, we
had taken with all the rooms we had searched below.
The bedroom my servant had selected for me was the best on the floor; a
large one, with two windows fronting the street. The four-posted
bedstead, which took up no inconsiderable space, was opposite to the
fire, which burned clear and bright; a door in the wall to the left,
between the bed and the window, communicated with the room which my
servant appropriated to himself. This last was a small room with a
sofa-bed, and had no communication with the landing-place; no other door
but that which conducted to the bedroom I was to occupy.
On either side of my fireplace was a cupboard, without locks, flush with
the wall, and covered with the same dull-brown paper. We examined these
cupboards; only hooks to suspend female dresses—nothing else. We sounded
the walls; evidently solid—the outer walls of the building.
Having finished the survey of these apartments, warmed myself a few
moments, and lighted my cigar, I then, still accompanied by F——, went
forth to complete my reconnoiter. In the landing-place there was another
door; it was closed firmly.
“Sir,” said my servant in surprise, “I unlocked this door with all the
others when I first came in; it cannot have got locked from the inside,
for it is a——”
Before he had finished his sentence, the door, which neither of us was
then touching, opened quietly of itself. We looked at each other a
single instant. The same thought seized both: some human agency might be
detected here. I rushed in first, my servant followed. A small, blank,
dreary room without furniture, a few empty boxes and hampers in a
corner, a small window, the shutters closed—not even a fireplace—no
other door but that by which we had entered, no carpet on the floor, and
the floor seemed very old, uneven, worm-eaten, mended here and there, as
was shown by the whiter patches on the wood; but no living being, and no
visible place in which a living being could have hidden.
As we stood gazing round, the door by which we had entered closed as
quietly as it had before opened; we were imprisoned.
For the first time I felt a creep of undefinable horror. Not so my
servant.
“Why, they don’t think to trap us, sir; I could break that trumpery door
with a kick of my foot.”
“Try first if it will open to your hand,” said I, shaking off the vague
apprehension that had seized me, “while I open the shutters and see what
is without.”
I unbarred the shutters; the window looked on the little back-yard I
have before described; there was no ledge without, nothing but sheer
descent. No man getting out of that window would have found any footing
till he had fallen on the stones below.
F—— meanwhile was vainly attempting to open the door. He now turned
round to me and asked my permission to use force. And I should here
state, in justice to the servant, that, far from evincing any
superstitious terror, his nerve, composure, and even gaiety amid
circumstances so extraordinary, compelled my admiration and made me
congratulate myself on having secured a companion in every way fitted to
the occasion. I willingly gave him the permission he required. But,
though he was a remarkably strong man, his force was as idle as his
milder efforts; the door did not even shake to his stoutest kick.
Breathless and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself,
equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror
came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if
some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising from the chinks of that
rugged floor and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence
hostile to human life.
The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We
precipitated ourselves onto the landing-place. We both saw a large, pale
light—as large as the human figure, but shapeless and unsubstantial—move
before us and ascend the stairs that led from the landing into the
attics.
I followed the light, and my servant followed me. It entered, to the
right of the landing, a small garret, of which the door stood open. I
entered in the same instant. The light then collapsed into a small
globule, exceedingly brilliant and vivid; rested a moment on a bed in
the corner, quivered, and vanished.
We approached the bed and examined it—a half-tester, such as is commonly
found in attics devoted to servants. On the drawers that stood near it
we perceived an old faded silk kerchief, with the needle still left in
the rent half repaired. The kerchief was covered with dust; probably it
had belonged to the old woman who had last died there, and this might
have been her sleeping-room.
I had sufficient curiosity to open the drawers; there were a few odds
and ends of female dress, and two letters tied round with a narrow
ribbon of faded yellow. I took the liberty to possess myself of the
letters. We found nothing else in the room worth noticing, nor did the
light reappear; but we distinctly heard, as we turned to go, a pattering
footfall on the floor just before us.
We went through the other attics (in all four), the footfall still
preceding us. Nothing to be seen, nothing but the footfall heard. I had
the letters in my hand; just as I was descending the stairs I distinctly
felt my wrist seized, and a faint, soft effort made to draw the letters
from my clasp. I only held them the more tightly, and the effort ceased.
We regained the bedchamber appropriated to myself, and I then remarked
that my dog had not followed us when we had left it. He was thrusting
himself close to the fire and trembling. I was impatient to examine the
letters; and while I read them my servant opened a little box in which
he had deposited the weapons I had ordered him to bring, took them out,
placed them on a table close at my bed-head, and then occupied himself
in soothing the dog, who, however, seemed to heed him very little.
The letters were short; they were dated—the dates exactly thirty-five
years ago. They were evidently from a lover to his mistress, or a
husband to some young wife. Not only the terms of expression, but a
distinct reference to a former voyage indicated the writer to have been
a seafarer. The spelling and handwriting were those of a man imperfectly
educated; but still the language itself was forcible. In the expressions
of endearment there was a kind of rough, wild love; but here and there
were dark, unintelligible hints at some secret not of love—some secret
that seemed of crime.
“We ought to love each other,” was one of the sentences I remember, “for
how every one else would execrate us if all was known.”
Again: “Don’t let any one be in the same room with you at night—you talk
in your sleep.”
And again: “What’s done can’t be undone; and I tell you there’s nothing
against us, unless the dead should come to life.”
Here was interlined, in a better handwriting (a female’s), “They do!”
At the end of the letter latest in date the same female hand had written
these words:
“Lost at sea the 4th of June, the same day as——”
I put down the letters, and began to muse over their contents.
Fearing, however, that the train of thought into which I fell might
unsteady my nerves, I fully determined to keep my mind in a fit state to
cope with whatever of marvelous the advancing night might bring forth. I
roused myself, laid the letters on the table, stirred up the fire, which
was still bright and cheering, and opened my volume of Macaulay.
I read quietly enough till about half-past eleven. I then threw myself
dressed upon the bed, and told my servant he might retire to his own
room, but must keep himself awake. I bade him leave open the doors
between the two rooms. Thus alone I kept two candles burning on the
table by my bed-head. I placed my watch beside the weapons, and calmly
resumed my Macaulay. Opposite to me the fire burned clear, and on the
hearth-rug, seemingly asleep, lay the dog. In about twenty minutes I
felt an exceedingly cold air pass by my cheek, like a sudden draft. I
fancied the door to my right, communicating with the landing-place, must
have got open; but no, it was closed.
I then turned my glance to the left, and saw the flames of the candles
violently swayed as by a wind. At the same moment the watch beside the
revolver softly slid from the table—softly, softly—no visible hand—it
was gone. I sprang up, seizing the revolver with the one hand, the
dagger with the other: I was not willing that my weapons should share
the fate of the watch.
Thus armed, I looked round the floor: no sign of the watch. Three slow,
loud, distinct knocks were now heard at the bed-head; my servant called
out:
“Is that you, sir?”
“No; be on your guard.”
The dog now roused himself and sat on his haunches, his ears moving
quickly backward and forward. He kept his eye fixed on me with a look so
strange that he concentered all my attention on himself. Slowly he rose,
all his hair bristling, and stood perfectly rigid, and with the same
wild stare.
I had no time, however, to examine the dog. Presently my servant emerged
from his room; and if I ever saw horror in the human face, it was then.
I should not have recognized him had we met in the streets, so altered
was every lineament. He passed by me quickly, saying, in a whisper that
seemed scarcely to come from his lips:
“Run! run! It is after me!”
He gained the door to the landing, pulled it open, and rushed forth. I
followed him into the landing involuntarily, calling him to stop; but,
without heeding me, he bounded down the stairs, clinging to the
balusters and taking several steps at a time. I heard, where I stood,
the street-door open, heard it again clap to.
I was left alone in the haunted house.
It was but for a moment that I remained undecided whether or not to
follow my servant; pride and curiosity alike forbade so dastardly a
flight. I reentered my room, closing the door after me, and proceeded
cautiously into the interior chamber. I encountered nothing to justify
my servant’s terror.
I again carefully examined the walls, to see if there were any concealed
door. I could find no trace of one—not even a seam in the dull-brown
paper with which the room was hung. How then had the THING, whatever it
was, which had so scared him, obtained ingress, except through my own
chamber?
I returned to my room, shut and locked the door that opened upon the
interior one, and stood on the hearth, expectant and prepared.
I now perceived that the dog had slunk into an angle of the wall, and
was pressing close against it, as if literally striving to force his way
into it. I approached the animal and spoke to it; the poor brute was
evidently beside itself with terror. It showed all its teeth, the slaver
dropping from its jaws, and would certainly have bitten me if I had
touched it. It did not seem to recognize me. Whoever has seen at the
Zoological Gardens a rabbit fascinated by a serpent, cowering in a
corner, may form some idea of the anguish which the dog exhibited.
Finding all efforts to soothe the animal in vain, and fearing that his
bite might be as venomous in that state as if in the madness of
hydrophobia, I left him alone, placed my weapons on the table beside the
fire, seated myself, and recommenced my Macaulay.
Perhaps, in order not to appear seeking credit for a courage, or rather
a coolness, which the reader may conceive I exaggerate, I may be
pardoned if I pause to indulge in one or two egotistical remarks.
As I hold presence of mind, or what is called courage, to be precisely
proportioned to familiarity with the circumstances that lead to it, so I
should say that I had been long sufficiently familiar with all
experiments that appertain to the marvelous. I had witnessed many very
extraordinary phenomena in various parts of the world—phenomena that
would be either totally disbelieved if I stated them, or ascribed to
supernatural agencies.
Now, my theory is that the supernatural is the impossible, and that what
is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of
which we have been hitherto ignorant. Therefore, if a ghost rise before
me, I have not the right to say, “So, then, the supernatural is
possible,” but rather, “So, then, the apparition of a ghost is, contrary
to received opinion, within the laws of nature, namely, not
supernatural.”
Now, in all that I had hitherto witnessed, and indeed in all the wonders
which the amateurs of mystery in our age record as facts, a material
living agency is always required. On the Continent you will still find
magicians who assert that they can raise spirits. Assume for a moment
that they assert truly, still the living material form of the magician
is present; he is the material agency by which, from some constitutional
peculiarities, certain strange phenomena are represented to your natural
senses.
Accept, again, as truthful the tales of spirit manifestation in
America—musical or other sounds, writings on paper, produced by no
discernible hand, articles of furniture moved without apparent human
agency, or the actual sight and touch of hands, to which no bodies seem
to belong—still there must be found the medium, or living being, with
constitutional peculiarities capable of obtaining these signs.
In fine, in all such marvels, supposing even that there is no imposture,
there must be a human being like ourselves, by whom or through whom the
effects presented to human beings are produced. It is so with the now
familiar phenomena of mesmerism or electro-biology; the mind of the
person operated on is affected through a material living agent.
Nor, supposing it true that a mesmerized patient can respond to the will
or passes of a mesmerizer a hundred miles distant, is the response less
occasioned by a material being. It may be through a material fluid, call
it Electric, call it Odic, call it what you will, which has the power of
traversing space and passing obstacles, that the material effect is
communicated from one to the other.
Hence, all that I had hitherto witnessed, or expected to witness, in
this strange house, I believed to be occasioned through some agency or
medium as mortal as myself; and this idea necessarily prevented the awe
with which those who regard as supernatural things that are not within
the ordinary operations of nature might have been impressed by the
adventures of that memorable night.
As, then, it was my conjecture that all that was presented, or would be
presented, to my senses, must originate in some human being gifted by
constitution with the power so to present them, and having some motive
so to do, I felt an interest in my theory which, in its way, was rather
philosophical than superstitious. And I can sincerely say that I was in
as tranquil a temper for observation as any practical experimentalist
could be in awaiting the effects of some rare though perhaps perilous
chemical combination. Of course, the more I kept my mind detached from
fancy the more the temper fitted for observation would be obtained; and
I therefore riveted eye and thought on the strong daylight sense in the
page of my Macaulay.
I now became aware that something interposed between the page and the
light: the page was overshadowed. I looked up and saw what I shall find
it very difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe.
It was a darkness shaping itself out of the air in very undefined
outline. I cannot say it was of a human form, and yet it had more of a
resemblance to a human form, or rather shadow, than anything else. As it
stood, wholly apart and distinct from the air and the light around it,
its dimensions seemed gigantic; the summit nearly touched the ceiling.
While I gazed, a feeling of intense cold seized me. An iceberg before me
could not more have chilled me; nor could the cold of an iceberg have
been more purely physical. I feel convinced that it was not the cold
caused by fear. As I continued to gaze, I thought—but this I cannot say
with precision—that I distinguished two eyes looking down on me from the
height. One moment I seemed to distinguish them clearly, the next they
seemed gone; but two rays of a pale, blue light frequently shot through
the darkness, as from the height on which I half believed, half doubted,
that I had encountered the eyes.
I strove to speak; my voice utterly failed me. I could only think to
myself, “Is this fear? it is _not_ fear!” I strove to rise, in vain; I
felt as weighed down by an irresistible force. Indeed, my impression was
that of an immense and overwhelming power opposed to my volition; that
sense of utter inadequacy to cope with a force beyond men’s, which one
may feel _physically_ in a storm at sea, in a conflagration, or when
confronting some terrible wild beast, or rather, perhaps, the shark of
the ocean, I felt _morally_. Opposed to my will was another will, as far
superior to its strength as storm, fire, and shark are superior in
material force to the force of men.
And now, as this impression grew on me, now came, at last, horror—horror
to a degree that no words can convey. Still I retained pride, if not
courage; and in my own mind I said, “This is horror, but it is not fear;
unless I fear I cannot be harmed; my reason rejects this thing; it is an
illusion, I do not fear.”
With a violent effort I succeeded at last in stretching out my hand
toward the weapon on the table; as I did so, on the arm and shoulder I
received a strange shock, and my arm fell to my side powerless. And now,
to add to my horror, the light began slowly to wane from the candles;
they were not, as it were, extinguished, but their flame seemed very
gradually withdrawn; it was the same with the fire, the light was
extracted from the fuel; in a few minutes the room was in utter
darkness.
The dread that came over me to be thus in the dark with that dark thing,
whose power was so intensely felt, brought a reaction of nerve. In fact,
terror had reached that climax that either my senses must have deserted
me, or I must have burst through the spell.
I did burst through it.
I found voice, though the voice was a shriek. I remember that I broke
forth with words like these, “I do not fear, my soul does not fear”; and
at the same time I found strength to rise.
Still in that profound gloom, I rushed to one of the windows, tore aside
the curtain, flung open the shutters; my first thought was, LIGHT.
And when I saw the moon, high, clear, and calm, I felt a joy that almost
compensated for the previous terror. There was the moon, there was also
the light from the gas-lamps in the deserted, slumberous street. I
turned to look back into the room; the moon penetrated its shadow very
palely and partially, but still there was light. The dark thing,
whatever it might be, was gone; except that I could yet see a dim
shadow, which seemed the shadow of that shade, against the opposite
wall.
My eye now rested on the table, and from under the table (which was
without cloth or cover, an old mahogany round table) rose a hand,
visible as far as the wrist. It was a hand, seemingly, as much of flesh
and blood as my own, but the hand of an aged person, lean, wrinkled,
small too, a woman’s hand. That hand very softly closed on the two
letters that lay on the table; hand and letters both vanished. Then came
the same three loud measured knocks I had heard at the bed-head before
this extraordinary drama had commenced.
As these sounds slowly ceased, I felt the whole room vibrate sensibly;
and at the far end rose, as from the floor, sparks or globules like
bubbles of light, many-colored—green, yellow, fire-red, azure—up and
down, to and fro, hither, thither, as tiny will-o’-the-wisps the sparks
moved, slow or swift, each at its own caprice. A chair (as in the
drawing-room below) was now advanced from the wall without apparent
agency, and placed at the opposite side of the table.
Suddenly, as forth from the chair, grew a shape, a woman’s shape. It was
distinct as a shape of life, ghastly as a shape of death. The face was
that of youth, with a strange, mournful beauty; the throat and shoulders
were bare, the rest of the form in a loose robe of cloudy white.
It began sleeking its long yellow hair, which fell over its shoulders;
its eyes were not turned toward me, but to the door; it seemed
listening, watching, waiting. The shadow of the shade in the background
grew darker, and again I thought I beheld the eyes gleaming out from the
summit of the shadow, eyes fixed upon that shape.
As if from the door, though it did not open, grew out another shape,
equally distinct, equally ghastly—a man’s shape, a young man’s. It was
in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress;
for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently
unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacre, fantasms; and there was something
incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the
elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with
its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and
ghost-like stillness of the fitting wearer. Just as the male shape
approached the female, the dark shadow darted from the wall, all three
for a moment wrapped in darkness.
When the pale light returned, the two fantoms were as if in the grasp of
the shadow that towered between them, and there was a blood-stain on the
breast of the female; and the fantom male was leaning on its fantom
sword, and blood seemed trickling fast from the ruffles, from the lace;
and the darkness of the intermediate shadow swallowed them up—they were
gone. And again the bubbles of light shot, and sailed, and undulated,
growing thicker and thicker and more wildly confused in their movements.
The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from the
aperture came the form of a woman, aged. In her hand she held
letters—the very letters over which I had seen _the_ hand close; and
behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if to listen, and
then she opened the letters and seemed to read: and over her shoulder I
saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned—bloated, bleached,
sea-weed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of
a corpse, and beside the corpse cowered a child, a miserable squalid
child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. As I looked in
the old woman’s face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a
face of youth—hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the shadow darted
forth and darkened over these fantoms, as it had darkened over the last.
Nothing now was left but the shadow, and on that my eyes were intently
fixed, till again eyes grew out of the shadow—malignant, serpent eyes.
And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered,
irregular, turbulent maze mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from
these globules themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things
burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvæ so bloodless and so
hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader
of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes
in a drop of water—things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each
other, devouring each other—forms like naught ever beheld by the naked
eye.
As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without
order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me
and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head,
crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary
command against all evil beings.
Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands
touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my
throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I
should be in bodily peril, and I concentered all my faculties in the
single focus of resisting, stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the
shadow, above all from those strange serpent eyes—eyes that had now to
redden as if in the air of some though in naught else around me, I was
aware that there was a will, and a will of intense, creative, working
evil, which might crush down my own.
The pale atmosphere in the room began now to redden as if in the air of
some near conflagration. The larvæ grew lurid as things that live in
fire. Again the room vibrated; again were heard the three measured
knocks; and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the
dark shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into that darkness
all returned.
As the gloom receded, the shadow was wholly gone. Slowly as it had been
withdrawn, the flame grew again into the candles on the table, again
into the fuel in the grate. The whole room came once more calmly,
healthfully into sight.
The two doors were still closed, the door communicating with the
servant’s room still locked. In the corner of the wall, into which he
had convulsively niched himself, lay the dog. I called to him—no
movement; I approached—the animal was dead; his eyes protruded, his
tongue out of his mouth, the froth gathered round his jaws. I took him
in my arms; I brought him to the fire; I felt acute grief for the loss
of my poor favorite, acute self-reproach; I accused myself of his death;
I imagined he had died of fright. But what was my surprise on finding
that his neck was actually broken—actually twisted out at the vertebræ.
Had this been done in the dark? Must it not have been done by a hand
human as mine? Must there not have been a human agency all the while in
that room? Good cause to suspect it. I cannot tell. I cannot do more
than state the fact fairly; the reader may draw his own inference.
Another surprising circumstance—my watch was restored to the table from
which it had been so mysteriously withdrawn; but it had stopped at the
very moment it was so withdrawn; nor, despite all the skill of the
watchmaker, has it ever gone since—that is, it will go in a strange,
erratic way for a few hours, and then comes to a dead stop; it is
worthless.
Nothing more chanced for the rest of the night; nor, indeed, had I long
to wait before the dawn broke. Not till it was broad daylight did I quit
the haunted house. Before I did so I revisited the little blind room in
which my servant and I had been for a time imprisoned.
I had a strong impression, for which I could not account, that from that
room had originated the mechanism of the phenomena, if I may use the
term, which had been experienced in my chamber; and though I entered it
now in the clear day, with the sun peering through the filmy window, I
still felt, as I stood on its floor, the creep of the horror which I had
first experienced there the night before, and which had been so
aggravated by what had passed in my own chamber.
I could not, indeed, bear to stay more than half a minute within those
walls. I descended the stairs, and again I heard the footfall before me;
and when I opened the street-door I thought I could distinguish a very
low laugh. I gained my own home, expecting to find my runaway servant
there. But he had not presented himself; nor did I hear more of him for
three days, when I received a letter from him, dated from Liverpool, to
this effect:
HONORED SIR—I humbly entreat your pardon, though I can scarcely hope
that you will think I deserve it, unless—which heaven forbid!—you saw
what I did. I feel that it will be years before I can recover myself;
and as to being fit for service, It is out of the question. I am
therefore going to my brother-in-law at Melbourne. The ship sails
to-morrow. Perhaps the long voyage may set me up. I do nothing now but
start and tremble, and fancy it is behind me. I humbly beg you,
honored sir, to order my clothes, and whatever wages are due to me, to
be sent to my mother’s, at Walworth: John knows her address.
The letter ended with additional apologies, somewhat incoherent, and
explanatory details as to effects that had been under the writer’s
charge.
This flight may perhaps warrant a suspicion that the man wished to go to
Australia, and had been somehow or other fraudulently mixed up with the
events of the night. I say nothing in refutation of that conjecture;
rather, I suggest it as one that would seem to many persons the most
probable solution of improbable occurrences.
My own theory remained unshaken. I returned in the evening to the house,
to bring away in a hack cab the things I had left there, with my poor
dog’s body. In this task I was not disturbed, nor did any incident worth
note befall me, except that still, on ascending and descending the
stairs, I heard the same footfall in advance. On leaving the house, I
went to Mr. J——‘s. He was at home. I returned him the keys, told him
that my curiosity was sufficiently gratified, and was about to relate
quickly what had passed, when he stopped me and said, though with much
politeness, that he had no longer any interest in a mystery which none
had ever solved.
I determined at least to tell him of the two letters I had read, as well
as of the extraordinary manner in which they had disappeared; and I then
inquired if he thought they had been addressed to the woman who had died
in the house, and if there were anything in her early history which
could possibly confirm the dark suspicions to which the letters gave
rise.
Mr. J—— seemed startled, and after musing a few moments, answered:
“I know but little of the woman’s earlier history, except, as I before
told you, that her family were known to mine. But you revive some vague
reminiscences to her prejudice. I will make inquiries, and inform you of
their result. Still, even if we could admit the popular superstition
that a person who had been either the perpetrator or the victim of dark
crimes in life could revisit, as a restless spirit, the scene in which
those crimes had been committed, I should observe that the house was
infested by strange sights and sounds before the old woman died. You
smile; what would you say?”
“I would say this: that I am convinced, if we could get to the bottom of
these mysteries, we should find a living, human agency.”
“What! you believe it is all an imposture? For what object?”
“Not an imposture, in the ordinary sense of the word. If suddenly I were
to sink into a deep sleep, from which you could not awake me, but in
that deep sleep could answer questions with an accuracy which I could
not pretend to when awake—tell you what money you had in your pocket,
nay, describe your very thoughts—it is not necessarily an imposture, any
more than it is necessarily supernatural. I should be, unconsciously to
myself, under a mesmeric influence, conveyed to me from a distance by a
human being who had acquired power over me by previous _rapport_.”
“Granting mesmerism, so far carried, to be a fact, you are right. And
you would infer from this that a mesmerizer might produce the
extraordinary effects you and others have witnessed over inanimate
objects—fill the air with sights and sounds?”
“Or impress our senses with the belief in them, we never having been _en
rapport_ with the person acting on us? No. What is commonly called
mesmerism could not do this; but there may be a power akin to mesmerism
and superior to it—the power that in the old days was called magic. That
such a power may extend to all inanimate objects of matter, I do not
say; but if so, it would not be against nature, only a rare power in
nature, which might be given to constitutions with certain
peculiarities, and cultivated by practise to an extraordinary degree.
“That such a power might extend over the dead—that is, over certain
thoughts and memories that the dead may still retain—and compel, not
that which ought properly to be called the SOUL, and which is far beyond
human reach, but rather a fantom of what has been most earth-stained on
earth, to make itself apparent to our senses—is a very ancient though
obsolete theory, upon which I will hazard no opinion. But I do not
conceive the power would be supernatural.
“Let me illustrate what I mean, from an experiment which Paracelsus
describes as not difficult, and which the author of the ‘Curiosities of
Literature’ cites as credible: A flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever
were the elements of that flower while it lived are gone, dispersed, you
know not whither; you can never discover nor re-collect them. But you
can, by chemistry, out of the burnt dust of that flower, raise a
spectrum of the flower, just as it seemed in life.
“It may be the same with a human being. The soul has as much escaped you
as the essence or elements of the flower. Still you may make a spectrum
of it. And this fantom, though in the popular superstition it is held to
be the soul of the departed, must not be confounded with the true soul;
it is but the eidolon of the dead form.
“Hence, like the best-attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing
that most strikes us is the absence of what we hold to be soul—that is,
of superior, emancipated intelligence. They come for little or no
object; they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above
those of an ordinary person on earth. These American spirit-seers have
published volumes of communications in prose and verse, which they
assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious
dead—Shakespeare, Bacon, heaven knows whom.
“Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not of a whit
higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair
talent and education; they are wondrously inferior to what Bacon,
Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth. Nor, what is more
notable, do they ever contain an idea that was not on the earth before.
“Wonderful, therefore, as such phenomena may be (granting them to be
truthful), I see much that philosophy may question, nothing that it is
incumbent on philosophy to deny, namely, nothing supernatural. They are
but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the
means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether in so doing tables walk
of their own accord, or fiend-like shapes appear in a magic circle, or
bodiless hands rise and remove material objects, or a thing of darkness,
such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood—still am I persuaded
that these are but agencies conveyed, as by electric wires, to my own
brain from the brain of another.
In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those may
produce chemic wonders; in others a natural fluid, call it electricity,
and these produce electric wonders. But they differ in this from normal
science: they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous.
They lead on to no grand results, and therefore the world does not heed,
and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I
saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and, I
believe, unconsciously to himself as to the exact effects produced, for
this reason: no two persons, you say, have ever told you that they
experienced exactly the same thing; well, observe, no two persons ever
experience exactly the same dream.
“If this were an ordinary imposture, the machinery would be arranged for
results that would but little vary; if it were a supernatural agency
permitted by the Almighty, it would surely be for some definite end.
These phenomena belong to neither class. My persuasion is that they
originate in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct
volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but
its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that
it has been but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested
with a semi-substance.
“That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into
movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe. Some material
force must have killed my dog; it might, for aught I know, have sufficed
to kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the dog—had my
intellect or my spirit given me no countervailing resistance in my
will.”
“It killed your dog! that is fearful! Indeed, it is strange that no
animal can be induced to stay in that house; not even a cat. Rats and
mice are never found in it.”
“The instincts of the brute creation detect influences deadly to their
existence. Man’s reason has a sense less subtle, because it has a
resisting power more supreme. But enough; do you comprehend my theory?”
“Yes, though imperfectly; and I accept any crotchet (pardon the word),
however odd, rather than embrace at once the notion of ghosts and
hobgoblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house
the evil is the same. What on earth can I do with the house?”
“I will tell you what I would do. I am convinced from my own internal
feelings that the small unfurnished room, at right angles to the door of
the bedroom which I occupied, forms a starting-point or receptacle for
the influences which haunt the house; and I strongly advise you to have
the walls opened, the floor removed, nay, the whole room pulled down. I
observe that it is detached from the body of the house, built over the
small back-yard, and could be removed without injury to the rest of the
building.”
“And you think that if I did that——”
“You would cut off the telegraph-wires. Try it. I am so persuaded that I
am right that I will pay half the expense if you will allow me to direct
the operations.”
“Nay, I am well able to afford the cost; for the rest, allow me to write
to you.”
About ten days afterward I received a letter from Mr. J——, telling me
that he had visited the house since I had seen him; that he had found
the two letters I had described replaced in the drawer from which I had
taken them; that he had read them with misgivings like my own; that he
had instituted a cautious inquiry about the woman to whom I rightly
conjectured they had been written.
It seemed that thirty-six years ago (a year before the date of the
letters) she had married, against the wish of her relatives, an American
of very suspicious character; in fact, he was generally believed to have
been a pirate. She herself was the daughter of very respectable
tradespeople, and had served in the capacity of nursery governess before
her marriage. She had a brother, a widower, who was considered wealthy,
and who had one child about six years old. A month after the marriage
the body of this brother was found in the Thames, near London Bridge;
there seemed some marks of violence about his throat, but they were not
deemed sufficient to warrant the inquest in any other verdict than that
of “found drowned.”
The American and his wife took charge of the little boy, the deceased
brother having by his will left his sister the guardian of his only
child, and in the event of the child’s death the sister inherited. The
child died about six months afterward; it was supposed to have been
neglected and ill-treated. The neighbors deposed to have heard it shriek
at night.
The surgeon who had examined it after death said that it was emaciated
as if from want of nourishment, and the body was covered with livid
bruises. It seemed that one winter night the child had sought to escape;
had crept out into the back-yard, tried to scale the wall, fallen back
exhausted, and had been found at morning on the stones in a dying state.
But though there was some evidence of cruelty, there was none of murder;
and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate cruelty by alleging
the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child, who was declared
to be half-witted. Be that as it may, at the orphan’s death the aunt
inherited her brother’s fortune.
Before the first wedded year was out, the American quitted England
abruptly, and never returned to it. He obtained a cruising vessel, which
was lost in the Atlantic two years afterward. The widow was left in
affluence; but reverses of various kinds had befallen her; a bank broke,
an investment failed, she went into a small business and became
insolvent, then she entered into service, sinking lower and lower, from
housekeeper down to maid-of-all-work, never long retaining a place,
though nothing peculiar against her character was ever alleged.
She was considered sober, honest, and peculiarly quiet in her ways;
still nothing prospered with her. And so she had dropped into the
workhouse, from which Mr. J—— had taken her, to be placed in charge of
the very house which she had rented as mistress in the first year of her
wedded life.
Mr. J—— added that he had passed an hour alone in the unfurnished room
which I had urged him to destroy, and that his impressions of dread
while there were so great, though he had neither heard nor seen
anything, that he was eager to have the walls bared and the floors
removed, as I had suggested. He had engaged persons for the work, and
would commence any day I would name.
The day was accordingly fixed. I repaired to the haunted house; we went
into the blind, dreary room, took up the skirting, and then the floors.
Under the rafters, covered with rubbish, was found a trapdoor, quite
large enough to admit a man. It was closely nailed down with clamps and
rivets of iron. On removing these we descended into a room below, the
existence of which had never been suspected.
In this room there had been a window and a flue, but they had been
bricked over, evidently for many years. By the help of candles we
examined this place; It still retained some moldering furniture—three
chairs, an oak settee, a table—all of the fashion of about eighty years
ago.
There was a chest of drawers against the wall, in which we found, half
rotted away, old-fashioned articles of a man’s dress, such as might have
been worn eighty or a hundred years ago, by a gentleman of some rank;
costly steel buckles and buttons, like those yet worn in court-dresses,
a handsome court-sword; in a waistcoat which had once been rich with
gold-lace, but which was now blackened and foul with damp, we found five
guineas, a few silver coins, and an ivory ticket, probably for some
place of entertainment long since passed away.
But our main discovery was in a kind of iron safe fixed to the wall, the
lock of which it cost us much trouble to get picked.
In this safe were three shelves and two small drawers. Ranged on the
shelves were several small bottles of crystal, hermetically stopped.
They contained colorless volatile essences, of what nature I shall say
no more than that they were not poisons; phosphor and ammonia entered
into some of them. There were also some very curious glass tubes, and a
small pointed rod of iron, with a large lump of rock crystal, and
another of amber, also a lodestone of great power.
In one of the drawers we found a miniature portrait set in gold, and
retaining the freshness of its colors most remarkably, considering the
length of time it had probably been there. The portrait was that of a
man who might be somewhat advanced in middle life, perhaps forty-seven
or forty-eight.
It was a most peculiar face, a most impressive face. If you could fancy
some mighty serpent transformed into man, preserving in the human
lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that
countenance than long descriptions can convey; the width and flatness of
frontal, the tapering elegance of contour, disguising the strength of
the deadly jaw; the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as
the emerald, and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the
consciousness of an immense power.
The strange thing was this: the instant I saw the miniature I recognized
a startling likeness to one of the rarest portraits in the world; the
portrait of a man of rank only below that of royalty, who in his own day
had made a considerable noise. History says little or nothing of him;
but search the correspondence of his contemporaries, and you find
reference to his wild daring, his bold profligacy, his restless spirit,
his taste for the occult sciences.
While still in the meridian of life he died and was buried, so say the
chronicles, in a foreign land. He died in time to escape the grasp of
the law; for he was accused of crimes which would have given him to the
headsman. After his death the portraits of him, which had been numerous,
for he had been a munificent encourager of art, were bought up and
destroyed, it was supposed by his heirs, who might have been glad could
they have razed his very name from their splendid line.
He had enjoyed vast wealth; a large portion of this was believed to have
been embezzled by a favorite astrologer or soothsayer; at all events, it
had unaccountably vanished at the time of his death. One portrait alone
of him was supposed to have escaped the general destruction; I had seen
it in the house of a collector some months before. It had made on me a
wonderful impression, as it does on all who behold it—a face never to be
forgotten; and there was that face in the miniature that lay within my
hand. True that in the miniature the man was a few years older than in
the portrait I had seen, or than the original was even at the time of
his death. But a few years!—why, between the date in which flourished
that direful noble and the date in which the miniature was evidently
painted there was an interval of more than two centuries. While I was
thus gazing, silent and wondering, Mr. J—— said:
“But is it possible? I have known this man.”
“How? where?” cried I.
“In India. He was high in the confidence of the Rajah of ——, and
well-nigh drew him into a revolt which would have lost the Rajah his
dominions. The man was a Frenchman; his name De V——; clever, bold,
lawless; we insisted on his dismissal and banishment. It must be the
same man, no two faces like his, yet this miniature seems nearly a
hundred years old.”
Mechanically I turned round the miniature to examine the back of it, and
on the back was engraved a pentacle; in the middle of the pentacle a
ladder, and the third step of the ladder was formed by the date 1765.
Examining still more minutely, I detected a spring; this, on being
pressed, opened the back of the miniature as a lid.
Within-side the lid were engraved: “Mariana, to thee. Be faithful in
life and in death to ——.”
Here follows a name that I will not mention, but it was not unfamiliar
to me. I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as the name
borne by a dazzling charlatan, who had made a great sensation in London
for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a double
murder within his own house—that of his mistress and his rival. I said
nothing of this to Mr. J——, to whom reluctantly I resigned the
miniature.
We had found no difficulty in opening the first drawer within the iron
safe; we found great difficulty in opening the second: it was not
locked, but it resisted all efforts, till we inserted in the chinks the
edge of a chisel. When we had thus drawn it forth we found a very
singular apparatus, in the nicest order.
Upon a small, thin book, or rather tablet, was placed a saucer of
crystal; this saucer was filled with a clear liquid; on that liquid
floated a kind of compass, with a needle shifting rapidly round; but
instead of the usual points of a compass, were seven strange characters,
not very unlike those used by astrologers to denote the planets.
A very peculiar, but not strong nor displeasing odor came from this
drawer, which was lined with a wood that we afterward discovered to be
hazel. Whatever the cause of this odor, it produced a material effect on
the nerves. We all felt it, even the two workmen who were in the room; a
creeping, tingling sensation, from the tips of the fingers to the roots
of the hair.
Impatient to examine the tablet, I removed the saucer. As I did so, the
needle of the compass went round and round with exceeding swiftness, and
I felt a shock that ran through my whole frame, so that I dropped the
saucer on the floor. The liquid was spilt, the saucer was broken, the
compass rolled to the end of the room, and at that instant the walls
shook to and fro as it a giant had swayed and rocked them.
The two workmen were so frightened that they ran up the ladder by which
we had descended from the trapdoor; but, seeing that nothing more
happened, they were easily induced to return.
Meanwhile I had opened the tablet; it was bound in plain red leather,
with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on
that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old
monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus:
On all that it can reach within these walls, sentient or inanimate,
living or dead, as moves the needle, so works my will! Accursed be the
house, and restless the dwellers therein.
We found no more. Mr. J—— burned the tablet and its anathema. He razed
to the foundation the part of the building containing the secret room,
with the chamber over it. He had then the courage to inhabit the house
himself for a month, and a quieter, better conditioned house could not
be found in all London. Subsequently he let it to advantage, and his
tenant has made no complaints.
But my story is not yet done. A few days after Mr. J—— had removed into
the house, I paid him a visit. We were standing by the open window and
conversing. A van containing some articles of furniture which he was
moving from his former house was at the door.
I had just urged on him my theory that all those phenomena regarded as
supermundane had emanated from a human brain; adducing the charm, or
rather curse we had found and destroyed, in support of my theory.
Mr. J—— was observing in reply, “that even if mesmerism, or whatever
analogous power it might be called, could really thus work in the
absence of the operator, and produce effects so extraordinary, still
could those effects continue when the operator himself was dead? and if
the spell had been wrought, and, indeed, the room walled up, more than
seventy years ago, the probability was that the operator had long since
departed this life”—Mr. J——, I say, was thus answering, when I caught
hold of his arm and pointed to the street below.
A well-dressed man had crossed from the opposite side, and was accosting
the carrier in charge of the van. His face, as he stood, was exactly
fronting our window. It was the face of the miniature we had discovered;
it was the face of the portrait of the noble three centuries ago.
“Good heavens!” cried Mr. J——; “that is the face of De V——, and scarcely
a day older than when I saw it in the Rajah’s court in my youth!”
Seized by the same thought, we both hastened down-stairs; I was first in
the street, but the man had already gone. I caught sight of him,
however, not many yards in advance, and in another moment I was by his
side.
I had resolved to speak to him, but when I looked into his face I felt
as if it were impossible to do so. That eye—the eye of the serpent—fixed
and held me spellbound. And withal, about the man’s whole person there
was a dignity, an air of pride and station and superiority that would
have made any one, habituated to the usages of the world, hesitate long
before venturing upon a liberty or impertinence.
And what could I say? What was it I could ask?
Thus ashamed of my first impulse, I fell a few paces back, still,
however, following the stranger, undecided what else to do. Meanwhile he
turned the corner of the street; a plain carriage was in waiting with a
servant out of livery, dressed like a _valet de place_, at the carriage
door. In another moment he had stepped into the carriage, and it drove
off. I returned to the house.
Mr. J—— was still at the street-door. He had asked the carrier what the
stranger had said to him.
“Merely asked whom that house now belonged to.”
The same evening I happened to go with a friend to a place in town
called the Cosmopolitan Club, a place open to men of all countries, all
opinions, all degrees. One orders one’s coffee, smokes one’s cigar. One
is always sure to meet agreeable, sometimes remarkable persons.
I had not been two minutes in the room before I beheld at table,
conversing with an acquaintance of mine, whom I will designate by the
initial G——, the man, the original of the miniature. He was now without
his hat, and the likeness was yet more startling, only I observed that
while he was conversing there was less severity in the countenance;
there was even a smile, though a very quiet and very cold one. The
dignity of mien I had acknowledged in the street was also more striking;
a dignity akin to that which invests some prince of the East, conveying
the idea of supreme indifference and habitual, indisputable, indolent
but resistless power.
G—— soon after left the stranger, who then took up a scientific journal,
which seemed to absorb his attention.
I drew G—— aside.
“Who and what is that gentleman?”
“That? Oh, a very remarkable man indeed! I met him last year amid the
caves of Petra, the Scriptural Edom. He is the best Oriental scholar I
know. We joined company, had an adventure with robbers, in which he
showed a coolness that saved our lives; afterward he invited me to spend
a day with him in a house he had bought at Damascus, buried among
almond-blossoms and roses—the most beautiful thing! He had lived there
for some time, quite as an Oriental, in grand style.
“I half suspect he is a renegade, immensely rich, very odd; by the by, a
great mesmerizer. I have seen him with my own eyes produce an effect on
inanimate things. If you take a letter from your pocket and throw it to
the other end of the room, he will order it to come to his feet, and you
will see the letter wriggle itself along the floor till it has obeyed
his command. ’Pon my honor ’tis true; I have seen him affect even the
weather, disperse or collect clouds by means of a glass tube or wand.
But he does not like talking of these matters to strangers. He has only
just arrived in England; says he has not been here for a great many
years; let me introduce him to you.”
“Certainly! He is English, then? What is his name?”
“Oh! a very homely one—Richards.”
“And what is his birth—his family?”
“How do I know? What does it signify? No doubt some _parvenue_; but
rich, so infernally rich!”
G—— drew me up to the stranger, and the introduction was effected. The
manners of Mr. Richards were not those of an adventurous traveler.
Travelers are in general gifted with high animal spirits; they are
talkative, eager, imperious. Mr. Richards was calm and subdued in tone,
with manners which were made distant by the loftiness of punctilious
courtesy, the manners of a former age.
I observed that the English he spoke was not exactly of our day. I
should even have said that the accent was slightly foreign. But then Mr.
Richards remarked that he had been little in the habit for years of
speaking in his native tongue.
The conversation fell upon the changes in the aspect of London since he
had last visited our metropolis. G—— then glanced off to the moral
changes—literary, social, political—the great men who were removed from
the stage within the last twenty years; the new great men who were
coming on.
In all this Mr. Richards evinced no interest. He had evidently read none
of our living authors, and seemed scarcely acquainted by name with our
younger statesmen. Once, and only once, he laughed; it was when G——
asked him whether he had any thoughts of getting into Parliament; and
the laugh was inward, sarcastic, sinister—a sneer raised into a laugh.
After a few minutes, G—— left us to talk to some other acquaintances who
had just lounged into the room, and I then said, quietly:
“I have seen a miniature of you, Mr. Richards, in the house you once
inhabited, and perhaps built—if not wholly, at least in part—in Oxford
Street. You passed by that house this morning.”
Not till I had finished did I raise my eyes to his, and then he fixed my
gaze so steadfastly that I could not withdraw it—those fascinating
serpent-eyes. But involuntarily, and as if the words that translated my
thought were dragged from me, I added, in a low whisper, “I have been a
student in the mysteries of life and nature; of those mysteries I have
known the occult professors. I have the right to speak to you thus.” And
I uttered a certain password.
“Well. I concede the right. What would you ask?”
“To what extent human will in certain temperaments can extend?”
“To what extent can thought extend? Think, and before you draw breath
you are in China!”
“True; but my thought has no power in China.”
“Give it expression, and it may have. You may write down a thought
which, sooner or later, may alter the whole condition of China. What is
a law but a thought? Therefore thought is infinite. Therefore thought
has power; not in proportion to its value—a bad thought may make a bad
law as potent as a good thought can make a good one.”
“Yes; what you say confirms my own theory. Through invisible currents
one human brain may transmit its ideas to other human brains, with the
same rapidity as a thought promulgated by visible means. And as thought
is imperishable, as it leaves its stamp behind it in the natural world,
even when the thinker has passed out of this world, so the thought of
the living may have power to rouse up and revive the thoughts of the
dead, such as those thoughts _were in life_, though the thought of the
living cannot reach the thoughts which the dead now may entertain. Is it
not so?”
“I decline to answer, if in my judgment thought has the limit you would
fix to it. But proceed; you have a special question you wish to put.”
“Intense malignity in an intense will, engendered in a peculiar
temperament, and aided by natural means within the reach of science, may
produce effects like those ascribed of old to evil magic. It might thus
haunt the walls of a human habitation with spectral revivals of all
guilty thoughts and guilty deeds once conceived and done within those
walls; all, in short, with which the evil will claims _rapport_ and
affinity—imperfect, incoherent, fragmentary snatches at the old dramas
acted therein years ago.
“Thoughts thus crossing each other haphazard, as in the nightmare of a
vision, growing up into fantom sights and sounds, and all serving to
create horror; not because those sights and sounds are really
visitations from a world without, but that they are ghastly, monstrous
renewals of what have been in this world itself, set into malignant play
by a malignant mortal. And it is through the material agency of that
human brain that these things would acquire even a human power; would
strike as with the shock of electricity, and might kill, if the thought
of the person assailed did not rise superior to the dignity of the
original assailer; might kill the most powerful animal, if unnerved by
fear, but not injure the feeblest man, if, while his flesh crept, his
mind stood out fearless.
“Thus when in old stories we read of a magician rent to pieces by the
fiends he had invoked, or still more, in Eastern legends, that one
magician succeeds by arts in destroying another, there may be so far
truth, that a material being has clothed, from his own evil
propensities, certain elements and fluids, usually quiescent or
harmless, with awful shapes and terrific force; just as the lightning,
that had lain hidden and innocent in the cloud, becomes by natural law
suddenly visible, takes a distinct shape to the eye, and can strike
destruction on the object to which it is attracted.”
“You are not without glimpses of a mighty secret,” said Mr. Richards,
composedly. “According to your view, could a mortal obtain the power you
speak of, he would necessarily be a malignant and evil being.”
“If the power were exercised, as I have said, most malignant and most
evil; though I believe in the ancient traditions that he could not
injure the good. His will could only injure those with whom it has
established an affinity, or over whom it forces unresisted sway. I will
now imagine an example that may be within the laws of nature, yet seem
wild as the fables of a bewildered monk.
“You will remember that Albertus Magnus, after describing minutely the
process by which the spirits may be invoked and commanded, adds
emphatically that the process will instruct and avail only to the few;
that _a man must be born a magician_!—that is, born with a peculiar
physical temperament, as a man is born a poet.
Rarely are men in whose constitutions lurks this occult power of the
highest order of intellect; usually in the intellect there is some
twist, perversity, or disease. But, on the other hand, they must
possess, to an astonishing degree, the faculty to concentrate thought on
a single object—the energic faculty that we call WILL. Therefore, though
their intellect be not sound, it is exceedingly forcible for the
attainment of what it desires. I will imagine such a person,
preeminently gifted with this constitution and its concomitant forces. I
will place him in the loftier grades of society.
“I will suppose his desires emphatically those of the sensualist; he
has, therefore, a strong love of life. He is an absolute egotist; his
will is concentered in himself; he has fierce passions; he knows no
enduring, no holy affections, but he can covet eagerly what for the
moment he desires; he can hate implacably what opposes itself to his
objects; he can commit fearful crimes, yet feel small remorse; he
resorts rather to curses upon others than to penitence for his misdeeds.
Circumstances, to which his constitution guides him, lead him to a rare
knowledge of the natural secrets which may serve his egotism. He is a
close observer where his passions encourage observation; he is a minute
calculator, not from love of truth, but where love of self sharpens his
faculties; therefore he can be a man of science.
“I suppose such a being, having by experience learned the power of his
arts over others, trying what may be the power of will over his own
frame, and studying all that in natural philosophy may increase that
power. He loves life, he dreads death; _he wills to live on_. He cannot
restore himself to youth; he cannot entirely stay the progress of death;
he cannot make himself immortal in the flesh and blood. But he may
arrest, for a time so long as to appear incredible if I said it, that
hardening of the parts which constitutes old age.
“A year may age him no more than an hour ages another. His intense will,
scientifically trained into system, operates, in short, over the wear
and tear of his own frame. He lives on. That he may not seem a portent
and a miracle, he _dies_, from time to time, seemingly, to certain
persons. Having schemed the transfer of a wealth that suffices to his
wants, he disappears from one corner of the world, and contrives that
his obsequies shall be celebrated.
“He reappears at another corner of the world, where he resides
undetected, and does not visit the scenes of his former career till all
who could remember his features are no more. He would be profoundly
miserable if he had affections; he has none but for himself. No good man
would accept his longevity; and to no man, good or bad, would he or
could he communicate its true secret.
“Such a man might exist; such a man as I have described I see now before
me—Duke of ——, in the court of ——, dividing time between lust and brawl,
alchemists and wizards; again, in the last century, charlatan and
criminal, with name less noble, domiciled in the house at which you
gazed to-day, and flying from the law you had outraged, none knew
whither; traveler once more revisiting London with the same earthly
passion which filled your heart when races now no more walked through
yonder streets; outlaw from the school of all the nobler and diviner
mysteries. Execrable image of life in death and death in life, I warn
you back from the cities and homes of healthful men! back to the ruins
of departed empires! back to the deserts of nature unredeemed!”
There answered me a whisper so musical, so potently musical, that it
seemed to enter into my whole being and subdue me despite myself. Thus
it said:
“I have sought one like you for the last hundred years. Now I have found
you, we part not till I know what I desire. The vision that sees through
the past and cleaves through the veil of the future is in you at this
hour—never before, never to come again. The vision of no puling,
fantastic girl, of no sick-bed somnambule, but of a strong man with a
vigorous brain. Soar, and look forth!”
As he spoke, I felt as if I rose out of myself upon eagle wings. All the
weight seemed gone from air, roofless the room, roofless the dome of
space. I was not in the body—where, I knew not; but aloft over time,
over earth.
Again I heard the melodious whisper:
“You say right. I have mastered great secrets by the power of will.
True, by will and by science I can retard the process of years, but
death comes not by age alone. Can I frustrate the accidents which bring
death upon the young?”
“No; every accident is a providence. Before a providence snaps every
human will.”
“Shall I die at last, ages and ages hence, by the slow though inevitable
growth of time, or by the cause that I call accident?”
“By a cause you call accident.”
“Is not the end still remote?” asked the whisper, with a slight tremor.
“Regarded as my life regards time, it is still remote.”
“And shall I, before then, mix with the world of men as I did ere I
learned these secrets; resume eager interest in their strife and their
trouble; battle with ambition, and use the power of the sage to win the
power that belongs to kings?”
“You will yet play a part on the earth that will fill earth with
commotion and amaze. For wondrous designs have you, a wonder yourself,
been permitted to live on through the centuries. All the secrets you
have stored will then have their uses; all that now makes you a stranger
amid the generations will contribute then to make you their lord. As the
trees and the straws are drawn into a whirlpool, as they spin round, are
sucked to the deep, and again tossed aloft by the eddies, so shall races
and thrones be drawn into your vortex. Awful destroyer! but in
destroying, made, against your own will, a constructor.”
“And that date, too, is far off?”
“Far off; when it comes, think your end in this world is at hand!”
“How and what is the end? Look east, west, south, and north.”
“In the north, where you never yet trod, toward the point whence your
instincts have warned you, there a specter will seize you. ’Tis Death! I
see a ship; it is haunted; ’tis chased! it sails on. Baffled navies sail
after that ship. It enters the region of ice. It passes a sky red with
meteors. Two moons stand on high, over ice-reefs. I see the ship locked
between white defiles; they are ice-rocks. I see the dead strew the
decks, stark and livid, green mold on their limbs. All are dead but one
man—it is you! But years, though so slowly they come, have then scathed
you. There is the coming of age on your brow, and the will is relaxed in
the cells of the brain. Still that will, though enfeebled, exceeds all
that man knew before you; through the will you live on, gnawed with
famine. And nature no longer obeys you in that death-spreading region;
the sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron clamps, and the ice-rocks
wedge in the ship. Hark how it cracks and groans! Ice will imbed it as
amber imbeds a straw. And a man has gone forth, living yet, from the
ship and its dead; and he has clambered up the spikes of an iceberg, and
the two moons gaze down on his form. That man is yourself, and terror is
on you—terror; and terror has swallowed up your will.
“And I see, swarming up the steep ice-rock, gray, grizzly things. The
bears of the North have scented their quarry; they come nearer and
nearer, shambling, and rolling their bulk. In that day every moment
shall seem to you longer than the centuries through which you have
passed. Heed this: after life, moments continued make the bliss or the
hell of eternity.”
“Hush!” said the whisper. “But the day, you assure me, is far off, very
far! I go back to the almond and rose of Damascus! Sleep!”
The room swam before my eyes. I became insensible. When I recovered, I
found G—— holding my hand and smiling. He said, “You, who have always
declared yourself proof against mesmerism, have succumbed at last to my
friend Richards.”
“Where is Mr. Richards?”
“Gone, when you passed into a trance, saying quietly to me, ‘Your friend
will not wake for an hour.’”
I asked, as collectedly as I could, where Mr. Richards lodged.
“At the Trafalgar Hotel.”
“Give me your arm,” said I to G——. “Let us call on him; I have something
to say.”
When we arrived at the hotel we were told that Mr. Richards had returned
twenty minutes before, paid his bill, left directions with his servant
(a Greek) to pack his effects, and proceed to Malta by the steamer that
should leave Southampton the next day. Mr. Richards had merely said of
his own movements that he had visits to pay in the neighborhood of
London, and it was uncertain whether he should be able to reach
Southampton in time for that steamer; if not, he should follow in the
next one.
The waiter asked me my name. On my informing him, he gave me a note that
Mr. Richards had left for me in case I called.
The note was as follows:
I wished you to utter what was in your mind. You obeyed. I have
therefore established power over you. For three months from this day
you can communicate to no living man what has passed between us. You
cannot even show this note to the friend by your side. During three
months, silence complete as to me and mine. Do you doubt my power to
lay on you this command? Try to disobey me. At the end of the third
month the spell is raised. For the rest, I spare you. I shall visit
your grave a year and a day after it has received you.
So ends this strange story, which I ask no one to believe. I write it
down exactly three months after I received the above note. I could not
write it before, nor could I show to G——, in spite of his urgent
request, the note which I read under the gas-lamp by his side.
THE SEPTEMBER GALE.
BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
I’m not a chicken; I have seen
Full many a chill September,
And though 1 was a youngster then,
That gale I well remember;
The day before, my kite-string snapped,
And I, my kite pursuing,
The wind whisked off my palm-leaf hat;—
For me two storms were brewing!
It came as quarrels sometimes do,
When married folks get clashing;
There was a heavy sigh or two,
Before the fire was flashing,—
A little stir among the clouds,
Before they rent asunder,—
A little rocking of the trees,
And then came on the thunder.
Lord! how the ponds and rivers boiled,
And how the shingles rattled!
And oaks were scattered on the ground
As it the Titans battled;
And all above was in a howl,
And all below a clatter,—
The earth was like a frying-pan,
Or some such hissing matter.
It chanced to be our washing-day,
And all our things were drying:
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a-flying;
I saw the shirts and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,—
I lost my Sunday breeches!
I saw them straddling through the air,
Alas! too late to win them;
I saw them chase the clouds as if
The devil had been in them;
They were my darlings and my pride,
My boyhood’s only riches,—
“Farewell, farewell,” I faintly cried,—
“My breeches! O my breeches!”
That night I saw them in my dreams,
How changed from what I knew them.
The dews had steeped their faded threads,
The winds had whistled through them;
I saw the wide and ghastly rents
Where demon claws had torn them;
A hole was in their amplest part,
As if an imp had worn them.
I have had many happy years,
And tailors kind and clever,
But those young pantaloons have gone
Forever and forever!
And not till fate has cut the last
Of all my earthly stitches,
This aching heart shall cease to mourn
My loved, my long-lost breeches!
FACTS FOR THE WEATHERWISE.
WEATHER SIGNS.
The sun is bright, the sky is clear,
But grandma says a storm is near;
And when I asked how she could know,
She said the peacock told her so,
When, perching on the old fence rail,
He screamed so loud and dropped his tail;
And the shy cuckoo on the wing
Repeated over the same thing;
And “More wet!” all the bob-whites cried
That in the grassy meadows hide;
The soot that from the chimney fell
Came down, it seems, this news to tell;
The kettle sang the self-same tune
When it boiled dry so very soon;
The grass this morning said so, too,
That hung without a drop of dew;
And the blue swallows, flying low
Across the river, to and fro.
So all these told her very plain
That ere the evening it would rain;
But who told them, and when, and how?
That’s what I want to find out now.
_St. Nicholas._
THE SIROCCO OF ITALY.
Italy is visited by a hot wind from the south which is known as the
“Sirocco.” This wind will run the temperature in southern Italy up to
110 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and has a most peculiar effect on
the human system, causing intense weakness and irritable depression.
The Sirocco is said to be indirectly the cause of more murders, and of
quarrels in which blood is shed, than any other phenomenon in nature.
WEATHER PROVERBS.
The absence of dew for three days indicates rain. Heavy dew indicates
fair weather. Clouds without dew indicate rain. If there is a heavy dew
and it soon dries, expect fine weather; if it lies long on the grass,
expect rain in twenty-four hours.
With dew before midnight, the next day will surely be bright. If you wet
your feet with the dew in the morning, you may keep them dry for the
rest of the day.
If it rains before seven, ’twill clear before eleven. Rains from the
south prevent drought, but rains from the west are always best. If it
rains before sunrise, expect a fair afternoon. If it rains when the sun
shines, it will rain the next day. Rain is likely to commence on the
turn of the tide.
Marry the rain to the wind and you have a calm. If rain commences before
daylight, it will hold up before 8 A.M.; if it begins about noon, it
will continue through the afternoon; if it commences after 9 P.M., it
will rain the next day; if the wind is from the northwest or southwest,
the storm will be short; if from the northeast, it will be a hard one.
THUNDER IN ENGLAND.
An early English author writes:
“Thunders in the morning signifie wynde: about noone, rayne; in the
evening great tempest.
“Somme wryte (their ground I see not) that Sondayes thundre should
brynge the death of learned men, judges, and others; Mondayes thundre,
the death of women; Tuesdayes thundre, pleantie of graine; Wednesdayes
thundre, much blodshede; Thursdayes thundre, pleantie of shepe and
corne; Fridayes thundre, the slaughter of a great man and other horrible
murders; and Saturdayes thundre, a generall pestilent plague and great
deathe.”
HOW TO USE A BAROMETER.
The following rules are those which are used by the
Seawanhaka-Corinthian Yacht Club in their very successful attempts to
forecast the weather with the aid of the barometer.
A Rising Barometer.—A rapid rise indicates unsettled weather. A gradual
rise indicates settled weather. A rise with dry air and cold air
increasing in summer indicates wind from the northward; and if rain has
fallen, better weather may be expected. A rise with moist air and a low
temperature indicates wind and rain from the northward. A rise with
southerly winds indicates fine weather.
A Steady Barometer.—With dry air and seasonable temperature indicates a
continuance of very fine weather.
A Falling Barometer.—A rapid fall indicates stormy weather. A rapid fall
with westerly wind indicates stormy weather from the northward. A fall
with a northerly wind indicates storm, with rain and hail in summer, and
snow in winter. A fall with increased moisture in the air and heat
increasing indicates wind and rain from the southward. A fall with dry
air and cold increasing in winter indicates snow. A fall after very calm
and warm weather indicates rain with squally weather.
The barometer rises for northerly winds, including from northwest by
north to the eastward for dry or less wet weather, for less wind, or for
more than one of these changes, except on a few occasions, when rain,
hail, or snow comes from the northward with strong wind.
The barometer falls for southerly wind, including from southeast by
south to the westward, for wet weather, for stronger wind, or for more
than one of these changes, except on a few occasions, moderate wind,
with rain or snow, comes from the northward.
COWS TELL RAIN.
A sign of coming rain or strong wind is evident when a herd of cows
gather together at one end of a pasture, with their tails to windward.
Again, when cows are unusually frisky—so that sedate old grandmother
cows caper about the field and butt imaginary objects with their horns,
while they fling up their heels—often storms are in the air.
Cows are sometimes thus playful in the witching hours of twilight, to
the terror of nervous ladies who must cross their pastures.
But when in twilight cows follow one another along a field path
unpleasantly close and gambol unpleasantly around one, fear of a storm
need not necessarily add terror to the situation. For cows are very
inquisitive, and in the dusk of twilight like to make careful
investigation of strangers, without meaning any offense.
Cows show a sign of heat and its accompaniment, annoying insects, when
they thus collect together, rubbing themselves against each other, and
one might read in this a sign of fair weather ahead.
FIRE AS A BAROMETER.
Willsford, in his “Nature’s Secrets” (1658), tells us:
“When our common fires do burn with a pale flame, they presage foul
weather. If the fire do make a huzzing noise, it is a sign of tempests
near at hand. When the fire sparkleth. very much, it is a sign of rain.
If the ashes on the hearth do dodder together of themselves, it is a
sign of rain. When pots are newly taken off the fire, if they sparkle
(the soot upon them being incensed), it presages rain.
“When the fire scorcheth, and burneth more vehemently than it useth to
do, it is a sign of frosty weather; but if the living coals do shine
brighter than commonly at other times, expect then rain. If wood or any
other fuel do crackle more than ordinary, it is an evident sign of some
tempestuous weather neer at hand; the much and suddain falling of soot
presages rain.”
GOOSE-BONES AND PROPHECIES.
The goose-bone predictions are perhaps more closely watched in Kentucky
than anywhere else, and it may be called the Kentucky weather prophet.
We must take the breastbone of a last spring’s goose—none other will do,
for the prophecy does not extend beyond the year in which the goose is
hatched. It must be divided into three different parts, which represent
the three divisions of winter.
The breastbone of a goose is translucent, but at places has cloudlike
blots upon it. These blots denote cold weather, and the prophecy is made
according to their density and position.
ORIGIN OF COLD WAVES OF AIR.
Dr. Klein, in reference to the use of daily weather reports, states that
in Europe, as in America, in all cases, the reports of the weather
westward of a given station are of the greatest importance, while
reports from stations to the east are, on the average, of minor
importance in making weather predictions.
A southerly wind in the region of Ireland, Scotland, or Norway indicates
the approaching side of an area of low barometer. It is therefore a sign
of a coming change in the weather.
A northerly wind in those regions indicates, for Germany, that the
pressure of the air from the ocean is high, and can be considered as a
sign of steady pleasant weather.
The region of high barometer is generally separated from oceans and from
equatorial regions by lofty chains of mountains. The coldest and densest
stratum of air can therefore not flow away toward the sea.
The area of greatest cold on this continent is not prevented by any
range of mountains from extending southward and eastward, but is only
hemmed in on the west by the Rocky Mountains. Thus while the Pacific
Coast is protected from an overflow of very cold air, the whole eastern
portion of America becomes peculiarly subject to it.
A HOROSCOPE OF THE MONTHS.[7]
BY MARION Y. BUNNER.
The Nature of the Destiny and Some of the Idiosyncrasies Which Have To
Do with Persons Born Under the Sign “Libra,” Representing the Period
Between September 23d and October 23d.
_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Footnote 7:
This is the eighth instalment of “A Horoscope of the Months.” The
first was printed in the March issue of THE SCRAP BOOK. In subsequent
numbers we will give the sign for the month of issue and explain its
significance to those whose birth-month it may happen to indicate.
Watch for your month and note whether the characteristics given will
apply to yourself and to your friends.—The Editor.
LIBRA: THE SCALES.
SEPTEMBER 23d to OCTOBER 23d. CUSP: RUNS SEPTEMBER 23d to 29th.
The constellation Libra—the seventh sign of the zodiac, and the middle
one of the Air Triplicity—is a cardinal, sanguine, diurnal, airy,
masculine sign, governing the loins. The higher attributes are
inspiration and perception.
A person born during the cusp, when the sun is on the edge of the sign,
does not receive the full benefits of the individuality of either Virgo
or Libra, but partakes of the characteristics of both.
There is a greater variety of disposition among the Libra people than
among those of any other sign. They are energetic, ambitious, and
inspired. The inner nature is receptive, intuitional, sensitive, and
poetical. They always finish things in a careful, competent, and
conclusive manner. They keenly feel and can closely imitate the acts and
sentiments of others, and can thus readily learn from example.
Their strong emotions and great imitative ability make them well adapted
for the dramatic profession. When angry, they leave nothing unsaid.
Their nature responds to all forms of ideality. As students, they are
fond of philosophical and ethical and especially of mystical literature,
Many good linguists are found in this sign.
The Libra people have remarkable foresight, and in the decision of most
matters they are correctly guided by their intuitive faculty. This is
especially so in the buying or selling of commodities, in which they can
rarely be defrauded.
When overtaken by disaster they recover quickly and go to work again
with redoubled vigor. The Libra women are kind, constant, and merciful.
The other type of Libra people is to be found more among the men, who
are cunning in their business dealings and inconstant in their
affections.
In physical appearance Libra subjects are usually tall, slender, and
well-formed, with oval face, or languid expression of countenance, and
beautiful eyes. The physical temperament will be sanguine-bilious in
Southern latitudes, and nervous-bilious in Northern climates.
Their most congenial friends will be found among the Fire people (Aries,
Leo, and Sagittarius); next, with those born under their own sign, and,
third, with those born under Aquarius.
Libra people take things from a material and literal standpoint; and
though their intuitive nature will often show them the true side of the
question, they prefer to accept the conclusions of human logic.
Impatience is one of their chief faults. They are prodigal of their
strength and talents, and scatter their forces in all directions. They
suffer through anger and jealousy.
When a Libra and a Sagittarius person are united, the children will be
very talented. Children of Libra and Aquarius will be stronger
physically, and will possess a keen intellect. These children are quick
to perceive the truth in anything, and will make determined efforts to
improve. They have a natural genius for invention, having a marked
mechanical ability over all the other signs. They should be permitted to
have their own way when not entirely wrong. To circumscribe a Libra
child is to destroy its genius.
The governing planet is Venus, and the gems are the diamond and the
opal. The astral colors are black, crimson, and light blue. The flower
is the violet.
August and December are the most favorable months, and Wednesday is the
lucky day in this sign.
October, the eighth month of the old Roman year, originally began in
spring. By the Julian arrangement it became the tenth month, and had
thirty-one days assigned to it. By the Slavs this is called “yellow
month” from the fading of the leaf; to the Anglo-Saxons it was known as
the Wyn-Monat (wine month), because it was the month in which they
pressed grapes, also as Winter-fylleth, because at this full moon
(fylleth) winter was supposed to begin. It corresponds partly with the
Vendémiaire and partly to the Brumaire of the first French Republic.
In some of the very old Saxon calendars October is characterized by the
figure of a husbandman carrying a sack on his shoulders and sowing of
corn. In others, less ancient, hawking is the emblem of the month; and
yet in more modern times it has been represented as a man clothed in a
garment of the color of decaying leaves, with a coronal of oak-branches
and acorns on his head, holding in his left hand a basket of chestnuts,
medlars, etc., and in his right, Scorpio—_i.e._, the sign of the zodiac
which the sun enters on the twenty-third of October.
The principal ecclesiastical feasts are those of St. Luke, on the 18th;
and St. Simon and St. Jude, on the 28th.
The late Senator Mark A. Hanna and Mrs. Annie Besant were born under
this sign. Bernhardt, Modjeska, and Peg Woffington are excellent
illustrations of the dramatic genius of the Libra people.
THE ZODIACAL SIGNS.
1. Aries The Ram. Reigns from March 21 to April 19.
2. Taurus The Bull. Reigns from April 20 to May 19.
3. Gemini The Twins. Reigns from May 20 to June 18.
4. Cancer The Crab. Reigns from June 19 to July 23.
5. Leo The Lion. Reigns from July 24 to August 23.
6. Virgo The Virgin. Reigns from August 24 to September 21.
7. Libra The Scales. Reigns from September 22 to October
21.
8. Scorpio The Scorpion. Reigns from October 22 to November 20.
9. Sagittarius The Archer. Reigns from November 21 to December
20.
10. Capricorn The Sea-Goat. Reigns from December 21 to January 19.
11. Aquarius The Water Reigns from January 20 to February 18.
Bearer.
12. Pisces The Fishes. Reigns from February 19 to March 20.
WHAT FOREIGN JOHN SMITHS ARE CALLED.
Nearly Every Nation Has a Peculiar Manner of Spelling His Name—In Poland
He is Ivan Schmittiweiski, and in Turkey Yoo Seef.
Of all the families of the earth probably there is none more numerous
than that of Smith, and of all the Smiths in the world it seems that at
least fifty per cent have been christened John. If the name were not so
common we should probably admire it and see it through a glamour, as we
do many other names that are not half as solid and substantial.
As it is, plain John Smith is not very high-sounding; it does not
suggest aristocracy. It is not the name of any hero in die-away novels;
yet it is good and honest. Transferred to other languages it seems to
climb the ladder of respectability.
Thus in Latin it is Johannes Smithus; the Italian smoothes it off into
Giovanni Smithi; the Spaniards render it Juan Smithus; the German
adopts it as Hans Schmidt; the French flatten it out into Jean Smeets;
the Russian turns it into Jonloff Smitowski; the Icelanders say he is
Jahnne Smithson. Among the Tuscaroras he becomes Tam Qua Smittia; in
Poland he is known as Ivan Schmittiweiski; among the Welsh mountains
they call him Jihom Schmidt; in Mexico his name is written Jontli
F’Smitri; in Greece he turns to I’on Sinikton; in Turkey he is almost
disguised as Yoo Seef.
MATHEMATICAL PUZZLES.
“Magic Squares” Were Held in Veneration by the Egyptians and
Pythagoreans, and They Constitute the Oldest Numerical Problems Known to
Man—Bewildering Results Obtained by Simple Methods.
The art of arranging numbers in the form of squares, so that the sum of
the various rows—vertical, horizontal, and diagonal—would in each case
be the same, is, without question, the oldest of mathematical puzzles.
The Egyptians and Pythagoreans held them in the greatest
veneration—especially the latter, who dedicated them to the then known
seven planets.
The magic 34 square was probably the strangest freak of figures known at
this time.
┌──┬──┬──┬──┐
│16│ 3│ 2│13│
├──┼──┼──┼──┤
│ 5│10│11│ 8│
├──┼──┼──┼──┤
│ 9│ 6│ 7│12│
├──┼──┼──┼──┤
│ 4│15│14│ 1│
└──┴──┴──┴──┘
This strange freak may be found in Dürer’s “Melancholia,” engraved on
copper in 1514, being included in the series of symbolical engravings
of “The Death of the Devil,” “The Knight on Horseback,” etc.
The aim in this instance, as shown by ancient writings, was not only
to obtain the same total (34) in the ten rows of four, but to discover
as many symmetrical combinations as possible giving the same result.
According to the ancients, “symmetrical combinations which no man
could number” were to be found in this arrangement of the numbers from
1 to 16, inclusive. As an example, take 16, 3, 5, and 10, or 2, 8, 9,
and 15, or 1, 9, 16, and 8, and so on indefinitely. The result is the
same.
Another unique example is the following:
┌──┬──┬──┬──┬──┐
│ 3│20│ 7│24│11│
├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┤
│16│ 8│25│12│ 4│
├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┤
│ 9│21│13│ 5│17│
├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┤
│22│14│ 1│18│10│
├──┼──┼──┼──┼──┤
│15│ 2│19│ 6│23│
└──┴──┴──┴──┴──┘
In this case the sum is 65, and can be reached in an almost endless
variety of combinations. However, there is one feature to be
remembered in dealing with this problem, and that is that the central
number (13) must be added to each combination except in the straight
and diagonal lines. Thus: 20, 24, 2, 6, and 13, or 8, 12, 14, 18, and
13, etc., each make the magic sum 65.
The well-known “15 puzzle” is another illustration of the surprising
feats which figures are sometimes made to play. The problem being to
arrange in a square of three rows, three figures in each row, the
numerals, 1 to 9 inclusive, in such a manner that each row—vertical,
horizontal, or diagonal—will total 15. This is more difficult than
appears at first glance, unless you have the key, which is: place 5 in
the center, and let the four corners be 2, 4, 6, and 8. The rest is
easy.
┌──┬──┬──┐
│ 2│ 9│ 4│
├──┼──┼──┤
│ 7│ 5│ 3│
├──┼──┼──┤
│ 6│ 1│ 8│
└──┴──┴──┘
This form differs from the 65 and 34 in that it can only be added
diagonally, horizontally, and vertically.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
4. Enclosed bold font in =equals=.
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